Information

Table of Contents URL: https://novelpie.com/novel/this-used-to-be-about-dungeons/

This Used to be About Dungeons is a comfy slice-of-life adventuring story that occasionally features dungeons. Updates Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Mostly it’s about walking in the woods with a friend, looking for mushrooms to put in your soup, or haggling with the guy selling squash, or taking care of a neglected garden. It’s putting some jam on shortbread biscuits. And yes, sometimes you go down into the dungeons with your friends, and you kill monsters there, or disarm traps, but when you come out, you realize you’ve found the perfect magic item to give to one of the local kids that helped you out when your cat was sick. Look, the dungeons are always going to be there, and sometimes you need to make a journey to one of the Spirit Gates, or make a pilgrimage with the local Cleric of Symmetry to a holy shrine. Your tour through the local dungeons can wait. You’ll have rivalries with other groups, and find some dungeon eggs that need to be carefully incubated in case they turn out to be something valuable, and help a friend to build a fishing weir. There’s a big world out there, a mostly tame place with lots of magic, and even more to do and see. Join me, won’t you?

The cover image is Morning Sunlight Effect, Eragny, by Camille Pissarro.

Chapter 2 - Big City Energy

Alfric knocked on Mizuki’s door just after sunrise, having woken up to twilight filtering in through the curtains of his tavern room. She answered quite a while after he’d knocked, wearing a robe and looking disheveled, with her hair out of place. She was squinting and frowning as she looked at him, trying to keep the light from fully entering her eyes.

“You,” she said.

“Alfric,” he supplied.

“Have you had breakfast?” she asked.

“I don’t eat breakfast,” said Alfric. “Lunch is my first meal of the day. It’s the custom, where I’m from.”

“Well, you can wait outside while I make breakfast, or you can come in and sit there awkwardly while I eat,” she said. “Your choice.”

“Sorry if I woke you,” said Alfric. Looking at her, there was really no need for the ‘if’.

Mizuki waved away his apology and staggered into her house, clutching her robe close to her and leaving the door open by way of invitation. She was barefoot, and Alfric hesitated slightly by the doorway, looking at the different shoes there, before deciding to take his boots off. He didn’t know the custom in Pucklechurch, nor did he know whether Mizuki would actually follow that custom, being as she was half-Kiromon. He set his sword in a holder by the door as well, then trod into the house, following the sounds of someone banging around in the kitchen.

The house was too large for one person, that much was obvious from the outside, but it was fully furnished, and almost everything was slightly dusty. The fireplace was filled with ash, and the fabric of the couches was faded. There were places on the walls where pictures had once hung, their removal leaving nails in place and bare spots beneath them. It gave the impression of having been effectively abandoned ages ago, but Mizuki clearly lived there. Alfric wondered, briefly, whether she was a squatter, but dismissed the notion. Squatters weren’t common in small towns like this, he didn’t think, and besides, there was something strongly Kiromon about the architecture, though he still thought it strange even by those standards.

The kitchen was something different, and where the rest of the house was in need of cleaning, the kitchen was immaculate. It had a four-plate stove in the center, along with a dual oven against one wall, all heavy cast iron. The tiled blue and white walls were obscured by hanging copper pots and pans, with a selection of knives against one wall, all polished until they gleamed. There were two porcelain sinks, side by side, each connected to a glass tank of clean water that hung on the ceiling, and was likely fed into the house system. There were hanging braids of garlic and dried bunches of herbs, and when Alfric peeked into the open chiller, he saw a small selection of fresh ingredients. Mizuki had already grabbed a slab of pork, and was pulling a few other things out, including glass bottles with dark liquids in them, a block of cheese, and a clump of thin mushrooms. He took a seat on a stool next to the island counter that the stove was set into.

Mizuki cut off a thick slice of the pork belly with an enormous and quite sharp knife, then looked at Alfric. “Last chance to get in on this.”

“Alright,” he replied. “Sure.”

Mizuki gave him a satisfied smile, then cut off another slice of pork belly and put the rest back into the chiller. She opened up one of the heaters on the stove, setting the cooling element to one side and letting the warming element heat up, with a heavy cast-iron pan placed on top of it.

“So, where is it?” she asked.

“What?” asked Alfric.

“You said skipping breakfast was custom where you’re from,” replied Mizuki as she watched the pan. “Where is that?” She deemed the pan hot enough, and slipped the pork belly onto it, where it sizzled. Once that was completed, she moved over a basket of eggs, then began mixing together a few of the brown liquids into a small bowl.

“The city of Dondrian,” said Alfric. “It’s a hundred hexes away, which is quite far even by leycraft or portal.” He’d spent a fair amount to travel it, first taking a leycraft, then going through a conveniently timed portal, which had still left a lot of walking.

“I know where it is,” said Mizuki, rolling her eyes. “That’s a long way though, to come to a place like Pucklechurch.”

“Not so far as Kiromo,” Alfric replied. “I’m sure that’s a story.”

“Oh, certainly,” said Mizuki. “But we’ve known each other for half a day.” She used her huge knife to quickly chop some garlic, pulled some dried herbs from where they were hanging, and put all of that in the bowl. So far as Alfric was concerned, cooking was a variety of magic, strange and arcane, with its own inscrutable laws. “So what brings you our way?” she asked as she went about cooking in her bathrobe, flipping the pork and seeming to revel in the sizzling sound.

“I wanted to put together a party,” said Alfric. “I suppose you’ve already figured out that I’d like for it to be more than a one-time affair.” Again, there was a bit of a lie there, something not said that should have been.

“So long as you understand that’s not what I agreed to,” said Mizuki. She stuck a finger in her sauce and tasted it, then made a face and began adding more things. “But why here? Why not closer to your great and mighty city?”

“What do you know about how the dungeons are made?” asked Alfric.

“Almost nothing,” Mizuki replied. “How many eggs for you? I’m having three.”

“Three is fine,” said Alfric, watching her take the eggs from the basket. “The dungeon portals are old magic, one of the anchoring techniques that keep rogue magic from building up.”

“Well I knew that, I am a sorc,” said Mizuki. She pronounced it ‘sork’. With a spatula, she carefully moved the pork to the side, then began cracking the eggs right into the pan, one by one. The shells went into a wooden bucket that had some kind of lining. “Mushrooms?” she asked. “Bread, cheese?”

“Sure,” he replied as he watched her add butter and button mushrooms to the crowded pan. “So, if left unchecked, magic builds up, and when magic builds up, bad things happen. The dungeon portals drain off that magic to keep it below a baseline within a hex, but part of the exchange is that the dungeons take on the flavoring of whatever magic they’re draining.” She hopefully knew all this. “In an enormous city like Dondrian, there’s heavy magic in use, some of it harvested from other hexes, some from all the magic users, some from the wide variety of magic items, some from the leylines, all swirling around with cast-offs and residue. All that gets eaten up by the dungeon portals, which makes them exceptionally dangerous. The portals out here have a lot less magic to work with, which makes them safer. It’s a better place to start out, in relatively unsettled lands.”

“Hrm,” said Mizuki. She had taken two plates down from a cabinet and loaded them up with the pork, eggs, bread, mushrooms, and cheese. “This is a dipping sauce,” she said, pouring half of the sauce she’d made into a second bowl. A fork and knife came clattering down next to his plate. “Dig in.” Before she sat down, she remarried the warming element to the cooling one, carefully matching them to each other so that they would be inert.

Alfric wasted no time in eating, and though he was skeptical of the sauce at first, it turned out to be salty and herbaceous, going well with the fatty pork. It was an unconventional arrangement of foods, by Dondrian standards, and it was the first breakfast that Alfric could remember eating in a very long while, but it was good food, far better than he had expected, and more than he had any right to. He found himself consumed with the eating, which went on in silence. When they were finished, at roughly the same time, Mizuki filled up one of the sinks with water and began doing the dishes.

“I’m not sure your explanation makes sense,” said Mizuki.

“Oh?” asked Alfric. “And … can I help with the dishes?”

“You’d just get in the way,” said Mizuki, her hands covered in suds. “I mean, it makes sense that a dungeon out here would be safer than a dungeon in or near the city, but what doesn’t make sense is why you’d come out alone. You were just hoping to find four people to rip up from their jobs and go adventuring with you?”

“No,” said Alfric. “You would all keep your jobs, whatever they might be. It was my understanding that you were in the business of odd jobs anyway?”

“Well me I understand,” said Mizuki. “But you’re asking a healing cleric to first take a day off from the temple, then several days if things go your way. And I know for a fact that Verity plays at the Fig and Gristle almost every day. Seems like it would have been easier to gather up a bunch of people in the city, then have you all move out to Pucklechurch together.”

“Might have been,” nodded Alfric. He didn’t want to say too much, and hoped that she wouldn’t take his silence the wrong way.

“Sorry if I’m pushing things,” said Mizuki. “It’s a bad habit.”

“No,” said Alfric. “They’re good questions, I just don’t have good answers.” Not at this stage, at least. Maybe later, once they all knew each other, once the party was together, after their second or third dungeon.

“Fair,” said Mizuki. She put the last of the dishes on a drying rack and wiped her hands on a towel that hung on the handle of the oven door. She briefly looked down at her robe and cinched it tighter with a sheepish look. “Well, I should probably change into something more acceptable before we leave. It shouldn’t take long. Make yourself at home, but don’t snoop.”

Alfric waited patiently in the kitchen, looking around, but trying to do it in a way that didn’t constitute snooping. There was a large dining room through one door, but it looked as disused as the rest of the house. The obvious question was why Mizuki was living in such a large house alone, but Alfric hadn’t asked, because it seemed like the kind of question that might have a difficult and painful story attached to it. The house was far too big for one person, and Mizuki obviously hadn’t kept up with either repairs or cleaning. The kitchen was the only place that Alfric had seen which had obvious love and attention applied to it.

Mizuki came back into the kitchen not long after she’d left, wearing a similar outfit to the day before, a wrap on top that left her arms bare, and pants that ended at her calves and had such wide legs that they were practically a skirt, this time a dark blue. In addition, she had a small belt that provided an anchor for a dagger in a sheath, which she hadn’t had the day before. She had also spent some time fixing her hair, and she’d applied lipstick, making her look much more put together than she’d seemed while making breakfast, or the night before. Her bag was her final addition.

“I thought it would help me look serious,” she said, gesturing to the dagger. “Like an adventurer.”

“Your job won’t be to stab things,” said Alfric, frowning.

“Durr,” said Mizuki, sticking out her tongue. “But it looks cool, right?”

“I guess,” said Alfric.

“Verity will think it looks cool, I bet,” said Mizuki.

“Well, let’s hope so,” said Alfric.

The Fig and Gristle didn’t open until noon, but the proprietor, a sturdy woman with a streak of gray hair, answered the door when they knocked and brought them up to Verity’s room when they explained that they had arranged to meet with her.

“You’re not planning to take her away from me, are you?” asked the woman, Cynthia.

“We were hoping to go into a dungeon with her,” said Alfric, who had always considered honesty to be the best policy.

“Well, you protect her,” said Cynthia with a nod. “I always thought she wouldn’t be here long. I’m paying her a pittance, compared to what she can do.” She came to the door and knocked on it twice, hard. “Verity! Visitors!” She turned to Alfric and Mizuki. “You might have to knock again,” she said. “Verity doesn’t like the mornings, but I’m not going to sit here all day waiting for her to get up.” She turned and went down the stairs, leaving Alfric and Mizuki standing there.

After a full minute had passed and Alfric was contemplating knocking again, there were sounds from the other side of the door, including a fair amount of banging noises. This continued on for some time, until finally Verity opened her door and poked her head out. Alfric was surprised by how similar she looked to Mizuki, with her hair messy, a frown on her face, and a squint. Unlike Mizuki, she had gotten into a dress instead of a robe, one that had a pattern of white flowers on top of lavender fabric. It was slightly wrinkled.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Just past second bell,” said Alfric.

“Oh,” she said, looking between the two of them. Her bleary eyes finally rested on Mizuki. “I don’t usually get up until at least fourth bell.” She stared at Mizuki. “There are two of you now?”

“Three makes a party,” said Mizuki, quite cheerfully. She held out her hand. “Mizuki.”

“Verity,” said Verity, slipping a limp hand through the door for just long enough to do a perfunctory shake. “Hang on.” She closed the door for a moment, and there were more sounds from inside her room. Alfric had only gotten a narrow glimpse into her room, but it was a complete mess, with clothes everywhere, books in haphazard piles, and remnants of old meals. It was, frankly, a frightening amount of detritus to be packed into a relatively small room.

“Okay,” said Verity when she returned, slipping out of the door without letting them see any more of the inside. “Let’s go downstairs and talk.”

The tavern was empty, save for the proprietor, who was cleaning out glasses and tidying up the place. The chairs were all upside down on top of their tables, and Verity quickly flipped a few of them, giving them a place to sit.

“So,” she said, steepling her fingers and trying to look more awake than she was. “You want to go into a dungeon.”

“All you would have to do is sing and play,” said Alfric. “If you felt like you were in any danger whatsoever, you could run back to the entrance and leave without me. I’ll be the point man, the one facing down anything dangerous, and I’ll try to keep myself between you and whatever we find in the dungeon. In exchange for maybe two hours of work, only an hour of which will actually be in the dungeon, you’ll get a fifth share of whatever we find.”

“Do we have a healer?” asked Verity. “I’d feel better with one.”

“We’ll be picking her up later today,” said Alfric. “It might be better to have everything else squared away and agreed on before we approach her though.”

“And what kind of songs would you like, if you’ve given it thought?” asked Verity.

“Strength and speed,” said Alfric. “I’ll be up front, sword in hand, and with your proficiency, you should be able to give me a boost of some thirty to forty percent. Enhanced vision and hearing would be great, if you can add that in, and endurance would be a bonus as well, but with a healer on board that’s less of a concern.”

“Just one dungeon?” asked Verity, after a long pause. Alfric was getting the feeling that this was perhaps too much information at once for her.

“He wants more,” said Mizuki. “He’s got plans for the one in this hex, and the six surrounding, and no doubt more beyond that.”

“Just one to start,” said Alfric, casting a glance at Mizuki. “I wouldn’t want to commit until we know we can work together as a team, and I know that a single day is much more manageable in terms of scheduling than seven days or more. We need to allow for the possibility that someone won’t be a good fit, or that something unexpected crops up, so yes, just one.”

“With the option for more?” asked Verity, tapping her fingers on the table. There was something rhythmic on how she did it, like she was tapping out a tune.

“Possibly,” said Alfric. “And for a bard, it’s good training, good exposure to party dynamics and custom songs. I know that you can make decent money with taverns and outdoor performances, but party or guild level performance is where the real money is for a bard, even if it’s outside the traditional adventuring structures.”

Verity glanced at Mizuki.

“I think he’s just like this,” said Mizuki. She looked at Alfric. “How long have you been in Pucklechurch?”

“I arrived early last morning,” Alfric replied.

“So, based on what I know about this guy,” said Mizuki, seeming quite pleased with herself. “He comes in yesterday, early in the morning, makes a beeline for the censusmaster and gets a list of people, then spends the rest of the day asking around to see what he can find out about us, our reputations, our skills, things like that, and then, having not been in town for more than twelve hours, he visits first you, then me, trying to pull together a party in record time.”

“Sorry,” said Alfric. He didn’t know quite what he was apologizing for. “I just think that there’s a good opportunity here. It’s an easy win for everyone involved. And if we do work well as a team, or even if we need to swap a member out, then the surrounding dungeons could be profitable too. And yes, ideally, we would do the dungeon today.”

“Hmm,” said Verity. She sat back in her chair for a moment, looking at Mizuki, who was smiling, and Alfric, who was trying to give the pitch the gravitas it deserved. “Okay,” she finally said. “I can do this once. Don’t expect a second time unless it goes swimmingly. I’ll have to see if Cynthia is alright with me ducking out.”

“Good, then we can make the party now,” said Mizuki. She turned to Alfric. “It’s better to have one made early, right?”

“It is,” said Alfric, but he paused, listening. “That’s third bell though, which means the market just opened, which means that we have very little time to waste in meeting up with our fourth member. I don’t know where she lives, so her daily trip to the market might be the only time to find her.”

“Ooo,” said Mizuki. “Exciting. We get to hunt for a member. The huntress becomes the hunted!”

“I still need to wake up, or sleep some more,” said Verity. “I’ll be around if you need me. Let me know when you’re planning to go to the dungeon.”

“I was hoping for sixth bell or sooner,” said Alfric.

Mizuki laughed. “Big city energy,” she said, grinning. “It’s a change of pace, that’s for sure.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Verity.

“Do,” said Alfric. He stood up and gave her a bow. “It was a pleasure to meet you again. I hope we have something more firm in the near future.”

Chapter 1 - The Fig and Gristle

The Fig and Gristle was the smaller of the two taverns in Pucklechurch, a squat place braced by thick beams, but it had the best music by far. Alfric hadn’t come for the poached figs, though he was sure they were delicious. He hadn’t come for the music either, though it was a caliber of melody that he had only heard before in Dondrian, and not the kind of thing that he would have ordinarily expected from a small town like this. No, he had come for the bard, who was hunched over a small stool, strumming her six-stringed lute with her eyes closed, her words barely audible over the sound of her instrument.

The effect of the music was subtle but complex, with more points of enhancement than were obvious at first glance. Alfric ordered the herbed chicken and garlic potatoes, with a cup of honeyed tea, and the flavors of each were heightened by the melody, the tea sweeter but not cloying, the chicken richer and more flavorful. All that was par for the course from a tavern bard, but this girl was weaving in other aspects, subtle enough that you could miss them, emotional components. Alfric wasn’t a naturally anxious person, but his worries had their edge taken from them, reduced down a fraction, and when he tried to focus on old sources of sadness, he found that those, too, were blunted. The inverse seemed true as well, with a few jokes overheard much funnier than they should have been, and the cozy warmth of the tavern much cosier.

Altogether, it made Alfric more confident in his choice to come to Pucklechurch. He had heard about her back in Dondrian, where she had trained in a conservatory and achieved a considerable level of fame, and hoped that he could pluck her from this tavern. There were other candidates in Pucklechurch, six others all told, but Verity was the one he felt was a necessity, and if she said no, he would do his best to persist. If she said yes, then he would get things going as quickly as possible.

She finished with her set just as he was finishing his poached fig, which he’d ordered after he was finished with the meal. It was as good as advertised, aided as it was by the music. He hurried to finish, scooping up the last bites of mushy pear, then got up from his seat and walked over to her as she was packing up her lute.

“Beautiful music,” he said. “Are you done for the night?”

“Yes,” replied Verity, glancing up only briefly from her work of packing up. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

She was tall, for a girl, but had a hunched posture when performing that made her seem smaller. Now, with the playing done, she’d straightened to her considerable height, just a touch shorter than Alfric, if that. Her clothes were conservative, a long blue dress that went down to mid-calf, and sleeves that she’d hitched up for playing but were down now, slightly wrinkled. Her hair was long and black, with a sheen to it, and it was tied back, leaving her face clearly visible. She had green eyes with long lashes and a slenderness to her features that made her look more delicate than she probably was. She had high cheekbones, a narrow nose, and thin lips, but when she smiled, as she sometimes did when she was singing, it made her face come alive. She was pale, and fit in with most of the people in the tavern in that regard, in a way that Alfric did not.

“Have you ever been in a dungeon?” asked Alfric.

Verity stopped what she was doing and looked up at him again, this time paying more attention to him. “No,” she said, frowning. “Sorry, who are you?”

“My name is Alfric Overguard, adventurer,” he said, holding out his hand. That wasn’t the half of it, but it would do as an introduction.

She took his hand, raising an eyebrow, skeptical at first and then faintly amused. Alfric wasn’t wearing his full adventuring gear, just his boots, bandolier, and sword in its sheath, with his shirt and pants being nothing particularly special. The sword was unique, an heirloom, but it would be hard for her to tell without him drawing it.

“Verity Parson,” said Verity. She finished with her lute and stood up. “Can I help you?”

“Well, would you like to go into a dungeon?” asked Alfric, giving her his most optimistic, hopeful look.

“Hrm,” said Verity. She slung her lute case over her shoulder. “I’ll think about it.”

“Can I walk you home?” asked Alfric. “And then maybe we can speak while we walk.”

Verity looked him over again. “You’re not from in town.”

“No,” he replied, wondering which part, exactly, had given him away. She wasn’t from in town either, though perhaps eight months had been long enough for her to consider herself a local.

“Then yes,” she said. “You can walk me home.” She began walking across the tavern, and Alfric followed after her, feeling a bit like a puppy dog.

“I’m putting together a party,” said Alfric. “You’re a quite skilled bard, and in terms of party composition —”

“We’re here,” said Verity. She was standing next to a set of stairs that led to the second floor of the tavern.

“You live here?” asked Alfric, looking up the stairs.

“I do,” replied Verity. “Thank you for speaking with me.” This was a very perfunctory thanks, of the kind that Alfric was still getting used to. People in the region seemed to feel the need to thank people for even the smallest of charities, though Verity, like him, came from Dondrian. “I’ll give it some consideration.”

“Can I tell the others that you’re in?” asked Alfric.

“If you’d like, I suppose,” replied Verity. She started up the stairs, then stopped and turned around. “You have other people lined up?”

“Three others,” Alfric replied. And two alternates. He had grown accustomed to people saying no. “We could probably do it with only four of us, but five is better. A sorcerer, a cleric, and a ranger. The pay is —”

“I’m done with people for the day, sorry,” said Verity. “We can talk tomorrow, if you’re still in town. I usually start playing at noon, so anytime before then.”

“Okay,” said Alfric, taking what he could get. “It was nice to meet you,” he added, as it seemed to be custom in this part of the world.

Verity nodded, then went on up the stairs without another word.

Alfric frowned to himself. As opening moves went, it could have been worse, but it could also have been a lot better. The choice was whether to go back to his room and wait until morning, or whether to strike now, given that he had enough time. As always, Alfric took action.

Alfric found Mizuki where he expected her to be, chasing will-o-wisps in the forest. It was something she often did just after dark, once the will-o-wisps were out, but while there was still some residual light. All this was according to some people around town. They had spoken highly of her, if they knew her, which most of them seemed to. It wasn’t particularly hard to find her: all he had to do was to wait until he saw a flash of light, then move toward it.

Mizuki wore culottes that stopped just above her knees, looking like a skirt when she was still, but short pants when she was in motion. Her upper body had a garment that wrapped around her, leaving her arms bare. As the will-o-wisps favored the boggy areas of the forest, she was wearing clogs of her own design, with a heel high enough that her feet wouldn’t get wet where the grass and moss sank down. From what Alfric had been able to find out, she was local to the town, but her mother had been from far-off Kiromo, which showed on Mizuki’s face. She had a round face, darker skin, small eyes, a small nose, and a slight downward slant to her eyes. Her hair was cropped short, to just below her chin, and she had long bangs that threatened to block her vision.

“Gah!” she shouted after a particularly bright flash of light illuminated Alfric, who was approaching her.

“Sorry!” he called out to her. “Didn’t mean to sneak up.”

“What are you doing out in the woods at this time of night?” she asked, the will-o-wisps forgotten and floating off as a small herd, motes of blue and white lights drifting in the dark.

“Have you ever been in a dungeon?” he asked her.

“That’s not an answer!” she replied, stomping with her clogs toward him through the squelching mud. “You answer, then you can ask questions.”

“I was looking for you,” said Alfric, once she was close enough that they didn’t have to raise their voices. “So, have you ever been in a dungeon?”

“No,” said Mizuki. “Did you bring a lantern? It’s hard to see.”

“I did,” said Alfric, pulling a disc from his pocket. He unlatched it, and light spilled out from one half of it. Mizuki looked him over, paying some special attention to the sword on his hip.

“Why do you want to know if I’ve been in a dungeon?” asked Mizuki, hands on her hips.

“If you had been to one, I wanted to ask you about it,” said Alfric. “To know which ones you’ve been in and what your general impression was. But if you hadn’t been in a dungeon, then I thought we could talk about dungeons, and I could see if you wanted to join a party to go to one.”

“With you?” asked Mizuki. Alfric nodded. “And who else?”

“We have a bard so far,” said Alfric. “Verity, she plays sets down at the Fig and Gristle. I have others in mind, but even if it’s just four, we should be able to do it.”

“Which two others?” asked Mizuki. “What kinds of casters?”

“Only one other caster,” said Alfric. “A cleric. The other I’m planning to ask is a ranger, of sorts, at least according to the censusmaster.” One of the alternates was a caster, if he understood the term from a sorcerer’s perspective, but he didn’t want to get her hopes up.

“A sorcerer needs magic to make magic,” said Mizuki. “With a priest and a bard I’m not going to be getting much in the way of interference patterns to work with.”

“You’ll have the dungeon too,” said Alfric. “That’s three. It should be more than enough.”

“And you know no magic?” asked Mizuki.

“Nothing of note for invading a dungeon,” replied Alfric, which he tried to comfort himself as being not quite a lie. “I tried a few of them, but was always better with a sword and shield.”

“No shield though,” replied Mizuki, looking down at the sword on his hip.

“It’s back in my room, with the rest of my armor,” said Alfric. “So, are you in? It’s a few hours’ work for easy money. Easier money than chasing around will-o-wisps.”

“Hrmph,” said Mizuki. She looked out into the woods, where the will-o-wisps were still floating away. “Well, I don’t particularly feel like following them just in the hopes that I can finagle something from their magic, so I guess I’ll be with you. Do you already have the party made? Or is this fresh?”

“Not yet,” said Alfric, brightening up considerably. “You, me, and Verity will make three, we can form the party in the morning.”

“Wait,” said Mizuki, and Alfric’s heart seemed to stop, not that he really expected a problem he couldn’t overcome. He’d had too many setbacks over the last year. “Can you give me an escort back into town?” asked Mizuki. “My light is gone, and there’s barely enough ambient magic for me to make my own way.”

“Certainly,” replied Alfric. “And as we go, we can talk shop.”

“Here, let me grab my bag,” said Mizuki. She walked over to a tree, which had a simple cloth bag hanging down from one branch. After she grabbed it and threw it over her shoulder, she came closer to Alfric, and slipped her arm into his. “Lead the way,” she said.

“So,” said Alfric as they walked. “Your role would be ranged combat and support. For a novice sorcerer, it’s generally safe to figure one spell per room, and it would be best for you to go first, so there’s not so much a risk of friendly fire. I’ll be going in with sword and shield, taking the brunt of the punishment, and if you’re able to eke out another spell or two from the cross-magic going around, all the better.”

“Sounds fun,” said Mizuki. “And for rewards? We’re splitting evenly?”

“That’s the plan,” said Alfric. “Materials and henlings sold off and split five ways, but not everything can be split, so we’ll be doing a points auction before we leave the dungeon.”

“Seems like you’ve given this some thought,” said Mizuki. Alfric still had his small lantern out, pointing forward, giving them guiding light, and he could just barely see the frown on her face with the reflected light. “You’ll have to explain the concept of a points auction, but I can wait so you don’t have to repeat it and I don’t have to hear it twice.” She looked up at his face, illuminated by the light of the lantern that was bouncing off the trees ahead of them. “Is the dungeon thing safe?”

“Dungeons aren’t dangerous,” said Alfric. “At least, they’re not as dangerous as everyone thinks. Still, it’s better to go in with a clear plan and a balanced party.”

“How did you find me?” asked Mizuki.

“I spoke with the censusmaster of the hex,” said Alfric. “She was able to give me a list of people who weren’t in a party, and were below the age of thirty, and from there it was just a matter of asking around.”

“So you know my name then,” said Mizuki. “And you have me at quite the disadvantage.”

“Alfric Overguard,” said Alfric.

“Mizuki Yono,” replied Mizuki.

“Anyhow,” said Alfric. “When I was asking around, the woman who runs the general store —”

“Bethany. What an intolerable gossip,” said Mizuki. “And it feels weird to call her a woman. We’re the same age.”

“My apologies,” replied Alfric.

“No, it’s fine,” said Mizuki. “It’s probably fair. I just think of myself as a girl, still. I don’t feel like an adult.” According to the censusmaster, she was twenty-two. She shook her head. “Who was the other person you spoke with? The bard? I wasn’t paying the most attention.”

“Verity,” Alfric said. “She’s an extremely skilled bard, for being second elevation.”

“And we’re all going to be of second elevation?” asked Mizuki. “I’ve always thought elevation was kind of bunk.”

“Going in with mixed elevations is dangerous,” said Alfric, ignoring the latter part of what she’d said. It sounded like a long digression. “If I get everyone I want, we’ll all be second elevation, and hopefully we can move up together.” He realized that was a misstep just after he said it.

“Together?” asked Mizuki. “So you’re not just planning one dungeon, you’re planning many of them. See, that’s a different question. I’d like to try a dungeon, sure, but if you’re asking for a commitment, one that’s going to mean travel outside the hex, that’s another thing entirely.”

“No commitment,” said Alfric, backpedaling as hard as he could. “You all live here, and the dungeon in this hex will be half a day’s work at the most, including the time to walk there. I’m not asking for anything else. Going to the six surrounding dungeons would mean a single day away from home each, if that. If we had to, we’d camp out or find a room at an inn. That’s not the kind of thing you would do right off the first swing, not before we know each other.”

“But you’re clearly thinking about it,” said Mizuki.

“Well,” said Alfric, not knowing how to respond. Disclosure had been a cornerstone of his education, and it felt wrong to lie about his further plans. He was already not being as forthcoming as he would have liked, on several fronts.

“That’s fine, no one is going to be forcing me to do something I don’t want to do,” replied Mizuki. “Oh, I think I can see the lights of the town.”

And indeed, through the trees the warm glow of hanging lanterns was visible, though a number of them had been shuttered for the night, leaving only a soft glow coming from a few of the houses. It was fully dark now, with the last of the sun’s light faded away, and the temperature had begun to drop. Pucklechurch was nothing much to look at, a small town like most others, in the center of its hex, though the large temple was the obvious local landmark and quite grand. Mizuki reached into her bag and pulled out a hooded cloak, which she quickly wrapped around herself, covering her bare arms.

“Can I ask if you know any of the others?” asked Alfric. “I’m still working on recruitment, and any insights would be appreciated.”

“Names?” asked Mizuki.

“Hannah is the cleric, and Isra is the ranger,” said Alfric.

“Hannah’s not a local,” said Mizuki. “She patched me up once, just a minor burn. She seemed cheerful enough, but I don’t know her well. Church of Garos. Isra — is that a boy’s name or a girl’s name?”

“Girl’s,” replied Alfric.

“Then she’s probably not a local either, though I don’t know everyone in town.” She gave Alfric a skeptical look. “You sure picked a lot of people from outside the hex, since Verity’s not local either.”

“Ah,” said Alfric. “That’s not on purpose, I assure you. The censusmaster didn’t say, and I haven’t been able to learn as much as I would have liked about everyone.” This, too, wasn’t quite a lie.

“Are you sure that Hannah is going to join?” asked Mizuki. They had reached the town and were walking down the street together, with Mizuki still holding Alfric’s arm, even though it wasn’t really necessary now that they were out of the woods and the ground was more even.

“The only one that I’m sure of is you, because you said you would,” replied Alfric. “Verity needs time to think, but gave a soft commitment. Will you come with me to help pitch to the others? People seem to like you.” A little flattery never hurt, in Alfric’s opinion.

“I suppose,” said Mizuki, blushing somewhat. She came to a stop, and Alfric stopped next to her. “This is me.”

They were standing in front of a surprisingly large house, three stories tall, arranged in tiers of decreasing size, with eaves on each level. It was a beautiful building, but in a state of minor disrepair. Even in the dim light of the night time lanterns, Alfric could see moss growing on a few of the wooden beams, and places where the tiled roof needed to have pine needles and fallen leaves swept from it. The door and windows were painted red, but the paint was faded and starting to chip. For all that, it was old and sturdy, a large house that had been built to last. It was completely dark, without a single light on.

“Do you live with your parents?” asked Alfric.

“No, just me,” said Mizuki. “You’re asking after the others tomorrow?”

“Yes,” replied Alfric. “I need to talk to Verity a bit more. She said that I could tell the others that she was in, but she didn’t actually say she’d go.”

“Well, then if this thing ends up working, I’ll be able to say that I was the first to say yes,” said Mizuki, smiling. “Have a good night. Come get me before you go see Verity. I might be able to help talk her into it.”

“Good,” said Alfric, feeling a surge of relief. Things were falling into place, just like he’d hoped they would. He needed the win. “You have a good night too. I look forward to working with you.”

Alfric couldn’t keep himself from smiling as he walked back to the room he was renting. He had done some basic research on the girls, but he hadn’t known that Mizuki was living in such a large house all on her own. He idly wondered whether and when it would be appropriate to ask for a room in her house, with payment, of course, or perhaps with a share of his dungeon loot. If they did the dungeon for the hex, then all six surrounding ones, that would be something like a fortnight of work. He’d need a home base.

On his way back, he stopped by the tavern and looked up at the second floor, where he could see a lantern still glowing, which he thought meant Verity was awake. He wanted to go up and speak with her, but she’d said to wait until the next day, and he would abide by that, as much as he wanted to get things moving. He didn’t really understand why she would have wanted to put it off. Bards were supposed to take joy in other people, never wanting a quiet moment to themselves, but it seemed that Verity hadn’t been cast from the same mold. Given what he knew of her history, this was little surprise.

The temple was quiet as well, with no lights on, which meant that there was no chance to speak with Hannah ahead of schedule, not that Alfric really wanted to. By his reckoning, clerics were one of the most useful professions you could have with you in a dungeon, depending on which god they followed, but they were also one of the hardest to convince to go in. Hannah was a devotee of Garos Orag, one of the best gods for healing, and also one whose clerics were typically the least inclined toward dungeons.

And as for the last potential member of the party, Isra, all Alfric knew aside from her vital statistics was that she came to the biweekly market in the mid-morning, carrying meat and skins from a day’s hunting, sometimes with the meat smoked or dried, sometimes with the skins tanned, and occasionally with other goods as well. She didn’t live in Pucklechurch, but she showed up on the censusmaster’s query, and she’d been seen around often enough that she must have lived somewhere in the hex, though the woman at the general store hadn’t had any clue where that might be.

All in all, Alfric had to call his first day in Pucklechurch a qualified success. If he could get a party together and head down into a dungeon within the next few days, everything would be back on track.

Chapter 3 - Venison and Honey

“So, what else do you know about our mystery girl?” asked Mizuki as they walked through Pucklechurch toward the town market. Alfric had a long stride, and Mizuki had to move quickly to keep up. Based on how things had gone with Verity, he wasn’t sure that he wanted her with him. She seemed to find him a bit too amusing.

“Fairly little,” nodded Alfric. “What did you mean about big city energy?”

“Oh,” replied Mizuki. “I didn’t mean to offend, it’s just that there are some stereotypes of the cities. People bustling to and fro, always in a rush, always working on step twenty-six of their ninety step plan, things like that. I might not find it so funny if you didn’t seem completely oblivious to it.”

“Sorry,” said Alfric. “I don’t mean to be brusque.”

“I figure if we’re in this together, maybe I can help you,” said Mizuki. “I’m a local, I know the people and I know what kind of approaches work. You come on really strong. With Verity, we probably could have spent a half hour or so just chatting, getting to know her, talking about what her life is like, how long she’d been at the Fig and Gristle, things like that, and then gotten around to the adventuring thing.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Alfric. “But she’s from Dondrian too.”

“Yeah?” asked Mizuki. “I didn’t know that. She’s gone local in a hurry.”

“Do you know anything about this girl we’re hoping to see, Isra?” asked Alfric. It was possible he shouldn’t have said anything about Verity. He wasn’t supposed to know.

“Nothing,” said Mizuki. “The name’s not familiar, aside from last night. Like, really not familiar. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone with that name. Foreign, maybe?”

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. They approached the market, where stalls had opened up, displaying all kinds of wares. Pucklechurch wasn’t large enough to have a daily market, which made it especially important that they find Isra today. Otherwise, they’d be reduced to waiting three days until the next market, or spending time trying to find someone who knew her well enough to know where she lived. Alfric wasn’t sure whether he would do that or try to track down one of the alternates. “She’s dark-skinned, like me, roughly our age, second elevation, and she should have some furs or meat with her, unless she’s already dropped them off.”

“Oooh, honey,” said Mizuki, splitting off almost immediately. She picked up a jar of warm golden honey and held it up to the light.

“Come find me if you see her,” said Alfric, still looking around. He moved away from Mizuki, who was apparently trying to pick out which of the containers of honey she wanted to buy, and went over to one of the other stalls, which was set up with cuts of meat displayed in a cart. The base of it was apparently lined with chilling elements, as it was quite cool. “Excuse me, do you know a girl named Isra?” he asked the elderly woman. “I’m told that she brings in meat to sell sometimes.”

“She does,” said the woman with a nod. She was looking Alfric over, seeming to be in no rush. “We’ve got flanks of venison, fresh today.”

“I apologize, but I’m not really here to buy,” said Alfric. “Do you know if Isra has been through here yet today? I was told she usually comes with furs and meats.”

“And what’s this about?” asked the woman, staring Alfric down. “Is she in trouble?”

“We actually will take two venison loins,” said Mizuki as she came up behind Alfric. She was slipping a jar of honey into the large bag that she apparently carried with her everywhere. “I’m thinking a glaze of honey, butter, peppercorns, and juniper berries.”

“My, that sounds wonderful,” replied the shopkeeper, perking up. She smiled. “You’ll have to have me over some time Mizuki, you always make your meals sound so good.”

“I’d love to!” said Mizuki, who really seemed to mean it. “If you bring the meat, I’ll make the meal. I’m already near the end of the pork I got from you. It’s been wonderful fried up and dipped in a dark, salty sauce that I make for it. I fed Alfric some this morning. Did you know that in Dondrian they don’t eat breakfast?”

“He’s from Dondrian?” asked the woman, looking him over again. “What are you doing in Pucklechurch of all places?” she asked. “And if you’re with Mizuki, then I just know Isra is in trouble,” but she said it with a little laugh and a smile.

“I’m looking to put together a party to go into the dungeon,” he said.

“Oh, how lovely,” said the shopkeeper. She turned to Mizuki. “Did you want those venison loins now?”

“I’d prefer to pick them up later, near the end of the day,” said Mizuki. “We have our work cut out for us before I can get back to the chiller, first with finding this Isra character, and then with going to the temple. I can pay now, so you’ll hold them?”

Alfric shifted slightly, getting ready to interject and bring the subject back to finding Isra, and Mizuki put a hand on his wrist, gentle, subtle, but firm.

“Oh, I would hold them for you anyhow, Mizuki,” replied the shopkeeper.

“I insist, it’s one less thing to worry about,” said Mizuki. She reached into her bag and pulled out a thick string, which had dozens of rings on it. She undid the knot without even looking at it, and began quickly counting out rings. “Two loins, two and a half pounds total, does sixteen sound good?”

“For you, fifteen,” replied the shopkeeper. “But I might just take you up on that dinner one of these days.”

“I’d welcome it, but it would mean that I’d have to clean,” replied Mizuki with a smile. Their transaction completed, Mizuki retied the string her rings were kept on, again without looking, and slipped it back into her bag. “What do you know of Isra?” Mizuki asked. “Is she nice?”

“A bit cold, actually,” the shopkeeper said. “Given what she brings to market, she must be a good hunter and trapper, because she has game even in the long winter months. I think the beastmaster had to speak with her once about taking too much, actually. Anyhow, a few months back I offered her a standing arrangement for her game, and she rebuffed me, which I thought was a bit rude, mostly in how she chose her words. It might be because she likes to shop her wares around every market day, but I don’t know if that’s it, because it’s hard to get any chatter out of her. She’s a bit late today, but I would expect her to arrive sooner than later, the better not to miss the midday rush of customers.”

“I appreciate it,” smiled Mizuki. “I’ll be back for those venison loins later.”

“Of course,” nodded the shopkeeper. “And it was nice to meet you, young man. Alfric, was it?”

“Yes,” said Alfric, bowing. “I’m sorry, I didn’t inquire as to your name.”

“Marta,” she replied. “Good luck with your dungeon run. You know, I used to do the dungeons myself, when I was much younger. When I quit I had twenty-eight under my belt.”

“Did you?” asked Mizuki, leaning forward slightly and not seeming in the least like she was ready to leave. “I would never have guessed. Why did you stop?”

“Oh, we had to go further and further afield for the dungeons,” said Marta. “And toward the end of it, I was pregnant with my first child, which would likely have put a stop to adventuring anyhow.”

“But what did you do?” asked Mizuki. “Let me guess, ranger?”

“No,” laughed Marta. “I was, in fact, a wizard, though only middling at best, and I’m sure I could hardly get a spark engine going, it’s been so long. I sold most of my old equipment off a decade back.”

“Well,” said Mizuki, “If we ever do have that dinner, I’m happy to have my ear talked off about your adventures.”

“Ah,” said Marta, looking across the market. “There’s Isra now. Should I call her over for you?” She pointed to the opposite end of the market, where a young girl with a loaded backpack was talking to one of the other shopkeepers. She was dark-skinned, as Alfric had already heard, and wore a headscarf that completely covered her hair. Attached to her stuffed backpack were over a dozen brown furs, all strung together, though Alfric knew virtually nothing about small game. As Alfric watched her, he noticed a glint of metal by her face, which he quickly realized came from piercings in her nose, lip, and eyebrow.

“We can wait,” said Alfric. “I don’t want to spook her.”

“She doesn’t seem like she’d spook easy,” said Mizuki, who was likewise watching the girl. “But I doubt she’ll like you, no offense.”

“Big city energy?” he asked.

Mizuki nodded. “Maybe let me handle her?”

“Sure,” Alfric replied. “Remember, it’s a fifth share, not much work or risk for any of you,” but before he could finish, Mizuki had already taken off.

“Mizuki’s a firecracker,” said Marta, from behind Alfric. “Nice girl, but not too responsible with her magic.”

“Hrm,” said Alfric. He watched as Mizuki approached Isra, and tried his hardest to listen in on what they were saying, but it was too far away, and the market was too busy. All he could do was read the body language, Mizuki’s animated expressions and Isra’s folded arms. Mizuki pointed over at Alfric, and he gave a friendly wave, but Isra didn’t wave back. “Is she going to be a problem?” he asked Marta.

“Mizuki? Oh, I think she’ll do fine,” said Marta. “She reminds me a bit of one of my dungeoneering friends from back in the day. I won’t say all sorcs are of a type, but Mizuki certainly seems to be. If you find yourself in need of advice, I have some to spare. There are more old adventurers in Pucklechurch than you might think, most of which would be happy to help.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Alfric, nodding. “It’s appreciated.”

After what seemed like far too short a time for it to be good news, Mizuki came walking back over.

“She’s not interested,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “So cross that one off your list. Seems a shame, she was cute.”

“What did you say to her?” asked Alfric, frowning at Isra, who had moved over to the next stall, her backpack considerably less full.

“I gave her the pitch, like I said I would,” replied Mizuki. “She gave a pretty firm no.” She shrugged. “Can’t force people into a dungeon, you know? I don’t know if that’s a rule in the city.”

“I’m going to speak with her,” said Alfric, walking away before Mizuki could add more commentary.

“Good luck!” Mizuki called after him.

Alfric approached Isra from the side, and waited while she engaged in her negotiations over her furs. He tried to project polite patience, but patience had never been his strong suit. On closer inspection, he could see Isra’s many piercings, all of them apparently gold, which seemed unusual for a ranger. Her head covering wasn’t really a scarf, as he’d thought before, but a single piece that had been made for that purpose. Like Mizuki and Alfric himself, she was clearly not from the area, with skin the color of mahogany, a rich ochre, and beyond that, a wider nose and thicker lips. Alfric’s people had originally come to what was now Inter from Tarbin, to the east, but that had been five hundred years ago, and they had kept almost nothing of the culture. Isra seemed a much more recent arrival. Isra herself didn’t seem cute to Alfric at all: there was something too stern about her. She was pretty, certainly, but cute gave very much the wrong impression. She didn’t smile.

Once the transaction was completed, and her furs offloaded, Isra turned to Alfric. “Yes?” she asked.

“We’re putting together a party for a dungeon run,” said Alfric. “It’s a half day’s work for better returns than you’re likely to get anywhere else, one fifth share. No other obligation.”

“When?” asked Isra.

“Today is possible, but first light tomorrow is more likely,” said Alfric, though Verity apparently didn’t rise until fourth bell, so that might have been too optimistic.

“How much will we make?” she asked.

“It’s hard to say,” said Alfric. “As a reasonable bottom end, four hundred rings, divided five ways, but that’s after everything has been sold, which could take some time.”

“And the magic items we want to keep?” asked Isra, eyes narrowed.

“My plan was to have us bid with parts of our share,” said Alfric. “If you bid a third of your share and take the bid, then if we bring in four hundred rings after sales, you would get,” he paused, working it out, “Fifty-four and everyone else would get eighty-six.”

“I want first pick,” said Isra.

“We’d be bidding,” said Alfric. “First bid?”

“I want to win equal bids,” she said.

“Deal,” said Alfric, though it was more than he’d wanted to give. If she had first bid, he could have just had her start and not mentioned it to the others. Having her win equal bids would be difficult to explain, and wasn’t the best start to a working relationship, but sometimes these kinds of concessions were needed.

“I’ll be in town until sixth bell,” said Isra. “When sixth bell comes, I’ll wait by the warp point. If you’re not there, I’ll assume we’re doing it tomorrow, and meet you there around first bell. If it’s not one of those two times, I’m not doing it.”

“Okay,” said Alfric. “Sounds good,” but it was really a lot of time pressure, and meant that he was going to have trouble getting everything together, especially since they still needed the cleric.

With their business concluded, Isra turned away from him and continued on to the next stall.

“How’d it go?” asked Mizuki, appearing next to him.

“She’s in,” said Alfric. “That means that we only need Hannah, the cleric, but she was the one I was most worried about.” And if they didn’t get Hannah, then it would be down to second choices, and Isra was apparently not going to go into the dungeon at all unless it was quite soon.

The temple at Pucklechurch was an old one, perhaps the oldest building in the town. It was four stories tall, though only in its center, which had a high, vaulted ceiling that took up almost all of what would have been the upper floors. It was divided into sixths, with each of the gods having their own statue, and behind the statue, a set of rooms for smaller services, private talks, and for the clerics to live. Alfric was pretty sure it was too large a building for a town like Pucklechurch to warrant, and he’d already heard from the woman at the general store that there were only six clerics.

Alfric took a moment to make the signs of the six gods, a quick motion for each, both honoring them and warding against them. In Dondrian, each of the gods had their own temple, one devoted wholly to each particular god, with a whole host of clerics, and services that the devout attended weekly. His parents had done what many did, rotating temples each week, which allowed a deeper, fuller understanding of each god and their existence, for good and ill. He had always favored Xuphin, God of Infinity, whose doctrine seemed most sensible, but he had a healthy respect for all six gods.

Mizuki brushed past him as he was looking at the statues. “Are you taking point, or am I?” she asked.

“I will,” said Alfric. “First, can I ask why this temple is so big?”

“What do you mean?” asked Mizuki. “How big should it be?”

“It was my understanding that for a town the size of Pucklechurch, there should be shrines instead, with maybe a small room of worship for those that had a cleric,” said Alfric. He was looking around. “Much of this space isn’t used.”

“I’ve never really thought about it,” said Mizuki, shrugging. “Well, come on, chop chop.”

Alfric moved toward the statue of Garos, done here in his animal form, a mighty stag whose antlers had fractal prongs. The room behind the statue could be reached by going around it to the left or right, and when they were close enough, Alfric could see that the room was symmetrically arranged, not just with the chairs, table, and benches aligned with each other, but so that most of the floor was mirrored in the ceiling, both of them tile, and the trim on the walls the same along the top and bottom. The plants within the foyer were all sculpted, their branches forking at regular intervals, styled so that their left and right halves were identical.

There were three people, one in simple clothes, and the other two in clerical chasubles. The clerics were decidedly not symmetrical: one was an older man, his head shaved bald, while the other was a young woman with red hair in ringlets that went down to the small of her back. She had a serious expression on her face as she listened to the man in plain clothes speak, but when she caught sight of Alfric, she excused herself and walked over. The first thing he noticed about her, aside from the bright red hair, was that she had a much thicker build, not unpleasantly so, but more than Alfric had seen in anyone else around Pucklechurch.

“Garos’ blessin’. May I help you, ay?” she asked. There was a brightness to her eyes and a lilt to her voice, which Alfric found refreshing, maybe because Mizuki and Verity had been so slow to rise, and Isra had been, as the shopkeeper had warned, comparatively cold.

“Have you ever been in a dungeon?” he asked.

Hannah’s eyes widened slightly. “Yes,” she replied. “I mean no, I haven’t, not properly, but I’d like ta — are you askin’, ay?” Her dialect was clearly southern, and fairly thick.

“I am,” said Alfric. “It’s a one-fifth share, —”

But Hannah had already rushed away and interrupted the foyer conversation for a quick chat with the other cleric, and as soon as that was done, with a glance back at Alfric, she went through a door in the back wall, disappearing from sight for just a moment before returning with a packed bag. She’d thrown off her chasuble, revealing very functional trousers and a buttoned-down shirt that must have been beneath it. She rolled up the sleeves as she hustled back over to Alfric. “Ready to go,” she said, smiling at Alfric. “You were sayin’ a fifth share?”

“I — yes,” said Alfric. “Don’t you need to make arrangements?”

“Arrangements made,” replied Hannah, waving a dismissive hand toward the other cleric. “When do we go, ay?” She had a thick accent with rounded vowels, which was all that marked her as not being a native of Pucklechurch. Alfric suspected that she hailed from far south.

“Er,” said Alfric. “Not earlier than sixth bell.”

“Can I help you prepare?” she asked. “And who are we with, ay? You, me, and who else?” She looked over at Mizuki, who was standing off to one side. “Her?” she asked, frowning slightly.

“Hi Hannah,” said Mizuki.

“Had to run her out of the temple a few weeks back, she was doing her magic,” said Hannah with a scowl.

“There was built up magic in here,” said Mizuki, gesturing around. “It could have gotten dangerous.”

“Your magic was the only thing dangerous,” said Hannah. “But still, if that’s who it’s to be, no arguments from me. You said the sixth bell?” She looked Alfric up and down. “And is that what you’ll be wearin’?”

“Sorry,” said Alfric, “It might be sixth bell, but I’ll have to check with our bard. We didn’t know whether you would be able or willing to join us.”

“‘Course I am,” replied Hannah. “I heard from Bethany that you’d been askin’ around, and I thought for sure that you would want me, so I cleared everythin’ yesterday, not that there’s too much work to split between Lemmel and me in the first place. I’ve been waitin’ on tenterhooks for you to swing by, if you were going to, because I went by your room this mornin’ at first light, the one Bethany said you were in, only you had gone out, and I didn’t know where to. And are you wearin’ that? Because you’ll be point man, ay?”

“Er, yes,” said Alfric. “I’ll be point man, but I have some armor that I’ll be wearing, a cuirass and greaves, plus a helm, though they’re back at my room.”

“And everyone is second elevation, ay?” asked Hannah. “I’ve heard you can do one up or one down, but it’s more dangerous that way, and by the time I got to the censusmaster last night she had closed down and seemed a bit cross with me, for no good reason other than it was so late.” She paused and knit her brow. “Sixth bell, are we eating before or after? I can see it both ways.”

“After,” said Alfric. “It’s better not to go into a dungeon with a full stomach. Sorry, but have you really taken care of everything?”

“Of course, who do you take me for?” asked Hannah. “I’m a cleric of Garos, we don’t like to leave danglin’ threads, for it is said, ‘Let those who shirk their endings be beset by the costs of continuance’, the Book of Garam Ashar, section eight, verse six.” She gave a small bow on finishing.

“Alright,” said Alfric. “Then all we need is to go get our bard.”

“And add me to the party,” said Hannah with a nod.

“There’s not a party yet,” said Alfric. “We can do it now though, if you’d like.”

“Better soon than late, so it is said,” replied Hannah.

Alfric didn’t have a bag like the girls did, but he had folded up the instructions for the spell in his pocket, which he produced and smoothed out. “Alright,” he said. “We just need to do this at the same time. There’s a phonic and cheremic component. Have either of you been in a party before?”

“We had a family party,” said Mizuki. “Me, my mom and dad, and my two sisters. About a year after they left, my youngest sister was born, and the party channel was getting a lot of use for things that I didn’t care much about, so,” she shrugged. “Hard to get a toddler to do the spell, but not that hard.”

“I had two different family parties, one with ma and da, then another with some cousins, and then another few in the seminary,” said Hannah. “It was a lot of drama, if you ask me, people always wantin’ in or out of the parties, and the guilds weren’t much better, but there’s not much to be done about that. I tried to stick to the ones people made for studyin’, but there were always people using the channel for other things, parties and such, flirtin’, and someone drunk on the channel tellin’ you their every thought isn’t too fun when you’re trying to sleep, let me tell you, ay? This’ll make seven for me, I think.”

“Just curious,” said Alfric, making a mental note that Hannah talked at length without much prompting or pause for breath. “Ready?” He got some nods. “Starting now.”

The finger positioning didn’t need to be terribly precise, and neither did the words, which was good, because they were all slightly off from each other. Once it was finished, a glowing blue triangle appeared with each of them as one of the vertices. It faded quickly.

“Anything either of you need done before we get goin’?” asked Hannah. “Minor cuts and scrapes, bruisin’ that needs fixin’, cosmetics, things like that, ay?”

“No, I’m fine,” said Alfric.

“I’ve got a burn on my forearm,” said Mizuki, twisting her arm around. “Can you heal it?”

“Castin’ fireballs, were we?” asked Hannah, coming over to inspect the wound.

“Cooking,” replied Mizuki with a roll of her eyes.

Hannah touched Mizuki lightly, placing the burn in the span between her thumb and forefinger. She pressed against the skin and blew lightly on the wound. Within a second, it had faded away to nothing.

“Neat,” said Mizuki. “Thank you.”

“Just try not to break any bones,” said Hannah. “I can’t do much about that yet. And don’t lose too much blood either.”

“We’ll do our best,” said Alfric.

Chapter 5 - This One is Actually About a Dungeon

They came to a clearing in the aspens, one with a fair bit of overgrowth, except where a dirt path led to the center. At that center point there was a built up earthen mound, and as they went single file down the path, they eventually saw the large wooden door that was set into the mound at an angle. It was in poor condition. The angle was the most obvious flaw, as portals were supposed to be completely upright. The door had been painted at one point, but the paint was faded and chipped. The stone that surrounded the door was stained and covered in moss, but the runes it was inscribed with pulsed with light as soon as they came closer. If the runes didn’t pulse, there was a problem, but a dungeon entrance needed to be quite far gone for that to happen.

“The Adventurer’s League is supposed to keep these in good repair,” said Alfric, frowning at the door. The lock that kept the door shut seemed like it was in better shape than the door itself, with a small bit of protection from the elements, and Alfric knelt down to look it over, drawing a key from his pocket.

“What’s that?” asked Mizuki, peering over his shoulder.

“You can’t get in the dungeon without a key,” said Alfric. “This is the basic one; they give them out readily. There are probably a few thousand copies floating around in the world.” He inserted the key into the lock and twisted it. It was a simple mechanism, but it gave him a bit of trouble, perhaps because it was so crudely made. After some jiggling, the lock came undone, and Alfric pulled it off, then opened the door. The runes on the stonework gave another pulse of light.

“And we just go in?” asked Verity.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “Once we pass through the stone arch, that’s it, we’re in. If you leave the dungeon once you’ve entered, you can’t go back in. This is the one and only time any of us will ever do the Pucklechurch dungeon.” Again, he braced himself for some pedantry that didn’t come.

The dungeon mouth extended down into the built up earth, and even from where they were standing, they could see that it was warping space, the tunnel an impossibility. The dungeon as it stood before them was its own splinter reality, one conjured by the portal just for them. Alfric stood for a moment, soaking in the gravity of the situation, the immutability of the dungeon visit.

“We can go in now, ay?” asked Hannah. “Or are we waiting for somethin’?”

“No, we can go now,” said Alfric. “Just … mentally preparing.” He had prepared for years to get to this moment. It would be a cakewalk. Still, some part of him worried. Variance was the harshest beast to be found in the dungeons.

“Should I be preparing?” asked Mizuki. “Because I thought my job was just to blast whatever we find in there.”

“It is,” said Alfric with a nod. “Verity, be ready to play your song, Hannah, be ready to heal any injuries I take, and Isra, take your shots if you see them.”

Mizuki cracked her knuckles and stretched out, shaking herself out, while the others made their own preparations. Verity unstrapped her lute and tuned it, while Isra undid the straps of her backpack, then strung her bow. The pack would be brought in with them, left just inside the dungeon entrance, so they could return to it if need be, as would anything else that wasn’t essential to the particulars of making their way through the dungeon.

When everyone was ready, Alfric went first, passing through the doorway.

Their two lanterns provided the light, one each around Verity and Alfric’s necks. The tunnel was rounded, its walls curved, packed earth with nothing supporting it. If it had been a tunnel they’d found in the wilderness, rather than a dungeon, Alfric might have feared collapse, but such things didn’t happen in dungeons, as structurally unsound as they might appear.

After a hundred feet, the tunnel ended in a small room, with thick wooden beams for supports, a large door that was tightly closed, and overhead, what looked like floorboards.

“We can leave our things here,” said Alfric, speaking in a whisper. “Packs, gear, things that we won’t want in the middle of a fight.” Isra had the largest pack, and she set it down gently on the floor, barely making a noise. Alfric was nervous, and saying things that didn’t really need to be said. It was a bad habit.

“When do I start to play?” asked Verity, also whispering.

Alfric drew his sword, which brought arcs of electricity. He faced the door, got a grip on his shield, and steeled himself. “Now,” he said.

Verity began her song, a more focused one this time, with couplets about the springtime and the horrors that could lurk in dark places that the spring sun had not yet touched. It was a little morose, Alfric thought, but it made him stronger, and the actual words didn’t matter much, so long as they were helping Verity to focus on the rhythms and melodies.

Alfric waited at the closed door, sword drawn, hoping that nothing would hear the song and come through. In some dungeons, the first sound would send almost every creature running, all at once, to the source of the noise. It was rare, but he had heard of it happening, and if that happened in their first dungeon, well, that was a melee they would face down, but it was unlikely that he would be able to escape without serious injuries, even if the rest of the party acted as they should.

After a few minutes, he relaxed and lowered his sword slightly. There was no sound except the song.

“What does the sword do?” asked Mizuki. “I saw the lightning when you drew it.”

“It’s electric,” replied Alfric. “A fairly mild effect unless I use one of the charges, and a good candidate for replacement. It was my father’s weapon when he went into the dungeons.” He went out of his fighting stance and turned back toward them, keeping one eye on the door. “You can touch it, if you’d like.” He held the sword out, and Isra tentatively stepped forward, pressing her finger against the blade for a moment, then giving a curt nod, with no expression on her face, which Alfric found surprising. Mizuki frowned, looked at Isra, then stepped forward as well, and touched the blade too, almost immediately leaping back and swearing.

“Tricks!” she cried.

Isra smirked, a playful, impish expression that was gone almost as soon as Alfric noticed it.

“We’ll be opening this door soon,” said Alfric. “When we do, there’s a good chance that something will come out. If it does, then I’ll cut it with my sword and try to draw it back so that Isra and Mizuki can get clear shots at it. If nothing comes out, we’ll be moving in slowly and cautiously, and I’ll be trying to bait out whatever lies beyond. Mizuki, you blast it the moment I’m free, but don’t be afraid to catch me as collateral damage if it comes to that. That’s what we have Hannah for.”

“I’ve got limits,” said Hannah. “Lots of limits, actually, should have gone into it more on the way over, I suppose.”

“Faster, please,” said Verity, who was still holding the song in her head.

Alfric nodded, and pulled the door open with his off-hand, temporarily letting go of his shield’s handle.

The beast burst out almost at once, thrusting the door backward and lunging straight for Alfric’s face. It was large, as thick around as a barrel, and long, like a snake, though it had a hundred small legs ending in cat’s claws, and two enormous pincers on its front, which it was trying to close around Alfric’s skull. It was the same creamy color of human flesh, with freckles no less, and when Alfric ducked beneath the pincers and stabbed it, its blood was very human too.

He backed up as he fought it, getting a grip on his shield and putting it in front of him. The girls were behind him, and he whipped his head back toward them just once, to make sure that they were safe, as he’d said they would be. The beast opened its pincers wide and lunged at him once more, its sinuous body weaving back and forth to provide the propulsion. It got his shield and bore down on it, denting the metal, but while it was occupied with that, Alfric was thrusting his sword into its underbelly, which was exposed because of how it was lifting its forward section, and there wasn’t terribly much resistance, which was quickly making a bloody mess.

There was a sudden and deafening blast, followed by an intense wave of heat, and the beast lurched to the side, losing its grip on the shield. Alfric moved forward and began stabbing it more, this time aiming for the head, but it wasn’t clear how much this was actually necessary, because the blast had torn out a sizable chunk of its midsection.

It took some time for the thing to finally die, and by the end of it, Alfric’s sword arm was wet up to the elbow with its blood. He was breathing hard from exertion, and took a moment for him to cool down. He looked down the hallway, tensed, then finally lowered his sword.

“Everyone okay?” he asked.

“What even is that?” asked Mizuki, looking down at the beast. Her hands were shaking.

“It’s a monster,” said Isra. She was outwardly calm, but she had a stillness to her that made her hard to read.

“You said we would be safe!” said Mizuki. “It could have killed us!”

“It didn’t,” said Alfric. “I didn’t even get hurt.”

“In what way was that like three raccoons!” shouted Mizuki.

“Your forehead is bleeding,” said Hannah. Alfric touched his scalp just below his hairline and looked at his fingers, which had come away bloody. “Here.” She approached him and laid two fingers on his temple, then muttered some words under her breath. The wound sizzled slightly, and the slight stinging pain evaporated completely.

“It probably looked worse than it was,” said Alfric, feeling sheepish. “Head wounds tend to bleed a lot.” He adjusted his helm, which had done less to protect him than he’d hoped it would. It was open in the face, the better to see, but that did mean that he had less protection. One of the pincers must have grazed him.

“We are not safe,” said Mizuki. “That wasn’t three racoons.” Verity was still focusing on her song, but it was clear she agreed. For her part, Mizuki looked like she was in shock, but Verity had maintained her composure.

“Good job killing it though,” said Alfric, nodding at the hole in the monster. “My ears are still ringing.”

“I’ve never killed anything,” she said, staring down at the monster. “What if there had been two of them?” asked Mizuki. “This is nuts.”

“And lo they traveled the twisting ways,” sang Verity, “The monsters died to the righteous blaze, the songstress sang her burdensome song, and lamented that talking should take so long.” She kept strumming her lute after that, keeping the song going, and humming as she did so.

“Are you seriously talking to us in rhyme?” asked Mizuki.

“She’s right, we should keep going,” said Alfric.

“Sorry I didn’t have a shot,” said Isra, bowing her head slightly.

“It’s fine,” said Alfric. “I’m not sure how much arrows would have done against that. Archery is typically better against smaller things, so long as your aim is good.”

Isra nodded and said nothing more. The one Alfric was worried about was Mizuki, who seemed the most skittish about combat, but was also the most necessary for being able to put down a bigger monster, maybe even more than himself. Her powers were situational and limited, reliable for no more than one good spell a room, but that one spell was likely to be pretty good.

The monster had been worse than he’d been hoping for, though not outside expected variance, and Mizuki did have a point, which was that it was considerably more difficult to fight than three bloodlusted racoons. That was why you came in with armor though, and a party of five, rather than trying everything yourself. The monster had been on the higher end of what might be found in a dungeon of second elevation. It was unfortunate that he wouldn’t be able to say the dungeon had been a breeze.

Alfric took a cloth from his pack, which was on the ground, and wiped his hand and grip clean of blood, so that it wouldn’t slip. He checked his shield over, grimacing at the dent that would have to be hammered out or possibly fixed by Hannah, then began dragging the corpse of the thing out of the way. Without a word, Isra moved to help, and between the two of them, they quickly got the hallway clear.

There was something grim about it, certainly, something disgusting and unpleasant. Alfric could acknowledge that. That he had won without too much damage to himself, that the team hadn’t fallen apart during the first frantic moment of battle, was heartening. The work itself, the killing of monsters, was something he’d done his best to adapt his mind to, and it was clear now that there was still quite a long way to go until he had his mother or father’s iron stomach.

When he finished, he saw Hannah speaking to Mizuki in a soft voice, with a hand on her shoulder, and as Hannah went on, some of the nerves seemed to leave her.

Somehow, like a miracle, no one called it quits.

His light shone on two doors, one to the left and one to the right, and at the end of the corridor the base of some stairs that led up to the next level. The door on the left was open, while the one on the right was closed. Alfric glanced back at the girls, checking that they were safe and following him, then moved forward to the open door. He didn’t like putting his back against the closed door, but there was no helping it. The open door led into a room that was filled with books, both stacked along a wall of shelves, and in piles around the room, on top of the table, and on the chairs. Most of them were bound in leather, with a wide variety of different colors and sizes, some of them larger than others. Alfric glanced up at the ceiling, then down at the floor. He crouched so that he could see under the table. Still he saw no monsters. This might have been where the hairless centipede creature had been living, but there were no signs of it.

Alfric stepped in slowly, keeping his footing steady, and bathed the room in light.

The books stirred slowly, then leapt from the shelves and their places on the room’s furniture. It wasn’t all of them, only a dozen, but they flapped through the air toward Alfric, and before he knew it, he was being battered by them, knocking his helm askew and then off. His sword stabbed through one, but they were fast, and not the ideal enemy, especially when his quick slashes seemed to knock them aside rather than actually cutting into them.

“No magic!” Alfric called back to the girls, though he really only meant Mizuki.

Thankfully, the books weren’t able to do much damage to him through the armor, and after not too much time had passed with them trying to knock him down, arrows started flying in through the open door. Alfric felt his magically enhanced strength fading, and hoped that was because it was going to Isra instead of because Verity’s song had failed. The books were taken out one by one, each with an arrow through them, the book creatures bleeding black ink, while Alfric took the beatings of book spines and more than a few papercuts to his hands and face.

When there were only a handful left, Alfric moved further into the room, giving Isra more space to line up her shots. He dropped his shield to the ground and went after the books with his hand, grabbing onto them and slamming them to the floor so he could line up a sword thrust that would run them straight through. When the last of them was dropped by one of Isra’s arrows, Alfric took a moment to breathe. He was sweating, bloodied, and bruised, having taken quite a bit of a beating in the course of fighting the book things.

On closer inspection, they were only booklike things, the ‘pages’ like gills with razor-sharp edges, and small eyes set into the spines. Their black blood was the consistency and color of ink though.

“Clear,” called Alfric, when there was no more rustling of pages. He replaced his helm on top of his sweat-damp hair and picked up his shield from the ground, then turned toward the closed door on the other side of the hallway as the girls filed in. “Good work, Isra. Verity, you can drop the song if you’d like.”

“The maid played on, her singular song, its beat so solid and sweet,” replied Verity, weaving her words into the melody without any seeming trouble. “She thought she’d continue, as sword cut through sinew, following a steady beat.”

“Alright, up to you,” said Alfric. Thankfully, he didn’t have to call on Hannah for more healing, because she did it on her own, touching first his right hand, then his left, and finally touching his face again. Her fingers were soft and warm. Alfric had always liked a healer’s touch, even from the old man who occasionally came over to supervise Alfric’s sparring matches.

“Gloves next time, I would think,” she said. She turned over his hand and pointed to a little cross-shaped wound, which was present on the other hand as well. “Intersecting wounds,” she said. “I can’t do much about ‘em, ay? Unless you think now’s the time for more thorough healin’, but I don’t know what this dungeon’s got left.”

“It’ll be fine,” said Alfric. “It just stings.” The wounds were barely even bleeding. Hannah gave him a nod, then bent down to prod at one of the book things.

“Why no magic?” asked Mizuki. She was breathing harder than she should have been, and her eyes were slightly wide, but she hadn’t bowed out, and she was asking sensible questions, which Alfric took to be a good sign. Before you did a dungeon, you didn’t know how people would be, and he’d been playing fast and loose with proper protocol, which involved reading off all kinds of horror stories. Mizuki seemed like the weak link, but at least there seemed to be only one weak link. He glanced at Verity, who was remaining stoic. She was from the city though, where the dungeons were almost certainly fatal, so her expectations would naturally be different.

“This is probably the most valuable room in this dungeon,” said Alfric. “Check it for magic. Verity, if you could enhance her sight, that would make this go faster.”

“There and there,” said Mizuki after a moment looking around the room.

Alfric moved over and picked up both of the books she’d pointed out. One of them was big and thick, nearly a foot and a half tall, with what had to be more than a thousand pages. The other was much smaller, and took some consulting with Mizuki before he finally plucked the right one from the shelf.

“These are valuable?” asked Mizuki when he’d set them on the table. She was keeping her composure, if only barely.

“I don’t know,” replied Alfric. “They might be, they might not. We won’t test them until we leave the dungeon. It can take some time to find out what an entad does.” His blood was still pumping hard, loud enough that he could hear it. Focus on the here and now. “No, the value in this room is in the other books. You can just look at the spines and see they’re in no language you’ll have heard of. There are translation entads, or a wortier, who could translate them though, usually. Depending on what we have here, we might be looking at maybe fifty rings apiece.”

“You’re serious?” asked Mizuki, looking at the wall of books with wide eyes. “There have to be a thousand books here. That’s fifty thousand rings!” Her amazement at that seemed to wash away a bit of the fear.

“Libraries like this are rare,” said Alfric. He wondered whether there was a corresponding library in Pucklechurch that he’d missed, or whether it was just variance. “It will take some time to sell off all the books, especially if we want that kind of price, and I don’t know how many we’ll actually be able to get out given we only have one exit apiece, but finds like this are one of the reasons that people go into dungeons in the first place. Sometimes you find trash, sometimes you find enough to fund you for a whole season or two.” It was more than he’d expected to find, and potentially put a kink in his plans. If they made out too well on this first expedition, then there would be no pressure to go on a second. “We’ll leave this stuff here for now. There are at least two more rooms to clear.”

Through this whole time, Verity had been strumming her lute, playing the same melody, with an apparent focus on the senses rather than anything related to combat. Alfric heard a chittering sound, but wasn’t quite sure where it was coming from. He was just hoping that it wasn’t an insect swarm, as he’d heard plenty of stories of dungeon runs cut short by them. There was equipment that you could bring to help handle them, but they certainly didn’t have it, and it would mean a retreat. He had confidence in his ability to protect them from most things, but not a swarm of insects.

Luckily, when Alfric opened the door across the hallways from the library room, it was only a furry creature with scaly legs, which hissed and launched itself at him, before being promptly and violently exploded out of the air by a fizz-crackling electric jolt from Mizuki. Alfric waited for more, but when none came, he moved into the room, eyes scanning everything that his light illuminated, turning every half step to make sure that nothing was creeping up on him. The room was half-filled with metal pipes, almost all of them running vertically from the floor to the ceiling, with only a few junctions leading off into the walls, or into other pipes.

“Clear, I think,” said Alfric, though it was hard to tell given how bad the sightlines of the room were, and how many places there would be for a creature to be hiding. “The pipes would be worth taking. They’re almost certainly water-aligned elemetal. I’m not sure how easy they’ll be to get out of here though.”

“We’re stealing pipes?” asked Mizuki.

“It’s not stealin’,” said Hannah. “Doesn’t belong to anyone, ay?”

“Elemetal is a good find,” said Alfric, looking over the pipes. “Water is evergreen. We’ll come back to this room though, I don’t see any obvious entads. Mizuki, can you take a quick look?”

“I’m starting to think that you only like me for my eyes,” she muttered, but after half a minute of looking around, she shook her head. “How’d you know the pipes were magic?”

“A good guess,” said Alfric. “We can talk about it more later, it’s not really something that you need to know if you can just look at things and see them.” He looked up at the floorboards. “Time to head upstairs.” He tried not to look at the others to see whether they were thinking of bowing out. He wouldn’t have blamed them, given what they’d come across so far.

Verity was still holding strong with the song, strumming her lute and sometimes singing under her breath. Some bards liked to take breaks, and others liked to keep going through thick and thin, and it seemed like Verity was the latter. Alfric was trying to be conscious of that and keep things moving, which was the best policy anyway. Verity was holding up well under pressure, as he thought she would.

The stairs were made of wood, thick beams that ran across into the wall of the library, and Alfric took them cautiously, worried that one of them might buckle under him. Dungeons were, as a rule, structurally sound, but that soundness mostly applied to the roofs and walls. This dungeon didn’t actually appear to have a roof, which was apparent when he looked up the stairs and saw a dark sky with swirling green clouds. He made it to the top of the stairs safely though, and stared into the eyes of a giant reptile.

It closed its eyes soon after though, curled up a bit tighter, and then went back to sleep, which was apparently what it had been doing prior to Alfric coming up the stairs. The room it was in was large, but it was a large creature, with its body and tail wrapped around a fountain that seemed like it was probably connected to some of the pipes downstairs. The creature had iridescent scales of green, blue, and red, with its claws and teeth a creamy white, and two curly horns that were jet black. On its back were feathers, the same colors as its scales, and its belly was rounded, making it look particularly fat.

Alfric felt a moment of weakness. The creature was just sleeping there, not doing anything else. Unlike the others, it wasn’t attacking on sight. There was nothing to say that you had to kill every creature you found in a dungeon, but they had a strong tendency to be misbegotten creatures, formed to fill this halfway world and full of rage. There were plenty of stories adventurers told about times they’d tried to live and let live, which only rarely worked out well. They had none of the equipment necessary to take this thing out of the dungeon, not given its size, and without a breeding pair, it would be mostly pointless, able to be sold to a zoo but having no other practical use. Looking at the claws, Alfric thought there was no chance to subdue it. And behind the creature, there were cabinets of riches.

The thing opened one eye, much faster this time, and focused right on Alfric. One nostril went wide, taking in the scent, and it curled its lip, displaying a fang in full.

There was nothing for it. Alfric charged, shield held in front of him, yelling at the top of his lungs, not just to drive out the last traces of fear, but to let the others know that he was engaging in combat. He tried to stab the creature in the eye, but it reared back and roared, out of reach of his sword.

Mizuki’s contribution to the fight came in early, with a sharp crack of green magic that seared off feathers from the creature’s back and caused it to writhe in pain. Alfric moved in while it was injured and slashed at its exposed chest, but the sword left only a shallow gash, with a trickle of shimmering blood to show for the effort. The not-dragon’s claws came down, and Alfric heard a squealing sound of those claws meeting the metal of his shield. He thrust his sword forward, a bit wild, but the tip of his sword fared little better against the beast’s chest.

Verity’s song grew louder, almost matching the volume of the fight, and Alfric felt a surge of strength. He went at the monster harder, this time trying to get at its weak points, its eyes or mouth. If its claws could cut into metal, then it was wise to stay away from them, or let the shield take the brunt of the damage.

One of his thrusts finally got the creature in its eye, which burst like a ripe grape and sent the creature reeling, but it bounced back almost instantly, hurtling itself at Alfric and swiping wildly. Two of the hits bounced off the shield with a screech of torn metal, but the final one went just over the upper lip of the shield, hitting Alfric in the helm and tearing through some of the flesh on his face in a shock of pain.

Alfric gave a roar of his own. They were both injured, and began to circle each other, with Alfric trying to keep himself in the not-dragon’s blind spot. The room was a large one, with the central fountain dominating, but there were other things in it, a seating area to one side and a handful of cabinets, some of them with glass display cases. The tail whipped to the side and destroyed one of the cases, and some instinctive part of Alfric winced, because that might have been valuable. He licked the blood from his lips, then tried to blink away the blood that had gotten in his right eye, and lunged forward once more, trying to pierce the creature in the mouth.

They moved back and forth, neither accomplishing much, with more of the room destroyed with every passing moment. Alfric was starting to fatigue, even with the aid of Verity’s loud song, and his shield had taken plenty of abuse, enough that there were visible shears in it even from the back side. As he was starting to wonder whether he would actually manage to kill the creature, he felt a pressure on his back, and a moment later, his wounds were closed, his strength returned.

The time it took for that to take effect might have given the monster an opening, but another spell came crashing into existence, this time right in the creature’s face, an explosive green mist that washed over it and caused it to screech in pain.

Alfric moved forward again, with renewed vigor, knowing that he had the advantage over the creature now. He attacked more fiercely, aiming at its head again, and letting it claw at his shield, but couldn’t manage to sink his blade anywhere that did more than surface damage.

It was at about this time that he saw Isra slinking around the side to flank the creature, out of its field of view. She had dropped her bow and instead unsheathed her long dagger. Alfric wanted to call to her, to tell her not to do anything foolish, that he would handle it, but while there was little doubt that the creature was unintelligent, it might still be able to read his body language and eye line. You had to trust the members of your party. That was a fundamental rule of dungeoneering, and one that he’d ignored until now.

Alfric was still trying to end the injured not-dragon when Isra launched herself forward onto the back of the creature. She slammed her dagger down into its other eye in a single swift motion. It screeched and howled in pain, but now it was blind, and Isra slipped off its back and away, leaving the dagger in place. Alfric stepped back and watched it, making sure that Isra got out of its way, then waiting until it had begun to tire itself out in its blind panic. When it was panting and heaving for breath, that was when Alfric stepped in, lining up a perfect thrust with all his might behind it, which drove his sword straight through the creature’s thick skin and into its internals. It thrashed around again, but this time when it stopped, it stopped for good.

Alfric looked around. There were no new doors. The dungeon had been cleared.

Chapter 4 - Three Raccoons

“This is all pretty fast, isn’t it?” asked Verity after she’d joined the party. Once the party was established, anyone else could join by doing the spell with someone who was a member, and Mizuki had volunteered to be the one to do it, because she felt the fingering technique of the others was ‘atrocious’. This time, the blue glow of lines formed a diamond between the four of them, briefly lighting up the Fig and Gristle.

“It is fast. Big city energy,” said Mizuki, as though that explained anything.

“I’ve been waitin’ on a dungeon party for ages now,” said Hannah. “I’d heard that people always wanted healers, but until Alfric no one had ever asked, which seemed a shame, ay. And I had a few rejections too, which stung. Thought they could just come into the temple an’ get their scratches and bites fixed, which they could, but still.”

“It is fast,” said Alfric. “But for a full party of second elevation, in a dungeon like the one the Pucklechurch portal will produce, there’s not much need for us to go in with more training or equipment than we have. Ten rooms, at the most.”

“For the second dungeon we do I’ll have some armor,” said Hannah. “A breastplate at least, and maybe a helm, not that I’ll be on the front lines. You’ll mostly be in want of patchin’ after the fights are over, if you’re doin’ it in the normal way.”

“Second dungeon?” asked Verity, arching an eyebrow. “I’m not signed on for more than this one.”

“No one is,” said Alfric. “We’re a half mile away from the portal, and with how little magic there is in the area, it should be a breeze for us. A second dungeon would take more coordination, and maybe a little more preparation, but it would also be quite a bit further, since we’d be going to the next hex over.”

“Well, I’m up for a second if anyone else is,” said Hannah. “A second, and a third, and a fourth, ay?”

“Depends on what we get out of it,” said Mizuki.

“It depends on how dangerous it is,” said Verity.

“Can you sing us a song now?” asked Hannah. “I’ve heard you’re good with a lute, but never found cause to hear you play, and it’s good for a bard to test their strings with a new party.”

“Sure,” said Verity. She looked to Alfric as she undid her case and pulled out her lute. “You said strength and speed?”

“Whatever you’d like,” he said, trying to be diplomatic. He’d given her the specifics earlier, and her reaction hadn’t been what he’d imagined it would be. “That would be conventional though.”

Verity strummed her lute once, then began in on a brief song with two verses and a chorus. It took a minute and a half, all told, as it was a short song about two children playing in the forest, but when it was over, Alfric felt a warm glow within himself. He unsheathed his sword, dampening the magical effect to err on the side of safety, and twirled it once, feeling the perfect balance of it, and spun again, practicing his forms. There was strength and speed, but something else laced in with it, and when he’d sheathed his sword, he dragged a nail across the flesh of his forearm.

“You added something?” he asked.

Verity shrugged. “Just testing the strings.”

“I can see better,” said Mizuki, using her fingers to spread her eyelids and look around. “That’s you?” She stared at Verity with her eyes held open by her fingers.

“Shush,” said Verity. She tapped her head. “I’m holding that tune.”

Mizuki let go of her eyes and frowned. “So she’s just out of commission for the rest of the day then?”

“No,” said Verity. “Just hard to talk.”

“We don’t need it now, if you’d rather drop it,” said Alfric.

“I can hear better too,” said Hannah. “That’s five effects?”

Verity shook her head, swishing her hair side to side, and held up her fingers, indicating six.

“I’d rather it be stable and weak than unstable and powerful,” said Alfric, looking at Verity. She was very clearly intensely concentrating on the task at hand, her musical magic weaving together their personal qualities and giving boosts to them.

“It’s fine,” said Verity. “Good practice. Easier when I’m playing. Saving that for later.”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Is the sixth magic? I think I can see it a bit better.” She looked down at Alfric’s boots. “Are those magical?”

“They are,” replied Alfric, looking down. “They increase my stride length.”

“It’s a real subtle effect,” said Mizuki, looking over at Verity. “Not the shoes,” she said to Alfric, before turning back. “The vision.”

“It works on what you have,” said Verity.

Mizuki narrowed her eyes at Verity. “I can’t tell if that was a slight or not.”

“Probably not,” said Alfric. “Bards exclusively work with what’s already there. If you’re blind, no bard is going to make you see. If you have no sense of taste, then they have nothing to work with, nothing to enhance. Even in a more mild case, a weak person is going to gain less strength than someone who’s already strong to start with. It’s a compounding effect.”

“Multiplying,” said Verity. “Compounding would mean — ah, lost it.”

Alfric felt the effect slowly fade away, leaving him feeling weak, though he knew from experience that it was only a matter of his body needing to adapt back to baseline.

“Compounding would mean that it was building on itself,” said Verity. “Progressive melodies are a bit beyond me. I’ll start up a song again once we’re at the portal itself, and probably continue playing and singing throughout, which will help to keep the tune going.”

“Good,” said Alfric, nodding.

“But is this what everyone is wearing, ay?” asked Hannah, looking at the other girls. “Because a dungeon can be a terrible place. Better to have paddin’, if you don’t have armor, and better to cover up if you don’t have paddin’.” She was giving Mizuki a skeptical look. “Your arms are bare, ay?”

“I’ve got a cloak,” said Mizuki, pulling it from her bag to show Hannah. “Besides, Alfric has been very clear that he’ll protect us.”

“You’re wearin’ culottes and sandals,” said Hannah, looking down at Mizuki’s feet. “How’s Alfric to protect you from insects and mud, ay?”

“I’ll be fine,” said Mizuki, frowning. “Bugs don’t like me, and mud doesn’t bother me.”

“Well, we’ll see,” said Hannah, clearly not buying it. “I can heal anythin’ that’s no more’n skin deep, ay, but if it’s into the muscle there are limits to how much and how often, so you be careful not to rely on me overmuch. And a puncture to the guts, we’d have to bring you back into town. Very little symmetry to be found in the guts.” Her gaze went to Verity.

“This is the best I have,” said Verity. She was wearing a dress with small white flowers printed on it, with boots her only concession to practicality. “I don’t actually own pants.”

“What do you do in winter then, ay?” asked Hannah.

“I sing a song so I don’t feel the cold,” replied Verity.

Hannah laughed, before it became obvious that Verity wasn’t joking. “But you’re still cold!”

Verity shrugged. “I stay inside a lot. And I do have a jacket. Plus some warming elements to keep my room toasty.”

Hannah clucked her tongue. “Well then, I suppose we’re ready as we’re going to be. Who is our last?” she asked Alfric.

“Isra,” he replied. “She’ll be our ranger.”

“Not typical, is it?” asked Hannah. “To have a ranger?”

“Not really, no,” replied Alfric. “But she’s a skilled huntress, second elevation, and —”

“Available?” asked Mizuki with a bright smile.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “Better than the other options the censusmaster gave me.” He had done his asking around.

“Well, I’m in need of supplies, things that I couldn’t get yesterday when I heard you sniffin’ around,” said Hannah. “Does anyone want to come with me? We’ve got a bit more than a bell, but if the meetin’ place is to be by the warp, then we can all just warp there, so time’s not so much a concern.”

“I’ll come with,” said Mizuki, looking down at her sandals. “You might have a point.”

“Do you not own proper shoes?” asked Hannah.

“None that I’d want covered in ichor, which seems to be what you’re suggesting,” replied Mizuki.

They split off, leaving Verity and Alfric alone.

“I hope those two do well by themselves,” said Alfric. “I should probably be going back to my room to put on my armor and get ready to go.”

“I’ll do better with the song later,” said Verity. “I was pushing it.”

“It’s fine,” said Alfric. “I don’t really care what happens when we’re outside the dungeon, so long as it goes smoothly once we’re in. You only get to do each dungeon once, so I’m hoping that we do a full clear every time.” It wasn’t technically true that you could only do each dungeon once, but he was hoping not to be called out on that technicality, because it wasn’t the kind of digression he wanted at the moment.

“Except that not everyone has agreed to a second?” asked Verity, raising an eyebrow.

“True,” said Alfric. “A full clear this time, then.”

“This has been put together fast,” said Verity. “I don’t know anything about dungeoneering, but I would think that we’d have trial runs and training.”

“It might be better that way, yes, but I really don’t think it’s necessary,” said Alfric.

“I’ve played with other musicians before,” said Verity. “My current conditions might not suggest it, but I was conservatory-trained. You can sit down, three or four of you together, totally unknown to each other, and make beautiful music in accordance with your sheet music, but you only ever do that if you have very little time. It’s better with people you’ve come to know and trust, people who you’ve practiced with extensively. The music comes out much better.”

“Well,” said Alfric, sniffing slightly. “There are differences of opinion when it comes to dungeoneering. Sometimes you put together what is, on paper, a perfect team, you prepare everything perfectly, you do trial runs and theorycrafting … and it just falls apart.”

“I suppose I can see that,” said Verity. “I’ll trust you to know your business, if you trust me to know mine.”

The warp point in Pucklechurch was an utterly simple affair, by city standards, nothing more than a slightly raised area of stonework with a few columns and a dome for protection from the elements. In comparison with the temple, which was far too big for the town’s size, the warp point seemed too small and too simple, not even fully enclosed, with none of the guards or attendants that Alfric would have expected. With a very simple, universally available spell, you would warp from anywhere in the hex to the hex’s exact center. Even with how small Pucklechurch was, he would have thought it would be someone’s job to watch the warp point, but no, not even that. When he’d first warped in, he’d quickly stepped off, but then looked around expectantly, not knowing what he was supposed to do. It was weird.

“It makes sense,” said Hannah when he mentioned it. “Warp points are most used by those who live in the hex. If you’re travelin’ long-distance, you’re probably using portals or leylines, or you have enough cargo that the warp’ll fail, ay? People goin’ through-and-through, overland, popping over the hex border so they can warp, how many is that a week?”

“I’ve got no idea,” said Alfric.

“Not many, I’d reckon,” said Hannah. “Traders from other towns, maybe on market days, but it’s six miles from the hex edge. You haven’t been out of the big city long, have you?”

“Only a few days, most of them in travel,” said Alfric. “I’ll admit that there are more differences in custom than I was expecting.” Pucklechurch wasn’t the emptiest hex he’d been through, but as final destinations went, it was miniscule. Some of the smaller hexes had no more than a hundred people in them, and he would see them only briefly when he warped in before hiking out to the next hex edge.

“Sixth bell was two minutes ago,” said Mizuki, staring at the warp point. “Where’s our girl?”

“There,” said Verity, pointing down the way.

Mizuki gave a friendly wave, and Isra faltered for a moment before continuing forward.

“Ready to join the party?” asked Alfric once she’d come close.

Isra nodded, slowly, as she looked at the others.

“That’s Verity, that’s Hannah, and you know me, Mizuki, and Alfric,” said Mizuki. “This is Isra, ranger extraordinaire.”

“Are we ready to go?” asked Isra. She looked at them. “Is this what everyone is wearing?”

“I put on some boots and gloves,” said Mizuki, extending her hands to display. “I don’t know what anyone else expects of me.” Other than those two additions, she was dressed the same as she’d been before, with her arms completely bare except for the gloves, which went up almost to her elbows.

“It’ll be fine,” said Alfric. He looked Isra over. She hadn’t changed, but her pack was now nearly empty and rolled up so that its excess folds were tucked and strapped in. She had a bow too, strapped across her back, and a quiver of arrows, along with a sheathed dirk at her hip. She looked different though, and he realized that she’d removed the piercings from her face, which gave her a much neater look.

He pulled the spell from his pocket and handed it over to her. “Just follow along, Mizuki will do it with you.”

The spell was completed in short order, and this time formed a pentagon connecting the five of them. Not long after that, Isra was frowning.

“I don’t have the channel,” she said.

“The channel doesn’t appear until after a week’s time,” said Alfric. “We’re just a basic party right now.”

“Oh,” said Isra. She looked relieved. “Are we ready?”

“We’re ready,” said Alfric, keeping his voice firm. “The dungeon portal is a half mile outside of town. If we leave now, we’ll be able to get back before dusk, though I have a lantern with me.” He turned and started off, hoping that the others would follow him, and feeling relief when they did. From what he’d experienced of Pucklechurch, he half-expected that going anywhere would be preceded by an hour’s worth of talking.

“So, is this everyone’s first time in a dungeon?” asked Mizuki as they walked.

“I went when I was in seminary,” said Hannah, “A long way from here, with a party full of clerics, mostly so we could see what there was to see, and we got almost nothin’ from it. Still, interestin’ enough, and I’ve wanted to go again. To go properly, I mean.”

“Never been, never wanted to,” said Verity.

“I’ve been curious,” said Mizuki. “But it seems like there’s a lot of traveling involved in being an adventurer.”

“It’s not that much,” said Alfric. “If you use the warp points to cut distance in half, going from center to hex edge, that’s only six miles of walking between dungeons.”

“Six miles is a long way to walk,” said Mizuki with a frown.

“It feels less long if you’ve got sensible shoes,” said Hannah, smiling at Mizuki. “But to your point, Alfric, dungeons aren’t always close to the warp points, are they? So you’d have to go further, ay?”

“Sometimes,” Alfric admitted.

“And sometimes there’s no road to the hex edge, or no direct road, or not to the right hex edge, ay?” asked Hannah, who seemed to use an inflected ‘ay’ on a whim. Her accent was hard to place, but it was somewhere southern, Alfric thought. “So you’d want to map it out, is what I’m sayin’.”

“You would,” said Alfric.

“Did you?” asked Mizuki. “Because you’re Mister Planning, it seems like. Does one of those pockets contain a plan?”

“It’s complicated,” said Alfric.

“The matter of what’s in your pockets is complicated?” asked Hannah, raising an eyebrow.

“I have a map,” said Alfric. “But I don’t have a firm route, because it depends on too many things, not least of which is whether I can keep a party together. If this goes well, and I can interest all of you in a second dungeon, then we’d obviously go to one of the six adjacent hexes, but from there it depends on whether Pucklechurch will be our home base.”

“I own a house,” said Mizuki. “I’m not leaving my house for long.”

“I suppose I’ll echo that, for different reasons,” said Verity. “Asking me to quit my job and take up work as an adventurer, well, that’s something that I would have to think long and hard about.”

“I would go,” said Isra, her words soft.

“I’d go too,” said Hannah. “There’s always work for a cleric on the move, though I’d want to save my best for the dungeons, as I’ve done today. If not, I’ve a room at the temple, and can take the apprenticeship at my own speed, for the way of the righteous is often slow, so it is said.”

“We can talk about all that later,” said Alfric. “Personally, while I’m not pinning my hopes on it, I’m looking forward to seeing what we find down in the dungeon. Something to help us travel faster would make a lot of this discussion moot, or if not moot, then at least easier.”

“Like boots that make your stride longer?” asked Mizuki.

“Or something better,” said Alfric. “It’s hard to say what’s going to come out of a dungeon, but it’s not out of the question that we could cut six miles of travel down to none. If we did find that, then going to the next dungeons, if we all want to do that, would be a lot easier.”

“Well, I’m excited,” said Mizuki. “I’ve never owned a magic item.”

“Your house is full of them,” said Alfric.

“Well, you know what I mean,” said Mizuki. “A stove isn’t magic.”

“It is,” said Hannah, “You might as well say warp points aren’t magical, ay.”

“You know what I mean,” said Mizuki.

“The difference you’re looking for is entads and ectads,” said Verity. “Stuff that comes from the dungeons, they’re their own thing, separate and different, entads. Ectads are part of a system, like the warming elements, chilling elements, water makers, things like that.”

“They both come from dungeons though,” said Alfric. “The base materials for ectads, anyway. It’s one of the things that we’ll be on the lookout for.”

“But there will be entads in the dungeon?” asked Mizuki.

“There should be,” said Alfric. “I would expect between four and six, but only one or two that are actually worthwhile. We’ll sell some, keep others, depending on what we get. Some bind though, which would mean that we wouldn’t be able to sell them. Most of the profit in a dungeon is in the materials we can extract from it.” He looked at Mizuki. “We’ll need your eyes.”

“And what kind of monsters will we find?” asked Verity.

“That depends,” said Alfric. “The nature of a dungeon depends on too many things to say for certain. The geography of the hex is one element, as are the flora and fauna, but there’s also the time of day, the weather, the season, the positions of the stars, what magic has been used, on and on, and beyond all that, the people in the party going into the dungeon. It’s an art, not a science. We’re following best practices though. It’s said that your first dungeon is always best in the springtime, on a clear day.”

“It’s late spring,” said Verity. “Does that matter?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” replied Alfric.

“How dangerous will it actually be?” asked Verity.

“That’s hard to quantify,” said Alfric.

“Raccoons,” said Hannah, nodding sagely. “Or maybe another animal of the same size.”

“I’m sorry?” asked Verity.

“It’s what they said, in the seminary, ay?” asked Hannah. “The monsters you find in the dungeons are, oh, like bein’ attacked by two or three raccoons at once. Frightenin’, and a bit of a risk of being scratched or bit, but no one would expect you to die, ay?”

“Raccoons that I will be protecting you all from,” said Alfric.

“Raccoons are gentle creatures,” said Isra.

“Well, obviously,” nodded Hannah. “Another animal then? One that would attack?”

“No animal attacks humans,” said Isra. “Only if they defend their young.”

“A rabid raccoon then?” asked Hannah.

“Perhaps,” said Isra.

“I expect scratches and bites,” said Alfric. “I expect a few minor injuries that Hannah will be able to heal, and if it’s anything worse, then we can get other healing. I don’t expect anyone else to be hurt, not seriously.”

“I’ve heard, at second elevation, you can almost do a minor dungeon yourself,” said Hannah. “But you wouldn’t want to, naturally, since there’s such a risk of it goin’ bad.”

“Not even that bad,” said Alfric. “When we say ‘bad’, we mean leaving the dungeon with a mild injury that you’d need a cleric for.” He gave Hannah a pleading look, and she kept whatever clarification or elaboration she had in store to herself.

“I suppose,” said Verity. “I’m not sure all that has done much for my nerves.” She let out a breath. “Three raccoons.”

Alfric nodded. He had never liked the raccoon comparison, which he’d heard before, but it was helpful, if wrong. “Ah, this is the turn, we’re almost there.”

Chapter 6 - Henlings

“Everyone okay?” asked Alfric, throwing his sword and shield to the ground. He was shaking from the rush of battle.

“I think you were the only one hurt,” said Hannah.

“I’m not going further,” said Mizuki. She was standing far back, by the stairs, ready to bolt. “No way. That thing could have killed you. Was that a dragon?”

“Not a dragon,” said Alfric. “Not even close.”

“Well I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “I’ve never seen a dragon, and there was all sorts of other crazy stuff.”

“A dragon wouldn’t fit in the room,” said Verity, finally stopping her song. “Plus we would all be dead. I’ll second Mizuki, I’m done.” Again, she was composed in a way that Alfric found both admirable and unexpected. She’d kept up her song throughout, which must have taken a fair amount of courage and concentration.

“It’s just a fight,” huffed Hannah. “No one hurt, and I can fix the shield, mostly.”

“It’s fine,” said Alfric, breathing a sigh of relief. “We’re done. That was the whole dungeon.” He pointed around at the walls. “No more doors, no more hallways, just three and a half rooms this time.”

Mizuki looked up at the dark sky and its green clouds, which provided only faint illumination. She very cautiously took a few steps away from the stairs to get a better look. “But what’s up there?”

“Nothing,” said Alfric. “People try to go beyond the dungeons sometimes, and there’s never anything there. It’s a little false, half-created world. All a small one like this needs is four rooms and a handful of monsters. This is the Pucklechurch dungeon, not one of the megadungeons of a city, or an infinidungeon that you’d find at a place of power. Fewer monsters than I’d expected, and fewer rooms, but much tougher, which is the trade-off sometimes. All that’s left is to loot as much as we can.”

“Wait, it’s over?” asked Mizuki, sagging. “That was it?”

“Yup,” replied Alfric, giving her a smile.

“Well I guess that wasn’t so bad then,” Mizuki said, frowning a bit. The tension started to wind out of her. She crossed her arms. “I was prepared to go through another few rooms.”

“You were?” asked Alfric.

“Well, I wanted to be talked into it, assured that things would be fine,” said Mizuki. She ran shaky fingers through her hair. They were going to have to get her a helm, if there was any way she’d agree to another dungeon. She looked around the room, as though confirming that there really weren’t more doors. “Huh. We did it.”

“I would have needed ten minutes or so, maybe twenty,” said Verity, slinging her lute behind her back. “I was pushing it with that melody.”

“I noticed,” said Alfric. “It was appreciated. We can wait on it, but it’ll probably be necessary for you to weave another song for Mizuki to see any entads we’re missing.” He looked at the broken cabinets and crushed furniture. “I wish it weren’t such a mess. Hopefully we didn’t break anything.”

“I brought gloves,” said Hannah, pulling them from her pants pocket and slipping them on. “I can move some glass away. We’re lookin’ for valuables, ay?”

“Entads are the first priority,” said Alfric. “There’s not really a limit to how valuable they can be, but I would be surprised if we found anything that was astounding. What I’m really hoping for is travel, which is most associated with brooms, carpets, boots, watches, rings, and drinks, but it could be anything.”

“You memorized all that?” asked Verity.

“Sure,” replied Alfric. He moved over to the crushed display cases and began moving things aside, being as careful as he could. “Not on purpose, I didn’t sit down to do it, but I read enough that I picked it up. Different effects have different associations. It’s not completely random.”

“But we find what we find, right?” asked Mizuki. She had moved fully away from the stairs now, cautiously creeping her way into the room.

“We do,” nodded Alfric. He had opened up the smashed remains of a cabinet, only to find equally smashed vials that had once contained liquids. “Never eat or drink anything you find in a dungeon,” said Alfric. “I don’t think anyone would, but I thought I would say it.”

“Is it all poisonous or something?” asked Mizuki.

“Not at all,” said Hannah. “But it takes a lot of work to say for sure what’s good and what’s not. Some can kill you, that’s for sure, but others are just disgustin’.”

“It’s a shame to waste the meat,” said Isra, looking over the body of the not-dragon.

“Good work, by the way,” Alfric said to her. “I wasn’t sure that I would be able to get it. I was considering a retreat.”

“Arrows weren’t working,” replied Isra with a shrug.

“I hadn’t even noticed,” Alfric confessed.

In one of the cabinets, Alfric found a set of seven keys, each of them with a different bow. Each bow had a different decorative animal, and Alfric assumed that they were native to the Pucklechurch hex. It was possible that they were magic, but also entirely possible that they were just a bit of set dressing. There was a name for such things: henlings. They were bits of frippery and tatt that could sometimes be sold, but more often just served as mementos. Taverns that catered to adventurers were commonly decorated with the stuff, sometimes with a full wall of bric-a-brac. In the city, at least, there had been stores that sold the stuff, usually for fairly cheap. You could get plates and silverware pulled from a dungeon for cheaper than handcrafted.

“Ready,” said Verity. She unslung her lute and strummed it once, looking up slightly as she searched for the words. “My eyes were bright, as I watched through the keyhole, oh so late in the night, the old man read him a very long scroll, a tale of magic and horrible blight, and I watched as he cast him, a most fearsome spell, and I waited and whimpered, as his portal did swell.”

Mizuki was moving fast, stepping over the wreckage and looking at things, including pulling back cabinets with wild abandon, not seeming to fear getting cut by the broken glass that was scattered everywhere. She set the things she found on a small table that had been next to the seating, and was miraculously unhurt. When she was finished, she stepped back and looked around.

“These?” asked Alfric, holding out the set of keys. Mizuki shook her head, and Alfric slipped the keys back into his pocket.

“All done,” Mizuki called to Verity, but Verity continued on with the end of the song anyhow, bringing it to a proper conclusion. “You use the weirdest lyrics. What was all that about a portal?”

“I was just making it up as I went,” said Verity. “If a song is going to have a tight focus, it’s better to have it revolve around the subject that’s being focused on, in this case, sight.”

“I guess,” replied Mizuki. “I’m not sure I’ll ever understand bards.” Not even ten minutes after the battle had concluded, and she was already returning to her old self. Alfric couldn’t help but smile at that. Midway through, he’d wondered whether he was going to have to replace her. She gestured at the things she’d set onto the table. “This is what we have, so far as I could sniff out.”

Sitting on the table were four entads, which, with the two books below, made for six in total. That was on the high side, but then, the monsters they’d encountered had been much tougher than expected as well. Unfortunately, none of them looked likely to be travel entads. There was a flute with what seemed like far too many holes, a small silver spoon, a dark red handkerchief, and a white wooden longbow the color of bone that had been hiding in one of the cabinets.

“Dibs on the spoon,” said Mizuki. She was still slightly shaky, but seemed to have it under control. If she had recriminations, she was saving them for later.

“We don’t know what it does, and that’s not the arrangement we have,” said Alfric. “Also, as I mentioned earlier, I promised Isra that she would have first bidding rights for entads and break any tied bids. Because we’re not allowing outside money, that means she could potentially take any of these entads by bidding her entire share of the loot.”

“I continue to object, except I feel like she did a lot more than me, so whatever,” said Mizuki. That wasn’t Alfric’s read of what happened, but he kept his mouth shut.

“It was needed to bait her, sure,” said Hannah, giving Isra a smile. “Alfric, you reckon to wait until after we’re out to find out what they do?”

“Usually, yes,” said Alfric. “You don’t want to stay in the dungeon longer than you have to. But in our case, because we got lucky and there’s so much we want to carry out, I think it’s better that we find out now, just in case one of these things allows for extradimensional space.” Aside from travel, extradimensional space was one of the cornerstone abilities needed in the trade, because it could greatly multiply what you could bring out of a dungeon.

Mizuki picked up the spoon and looked it over.

“Be very, very careful,” said Alfric, holding up a hand. “You don’t know what they do. Treat it like it might kill you or anyone you point it at. Assume that it’s deadly.”

Mizuki looked down at the spoon in her hand, then back up at Alfric. “It’s a spoon,” she said.

“One of the most powerful combat entads in existence is a flower pot,” said Alfric. “If you tap on the bottom of it twice, it lets out a beam of concentrated light that can blast halfway through a city.”

“The first time it was fired, nigh on a hundred people died, though it did get undone,” said Hannah. “Rare, that, though, ay?”

“It’s good to keep in mind,” said Alfric, nodding to Hannah. He was going to have to talk to her in private, he decided, to see what she knew and how she knew it. He hadn’t expected a cleric so eager to venture into a dungeon, and he certainly hadn’t expected her to be so knowledgeable.

“Oh, it changes size,” said Mizuki, twirling around a spoon that was much bigger than it had been before. “That’s … neat.” It warped and shifted in her hand, and from the way that she was concentrating, it was taking quite a bit of effort to do it. It wasn’t just changing size, it was changing shape as well, becoming deep or shallow, changing its angle, but never going too far from being a normal spoon. “I want it,” said Mizuki.

“That’s not really how we’re doing things,” said Alfric.

“Then I’ll bid on it,” said Mizuki. “One twentieth of my share.”

“That’s stupid,” said Verity. “No offense. With the books, we might get as much as fifty thousand rings, by Alfric’s evaluation, which … I’m skeptical of. Your share would be ten thousand. A twentieth of that is five hundred rings. You think a spoon that changes size is worth that?”

Mizuki turned the spoon into a ladle and frowned at it. “I suppose not.”

“You shouldn’t tell her that,” said Isra. “More for the rest of us.”

“I don’t particularly need the money,” said Verity. “I live a nice enough life right now, even without this windfall.”

“Then for my sake,” said Isra.

“We’ll do all the negotiations at the end, once we’ve taken out everything we can carry,” said Alfric. “No point in talking about it now.”

“And we can touch these?” asked Verity, looking down at the objects on the table, then up at Alfric for confirmation.

“You can,” said Alfric. “The flower pot was an aberration. Just be careful what you try.”

Verity picked up the flute and looked it over, while Isra went for the bow. Alfric watched them carefully, then went to grab the handkerchief, only to find that Hannah had already picked it up.

“I’ll go get the two books from downstairs,” said Alfric, closing his hand. “If we’re entad testing, best to do it all at once.”

The bigger of the two books was nearly fifty pounds, and while that wasn’t a problem for Alfric, it did make him wonder what it could do that would possibly be worth lugging that weight around. Naturally, entads didn’t have to be worthwhile, and many of them (like the shape-changing spoon) were little more than curiosities, but he was hopeful that the book would prove its worth. Perhaps when he opened it he would find a multitude of maps, and touching them would take him and the book to somewhere else, the exact kind of travel entad that he’d been hoping for. More likely, it would be something just barely useful enough to justify taking it out. It was useless to guess at what an entad did before testing it, but impossible to stop yourself.

“I figured out the handkerchief,” said Hannah when Alfric came back up. She was smiling. “It heals wounds.”

“It does?” asked Alfric.

“Well, ‘heals’ is strong language for what it does,” she said, looking a bit sheepish. She held out her arm, where she’d rolled up her sleeve. The handkerchief was wrapped around her forearm. “See?” she asked. “Covered, it looks and feels fine. But take it off?” she took off the handkerchief, revealing an inch-long cut that was bleeding freely. “Huh,” she said, looking down at the wound. “I thought it just stopped the hurt and the blood, but I think it’s a bit more.” She replaced the handkerchief and held it there.

“How’d you get hurt?” asked Alfric.

“Did it myself,” replied Hannah, still looking cheerful. “Red is the color of blood, ay?”

“That’s,” Alfric began. “I suppose if it works, it works. Guessing things on the basis of their looks is a crapshoot though, maybe a bit better than chance, but not so much that you should be cutting yourself.”

“This flute has too many holes,” said Verity, turning it over. “And there would be no way for your fingers to effectively cover them.”

“Do you play the flute?” asked Mizuki, moving over to stand next to the bard.

“No,” replied Verity.

“And how many fingers do you have?” asked Mizuki.

“The usual amount,” replied Verity with a sigh of exasperation.

“I’m counting six on each hand, for what it’s worth,” said Mizuki.

Alfric looked, and saw that this was true, at nearly the same moment that Verity seemed to notice. She shrieked and dropped the flute, which clattered on the ground, at which point her hands went back to having the usual number of fingers. She stared at her hands, keeping them in front of her, as though they were going to mutate at any moment.

“Entad effects usually aren’t permanent, for bodily effects,” said Alfric. “If there were one that gave you an extra finger on your hand for the rest of your life, it would be one of the really rare ones.”

“Neat,” said Mizuki, picking up the flute and giving it a twirl, the spoon she’d taken stuffed into a pants pocket. She held the flute in one hand and stared at her free hand, which had six fingers. She waved them back and forth, then clenched and unclenched them. “This is so weird. You can’t even feel it. It’s like I always had six fingers.” She squinted for a moment, and then she had seven fingers instead of six. “Alright, time to see how many we can get out of this.” More and more fingers were added to her hands, until eventually she had ten fingers on each. It was altogether too many fingers, very noticeable when Alfric looked at her.

There was, of course, another point to entad testing in the dungeon, which was that it allowed them to have a bit of a ‘cool down’. Alfric’s father had always said that when people went through something awful, it was best to give them something fun or interesting, some kind of distraction that would rip their mind from the awfulness. Entad testing was one of those things, and that it could be done in the dungeon would mean that perhaps the associations with blood and injury wouldn’t stick as much.

“I don’t like that one,” said Hannah, who was still holding the handkerchief to her cut arm, but had come over to watch.

“Seems kind of useless,” said Mizuki, tossing the flute up into the air with her ten-fingered hand and then catching it with a hand that had gone back to normal.

“It’s gross,” said Verity. “But it might actually be useful for playing music.”

“You think with the extra fingers this flute makes some nice noises?” asked Mizuki, seeming skeptical.

“I wasn’t actually thinking about that,” replied Verity. “I was thinking that if you had the flute touching your skin, you could play the lute a bit easier. Here, let me test.”

He wanted the girls to all be happy, and from what he’d heard, a lot of people really enjoyed testing out new entads. Back in the big city, Alfric’s friends had taken a lot of joy in going into entad shops to look around at what was there, from the mundane to the exotic. Whatever entads weren’t bound to the party or to party members would probably be sent back to the city to be sold there, where they could fetch a better price, though Alfric would almost certainly be dealing with middlemen in Tarchwood or Liberfell.

While Verity played her lute using extra fingers, Alfric watched Isra. She was taking a more cautious approach to entad testing than the others seemed to, and despite the fact that she was holding the bone white longbow and had plenty of arrows, she hadn’t actually fired it. The flower pot entad was quite famous, particularly because it served as an object lesson in how things could unexpectedly go wrong, but he didn’t have a handle on how much Isra knew about the wider world, and perhaps saying outright that entad testing could hypothetically kill them all was a bit much. She was instead testing the string, feeling the parts of it, twisting and bending, looking it over … but not actually firing it.

Alfric decided that he would go over and talk to her if she’d still done nothing with it when they were getting ready to gather up the rest of the loot.

The bigger of the two books he’d brought up was completely blank, its thousand-odd pages containing not so much as a scrap of information. It didn’t have a title on the cover or on the spine, not that Alfric had really expected it would. Staring at the blank pages, Alfric thought about them as representations of something else, which was sometimes true for entads with multiple parts. A suit of entad armor with three jewels on the chest almost certainly had some ability that could be used three times in a day, or in a week, or could affect three objects, though of course that rule wasn’t a firm one, because almost no rules about entads were. And with a thousand blank pages, what might that mean?

Alfric proceeded to touch various parts of the book, running his fingers all along it. His approach wasn’t all that different from Isra’s, when he thought about it. The obvious thing to do with a blank book was to write inside it, but he was going to hold off on that until he’d tried other things.

The answer finally came when he pressed firmly against one of the open pages. His fingers sunk in, and as he kept up the pressure, his entire hand disappeared into the book, until finally he was in it down to the arm. As no more of him would go in, and because he was mildly worried, he extracted his arm back out of the book, leaving a blank page. Trying a different approach, Alfric pressed something else against the open page, this time a small rock picked up from the floor, and when it sank down into the book with light pressure, it stayed there, visible as a picture of itself with ink. After a few seconds, the picture of the rock was surrounded by a frame of black ink, and below it a small description was written, a simple paragraph that described the rock.

Alfric stared at it for a moment, then flipped the page and pushed in another rock, which had the same effect. Finally, he tried his best to get the rock back out, which he eventually found was possible just by pushing his hand in and grabbing it.

It was a storage entad, and a fairly good one, though it didn’t take anything that was larger than two feet on its longest side, and getting things in and out of it took some time. Still, with a thousand pages of storage, it meant that they would be able to take the entirety of the book collection downstairs with ease.

If it was unbound, which they wouldn’t know until later, then it was probably worth quite a bit, since storage entads were always in demand. If it bound to one of them, which could happen but was fairly rare, then it would make for a particularly good item, one that he would try to get for himself: you had a better chance of personal binding if the entad was physically on you as you left. But the best case scenario, at least for Alfric, was that it was partybound, because that would mean that they would have much more incentive to keep the party together. He prayed to the six gods, a short, simple prayer for each, appealing to their better natures.

It was while he was thinking about the party dynamics that Isra fired the bow. One moment she had it pointed across the room with an arrow nocked, the next she was standing against the far wall and plucking her arrow from where it was stuck in a wooden beam. She looked the arrow over once, then looked at the others.

“It’s a good one,” she said.

“Moves you to the arrow’s destination?” asked Alfric, when no explanation seemed to be forthcoming.

“No,” replied Isra. “The world slowed down and I walked with the arrow.”

“Time manipulation?” asked Alfric, raising an eyebrow. “That is good, even if it just lets you take a breather.”

Isra began experimenting with it more, and for a time, they simply watched her. The arrow would be let loose, and then Isra would be standing somewhere else in the room, usually directly along the route it had taken. She wasn’t the most articulate at describing its effects, but when Alfric took a turn, he could see the notions that she’d been pointing at.

Shooting an arrow created an invisible sphere, maybe ten feet across, one which followed the arrow. So long as you stayed within that invisible sphere, time was slowed to a crawl, the arrow’s flight easy to keep up with even if you were walking at a leisurely pace. It was hard to affect things in this slowed-down time, but as Isra had found, you could still fire arrows, and while those didn’t create little time bubbles of their own, they did seem to interact with the world in the normal way, which meant that you could fire that first arrow, then walk along beside it firing other arrows, and end up spitting out five arrows in the time that it took a normal archer to fire only once.

“It’s very powerful,” said Alfric. “We’ll need to see how it binds, if it does, but … it’s world class.”

“Meaning best in the world?” asked Mizuki.

“Yes,” replied Alfric.

“It doesn’t seem that good,” said Mizuki, giving the white longbow a skeptical look.

“Entads compound,” said Alfric. “If you have a good one, then mixing it with a second good one can make for a much more powerful result. Take a bow like that one, add in a quiver that lets you shoot faster or with more arrows, or that generates arrows, mix in an amulet that gives you constant low-grade healing, a dagger that takes time to charge … it’s not only powerful by itself, there are a lot of common effects that it makes more powerful, to say nothing of the rare effects.”

“So you’re saying we’re rich?” asked Mizuki.

“It depends on whether it binds,” replied Hannah. “Bound, we’re not rich, no.”

“Then how do we get it not to bind?” asked Mizuki.

“We don’t have control of that,” said Alfric. “The most you can do is have specific people carry out the entads, because they’re very slightly more likely to bind to whoever carries them when they cross the threshold, but that’s about it.”

“I want the bow,” said Isra. It had found its way back into her grip.

“It would be best for you to carry it out, yes,” said Alfric. “But splitting the pot isn’t usually done until everyone is outside. It’s hard to put value on things if you don’t know how or whether they’re bound.” There were some parties, he knew, where there was extensive discussion on who carried what, which usually meant testing done in the dungeon, but that wasn’t how he’d envisioned his ideal party.

“So I can take the spoon out with me?” asked Mizuki.

“We’ll divide them up equally for the trip out,” said Alfric. “Personal binding is uncommon, but if it happens, then we’ll deal with it.”

“But I could wager a portion of my share, couldn’t I?” asked Mizuki.

Alfric sighed. “The more complicated arrangements get, the more trouble they are. You don’t want people to gamble, and you don’t want people to leave with hard feelings. That’s not what keeps a party together.”

“There’s no need for us to be a party anymore, is there?” asked Verity. “Because we all agreed on a single dungeon, and that was it.”

“We did,” said Alfric. He’d known this moment was coming, and had hoped that it wouldn’t be so soon, or with such casual disregard for their clear value as a team. “Even if we’re not doing anything together, it makes sense to stay as a party for as long as possible. In a week we’ll have a party channel to talk together, and that might be necessary, because it’s going to take quite a bit of time and effort to move everything that we’re going to take out of here. This bigger book is a storage entad, and if it’s partybound, then we’ll at least have to keep a party of three in order to use it. Breaking the party before then would likely mean that everything put into it was stuck. We won’t know until we get out of here though.”

“What does the little one do?” asked Mizuki, coming over to where Alfric was and picking the book up.

“I haven’t looked at it yet,” said Alfric. “Hopefully something good, but I doubt it.”

Mizuki leafed through the small book, then stopped on a page and read for a bit. “It’s a transcription of everything that we’ve said.”

“Huh,” said Alfric. “Can I see?”

“No,” replied Mizuki. “Still looking. No names, seems like it’s doing some marks for dialect … can this thing read?” She directed that question at the group, but Alfric assumed that the question was for him.

“Read … in what sense?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “I mean … it’s writing all this in Inter, or something close to it, so how’s that work?”

“Oh,” said Alfric. “If there’s language involved, then it’s probably drawing from us.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. She slid the book over to him. “Yeah, it’s worthless.”

“Not necessarily,” said Alfric. “It depends on how it works. You could use it for eavesdropping. But we’ll need to test it, see how it actually functions.”

“Are we ready to leave?” asked Verity.

“Not hardly,” said Hannah. “We have things to loot, ya?”

“Can we start with that then?” asked Verity. “I don’t like being under this sky, or in this place. It gives me the creeps.”

They were overdue for a conversation on how dangerous the dungeon had actually been, and Alfric was grateful that it seemed like they could put it off for a bit.

Chapter 7 - Songbird

Isra bound to the bow.

“It’s not unexpected,” said Hannah. “Happens more when there’s somethin’ going on between the wielder and the weapon, least if my schoolin’ was right. It’s a windfall for her and a shame for the rest of us, since it would have fetched a hefty price on the market, but that’s the nature of dungeoneerin’.”

“And the book is partybound,” said Alfric, sighing slightly. “Which means that it won’t be fetching a good price either, and if the party breaks, it stops functioning entirely. More bad news on that front.” Though it was the kind of bad news that was also good news, when it came to keeping the party together. It was a weak incentive though, since a party could still function when down to just three members. It was also possible to sell the book even if it was partybound, but the way to do that was by cycling members in and out, and there were heaps of problems with that, all of which revolved around party minimums and maximums.

“How can you tell?” asked Verity, who had been combing her hair while the testing outside the dungeon was going on.

“I can see potential,” said Mizuki. “Comes from being a sorc. As soon as he sets the book down, it goes mostly inert, but when he picks it up, it’s got some magical life to it. Same goes for if any of us pick it up, which means it’s partybound. The bow only responds to Isra though.” She took her spoon out of her pocket. “Spoon seems like it’ll work for anyone though. Alfric, you think that this is worthless?”

“Yes,” he said. “Who would need a magical spoon? At best it replaces several mundane spoons. So what’s the market?”

“Dunno,” she said. “I mean, if you have it, then you don’t need to switch between spoons all the time, always fumbling with your big spoons, small spoons, slotted spoons, you know, making a mess of things because there are just too many of them to keep track of them all?”

“Uh huh,” he said, thinking to himself that the market of people who were improbably bad with their spoon collections was quite small. “Well, if you want to bid on it, I won’t stop you.”

“Do we really need to do the points bidding?” asked Hannah, folding her arms. “Seems complicated, for what’s just between five people, ay?”

“It’s to make sure things are fair,” said Alfric. He looked at the others. “If we aren’t going to be a long-term party, then we want everyone to come away with something they think was fair and worth their time. We have a windfall, not a major one, but one that will keep us comfortable for a bit.”

“I want the bow,” said Isra.

“Well,” said Alfric. “I mean, you have the bow, there’s nothing that anyone can do about that now. Anyone who takes the bow wouldn’t be able to do anything special with it. How the points system handles that is taking the expected value of the bow at market and reducing it by a set margin, which gets converted into —”

“Can we all just agree on a fifth of the unbound proceeds for each?” asked Hannah. “Faffin’ about with points and conversions is going to give me a headache.”

“Hey,” said Mizuki. “Can’t you do the Church of Symmetry thing? Like, divide everything up exactly equally?”

“That’s not how it works,” replied Hannah. “I can do the math, if you’d like, but there’s no special power involved there. Anywho, vote on whether we ignore the points and just do a fair split?” she asked, raising her hand.

To Alfric’s dismay, the other three raised their hands too. Eventually, he did as well, just so that it would be unanimous. He wanted them happy more than he wanted things fair.

“Wait,” said Mizuki. “Do I get the spoon?”

“Fine by me,” said Hannah.

“I’d like the flute,” said Verity. “I don’t think it’s very good, but we’ll see if I can get a hang of six-fingered playing.”

“This is throwing everything into disarray,” said Alfric. “There’s no way that the flute, spoon, and bow, are worth the same amount to each of us.”

“Well, you’re outvoted,” said Hannah, nodding as though the matter was settled. Unfortunately for Alfric, it seemed like she was right, because no one wanted to go through the time and effort to make sure things were actually fair.

“Then we sell the rag, book, and all the materials?” asked Alfric. “And hang onto the storage book, because we don’t really have any other option.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Verity. “Can we get moving though? I’d like to get back in time for dinner, and we spent longer there than I’d planned. I eat almost all my meals at the Fig and Gristle, and Cynthia closes down the kitchen earlier than I would like.”

The light was already fading, and they hadn’t left the doorway into the dungeon. Alfric quickly replaced the lock and locked it tight, then gave it a tug to test it. The lock was a simple thing, really just meant to ensure that kids wouldn’t wander into a dungeon, but there was also some ceremony and importance to it, especially when locking it up.

They began moving down the path back to Pucklechurch. Alfric was feeling good about how the dungeon had gone, overall. Hannah was an ally, in a sense, and it seemed as though Isra could be counted on to do some travelling and dungeoneering, especially because she seemed less tied to Pucklechurch. That she’d lucked out with the bow was unfortunate, in some respects, but helped prove the value of a dungeon. Verity, on the other hand, seemed a bit put off by the violence, though perhaps less than Alfric had thought. With Mizuki, it was hard to tell.

Not too long into their trip back, Verity began to sing a victory song, keeping her lute stored and using just her voice. There was no trace of magic. The song was long and involved, and involved animals fighting a dread menace. She was halfway through when Alfric realized that they were the five animals, at least if he understood right.

“A bear is not a healing animal,” said Hannah once Verity was finished and the brief applause had concluded.

“Which animal is a healing animal?” asked Verity. She looked around at them. “Sorry if the choices were offensive.”

“Well, there’s no proper healing animal,” said Hannah. “But a lizard can regrow its arms.”

“Legs, right?” asked Mizuki.

“They have arms and legs,” said Hannah.

“And a tail,” said Isra. “Which is what they most commonly regrow.”

“You’d prefer a lizard over a bear?” asked Mizuki. “Blegh. I mean, I wouldn’t want to be compared to a bear at all, too hairy.”

“Well, I’ve got hair to spare, as my ma always said,” laughed Hannah. This wasn’t at all in dispute; Hannah’s hair went down to the small of her back when unfurled, but it was also very voluminous, making her head appear larger than it really was. “And a bear’s a fine creature, but they’re not healers by any stretch.”

“Why was I a cat?” asked Isra, who had been fairly quiet. She now carried two bows on her back. Her pack was full, mostly with whatever pipes were too long to fit within the book.

“I was thinking you were a silent, slinking creature,” said Verity. “A diamond-eyed stalker in the night waiting to pounce at exactly the right moment.”

Isra nodded. She looked lost in thought. Alfric had been pleased that she’d joined the applause.

“What was I?” asked Mizuki. “A dog, a cat, a rabbit, a bear, and a songbird? And I was … the songbird?”

Verity gave a high, delighted giggle, and Mizuki grinned at her.

“Wait,” said Alfric. “I think I actually have matching keys.” He went into a pocket, where he’d put the keys, and pulled them out, handing them to Verity.

She looked through them one by one. “The bird isn’t a songbird, the dog is a wolf, and there’s no bear.”

“What are these?” asked Hannah, coming over to look at the keys. “These were in the dungeon?”

“Henlings,” said Alfric, though he assumed Hannah already knew the term. “There would have been more, but a lot of it was destroyed in the battle, which is a shame. Technically, a henling is anything that’s distinctive enough that it seems like it’s got a story behind it, though of course it doesn’t. Sometimes people use the term broadly, to mean anything mundane you pull out, even something like rope.” He felt a bit of ire toward people who used the broad definition, as they were ruining a perfectly good word.

“I could be a raccoon instead of a bear,” said Hannah, taking one of the keys for herself and passing the rest off to Mizuki.

“Raccoons are noted healers, are they?” asked Verity. “Also, I’d have to completely rework the song.”

“I know nothing about raccoons,” said Hannah. “But if no one tells me otherwise, I’m going to assume that they’re masters of the healing arts.”

“A raccoon is a clever beast,” said Isra. “More clever than a fox. They’re adaptable and fastidiously clean.”

“Weren’t we just comparing those monsters to raccoons?” asked Mizuki. “And also, they were very much not raccoons.”

“I’d prefer to keep my mind off it, frankly,” said Verity.

“Better not to dwell on the battle,” added Alfric, though it was going to be hard to avoid, especially to interest them in a second.

“Well,” said Hannah. “I suppose that’ll do.” She took her own key and distributed the rest to the others. “Makes me feel bad about the raccoon comparison.”

“What are these keys to then?” asked Mizuki, looking over her key, which was a rabbit, just as in the song.

“They’re not ‘to’ anything, they’re just … pulled from the aether,” said Alfric. “That was how it was always described to me, at least. Some people have a fascination with henlings, and with things pulled from the dungeons. The books we have might be translated with enough time, attention, and magic, and sometimes there’s readable stuff in them. But they’re not ‘from’ anywhere, they’re just a product of the hex, the conditions, the magic, and the people entering the dungeon, along with other stuff we know nothing about.”

“Kind of creepy, when you think about it,” said Mizuki.

Alfric tightened. “I suppose we don’t need to think about it then,” he said.

“What do we do with the other two?” asked Hannah, holding the two spare keys, one of a snake, the other of a bee.

“I wasn’t going to do anything with them,” said Alfric. “They’re not really valuable.”

“Well they are now, right?” asked Hannah. “They’re mementos. I say we hold onto the keys, and if we ever have a sixth, or someone who’s a support member, we can give them one.”

“Parties only go to five,” said Verity, frowning. Alfric was watching her the most closely, because she was the most on the fence, aside from Mizuki. She was also the entire reason he’d come to Pucklechurch.

“Well, I didn’t mean to put a damper on things, but accidents happen, ay?” asked Hannah, being a little too flippant for Alfric’s tastes. “We went through that nicely, if I do say so myself, quick and clean with not too much to patch up after, but it could have been different, ay? We could have lost one. That’s something to keep in mind, when you’re doin’ a thing like this.”

That killed the conversation for a moment and brought silence down on the group. Alfric focused his eyes on his steps while he tried to think about how to change the course of the conversation. There were things he could tell them that would help assure them that they were in safe hands, but revealing too much at this stage, especially with Verity on the fence, seemed like the wrong move.

“I’ll spend the night in Pucklechurch, then go off to Tarchwood to try to sell what I can,” said Alfric. Talking business was usually safe, and more than that, it needed to be done. “The books are the biggest thing we’ll get paid for, and the pipes will be the second biggest. Once that’s all done, I’ll come back to Pucklechurch and distribute the money, at which point we’ll be able to talk about what the next step for the party is, if anything. In six days, we’ll have a party channel, but I should have the money before then.”

“How do we know that you won’t just take the money?” asked Isra.

Alfric faltered. “I would never do that,” he said. “To do that to your party members — even to strangers, I would never —”

“Personally, I trust him,” said Mizuki.

“I don’t trust him enough to allow him full responsibility with fifty thousand rings,” said Isra.

“Well, then,” said Alfric, feeling helpless. “I don’t know. I’m true to my word, I’m honest,” though perhaps less so of late, if mostly lies of omission, “Would it help if you came with me?”

“We could do that,” said Isra. “We’d walk together.”

Alfric felt a knot of tension unwind. Normally when his honor was questioned, it wasn’t so easy to find a solution.

“Well, I’m not doing that,” said Verity. “If you choose to run off with the money, then so be it.”

“Same,” said Hannah. “Though my sense of Alfric is that he’s far more concerned with the next dungeon than with the spoils of this one. Going to Tarchwood might also serve another function, which is scoping out another dungeon for us. Otherwise it would be Liberfell, right?”

“I don’t think I’ll do the next,” said Verity. Her voice was soft. “I didn’t particularly think that it suited me.”

“Ah, well, let it settle then before you make your choice,” said Hannah. “And if we can’t have you, we’ll go searchin’ out another, with no worries.”

Alfric definitely didn’t like that, but they had arrived back at Pucklechurch, and soon thereafter said their goodbyes. He watched as Verity left with Mizuki toward the Fig and Gristle, then went to the other tavern, where his room was, to make his plans for the next day. Of all the party members to act as a sticking point, Verity had to have been the worst of them. She was special, in more ways than the others knew. He had come all this way for her.

Isra came with him. That was natural, given that she wanted to make sure he didn’t run off with the loot, but it still rankled. Trust, his father had often said, had to be earned, and Alfric could see that the only thing he’d done to earn trust so far was to take hits and keep the other members of his party safe. That felt like something, but apparently for Isra, it wasn’t enough that she could be sure he wouldn’t rob her, and for Verity, it wasn’t enough that she was willing to do another dungeon. Hannah, at least, seemed a stalwart dungeoneer, even if she had some rough edges and different ideas about how to handle things. It wasn’t clear where Mizuki stood, but he was hopeful that she was more of a risk taker than she seemed. Sorcerers were notorious for that, but people didn’t always play to type.

Hours later, once he’d had a meal and a quick wash, and made somewhat annoying arrangements with Isra, Alfric lay in his rented bed, staring up at the ceiling, going over the dungeon in his head, not just the fights, which were admittedly the main thing, but the dynamics of the group.

There were two alternates, the blacksmith and the wizard, but neither of them was a proper replacement. If he hadn’t had Hannah, then every injury would have accumulated through the dungeon, and he’d have been fighting that last monster with a bloodied face and scratches all over his hands. If he hadn’t had Verity … well, it was possible that someone else could have picked up the slack, in a totally different way. And if he’d been missing Mizuki, he would have needed the wizard, just in order to have the offensive power necessary. The wizard would have taken more time though, if he didn’t already have offensive engines built.

He’d have been tempted to call Isra the weak link, but she was an exceptional archer and possessed of a bravery that brought a smile to his lips when he thought back on it. She could have stayed back, firing arrows, but she’d leapt onto the creature to attack it with a dagger. Whatever else she was, however much she might not trust him, she had a ferocious tenacity that he thought would be hard to match. She reminded him of his mother, in that respect.

He liked the party. It was a good party. They needed time and training, that was true, but they hadn’t collapsed during their first bout of combat, and however much he wished that the dungeon had been easier, morale still seemed to be high.

One of the things he hadn’t been sharing with his party was that he was still in the family guild. They’d have expected it, perhaps, if they knew his pedigree, but it didn’t seem like the name Overguard had rung any bells, not even for Verity, who had surely heard it at least once or twice while living in Dondrian. Mizuki was, curiously, one of the only ones in a guild; he’d have thought Hannah, at least, would be. None of them had yet gone to the censusmaster about him, he didn’t think.

There were fifty people in the family guild, and so he crafted his message with care, knowing that cousins, aunts, and uncles would all be reading it in the morning. A single dungeon run wasn’t normally something to report on, but this was nominally Alfric’s first, and the first he’d done with a true, proper party. The family had more than its fair share of traditions, and a first dungeon run, even if it was coming late, was something that demanded a report.

He left out details, but that was only natural. He tried his best to ape the style of his father’s reports, which he’d enjoyed reading since the age of five, when he’d first joined the guild. Those were, of course, larger, more dangerous dungeons, ones that took days or even weeks to clear, and typically only the highlights were given, either in terms of monsters or loot.

The report wove a somewhat different story than what happened. It was a dungeon at the high end of normal variance, possibly owing to some unknown aspect of Pucklechurch, or the particulars of their party. In the report, he didn’t mention anything of the reticence of his party members, only of the monsters they fought, and the two particularly good bits of luck: the books and Isra’s bow. He looked over the wording three times, changing things here and there. If this didn’t work out, if he couldn’t make his own way in the world, he would have to fall back on the family, and that, of course, would go against the central tenet of self-reliance. A sword from his father and boots from his mother, two small tokens from the vast family hoard.

For Alfric, it wasn’t simply a matter of wanting to please his parents or his family, because he truly did believe in making his own way, hunting down his own leads, and assembling his own party. It was what he wanted in life.

But he did also want his parents to be proud that he was following in their footsteps, despite the rocky start and the wasted months, so he checked the message over again before sending it off. They would get it in the morning, which meant that he wouldn’t get a response back until the morning after that, which was always an uncomfortable feeling.

And Lola would find out, if she cared to. She had too many friends among his family. There was nothing for it though; that part of his life was firmly over, and he tried to put her out of his mind.

With the message sent, there was nothing left to do but sleep. He stared at the ceiling, waiting for his mind to stop racing.

They were only just at the beginning. There was so much left to do.

Chapter 8 - Late Meals in a Quiet Kitchen

“Cynthia, come on, it’s not even that late,” said Verity.

“Rules are rules, as much as I like you,” the tavern owner replied. “And it’s not just a matter of the rules, the kitchen gets shut down at ninth bell, and the boy has already started in on dishes and cleaning up.”

“Who’s the boy?” asked Mizuki, who had tagged along without asking if that was okay. If she had asked, Verity might have said no, and Mizuki wasn’t quite ready to be done. Doing the dungeon had filled her with a nervous energy that hadn’t quite dissipated, and sitting with that energy, alone in her house, with only perhaps her cat Tabbins for company, seemed a bit too lonely.

“Edmund Clarke,” said Verity, not so much as turning to look at Mizuki. “Cynthia, please, I went into a dungeon, I’ve had a long day.”

“There’s bread, meat, and cheese, all cold,” replied Cynthia. “I know you like your meals piping hot, but the kitchen is closed for the night. I can offer you drinks, but that’s about it.”

“I know Edmund a bit,” said Mizuki. “He was the year below me in school.”

Verity turned to her. “And you think you can convince him to open the kitchen back up?”

“We didn’t leave on terribly good terms,” said Mizuki. “I was just making conversation. But if you want some food, you can swing by Marta’s with me and I can cook you up some venison. It’s no trouble really, since I was going to make something for myself.”

The assurance that it was no trouble didn’t seem to be needed, because as soon as food was mentioned, Verity’s eyes had lit up like a lighthouse in a dark fog.

“You know how to cook?” she asked, in an almost predatory way.

“It’s a hobby of mine,” Mizuki replied. “Come on, better to get started early.”

They walked through town together to Marta’s, where Mizuki kept the conversation short, taking her linen-wrapped venison loins. As they walked to her house, Mizuki was trying to think about what she was going to make, going through her mental catalog of recipes and the inventory of vegetables, herbs, and sauces available in the house. A soup would be best, to test her new magical spoon, but she had no stock or broth, and if this was her first time feeding Verity, she needed to make a good impression.

“Here’s me,” said Mizuki as they came down the path to the house. “Shoes off, please.”

She slipped out of her boots, enjoying the feeling of her toes finally being free, then cast off her gloves as well, leaving her much more comfortable. From there, she went into the kitchen, flipped up the lighting discs, and went through to double check that she really did have everything she thought she did. Venison went well with something a bit sweet, a role that Mizuki thought would be played by carrots, and it was hearty, which would be complemented with mashed potatoes that would soak up some of the gravy.

“Alright,” Mizuki said, looking over at her guest. “How hungry are you?”

“Famished,” Verity replied. “Music takes it out of me, especially with so many layers. I should have eaten before we left. I didn’t think we’d be out so long.” It had been the pipes that had taken most of the time.

“I’ll try to make it fast,” said Mizuki as she flipped open the stove. She held a hand over the heating element and waited until it came up to the right temperature, then moved a pan into place. It was possible to do everything with a single pan, but reluctantly, thinking about the extra dish she’d have to wash, she filled a pot with water from the tank and put that on the stove as well. “Do you like mushrooms?”

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “There are lots of kinds, aren’t there?”

“Oh, of course,” replied Mizuki as she melted some butter into the pan, then moved over to start chopping up the carrots. “But if you don’t like mushrooms, then you just say that and I leave them out, and if you’re picky about your mushrooms, we can start a negotiation.” She held up some mushrooms for Verity to see. They were white, with long, thin stems and a cap that wasn’t much thicker around than the stalk. “Lily mushrooms?”

“At this point, I’m hungry enough that I’ll eat anything you serve me with a smile on my face,” said Verity, whose eyes were roaming over the ingredients.

Mizuki nodded and tossed the mushrooms and carrots in, got some diced onions from the chiller and added them, then added herbs mostly by instinct, including garlic, rosemary, and sage. When that was done, she turned her attention to the meat, but not before she gave the pot another skeptical look. The timing, she decided, was going to be off. The carrots, mushrooms, and venison would be done before the potatoes were boiled through, even if she cut them thin. She decided to do her best.

“So,” said Mizuki while she cut into the loin. “You’re not from around here? You mentioned a conservatory, I think.”

“Like Alfric, I’m from Dondrian,” said Verity. “At first I thought it was odd to meet another Donder so far out from the city, but there are an enormous amount of people there, so I suppose it’s not that unusual.”

“Mmm,” said Mizuki. She wiped her blade and began cutting the potatoes, throwing them in as soon as she had them in thin slices. “And why are you in Pucklechurch? It’s a very out of the way place.”

“It’s a long story,” said Verity. “And I’m hoping that we don’t have too much time until we’re eating?” She was watching the proceedings with interest, though it was the interest of a hungry animal rather than a curious onlooker.

“We’ve got a bit,” said Mizuki. The meal was almost at her favorite part, which was when things were cooking along on their own and being tended to, without all that much interaction on her part.

“Well,” said Verity, seeming dejected that food was going to take a little longer to touch her lips. “Like I said, I was conservatory trained. I was four years old when I first started playing an instrument, and I was something of a prodigy at it, to the delight of my parents. Money wasn’t really a concern to them, so they spent enormous sums on getting me the best tutors, both for my ability to play and my magical talent. When I entered the conservatory I started questioning why I was doing any of it. The training regimes were brutal, the demands to practice were brutal, the competition was fierce, and … I just dropped out, if I’m being honest. I was doing well, as far as the performances went, but everything else, my relationship to the music, my disposition, was going horribly. There was too much weight on my shoulders.” She paused for a moment. “From many quarters.” She paused again. “So I left.”

“To come here,” said Mizuki. She’d taken most of what was in the pan out and placed the rounds of venison there to sear. It was better to cook venison as little as possible to keep it from getting tough. Really, it would have been better to soak them in buttermilk overnight, to get rid of some of the gamey flavor, and she resolved to do that with the remainder of the meat. “So Pucklechurch was picked out of a hat?”

“I’d heard about it in one of my classes,” said Verity. “One of the ones that wasn’t focused entirely on music or bardic arts, that is. The church was built because when the town was founded, ages ago, a ley line used to run through the hex. When the ley line shifted, the church wasn’t needed, but they finished it anyway given how much they’d sunk into the construction. I thought it sounded quite charming, even if the lesson was meant to be about how leylines can occasionally be fickle. There was something about a town that was meant to be something greater that seemed poetic to me. Not the most sensible reason to move to a place, I’ll admit.”

Mizuki emptied the water from the pot of potatoes and set about mashing them while they were still hot, opening the chiller for just a moment so she could add a splash of milk and a lump of butter. Herbs went in too, though not as many of them, because there’d be gravy as well. It was all a balancing act, trying to weigh one thing against the other, and time management wasn’t particularly a strong suit for Mizuki, but she did manage to get the venison out of the pan before everything overcooked, and as soon as the potatoes were mashed, she was starting in on the gravy.

“And you?” asked Verity. “Do you live in this house all by yourself?”

“Ah,” said Mizuki. “Well, that’s not a terribly interesting story, but it’s also not terribly long, so. My grandfather was the one who built this house, nearly fifty years ago. He’d been planning to have a whole community of people from Kiromo, but the point of him coming here and setting up was because of Emperor Haga, who then died early, making the whole thing kind of moot. Emperor Goya is supposed to be a much gentler man, and the community never really ended up happening. Grandpa was always proud of this place though.” She plated the food, and Verity began digging in almost immediately, eating quick bites of everything. It seemed a curious way to eat, at least to Mizuki, hundreds of tiny pieces rather than simple mouthfuls. It probably came down to culture, she expected.

“This is amazing,” said Verity, once she’d eaten half the plate without slowing down. “This is really amazing.”

“I learned from my mom,” said Mizuki. “In Kiromo, cooking is the first and most important of all skills. Mom thought it was vital, but I also took to it, and if you’ve got to eat anyway, better to make sure you’re eating well. Besides, it’s a hobby that saves money, not that we’ll need to worry too much about that now.”

“Right,” said Verity, slowing for the first time since getting her food. “The money.”

“You don’t like money?” asked Mizuki.

“I do,” said Verity. “Who doesn’t? But I grew up with money, and — out here, I’ve been discovering a love of music again. I play at the tavern and try new things, get messy, make up songs for the fun of it, and now … Alfric is a reminder of what I don’t like about Dondrian.” She looked down at her plate, seeming a bit glum, then began moving more food into her mouth in that same strange way, tiny pieces one after the other.

“Big city energy,” said Mizuki, nodding. She was eating much slower than Verity, though that wasn’t saying much. “But in this case, it did help us get things done. He was right, it was a half day’s work, not all that much difficulty, and we got rich from it.”

“Not really that rich,” said Verity.

“Ten thousand rings for the books alone,” said Mizuki. “Perhaps you have a warped sense of what being rich is, but ten thousand rings is a lot. Not life-changing, but a lot.”

“I think it’s going to end up less than that,” said Verity. “The books would fetch a better price in Dondrian, where there are more buyers for that kind of thing. It’s likely that they’ll get sent to Dondrian anyhow, which means that a few people will be taking their cut along the way.”

“Well, even if it was less,” said Mizuki. “This meal was, altogether, maybe … ten for the both of us? That means, uh, some math, which I’ve never been too good at. But surely the sum takes care of my food for a year, maybe more. And that’s for a half day’s work! I don’t think you or I were ever in much danger, to be honest.”

“Yes,” said Verity. “I suppose. It was scary, but I didn’t get so much as a scratch.” She pushed her plate forward, which had been completely cleared down to the smallest bit of diced onion. Mizuki was pleased to note that included the mushrooms. “There was almost something familiar to it, as though it were just another high pressure performance.”

“So you might do a second one with us?” asked Mizuki. She tried to keep her tone casual.

“I might,” said Verity. “I’ll see how I feel in the morning, whether I have shaky nerves.” She sat in quiet contemplation for a moment. “I ate too much.”

“My fault,” said Mizuki. “I made too much.” She looked down at the plate. “I think this will probably be my breakfast tomorrow morning.” She looked at Verity. “Alfric said that in Dondrian they don’t eat breakfast?”

Verity nodded. “Technically we break our fast for lunch. Before then, it’s usually some kind of hot drink, though of late there’s been a surge in hot drinks which are basically soup, which, at the time I left, was causing a bit of a hubbub.” She sighed. “I do miss it, sometimes, but I also enjoy the simple life that I’ve built here. Playing at the Fig and Gristle, hiking out into the woods to practice, enjoying the peace and solitude, reading through whatever I can get from the library … it’s a very pleasant life, and I don’t know that I want it interrupted.”

“Well, you can go back to the quiet life, can’t you?” asked Mizuki. “Alfric will want to go through dungeons as quickly as we can, he seems like the sort, but if we did, say, one every two weeks, that wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”

“I suppose not,” said Verity. She smiled a bit. “I’m going to need to practice some of the group things. There are special elements only available to parties.”

“I think we all have some work and training to do,” said Mizuki, nodding. “There’s something in the interference pattern between you and Hannah that I know I can do something more with.”

“For bards, there’s a progression technique,” said Verity. “Where you can keep someone getting stronger and stronger with every minute that you can hold the song. But of course it gets harder and harder to keep going.” She grinned and leaned back slightly. “I could make you stronger than Alfric, even.” She looked a bit sheepish. “Assuming that I can actually manage to pull it off, that is.”

“Our party composition is quite good,” said Mizuki, though this was an informed guess on her part. “I’m surprised and impressed that Alfric was able to put it together, though I imagine some of it was just luck.” She got up from her seat and took her plate with her, sliding it into the chiller, then grabbed Verity’s plate and started on doing dishes. “Would you be a pal and go down into the wine cellar? It’s that door to the left. Something fruity.” She pointed using her shoulder.

Mizuki was almost finished with the dishes by the time Verity came back up. “Did you have trouble?” She asked.

“There were just so many,” said Verity. “I’m not very good at making choices.”

“Peach wine,” said Mizuki, taking the bottle and looking at the label. “Do you drink? Or is that not a thing people do in Dondrian? Otherwise, this bottle is for me. Sorry, I should have brought it up for dinner.”

“I drink,” nodded Verity. She watched as Mizuki filled up a glass. “You’re being very hospitable to someone you’ve just met.”

“We’re party members,” shrugged Mizuki. “It’s been two years since I’ve been in a party with someone, and I think being in a new one is cause for celebration.” She realized this wasn’t quite what she’d said before. She hadn’t mentioned a brief party she’d done with the Pedder boys, before that whole thing had ended in disaster. Perhaps she should have, but it was the kind of thing that seemed like it would break the flow of conversation.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Verity after she’d taken a sip. “I’m being a terrible conversationalist. I completely dropped the thread from earlier. You were explaining about the house, and your grandfather. How’d you end up … alone?” She had hesitated on the word, like she was trying to think of some better way to say it.

“My mother was born here, fully Kiromon, but not actually a part of Kiromo, if that makes sense,” said Mizuki. “My father was actually a quarter Kiromon himself, though the other way around, someone from the area who visited Kiromo and brought back a baby and a wife, that baby being my other grandfather. There are a fair number of them — us — in the area. Anyway, my Kiromon grandfather eventually moved back to Kiromo and encouraged my mom and dad to do the same, because the situation there had changed, and Pucklechurch was, well, a small town in more or less the middle of nowhere. I was seventeen when they were making plans to move, and … we couldn’t take the house with us, obviously, and most of the stuff was going to be sold off, because there are limits to what you can fit on a leycraft, and I barely spoke Kiro, and had a lot of friends.” She shrugged. “I do sometimes wonder what it would have been like if I had gone with them.”

“So you own this whole house?” asked Verity, raising an eyebrow.

“No, it’s still my grandfather’s, but I’m free to stay in it as long as I like,” said Mizuki. “But if I move out, I’m going to have to sell it, and that money goes to my grandfather, which is just the kind of sneaky thing he does to put pressure on the family. I’m tied to the house, sort of. There’d be much worse things to be tied to though. Oh, and also a bunch of the land around it, that’s his too, which technically makes it mine, in a sense.”

Verity took a long drink from her glass of wine. For a moment, Mizuki was worried that she would drink wine as fast as she ate dinner, but the bard stopped short, smacking her lips. “This is amazing, how do you have such good wine?”

“My grandfather ran a winery in Liberfell,” Mizuki replied. “He was always experimenting with new things. He called himself a radical in both winemaking and politics.” Mizuki smiled, then took a sip of her own. It was much less fruity than she’d expected. “Did you want to spend the night?”

“Oh,” said Verity, pausing. “I wouldn’t want to impose.” She looked past the windows, where it was now fully dark.

“It wouldn’t make a huge difference to me one way or another,” said Mizuki. “And the Fig and Gristle is halfway across town. There are lots of bedrooms in this place, and the guest room is already done up. I take overflow from the taverns sometimes, though that usually only happens when there’s something important going on.”

“And that doesn’t frighten you?” asked Verity. “Letting some stranger into your home?”

“I can blast people with fireballs, remember?” asked Mizuki, grinning. “If someone tried to lay a hand on me, or on my valuables, not that I have valuables, they would lose that hand. Besides, the last time, having a stranger in my home was rather the point.”

Verity raised an eyebrow.

“Tall, handsome, muscular,” said Mizuki with a fond sigh. “Sadly, my flirtation wasn’t up to snuff. He was a priest, but it’s not like the Order of Qymmos have a vow of celibacy.”

Verity blushed. “Well,” she said.

“Speaking of, what are your thoughts on Alfric?” asked Mizuki. She took a drink from her glass of wine and gave Verity her best innocent look.

“Um,” said Verity. She was clearly already feeling the warmth of the wine. “As a, ah, romantic partner?”

Mizuki nodded, still hiding behind her glass of wine.

“He’s got a handsome way about him,” said Verity. She seemed hesitant. “A kind of … toughness, I suppose, a solidity. But he seems like the sort of man who goes about everything with a rigid plan, and I can’t see myself working with someone like that. Certainly not romantically, but perhaps not in any other way either.”

“Like dating someone who thinks of kissing as eighteen steps,” laughed Mizuki. “I can see that.”

“Nothing against him,” said Verity.

“No, of course not,” said Mizuki. “He’s just … a brick. The world needs bricks. Bricks are great. We use them to build houses. But a brick is never going to court anyone, and you don’t dream of kissing a brick.” Mizuki had considered it, with Alfric, until it became clear that he only wanted her for her fireballs. Their shared breakfast had convinced her that romance and flirtation were the furthest things from his mind, which was no great shame.

“Again, no offense to him,” said Verity.

“No,” said Mizuki. “Unless he takes offense to being called a brick.”

Verity giggled. “And I might do another dungeon. We’ll see. If he knew me, he’d have tried to tempt me with magic items. If I could get a lute that was like the bow Isra got today, well, there’s a lot I would brave to make that happen. An entad, something that was mine rather than on loan, or bought by my parents, something that didn’t have a weight of obligation.” She took a second long swallow of wine, draining the glass, and Mizuki filled it up again, though only halfway. They were large glasses, and she wasn’t sure Verity realized that. “You?”

“What kind of magic would I want?” asked Mizuki. She thought for a moment. “Well, I already got the spoon, so I think I’m good to go.” She had used it to stir the gravy, then again to eat her meal, playing with it.

Verity laughed, but it was a bit forced, and the two of them were silent for a bit. When the conversation returned, it was missing some of the life it’d had before. Mizuki felt bad. She had joked instead of giving an honest answer.

“Well,” said Verity, after she’d finished her second glass of wine. “Do you want to show me to my room?”

“Of course,” said Mizuki. She stuck the bottle in the chiller, then quickly rinsed the glass before showing Verity the way. “After I’d been by myself for a year, I switched to using my parents’ bed, which means that you’ll have my old room.”

There was something crushingly vulnerable about letting Verity into the room. Verity didn’t pass comment on the paintings on the wall, all Mizuki’s work, only flopped onto the bed and let out a deep sigh of satisfaction.

“The bathroom is just down the hall,” said Mizuki. “If you need to take a shower, there are towels there too, and I can loan you clothes, if you’d like, but I doubt I have much that would fit you.” Verity was quite tall, and Mizuki was … short wasn’t the word she preferred, but small sounded too childish. “Don’t worry about using up the water, the tanks were meant for a pretty large household.”

“A shower sounds like a lot of work,” said Verity, staring at the ceiling. “I ate too much and drank too much.”

“It was only two glasses,” said Mizuki. She was standing in the doorway, looking over Verity, who wasn’t moving from her spread out position on the bed.

“I have a bad head for drinks,” said Verity. She sat up, propping herself up with her elbows. “Thank you for all this. You really didn’t have to.”

“Oh, I know,” said Mizuki. “But a spinster likes some company every once in a while.”

She almost, almost made a bigger offer, to say that Verity could move in, but Verity flopped back down, and Mizuki came to her senses.

Mizuki went to her own room, which had belonged to her parents until four years ago. She no longer felt self-conscious about sleeping there, but it was a large room, and felt somewhat cold with just her in it. She made kissing noises, which sometimes got Tabbins to come, but she wasn’t even sure her fat oaf of a cat was in the house.

“The truth,” Mizuki said to herself as she undressed for the night, “The truth is that magic can’t get me the things that I want, and dungeons can’t either. Being alone was fun, but at some point, it stopped being fun. I want a family again.” She said the words at barely more than a whisper, so that Verity wouldn’t be able to hear from next door, but saying it out loud made her feel better, like she was at least being honest with herself.

Chapter 10 - Second Breakfast

After finishing the dungeon, Hannah was left feeling a bit rootless. She hadn’t quit the temple, because she’d said that she would still help out from time to time when the dungeons weren’t calling, and Lemmel, the older cleric of the Church of Symmetry, had graciously allowed her to keep her room until she found some other lodging. So after an exciting time in a dungeon with a promising party, she found herself right back where she’d started the day before. There was nothing to show for the adventure, because she was waiting on Alfric to sell it all, and she hadn’t gotten an entad out of the dungeon, which was a bit of a disappointment. It would be another six days before the party channel opened up, so she couldn’t even talk to the others, not without physically tracking them down, and both Alfric and Isra would be gone for at least a day, maybe two. The one thing she had, the sole proof that she’d been in that dungeon, was the key with a raccoon on it, but that could hold her attention for only so long.

“Alfric seems a good sort,” she said to Lemmel. “Hard-headed, but that’s what you need sometimes, and a bit of a goof when it comes to people, or at least these people, ay? Too rigid, is my thinking, where what he should be is generous and friendly. My opinion, for what it’s worth, is if you treat people like friends then friends is what they’ll end up being. What he should of done, when we finished, was to take us to the tavern and buy a round of drinks, and I know you’re thinkin’ that if I thought that was somethin’ that needed doing, it’s somethin’ I shoulda done myself, but a party can’t have two leaders, ay, the math doesn’t work, and I never fancied leadin’ anyway, I just wish that he were better at it.”

“I hope that it works out for you,” said Lemmel, which was the kind of empty-headed nothing he was always saying. It was kind and polite, but it wasn’t helpful, if it was meant to be. Words always seemed to come out of his head like mud from a pipe, which wasn’t to say that he was a bad sort, just that he was quite dull.

“There was a sermon I was plannin’, which I guess I won’t do now, about reflection, ay?” asked Hannah. “There’s a line in the Book of Garam Ashar, ‘We find ourselves reflected in others, and reflect them into ourselves’, section two, verse seven. My thinkin’ is that how we should look at people, the best way of it, is to stick ourselves in their shoes to see how things would look from their perspective, and then stick them in our shoes to see how they’d do things different, ay? So I was thinkin’ on Alfric, and what it might be like if we reflected into each others shoes, and I think I’d do a better job than he’s done so far, no offense to him, because I have a better handle on what the others want, what helps keep a party together, ay?”

“Perhaps,” nodded Lemmel.

“I think most people don’t really like being solitary,” said Hannah. “From the Book of Garam Ashar, ‘A person has only one symmetry of his own, the left reflecting the right, which leaves asymmetry of the front and back that can only be rectified by the addition of others’, section one, verse three. Alfric selected solitary people, picked those not in a party and young enough that we might be without any connections, so my thinkin’ is that the best thing to bind us together as a party is the fact that mostly we don’t want to be alone. Bein’ without a party can be rough in a lot of ways, not havin’ someone to talk to whenever you want, bein’ cut out of conversations, things like that. So if I were him, I’d be tryin’ to knit us together without even talkin’ about the dungeons at all, tryin’ to make sure that we all knew we could rely on each other, that we would be friends, and support each other more than just in the dungeons. Now, I can’t speak for them, and can barely speak about them, but Verity seems like she came here runnin’ from somethin’, same as Alfric. Mizuki and Isra, if I had to say, were both abandoned, which is altogether a different sort of thing, and that’s just me sayin’ that, but it’s probably close to the truth. I’ve seen Isra a few times, healed her leg once, and when she comes into market she’s always alone. The leg injury? My guess is if she had someone, they’d have come with her, though I might be wrong. And Mizuki’s not so much abandoned, I s’pose, since she chose to stay behind, but I have to imagine it gets lonely in that big house. She’s friendly, but I don’t know that she has many friends.”

“You should learn more about them before judging,” said Lemmel.

“Oh, ay,” said Hannah. “I mean, of course, I’m just talkin’ first impressions and that, or what I know from what I’ve heard. Might be I’m wrong about the lot of them, or more likely, it’s one or two I’m a little off on. I have half a mind to go bother the censusmaster and see what I can find about the four of them, just to have some background, but some people take it the wrong way, even if it’s all just freely there.” She clucked her tongue. “But if I don’t go see the censusmaster, then that means I’m just sittin’ here on my hands, doin’ as much as a bear in winter.” She huffed a sigh and looked at Lemmel expectantly. “So what is there for me to be doin’?”

“Nothing,” he replied. “Same as when you asked an hour ago. If you want my advice, we have an hour until bed. Take the time to get yourself cleaned up and ready to rest. Were you planning to follow Alfric and Isra?”

“I was, hopin’ to mediate in case he puts his foot in his mouth or she decides she’s better off without us, but the more I think about it, the more I figure I need to trust him,” said Hannah. “If they can’t spend a day or two together without blowin’ up, then the whole thing is doomed, and maybe they’ll get to know each other on their own terms, for in the book of Garam Ashar it is said, ‘The simplest reflection is the one that is made by nature, not through the hands of man’, section one, verse eight.” Lemmel knew the book backward and forward, same as Hannah, but it was habit for both of them to give section and verse, especially when in the church. “So I was thinkin’ that tomorrow morning I would stop by to see Mizuki and her house, and maybe help her with cleanin’ it up, because it looked like it was in poor shape last time I passed by, and of course it would all be just to get us talkin’. She’s a sorc, so she can use some of what I put off, and maybe we can have a chat about that. At some point I’ll ask her if I can bed down in her house, but I don’t need to be told it’s a bit soon for that.”

“I would temper your expectations,” said Lemmel. “You have a way of coming on strong.”

“People like it,” said Hannah. “And anyway, I said I would wait, didn’t I?” Lemmel nodded. “I’m off to take a bath, thank you again for lettin’ me stay, you have my word I’ll help when it’s needed, but in my time here so far it’s felt slow as sap.”

“I’ve told you before that it’s more about the community than the healing,” said Lemmel.

“And I listened, truly, but the point about slowness stands, I think you’ll agree,” she replied. She got up from her seat and went into the back room of the temple, which had the bathroom the two of them shared, a living space that they sometimes brought people into, their small bedrooms, and a kitchenette. It was somewhat cramped, but much more than a cleric normally got in a place like Pucklechurch.

Perhaps it was because she’d grown up in a big family, but the bathroom had always been her favorite place in almost any house. The old place, back in Cairbre, had a small tank, and they had to ration water, either sharing baths when she was little, or sticking to short showers when she was older.

Sharing a bathroom with just one other person was, in comparison, a delight. The temple had two large tanks, one for hot water and the other for cold, put in place before it became clear that the temple was never going to have the twelve full-time clerics that it had originally been planned to have. Even two clerics in the Church of Symmetry was one and a half clerics too many, but they’d been hoping that Hannah would replace Lemmel. She was the fourth in six years, and there would be a fifth, which she knew was a disappointment to the church, but one she was comfortable with.

Hannah ran the water through both pipes, mixing the hot and cold, and undressed as she allowed the bathtub to fill up to a line she’d marked out early on in her time at Pucklechurch. It was just the right point so that once she was in, the bathtub would be as full as it could be without running the risk of overflowing. She added in a sachet, one of several she kept in a small tin, this one rosemary and lavender. She’d often joked that she liked baths because she was making a tea of herself.

While bath time was Hannah’s most treasured of times, on this particular occasion, it wasn’t doing much to stop her mind from racing. Some of it was undeniably the excitement of the dungeon, not just the battles, but the newness and mystery of it, the entads, the henlings, the things to see and touch. The key was a good memento, but Hannah found herself wishing that she had taken more. Mostly, she wished that the not-dragon hadn’t destroyed so much of the room in the battle, because there were things of glass and wood that had been completely smashed as it spun and thrashed.

Her mind went to her new party members and what she knew about them, which admittedly wasn’t much. She found herself daydreaming about what the future might be like, how they would all fit together in six months time, all living together in Mizuki’s large house, eating meals together, and every so often, maybe two or three times a week, going down into the depths of a new dungeon together.

The daydreaming helped to calm her down and get her thoughts in order, and after an hour long bath, which required several injections of hot water and a bit of draining to compensate, Hannah got out of the tub, brushed her teeth, and went to bed, falling asleep before her brain could perk back up again.

She woke up early in the morning, as she usually did, and got dressed in a hurry, trying her best to pick something sensible for a day around the town. It was hard to know when or if they were going to another dungeon, but it certainly wasn’t going to be right away. She picked one of her heavier dresses, dark blue with white embroidery around the bust. She tended to like trousers, most of the time, but she’d found that trousers on a woman sometimes sent the wrong message, especially if you were a cleric of Garos.

Breakfast was a hard-boiled egg from the chiller and a fruit pastry that she kept in a small bag. Hannah’s mother had always made breakfast into a production, but Hannah had never seen the point. Breakfast was a meal to be enjoyed quick and cold.

She walked by Mizuki’s house twice, looking inside to see whether there were signs of life, which required going down the little path to it in a way that felt conspicuous. She didn’t want to knock on the door unless Mizuki was awake, but it was hard to tell, and someone like Mizuki, who didn’t have gainful employment, might wait until the third bell to rise. That left Hannah wandering back and forth, pretending to have business somewhere, which very quickly made her feel foolish. This was a prime example of what made a party channel so valuable, but it would be a while before they had it available to them.

Finally, after hemming and hawing about it, Hannah knocked sharply on the door not too long after first bell. She resolved to not knock too hard, or more than once, just in case Mizuki was sleeping, and if that meant going to the temple to twiddle her thumbs, then that was that.

Mizuki did come to the door though, eventually. She was looking disheveled and had a robe clutched around her, and when she looked at Hannah, it was as though for the first time.

“Hannah?” she asked as she opened the door. “What is it?”

“Oh, sorry to bother,” said Hannah. “I’d only thought … well, that we’re party members now, and — with how things are, I’m not obligated to work at the temple anymore, so I have my day free, and was wonderin’ if you needed anythin’.”

“No,” said Mizuki, frowning. “But come in, come in, it’s cold out.”

“Well, I don’t particularly think so,” said Hannah. “But my family is from far to the south, ay? It’s the summers here that I can’t handle, those two weeks when it’s so hot that you feel like sittin’ in front of the chiller.”

“Shoes off,” said Mizuki as she disappeared into the house.

Hannah took her boots off, which was a bit of a process, then followed, looking around as she did. She’d seen the house a few times, and it was one of the nicer ones in Pucklechurch, though it was definitely in need of some care. The kitchen was resplendent though.

“Do you eat breakfast?” asked Mizuki.

“Already did,” said Hannah. “Egg and a pastry.”

“Pastry?” asked Mizuki, perking up slightly.

“Apricot jam in the middle, egg wash on top,” said Hannah. “I baked them myself, and I can deliver some for you tomorrow, if you’d like.”

“That sounds amazing,” said Mizuki. “My mouth is already watering.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Well, I’m going to make myself breakfast, and it’s about as easy to cook for two as for one, so if you’d like something, now’s the time.”

“What’s on the menu?” asked Hannah.

“Thin-sliced venison, mushrooms, eggs,” said Mizuki. “Maybe some potatoes, if you can handle eating leftovers. Oh, and how do you feel about, um, sobyu? It’s a Kiromo thing. Fermented vegetables?”

“I’ve never heard of it,” said Hannah. “But we have the same thing, fermented vegetables, back in Cairbre, and from the book of Garam Ashar, section seven, verse six, ‘There are reflections across every society of righteous behavior and cunning intellect.’”

Mizuki blinked. “Do you have the whole book of Garam Ashar memorized?” she asked.

“I’m a cleric,” said Hannah. “And none of the books are very long, a hundred pages at most, ay.” The books discussing and dissecting those hundred pages, however, filled an entire library.

“And did you want food?” asked Mizuki.

“I suppose I could see fit,” replied Hannah. “I’ll need less than you make for yourself.”

Mizuki unlatched the burners on her stove, then began getting things out before pausing. “Do you think Verity will want some?”

“The bard?” asked Hannah, momentarily bewildered. “Didn’t she say she rises quite late?”

“I suppose,” said Mizuki. “But sleeping in an unfamiliar place, I’d thought maybe she wouldn’t want to.” She had gotten everything ready, it seemed, including a small crock of something that smelled quite intriguing, perhaps the sobyu.

“She slept here last night?” asked Hannah, raising an eyebrow.

Mizuki nodded. “She was just going to come over for a bit, to eat, and then we got to talking. She should be upstairs now, but I guess she might have slipped out in the night.”

“Well,” said Hannah. “It’s very kind of you to offer a bed.” A liaison between the two of them wouldn’t be the strangest thing, though it would be a poor start to the party.

“No kindness at all,” said Mizuki as she added the first things to the pan. “Or not more than I’d hope anyone else would offer. I’ve got beds, people need to sleep.” She looked up. “Do you?”

“Do I?” asked Hannah. “Need a place to sleep?”

Mizuki nodded. “If you’re done at the temple, which you said you were.”

“Well,” said Hannah. “I do need a place to sleep, but we’ve only just met, and I wouldn’t want to —”

“It’s just an offer,” said Mizuki, shrugging. “What do you like to drink? I have all kinds of things that can be steeped in boiling water.”

“There’s a tuber tea I’m fond of, but I’d be surprised if you had it,” said Hannah. “Mint?”

“I’ve got mint,” said Mizuki. Almost everything had been put into the pan, and it was starting to smell good. A kettle joined the pan on another burner. “Now then, you came by to see if I wanted help?”

“But really just to see you,” said Hannah, thankful to feel like she could drop the pretense. “We’re in a party now, and that doesn’t mean too much at the moment, but as time goes on, we’ll be in each other’s lives one way or another, and if we end up travelin’ together, that’s more time to talk to each other. ‘Symmetry is found through close inspection, with precision coming in the examination of details’, so it is said in the book of Garam Ashar, and I thought that I wanted to get to know you better, and you to know me, so we can find those symmetries, places where we match, or reflect, and have things be a little easier. The same goes for the opposite, naturally, the places where we don’t match up well, which you need to know so you can skirt some things that shouldn’t be talked of.”

“Like what?” asked Mizuki. She set a plate in front of Hannah, then sat down with her own plate.

It seemed to Hannah like it was too much food, but it all looked and smelled delicious. There was more food sitting in the pan, which had been put off to one side, but she didn’t think much of it.

“Well,” said Hannah. “If we’re talkin’ of things that perhaps shouldn’t be talked of — do you have a favorite of the gods?”

“Qymmos or,” she faltered. “Oeyr, I guess. I know he’s the nemesis of Garos though, so.” She ate a bite of food.

“Oh, it’s not like that,” said Hannah, her own mouth half full of food. “Garos and Oeyr are opposites in many ways, but I think there’s hardly a cleric of Garos that would want Oeyr dead. Oeyr’s necessary, they all are, it’s just a matter of where we put our focus. I think symmetry and order are beautiful, but in the Church there’s somethin’ called the Meditation on Dichotomy, and it starts with the first and biggest of them, the separation of man and woman, largely Oeyr’s domain.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “I’d kind of thought … Garos has a reputation for,” she waved a hand. “I don’t want to be crude, but I don’t know how to say it.”

“Men laying with men, and women with women,” said Hannah, nodding. “It’s one of the old sacred rites, not so common anymore, at least as rites, but the Church of Garos has always been a place for that kind of thing.” She raised an eyebrow. “And did you and Verity … ?” Best to be direct about it.

“Did we what?” asked Mizuki. It was still early, and it took her a moment. “Oh, no. No. No no no, it wasn’t,” she paused. “Not that she isn’t pretty, she is, I just … no.”

Hannah was a bit thankful for that, because it was a source of tension the party didn’t need. “And is talkin’ about such things, women with women, somethin’ I should avoid with you? Because if so, that’s fine, I’d just want to know. You’re half Kiromom, and I don’t know what the thinkin’ is there.” No one would bat an eye in the Interim, though it was a quite large country.

“I don’t really know,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “I’ve never been, so all I have are stories. I think … there was something my father said, off-hand, when he was drunk once, that it was fine for a man to be with a man, but not a woman with a woman? He was drunk though. Personally, I don’t, um — it’s not relevant to my life.”

Hannah nodded, and she was thankful that Mizuki seemed befuddled. Some people cared, and thought that it was the ‘business of Garos’, to be confined within the church in one way or another, but it was a minority opinion throughout Inter, typically held by those more skeptical of religion. She’d met a few in the seminary that had come because their families thought that it was a matter of religion, but it was like tall people becoming clerics of Xuphin, or short ones clerics of Kesbin, a poor reason to become a cleric, and likely to result in a poor cleric if they had no real godly fire in them.

“And you care about the things close to you?” she asked.

“Isn’t that how everyone is?” asked Mizuki.

“Oh, not at all,” said Hannah. “Some people care the most about things far away from them.” She took another bite of the fermented vegetables, then the perfect example occurred to her. “Henlings!” she said around the mouth of food. “Some people obsess over them, collect them, things like that, spend their time and effort lookin’ at them, tryin’ to figure them out. Some of these people never stepped foot inside a dungeon. But it’s the same for everythin’ else, isn’t it, kittens and bobbins and what have you, they bring all this into their lives, make it their focus, but it’s not close to them, necessarily. So of course I wouldn’t be surprised if what you care about was far away from you, some distant thing that didn’t touch you personally, ay?” She returned to quickly eating her food. She had a bad habit of talking too much at mealtimes and lagging behind. Mizuki had very little left on her plate.

“Like you with Garos?” asked Mizuki. “Because he’s something you bring into your life, isn’t he?”

“Well,” said Hannah, swallowing a mouthful of venison. “This is amazin’, by the way.”

“Thanks!” said Mizuki, beaming. “The sobyu, yes or no?”

“Yes, I think,” replied Hannah. The taste wasn’t quite reminiscent of a pickled cucumber, nor the pickled cabbage she was used to, but there was a similarity there.

“In Kiromo they eat it with every meal,” said Mizuki. “I only do that in the winter, when there’s less that’s fresh.”

“Mmm,” said Hannah, gulping down an egg. She took up a cloth napkin and wiped her mouth, trying to remember decorum, which she’d never been too good at. “Well, as I was sayin’, with Garos, it’s not quite the same, is it? Because the nature of symmetry is all around us, isn’t it, and even if you don’t think much about Garos, you can’t escape him, just like you can’t escape Oeyr. All the more in Pucklechurch, where there’s this grand temple that looms over the town.”

“Is that for me?” asked a voice from the doorway into the kitchen. Verity was looking much worse for the wear, with rumpled clothes and disheveled hair. Her eyes were bleary and she was blinking slowly, but her attention was fixed on the pan, which had a serving of food still in it, though Mizuki had closed the burner.

“Of course,” said Mizuki. “I didn’t know when you’d be up, but it should still be warm. Hope we didn’t wake you.”

“Mmm,” said Verity. She sat down at the counter, which was slightly crowded with three people. Hannah looked at the straightness of her back and the poise with which she picked up a fork and began eating tiny little bird bites of venison and egg. “Thank you, it’s very gracious of you.”

“Common courtesy,” replied Mizuki with a shrug. “How’d you sleep?”

“Like the dead,” said Verity. “I cannot say enough how much music takes it out of me.”

“Well,” said Hannah. “No cause to be singin’ today, I’d think, or for a few more days after, since it’ll take some time for Alfric and Isra to come back. There’s a question of what we’re doin’ with ourselves until then, I s’pose.”

“I was still planning to go to the Fig and Gristle,” said Verity. “I have a standing offer from Cynthia, and I’d like to keep from paying room and board for as long as possible.”

“Mmm,” said Mizuki. Hannah looked at her. The offer of a room had been made quickly, and Hannah was still mulling it over. She was wondering whether that same offer was going to be tossed to Verity, and how many bedrooms this place had.

Verity dabbed at her mouth after another small bite. “And as I’ve said, I’m not entirely sold on dungeoneering.”

Hannah and Mizuki were both silent, but just for a moment, and then they began talking at the same time.

“I don’t think —” began Hannah.

“In terms of —” started Mizuki.

They looked at each other.

“Go ahead,” said Hannah.

“It’s not actually that dangerous,” said Mizuki. She looked at Hannah. “We talked about this last night some, but I think drink affects Verity more than me.”

“I remember,” nodded Verity. “And I said maybe, I recall.”

“There are all sorts of reasons to do it,” said Hannah. “You could get a higher elevation.”

“Frankly, elevation has always been a bit murky to me,” said Verity.

“It’s bunk,” said Mizuki. “Magic items, now there’s something valuable, and hard to get any other way unless you’re willing to shell out a lot of money, which you would also probably have to get by going into dungeons, unless you can score yourself a sweet gig playing music.”

“I probably could,” said Verity. “Though my skill has been rotting away here, and the people I was up against in the conservatory have probably blown past me. Not that my relationship to the profession hasn’t markedly improved.”

“You think elevation isn’t … true?” asked Hannah, looking at Mizuki. She wasn’t sure she could let that pass. “I don’t see how that could be.”

“I mean, it was all made up by the Editors long ago, right?” asked Mizuki. “At some point, hundreds of years ago or whatever, they decided they needed a number for every man, woman, and child on the planet, and they figured out a bunch of complicated rules that no one gets to see.”

“Is that all it is?” asked Verity. “I mean, I knew we had an elevation, but it was never really relevant to my life.”

“It’s a measure of power,” said Hannah. “And the exact metrics are secret, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work.”

“They go up the more dungeons you do,” said Mizuki, frowning at Hannah. “How can you explain that?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Hannah. “Perhaps the people who go into the dungeon grow more powerful more quickly?” She wrinkled her nose. That didn’t seem quite right. The other obvious option was that dungeons changed a person, in either natural or unnatural ways. “Well, they never put too much effort into explainin’ it in the seminary.”

“Because no one knows,” said Mizuki. “But people use it for things anyway. It’s nuts.”

“Anyway,” said Verity, who clearly had no enthusiasm for the conversation.

“Right,” said Mizuki. “Anyway, at least one more dungeon?”

Verity nodded as she chewed, then cleared her mouth before answering. “At least one more. Probably.”

“Wonderful,” said Hannah, with real enthusiasm. “Let’s hope that Alfric is doin’ well with Isra, but I wouldn’t count on it, so we might have to find one of the others. Wouldn’t be bad to know who they were anyway, ay? If Verity’s out, we’d need to bring them in, and better to get them on board before we need them.”

“Others?” asked Verity. She had paused with a forkful of food in mid-air.

“He went to the censusmaster,” said Mizuki. “Found everyone of the right age and elevation and not in a party, and then I’d guess he weeded out people who weren’t going to be suitable. I can’t make any good guesses about who the alternates would be.” She shrugged. “Maybe one of the Pedder boys?”

“Well, either way, better to know who Alfric was thinkin’ of,” said Hannah. “Isra got the bow, and seems a bit skittish, not like a rabbit, all afraid of things, but like a cat ready to scratch anyone the least bit threatenin’.”

“She’s got skills,” said Mizuki. “Though I don’t know how much hunting translates into going into dungeons. She certainly seemed to handle herself well.”

“We’ll see if Alfric drives her off,” said Hannah. “And if Verity is out for the third dungeon, then better to have someone lined up anyhow.”

“I didn’t say I was out for the third dungeon,” said Verity. “Just that I wouldn’t be signing up for it right away.”

“Wasn’t that what I said?” asked Hannah. She was feeling some glee at this plan working as well as it had. Alfric probably would have been upfront about things and made a nice and logical case that wouldn’t have moved Verity at all. Hannah was touching something deeper, the fear of missing out, just not being so crude as to say it outright.

“Well, we’ll see when the time comes,” said Verity, setting her fork down. She’d eaten almost everything, even if she’d done it a tiny bit at a time. “For the second dungeon — I had said to Alfric that it was better to practice, do you think we’ll be doing any of that? I ask because I want to be able to let Cynthia know.”

“We could do some now, if you’d like,” said Hannah. “We’re the three most important, in terms of teamwork, ay?”

“Why?” asked Verity, looking between the two of them.

“Magic,” said Mizuki. “Or, not magic, but the ability to affect the aether. The more I see your spells, the more I know what I can do with them, the better we’ll fare in the dungeons. Or, not spells, but … affections.”

“I don’t mind if you call the works of Garos spells,” said Hannah.

“Okay, good, thanks, because I was definitely going to keep forgetting,” said Mizuki. “To me, anything that affects the aether is a spell.”

“Songs aren’t spells,” said Verity, frowning.

“Well,” said Hannah. “True.”

“Not spells,” said Mizuki. “But they’re constructs that affect the aether, so … from my perspective, spells, yes.”

“Meaning that you can knock them down to make fireballs?” asked Verity.

“That is extraordinarily wrong,” said Mizuki, folding her arms across her chest. “A sorcerer doesn’t knock things down, she uses ambient patterns to create and fuel her own magic, and someone who goes about just wily-nily knocking down the magic of others doesn’t deserve the name.”

“Sorry,” shrugged Verity. “In the conservatory I was mostly around other bards.”

“Sorcs are the most hated of all magic casters,” said Mizuki. “And it’s entirely because people think that we’re some kind of anti-magic gang that breaks things other people have spent time on.”

“But you can, can’t you?” asked Hannah.

“We can, sure,” said Mizuki.

“I’d have thought people hated warlocks or alienists more,” said Verity, frowning. “Or chrononauts. Maybe you see more people who don’t like sorcerers because …” and then she trailed off.

“You hear about it more,” said Hannah. “And it happens to you more, and you care about it more. How many times does someone talk down the alienists and it just passes you by?”

“Well,” grumbled Mizuki. “Alright, fair, but I don’t want either of you to think of me as a leech or a spell-wrecker, because that’s not what it is.”

“Should we go outside and practice then?” asked Hannah. “If Verity’s not familiar, it might be a good chance for her to see and you to explain.”

“I need a change of clothes,” said Verity, looking down at her rumpled dress.

“Well, go back to the tavern, then come back here?” asked Mizuki. “I own five acres or so behind the house, it’s a good place to spread out.” It was, Hannah knew, her grandfather who owned the land, but the old man had been gone for quite some time, and Mizuki had a loose way of speaking.

“I suppose,” said Verity. She sighed. “Alright, but I’m putting limits on how long I go on for. I’d still like to have the energy left to play at the tavern tonight, at least for one set.”

“Of course,” replied Hannah.

Hannah was looking forward to it. Hopefully, they were going to produce something neat. And if things went well, perhaps one or both of them would consent to symmetricalization.

Chapter 9 - An Unwanted Civics Lesson

Isra ended up renting a room at the Angry Plum, the larger of Pucklechurch’s two taverns, taking a room across from Alfric. She insisted that the materials from the book be taken out and distributed between their two rooms, which took a fair amount of time given how slow the storage book was, and how many ordinary books were contained within it. Alfric got to glumly watch, once again, as the book gave them descriptions of the books that said nothing about what information they contained. He tried to keep up his well-practiced stoicism, but his eyes went to Isra every once in a while.

On a base level, Alfric understood it. If she didn’t trust him, then she didn’t trust him, and trust had to be earned. But emotionally, it felt like a second punch to the gut to follow up the first. Not only was she going to escort him for what was really just a job for a single person, but she was insisting on making sure he didn’t run off in the night. Obviously if he wasn’t trustworthy, he would just leave, and obviously she had to prevent that, but it still stung, and he wasn’t sure that he’d handled himself as well as possible.

Once the guild message had been completed, he’d stayed up later than he would have liked to admit staring at the ceiling and rehearsing conversations to himself, both things that had already been said and things that he would say the next day.

When he woke up and got dressed, he was surprised to see her outside his door, ready to go. She was wearing different clothes than the day before, brown, but with a crimson head scarf. Her gold piercings had been returned to their place on her face. She moved into his room without a word and began loading the storage book once more. When she finished, she moved to put it in her pack.

“Let me take it,” he said. She raised an eyebrow. “I’m almost certainly stronger than you,” he said, hoping that wasn’t cause for offense. “No sense in you taking the burden.”

“Fine,” she said. Alfric loaded the book up, making sure that it was secure. There was still plenty to carry, mostly those pipes, and they split the load, with him taking more.

“Are we ready to go?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “No, I need to fill my waterskin, but yes, after that.” He’d decided on taking his sword but leaving behind most of his armor, including his shield, which Hannah had mostly repaired the day before. The load would be heavy enough without adding more.

They set off down the road together. It was six miles east to the hex border, which would be marked with white pillars, and then once they had warped, there were another six miles to go to the next hex border, and finally, they would arrive in Tarchwood with a second warp. It would have gone faster if Alfric had been traveling by himself, thanks to his stride-lengthening boots, but he wasn’t terribly concerned about the time, and he hoped that he could make an impact on Isra, who seemed to be the second-most capable warrior of the group. Besides, there was a lot to carry.

“I apologize for my reaction yesterday,” he said once they were past the last of the houses. “I understand that it’s hard to trust people, especially people you’ve just met, and I may have overreacted a bit. I think once we get to know each other, you’ll understand where I’m coming from, and how much honor and truth mean to me.”

Isra took a long time to respond. Her face was impassive. “I’ve been stolen from before.”

“So have I,” nodded Alfric. “It’s a horrible feeling, knowing that something that was yours is gone.”

Sometimes a conversation was like an akshi match, topics lobbed back and forth as quick as could be, but Isra seemed to take things like they were one of those western games played on boards with long pauses between any movement of the pieces.

“What was stolen from you?” she asked, after some more time had passed.

“Oh,” said Alfric. He hadn’t quite been ready for that question, only trying to sympathize with her. “I had been planning on being a dungeoneer since I was old enough to know what a dungeon was. I studied, endlessly, joined the Junior League, got training from experts … it was my life’s goal. I mapped out a path through dungeons as best I could, a route that would take the optimal party to heights that hadn’t been seen in decades. I made connections with other people in the Junior League, trained with them, planned with them, shared my knowledge and designs. And then, at the last minute, someone moved in to take my place on the team that I’d put together. They had all my work, all my planning, and I was left in the lurch.” He felt that familiar sour feeling in his gut. “It’s been a year since that happened. I was seventeen then, ready to be authorized to go out, only waiting on our wizard to be old enough. For a while I scrambled to find someone who would take me, but everyone in the Junior League had partied up ages ago.” And there were rumors swirling, which surely must have been part of it. “I tried going younger, to find a workable party who were two or three years below me, but it was awkward, and there were false starts.” Failures, though he didn’t like the word. “Everyone thought there must be something wrong with me, that there was a reason that I hadn’t been able to find anyone.” He shook his head. “All that work was taken from me. They copied my journal and used it for their own. And it worked. They’re all far ahead of me, not as far as they’d have been if I had been the one to lead the charge, but far enough that they’re getting plaudits.”

He snuck a look at Isra, who had been silent through all this. Her face was impassive.

“If I’ve been trying to rush things, this is why,” said Alfric. “I’m trying to make up for lost time.” Again, there were what might later be seen as lies of omission. He wondered whether she would ask what had taken so long, why an entire year had passed without him being able to gain traction, and he would have to admit to failed parties, or perhaps use the excuse of the target on his back, or his personal politics. All that, he was willing to speak freely about.

Isra was still silent, and he gave her some time to process or think while they walked. It was a story that he would share with the others, when the time was right, but it was entirely possible that he should share the other piece of it, the thing lurking in the background that he didn’t want to mention. He would have to, eventually, but he was hoping that it could wait until after their second dungeon.

“My father died when I was thirteen,” said Isra. “A friend of his stole almost everything of value from our cabin.”

“Oh,” said Alfric. “Oh, I’m so sorry, that must have been horrible.” He had the familiar feeling of shame, because his problems were so much smaller and more pathetic. He had a good life, he knew that. He had good parents, his health, access to money, all kinds of advantages. “And your mother —”

“Died in childbirth,” said Isra. “It was just me and my father. I’ve been alone since his death.”

“Sorry,” Alfric said again, as if an apology would do anything. “All alone? At thirteen?”

Isra nodded.

“How did you,” he started. “How did you survive?”

“My father taught me,” she said. “Trapping, hunting, making fires, getting through the winters. How to make and string a bow. How to preserve food. How to hide.”

“And you’ve just been doing that for the last five years?” he asked.

Isra looked at him, almost glaring. “How did you know how old I was?” she asked.

“The censusmaster,” he said, feeling slightly surprised. “That was how I knew about you in the first place.”

“Oh,” she replied, frowning. “What else do you know?”

“Nothing much,” he replied. “Name, age, gender, occupation, residency status, elevation, eye color, skin color, and hair color are the main things. The censusmaster can give weight and height, but I didn’t ask about those. Guild status, which I did ask about.”

“Occupation?” she asked, still frowning. He was tempted to ask how she didn’t know any of this, but if she’d been living in the woods by herself for the last five years with both her parents dead, it was small wonder. He wondered whether she’d attended the small schools they had in a hex like Pucklechurch, and decided that she probably hadn’t.

“A lot of what the censusmaster knows is an approximation,” said Alfirc. “The Editors — do you know about the Editors?”

Isra frowned. “Vaguely.”

“Well, the Editors are a council of people who are, basically, in charge of the shape of the world,” he said. “They’re not the ones who make the changes, but they’re the ones who decide what changes need to be made. A lot of what the Editors have focused on in the past three hundred years is legibility and information.” He tried to organize his thoughts. “The censusmasters have only been around for the last two hundred years, and some of the information structures put into place from earlier are, uh.” He stopped. “Is this too much for you?”

“I just want to know what he says about me,” she said.

“He?” asked Alfric. “Oh, the censusmaster. She’s a woman. Well, it’s not really what she says, because the information comes to her from a construct that was created by the Editors about a thousand years ago. The construct thinks, though that’s not the right word, that you’re a ranger.”

“A ranger,” she said, as if tasting the word. “I suppose.”

“It’s not a very good system,” said Alfric. “The categorization system predates the censusmasters, and hasn’t been updated in a thousand years, so you get weird things like ectad engineers being labeled as cobblers. Unfortunately, the category system is kind of broken and apparently hard to fix, so everyone just kind of lives with it.” There were many things that were broken and hard to fix, which greatly informed the policy of the modern Editors, which largely involved getting it right the first time and future-proofing as much as possible.

“How do you know so much?” asked Isra.

“Oh,” said Alfric. “Well, no offense to Pucklechurch, but I was raised in Dondrian, which has a good education system, even if your family can’t send you to a private school or hire tutors. My parents could afford both of those. All of this kind of thing was covered in our civics class, because the census stuff is a basic part of governance.” He hesitated. “If you want, I can give you a quick lesson. It’s good stuff to know.”

Isra nodded. “They don’t know where I live though.”

“Er,” said Alfric. “Well, there are seven positions of civic power within a hex, and the censusmaster only knows who lives in or is visiting the hex, not where they are. The structuralist knows where all the buildings are, so if you live in a building, and the censusmaster and the structuralist talk to each other, they might be able to figure out by process of elimination where you are. I don’t know if they’ve done that.” He stopped himself before saying that they should do that.

“Censusmaster, beastmaster, structuralist, cloudmaster, plantmaster,” said Isra. “What are the others?”

“Hexmaster and collector,” said Alfric. “Arguably the two most important.” He hesitated again, unsure of how much to add. “The hexmaster is elected by everyone who has occupancy, and the collector is in charge of information related to aether, mostly as an early-warning role.”

They walked in silence for a bit after that, and Alfric resisted the urge to speak more. He had a bad habit of explaining things to people that they didn’t care to know, and he’d been working hard to curb it. If Isra was ignorant of even the basics of governance and civics, possibly everything, then that might be a problem, but not all that much of one. It was a mark of failure on the part of Pucklechurch that a child had been left out in the woods to raise herself, but that was neither here nor there.

“The beastmaster spoke to me,” said Isra. “She said I was taking too much. She can track the animals through magic?”

“Yes,” said Alfric. “Animals are categorized and tracked. In the city it’s mostly used to make sure that people aren’t bringing in the wrong sorts of animals, fighting them, things like that. I’m not too sure about in more rural areas.”

“The world is so … ordered,” said Isra. That Alfric could agree on, and had said many times. He was just about to enthusiastically share her unease when she asked a question. “It’s the same in every hex?”

“There are a few that are unsettled,” said Alfric. “It takes, I think, about twenty people to get a vote going, and once that happens, the positions are filled by the hexmaster.” He wondered whether she had ever gone through a vote before. “But in those cases, it’s just a matter of knowing things. They don’t really have any power to do anything, and a different group could move in pretty quickly to take the position, if they wanted to.” He shrugged. “We’ll be passing through one of those small hexes soon. Not small in size, they’re all the same size,” he had no idea whether that needed to be said, “But probably not more than a hundred people there.”

Alfric had come in from the west, and they were now going east, down a path he hadn’t seen before. He was enjoying the change in scenery, which was largely woodlands instead of farms. The land wasn’t particularly suited to agriculture, with too rough of terrain, broken up by large slabs of rock sticking up from the ground. The path was in good repair though, which he couldn’t say about all of the hexes he’d passed through on his way from the fortuitously-timed portal. It was pretty common for a hex to have six roads going directly to the hex borders, though it took a fair bit of labor, and local geography sometimes stymied these efforts.

They soon reached one of those places where the geography was definitely not ideal, a steep hill where the road became a series of switchbacks that carefully navigated the outcroppings of rock. In a few places there were short wooden bridges, and embankments holding back trees and dirt. The whole thing was in good repair, but it had a rustic quality to it that Alfric still found somewhat unsettling. Something like this in any of the city hexes would be solid stonework, and if it was a road that was going to the hex boundary, it was much more likely that the city would just make a tunnel straight through the rock.

By the time they reached the summit, Alfric was slightly out of breath, though to his surprise, Isra didn’t seem to be affected all that much by the climb. She was sweating slightly, but doing much better than he was. Granted, she had less weighing her down, but he was still impressed. He stood for a moment, letting the cool air from the top of the hill wash over him. Looking back, Pucklechurch was just barely visible, mostly in the form of a swatch of farmland and the temple as the only building that stood out from the mess of white rectangles and gray slate roofs.

When Alfric turned back toward the path, he realized that the white pillars that marked the hex boundary were right there, on top of the hill. He groaned in disappointment.

“Problem?” asked Isra, furrowing her brow and trying to see what he’d seen.

“We’re at the hex boundary,” he said, gesturing at the pillars. “That means that when we come back, we’re going to have to make that long hike again from the opposite direction. If the boundary were further away, then we could warp before we came near the big hill.”

“Ah,” she said. “That’s a problem for tomorrow though.” She went ahead, walking quickly, and passed through the pillars. She was just about to start on the spell when Alfric called to her.

“Wait!” he said. She stopped, giving him a raised eyebrow. “You need to go further.”

“Further?” she asked, looking at the white pillars. She was past them, but only by about five feet.

“Thirty feet,” he said. “That’s protocol. The pillars aren’t always perfect, and I doubt you want to walk those six miles over again. I’ve had it happen to me once, and once was enough.”

Isra nodded and then moved, and Alfric walked toward her, reaching her just as she vanished. He shook his head and performed the spell himself, using familiar motions that he’d used dozens of times through the past few weeks on his way to Pucklechurch.

The transition was instant, and the design of the warp point was quite similar to that of Pucklechurch, with pillars supporting a roof above an open area. He stepped to the side right away, over to where Isra was standing.

“I was worried that you would leave me,” she said.

“Leave you?” asked Alfric.

“You could have gone back to Pucklechurch,” she said. “All you would have needed to do was to go back to the other side of the boundary.”

“Oh, that’s devious,” said Alfric. “The thought didn’t even cross my mind.” He paused. “Was that a test?”

“No,” said Isra. “I didn’t think about it until I was through.”

“Well, we’re here,” said Alfric, looking around.

The town was much smaller than Pucklechurch, barely more than a collection of houses. From the records Alfric had looked at, it had barely more than a hundred people. There were only three stores, though a few of the houses had workshops attached that might serve as a place of business. There was farmland, but largely just for self-sufficiency. It was somewhat safe to say that without hexilization and the warp, there might not have been a town at all, and in the days before waterstones, they’d have built much closer to the local water source. It was the kind of thing that had fascinated him as a child, wondering how it was that people lived in rural places like this, so far from all the goods and services he was used to.

“Let’s keep going,” said Isra after she’d taken her own look around.

“Of course,” nodded Alfric.

They got a few looks as they went through the small town, but no one spoke to them. It was obvious they were just passing through, and Alfric supposed that this was at least a daily occurrence, especially because this was the easiest path between Tarchwood and Pucklechurch.

“I’ve only left the hex twice before,” said Isra. She was looking around more, now that they were somewhere new. The roads were in much worse condition, more trails than proper roads, the kind that a wagon could get through with some difficulty, risking getting stuck in the mud if it rained. From the town, Alfric hadn’t even been sure that there were roads in all six directions.

“I rarely left Dondrian,” said Alfric. “Why twice?”

“Both times by accident,” said Isra. “I crossed the border without knowing it.”

“And the warp sent you to the center of some other hex,” said Alfric. “That’s always a painful experience, especially if you don’t know quite where you’ve ended up. Adding an extra six miles, at least, when you’ve had a long day, or thought you were getting an early start on things, can be awful.”

Isra nodded. “I used to go into Pucklechurch with my father. The first time, I hadn’t known that the spell could send you anywhere else.”

“Ouch,” said Alfric. “But you made your way back?”

Isra nodded. “Obviously.”

“But I mean,” said Alfric, “Being in a strange place, not knowing what had happened, that must have been scary.”

“It was,” said Isra.

They said nothing more for the next two miles. At various points, Alfric thought of something to say, and then he would look at Isra, and the thought would die on his lips. He had, in his time in the Junior League, met a number of people who were tightly wound and cold as ice, but Isra seemed to be in a league of her own so far as that was concerned. He needed to talk to her, to convince her that being in the party was in her best interests, but he had no idea how to do that. She was an orphan. Shouldn’t she want friends? Wasn’t that, in part, what a party was? Alfric had heard of parties where everyone was only cordial with each other, and of course he’d had many stories about interpersonal drama within a party, but it seemed to him that your party would, inevitably, become your friends. Or at least, he’d thought that before he’d been abandoned, and never really reflected on it afterward.

“Tarchwood is larger,” said Alfric. “I’ve never been, but it has a number of shops that we’ll want to bring what we have to. We’ll see if we can sell the books as they are, but if not, then they can be bleached or have the ink removed, and we can sell them blank. Aside from that, we’ll also need to find an entad shop, which there are two of. I don’t think we’ll get much from what we have, but it’s part of due diligence.”

“Okay,” said Isra.

They went another five minutes. The silence was agonizing. He was starting to think that perhaps Isra just didn’t know how conversations were supposed to go, or at least not the kind of frippery that you were meant to fill the air with when you were walking with someone.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Know what?” asked Alfric.

“What’s in Tarchwood,” replied Isra.

“Oh,” replied Alfric. “Um, more civics stuff. A hex under the command of a hexmaster can pledge information to a province, which is a collection of hexes, and provinces have their own people and rules and stuff.” He hesitated, feeling foolish for what he felt compelled to say next. “There are also collections of provinces, which is a nation. We’re in the nation of Interim.”

“That, I knew,” replied Isra.

“Alright,” said Alfric. “Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, hexmasters can pledge information to a province, and the province pledges to the nation. The nation, through the mechanism of the prime minister, can appoint someone to administer, usually sent from the seat of power, in this case Dondrian, and then they send information back along the national backbone to be cataloged.”

“But how do you know?” asked Isra.

“There are detailed maps available for the public to view,” said Alfric.

“And you viewed them,” said Isra. “And you remembered everything about them.”

“Well, yes,” said Alfric. “Not entirely, because the Interim is one of the largest nations in the world, almost thirty thousand hexes not including all the oceanic territory, but I tried my best to remember everything about this general area.”

“Mmm,” said Isra.

“Did you want another civics lesson?” asked Alfric.

“No,” said Isra. “One a day is fine.”

Alfirc couldn’t tell whether that was a joke or not.

Their long silence resumed.

“Say,” said Alfric. “Where are you from?”

“Not far from Pucklechurch,” replied Isra.

“I mean, where were you born?” he asked.

“Not far from Pucklechurch,” Isra replied a second time.

“Oh,” said Alfric. “I just meant … you have a light accent. And we don’t get many people with our color of skin in these parts.” His own skin was a shade darker than hers.

“My mother and father were from Tarbin,” said Isra. “They moved before I was born.”

“Tarbin,” said Alfric, nodding. “My own family is from North Tarbin, though we didn’t cross the sea until five hundred years ago.” There were relatively few nations left in the world, but North Tarbin had been holding on for a long time, and it was Tarbin they were holding off against.

“My father taught me about Tarbin, but that was years ago,” said Isra. “I haven’t spoken the language since he passed.”

Alfric didn’t speak any of the languages of North Tarbin. It was a point of pride among his family that they were as Inter as they came.

The silence descended again, this time like a thick and suffocating cloud, but as a small mercy, it wasn’t too long until they saw the hex boundary, and then Alfric could pretend that they weren’t talking because they were focused on getting there. If it were anyone else, Alfric would have filled the air with unimportant thoughts about Tarchwood.

The warp point at Tarchwood was larger than the one at Pucklechurch. It was fully enclosed, and it had an attendant, though she was sitting slumped in a chair when they came in and only reluctantly got up from her seat to usher them to the side. Alfric nonetheless thanked her and offered her a tip, but she didn’t seem to understand, and he sheepishly stuck the ring back in his pocket.

Tarchwood was built on the edge of one of the huge Proten Lakes, and the hex had ended up so that it was a short walk to the city proper, which had mostly clumped up by the lake. There were a few taller buildings, though of course nothing like the enormous city of Dondrian, or even a more residential area of Dondrian. Here, finally, there were people, lots of them, and again, they didn’t have quite the numbers or variety that Alfric was used to, but it was something that came close to home.

Isra moved at the same pace she’d used on the roads, but there was something wary and tentative in her movements, to say nothing of her face. Alfric thought she had the look of someone trying very hard to fit in and not show fear.

“I’ll take point,” he said. “I know the names of the shops, and how to navigate a city.”

Isra nodded, and seemed somewhat reassured that the only thing that would be asked of her would be to make sure he didn’t steal anything. He would have to be a fool to do that though, given what he knew her bow was capable of.

Tarchwood had more wooden structures than Alfric was used to, and more than had been used in Pucklechurch. Dondrian had a fire some five hundred years prior, and wooden structures had been outlawed. Looking at the buildings, he couldn’t help but think about that and see the three or four story buildings as being tinderboxes. Putting out fires had become a lot easier since that time, thanks to advances in both magic and coordination, but Alfric had always been more afraid of fire than other people seemed to be. Fires could also, of course, be undone, but Alfric found little comfort in that.

Not that there seemed to be much risk. It was a somewhat wet day, and the air was damp against his skin, as though it had just finished raining moments ago.

“Here, I think this is a likely place,” said Alfric. The sign professed that the store had many things, among them, novelties and henlings. “We’ll see what we can get for them.”

The owner of the shop was a tall man with large ears who eyed them as they came in, particularly Alfric. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

“We’re dungeoneers looking to make a sale,” said Alfric. “We have a large number of books and were hoping to sell them as a lot.”

“And the contents?” asked the big-eared man. He was looking back and forth between the two of them.

Alfric shrugged. “We don’t know. From what I saw, it seems to be a mix, but I’m not sure.”

The big-eared man sighed. “Then you’re just starting out?”

“Yes,” said Alfric, frowning. “Sorry if there’s something I’m missing here.”

“How many do you have?” he asked.

“Six hundred,” Alfric replied.

“Alright,” nodded the shopkeeper. He held out a hand. “Mergan,” he said. Alfric might have guessed that: the sign outside had said ‘Mergan’s Emporium’.

“Alfric,” Alfric replied. He nodded to Isra. “This is Isra.”

“Where is your party stationed out of?” asked Mergan.

“Pucklechurch, for now,” said Alfric.

“So there’s a good chance that you’ll be dealing with me on a regular basis,” nodded Mergan. “Well, the thing you need to know about books is that their worth depends largely on what’s inside them. There are entads for translation, and I have one, but the market is pretty small, mostly made up of specialists and hobbyists. Six hundred books might make you a fortune, if they’re the right ones, or they might only be good for washing the pages clean and writing something else there. With six hundred, that would still make you a good amount, but there’s no one in Tarchwood who does that work, which means that if I bought them, I would have to ship them off to somewhere else. Beyond that, I’d be the one taking a risk, so your price would be quite a bit lower. Now, I’m always looking for up-and-comers, and I hope we can have a relationship of some kind. I’m also hoping that if I do right by you, you do right by me. If we don’t get along, there’s another shop in Tarchwood that deals with dungeon things, though they’re more on the entad side, or you could go the other way, to Liberfell, which has its own buyers. Alright?”

Alfric nodded. “I’m more used to how things are done in Dondrian,” he said. “So any guidance you can give would be more than welcome.” From experience, he knew that some people would sit through a talk like that trying to keep themselves from sighing with boredom, but he had always been an eager sponge, appreciative of others sharing what they knew.

“Dondrian,” said Mergan, shaking his head. “I’d thought you might, given your manner, and the darkness of your skin.” It was common there, a third of the population, almost all of them originally from North Tarbin a long time ago. Mergan glanced at Isra. “The both of you? Siblings?”

Alfric looked at Isra. His skin was darker than hers, and their features quite distinct, but he could see where someone might think that. Most of the people in this particular province of the Interim were light-skinned, with a somewhat sizable contingent from Kiromo, and to them, he and Isra might have seemed similar.

“No,” said Isra. She almost seemed like she would leave it at that. “My parents immigrated from Tarbin and I was born near Pucklechurch.”

“Ah,” replied Mergan. “Well, I’ll welcome you all the same. Good to have a local, to keep the city folk in line. You can feel free to look around while we talk about business, it’s mostly henlings and some dungeon art.” Isra stayed where she was while Mergan turned back to Alfric. “The books, then?”

Alfric pulled out the storage book, and began removing the mundane books from it, stacking them up on the counter one by one. At first, Mergan just watched, but as it became clear just how long this process was going to take, he began looking through the books. He checked the spine first, then leafed through, though Alfric had no idea what he might be looking for. Once a hundred books had been removed, set into stacks of ten, Mergan used a key to open a small box on the counter and pulled out a monocle with a green lens, which he used to look at the books, largely focusing on their spines.

“About half of these are recipe books,” said Mergan. “Those are only worth the paper and the binding, raw material for some kind of magic or another. The recipes have measurements no one’s ever heard of, ingredients that might mean anything, all kinds of problems that make them a curiosity and nothing more. I think I’ve sold two over twenty years running this place.”

“That’s a shame,” said Alfric, who was continuing to pull out more books. He was going to be happy to see the end of this particular transaction. If the books turned out not to be worth much, there wasn’t anything much he could do about it.

“It’s the same for instruction books, manuals, all kinds of things,” said Mergan. “Gardening books for fruits and flowers that don’t exist, using tools that you’d have to make special, from someone who’s got different ideas about what soil is like, that kind of thing. Not all entirely worthless, but close to it, and hard to find a buyer.”

“What about the rest?” asked Alfric.

“Well, I can tell you what I’m looking for,” said Mergan as he flipped through more of them. “I’m looking for stories, I’m looking for books with illustrations, I’m looking for sciences, I’m looking for magic. The two biggest markets for dungeon books are, broadly, entertainment and education.” He stopped in the middle of flipping through one particular book and gave it a closer look, then set it over to one side. “The problem here is that I’m both the appraiser and the buyer, which isn’t a good situation for you, and I don’t want to put you at a disadvantage, because as I’ve said, I like up-and-comers bringing their finds to me. Now, you’ve got two options. The first is that you just trust that I’m a good guy, which I don’t think I’d do, if I were you. You’d appraise them yourselves, obviously, but respectfully, you have no idea. The second option is that you bring someone in to take a look.” He had been looking through the books as he talked, and setting aside perhaps one in every twenty of them. “Now, options are limited in Tarchwood, and so far as I know, there are only two or three people who’d be qualified to check my estimations. The entad shop, that’s run by a husband and wife couple, but they trade in henlings and such too. The wife, that’s Eddel, she’s got a head for numbers and I’m sure she’d be willing to take a look and maybe give you a counteroffer, if you want to fetch her.”

Alfric nodded. “If it’s alright with you, I’ll go get her,” he said.

“Of course,” said Mergan.

“I’ll stay with the books,” said Isra. There was distrust in her voice, and Alfric didn’t like that, not when it was so obvious. They had just met this man, Mergan, but from what he knew of small towns, the proprietors had too much to risk if they tried to swindle or cheat someone.

He took off, hoping that she would be okay on her own.

Chapter 12 - Overgrowth

Verity got going, leaving Hannah and Mizuki alone. Mizuki did the dishes for a bit, finishing up fairly quickly, and dried her hands on a towel hanging on the stove handle.

“Odd girl,” said Mizuki, after checking to make sure that Verity was actually gone.

“How so?” asked Hannah, quirking an eyebrow.

“She’s upper crust, I’m pretty sure,” said Mizuki. “And upper crust in Dondrian is very upper crust, so that’s saying something. But her room was kind of a mess, when Alfric and I went to go visit her, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what she’s doing here in Pucklechurch. We talked about it some last night, but … I don’t know. You ever have that feeling like someone is saying a bunch of words that you’re sure make sense, but they just don’t go together right in your head?”

“Can’t say I have,” replied Hannah. “Sometimes there’ll be a thing that takes me some time to get, but it never lasts, ay? And there are deep unknowable mysteries, questions without any answers to them, but those’re different.”

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “She’s just a mystery to me, that’s all. I like her, I think, but don’t get her.”

“They’re all odd ones, if you ask me,” said Hannah. “Nothin’ wrong with that.”

“Even Alfric?” asked Mizuki. “I think he’s stupidly straightforward.”

“Oh, he’s got depths to him, and bends in the road,” sighed Hannah. “Loads of plans and he ends up out here?”

“Then how’d you end up out here?” asked Mizuki.

“Church of Garos,” said Hannah, shrugging. “I’m not too popular with the superiors. My guess, and only a guess, is that they wanted to get rid of me and didn’t care too much if I left. Maybe they were hopin’ I would, which is why Pucklechurch. But there was also a need for a cleric here, someone to take over for Lemmel, so it suited them either way.”

“And what did you do to upset the apple cart?” asked Mizuki. “If anything?”

“I’m a true believer,” said Hannah, standing up straight. “The thing you gotta understand about the Church of Garos, and all the others, is that none of the gods actually care about the church itself, they care about the clerics. The churches are more like … well, let’s say you’ve got a guild of cobblers, right? Just a whole bunch of people who cobble shoes or whatnot. They’re a guild because they all do the same thing and want to work together, and so they can talk to each other over the guild channel, and have apprenticeships and everything. But there’s nothing to say that you can’t learn to cobble without the guild, it would just be harder, especially because if all the cobblers are in the guild, they control the apprenticeships, don’t they? So it’s a bit like that, I s’pose, but different, because it’s like … well, imagine that some people are cobblers because they’re mercenaries, they don’t really care about cobblin’, they just want the money, it’s a trade to them, and then there are others, people who are devotees, true believers.”

“In cobbling?” asked Mizuki.

“Well, I’m just tryin’ to make sense of it for you,” said Hannah. “You can imagine someone who was a good, devoted cobbler, who’d have learned cobblin’ even without bein’ taught, and you can imagine her bein’ a part of the guild because they wanted to keep a thumb on her and make sure she was stickin’ to what they wanted from cobblers.”

“And are you a part of the guild?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, there is a guild, right?”

“There are loads of guilds,” said Hannah. “There are enough clerics of Garos that if we were all in a guild together, nothin’ would ever get done. Every mornin’ you’d wake up to a novel’s worth of discussion, I’d wager.”

“Are you not in a guild then?” asked Mizuki.

“Are you?” asked Hannah.

“I am,” said Mizuki. “Greater Plenarch Sorcerer’s Association. Nothing to write home about, really, it’s just some local mages. I mostly ignore the guild, but they help with getting some odd jobs in the area, or early warning if there’s going to be some magical crisis or something, not that it’s been an issue so far. We’re all technically in competition with each other, so I can’t say that I get too much from it. Mostly it keeps us out of each other’s hair.”

“Ah,” said Hannah. “I was in the proper local guild for a bit, but there were some tensions with a few of the others, some disagreements, let’s say, about the nature of Garos and the best way to worship him and live by his symmetry. Some of it was on my end, naturally, but I don’t take all the blame. Easier for me to leave than them, since it was a few of the higher-ups in the guild that were talkin’ with me in the first place.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “So you argued with the guild leaders and were forced out?”

“I wouldn’t put it like that,” sighed Hannah. “It was more the feelin’ of comin’ into a room and realizin’ that there’s no one that wants you there.” She frowned. “I’d reply to the mornin’ messages, and when I got replies back it was like … well, either like bein’ ignored, or like they were rollin’ their eyes when they’d reply to me.”

“Ouch,” winced Mizuki.

“It hurt, sure,” said Hannah, though the pain wasn’t as sharp as it had once been. “All these people who’re supposed to be as devout as I was, who’re supposed to be scholars and fanatics of the same god we all worshiped and devoted our lives to, and it felt like I was the only one who really believed it. I don’t believe that’s true, but it’s how it felt.” She sighed again. It had been months since she’d left the guild, but she still sometimes felt down about it. She’d enjoyed waking up to read messages in the morning, but not when it felt like she’d be berated for trying to join in the discussion or make her points. Some day, she would probably join a guild again, and she’d resolved to talk a bit less and not feel the need to chime in so much.

“How about we go outside,” said Mizuki. “We can practice some while we wait for Verity.”

“Of course,” nodded Hannah, grateful for something else to think about.

The backyard was a huge, overgrown space, and it seemed that Mizuki, or at least her grandfather, owned a lot of land around it. There were a few flowers growing wild, but it was largely tall, leafy weeds, even in the raised beds at the back. Grass had grown between all the cracks in the stone path, and there was a fountain filled with an unpleasant-smelling muck.

“Sorry,” said Mizuki, shrinking back slightly as she looked at what must have once been a garden. “I just really don’t have the time to deal with a garden, or know what I’m doing when it comes to plants, so. I should probably just fireball the whole place.”

“Nah, trees and nature,” said Hannah. “Reminds me of the prairies, which are kind of like home.”

“Alright,” said Mizuki, turning away from the overgrown backyard and toward Hannah. “Show me what you’ve got.”

“You’ve already seen most of it, haven’t you?” asked Hannah. “In the dungeon?”

“Well,” said Mizuki. “I guess, but not under controlled conditions.”

“Sure,” said Hannah. “You should just know that I can’t do ‘magic’ all day, not like you can. Simple healing, usually I don’t run out of that, but anythin’ more, there are some limits.” Hannah hated the feeling of Garos leaving her, but it came with the territory if you were pushing things.

“Start simple then,” said Mizuki. She was bouncing from foot to foot, limbering up and getting ready, as though her magic was something that needed flexibility.

“Basic symmetry repair,” said Hannah. She held up her hands. “My hands are perfectly identical, aren’t they, just flipped versions of each other?”

“Sure,” said Mizuki. “Hey, wait.” She moved closer and peered at Hannah’s hands. “The freckles are mirror images.”

“My whole body is like that,” nodded Hannah, grinning. “It’s called symmetricalization, it’s somethin’ loads of clerics of Garos go through. I can do it for you too, if you want, but it takes about a day, and it’s a bit,” she paused, “Intimate.”

Mizuki squirmed slightly. “So you mean your whole body.”

“I’m a healer, first and foremost,” said Hannah. “I’ve got familiarity with bodies. But I can also limit it, if you’d like, to just your face, your arms, your legs. It would make healin’ easier.”

“It would?” asked Mizuki. She was looking at Hannah’s face a little closer, scanning its features, and Hannah stood there, letting her look. It was a perfectly symmetrical face, which allowed easy removal of blemishes and things like that. Clerics of Garos were known for their beauty, and in the larger cities, it was a rare member of the upper class that didn’t have some kind of symmetricalization done to them. A symmetrical face was beautiful, as a general rule, but symmetricalization had to be done carefully, and sometimes the results could be odd, or represent so fundamental a change that the person wouldn’t be recognized by their friends and family. Verity was upper crust, as Mizuki had said, but didn’t seem to have had symmetricalization done. That might have been because she was pretty enough without it.

“Basic symmetry repair needs the two halves to be very close to the same,” said Hannah. “So, somethin’ like an oak shield, the grain of the wood means it’s harder, ay, because the two halves of the shield are so different from one another. That’d be mixed symmetry repair. Unless, of course, you have a shield made from the same piece of wood, butterflied apart.” She made a motion with her hands.

“Okay,” said Mizuki slowly. “Hey, why do you think that Alfric was trying to rush us in without training and stuff?”

“No idea,” said Hannah. It felt a bit like Mizuki wasn’t paying attention, which Hannah had found somewhat the norm when she talked about religion with the laypeople.

“I was thinking it was just big city energy, but the more I think about it, the less it feels right,” said Mizuki. “Feels … fishy.”

“Are you ready?” asked Hannah. She took a pen knife from her pocket, then held it above the back of her hand.

“Blegh,” said Mizuki. “Blood.”

Hannah hesitated. “Well, I could symmetricalize somethin’, I suppose, but this is faster, ay.”

“Fine,” said Mizuki as she took in a breath.

Hannah cut herself, a long stinging cut across the back of her hand, then lined everything up in her mind and connected to the wonder and majesty of Garos, God of Symmetry and Order. People described the feeling differently, but for Hannah it always came with a tingling at her extremities as a mark of success. She let the heightened sense of her own symmetry fade away once the cut was healed.

“See?” asked Hannah. The wound had vanished, and the pain with it. Her hands were once again perfectly symmetrical.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” asked Mizuki.

“A bit, ay,” said Hannah. She shrugged. In the course of her time at seminary, she’d hurt herself so many times that she was used to the pain. “Did you see it though? The … magic?” The word she’d grown up with was ‘miracle’, but in the seminary they used ‘manifestation’, which had never quite sat right for Hannah.

Mizuki nodded. “It’s still there. It’s got a kind of … energetic flavor to it.”

“Flavor?” asked Hannah.

Mizuki waved a hand. “You know sorcs don’t go to school, right?” she asked. “Or at least not most of them. It’s a very personal magic. We end up making up our own words for things a lot of the time.”

Mizuki raised one hand into a fist, then opened it with force while thrusting out. There was a single licking arc of electricity, which was barely visible in the sunlight.

“Disappointing,” said Mizuki. “But … stronger than I’d thought it would be?”

“We’re in a party, ay?” asked Hannah.

“Does that … help?” asked Mizuki, blinking.

Hannah nodded. “I suppose maybe there are things a school for sorcs woulda taught you, ay?”

“But why would it help?” asked Mizuki. “The aether is the aether, I’m using your cast off, it shouldn’t matter that we’re in a party together.”

“Parties help anyone,” replied Hannah. “All my spells work better on party members, and a bit less so on guild members. It’s a matter of connection.”

“The aether is the aether,” Mizuki muttered, as though she was willing to match her ignorance against Hannah’s knowledge. Her confidence crumpled quickly though. “I just don’t get why it would work, since being a sorc isn’t about connection, it’s about the aether. Your cast offs are, I guess, connected to you, and being a party member means they’re connected to me, but it shouldn’t matter, that’s all I’m confused about.”

“You didn’t feel it when we were in the dungeon?” asked Hannah.

“Maybe,” said Mizuki, frowning. “To be honest, my heart was in my throat most of the time and I was just trying to fight down the panic. I thought I was just doing a good job.”

“And you did!” said Hannah. “But also probably bein’ in a party helped you out.”

Before they could move on to the next biggest piece of Hannah’s healing arsenal, Verity returned. She’d tied back her hair and put on a different dress, this one white with lavender highlights, and she was carrying her lute, which she carefully set down.

“What happened here?” asked Verity, looking around at the overgrown garden. She seemed taken aback.

“It used to be a garden,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “Grandpa was really into gardening, it was how he relaxed. I never really took to it though.”

“This is horrible,” said Verity, still looking at the plants. She didn’t see the sour look on Mizuki’s face. Verity drifted over to one of them, a bushy plant with broad leaves and a single drooping flower. She reached down and stuck a finger in the soil, then looked at the base of the plant. “You poor thing.”

“I said I never really took to it,” said Mizuki. “Can we leave it at that?”

“Oh,” said Verity, standing up. “Oh, I didn’t mean — I didn’t mean it like that. I just — in Dondrian it’s one of the womanly arts, and it was my favorite.”

“Gardening is … womanly?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t know what it’s like in Kiromo, or even in Pucklechurch,” said Verity. “But there are five womanly arts in Dondrian. Gardening, needlework, reading, music, and languages. I was always terrible at languages.”

“Well, I do know how to read,” said Mizuki. “So one out of five isn’t bad.”

“You don’t speak Kiromon?” asked Hannah.

“Two out of five isn’t bad,” said Mizuki, nodding.

“Well, reading is more, ah,” said Verity, measuring her words. “There are quite a few books you’re expected to have read, along with keeping up with more current works, and being a proper woman means being able to allude to all these books you’ve read when in conversation with others, and to understand the references that everyone else makes.” She shrugged.

“That sounds horrible,” said Mizuki.

“Ah, I think I have a better understandin’,” said Hannah. “It’s not ‘womanly arts’, it’s stuff for rich women to do.”

“Well,” said Verity, frowning. “I’m not sure I would say that.”

“Did you have maids, growin’ up?” asked Hannah.

“A few,” said Verity, folding her arms. “But the success of my family isn’t — I mean, it’s not like those things are — needlework is a plainly useful skill, and gardening is too.”

“Hey,” said Mizuki. “Why isn’t cooking a womanly art?”

“Well I have no idea,” said Verity. “It’s not like I made them up.” She shrugged, then looked at Mizuki. “I’m sorry if I insulted your garden, I just,” she looked around again. “I like gardening.”

“Well,” said Mizuki. “Like I said, it’s my grandfather’s garden. He wasn’t able to take it to Kiromo with him.”

Hannah looked at the two of them. “I think it’s always better, when you get an apology, to make it clear you accept it?”

Mizuki rolled her eyes, then looked at Verity. “Verity, I fully and earnestly accept your apology.” She looked back at Hannah. “Better?”

“Much better,” replied Hannah, beaming at her. They both looked a bit happier too.

“If I do end up coming around,” said Verity.

“Coming around?” asked Mizuki.

“Well, this is the obvious place for us to meet, if we’re in a party,” said Verity. She shifted. “I didn’t mean to presume.”

“I kind of thought that you’d end up staying here more than just the one night,” said Mizuki, shrugging. “If you wanted to.”

“Oh,” said Verity, eyes widening slightly. “Well, that’s kind.”

“You can think on it,” said Mizuki. “No rush.”

“Well, if I did end up coming around here, would you mind if I,” she looked around the garden. “Did something with this? Rescued a few plants, watered a few others, pruned out the worst of the weeds and the dead stems, things like that?”

“No, not at all,” said Mizuki. She looked at the garden. “If I had known how, and I’d had the time, I might not have let it get like this. But it’s pretty clear that I haven’t put in any effort here.” She clapped her hands. “We were supposed to be doing some magic, weren’t we?”

Verity burst into song almost immediately, picking up her lute from where she’d laid it and strumming a melody about a beautiful garden that she must have made up on the spot. The effects seemed largely emotional to Hannah, lightening whatever scraps of bad mood remained, but Mizuki was looking all around, so perhaps it was layered.

“Okay,” said Mizuki as Verity played on. “Now this is the stuff. If I just gather it up and hold it …” She picked up a stick that was laying on the ground and threw it as hard as she could, and Hannah was mildly surprised to see it zip off into the woods. “Bam.”

“Some kind of … force?” asked Hannah.

Mizuki nodded. “It’s always opposite from what the base magic was, and there are different axes to work from, but mental or emotional stuff has physical as its opposite. Telekinesis is the most obvious application.”

“But you were holding it?” asked Hannah.

“Yeah, because it’s easier that way,” said Mizuki. “But if we’re in a dungeon, I’m not going to be tossing things at the monsters, and I think it will take some time and effort to build up the concentration in the aether, so … I don’t know how useful it is in practice, especially since most fights are short.”

“Ready for the interference?” asked Hannah. Verity was still singing, and while she could go on for quite some time, as demonstrated in the dungeon and during her regular sets at the Fig and Gristle, Hannah didn’t want to tax her too much.

“Ready,” said Mizuki.

Again, Hannah cut her hand and healed it, quick and simple work that Mizuki turned away from. Once it was done though, Mizuki was looking into the air and trying to make something of what she saw there.

Hannah had been taught a bit about sorcs in the seminary. The analogy they’d used had been to that of a pond, which seemed to be a common view of it. The sorc, at her base, dealt in the ripples in the pond, the stuff left in the aether by other casters, or magical phenomena, or what have you. If there were two sources of magic, powerful enough to make ripples, those ripples would hit each other, and the sorc could do something more. It was probably one of those helpful but horrible analogies that Mizuki would explain was dead wrong, but Hannah found it enlightening.

Mizuki had two fingers extended with her right hand, and with her left, she leaned down to pick up a rock. She was muttering under her breath, and with a slight grunt, she tossed the rock into the air. She took the two fingers, which she’d been spinning, and pointed them at the rock that was sailing through the air. With a terrifying thunderclap, the rock exploded, sending bits of sharp rock crashing to the ground and leaving an afterimage of a bolt of lightning in Hannah’s eyes.

Verity’s song stopped at once. “Ouch,” she said, voice mild.

“Sorry!” yelped Mizuki. “I thought it would be, I don’t know.”

“Here,” said Hannah, stepping toward Verity. “You’ve got a small cut.” She had healed Verity before Verity had even noticed. It was probably from a bit of rock tumbling in just the wrong way so that it got her in the cheek.

“Seems good though,” said Verity.

“We’re lucky Hannah is here,” said Mizuki. She’d come forward to look at Verity’s cheek, and there was a nervous motion to her. “I have a new rule, which is that I don’t practice without Hannah.” She picked a bit of rock from her hair.

“Is that what you were trying to do?” asked Verity.

“It was supposed to be explosive lightning,” said Mizuki.

“Well it was, in a way,” nodded Hannah. “Just needs to be a bit more … directed.”

“Less splashback,” said Verity. She touched her cheek where the healing had been done.

“I’ll be more careful,” said Mizuki. “I’m so, so sorry, I really didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Verity smiled. “I fully and earnestly accept your apology. Besides, if Alfric is going to take so much punishment for us, then I should be able to take a little scratch.”

“You’re really okay?” asked Mizuki.

“Fine,” said Verity. She looked at Hannah. “Like new. Thank you, by the way.”

“We all have our roles,” said Hannah. “Before the day is through, if it’s alright with both of you, I’ll have a bit of a look at your bodies, though with the power of Garos, not anything to do with my eyes.” That was the kind of assurance that Mizuki seemed to need, and Verity very much didn’t. “Mostly so that if I need to heal either of you, if Alfric doesn’t do enough, I won’t have to be figurin’ things out while we’re in the thick of it.”

Mizuki looked down at her hands. “I’m already pretty symmetrical,” she said.

“Well,” said Hannah. “You are, in the broad strokes, but things don’t always lie the same on both sides. Blood vessels are one of them, and important, because we’d like to keep your blood in you.”

“Hmm,” said Mizuki, tapping her lip. “I am a fan of my own blood.”

“And there are asymmetries of the guts, the liver, and the heart, and a cleric of Garos is forbidden from touching the brain except in dire circumstances where it’s that or death,” said Hannah. Mizuki blanched. “Just so you know,” she said, holding up a hand. “As a matter of, well, precaution.”

“Seems reasonable,” said Verity. “I would hate to be blindsided by some strangeness of Garos — no offense — while we’re in the middle of the next dungeon, if it turns out that one is also more difficult than fighting three raccoons.”

“We’ll have helms for it,” said Hannah. “Less to worry about, especially when it comes to the head.”

“Well,” said Mizuki, stretching her fingers out. “Does anyone want to go again and see what magic we can make together?”

“Of course,” said Verity. “I’m going to have to learn to hold through the blasts. There’s no use for a bard who drops a song at the crucial moments.”

“I’ll call them out, so you can prepare yourself,” said Mizuki.

Verity nodded. “Very well, shall we go again? With some actual targets this time, please, and some warning about what kind of calamity you’re going to cause.”

“You better be saying ‘calamity’ in an affectionate way,” said Mizuki, pointing a finger at Verity.

“Obviously,” Verity smiled. “You’re the one bringing calamity down on our enemies.”

Hannah beamed. Whatever else was true about her, it seemed that Verity had a good work ethic, and she already seemed to be orienting it toward the dungeons. For a moment, Hannah listened to Verity’s song, a jaunty tune about a mighty sorcerer throwing thunderbolts around, and then she went for a more advanced miracle, something that would give Mizuki as much to play with as possible.

Chapter 11 - Agates Among the Stones

Alfric left and went down the street, finding ‘Sharpe & Eddel’ without too much trouble, and explained the situation to the woman behind the desk. Her shop was much more clean and organized than Mergan’s, with most of the wares inside glass cases. There were three mannequins, two of them with armor, and the last wearing miscellaneous items. If they were all entads, Alfric could imagine himself spending his share of whatever he got from the books there.

“‘Counteroffer’,” scoffed Eddel as they walked. She was well-dressed, with all kinds of embellishments built into both her vest and dress. Her hair was dark, almost black, but with streaks of grey. “Mergan is too damned scrupulous for his own good, and I wouldn’t mind him making sure things were squared away, but this is the fifth time this month he’s brought me in.”

“And did you counteroffer?” asked Alfric.

“Not once,” Eddel replied. “But I gave my own assessment of what things were worth. Mostly Mergan does it to make himself feel better, especially with the young ones.”

“And you’re still coming with me,” said Alfric.

Eddel waved a hand. “Well, of course, he’s right, you’re juniors, and if we’re lucky, we’ll be seeing a bit of you, if you come here instead of Liberfell. Liberfell is bigger, no doubt, but we’re next to the water, with shipping across the lake and a shorter trip to a major leyline. Without dungeoneers, I’d have no stock, and nothing kills an entad shop faster. Of course, a lot of young dungeoneers flame out early on.” She gave Alfric a look as she hustled along. “You seem like the kind who will stick it out though.”

There was a tightness in Alfric’s chest as he went through into Mergan’s Emporium, worried that somehow things would have deteriorated in his absence, but when he got back in, Isra was laughing. The laughter faltered when Alfric came in, but she made no attempt to hide her smile.

“Are we interrupting something?” asked Eddel. She immediately went to the books and started flipping through them.

“Just a joke,” Mergan said with a smile. “I know a scant amount of Tarbin, and three or four jokes. Jokes are the most useful thing you can learn in a language.”

“It was quite rude,” Isra smiled. When she saw Alfric looking at her, she turned away from him and toward some of the cluttered shop’s other goods.

“All the best jokes are,” Mergan replied.

“These are the worthwhile ones?” asked Eddel, pointing at the small stack of books that sat next to the much larger one.

“In my opinion, anyway,” said Mergan. He turned to Alfric. “You’ll have to understand that I don’t have the time or inclination to go through everything with a fine-toothed comb. If that’s a requirement for you, you’re best going somewhere else. Or, you could look through the books on your own, separate them out, and I could use that to inform my price.”

“We’re looking to sell quickly,” said Alfric. “Besides, I can’t read any of what’s written in the books.”

“You can still tell by looking,” replied Eddel, who was leafing through the small stack. “Sometimes there are one or two pictures, sometimes you can tell from the headings, sometimes just looking at the shape of the paragraphs.” She pointed to one open page. “Punctuation is usually done with small marks, different from the glyphs they use for letters or words, so if you see marks that seem to be annotating something, they can be pretty obvious. Here, you can see that these are probably quotation marks, though I’d be hard-pressed to bet on it.”

“They are,” said Mergan, who had slipped the monocle into his front pocket.

“It lets you make a good guess, anyhow,” said Eddel. She looked at the large stack of books that had been put off to the side. “And all those are dross?”

“Not dross,” said Mergan. “But I’d sell them as henlings, or ship them off to someone who’s willing to do the work of bleaching, or a wortier.” He clucked his tongue and looked at Alfric. “Alright, I’m thinking for these,” gesturing to the small pile, “Three hundred a piece.” He pointed at the other pile. “For the stinkers, five each.”

“Five?” asked Alfric, folding his arms. “That’s nearly robbery. It’s high quality parchment and good binding, and beyond that, they’re nearly standardized.”

“Five is a fair offer,” said Eddel. “It’s good parchment, but it’s got ink on it, hasn’t it?”

Alfric deflated somewhat. “But that’s what, thirteen thousand for the lot?”

“When you say it like that, it seems like a worse deal for Mergan,” said Eddel. “Personally, I’d offer less.” She turned to Mergan. “You think you can recoup three hundred a piece for those? Or did you see something I didn’t?”

“I think it’s a fair price,” said Mergan. “And I think they’re worth more considering how many of them there are, all from the same place. They could be sold as a set.” He shrugged. “You’d get a better price taking them back to Dondrian, but that’s quite a journey to make, and travel comes with costs of its own.”

Alfric had been prepared to get less than the fifty thousand he’d dreamed of, but so much less was a real blow. The money didn’t matter that much, and it might help keep the party hungry, which was important in the short term, though he tried his best not to listen to that intrusive thought. Still, he had been certain there were things to be had over at Sharpe and Eddel’s, and he was equally sure that they would be expensive. Perhaps there was something to going further afield, but without fortuitous timing on a portal, he’d have a wait ahead of him, and then another wait coming back, all while risking leaving the party stillborn.

“If you don’t like it, you don’t like it, but I’m not buying the books,” said Eddel. “And I know if you’re hot off a dungeon run, you’re probably coming my way soon, so I’ve got every incentive to get you to milk this poor bugger.”

Alfric looked at Isra, who was standing impassively. “Thoughts?” he asked.

“The opening offer is never the limit,” said Isra.

“It is with me,” said Mergan. He was standing still, as solid as a rock.

“Fourteen for the lot,” said Alfric. “I don’t think you’re trying to squeeze us, but I think there’s some give, and this is getting split five ways.”

“How it’s getting split isn’t my problem,” said Mergan. He looked at the small stack of books again, which wasn’t actually all that small. Alfric tried to see where his eyes were landing, and failed to see which of those books was the money maker. “Fine,” Mergan finally said, holding out his hand.

Alfric shook, feeling mixed emotions. Barter was a crucial aspect of being a dungeoneer, but it had always been a weak spot for him. In an ideal world, it would have been the responsibility of someone else on the team, but the party wasn’t a team yet.

“Well,” said Eddel, “Should I expect you over shortly, flush with rings?”

“Of course,” nodded Alfric. “And thank you for your input.”

“Oh, it’s no problem,” said Eddel. “We’re competitors, of a sort, but we also have to watch each other’s backs. I suppose I’ll wait for the transaction.”

It took some time to settle up with Mergan, in part because while he had fourteen thousand rings on hand, they were locked away in an entad that took some time and effort to open. It was a large sum of money, and Alfric was mildly surprised to see so many high-value rings in one place. In Dondrian, most purchases like this would go through banks, with nothing actually changing hands except a signature or seal. Here in Tarchwood, it was done differently, perhaps owing to the lack of banks, or possibly the fact that people were a bit less trusting of each other, or had fewer methods of enforcing trust.

The three of them, Alfric, Isra, and Eddel, went over to her store together.

“Now then, looking for anything specific?” asked Eddel. “You’ve got the funds.”

“Unfortunately, there are only two of the five of us,” said Alfric. “So most of the money has to be reserved.” Along with what he had on hand, he’d got a hundred rings to spend, and he was hoping that she would have something good for that price. Looking more closely, he could see that none of the entads on display had their prices listed, only descriptions.

“If I can offer a bit of advice,” said Eddel. “And this is only because I want you to succeed for my own selfish reasons — it’s best to hold off on buying some of the more common stuff. You’re a new party, aren’t you?”

Alfric nodded. “How’d you know?”

“You were talking to each other rather than using the channel,” said Eddel. “And you’re not as dripping in entads as I’d expect. Anyhow, if you’re a fresh new party, you’ll be finding stuff in the dungeons, and it’s a shame to spend rings on something basic only to come across it in the very next dungeon.”

“We could sell the extra to you though, couldn’t we?” asked Alfric.

“You could,” she replied. “But I take my cut, and my cut can be pretty big, because I’ve got floorspace and presentation to worry about. Beside that, there’s always the problem of binding.”

“How much for this set of arrows?” asked Isra, who had been looking at the displays.

“Two thousand,” said Eddel.

Alfric winced. Eddel had been with them when the deal was struck, and now knew exactly how much each of them could afford. Her going over there had definitely not been altruism.

“They’re indestructible?” asked Isra. “The price seems high if they’re not.”

“If you manage to destroy one without magic, I’ll refund half your rings,” said Eddel. “They passed the scratch tests with flying colors, and I had the cleric of Oeyr look at them last time he was in.”

“Wait, the book might help,” said Alfric. He took the book from his pack, again ruing how heavy it was, and laid it on the floor. He took one of the arrows from Isra and fed it into the book, then waited for the description to appear. From their tests, it hadn’t been able to identify entads or their functions, but it could do something that was nearly as valuable, which was to give an indication of their material composition. “Described as being like corum,” said Alfric. “Which is a rare metal, virtually indestructible.”

Isra nodded, and took another one of the arrows from the case they were in. She looked it over, examining the flight and the head, then tried to snap it over her knee. She winced in pain, but the arrow was unbroken.

“Don’t try that with anything else in the shop,” said Eddel, frowning. “Not without my say so.”

“Range?” asked Isra. Alfric had no idea what she was talking about, but she had read the description on the case, and he hadn’t. He extracted the arrow from the book and handed it to Isra.

“It’s time, not range,” said Eddel. “One second of motionlessness and they snap back to where they were.”

Isra nodded, then looked down at the description again. “But you can only fire four,” she said.

“If you want to have them return, yes,” said Eddel. She smiled. “Can you shoot more than four arrows in six seconds?”

“The bow slows down time,” said Isra, gesturing to the bone-white bow on her back.

“Ah,” said Eddel. The smug expression fell away. “Well, perhaps it’s a sub-par entad for you then, but it’s the best I’ve got when it comes to archery, if you’ve already got the bow covered. I do have a few other arrows, since they’re common enough, but nothing so indestructible. Novelties, really.” She waited, looking at Isra, then turned to Alfric. “And you?”

“The book is going to be our storage,” he said, hefting it back up. “But I was looking for something that would help with travel. I know travel is common enough, but the party is still forming, and I don’t think there’s much confidence that we should all uproot our lives. Being able to bring them directly to the next dungeon would be helpful.”

“You made fourteen thousand off just the books,” said Eddel with a frown. “I’m not sure how it is in Dondrian, but that’s a windfall for any new party in these parts.” She must have seen something in his face. “But not everyone is fully on board, are they?” She looked over at Isra.

“I am,” said Isra, still inspecting the arrows. She took one of them and nocked it in her bowstring, drawing back to get a feel for it.

“No shooting in the store,” said Eddel.

“Some of the others though, no,” said Alfric. “Not fully on board.”

“And then you’re the one who has to take up the coordination and everything else,” said Eddel, looking Alfric up and down. “That was what I did, in my adventuring days. Not only are you filling your role in the group, but you’re checking times with everyone, making travel arrangements, scoping out the dungeons, gathering information, all that work, and everyone profits off it unless you try to make sure you get a larger cut, which no one likes, because they don’t see it as work.”

“I don’t mind the work,” said Alfric. “I’ve been dreaming of going into dungeons all my life. I’d have taken the world by storm a year ago, if plans hadn’t fallen through.” As soon as he’d said it, he realized it sounded like arrogance and puffery. It was the kind of thing you weren’t supposed to say out loud, even if you thought it was true. And if he tried to justify it with his lineage, or his extensive knowledge and practice, it would sound even more like arrogance.

“Better to be older, I’d say,” nodded Eddel. She went over to one of the cabinets, which was packed with stuff, and began looking through it until she found what she was looking for. “Here,” she said, handing a dagger to Alfric. It was a small one, slightly dull, with a handle of jade. “It’s a part of what you need, and the best I can part with for what I know you have. Once a day, you can go to where the dagger is. It works for the last person the dagger cut, but the weight limit is high, and it’s only weight. You could take another with you, if she were light enough and standing on your feet. Any more than that, you’d need floatstones.”

Alfric nodded, feeling the dagger. “How’d it do on the scratch test?” he asked.

“Somewhat poor,” she said. “You could probably get away with stabbing someone with it, or using it for cooking, but I wouldn’t go into battle with it or use it against armor. Seventeen hundred for it.”

“So all I would need to have a good setup is a second one of these, then some way to take people with,” said Alfric. “One third of what I need, let’s say.” It seemed like a high price to pay, but equipment or services that allowed rapid traversal of the world always were. Floatstones would be a fairly significant expense, but they were probably better than trying to find an entad.

“It’s only a piece, but it’s what I have as far as travel goes,” said Eddel. “I’ve got three more entads that I don’t think you’d have much use for, all with some use in travel: a staff that lets you walk through trees about a mile at a time but in a random direction, a sail that can harness unseen winds, and a pair of boots that allow for long jumps.”

“How long of jumps?” asked Alfric.

“Fifty feet, or thereabouts, but you can do as many in a row as you’d like,” said Eddel. “The man who brought it in twisted his ankle using it and, I suppose, lost his taste for it.”

Alfric hefted the dagger. “You said, when we came in, that it was better not to buy something we were likely to get more of.”

“And I stand by that,” nodded Eddel. “But travel is vital, and one of the big things that stops dungeoneering teams. You might want shelter too, but that’s not vital in the same way that travel is. You might want food, but again, it’s not the hardest thing to get on your own.”

“I was told that I should never get an entad that replaced something I already had in my backpack,” said Alfric, nodding.

“Well, whoever said that was a fool, or someone wise who was trying to be too pithy,” said Eddel. “Replacing something that weighs ten pounds with something that weighs one? That’s almost always worth it, unless someone’s trying to charge you an arm and a leg.”

“Speaking of overcharging,” said Isra, stepping forward. “I’ll take the arrows for a thousand.”

Eddel shook her head. “That’s half their asking price. You should think about it in terms of what you save by never having to visit a fletcher again.”

“I have thought about it,” said Isra. “The arrows pay for themselves, but that will take time. They’re blunt, and there’s no way to sharpen them. And they’ve been sitting in that display case so long there’s discoloration on the wood.”

Eddel shifted in place. “I need something more than a thousand.”

“We’ll come here first when we come to Tarchwood,” said Isra. “You’ll have first pick of whatever we pull out of the dungeons. But then you’d have to knock another hundred off the dagger.”

Eddel sighed. “Fine, I can already tell you’re not going to be my favorite dungeoneers.”

“If you wanted the dagger?” asked Isra.

“I think I do,” nodded Alfric. “If I could hire a cartier, I’d be able to travel around quite a bit faster.”

“A deal to both then,” said Eddel. She went behind the counter and pulled out a sack of rings, with rings of different denominations on separate loops. “Have you gone to see Wilch yet? He’s the ectad man in Tarchwood, though he doesn’t have full facilities.”

“He’s our next stop,” said Alfric. “And then we were hoping to head back to Pucklechurch and get there before nightfall. That should be doable, right?”

“Depends on if you can find Wilch,” said Eddel as she took the rings that Alfric was offering. “He runs odd hours. If you want a recommendation on an inn, I’d say the Hare’s Rump would suit you.”

“If we don’t spend the night, that’s nearly twenty-four miles of walking for the day,” said Alfric. “I’m already feeling it in my shins.”

“This will be my second time staying at an inn,” said Isra as she put her arrows into her quiver.

“Really?” asked Eddel. “So you’re all very new at this.”

“We are,” said Alfric. “But we’ve got good plans in place, and a good party.”

Eddel didn’t quite roll her eyes at that, but Alfric could feel her skepticism. “Well, you feel free to look around and spend the rest of your rings, or square away what you don’t have funds for. I can put a hold on things for up to a few weeks, if you’re serious about coming back with the money.”

Alfric did end up selling her one of the entads they didn’t want, the red cloth, but she didn’t seem terribly interested in the book that recorded conversations, so he held onto it. It was the kind of thing that you’d get more for in a larger city, they both agreed on that, and Alfric hoped he wasn’t being derelict in the mission that the party had entrusted him with. Once that was finished, Alfric and Isra browsed the store together, and spoke about what they’d want in the future.

“Food is easy to find,” said Isra. “An hour or two in the woods can get you what you want.”

“But it’s an hour or two you’re spending,” said Alfric. “There are better things to do with your time.”

Isra shrugged. “I like hunting.” She looked over the entads. He was relieved that she seemed perfectly capable of reading, which had been in question given some of the peculiarity that clearly accompanied her upbringing. “Storage would be good. Something to help carry a deer.”

“Strength could do that too,” said Alfric. “But they’re more rare. Might help you get more draw from the bow though.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. “And you want something that can take the others to a dungeon while you spare them the travel.”

“I’d like that, yes,” said Alfric. He did have the dagger now, but they would have to properly test its limits. It was best to assume entad sellers had already done that, but you never knew. “We have a good party, I can feel that, but we need to stick together, and we need to be hitting the dungeons as quickly as we can. With the right travel entads, we could be doing two a day.”

Isra nodded, though Alfric didn’t think she was nodding because she thought that was a good idea.

“The dagger is good,” said Alfric, who had carefully stored it in a cloth. “It’s also possible that we could use it as a shortcut. Bards can do some amazing things, and if Verity can send a dagger from one member of a party to the other, then … well, we’d still have the limit of once a day, but it’s a definite start.”

“It can be used to collect whoever wants to be there least,” said Isra.

“Yeah,” said Alfric. He wanted to ask whether she was committed, but held back, because it seemed like perhaps he was gaining ground with her. From a pure utility perspective, he could afford to lose her more than he could afford to lose the others, even if she’d gotten an amazing bow from their first dungeon and seemed to have more of a head for combat than the others.

They found nothing else they’d wanted, and followed Eddel’s directions down to Tarchwood Ectads, which was owned by a man named Wilch, who, according to Eddel, was a layabout that kept odd hours. Tarchwood was on the shore of one of the enormous Proten Lakes, and that was where Tarchwood Ectads was located, with a dock sticking out the back.

“The sea is enormous,” said Isra when they were halfway down the hill.

“It’s not a sea, it’s a lake,” said Alfric. “The Gornorian Lake. Freshwater, not salt.”

“Ah,” said Isra, but she still had a look of confusion on her face.

“I’m guessing geography isn’t a strong suit?” asked Alfric.

“No,” Isra replied, lips tight.

“I always took to it,” said Alfric. “Let me know if you have any questions.”

“Mmm,” Isra replied.

Tarchwood Ectads was closed, a sign on the front informed them, and there was no additional information on when they would be open again.

“Well that’s unpleasant,” said Alfric.

“The stones,” said Isra.

“Huh?” asked Alfric. He looked where she was looking, to a stretch of shore without any houses or businesses on it. It was a rocky beach, one covered in smooth stones with barely any sand to speak of. The stones were black, grey, green, and blue, mostly subdued tones but with a few standouts. “The stones?” asked Alfric.

Isra went forward, hopping over a barrier, then stooped to look at the stones up close.

“I’ve never seen such stones,” said Isra. Her breath caught slightly as she picked up a particularly green one.

“Oh?” asked Alfric. He stood next to her, feeling awkward.

“Do you think I can take them?” asked Isra, looking up at him.

“The stones?” asked Alfric. “But … why?”

Isra didn’t reply, and instead began putting the rocks into her pockets, moving quickly, as though someone was going to come along and stop her. Alfric, having nothing better to do, stood by. She seemed to be pulling up the ones with the brightest colors, but every so often something dark and shiny would catch her eye instead. He half-wondered whether he should be helping her, but he still didn’t quite understand what she was doing or why. Eventually, she slowed down, then finally stopped. By Alfric’s estimation, she’d added almost thirty pounds of rocks to her pack.

“Are you going to tell me what that was about?” asked Alfric. He glanced back toward Tarchwood Ectads, whose errant owner still hadn’t returned.

“Why dungeoneering?” asked Isra. “You said it was what you’ve wanted to do since you were a child.”

“Oh,” said Alfric. “Well … my mother and father were both dungeoneers, along with cousins, aunts and uncles, it was a family thing.” This wasn’t the half of it. “But for me, it was the idea that there were these other worlds out there, that there were riches and power to be had through them, things that were impossible to get any other way. It fired up my imagination, I think, and it was the first thing I can remember wanting to know absolutely everything about. And then, with everything that I learned, I wanted to learn more. Learning led to training, and training led to planning, and I loved all of it.” He shrugged.

“Mmm,” said Isra.

“Why do you ask?” asked Alfric. “And what was with the rocks?”

“I thought it might be the same for us,” said Isra. “It’s not.”

“You … like rocks?” asked Alfric.

“No,” replied Isra. “I’m a collector.”

“Of what?” asked Alfric.

Isra shrugged. “Everything. Small treasures. Special stones, odd sticks, plants.” She frowned at him. “It’s not so strange.”

“No,” said Alfric. “No, of course not, I didn’t mean to judge, I just … I never really would have expected it of you.”

“You don’t know me,” said Isra.

“I’d like to,” said Alfric. “If we’re going to be a party, we’ll be spending time together, working together, and a solid relationship is the foundation of a strong team.”

Isra seemed as though she had some choice words to reply with, but she looked past him instead. “The ectad shop is open,” she said.

And whatever else they might have learned about each other, it would have to wait.

Chapter 13 - The Nature of Travel

When Isra woke up, it took her a moment to realize where she was. It was her second time staying at an inn, her second time in any house that wasn’t her own, really, and it was strange just how disorienting it was. Isra had camped out in the woods plenty of times, and she had never felt the sheer sense of dislocation that she experienced that morning in their small room in the Hare’s Rump inn. Gradually though, she came to herself, and listened to the birds chirping outside the window. They were tame creatures, scavengers of the town, but pleasant all the same, in the way of birds.

Alfric was still sleeping at first light, but he stirred as soon as Isra began moving. They had decided to share a room, which had taken a little negotiation, in part because they were so unsure of each other. Isra had worried, briefly, about sharing a room with a man, but Alfric hadn’t had so much as a brief moment of physical contact with her. She had wondered, as she was about to drift off to sleep, whether she needed to be worried.

In the morning light, things were more clear. Isra had woken in the middle of the night and seen Alfric sitting up straight, but she’d fallen back asleep, and wondered whether she had dreamed it. He hadn’t crossed to her side of the room. The dagger she’d kept beneath her pillow hadn’t needed to be drawn.

“Alright,” said Alfric as he stretched out. He went to look out the window and judge the time of day. “Early start then?”

“Yes,” replied Isra. “Breakfast on the road.”

Alfric frowned at that, but said nothing, and Isra decided not to inquire. She wondered whether he hadn’t brought his own food with, but if he hadn’t, then he was in luck, because she’d brought plenty to share. It was better not to inquire, given that there were so many mistakes she might inadvertently make. Even offering him food was a risk, since it might mark her as weird in some unexpected way. Her father hadn’t had enough time to teach her all the ways to avoid missteps. Silence was the easiest path, she’d found.

“I think the others will be happy with the results of the sale,” said Alfric as they took their first steps away from Tarchwood. “Even if it’s quite a bit less than I thought. Still a windfall.” He glanced at the bow on her back, but said nothing about it. She looked at his pack, which had the large book, now with many of its pages filled with rocks. He’d found that odd, but she didn’t care. “It’ll make it easier to convince the holdouts that it makes sense to do more dungeons.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. She now knew Alfric better than the others, if only by virtue of the scant conversation she’d had with him during the twelve miles of walking they’d done thus far. “It’s easy money.”

“There’s some risk,” Alfric admitted. “It’s easy money until it isn’t. One bad dungeon and everyone winds up dead.”

“Does that happen?” asked Isra. She kept her voice level, but the thought of it made her heart beat a bit faster. There could be anything in the dungeons, that was part of the allure, as she understood it, and if you found something that you couldn’t fight, or worse, that you couldn’t run from … well, she could understand how a person could die. The creatures there were so wrong, so disordered.

“Every now and then,” said Alfric. “You hear stories. Usually it’s younger groups that go places that are too tough for them. Sometimes there’s an uproar, and people try to put a stop to it. The League does help stop the worst of it, but they’re a bit of a trivial roadblock. Between the entads and the ectads, there’s too much profit to be had. We made out well in terms of rings, but the things we sold will almost immediately turn into profit for the people we sold them to, to the tune of twenty to thirty percent. They’d no more shut down the dungeons than they would shut down the mines or stop the foresters from chopping trees or — well, I hope you get the point.”

“There’s nothing from the dungeons that people need to live,” said Isra. She was thinking of her own trade, hunting. If she was forced to stop, it would mean less meat in the village, and people did need meat to live.

“Well, yes and no,” said Alfric. “Strictly speaking, I suppose you’re right, but those pipes we took from the dungeon will be used to make waterstones, and without those, people would be reduced to drinking well water, or river water.”

“I drink water from the stream,” said Isra.

“Oh, well,” said Alfric. “Is that … safe?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” asked Isra. She was getting that tight feeling, like she’d once again said something wrong.

“Disease, I thought,” said Alfric.

“In the cities, maybe,” Isra replied. “So long as people follow the rituals, there should be no problem.”

“The rituals?” asked Alfric.

“For waste,” Isra replied.

“Oh,” said Alfric, in a way that suggested he didn’t know the rituals for waste, or thought her odd for mentioning it.

They walked in silence for a bit. That was how it went with Alfric, and seemed to be how he preferred to spend their time together, silence punctuated by verbalizations. They were silences that she didn’t particularly like, because it seemed as though he was carrying on the conversation in his head, looking for ways to keep it going, which made her feel uneasy.

The silence was interrupted though, as a rustling of grass came from the grazing field beside them. By the time a ball of black fur leapt up over the stone wall, Alfric had his sword drawn and Isra’s dagger was in her hand.

It had to turn a bit to find them, but when it did, the dog started barking its head off.

“Back!” shouted Alfric, brandishing his sword. He lowered the point of it, aiming it at the dog, which was barking ferociously and showing teeth.

Isra slipped her dagger back into its sheath and stepped forward. “That’s not how you handle a dog,” she said. She moved to step in front of Alfric, between him and the dog, while the dog continued his barking. “Stop,” she said, using her best commanding voice.

The dog stopped immediately, closing his mouth and straightening up somewhat to look at her.

“Sit,” she said.

The dog sat on his haunches, now fully at attention. Isra got closer and stooped down, patting him softly on the head, then feeling around his neck for a collar, finding none. She frowned slightly, then stood back.

“You’re not a wild dog,” she said to the dog. “Someone should have put a collar on you. Go back to your owner.”

Without another sound, the dog hopped back over the stone wall and could be heard rustling through the grass, away from them. Isra turned to Alfric with a smile, but he was staring at her, and her smile fell.

“What?” she asked.

“How did you do that?” he asked.

“Have you never had a dog?” she asked. “They must be less common in the city.”

“That is not how you handle a dog,” said Alfric. “How did you — how did he know what you were saying?”

“They’re very intelligent creatures,” Isra replied. “More than birds or cats.”

“Yes, but,” Alfric said. “You can’t just get a dog to stop by telling him to stop.”

“You can,” said Isra, feeling confused. “I did. If you haven’t been around dogs before — you just tell them and they listen. Say it like a command.” She started walking again. Seeing the dog had made her feel good, though she’d have been happier if she’d been able to return him to his owner. They were new, strange people walking by his pasture, he hadn’t meant anything by coming at them. Alfric’s questions, and further, his insistence that she’d done something wrong, rankled. People talked to dogs, she knew they did, it was something she’d seen a dozen times before. There was nothing that should have been confusing or strange about it. She found herself walking a little bit faster than strictly necessary, and the way that Alfric lengthened his stride to catch up made her feel even worse, like he was chasing her.

“Sorry,” he said, once they were walking side by side, still at an unsustainably fast pace.

Isra slowed. “It’s how you deal with dogs,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll have to trust you on that.”

There was more of the slightly uncomfortable silence between them, but it gave Isra a chance to think. She had grown up in the woods with her father, and never spent very much time with other children. She had always felt that her father had taught her well, but when it came to other people, she was on uneven ground. Her father had friends, especially later in her life, but they were perhaps not the best to learn social matters from. It had never been clear to Isra just what her father had done back east, but clearly he’d been educated, and he’d raised her to know much about the world. And still, she felt like there were simple things she knew nothing about. Over the past year, she had discovered the Pucklechurch library, where books could be borrowed freely, and she’d been making full use of them, enjoying the strange people and their strange customs. It gave her some insight into the people of Pucklechurch, she thought.

She had also learned, through experience, which things were safe to talk about and which needed to be avoided. Animals were a sticking point, and the merchants were stingy, always ready to argue about whether her meat was good or what kind of furs she had, even when it was perfectly obvious. There was an herbalist that sold various tinctures and dried roots, and Isra steered clear of her after they’d had a rather heated altercation. The tinctures and roots did next to nothing, and Isra couldn’t understand why people were convinced by words when their own senses should have told them otherwise. She had learned that people had their rituals and their mysterious ways, and you weren’t supposed to question them. She hadn’t figured out why the herbalist sold these things, or why everyone seemed to accept it, but she’d come to accept it as one of those subjects which would make things awkward if it was brought up, even in the most gentle of ways.

“Are all animals like that?” asked Alfric.

“Like what?” asked Isra.

“You said that dogs were smart,” he said. “But do they all … listen to you?”

Isra thought about that. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. She didn’t know what he meant, but it was also a safe answer, one that wouldn’t invite ridicule.

“If you,” began Alfric, hesitating. “If you told the birds to get off your roof, would they listen to you?”

“Why would I ask them to do that?” asked Isra.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “It was just an example.”

“Part of the reason I get along with the birds is that I don’t tell them what to do,” said Isra.

Alfric fell silent again, and Isra wondered whether it was him that wasn’t making sense, or her. He came from some enormous city to the north, and from what she knew of enormous cities, they had far less in the way of both plants and animals. Tame plants and tame animals. As of the day before, the largest city that Isra had been to was Tarchwood, which was nearly ten times the size of Pucklechurch, but still a small place in comparison with Dondrian. Isra’s father had come from a city to the east, but hadn’t spoken of it all that much, especially not as Isra got older. She got the sense it was a place that he wanted to forget, even as he still celebrated some elements of its culture. Few birds in the city though, few animals. She wondered how they got along.

“When a woman goes off into the wilderness and has a child alone,” said Alfric. He was speaking slowly and deliberately. “If the child is then kept from other people for several years, it gains a connection to nature.”

“My mother didn’t have a child alone,” said Isra.

“Well, yes,” said Alfric. “I was listening when you said that yesterday. But … do you think that you might be a druid?”

“No,” said Isra. She paused, wondering whether the question would get her one of those pitying or befuddled looks that people occasionally gave her. “What’s a druid?”

“I’m not sure I should say anything, because I would probably just embarrass myself,” said Alfric. “But from what I know, they have command of plants and animals, along with some sense of the natural landscape.”

Isra frowned. That didn’t sound like her. “And you think I’m one of those, because of the dog?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “But if you are a druid, or you have that power, then … well, that would be surprising, but also important.”

“Would it?” asked Isra. “Why?” So far, Alfric had not laughed at her for her ignorance or strangeness. He hadn’t scoffed or narrowed his eyes in frustration. That was a strong point in his favor.

“You would be able to use it,” said Alfric. “Some of the things in the dungeons, surely they count as plants or animals, don’t they? If it’s a skill you have, it’s a fairly rare one. You could meet other druids, learn from them —”

“And if I like my life as it is?” asked Isra.

Alfric faltered. “And … do you?”

“I do,” replied Isra, with more conviction than she felt. There were rather a lot of rings stored away that formed the basis of an unexamined plan. She hadn’t quite decided what the plan was, only that it needed money. East, to Tarbin, where her family was, or perhaps somewhere else, where she could start fresh. A place where she wouldn’t feel compelled to hide from people who came near her house.

“Then I don’t want to dissuade you. But why are you going into the dungeons with us?” asked Alfric.

Isra hesitated. “It’s good pay for not much work,” she said. “Like you said.”

The entire year following her father’s death had been a blur. She wasn’t entirely sure how, at thirteen, she had survived it. Her father had friends, and they checked on her from time to time, but none of them had tried to take her in, and she hadn’t made the request. Instead, she hunted as she’d been taught to, foraged the verdant forests, and narrowly made it through the winter with the foodstuffs she had put up with her father. Her father had died in late summer, before they could harvest the autumnal bounty, but the work they’d done in spring and summer had been with the anticipation of feeding two mouths rather than one. It had been enough. That had been the time of the horrendous theft, but the thief had left the food, at least, alone.

In the four years after that, Isra found a rhythm to her days, and to the seasons. She went hunting and foraging, did skinning and tanning, made repairs to the house, went into the market every three days like clockwork, and stored away the rings she made. There were always things to do. When she was fifteen, she made a stone fishing weir across one of the local rivers and for that entire summer, smoked and sold whatever she couldn’t eat. When she was sixteen, she took a bounty on a black bear that had been rooting around Pucklechurch and brought it across the hex boundary, admonishing it to be good. At seventeen, she’d taken up collecting in a more serious manner, spending much of her free time looking for specific stones and plants, putting the former up on the shelves, and pressing the latter in her books.

Seventeen had also been the year that Isra had finally bought a freezer, which had changed things more than she’d expected it to. Being able to keep large quantities of meat in her house meant that she was able to make more on market days, and also meant that she was able to do more with larger game. She had always found hunting to be fairly easy, at least in comparison to how much puffery there was about it from other people, and in no time, the freezer was full, and then she was bringing so much meat to market that she couldn’t sell it all.

And through the rhythms of the days and the longer rhythms of the seasons, Isra was mostly happy. When she turned eighteen and celebrated her birthday alone, she didn’t feel sad that the celebration was happening without anyone to share it. What she felt instead was a sense that her life might continue on forever like this, each year the same as the last, and that brought a definite dissatisfaction. Something was missing, but she hadn’t been able to put her finger on what. She had started saving up the money after that, without knowing where it would eventually go.

“A party tends to be more than just a money-making venture,” said Alfric. “It’s inevitable, with the channel, with how much time you spend together … there’s more than just the individual abilities of those involved and their ability to clear a dungeon, or whatever they’ve come together to do.”

“Friends,” said Isra.

“Well, possibly,” said Alfric. “But if not friends, then at least something like family to each other. The channel is a part of it. Being able to speak to each other at will, even when you’re some distance from each other means that the people you speak to most often are the ones in your party.”

“You can’t leave family,” said Isra.

“Of course you can,” said Alfric. “But I agree, the bonds of a party, especially a short term one like we have now, are far easier to break.”

“And this is what you want?” asked Isra. “This is what you came to Pucklechurch to create?”

“No,” said Alfric. “I came to find a team, and it seems that I’ll be more lucky than I thought I’d be, especially if you really are, somehow, a druid. But a stable party inevitably becomes something more. Dungeoneering runs in my blood, as I think I’ve mentioned, and growing up the members of my parents’ parties were like aunts and uncles to me.”

“They didn’t adventure together, your parents?” asked Isra.

“No,” said Alfric. “With their skills, they would have been doubling up on a role. It was better for them to each have their own party.”

Isra wondered what that role was, but Alfric didn’t offer it, and she had some sense that his thoughts had escaped him.

Isra hadn’t known her mother, and her father never spoke much of the old days. They had both been from Tarbin though, had escaped, in her father’s words, and back there, they had been people of some means and education, which Isra had been slow to understand as she got older. Isra’s father had trained her as she got older, and sometimes it felt like that was the only way for them to relate to each other. Her father had been somewhat short on affection, at least in comparison to what she saw from some of the children in Pucklechurch.

Yet even as she got older, Isra hadn’t felt a longing for other children or a keen loneliness that she sometimes read of people having in stories. A party was, in some sense, unwelcome, as was the channel, having people able to speak into her head at their whim. She enjoyed being solitary, and whatever it was she found disagreeable about living her life as she had over the last five years, she was fairly sure that joining a party was not the cure. That was especially so when the party had these particular four other people in it. Hannah spoke too much and Mizuki had the wrong kind of energy, and while Verity had a grace and poise that Isra could appreciate, there was something alien about her, perhaps because she, like Alfric, was from the city.

Isra did like Alfric though, or at least had come to appreciate the way that he operated. He was very direct and straightforward. He hadn’t made any comments on her appearance, nor asked about her headscarf, and he exuded a competence and professionalism that the others did not. With Alfric, there was little in the way of frippery or filler. He hadn’t lied to her about obvious things, in the way that people sometimes did.

There was wildlife all around them as they walked, especially as the farmland became less prominent. Alfric, like most people, pretended not to see or feel it. A family of long-legged skinks hid beneath a hedge, a stub-necked squirrel raced up a tree, and a flock of night birds sat motionless on a tree, waiting for the sun to fall. Isra looked at the plants too, trying to see if there was anything they didn’t have in Pucklechurch. Most of the trees were the usual mix of ash, larch, birch, and aspens, but there were a small handful of the migrant trees that moved a foot a day, and some of the wild puckleberries and burstberries were of different varieties. Isra thought about what Alfric had said, about druids being able to see the world. But if she were a druid, then what did he see when he looked around him?

“Do you want to talk about the fact that you might be a druid?” asked Alfric, several miles later.

“You said that it happened only when a woman birthed a child alone in the woods,” said Isra. “My father was with us.”

“Yes, I was thinking about that,” said Alfric. “But I don’t know enough to know whether that’s only the typical case, or if there might not be some other ways for it to happen. We’d have to find someone knowledgeable to discuss it with. Perhaps if there’s only a single parent, that’s enough.”

“Perhaps,” said Isra. The exact methods to produce a druid did not interest her at all. “You think I should find another druid.”

“I do,” said Alfric. “They’re the subject matter experts. They would be able to tell if you really were a druid, or if you might be something else, and they could give you some insights into how to increase your power. Though …”

“Yes?” asked Isra.

“Druids aren’t usually,” he paused. “Hunters.”

“No?” asked Isra.

“They’re typically vegetarians, I think,” said Alfric. “I’m not sure why. Of all the people with some kind of aetheric talent, druids are probably the ones I know the least about. For obvious reasons, they’re rare within the city. I don’t know how far you’d have to be from Dondrian to be able to be a mile away from another person, which I think I read was the minimum.”

It sounded horrible to Isra. She often spent some time in Pucklechurch on market days once she was done selling what she had, either visiting the temple to make her prayers, or the library for a fresh book, or the stores to pick up things she couldn’t make herself, especially anything metal. Even that small amount of people sometimes felt suffocating by the time the day was through. Once, Isra had come into town during one of the large regional celebrations and been immediately overwhelmed by the crowds of people from who-knew-where. She’d lasted thirty minutes before stalking back off into the woods.

That was what she imagined Dondrian being, all of the time, only bigger, more crowded, noisier, and with buildings that towered above her like large cliffs.

“Did you enjoy living in the city?” asked Isra, after another of their periodic bouts of silence. They had started up the hill at the hex border, having to go through a long, winding path to get to the inconvenient edge.

“It’s faster there,” said Alfric. “More … ordered. There are aspects of it I miss already, and others that I wouldn’t be sad to never see again. Sometimes in the city it feels like everything is constantly calling for your attention, and at the same time, it feels like everyone is also ignoring you.” They crossed another few paces. “But I can see already that there’s less of the rich variety you get in the city. Even Tarchwood had only three stores of note for adventurers. In Dondrian, there are entad emporiums and a whole quarter of the city devoted to ectads. There are stores that specialize in not just henlings, but specific kinds of henlings, with enormous amounts of selection and choice. I’d always known how spoiled for choice we were, but I’m not sure that it really set in until yesterday.”

“Yesterday you said that Dondrian had dangerous dungeons,” said Isra. “Too dangerous for people to go into.”

“Yes, of course,” said Alfric, nodding. “Too much magic floating around means the dungeons are supercharged.”

“Then where do these things come from?” asked Isra. “How are these warehouses filled?”

“Oh,” said Alfric. “Well, from people like us, or if not quite like us, then close. Teams go out into the world and engage in dungeoneering, clearing as many as they can before injuries or apathy catch up with them, and the entads, ectads, henlings, and other things eventually flow back toward Dondrian, where the people are, or a smaller city, like Plenarch. Some of what we sold yesterday will be kept as stock in those stores, but quite a bit of it will flow through portals and down leylines until it makes its way to one of those cities.”

Isra thought that was an interesting view of the world, but had no idea whether or not it actually made sense. She simply didn’t know enough about the wider world. She didn’t think she particularly liked the viewpoint though, not if it meant that places like Pucklechurch existed partly to funnel things to a big city somewhere very far away. Perhaps that was what it looked like to the citizens of Dondrian, but Isra brought meat and furs to the people of Pucklechurch, and none of that was sold on to someone far away. Was it? Isra supposed that she didn’t actually know.

“Anyhow,” said Alfric. “One of the big benefits of going into the dungeons is that we get the best pick of what’s there, and all it costs is our labor and the risk we’re taking, which isn’t actually all that high. The bow you have would probably have fetched more than all the rest combined at auction. If we can convince the others that it’s worth it to do more, we’ll be practically dripping in entads by the end of it.”

“The end of it?” asked Isra.

“Well, you know,” said Alfric. “People slow down, get old, want to start families.” He shrugged. “I don’t expect we’ll stay together forever, especially not as things are now, but five or ten years is realistic if we can make it through the next month or two. And if it crumbles, I’ll have bona fides and equipment that will help me find a more … professional party.”

“Your parents still do this though,” said Isra.

“Yes, they do,” he said. “But they don’t have the same hunger for it that I do, almost no one their age does. Mom does ten dungeons a year, if that, though they’re longer, more dangerous ones. Dad aims for fifteen and always ends up doing less.” He shrugged. “But I expect when I’m their age, I’ll be doing the same. They say once you hit fifty, your career as a dungeoneer can be considered over, and both my parents are approaching that.”

“Eventually you run out of dungeons,” said Isra.

“Well, yes, that too,” said Alfric. “Right now, we’re looking at the low-hanging fruit, the simple ones like the Pucklechurch dungeon that shouldn’t cause problems. But the more we do, the more we’ll end up ranging, and there’s travel times to consider until you get a travel entad, or can purchase one. Even then, it’s pretty rare to be able to cut out travel times completely. Ideally you’re able to chart a path that allows a dungeon a day or sometimes, two, but that can only last for a limited amount of time, because there aren’t that many hexes in the world, and a lot of them are either impossible to get to or too dangerous to attempt.”

That Alfric seemed to like talking about dungeons seemed like an understatement, but Isra found herself not minding too much. Her least favorite part of talking with others was the pleasantries that they felt the need to lob back and forth at every opportunity. It had never been like that with her father: if there was nothing to say, they would stay silent. When things needed to be communicated, especially from someone who knew a lot to someone who didn’t, conversation felt a lot more pleasant, at least to Isra.

“Your parents were both dungeoneers,” said Isra. “Why aren’t you better equipped?”

“Ah,” said Alfric. He faltered. “Two reasons. The first is that my parents didn’t want me to depend too heavily on their support. The boots and the sword were a gift, as was the shield and my armor, but they didn’t offer more than that, and I think that if I’d tried to press them on it, they’d have given me a lecture far before they’d given me any of their more valuable entads. I was given money, but only just enough to settle myself. I do sorely need something for travel though, especially so that the team can be called in. The second reason is that the feeling of going into a dungeon and gathering new gear for yourself is, to them, something that makes you appreciate what you’ve earned. Once I get a good suit of armor for myself, something that resizes to me, at the very least, I’ll know that it was gained through the sweat of my brow. The same goes for a travel entad, and a storage entad if we find something better than the book, and entads that work with our own particular talents.”

“You think your parents were right,” said Isra.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “Absolutely. They were good parents, with many valuable lessons. Our family has a fair amount of prominence in Dondrian, and there’s a good reason for that. Honesty, disclosure, hard work, self-reliance, duty to others … I do my best to live by those values. Part of that means making my own way and not strolling into my first dungeon dressed in half the family armory.”

They saved their breath as they went up the hill, taking the path as it came. At a certain point they had to climb a set of stone steps. The path would have been impossible for a cart and the lizard that would pull it, and Isra wondered how much time it would add on the journey to and from Tarchwood to go through a pass in the hills somewhere.

They took a break at the top of the hills, by the markers for the hex boundary. Isra drank from her waterskin, and Alfric from his. Their packs were lighter, but the hill had been higher, and quite a bit steeper. Alfric still had the storage book, and Isra felt bad that he was having to carry it, but he did so without complaint.

“Sorry for not showing trust,” she said.

“No, it’s fine,” Alfric replied. “I understand. We don’t know each other, and it’s a lot of rings. I can’t say I’d have done the same, but I don’t fault you for it. Sorry if it was a waste of your time.”

Isra shrugged. “It’s further than I’ve ever been from home.” She had gathered quite a few rocks from that beach as well, and in the course of their wandering, had seen many more things that she would like to bring home with her. She had never quite realized how different it could be such a short way from Pucklechurch.

“I’m sorry if I offended you, speaking about druids like that,” said Alfric. “I do think you have a gift, but … I could have phrased it better.”

Isra shrugged. “I don’t know if you’re right.”

“I don’t either,” said Alfric. “But if you need help, or want me to find a druid for you to speak to, I’ll do what I can. Part of being members of a party together means you support each other.”

Isra felt a bit of warmth at hearing those words. From Alfric, she felt like she could trust them. “And you?” she asked. “Do you need support?”

“I need for us to do more dungeons,” said Alfric. “Anything that helps make that happen, I’ll consider support.”

“Deal,” said Isra, nodding. She packed her water away and went to the gate, continuing on home.

Chapter 15 - Good Next Steps, I Suppose

“How is she?” asked Alfric once Hannah came back downstairs.

“Nevermind that,” said Mizuki. “Look at this cat.”

Sitting on the kitchen counter like a proper gentleman was Tabbins, an enormous black cat with a white belly and white paws that looked a little like mittens. He was nominally Mizuki’s cat, though he spent most of his time outside, and Mizuki only ended up feeding him once a day. He caught his other meals, usually mice, but occasionally a rat or a bunny, and he sometimes left pieces of them outside the door for Mizuki to find. On balance, this felt like it was better than having mice in the house, but Mizuki wasn’t always so sanguine about their relationship.

“Look at him!” said Mizuki.

“Yes?” asked Hannah. “You have a cat?”

“Kind of,” said Mizuki. “I would say it’s more like there’s a cat who uses the home from time to time. More in the winter than the summer, and sometimes I don’t see him for days.” She stroked his head, and he tilted it back, closing his eyes. “Look at him though! Isra is a woods witch, she told him to jump up, and he did it, just like magic.”

“It is literally magic,” said Alfric.

“This cat has not listened to a single solitary thing that anyone has ever said,” Mizuki beamed, as though she was proud of that fact. “But he listened to Isra.”

“Isra might be a druid,” said Alfric.

“Woods witch,” said Mizuki. That was the term she’d grown up with. ‘Druid’ didn’t sound right to her ears. It was like something having to deal with ‘dru’, whatever that was. “Which is neat, but not really something that needed to be kept from us, I wouldn’t think.”

“It came up on our walk,” said Isra, who was looking at the cat. “I’m not certain. Most cats don’t listen to me though.”

“Most cats don’t listen to anyone,” said Mizuki. “But if you can get a cat to listen to you ten percent of the time, then you’re a woods witch for sure.”

“You’re all saying that what I can do is … not the same sort of thing you can do,” said Isra. “You’re saying that it’s not … natural?”

“Well, if it’s what you are,” said Hannah. “And I won’t say that it is what you are, not until I’ve seen some better evidence. Some might say it’s the most natural thing you can be. It’s a power, certainly, but bein’ a druid is almost like bein’ a cleric, though not quite so much, and without the power of a miracle.” She didn’t seem entirely sure about that.

“I’m not sure that I am a druid,” said Isra. The frown hadn’t left her face since Verity had gone upstairs. “I don’t feel like a druid.”

“You just feel like yourself,” Hannah nodded. “It’s common for druids, or so I’ve heard, since most of ‘em get raised in the woods, away from others, and all the talkin’ to animals and finding forage without lookin’ is no more an extra power to them than havin’ a second arm is to me.” She paused. “Can you find forage?”

“I forage,” said Isra, crossing her arms. “When you say that I find it without looking —” she shook her head. “I don’t think I understand what being a druid is. Alfric didn’t explain it well.”

If that was a slight, Alfric didn’t react to it.

“So,” said Hannah, always happy to be an authority. “As part of the seminary, we did some comparative studies, lookin’ into other gods and other things that are like gods. Other clerics, but also alienists and druids. Formally, a druid is someone who, first off, is born some five miles away from anyone else aside from their mother, and doesn’t come within five miles of anyone else for the first three years of their life.”

“Which isn’t the case for Isra,” said Alfric. “She’s insistent — and I believe her — that her mother died in childbirth and her father raised her alone.”

“Well,” said Hannah. “That’s a mystery for later then, but it might just be a corner case. Anyhow, a druid becomes attuned to nature, far more than you or I, and has a sixth sense for all kinds of things, which eventually blossoms into bein’ able to influence the natural world.” She snapped her fingers. “Isra, what’s the weather going to be like tomorrow?”

Isra stared at her. “Cloudy in the morning, then clear around lunch, and some light rain in the evening. You’re saying that you don’t know any of that?”

“Nope!” said Hannah, beaming. “You probably know all kinds of things that someone like myself or Alfric or even Mizuki doesn’t know, and you know them just by knowin’ them, without havin’ the faintest clue how you know. More likely than not, you never even thought about it, it just felt natural.”

“According to the census, she’s a ranger,” said Alfric.

“Och, yes, the all-knowin’ census,” said Hannah with a sigh.

“I was just offering it,” said Alfric. “And I had said that I would help to track down a druid for Isra to speak with, so we could get some confirmation one way or another, and she could work on her abilities.”

“Good next steps, I suppose,” said Hannah. “And it’ll be vital in the dungeons.”

“It will?” asked Isra.

“Oh certainly,” said Hannah. “The dungeons have all kinds of beasts and plants in them, and if you can hone your skills a bit more, you’ll be able to tell which of them are any good. All that talk of unique books in the dungeons? Well, what about unique plants? Tomatoes are famously a dungeon plant.”

“They are?” asked Mizuki.

“They’re thought to be,” said Alfric. He sounded skeptical. “And it’s illegal to bring anything that can replicate out of a dungeon unless it’s very securely contained. Illegal, and also a bad idea.”

“We’ve got the book, don’t we?” asked Hannah. “Shouldn’t be too hard to set up a grow box, should it? Not that we’ll get the next tomato, but it’s somethin’ to keep an eye out for.” She turned to Isra. “Meat and skins are the other big things. Normally you’d have no idea what any of the beasts parts could be used for, but that’s somethin’ a druid might know, if the skill is honed.”

Isra looked between Alfric and Hannah. “The skill is … about money?”

“No,” said Mizuki. “A woods witch is about helping people. That’s her main job, or, I guess, role, since usually she gets paid in goodwill or being loved. Pucklechurch had a woods witch back when my grandpa moved into town, and she helped him get settled and clear this land.”

“How?” asked Isra. She was frowning. “I wouldn’t be able to do that.”

“She told the trees to move,” said Mizuki.

“And they listened?” asked Isra.

“It took a long time, but yes,” said Mizuki. “You’ve got to be pretty patient with trees, he said. Over a couple of months though, they started ambling out of the way.”

“But why wouldn’t he just cut them down?” asked Hannah. “There’s lots of wood used in this house.”

“Grandpa had a cart,” said Mizuki. “It was a magical one. He had filled it with timbers, stones, and tiles from Kiromo, and this place was meant to be a piece of his homeland, which I guess it did end up being, until he moved back. As for why he wouldn’t cut the trees, that’s an old Kiromo superstition. If you start your foundation with the death of trees, they’ll haunt your house.”

They were all looking at her.

“It’s true,” she said. “Or, it’s not true that you’ll get ghost trees, but it’s true that it’s a superstition.”

“But what would a ghost tree even be?” asked Hannah.

“Well, ghosts live in the elsewhere and then appear for brief moments, right?” asked Mizuki. “So I guess you’d be walking through your house in the middle of the night, and the ghost tree would be real and solid for half a second, just long enough that you run smack into it.”

“You’ve got some peculiar notions on ghosts,” said Hannah. “If you ever have a real ghost, I have some trainin’ in the matter, though I imagine we’d get Lemmel before lettin’ me have a go at it myself.”

“Anyway,” said Mizuki. “The woods witch died some three decades back, and Pucklechurch hasn’t had another since. We’ve been borrowing one from Liberfell, when we have need, I think.”

“Which is where?” asked Isra.

“Two hexes southwest,” said Alfric. “It’s the size of Tarchwood, maybe a touch larger.”

“We can send a letter out, if you’d like,” said Mizuki. “We have a cartier servicing Pucklechurch, and you’d get a response back in, oh, two or three days? Or I could talk with some guildmates I have there.”

Isra nodded. “And she would help me understand?”

“Better than we can, that’s for sure,” said Mizuki. “Though I’m sure that Alfric and Hannah both consider themselves to be experts.”

“I don’t,” said Alfric, holding up a hand. “And I already said as much.”

“I did have a class on druids in seminary,” said Hannah. She turned to Isra. “Though no, I wouldn’t call myself an expert, even if I probably know as much as anyone here.”

“You’re saying I’ll be able to speak with trees,” said Isra, looking at Mizuki.

“Oh, woods witches are quite useful,” said Mizuki. “Especially the most powerful ones. When the woods witch comes to town she tells all the weeds in the fields to die, she tells the birds to stop poaching seeds, she tells the insects to bugger off, all kinds of things, then goes on her way. They naturally stop listening to her instructions after a bit, but it’s always a more pleasant week or two.”

“She tells the weeds … to die?” asked Isra, frowning.

“Pretty sure she does, yeah,” said Mizuki. “Oh, and druids have some weather control, so it’s always a nice balmy set of days when she’s in town, and then usually rain afterward to make sure the crops get their water.”

Isra looked at the three of them. “You’re saying that you have no control over what the weather does?”

Mizuki laughed. “No, none at all. Wow. I wonder what else you thought was completely normal?”

“Mmm,” said Isra. She stopped leaning against the counter and straightened out. “I think I’ll be going.”

“Well I didn’t mean it like that,” said Mizuki, sitting up a bit. “I just — it’s interesting, isn’t it?”

“It’s not because of what you said,” Isra replied. “I’ve been on the road and need some rest. I need time to myself to think.”

“There’s a room upstairs if you want it,” said Mizuki.

“No thank you,” replied Isra.

“We should talk about the timeline for the next dungeon first,” said Alfric. “I’d like to do it before we have the channel, but obviously coordination after we have the channel will be easier.”

“I can move at your schedule,” said Isra. She moved toward the door. “I’ll be in town again tomorrow. I’ll come here around noon.” She looked to Alfric. “I’ll get the rocks then.”

She slipped out without saying more, and Mizuki just stared at the door. “Huh,” she said. “Hope we didn’t scare her off.”

“It’s probably just a shock,” said Hannah.

“So when are we going to the next dungeon, if that’s what we’re doing?” asked Mizuki.

Verity chose that moment to come into the kitchen, though it was anyone’s guess how long she’d been listening in. In Mizuki’s experience, sound carried fairly well up the stairs, though not into the bedrooms.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hello,” said Alfric.

“How do you feel about lying to my parents?” asked Verity.

“I do my best not to lie to people,” said Alfric. “Though a lie by omission … that, I would think, would be acceptable, if there wasn’t some compelling interest in disclosure.” He seemed to use that word a lot, ‘disclosure’.

“Then I want you to send mail back to them, as you said,” said Verity. “Tell them the truth, but paint it as best you can. Don’t tell them that I’m running off to become part of a low-level dungeoneering team. And … let me read it, before it’s sent.”

“I can do that,” nodded Alfric.

“I need a few days of rest and practice,” said Verity. “I think we were risking too much going into a dungeon without proper preparation. And yes, I’ll buy some pants somewhere.”

“Practice would be good,” nodded Alfric. “And Isra already took her share of the rings, so we can divvy up what we have now. I’ve already gotten what I was after in Tarchwood, to help round out my gear, but most of what I need are entads, which I’m not willing to pay the markup on.”

Hannah went to the bag of rings and began dividing them up, which didn’t take all that much time, since the denominations were fairly large. It was more money than Mizuki had ever seen in one place, but she did her best to swallow her shock at it. Mizuki had never really wanted for money growing up, but after her parents had left, there had been some lean years as she got used to living by herself and the expenses associated with that. Cooking all her own meals had definitely helped, as well as scavenging what she could from what remained of the slowly deteriorating gardens, but most of her money came from random bits of sorcery, whether that was chasing down odd jobs or trying to make something of value from converting cast offs. Every now and then, someone needed a tree cut down or a stump removed, and big, splashy magic was what that called for. Really, dungeoneering had been the obvious choice, but it required a party, and short of doing what Alfric had done and getting a candidate list from the censusmaster … well, that was decidedly not her kind of thing. Even approaching people about odd jobs wasn’t her kind of thing. It felt unfriendly.

When Mizuki slipped the rings onto her string, she felt awkward about the weight, and it really wasn’t the kind of money that she wanted to be carrying around with her. She was going to have to find a place in the house to keep it, but with another person living with her — well, she didn’t think that Verity was the type to steal, but it did pay to be a little bit worried about security. It was a lot of money, especially for Mizuki, who had almost nothing in the way of expenses.

“So what’s it going to be for the next dungeon?” asked Hannah. “Six options, ay?”

“I’ll ask around a bit,” said Alfric. “They seem equivalent to me though, all with towns so small they almost don’t deserve the name … if there is a distinction between them, it will be in terms of how far the dungeon is from the hex center, since the differences in terms of dungeon difficulty should be pretty small.”

“No,” said Hannah. “Southeast is a mana mine, northeast is a magical forest, those should be more difficult affairs.”

“They weren’t marked on my map,” said Alfric, frowning.

“They’re both small operations,” shrugged Hannah. “How many mage trees do there need to be to show up on one of your maps?”

Alfric pondered that for a moment. “I suppose I don’t know.”

“I’d think it would be a mild difference,” said Hannah. “But the Pucklechurch dungeon was harder than expected, and I doubt anyone wants a surprise like that.”

“Definitely not,” said Verity.

“I didn’t realize there was a mana mine so close,” said Mizuki. “You’d think we’d get more wizards in the region.”

“Nah,” said Hannah. “Wizards need the mana stones, but bein’ close to a mine does nothin’ for them. Besides, none of the processin’ is close by.”

“And the woods?” asked Alfric. “What variety are they?”

“Nothin’ major,” said Hannah. “Thought to be a dungeon escape, but they’re slow-growin’. Fractalwoods, I think they’re called, both the forest and the trees. So far as I know, there’s an outpost of scientist types there tryin’ to figure out somethin’ useful to do with them, but the town is so small that it’s mostly scientists.”

“Either of those might be valuable dungeons then,” said Alfric, rubbing his chin. “But best saved for later.”

“Fractalwoods are neat,” said Mizuki. “I went up there a few years back to see whether I could make anything of them, and came back with a souvenir, which is probably still around here somewhere.”

“But there was nothin’ to be made of them?” asked Hannah. “No aether manipulation or what have you to be done?”

“Oh, I was a time god there, which was neat,” said Mizuki. “But nothing that anyone would pay me for.”

“It’s not polite to compare yourself to a god,” said Hannah, scowling. “Least of all in front of a cleric.”

“Sorry,” said Mizuki, though she couldn’t tell whether that was honest offense or good-natured ribbing. Either way, the scowl left Hannah’s face quickly, replaced by a smile. “For a while I had a standing offer out to any artisans who wanted things rapidly aged, or wanted things cast forward in time, or for people who wanted themselves cast forward in time, but I never had any takers. If we went into a dungeon, would it have some of that flavor to it? Or some kind of space manipulation aspect?”

“Hard to say,” said Alfric. “It would be best if we could speak with another team who had gone in. There’s supposed to be a tradition of leaving notes for other dungeoneers, but there was nothing at the Pucklechurch dungeon, and I’m actually not sure where the local Adventurers’ League branch is, but especially out in an area like this, they’re essentially useless.”

“They’re in Liberfell too, same as the druid,” said Hannah.

“Well, that suggests a course of action,” said Alfric with a sigh. “We go southwest, tackle the dungeon there, then Isra and I, or whoever likes, can take a trip further to the southwest, and find an inn for the night there. I think we could have come back from Tarchwood the same day, but there’s an unfortunate hill at the hex boundary, and I didn’t want to push it. Better to get things done quickly, so I think we’ll push for that dungeon in short order.”

“Another, so soon though?” asked Verity.

“You said a few days,” said Alfric, frowning. “Best to make plans for it now.”

“When I said a few days, I was thinking … well, that it sounded like more time than I think it actually is. Why not wait for the week to finish on the party so we can have the channel?”

“We don’t need the channel,” said Alfric. “The channel doesn’t do anything for us when we’re all in a dungeon together. It’s only marginally better than just talking.”

“I think it might be more the idea that this is somethin’ we’re gettin’ ready for,” said Hannah. “So maybe we’ll plan on two days, but play it by ear, and see where we stand as far as trainin’ and equipment go. We got in some practice together yesterday, and we’ll do some more tomorrow, then have a day of true rest where we do nothin’ at all but eat and shop.”

“Sure,” said Alfric.

“Sounds good to me,” said Mizuki. “But obviously we’ll need Isra, especially if it’s going to mean another long trip for her.”

“Even with the stride boots I felt like I was at risk of falling behind her,” said Alfric.

“I’ll accept three days from now,” said Verity. “But we do need to spend some time practicing. Alfric, do you have time tomorrow? I’d like to see what pushing the limits on strength does.”

“I’ll need some time with Isra too,” said Mizuki. “I don’t know what kind of impact druids have on the aether, but hopefully there’ll be something to squeeze from it.” She reached over and stroked Tabbins, who was still up on the counter. “Maybe we can take Tabbins with us so she has someone to talk to.”

“Maybe,” said Alfric, who seemed like he was seriously starting to consider it. “At any rate, I’m quite hungry.” He looked at the stove, where the pot was bubbling. “Is the stew done?”

“Stew is a funny thing,” said Mizuki as she got a stack of bowls down from the counter. “It can be done, but the longer it has to meld, the better it tends to be. A stew is never truly done, in my opinion, because part of the process of stew is letting it sit for an hour or two so the herbs and the flavors can work themselves together and the sauce can develop a proper richness.” She sighed. “But yes, to answer the question, the stew is done.”

“Excellent,” said Alfric. He was first in line, and used the ladle to fill his bowl, then grabbed a spoon from the pile that Mizuki had set out and started eating without waiting for anyone.

“Did you not have breakfast this morning?” asked Mizuki. “Are you really crazy enough to walk twelve miles on an empty stomach?”

Alfric nodded, and continued to wolf down the stew, which was hot enough to make curls of steam in the cool air.

“What is this?” asked Verity as she ladled a bowl.

“Chunks of venison, sage, rosemary, onion, potato, sweet potato, tomato, parsnips, garlic, ginger, um, salt, white pepper, um …” Mizuki tapped her foot, trying to remember. “Rutabaga, turnip. I think that’s it. Maybe some spices I’m forgetting, possibly a root vegetable — carrot! There’s carrot too.”

“It’s great,” said Alfric. He was still eating, but had slowed down halfway into the bowl. Mizuki was gratified to see him going through it quickly. “Do you have training?”

“From my dad,” said Mizuki. “But training is probably giving him too much credit. He had a lot of ideas about what made for good food and tried to get me involved from a young age.” As was tradition in her house, not that she’d told the others, she took her own bowl last, and gently blew on it to make sure that it wouldn’t burn her. By the time she’d taken the first bite, Alfric was already finished.

“Is there enough for me to have another bowl?” he asked, looking somewhat guilty.

“Of course,” said Mizuki. “I made enough for all of us, Isra, and one other.”

“Who was the one more meant to be?” asked Alfric as he ladled up more for himself.

“It’s just good manners and good sense, if you have the ingredients,” said Mizuki. “Either it’s something to eat for dinner, or you can host someone unexpected.”

“This is good stuff, ay?” asked Hannah, having finished her bowl. She ate quickly too, Mizuki noticed. Once she was finished, she reached for the bread. “Do you have butter?” she asked.

“Of course,” nodded Mizuki, slipping off her chair and going to get the butter dish.

“Sorry that the strawberry bread doesn’t go better with the stew,” Hannah said. “Next time, we can work together to plan it out.”

“I think it’ll be fine,” said Mizuki. “What would go better with this stew?”

“Oh, just something in the same palate, ay?” asked Hannah. “Rosemary and ginger or sage and garlic, that sort of thing. Something to sop up the sauce.”

“Well when you put it that way, I feel like I’m missing out,” said Mizuki. “And shoot, I’m going to need to make dinner for tonight, but there’s almost nothing in the chiller.” She frowned. “Do you think that when Isra hunts, she just tells the animals to lay down and die?”

“Don’t make fun,” said Alfric.

“I’m legitimately curious,” said Mizuki. “And then maybe that’s just what she thinks hunting is like for everyone.”

“I doubt she’d be so handy with a bow if it were that easy for her,” said Verity. “And Alfric is right, you shouldn’t make fun.”

“She’s a weird one though, right?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, we can all agree with that, can’t we? Just blithely wandering through the world, especially at our age, thinking that everyone can control the weather and talk to cats and whatever else?”

“‘Our age’?” asked Alfric. “Aren’t you twenty-two?”

“You know what I mean,” said Mizuki. “And four years doesn’t make that much difference, does it?”

“I think we’re all weird in our own ways,” said Alfric.

“A bunch of misfits, you mean?” asked Mizuki.

“Well, when I said ‘we’ I meant everyone,” he replied. “I don’t think that the five of us are all that different from, um, normal people.”

“Certainly more mages though,” said Hannah. “Not that I’m a mage, or Verity really is either, or Isra, for that matter, but you take my meaning.”

“I’m a sorc, not a mage,” said Mizuki. “You know, mage is probably one of the least helpful words anyone has ever invented. It covers everything from alienists to chrononauts.”

“Chrononauts aren’t mages,” said Alfric.

“Well, yes, that’s what I’m saying,” said Mizuki. “With the sole exception of wizards, you can make an argument for any practitioner not being a mage, even sorcs.”

“Why are chrononauts not mages?” asked Verity, turning to him.

“It has nothing to do with the aether,” he said, shrugging.

“Everything extranormal is mediated by the aether,” said Hannah, as though she’d read that in a book somewhere, or possibly was regurgitating something from a lesson at her seminary.

“I’m pretty sure that’s not true for chrononauts,” said Alfric.

“Well, either way,” said Verity. “They have a magical ability to go back in time. Isn’t that where the term mage comes from? From magical ability?”

“Not sure if it does,” said Hannah. “Seems circular to me.”

“I’ve always found chrononauts a bit creepy,” said Mizuki. On seeing that no one was taking more stew, she had put the rest of it into a bowl, which was then put in the chiller. The pot was then promptly put into the sink, where she washed it. “Can you imagine someone knowing your future? Or if she remembered a conversation that you had no knowledge of?”

“They’ve saved cities from disasters countless times,” said Alfric.

“Probably no one would be allowed in the dungeons if the chrononauts weren’t there to prevent the worst of the worst from comin’ out,” said Hannah.

“Aren’t they limited to like, a day?” asked Mizuki as she washed the pot. “Wouldn’t that prevent them from getting here if something went seriously wrong?”

“Nah, they have travel entads,” said Hannah. “And besides, part of the role of the province censusmaster is to make sure, at the end of the day, that the population hasn’t dropped by a thousand. It’s an early warnin’ system. Then, if they need to, they call in the chronos, and they’ll call in some of the heavy hitters, the Pyros or the Knives.”

“Blegh,” said Verity.

“Blegh?” asked Mizuki.

“I just wish that when these kinds of things happened, we had something better,” said Verity. “The two main solutions are to burn something to death or to stab it to death. It seems so primitive, and not in a good way.”

“That’s a real oversimplification of what the Pyros and the Knives actually do,” said Alfric.

“Well, if you’re going to talk Inter politics, I’m out,” said Mizuki, holding up a hand. She’d finished with the dishes, including all the spoons and bowls.

“It’s not politics, it’s high-level civics,” said Alfric. “It’s stuff you should know, in case the worst happens. That goes double if you’re a dungeoneer.”

“I know it, I just don’t like talking about it,” said Mizuki. This wasn’t quite true, and she hoped that no one would actually test her on her knowledge. She knew them, in the sense that she had a general idea. If someone told her about the structure of the Interim, she was sure everything would sound very familiar. But it also didn’t seem very important, and it was trending in the direction of those kinds of conversations that people got heated about.

“But the worst doesn’t happen, does it?” asked Hannah. “When was the last time the Pyros or the Knives had to be deployed, ay?”

“Three years ago,” said Alfric. He seemed to have the answer at the ready. “Now, granted, that wasn’t a full burn, but they were deployed to contain some kind of rapidly-spreading vine.”

“When people talk about deployment, they’re talkin’ about miles of forest turned to ash or a desert made into glass,” said Hannah with a sigh. “They don’t mean the Pyros comin’ in and dealin’ with somethin’ that at most destroys a farm.”

“It was two farms,” said Alfric.

“Wait,” said Mizuki. “Two farms got destroyed three years ago and that’s the worst that the Pyros have done?”

“Historically, no,” said Alfric. “But you have to go back a hundred years to find anything substantially worse.”

“Lesser things, though?” asked Verity. “Slow escapes?”

“The fractalwoods are maybe seventy years old,” said Mizuki. “So, relatively recent.”

“But they’re not a risk,” said Alfric. “And I thought you weren’t going to stomach politics?”

“Well,” said Mizuki. “I’m just saying. Things do escape, and the Pyros don’t see fit to burn it all, do they?” She was betraying her ignorance, she knew, and she kind of hated it.

“It’s about impact,” said Hannah. “Half the creatures in the woods are ‘escapes’, deliberate or otherwise, and half of the plants too.”

“Because some of the things that ‘escape’ are tomatoes,” said Alfric. “There are all kinds of fruits and vegetables that have come from the dungeons, and beyond that, all kinds of new and better varieties of fruits we already eat. Inter wants that. They want mounts and pack animals. And while breedable animals are incredibly rare, there are a few notable examples of those too, things that can actually propagate.”

“Those being?” asked Mizuki. Here, at least, it seemed like the conversation had moved on from Inter politics, which she was grateful for.

“Cats and chickens, for one,” said Alfric.

“Bull,” said Mizuki, folding her arms. “I can accept that tomatoes originated in dungeons, but you can’t possibly be saying that fat ol’ Tabbins was, at some point, a dungeon monster.” She picked up Tabbins, who was on the floor, to make her point, and didn’t set him down until she’d made sure that everyone had looked at him.

“Not a monster, maybe,” said Alfric. “Occasionally a dungeon will have something that doesn’t show any interest in attacking you. Dungeon madness isn’t universal.”

“And you think cats are an example of that?” asked Mizuki, turning Tabbins around to peer into his eyes. “He’s not even magical.”

“A lot of monsters aren’t magical,” said Alfric. “Most of them, in fact. You can imagine a cat as a henling, right?”

“Crazy,” said Mizuki. She’d stooped down to pet Tabbins. “I could buy it though, I suppose.”

“There’s actually a theory that everythin’ originally came from a dungeon,” said Hannah. “That humans are from dungeons, released by those who came before, or having come up from the dungeons without needin’ to be opened.”

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “It would’ve had to have happened an incredibly long time ago. Humans have been around for ages. Sounds like feili propaganda to me.”

“Well,” said Hannah. “The feil are long-lived, so if it happened ages ago, maybe they would know.”

“I wonder if Isra knows about feils,” said Mizuki. “How long has she been on her own?”

“Five years,” said Alfric. “She knows a lot, but there are considerable gaps. On top of that, her parents were from Tarbin, so I expect that some of the gaps are cultural, rather than things she just never learned. And being a druid too … from what I gathered, her father was at least somewhat educated, but whatever he was able to transfer to her between woodland lessons stopped at the age of thirteen.” He tapped his foot. “Hmm. I think she needs our help, frankly, or at least someone’s help.”

“Well, we’ll go find that druid,” said Verity. “And hopefully we won’t all die in our second dungeon. I’m going to get some practice in, alone, please. I’ll be outside.” She slipped out of the kitchen and headed upstairs to grab her lute.

“I need to go spend some money,” said Mizuki, hefting her sack. “Hannah? Were you going to come with? I could always use the company.”

“Of course,” nodded Hannah. “I was goin’ to speak with the blacksmith about a commission, now that we’ve got some rings. Alfric is right that it makes the most sense for us to let the dungeons equip us, but I’d still like a helmet and a breastplate, just to prevent the worst of the injuries that would prevent me from healin’ us.”

“Alfric?” asked Mizuki. “Are you going or staying?”

“I don’t think I’ll stay in your house alone,” said Alfric. “I need to wash the dust and sweat of the road off me, and talk to some people in town about next steps.”

“Then we’ll meet back up tomorrow,” said Mizuki. Her hand went to her bag, and the money there. “Thanks for making the trip, by the by.”

“Of course,” nodded Alfric. “We’re a proper party now. We all have to do our part.”

Chapter 14 - Cracked Tiles

Five was an annoying number, in Hannah’s opinion. There was very little symmetry to be had from it. Five could have rotational symmetry, but the same could be said of any number, since a circle could be defined by infinitely many points. Five also allowed a flanking approach, with one of the five in the center and two sides of two each, but this didn’t have manifold symmetry, not in the way that four could, not unless you put the fifth point in the center. But that was just pretending that five was actually four, and Hannah didn’t hold with that.

For people, trying to do that was trying to pretend that the fifth person wasn’t there, and if you were looking at symmetries, that wouldn’t do. Five was, no matter how she looked at it, a bad number. Still, five was the most you could have in a party, and five was what they did have, so it was up to Hannah to divine what might be done with what she had. It was, for a cleric of Garos, a form of meditation and prayer that might bring her closer to her god.

The first step was arranging the party in a pentagon, which Hannah did in her mind, though perhaps if she had time later, she would make little symbols for each of them. A pentagon had rotational symmetry, but it also had flanking symmetry when a line was drawn intersecting one of the points. The obvious point to go through was Alfric, for two reasons. The first was that he was the leader of their group, something Hannah didn’t dispute, even if she did think of herself as his deputy. The point around which the flanking should happen needed to be the most important of the points. The second reason was that he was male: both ‘halves’ of the pentagon would then contain half a male and two females, preserving gender symmetry and overall reflection.

This left the question of where each of the girls should go. There were three configurations, and Hannah ran through all of them in her mind, trying to find which one was best. Unfortunately, there were too many methods of division, and they kept giving different answers. Mizuki and Hannah were both clearly more outgoing, while Verity and Isra were less so. Verity and Hannah had more experience with the wider world, and had come from larger cities, in a fashion, while Mizuki and Isra were (approximately) natives of Pucklechurch. There were two who used magic and one who was a cleric, with a fourth who had only a bow, which was no good at all. They couldn’t be easily divided by the darkness of their skin, or their hair, or their different sense of fashion. For the most part, Hannah didn’t know them well enough to make good judgments about their personalities or how they saw the world.

Eventually, because she didn’t want her morning prayer to be a waste, Hannah decided that it should be her and Verity on one side with Mizuki and Isra on the other, but she wasn’t sure about which spots each of them should take, and the whole thing felt like an exercise in frustration, because none of it sang to her sense of symmetry. Garos would look at the arrangement and not be pleased. She would pray again, perhaps picking a different person to be the center, and as she talked to them, she would try to tease out the ways in which they reflected each other. Unfortunately, she had yet to find a firm grasp.

Hannah therefore started the morning feeling a bit out of sorts. It happened from time to time, and while her ability to call on Garos was unaffected, she didn’t feel quite right with the world. The last time it had been when she focused too much on the wrong parts of her own body. While she was perfectly symmetricalized, there were limits to symmetricalization. The lungs could be symmetrical with each other, which required moving the heart to the center, but the heart was an awkward, asymmetric shape, and the guts snaked and twisted back and forth in a person’s belly, with various organs sitting in awkward spots without respect to symmetry. If she put herself in the wrong mindset, all she could focus on was the hideous imperfection. Worse than those failures of bilateral symmetry were the other symmetry failures of the body, the way that the legs and arms seemed to almost mirror each other, the way the hands and feet were clearly made from a similar map but far too different from each other. In the seminary there had been classes on human anatomy, and Hannah had always cringed at seeing all these issues, something that she felt alone in, because no one else seemed to mind. One day in the seminary, while looking through books in the library, she’d found a thick tome that went on about theoretical changes to the body which would bring it to greater levels of symmetry, which she had loved, mostly because it made her feel seen. But of course the first verse of the first section was, “Man is not of Garos alone”, a refrain that each of the six holy books had in common, a plea to unity that hadn’t always been listened to.

As she walked from the Pucklechurch temple to Mizuki’s house, she tried to turn her thoughts away from imperfections, but there were times when that was difficult. On seeing Mizuki’s house though, Hannah’s mind lightened, because it was a house of immense and deliberate symmetry.

Each of the three levels was a square, and of all the basic geometric shapes, the square was Hannah’s favorite. There was four point rotational symmetry, and four lines of bisecting symmetry. All of the windows of the house were identical on every side, and the doors were centered in the middle of the square. There weren’t, unfortunately, doors on each of the sides, but on the two sides that didn’t have doors, there were large windows that hung within a frame that was identical to the door frames. The rooms, at least on the first level, almost perfectly divided the main floor into four smaller perfect squares, with the exception of the foyer that surrounded the front door and the symmetrical area that enclosed the back door. There were two sets of stairs going up to the next floor, each on opposite sides of the house, each going a different direction to preserve rotational symmetry, and there were likewise two sets of stairs leading to the basement. There were choices made in the house which were clearly impractical, and to Hannah it was obvious that there had been some religious worship of Garos in its construction. It was something that she would broach with Mizuki at some point, but the fact that Mizuki hadn’t mentioned it to a cleric of Garos seemed to be an indication that Mizuki didn’t know. The general state of the house and the garden behind it, and the fact that it belonged to her grandfather … well, Hannah was anticipating that they wouldn’t have much to discuss.

She came to the house with a loaf of berry bread, this one with cut up bits of strawberries, which had already passed their seasonal peak. The excess harvest was being made into jams and preserves that would supply them through the winter, and some of them would be frozen in large chillers, though Hannah had always felt that frozen berries were a pale imitation of fresh. There were other berries coming into bloom that were good for baking, and there would be sellers sweeping into Pucklechurch through the summer and into the autumn, trying to get the most they could for their harvests, whether foraged or cultivated. They were a bit far south for farkleberries, and with the wrong type of soil, but Hannah had taken a liking to the sour berries, and was going to do her best to find some, especially if she was going to be baking for more than just herself and Lemmel. Baking was just fine with a bit of flour, salt, sugar, yeast, and water, but she always liked it better with fruits and spices.

Hannah had puttered around the temple while baking, and made sure that this time she wouldn’t be waking Mizuki up. To her surprise, as she came to the door of the house, she saw Verity approaching, still looking bleary-eyed and with a sack over her shoulder and her lute case held in one hand.

“Hannah?” she asked.

“I brought bread,” said Hannah. She looked at the sack over Verity’s shoulder. “Are you … movin’ in?”

“Yeah,” said Verity. “I played my set at the Fig and Gristle last night and talked to Cynthia. I have a standing offer to play there, but she thinks she’ll be able to get someone in to replace me relatively soon. She seemed more happy that I was moving on to something else than she was sad to lose me.”

“Well, good,” said Hannah. “Nothin’ to stand in the way of dungeon delvin’, I suppose, ay?”

“I suppose not,” said Verity. She looked like she was ready for a nap. “I still need to go back and pick up a few things from my room, and Cynthia is making me clean up, but I’ll wait until I play my set tonight.”

“Well, consider this a housewarmin’ gift,” said Hannah, raising the bread.

“Thanks,” said Verity. “Could you get the door?”

Hannah followed Verity in, and while Verity went upstairs to put things away, Hannah went to the kitchen, where Mizuki seemed to spend most of her time. The smell of eggs and toast still hung in the air, and Mizuki was eating over the counter, sitting on one of the stools.

“Mmf,” she said around a mouthful of food. “Bread.”

Hannah set the loaf of bread down on the counter. “Bread,” she agreed. “Verity came about the same time I did, said she was movin’ in.”

“Sure is,” nodded Mizuki. “Hopefully we don’t drive each other insane.” She eyed the loaf. “That’s for me, right?”

“To share,” shrugged Hannah. “But I made two, and left one with Lemmel, so if you eat it all, no worries.”

“I doubt I’m going to sit and eat a whole loaf,” said Mizuki. “But, thank you! People don’t usually get me anything.”

“No problem,” said Hannah. “Alfric and Isra should be back today, around noon if they got an early start on things and don’t have trouble along the way. We’ll get our share of the money then, and my guess is start talkin’ about the what and when of the next dungeon, if I have the measure of Alfric.”

Mizuki sighed. “Can’t say I’m looking forward to it,” she said. “But I think I’ve got a better understanding of the magic, given the practice we did yesterday.” She looked at Hannah. “If we’re waiting until noon or so, do you have plans until then?”

“Well,” said Hannah. “Ay. I was thinkin’ that if you didn’t mind, I might take a look at the house a bit, and see if there’s mendin’ to do.”

“Mending?” asked Mizuki as she took the last bite of eggs on her plate.

“There’s a lot a cleric of Garos can do,” said Hannah as she took her plate to the sink for a quick wash. “Healin’ is what we’re most known for, but we can do more than just that. I fixed up Alfric’s shield as best I could, and I was goin’ to take a look around and see if there’s anythin’ I can do, as a favor of one friend to another. The house uses square beams all over the place, but the grain might make it a bit difficult. If I can see repairs that aren’t too hard, I’ll make ‘em.”

“Ah,” said Mizuki, as she gave the plate a quick wash.

“Unless you take offense,” said Hannah.

“No,” said Mizuki. She turned to look back at Hannah. “I mean … you’re saying that there are some problems with the house, and I know there are, things that I never knew how to do, or repairs I couldn’t afford, and like with the garden, it’s stupid to get offended about, but a part of me hates that people look at this place and instantly know how out of my depth I am.”

“Sure,” said Hannah. “Well, if it helps, when I’m done they’ll think about nothin’ but how nice it looks, though I can’t say that I’ll clean off your roof.”

“Do you need to clean roofs?” asked Mizuki, raising an eyebrow as she wiped her hands dry.

“You have some small trees threatenin’ to grow through the tiles,” said Hannah, as gentle as she could be.

“But I kind of like the moss up there,” said Mizuki.

“There’s somethin’ nice about the look, true,” said Hannah. She rubbed the back of her neck. She hadn’t quite realized how out of her depth Mizuki was. She desperately hoped that the septic was getting some regular attention. “But … you know a house can rot, right?”

“From moss?” asked Mizuki. “I thought that was from leaks.”

“The moss and dirt and leaves and things mean that it doesn’t dry as well,” said Hannah. “Anyway, as I said, I was going to check the beams, the stones, the skeleton of the place, and see if I could do anythin’ for you. It’s somethin’ we do as clerics of Garos, though of course I won’t charge.”

“Two gifts,” said Mizuki. “Seems a bit generous to me, and I don’t know how I could pay you back.”

“One is payback for breakfast yesterday,” said Hannah. “And as for the other … Lemmel will let me use the room at the temple for as long as I please, but I was thinkin’, if you had the space, and if you and Verity are both goin’ to be here, well …” she hesitated. “If it wouldn’t be an imposition.”

Mizuki considered this. “And you’d do baking?”

“And home repairs, where I can,” said Hannah. “And other things, surely, like healin’, ay.”

“Then yes, of course, you’re welcome to stay,” said Mizuki. “I actually have space for all five of us, just barely, though two of us will have to share a room.”

“You’ve come around to dungeons then?” asked Hannah. “Goin’ through and clearin’ all the ones in the area?”

“Yes, probably,” said Mizuki, shifting slightly. “It would be fun to have a full house again. Alfric would probably be interested, if just to save a few rings, but I don’t know about Isra. She’s got a place in the woods somewhere, presumably.”

“Well, we won’t press her on it, and hopefully when she comes back with Alfric she won’t have been driven off forever,” said Hannah. “I’m going to go look at the bones of the house while Verity unpacks.”

Hannah wandered out of the house again, looking for any damage. Mending was, as she’d said, a specialty of clerics of Garos, and she had more than a bit of knowledge about structures and what could go wrong with them. Sometimes houses were built with the clerics of Garos in mind, but that was a rarity, because having a perfectly symmetrical house meant that in some respects, you had to give up a bit of practicality, more was the pity. For a large enough house, no cleric but one of the Ashar would have the reach necessary to make repairs, and Mizuki’s house would likely stretch the limits of Hannah’s ability if it was necessary to make the front symmetrical with the back.

Wood was actually harder to work with than most people naively thought. Trees usually had some nice rotational symmetry in the trunk, with the exception of the limbs coming off them, but when the trees got taken to the sawmills, or when they were cut by hand, it was very rare that any of that symmetry would be preserved, leaving wood grain that was asymmetrical. Worse, when wood warped or split, there was even less to work with, and nails got put in seemingly at random, and there were all kinds of other issues.

Of course, the miracles that Hannah had available to her were strong, and nothing was impossible, but it was the kind of work that she couldn’t do too much of in a day. Symmetricalizing the house would be the work of months, maybe even a whole year, if she was using her power for almost nothing else. Spot fixes were more doable, but she would have to prioritize heavily, at least when it came to wood.

The foundation of the house was stone, but it had been made with overlapping stone bricks, and would be difficult to symmetricalize too, if not quite as difficult as the wood. Thankfully there was nothing there that needed repair, just perhaps a reapplication of mortar. A single one of the stones had a hairline crack, but it didn’t go through the strongest point of bilateral symmetry, and so was the work of simply laying hands on it and doing a basic reflection. The stones had been cut with precision, and while they weren’t cubes, which would have been ideal, they were regular in ways that were both helpful and pleasing to Hannah.

In a storage shed in the backyard, Hannah found a stack of tiles that seemed like they had come from the same batch that had been used on the roof. Half of the tiles had suffered some kind of damage and cracked down the center, nearly forty of them damaged in the same way, but the others were in good shape, and that meant that there was work Hannah could do. She laid the good tiles out in a pattern on the flat ground, using three concentric rings of eight tiles, with the exception of a single space in the inner ring, where she placed a cracked one. With so many symmetries there, it was simple to make the repair, and she went through the stack, repeating the process and turning the bad tiles into good with a fair bit of time but very little effort. Just looking at the roof, she could see some damage that had never been fixed, and Hannah thought it likely that she was going to be repeating this process at some point in the summer when she got to the work of cleaning off the roof and making necessary repairs. Hopefully there hadn’t been any water damage from where broken tiles didn’t provide protection. Ideally, someone else would clean off the roof, but she had the feeling that it was going to fall to her or simply not get done.

Hannah was in the middle of this work when Alfric and Isra came walking down the road, ahead of schedule. Hannah stood up, dusted off, and was just in time to meet them inside, where Mizuki had already gotten started on making a ‘quick’ lunch, which involved a bubbling pot of something brown.

“We’re back,” Alfric smiled, once the five of them were assembled in the kitchen. “Still four days away from the channel, or we’d have announced we were coming.”

“And we’re rich, right?” asked Mizuki.

“I guess we need to get the bad news out of the way first. We earned less than I’d hoped.” Alfric had a sheepish smile. “There’s a chance we could have gotten more by going further afield, possibly to Liberfell, but that was five hexes away in the opposite direction, which is a considerable hike, and probably would have meant three or four days travel in total, depending on the conditions. I also didn’t know if I had that mandate, and we can talk about that later. Still, we managed to sell everything, and I think we got a good price. I made contact with three stores there and have standing offers for materials, if we decide to go forward with dungeons in the future.” He didn’t look directly at Verity or Mizuki as he said that.

“Alright,” said Mizuki. “But we have a payout?”

Alfric nodded and set a bag on the counter, which clinked with the weight of metal. “Fifteen thousand,” he said. “That’s between the books, the ectad materials, and the entads. Three thousand a piece. Isra’s already got her cut.”

“I don’t want to sound like an ungrateful jerk, but only three thousand?” asked Mizuki. “I thought you said it was going to be like … ten each?”

“Overestimation on my part,” said Alfric. He winced. “My first mistake was saying anything at all. I should have said they were valuable without saying how valuable. I might have been more on the mark with how Dondrian prices things, but I’m not sure.”

“Ay. Better to be surprised and delighted with three than disappointed with ten,” nodded Hannah. It did sting, though she wasn’t particularly depending on the money. “Still, three thousand will last us for a good long while, I’d expect.”

“Probably a full year, if I did nothing else,” Mizuki nodded. “Though now that I have the money, I’m probably going to spend it on something lavish.” She looked around the kitchen. “More stuff for here, maybe an order of ingredients from one of the bigger cities, something like that.”

“You’re going to buy food?” asked Alfric. “Just … food?”

“Not just food,” shrugged Mizuki. “But yes, food. Food is great. We need it for living.”

“That’s true,” said Hannah. “Myself, I was going to have some armor commissioned. It would do to have some adventurin’ gear for the lot of us. The blacksmith likes me.”

“I already bought arrows,” said Isra.

“We’re thinking of putting money right back into going into dungeons?” asked Verity. “Doesn’t that seem a bit backward?”

“Not all the money,” said Mizuki. “But a bit of it, yeah. You said that you don’t even own pants.”

“Fine,” said Verity. “I’ll spend some money on pants.”

“If you’re not interested in further dungeons, we’ll use one of the alternates,” said Hannah. “There are two that Alfric had marked as being suitable.” Alfric didn’t seem to like that tactic, or to see it as a tactic, because he had a frown.

“I’m interested,” said Verity. “But I don’t want what Alfric wants, which is to hit two dungeons a day for the rest of our lives.”

“That’s not quite what I want,” said Alfric. “Besides, with six miles of walking to go between hexes and the amount of labor involved, and time to rest, we’d be quite lucky to be able to sustain one a day. Maybe with mounts or some other form of transport, but —”

“One every few days,” said Hannah. “For the first six, one day on, two days off, to give us time to recover from what I can’t heal, to not feel like our lives are on the line.”

“But that would mean we’d do the next one tomorrow?” Verity asked. She had her arms folded. “Six miles seems a lot to walk, and it’s not six miles, it’s twelve if we want to go there and back.”

“Not tomorrow, no,” said Alfric. “We had more of a hike than I was expecting with a fair amount on our backs. It was twelve miles each day, carrying more than fifty pounds of weight, with elevation changes. I’m aching. If I have to go another six miles, then go down into a dungeon tomorrow … well, I won’t say that I couldn’t, but I’d prefer at least a day of rest, and possibly some time to train or at least give you all a better picture of what it’s going to look like going forward. And if we’re waiting that long, better to wait until we have whatever gear we’re going to get and the party channel.”

“I don’t want to be the roadblock,” said Verity. “So I’ll do another few, but if it’s travel all the time, and there’s considerable danger later on … maybe you should start speaking to the alternates you had in mind.”

“I bought a dagger in Tarchwood,” said Alfric. “With my own money. It can teleport one of us to it, which means we can cut out six miles of travel for someone, and if it’s a condition of you coming with, then I’d be fine using it like that. We can also probably augment it to take all of us, which cuts travel time in half.”

“Hmm,” said Verity. “It seems generous to use it for me.”

“Yes,” said Alfric. “But I think you’re well worth it.” He shifted in place for a moment, keeping his eyes on her. “Verity, can I speak with you privately?”

Verity’s eyes were on him, boring holes into him. Something had changed between them, and Hannah wished that she knew what. “You knew me by reputation.”

“Yes,” he said. He looked to the doorway leading out of the kitchen. Verity wasn’t moving though. After a moment of hesitation, Alfric continued. “Your parents were worried about you. They were making some discreet inquiries as to whether they could get someone to first find you, and second, go check up on you.”

“My parents sent you here,” said Verity. She had her arms folded, but her stern posture gave way to confusion. “But surely not to have me go into a dungeon.”

“No,” said Alfric. “No, decidedly not. I had never really had any intention of spying on you for them, but I knew enough about you to know that you were quite skilled, and … I had been trying to put together parties. I watched them fail in one way or another.”

That, for Hannah, helped a few things fall into place about Alfric. Why the rush? Well, perhaps because he’d seen parties fail before, either through scheduling or personal issues, or collapsing when it came time to actually fight monsters. Hannah wondered just how many failed parties he’d had. Now that they’d been through one, and proven that they could do it, Alfric was willing to slow down and invest some time.

“And if I had said no?” asked Verity.

“I would have tried a few other approaches with you. If it had still been a firm no, I would have confirmed for them that it was really you,” said Alfric. “Then I’d have done my best to scrape together a party without you, using the funds that they’d given me.”

Verity nodded. “And if you know all that, you know … certain other salient information about me.”

Alfric nodded slowly.

“Which is?” asked Mizuki.

“I haven’t said it out loud because I assumed that Verity would prefer it to be private,” said Alfric.

Hannah felt the pull of curiosity, and immediately her mind went to work thinking of all the possible options that it could be. A disgrace of some kind seemed the most likely, but there were many options for the specific variety. A child out of wedlock, a failed engagement, a social embarrassment, a crime of passion … none of them fit. None immediately made sense of Verity, but Hannah was aware that she didn’t know Verity all that well.

“I think I need a moment to myself,” she said. “I’ll be upstairs.”

She left the kitchen, moving with the same grace as before, not teary-eyed, but certainly not looking like she was pleased.

“She’s only second elevation though,” said Mizuki. “She can’t be that good, right?”

“You’re the one that said elevation was bunk,” said Alfric. “And yes, there are reasons to believe that Verity is far more proficient than being a bard of second elevation would imply.”

“Seems crazy to come out all this way when the answer might have been no,” said Hannah.

“There was payment either way,” said Alfric. “And a place like this is the ideal starting location. I still need to send a message to her parents, but I’m hoping to get her input on that, once she’s had some time to process. If she’d have said no, I’d have sent them a message anyway, and taken the money for it, not that I would have been proud about it.”

“Cold,” said Mizuki with a whistle.

“A parent has a right to know,” said Hannah. “I hadn’t realized she’d run off like that.”

“She deserves her privacy,” said Isra. She was leaning up against the chiller with her arms folded.

“About the other issue,” said Alfric. “The one that I haven’t spoken about. I’d prefer if the three of you didn’t snoop or pry. She’ll tell you when she’s ready, if she’s ever ready, and if this doesn’t make her want nothing to do with me.”

“You know, she just moved in today,” said Mizuki. “You could have waited.”

“Waiting this long was already a violation of disclosure,” said Alfric. “I couldn’t wait until we’d done another dungeon run. It wouldn’t be ethical. Arguably, it wasn’t ethical to wait as long as I did. Besides, her parents will make other arrangements if I never report back to them through a guild messenger like we’d planned. It’s better for Verity to know now, so she can do something about that. I’m open to some deception though.”

“You know this raises all kinds of questions,” said Hannah. “Like why she ran away from home, and what her parents are like, and all those kinds of things.”

“She came to Pucklechurch to get away,” said Alfric. “My guess is that people not knowing much more than that she came from Dondrian was part of the point. I probably should have spoken with her separately, insisted on it, but I wanted my own deception to be out in the open, and if she wanted to leave because of it, I didn’t want it to be on her to explain things.”

He looked somewhat deflated. Hannah could imagine him rehearsing what he’d said and preparing to tell her. She wondered if it had gone better or worse than he’d expected, but her prior experience with telling people things you didn’t want to was that he probably just felt a bit hollow and unsure. She’d have to ask him, later, perhaps much later.

“I’ll go up to her,” said Hannah.

“No,” said Mizuki, who was looking out of sorts. “She said she wants to be alone, leave her alone.”

“I’m a cleric,” said Hannah. “Part of that is talkin’ to people about their problems. When people say they want to be alone, sometimes that means they think other people won’t understand. Even if she doesn’t want to share, we can talk around it. Talkin’ is what I’m trained for, it’s what I spent some years in seminary learnin’.”

“I guess,” said Mizuki, but she seemed doubtful.

Hannah left the others to go upstairs, and briefly overheard something about druids, but then she was out of earshot, and up on the second level. She didn’t actually know where Verity’s room was, but the layout was as pleasing to her as on the ground floor, with two staircases up and rooms of equal size, one being the blue-tiled bathroom with a huge claw-foot tub, the other three being bedrooms. Hannah found it by process of elimination, as two of the bedrooms were open, one of them with a large four poster bed that must have been Mizuki’s, the other with stripped-bare bunk beds that must have belonged to her sisters.

Hannah tapped lightly on the final door.

“Come in,” replied Verity’s soft voice.

“Hullo,” said Hannah as she entered. She closed the door behind her and sat on the bed next to Verity. Already, Verity’s things had been strewn about the room, with a pile of poetry books slumped on one shelf and clothes in a loose pile on the floor. “How’re you doin’?”

“Fine,” said Verity. “Fine, I just … if my parents hired him, even if he’s not going to do the work, that means they’ll hire someone else when he doesn’t report, or if he reports and says he’s not going to do it, and I was doing fine, I had a room and a job, it wasn’t like I was dead in a ditch somewhere.”

“Were they just worried, or was it somethin’ more?” asked Hannah. “When someone runs away, it can be hard on the parents.”

“I didn’t run away,” said Verity, but there was no confidence in the statement. “I talked to them and explained that I was an adult capable of making my own decisions and finding my own way in the world. They disagreed and shut down any further discussion, like I was going to change my mind if they just refused to entertain the idea.” She shook her head. “I’m not even that upset with Alfric, though maybe I should be. I’m more upset that I wasn’t trusted to be my own person. I’m upset with them.”

“Ah, I hear ya,” said Hannah. “My own parents didn’t fancy havin’ a cleric for a daughter.”

“They didn’t?” asked Verity. She hadn’t been looking at Hannah as they talked, but at this she turned, frowning.

Hannah nodded. “They tried to talk me out of it. My da thought that I was goin’ for the wrong reasons, and my ma just didn’t like the idea of me not gettin’ to see them so much, which I suppose she had a point about, but it wasn’t goin’ to stop me.”

“What are the wrong reasons to become a cleric?” asked Verity.

“Oh,” said Hannah, waving her hand. “My da had some ideas about why I had such a strong interest in Garos, mostly havin’ to do with him thinkin’ I was interested in women, given a certain reputation of the church, not that it’s not warranted. He said to me that I didn’t have to go, that we could find me a woman at home if that was what I wanted.”

“And … it wasn’t?” asked Verity. She had one eyebrow slightly arched.

Hannah laughed. “Oh, no, not at all. Da wasn’t wrong, there was a lot of that goin’ on in the seminary, and I did end up havin’ a few girlfriends. It’s a bit … well, I wouldn’t say encouraged, but —” She shook her head. “It’s not important right now. The point I was tryin’ to make was that parents can be a bit difficult, and if you didn’t want to be a bard, or not a bard like they wanted you to be, that’s somethin’ for them to deal with on their own, with no spyin’ on you. I don’t blame Alfric for seekin’ you out, if he thinks you’re the best bard he could get, but I wouldn’t blame you either if you decide you don’t want to deal with him. Now, to my mind he gets some credit for fessin’ up when he did, but that’s me, not you.”

“I suppose,” said Verity. “You know, all I really wanted to do was to make music.”

“And were you not allowed to, in the conservatory?” asked Hannah. “Or the life you were to have beyond there?”

“There was too much focus on the magic,” said Verity. “And if it wasn’t the magic, then it was dealing with other people, scheduling time with a group, arranging gigs, learning new music that needed to be played … there was so much pressure, so much demand, so much that wasn’t even remotely about the music itself.”

“And goin’ into dungeons doesn’t really help that, does it?” asked Hannah. “Alfric doesn’t want you because you can improvise a nice melody, or because he appreciates what you do with lyrics, it’s ‘cause he wants to be forty-six percent stronger or some such.”

“Yes,” said Verity. “Yes, exactly, and I understand it, the value that I have, but it feels like that’s the only thing that anyone cares about. It’s maddening.”

“Is it better at the tavern?” asked Hannah.

Verity paused. “People feel the effects, and that’s why I was hired, but I do get complimented on my songs. People notice, I think. They appreciate more than just having flavorful food. And I am good at the effects, better than most, I just … I didn’t want to be that lute player who gets hired into a guild so she can sit in a room somewhere and play away with no one hearing her.”

Hannah nodded. “Well, if you stick with us, know that you’re here for more than that. Everyone’s got a role in the party, and that role is important, but it’s not the sum of what it means to be a party member. For my own part, the song you sang on the way back from the dungeon was what made me think we could really be a party in the long term. That I wanted to, with you specific people, above and beyond any interest in dungeons.”

Verity blushed and nodded. “Thank you.”

“Now,” said Hannah, placing her hands on her knees. “I’m goin’ to give you a bit of time to yourself, to collect your thoughts and such, but Mizuki has some lunch bubblin’ away, and I doubt you’d want to miss it. There’s some strawberry bread to go with it, fresh baked this mornin’.”

As Hannah left, Verity was going for her lute, ready to sing a song to herself.

Chapter 16 - Notions from Elsewhere

Verity sat in the backyard, surrounded by the wild plants and the struggling ones that had once upon a time been cultivated. There was work to be done, an enormous amount of work, but that would have to wait for later. She was hoping that there was plenty of equipment, like a sun hat, gloves, a trowel, a hand rake, and a water can that would hopefully connect up to a water tank inside the house … but for the moment, what she needed was not to work, but to be alone. The best way she knew of doing that was immersing herself in music. She began idly playing her lute, hoping that a song would find her.

“A merry lass with hair of red / she mends the sick and bakes her bread,” Verity murmured. It was too straightforward though, the kind of direct song that always felt a bit cloying to her. It was always better to approach a subject from the side, in layers of metaphor and simile, not that Verity thought she was any great lyricist.

“The wolf he stood so tall and proud, trying to find a pack / but when he found the other four,” the rhyme failed to come, as it sometimes did. “Their bonds had too much slack,” she tried, but it didn’t sound quite right. If Alfric was the wolf in this metaphor, a strong, noble creature, then he was a wolf who had found a pack that didn’t quite fit him, and he was struggling to turn them into wolves when that was clearly not what they were best suited for. Verity was never going to be a metaphorical wolf.

“The wolf, he knew the secret / of the frightened widow’s heart,” Verity continued. “He stilled his tongue and kept his word / as he watched her make her art.” Again, this wasn’t quite right, the kind of thing that would need to be massaged in a hundred different ways before she’d feel like it was worthwhile to sing for anyone. “For if the wolf spoke freely / he knew the widow would depart.”

She thought about that for a moment. It was clear that Alfric did know, but it wasn’t clear to Verity what she would do if he told the others. She knew how she would feel, angry, depressed, anxious, and betrayed. She could already feel those emotions welling up inside her in anticipation of it happening, even though there was nothing to indicate that it ever actually would. It was a storm that felt largely contained within her gut, as bad as any pre-performance jitters. But as for what she would do, that remained a mystery to her. She could leave Pucklechurch, but it was clear that her nine months of playing in the tavern had been nothing but a reprieve from the clawing grasp of home.

Verity had been an exceptional musician from a young age, in part because her parents had pushed her into it. She’d tried three other instruments before settling on the lute, though she had a particular affection for singing to accompany herself, something that her instructors had reluctantly indulged. She was perhaps twelve years old when she first realized that she was being groomed for something. Her musical instructors began talking to her about parties and guilds, and the ways that bardic magic was used in them to boost the powers of everyone involved.

It was clear to Verity that for her parents, this wasn’t simply about wealth, though a bard of her predicted caliber would make a fair amount of money with the right placement. It also wasn’t simply a matter of public service, though there was some element of that, as though she had some obligation to do the thing she was good at, above and beyond the ability of others to pay her for it. But no, the overriding concern seemed to be that of status, the nebulous quality that her mother had a keen eye for. Some of this was with designs toward finding a good match for her, but some of it was simply to make sure she reflected well on ‘the family’ in terms of whom she was playing with, what she was playing, and what awards or accolades she’d achieved.

All that had been miserable enough, as though it was an attempt to deliberately destroy her love of music, but everything had changed when she was fifteen.

She had been Chosen.

Six was a magical number. It was the number of sides of a hexagon, the number of strings on her lute, and the number of gods. Each of the six gods had a Holy City, and each of them had six sets of six sets of six Chosen. Two hundred and sixteen for each god sometimes seemed like an enormous amount, and other times seemed like barely any at all.

Verity had been waiting on a market street for her mother, who was looking for more decorations for their house, this time with an eye towards coating the Dungeon Room with all kinds of nicely evocative henlings. The store promised ‘Notions from Elsewhere’, and Verity had stepped out, in part to get some air, and in part to have a break from her mother’s verbalizations about what might look good in which location, which the shopkeeper seemed happy to listen to and offer opinions on.

Verity had been humming a tune to herself when she felt her hands suddenly clasped by a man in fine clothes. She pulled back at once, but his eyes were glowing, and she found herself transfixed. Besides, he was much stronger than she was. He pulled her close and spoke in a language that Verity didn’t understand, his warm breath on her face as the words spilled out of him. Then, almost as soon as it began, it was over, and the man had released her. He was blinking, his eyes no longer glowing, and he seemed a bit taken aback that there was a young girl in front of him looking at him with wide eyes. He mumbled an apology, then took off down the street, moving at a jog and occasionally looking back at her before disappearing around a corner.

She hadn’t said anything when her mother had come out of the store with a paper bag filled with curiosities. By that time, her hands had stopped shaking, and while the image of the glowing eyes had remained, the encounter was starting to fade.

The second time it happened, Verity had been in one of the conservatory’s practice rooms. A small woman had burst in, interrupting the music, and again said something in that same alien language. This time though, as Verity watched the glowing eyes, she heard a phrase she recognized, or rather, a name: Xuphin, one of the six gods, the God of Infinity. Again, the glowing eyes faded, and the woman seemed confused about where she was and why, but unlike the man, she didn’t seem frightened and afraid. Instead, she was angry, and having nothing else to do with that anger, she directed it toward Verity. The matter escalated up the conservatory, until eventually it was brought to the attention of a cleric, who recognized it for what it was.

This, the Choosing, happened four more times. Two of them had been public, one of them at a conservatory, the other at a temple of Qymmos, and word had spread, to the delight of Verity’s parents. Chosen were rare. Chosen were special. Sometimes, anyway.

The Church of Xuphin sent clerics over to confirm, and it was formally announced that Verity was joining the exclusive ranks of the Chosen. This position, if you could call it that, came with no formal training or duties. It held no powers. Instead, it came with status and the weight of expectation. The Chosen sometimes had divine revelations, or at least unique insights, and sometimes they contributed to the world a Great Work. If you were Chosen, it was because one of the gods had a plan for you, one of a specific nature, or perhaps, they knew something about you, something they liked. Given that Verity was a promising young bard, it was supposed by the clerics that she would contribute a song at some point, either a song of infinity or something of that nature. But sometimes, Chosen became nothing special. Whatever purpose their Choosing had been for passed by, unseen and unknown. The gods never offered clarification.

Verity had read up on the other Chosen of Xuphin, trying to understand what it meant. One of the most important Chosen of Xuphin was an ectad engineer who was responsible for discovering a stabilizing agent that could be used to nearly triple the lifetime of ectads. Another had worked on advancements in land reclamation, expanding territory out into the seas. A third had been the architect on the largest building in Dondrian. That was Xuphin: big, splashy, expansive, always more, driving toward the impossibility of infinity. Yet some of his Chosen seemed to be nothing more than tradesmen or teachers, simple, unchallenging roles. Still, there was an expectation that came with being Chosen, and a prestige.

Whatever doors had been closed to Verity before, they were now opened. She had offers to play with all sorts of people, and for all sorts of people, enough that at sixteen she had her own wealth separate from her parents. She was given special attention at the conservatory from all kinds of people who wanted to have the distinction of having helped her, or at least being able to say that they had.

And through it all, Verity felt that she wasn’t making her best music. She would play and people would preen, but her magic was weaker than most adult bards, and the praise of the bardic masters towards her musical ability seemed tainted by the fact that she was Chosen, destined for greatness in some capacity, if she didn’t end up becoming nothing instead.

She had done some work to set her affairs in order before leaving. She’d talked to the Church of Xuphin, which had tried to convince her to stay, and she’d talked to her parents, who had demanded that she stay, but she was seventeen, the age of majority, and no one had the authority to stop her. She left in the dead of the night, leaving a note behind but not saying where she was going.

Alfric surely knew all of this. It was why he had sought her out. It wasn’t clear what Alfric thought she would do for Xuphin or Infinity, but presumably he thought she would do something. There were infinidungeons, she knew, not places with four or five rooms like the one in Pucklechurch, but the kind that were so deep you would never get to the bottom of them, if they had a bottom at all. There were dungeons in the heart of Dondrian that had fortifications built around them, and which you couldn’t attempt without all manner of mages standing guard outside, and a chrononaut to undo it. Perhaps that was Alfric’s ultimate goal. Well, if it was, Verity would simply refuse. She had been doing perfectly well pretending that she wasn’t Chosen, and it wasn’t like Xuphin or his Church had any particular mandate or expectation for her.

“Strawberry hair / strawberry fair,” Verity tried, strumming her lute. “Strawberry wares, and strawberry prayers.” The lyrics were getting worse as her thoughts drifted away from the music. Sometimes the songs came easily and freely, as it had when leaving that first dungeon, and other times it was like she was stuck in the mud.

“I live in a garden, abandoned so long, I sit on the ground, and I sing my sad song, but with time, the garden, shall rise up anew, and at least, in my sadness, I’ll have a nice view.” Verity sighed and set the lute back into its case.

“Alright garden,” she said to the plants. “It’s time to start getting you into shape.”

With some time to take it all in, the garden wasn’t quite as bad as Verity had thought the first time she’d seen it. There were almost certain to have been casualties of neglect, but they had likely died early on, and what was left were cultivated plants that had been hardy enough to survive, and a number of weeds that had put deep roots into the rich, loamy soil.

Different areas of the garden had clearly been kept for different purposes. Close to the house, there was a large, wide pot in a place of prominence, where purple-headed chives were fighting with a thick, dark mint. If there had been other herbs, they had been consumed in the war between those two remaining plants.

Further from the house, but still in a part of the garden where stone tiles dominated, there were a number of raised beds that Verity imagined had been for flowers, or perhaps decoration of some other kind, though it was hard to tell what was weed and what wasn’t. There were benches on the stone tile, and an area with what appeared to be a fire pit, though there was no wood anywhere nearby. Most likely, Verity would have to find a guide to local plants and pull everything that could be positively identified as a weed, but given what Mizuki had said about the history of the house, it seemed likely that some of these plants originated in Kiromo, and she didn’t want to pull anything that couldn’t be replaced.

Beyond the patio area of the garden, where most of the (presumably) decorative elements were, there was a fairly large patch of ground that had clearly once been a fruit and vegetable garden. The most obvious survivors were tomatoes and possibly some potatoes, along with onions that looked like they had gone feral, and aside from those, a strawberry patch that surely had killed some other plants in the course of its expansion, with runners going outside the stone edging. It was a quite large plot, large enough that Verity thought it likely someone had put on a major bottling effort to put things up for the winter. It was interesting, in a way, to look at a garden like this, one which sat untouched for perhaps five years. To know what to do with the space, Verity had to determine what someone else had planned. It would take some careful work to see what could be salvaged and what needed to be tossed out.

Finally, beyond the garden plot, there were plants around the house, though these seemed in better condition, if in need of pruning and care. There were also a number of trees, some of them clearly foreign, or at least nothing like Verity had seen during her long trip to Pucklechurch, or even in Dondrian.

Gardening was different in Dondrian, and not just because of the warmer climate. Verity’s home was deep in the city, rather than being a country estate, and they had to make do with a greenroom that jutted out from the third floor. Verity had loved the greenroom, especially in winter, when the sun came in through the glass ceiling and walls to heat the place up, and it took on a bit of swampiness without the normal airflow from outside. It was one of the only places you could get properly humid in the winter, and the smell of leaves and soil on top of that was all the better.

This kind of garden, in the backyard of Mizuki’s large house, was altogether different. The plants weren’t in neat little pots like back in the greenroom. There were weeds everywhere, which Verity had only occasionally had to deal with in her greenroom, usually from a batch of soil that hadn’t been properly cleaned. The plants here were subject to the winds and the rains, their water not carefully administered by a small, weak waterstone. There was, perhaps, something to like in the wildness on display, but there were so many complications that came with the true outdoors that Verity couldn’t say that it was what she would have chosen.

As with most things, a huge and daunting project could be made a lot simpler by taking it in pieces. Verity focused on the large pot next to the house that held the herbs, which was the smallest element of the rambling, overgrown garden, and the most like what she had known back in Dondrian. She was searching around to see if there was, perhaps, a survivor of the war between the chives and mint that could be nursed back to health, when Mizuki came back from town.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

“Poorly,” said Verity, giving her most cheerful smile. It felt false. “I don’t know what half these plants even are, since some are surely local to Pucklechurch, and some were presumably brought from Kiromo. I have no idea which is which, and I somewhat doubt that you do either.” She pointed at the big pot. “The mint and chives have taken over, and I’ll need to trim them back, but I’m not sure what you would want to go in their place.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “You know, I kind of forgot that this was here.”

“You don’t use herbs in your cooking?” asked Verity.

“Oh, I do, of course,” said Mizuki. “But mostly I buy them. I guess it just didn’t occur to me that they’d kept growing.”

“But you must walk by them almost every day, right?” asked Verity, feeling a bit helpless.

“I don’t go out the back that much,” shrugged Mizuki. “My mom used to bake a braided chive bread in the spring. I should go ask Hannah if she could make something like that.”

“Well, what do you use then?” asked Verity. “I’m willing to spend a few rings replacing things that have died, though late spring is probably a worse time for it than early spring.” She was used to buying seeds with her mother from one of the heritage shops, then sprouting them herself. This late into the spring, that wouldn’t do, and she would have to buy the actual plants, which would come with its own risks, given how much the roots would be moved around.

“Um, garlic?” asked Mizuki. “Or ginger.”

“Those are both roots,” said Verity, wondering if this was a thing she needed to explain.

“Yes, but you could plant them, right?” asked Mizuki.

“Garlic you plant at the start of winter, a week or two after the first killing frost,” said Verity. “Ginger … I’m less sure about. But it would take some time to grow, and it’s not an herb like chives or mint are.”

“Well, you figure out an herb, I’ll figure out how to use it,” said Mizuki. “An herb’s job is to bring a fresh, light, green flavor to a dish, so … anything that can do that. Sorrel, flat-leaf parsley, rosemary, sage? Any of those would be good. I guess there are also a bunch of things native to Kiromo, but,” she rubbed the back of her neck. “First, me saying their names probably wouldn’t help you, because you’d have no idea what geshi is, and second, you’d have no way to actually get any of them if they’re not right here in this garden. This used to be one of four Kiromo families, but they all moved back with grandpa, and I doubt that their gardens, if they had any, survived.”

“We could still probably get seeds somehow,” said Verity. “I wouldn’t trust them to do nicely with these two killers, but if we had seeds, we could get something growing in a pot indoors, then transplant it next year.” She faltered as she said that though, because next year was quite far away, and there was no guarantee that their party was going to survive into next week, let alone through the winter. The thought made Verity anxious and a bit sad.

“I could send a letter to my parents,” said Mizuki. “It takes a long time for the post to go that distance, if it makes it there at all, but they might be able to send seeds that way.”

“I think that would be nice,” said Verity. “Is there anything else that you’d like?”

Mizuki frowned, then reached out and plucked a piece of mint and put it in her mouth, chewing it and thinking. “There was a sauce that my mom made using these,” said Mizuki. “Some kind of sweet thing that I’d have to go to some trouble to recreate, and I’m not even sure this is the right mint. Sogri? Sogi? Something like that.”

“And for the rest of it?” asked Verity. “If you know the names of any of the trees, or what plants were supposed to be here, I think it would be helpful.”

“Come,” said Mizuki, holding out an arm, which Verity took. “Let me take you on a tour of this horrible jungle of a backyard.”

The tour took quite some time, and Verity was introduced to so many Kiromon words for plants that she felt she’d be lucky if she remembered one in ten. For someone who didn’t know much about the garden or gardening, she seemed to have quite a bit of knowledge about what grew there, and she had been letting the place grow wild, harvesting less and less with every passing year until eventually she just didn’t go there anymore. It filled Verity with something that wasn’t quite sadness. Loneliness, maybe. It felt like there was a song in there somewhere.

“I know there’s lots of work to do,” said Mizuki. “And I don’t blame you if you don’t want to do it. I’m willing to budget some rings for either tools and things, or seeds, or whatever else you need, but if you don’t want to do it, just say so. This was your idea.”

“It will be a good project,” said Verity, looking at the overgrown garden. The worst of the dead plants had been removed, and it was a bit easier to see the shape of things, especially with the tour having been concluded. What Verity really needed to make was a garden map, which she’d have to do with Mizuki’s help, in part to know what was what.

There was something poetical about it, Verity decided. It was a glorious garden, fallen from grace, and she was going to rehabilitate it. Perhaps it would be something grand and ornate, especially if she had Isra’s help, but perhaps it would simply be a garden. The parallels to her own life were, perhaps, a stretch, but she felt there was a song there, one that deserved a little bit more time than one simply made up on the spot. A garden of Kiromon delights, left to slowly deteriorate, but with new life breathed into it … Verity smiled, and thought about the lyrics, her two great passions melding in her mind.

Chapter 17 - The Blacksmith's Apprentice

When they were leaving to go shop, Mizuki debated how much money to take. She had a small crock that she kept some spare rings in, but this was three thousand rings, high denominations that would only be used for larger purchases.

“I don’t like having this much money,” said Mizuki. “I feel like there’s a target on my back.”

“You’re a sorc,” said Hannah. “Seems to me the money is safer with you.”

Mizuki gave an uncomfortable shrug, meant as a ‘yes, but all the same’, and Hannah didn’t press her on it.

They walked together, and Mizuki was happy to have someone to talk to, even if the conversation dipped toward religion a bit too often for her tastes.

“It’s maybe one in ten who feel some attraction to their own gender,” said Hannah. “Half that again who think of it as somethin’ core to them, a fact about themselves rather than just a thing they do. And half that again if it’s only their own gender.”

“Those numbers come from … the census?” asked Mizuki.

Hannah laughed. “No, just some guesses by the Church,” she said. “That sort of thing, the numbers, aren’t available at any level of governance, as the Editors didn’t see fit to include it. But you can see, of course, how there’d be problems bein’ in the minority like that, and part of what the Church of Garos does is to help with that. We’ve got a role in the community more than most of the clerics of other gods, ways that we help a specific sort of person. Especially in a place like this, you grow up havin’ these feelin’s that your parents never had, that your friends likely don’t have, and the Church of Garos is there to help you make sense of them, and on occasion, to play matchmaker, if that’s what’s needed.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. Religion was really not her particular cup of tea. She went to the temple for a sermon every now and then, but largely paid more attention to the people around her than to the clerics going on about … whatever. The temple was good for getting some community. She’d never known that Garos, or his church, played matchmaker, but then, why should she?

“And there are sermons and the like, when it’s one of the Garos months, or our time in the weekly rotation,” said Hannah. “I’d prefer we focused a bit more on the bits that were more core to Garos, but it’s for the community, to let them know about the struggles of others, to let people know they have a home if it’s needed, and all that. But the church does have a reputation, and it overshadows Garos a bit, again, in my opinion. And it’s interestin’ that men lovin’ men and women lovin’ women isn’t mentioned in the Garam Ashar at all, aside from a few lines that you might interpret that way, if your head was already there. The gods, as a whole, don’t seem like they give a fig about gender. So far as we know, they don’t have gender, though of course you have been ascribin’ it.”

“I’ve never gone to talk to the clerics,” said Mizuki. “So I guess I don’t know.”

“Gender is a human thing,” said Hannah. “Not godly at all. Now, people find their own meanin’ in what the gods say, what comes to us from revelations to the Chosen and the like, and I’d never begrudge them that, but still.”

Mizuki felt like Hannah did begrudge it, at least a little, but was worried that if she said something, Hannah would continue on with what felt, to Mizuki, like Hannah was toeing a line that wasn’t all that important to toe.

“It’s only been boys, for me,” said Mizuki.

“Ay, I appreciate a good man,” said Hannah.

“I meant romantically,” said Mizuki.

“Ay, me too,” said Hannah.

“Huh,” said Mizuki.

“Well, it’s caused problems for me, as you can understand,” said Hannah. “I like a more manly style of dress, and I’m a cleric of Garos, so of course people make their assumptions. And I know I don’t have a build like you or Verity do, slim and delicate, but that limits my options too.”

Mizuki didn’t think that she and Verity had the same build at all, namely because of the difference in height, but it was true that neither of them could be described as stocky.

“And the sorts of girls that go for me aren’t the sort of girls that I go for, more’s the shame,” Hannah continued.

“There’s a sort?” asked Mizuki.

“Oh, ay,” said Hannah. “Soft, gentle girls who want someone strong and burly, those are the sorts I seem to attract. But I like strong and burly myself, even, or especially, in a woman.”

“Sounds complicated,” said Mizuki. “And kind of exhausting.”

“Do you not have a type?” asked Hannah.

“Boys?” asked Mizuki.

“But what sort of boy, is what I’m askin’,” said Hannah. “Tall? Short? Quiet? Gruff?”

“I’ve dated them all,” said Mizuki, shrugging. “Usually I kind of … find something to appreciate? Someone shows me attention, and my mind highlights every good thing about them. I fall in love easily, I guess.”

“And out of love just as fast?” asked Hannah, arching an eyebrow.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “Mostly it just seems to go wrong.”

They arrived in the proper main street of Pucklechurch, and Mizuki was thankful that there was cause to change the topic.

They went into the blacksmith’s, and were greeted by a giant of man. He had to have been at least six and a half feet tall. His arms were like big hairy hams. He was hairy all over, in fact, red hair that covered his forearms, long hair tied back in a knot, and a surprisingly young face that was hidden behind a short but thick beard. He had eyebrows like two fuzzy caterpillars, and when he saw the two girls, the eyebrows shot up like they had been startled and wanted to escape.

“Hannah,” he said, and it was like his breath caught in his lungs for the last part of her name.

“Micah,” said Hannah with a nod. It wasn’t frosty, exactly, but it was missing some of the warmth that Hannah normally exuded. “You know Mizuki?”

“Ay,” he said, glancing at Mizuki only briefly before fixing his gaze on Hannah again. Saying they knew each other was putting it a bit strong, in Mizuki’s opinion, though they did know each other well enough to know each other’s name. Micah was hard to miss, the second tallest person in Pucklechurch beside the cleric of Xuphin. Mizuki had never paid him all that much attention, in part because he hadn’t grown up in Pucklechurch. Like Hannah, he wasn’t local, and the accent placed him as being from Cairbre or around those parts, same as her. His hair was a darker shade of red though.

“We’re lookin’ for armor,” said Hannah. “We’ve got a dungeon party put together and need protection. I’d like a helm and chestpiece for myself, and for Mizuki, a helm as well, maybe more. We’re hopin’ that you have somethin’ that can be fitted to us, because we’ll be goin’ out soon enough.”

“Ay,” he said slowly. “The master is out today, but I can find somethin’ for ye. Can ye give me a moment to go in back? And … I’d need to take measurements.” His accent wasn’t quite the same as Hannah’s, both thicker and with something different to it, and while they probably were both from Cairbre, maybe they were from different parts.

“Measurements are fine,” said Hannah. Again, it wasn’t as though she was being chilly with him, but there wasn’t any warmth, not like she usually had, and more than that, some of the boisterousness that Mizuki had come to expect was gone too.

Micah disappeared into the back of the shop, Mizuki got closer to Hannah. “Some history I should know about?”

“He’s sweet on me,” said Hannah.

“And … not your type?” asked Mizuki. She frowned a bit, because he seemed like exactly what Hannah had described as her type, big, burly, and strong enough to rip either of them in half.

“He wants to get married and put some babies in me,” said Hannah, sighing slightly.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “That’s a gross thing for a guy to say to you.”

Hannah rolled her eyes. “He didn’t say it, not in so many words, but,” she closed her mouth as Micah came back, and Mizuki hoped that he hadn’t heard any of that.

Micah laid two breastplates on the counter, front and back pieces held together by leather straps. One of them was almost certainly a henling, or at least Mizuki hoped that it was, since it had filigree on the front. Dungeon stuff sometimes ended up in local shops, and especially something like armor or weapons, which were basically only used by dungeoneers, it could sit there for ages.

“I’ll need to measure ye,” said Micah, holding up a marked tape measure. “Sorry.”

“No need to be sorry for it,” said Hannah. “It’s your job. Just tell me how to stand.”

Mizuki watched, not saying anything, while this went on. He started at the side, measuring from the top of her hip to her armpit, then around her neck, then her arms, which were quite thick, and finally, with large, timid hands, began to measure around her stomach and her bust.

“Micah,” said Hannah with a sigh. “Touchin’ people is a part of my job too, and if I were timid about it, there’d be problems. Now what I don’t want is ill-fittin’ armor, not when I’ll be fightin’ monsters in it, and travelin’ while wearin’ it.”

“Sorry,” said Micah. He went back to it, blushing but much more firm, and Mizuki kept her comments to herself.

When he was finished, he went over to the breastplates and picked up the one with the filigree. The metal was in pieces, allowing for some movement. “I think I could make this fit on ye, though I’d have to do some work, curve it out a bit. Four days, if ye’re in a rush.”

“We are,” said Hannah with a nod. “I know you do quality work.”

Micah nodded. His eyes were fixed on Hannah’s for a moment, and he finally turned to Mizuki, seeming reluctant. “And a helm for ye?” he asked.

“Yes, please,” said Mizuki. “My head is where I do my thinking. I would like it protected.”

“Try this one,” said Micah, reaching for one he’d brought from the back.

Mizuki slowly lowered it onto her head, and to her surprise, it felt like a perfect fit. A piece of metal came down right where her nose was, protecting it, but it didn’t obstruct her vision too much.

“Will ye be wantin’ full armor too?” he asked.

“Um,” said Mizuki, looking at Hannah. “Not if I can help it. I’m a sorc, so in theory I’ll be at the back. Hannah’s the one that will be rushing up.”

Micah blanched and looked at Hannah, but he kept whatever comments he had on that behind thin lips. “Well, ay,” he said.

“In due time, we’ll get her more,” said Hannah. “But it’s early days, and as she said, she’ll be the last one that’s likely to get hit. Full plate would be a waste of money for her. I can heal nearly anything that doesn’t pierce through, and most things that do.” She frowned a bit. “A plackart, to protect the guts, perhaps?” She gestured to her stomach, showing where it would go.

“Hard to do, without a breastplate,” said Micah. “And expensive, to have both.”

“I’ll see how the next dungeon goes,” said Mizuki. “I’m not convinced that I want to be pouring money into armor that I’d just be selling right back to you, no offense.”

Micah shook his head. “Most go into the dungeons with less, ay.” He looked at Hannah. “Some of them don’t come back though.”

“Don’t fret about me,” said Hannah. “Monsters in the dungeons we’re goin’ to, at least of our elevation, are no more dangerous than fightin’ three raccoons.”

Mizuki bit her lip at that, but said nothing. The obvious history between the two of them was making her a bit uncomfortable.

With the measurements taken and everything arranged, they handed their funds over to Micah, who made notes in a ledger and a promise to Hannah that her breastplate would be ready in four days time. Mizuki put the newly purchased helm into her bag, where it just barely fit. It had cost a shocking amount of money, though Mizuki hadn’t been under any delusion that armor was cheap.

“Seems like he still holds a candle for you,” said Mizuki once they were out of the shop.

“Ay,” said Hannah with a sigh. “I try not to be so nice to him, to lead him on and such, but it’s hard with such a man, who sees every kindness as a spark of attraction.”

“But you are attracted?” asked Mizuki. “At least a bit?”

“Ay,” said Hannah, shrugging. “But I’m only twenty, and to have children so soon, I’d feel like I hadn’t lived my life to my fullest.”

“And … you’re sure that’s what he wanted?” asked Mizuki.

“Oh, ay,” said Hannah. She shook her head. “But I’d rather not speak on it more, if that’s fine with you.”

This was the first time Mizuki could recall that Hannah had asked to drop a topic, and she didn’t know what to make of that. Clearly she wasn’t getting the full story. Mizuki felt bad for Micah, and inevitably, she got to thinking about what it might be like to date him. It was hard to help herself, but she did try.

Pucklechurch didn’t have all that much in the way of shops, but they went to what there was, and it felt to Mizuki like they were spending rings with abandon. Mizuki bought some pants and had them tailored, then a thick shirt with long sleeves that would help against superficial injuries and environmental concerns. Hannah gave some advice, and seemed to be a font of knowledge about dungeons. Almost everything that Hannah said about dungeons made them sound more dangerous rather than less, but Hannah was quick with assurances that this was all about planning for bad variance.

At the general store, they stopped to speak with Bethany for a bit. It was her father’s store, but Bethany had been running it for almost four years, and in Mizuki’s opinion, that was mostly because Bethany loved gossip.

“Your party is the talk of the town,” said Bethany with a smile. She had a mousy look and a bubbly personality, and within the last year she’d started dressing in shirts that left her shoulders bare, which Mizuki took as a sign that she was looking for someone to partner with.

“In a good way or a bad way?” asked Mizuki, wrinkling her nose. Bethany had been in the year below, and they knew each other fairly well, especially from their combined classes. They had never been close in school, but had slowly grown closer, in part because neither of them had settled down with a partner or children.

“Good,” said Bethany. “That Alfric — he’s made an impression.”

“Big city energy,” nodded Mizuki.

“Not so often you see so many mages in a party,” said Bethany. “No offense,” she said to Hannah.

“None taken,” said Hannah. “It’s a matter of luck, though a sorc would be worth a lot less without aether manipulation. The real luck, from my point of view, is not in the findin’ of people, but findin’ them without needin’ to break up a party. My guess, knowin’ Alfric a bit now, is that if we’d said no, or we’d already done all the dungeons around the area, he’d have gone to his alternates, and if they hadn’t worked out, he’d have gone down a list until he’d found someone that would agree to it. Easy enough to follow a man like that into the dungeon. If things had been different, he might well have come in here, askin’ you whether you’d ever been in a dungeon before, and if you hadn’t, whether you’d like to fill out the team.”

“I actually have been in the local dungeon,” said Bethany. She smiled. “And I resolved that one dungeon was all I ever needed to go into.”

“Who’d you go with?” asked Mizuki, frowning. “And when?” She had imagined that if Bethany had gone in the dungeon, it would have been hard to avoid news of it.

“Two years ago,” said Bethany. “With the Pedder boys and Neil. It was after you’d stopped hanging around with them.”

That did explain it. Things had gone wrong, and Mizuki had made herself scarce for a bit, especially around Bethany, whenever possible. Mizuki had been the token girl of their group, until it became clear that all three of the Pedder boys had feelings of one kind or another for her, and it became an absolute mess. She accepted at least some of the blame for it.

“And how’d you make out?” asked Hannah.

“Horribly,” Bethany laughed. “We cleared it, but we were pretty bloodied up, or at least the boys were. We stumbled our way back to Pucklechurch.” She reached up and touched her earrings, which were jet black in the center with silver swirls around the outside. “I got thirty rings and these, along with a scar on my leg.”

“Entad earrings,” said Mizuki. They had a very faint trace of magic about them, a minor disruption to the aether. “What do they do?”

“They let me hear better,” said Bethany, shrugging. “Only a little bit. It’s like … well, like I’ve got ears all over my head, I guess. I can pick up soft noises a bit better, and don’t need to be turned towards people. Not worth risking my life over.”

“I could remove the scar for you, if you’d like,” said Hannah. “I’d imagine it was left there through Oeyr’s rapid healin’?”

“Oh, the scar is — well,” said Bethany. “I was going to have it removed, but I liked the look of it, and no one can say it wasn’t hard won.”

Mizuki might have said that it wasn’t hard won, but she really had no idea. Her own three thousand rings and awesome spoon hadn’t felt hard won. It had been scary, but she hadn’t really done all that much. Alfric had taken the brunt of the punishment and done virtually all of the planning and getting the party together, on top of dealing with selling everything. She felt like she owed him, and wondered whether she should have offered him some of her share, but no one else had done that either, so maybe it was a stupid idea.

“How many are you going to do?” asked Bethany. “Alfric made it seem like this was a serious venture, not just a few local dungeons.”

“I think we’ll end up doin’ quite a few,” said Hannah. “At the rate we’re plannin’ to go, a year of dungeons would be fifty, all told, and if luck is on our side, or I s’pose even if it’s not, we’d get a great many entads from it. There’s lots you can do, if you’ve got fifty good entads to your name.”

“Unless they’re like this?” asked Bethany, gesturing to her earrings.

“Well, ay,” said Hannah. “But if you do enough dungeons, eventually you strike some valuable ore, ay? And by the numbers, we’d be likely to run into somethin’ that we could live off of, whether that’s somethin’ productive or somethin’ we could use for labor.”

“Alfric wants to do thousands, I’m sure,” said Mizuki. “Big city energy. But hearing about how things went for you … I’m starting to think that he’s pretty competent.”

“Well, our little adventure wasn’t all bad,” said Bethany. “I did get the earrings. And the Pedder boys went off to do another two dungeons, but lost the will to do more, even though they were sure they’d get rich off it. Klaus nearly died, and then their mother put her foot down.”

“Nearly died?” asked Mizuki. Klaus was the youngest of the three. “Was he okay?”

“You should talk to them,” said Bethany. “It’s been some time. But yes, he was fine, nothing that a cleric couldn’t heal, but it was a near thing, mostly in terms of getting to the cleric. Now, they’d gone in with only four, and it was the Liberfell dungeon, which they shouldn’t have been able to go into in the first place. They were trying to get a better payout, I think. It was definitely something a lot of people were talking about. I’m surprised you didn’t hear.”

“Well, I don’t have magical earrings, not yet,” said Mizuki. She laughed, but it felt weak. The falling out with the Pedder boys had hit her hard, and learning that they’d risked their lives without her … well, it was certainly in keeping with their nature, but there was a familiar sour feeling.

“We’ll be careful,” said Hannah. “Alfric is about as good of a dungeoneer as you can get for someone just startin’ out, and he comes from a long line of them, it seems. Most people who go into dungeons pass a simple test from the League, then go off like they know a thing or two, and it’s no wonder that they come out injured. We went in, and came out with not a scratch on us, and I don’t just attribute that to luck. It was a hard dungeon, come to that.”

“I got a neat spoon out of it,” said Mizuki. “It can change shape to almost anything that’s still a spoon.”

Bethany laughed at that, and Mizuki pulled the spoon out of her bag to show it off.

They bought quite a bit, including some frozen chicken and a fair number of vegetables for dinner, then said their goodbyes to Bethany. It was even more rings gone, enough that there could be a meal for four, plus more food for the days ahead, and Mizuki reminded herself that she was flush with money, and that this wasn’t a thing to worry about.

“Sorry if I was boastin’ in there,” said Hannah. “I didn’t mean to, but I’ve some pride in our party, and Alfric in particular. People do die in dungeons.”

“You said it was safe,” said Mizuki.

“Oh, ay,” said Hannah. “Mostly people die in the bigger dungeons, in places with more magic floatin’ around. Some of it’s variance, worse than what we’ve seen so far. That you can’t blame someone for. But more than it should be, it’s people who have no business bein’ in the place they’re in. The Pedder boys are friends of yours, or were, I gather, but a dungeon needs a bit of respect. People forget that.”

She sounded almost angry about it, and Mizuki had no idea why that might be, except that perhaps it was a cleric thing, or the fact that Hannah seemed to take strong stances on most things. Some people just had Opinions. For her own part, Mizuki didn’t feel like she had respected the dungeons nearly enough, not for that first one.

If she was going to be a dungeoneer, she wasn’t going to make that same mistake twice.

Chapter 18 - The Next Day's Weather

Isra moved through the woods, following a path the deer normally took. The world was looking different to her, and she didn’t know how much of that was in her head. Did normal people follow deer paths? Could they even find them? She would have to ask, and there was a chance that they would give her odd looks, and ask her what a deer path was, as though that wasn’t completely obvious. Of course, most people were oblivious, but she was having to reckon with the fact that they weren’t just oblivious. They didn’t have the same experience of the world as she did.

Other people couldn’t talk to animals, or if they did, the animals didn’t listen very well. She had seen them talk to animals though, like the old woman who yelled at the crows to stop pooping on her roof, or the way that someone like Mizuki talked to her pet. She had thought that some of this was simply performance, a way to do the same pretending that they did for so many other things, but it was clear now that it was something else. A handful of confusing conversations about talking to animals had been cleared up.

Other people couldn’t predict the next day’s weather. What else did other people not know? What else couldn’t they do? There were so many things about her life that Isra was now realizing she took for granted. Could normal people identify a bird by its song? It seemed equally plausible that they could or they could not. Could they see through a bird’s eyes? The more she thought about it, the more she thought that perhaps they couldn’t. She thought back to all the times her father had seemed oblivious or unaware, and in retrospect perhaps that was simply because he couldn’t see the woods like she did. She was always better at setting traps, always faster to find the deer, always more capable of tending to their garden or finding forage.

Could normal people coax a plant to grow? Isra thought that perhaps they couldn’t. She wondered what would happen if they tried. Other people had gardens though, so why was that? Were they just planting seeds and hoping for the best? Weeding and watering, and that was it?

She stopped for a moment as another thought occurred to her, one that was frightening. Did normal people know which plants were good to eat? She relaxed slightly as she thought about it, because of course they must know. They ate plants. How could they eat the right plants without knowing which ones were good to eat? She tried to imagine it, and her imagination failed, because the only thing she could think was that perhaps they got sick and learned that way. It was how most animals did it, after all, if they weren’t born with the right instincts about which to go after. But if it were true for people, then that meant everyone in Pucklechurch had gotten sick from plants at some point, or … they told each other which plants were safe to eat and which weren’t. Isra contemplated that as she moved past the birch trees that marked the start of her territory.

“How do you know which plants are good to eat?” Isra imagined herself asking Mizuki, who seemed to cook.

“My parents taught me,” Mizuki might answer.

“How did they know?” Isra might ask.

“Their parents taught them,” Mizuki might reply, and Isra could imagine a confused or possibly troubled look on the other girl’s face. Or worse, an embarrassed ‘why are you saying that, what is wrong with you’ smile.

“Someone must have firsthand knowledge, at some point,” Isra would have said.

It was difficult to imagine what the answer would be. Perhaps Mizuki wouldn’t know, or had never thought about it, or perhaps she would say, “oh, we pray to the gods about it” or “every year we have someone test all of the plants in the area by eating them” or “we eat what the pigs like” or something like that.

Isra was within sight of her house when she stumbled upon the obvious: people could just have a woods witch tell them.

Of course, it was entirely possible that Isra was wrong, and people knew which plants were good in the same way that she knew. There were a few conversations with her father that would make more sense if it was a skill unique to her though, times when she had been little and eating berries, only to be stopped by her father. Her father had been, perhaps, confused about whether the berries were good to eat, rather than worried she would spoil her appetite. She had thought that he was just playing at the game of lies, telling her the berries were bad because it was easier than explaining the real reason he didn’t want her to eat them. She had simply accepted that: people told obvious lies sometimes because that was just how things were done.

Isra’s home was relatively small, with a low-slung roof that was covered with sod. Whoever had originally owned it, they had dug into the ground quite a bit, leaving the narrow windows sitting just a few inches above the forest floor. When she was little, Isra’s father had complained that this let mice and bugs have an easy way in, so Isra had politely requested that they stay away, and that had done the trick. Bugs were barely thinking things, always ready to obey a plainly stated request, and mice were intelligent and had a skittish courteousness. It was clear now that Isra’s father had complained because he had no recourse against the bugs.

There were three birds perched on the roof above the door. She had asked them to guard her house while she was gone, and though it would have been fine for them to spend their time in the trees, inconspicuous, they were ravens, and liked to make a show of things. She hadn’t, as Alfric put it, ‘told them to’. Birds needed negotiation and requests, not instructions. Perhaps, thinking about it, he hadn’t meant to make such a distinction.

“Thank you,” she said, giving a bow. “I’ll bring out some food in just a bit.” The ravens didn’t do it for the food, they did it because they knew each other, but they had given up a fair amount of forage to keep watch over her house, and getting food for them was just basic manners. She went into the house for just long enough to take out three hard boiled eggs, which she kept in the smaller chiller for just such a purpose, and placed them on the ground, where the ravens began picking them apart.

With that matter settled, Isra returned to the house and put her pack down, then began shrugging out of her clothes. Twenty-four miles over two days hadn’t been particularly easy, and it had left her worse for the wear. Her skin had built up oils and dried sweat, and there was a smell she didn’t particularly like. The clothes would have to be washed, that much was clear, but for the first things first, she would have to wash herself.

The same tank fed both the kitchen and the bathroom, and was filled with a single waterstone. Because she’d been gone for two days, the tank was filled up, and she was thankful that the waterstones had stopped themselves from flooding her house. They were designed so that they would stop creating water from just the pressure of water in the tank, but Isra didn’t fully trust it. It was odd to think that the pipes they had sold off to the ectad merchant would be used to make something as vital as a waterstone.

Showers were a bit of a process, and when possible, Isra would make a trek out to the nearby river and wash herself there. The thought of walking another mile really didn’t appeal to her though, and so the process needed to be followed. The first step was to take the married heating and chilling elements from the stove and bring them to the tank of water, then unmarry them and put the heating element into the tank. It would take some time to heat, and Isra busied herself with a quick lunch while she waited.

There was quite a bit in the way of food, even though she’d been gone for two days and done no hunting in that time. She quickly ate one of the hardboiled eggs from the chiller, then opened a jar of pickled carrots that she’d bartered for a few market days prior. Isra loved pickles, perhaps more than any other food. After that, it was a piece of hard, crusty bread, the kind that kept for a fair amount of time, a piece of smoked venison, and a hunk of sharp cheddar, which, like the pickles, had been bought from the market.

She wished that she had stayed for stew at Mizuki’s, but there had been too much on her mind, and she did her best thinking away from people. Isra was a barely passable cook, though she was good at smoking and salting meat, and could do enough to get by. She made pickles and jams, and other ferments, but hadn’t been able to get the marriage of flavors right, not like the pickle woman at the market.

With her quick, cold meal concluded, Isra pressed a hand against the side of the tank to feel the temperature. Finding it adequate, she began her shower.

The amount of money she’d made from the dungeon was astonishing. There were certain things she’d been saving up for, aside from the nebulous plans for a trip, and now it seemed possible that she would be able to buy them all in a single fell swoop. A second water tank for the house would be ideal, though she had no idea where she would put it. Many houses had two tanks, one with hot water and the other with cold, and Isra had always thought that was an extravagance. Now, it was something she could rather easily afford, and without feeling as though the money needed to be saved for other purposes.

There were all kinds of things to replace, as well. She had no practical knowledge of woodworking, and needed a new chair for the table, since one of the two she’d had broke in the spring, and the other had a wobble. The simple stove had only a single element pair, and it had degraded slightly, making it cool to the touch even when the elements were married. The loss of power to the heating element meant that it took longer to get hot water as well. Her savings had bought her a large chiller for meat, which was sitting outside and had taken quite some time and effort to lug toward the house, but it was already full, and she had been thinking about getting another. Beyond that, she had three outfits she wore, and might like another, and there were certainly implements she didn’t have. What she wanted most of all, now that she’d seen the inside of an entad shop, was more entads. Each one was magical and unique, and there was something of a collector in her, as attested to by the shelves that were filled with rocks, branches, feathers, and all other manner of natural materials. The plants she collected had a home in a little side garden, one of each of the major and minor species, but she had begun to run out of room for them even there, especially since she liked to let them expand and grow where they pleased. When she picked up the colored rocks from Alfric, she would have to figure out a proper place of display.

The house was in need of repairs as well. Pieces of wood had begun to rot, and there was a leak into the bathroom, which was not the worst place for it, but still inconvenient. One of the window panes had been broken, and Isra had tried her best to replace it with a piece of glass she’d bought from in town, but she’d gotten frustrated after spending what felt like half a day on it, and eventually just patched it with a thick piece of birch bark and some sap. Her father had taught her many valuable things, and valuable skills, but home repair had never been his forte, and some of the damage that time and the elements had done, Isra had no way to undo. She had asked the water not to leak into her bathroom, and it had replied that it was incapable of doing otherwise, which was typical for water. That, too, she had patched, but it was a poor patch, not in fitting with the rest of the house, and it was clear that she would need someone’s help.

The house was a secret, which was a bit of a problem. People from the hex had come on three separate occasions, all when she was younger, but she had known they were coming from quite some distance away, and left with as much as she could handle, obscuring her tracks. From what Alfric had said, they probably knew that she lived there, and given it had been two years, they had probably given up trying to catch her. One of her father’s friends had taken her in on a temporary basis after her father had passed, and had told her that a girl of thirteen wouldn’t be allowed to live out in the woods on her own. She had already dodged the local school, with her father’s help, but if the hexmaster found out about her, then it was likely she would, at best, be forced to live with some well-meaning couple in Pucklechurch. The hex beastmaster had found Isra once, but only by going to her hunting grounds, and she had told her to take less from the woods, then inquired as to where she lived. She had lied, and thought that it was probably an obvious lie. She’d avoided the town for a month after that, living off the land instead of trading things in, and when she returned, it was with great caution. She was worried that someone would spring out of an alley and arrest her. That hadn’t happened. From what Alfric had said, they knew who she was, and where she was living, but had given up on her, which was a bit of a relief.

Now she was eighteen, but not quite willing to give up the secret of the house. There were a few that knew, her father’s old friends, but she spoke with them little, and they never came to visit. If she needed work done on the house, which she did, she supposed that she could see if one of them was interested, but her father had been secretive and mistrustful. They were friends in a weak sense, people who could be leaned on from time to time, but with whom no great secrets had been shared. And Isra had never forgotten the theft, which had been by one of those same friends. It had made it hard to trust. And if the house was no secret to the powers of the hex, if she was known and tracked, perhaps she could simply hire someone who she would watch carefully.

Isra’s father had loved Tarbin, and often mourned it. He hadn’t said why they couldn’t go back, only that it was impossible. Tarbin was quite some ways away to the east, and Isra had only seen it through some of the books her father had brought over. It was a place of tall towers and baking sun, lush jungles that hugged the banks of rivers and deserts beyond them. Pucklechurch was far different, in very many ways, which perhaps accounted for some of the alienation that Isra felt when she went into town. The other part of it, apparently, was that she was a woods witch and the others were not.

The water from the tank drained through a grate and into the basin below, where an evaporator was sitting and working at removing the water. As the basin filled, dried out muck was rehydrated, and the smell of it was strong enough that Isra decided it was time to once again remove the grate and scrape the basin clean of the accumulated oil, hair, and general gunk. It would have to be the next day though, once the dehydrator had plugged away at the moisture and dried everything. It was one of Isra’s least favorite jobs in the entire house, but it was at least one that she knew how to do, and once it was done, it wouldn’t need to be done again for half a year at least, more if she was diligent about bathing in the stream as often as she could. She had often contemplated cutting her hair, to make the mucking out easier, since the Tarbin headscarf meant that no one saw it anyway, but she liked having long hair.

When the shower concluded, the water was getting overly hot. She had drained the tank too much, and the heating element was having too easy a time of it. She used tongs to fish it out, and remarried it to the cooling element, then toweled herself off and laid in her bed for a moment, resting and thinking, before getting dressed.

A party. She had never been in a party before. It had always been her and her father, until it was just her. She wasn’t sure what to think of these people. Already, she felt that they fit together in a way that excluded her. But even if that were the case, the money and entads were too enticing. Before Alfric had come along, she hadn’t even really known that was what she wanted. Before the dungeon, she’d still had reservations. A dungeon was like hunting, she thought, but without any of the regret of having to kill an innocent animal who only wanted to survive.

With the water still quite hot, she decided to make herself a cup of spiced tea, one made from various herbs that she’d foraged in the weeks prior. Dried herbs weren’t nearly as good as fresh ones, but she kept long braids as a matter of habit so that she could get through the winter months and still have something warm to drink. The kettle took only a moment on the stove to get hot, and she used a combination of dandelion and chicory root, which together had a nicely earthly, burnt flavor to them.

She was excited for the second dungeon, and hoped that they would go soon.

~~~

The next day, Isra had a cup of morning tea, this time using actual tea leaves from a bush that sat outside her house, and got properly dressed to warp to the center of the hex. She checked herself over twice, making sure that she had everything. She’d had a constant fear, with the warp, that she would somehow go through naked and end up in the center of town with no clothes on. It had been a nightmare of hers for quite some time, sometimes in lesser versions, like going in without her headscarf or her pack. She had gone into town without her headscarf before, but that had been on purpose. She’d felt too naked without it, and also like she was disrespecting her father, who had seemed to place great importance on it, especially once she came of age.

When Isra arrived at Mizuki’s house, it was bustling with activity. All four members of the team were there, with Mizuki preparing lunch for them.

“Isra!” called Mizuki. “You made it!”

“I did,” said Isra.

“And have you thought about it?” asked Mizuki. “Do you think you’re a woods witch?”

“I do,” said Isra. “It will be important to go find the other. I have questions.”

“We can probably answer some questions too,” said Alfric, who had come in from the living room. The couch and chairs there had been covered the day before, but now the covers had been removed, revealing soft cushions of rich leather. Hannah and Verity stayed there, in low conversation with one another.

“I was reading a book last night,” said Isra. “A book from Tarbin. It was about a boy who discovered he had magical powers.”

“Oh?” asked Alfric. “And … you think it’s like that?”

“It’s a book my father read to me,” said Isra. “I don’t think it’s like that though. I think it’s like discovering that everyone else doesn’t have magical powers.”

“Well, technically, everyone but Alfric has magical powers,” said Mizuki.

“We understand what you mean though,” said Alfric. “And we’ll help you in any way that we can. Having a druid in the dungeon might be a powerful thing, it’s just not something that I had planned for. If I had, I’d have read more books on druids in Dondrian. From what I know, the animals and plants in the dungeons are unlikely to respond well to you, but you’ll still have diagnostic powers that will be virtually invaluable.”

“Diagnostic?” asked Isra. “The word is unfamiliar.”

“It means figuring things out,” said Mizuki. She was making a type of lunch that Isra had had once before, with thinly sliced cold meats between two slices of bread, called a sandwich. The way that Mizuki was doing it seemed alien though, because she was using far more ingredients than seemed reasonable, two types of meat, a layer of greens, slices of tomato, cheese, two sauces … it seemed extravagant, for a lunchtime meal.

“You want me to tell you about the animals after we’ve killed them?” asked Isra.

“That’s one of the applications, I think,” said Alfric. “Dungeon eggs or newborns can also be fairly profitable, though you have to keep them sealed, and … I’m not so sure about where we would sell them. There are markets, in Dondrian. I suppose I don’t know how they get the dungeon animals in the first place.”

“Are they really dungeon animals if you take them out of the dungeon?” asked Mizuki.

“They are,” nodded Alfric. “They’re considered a bastle until the first viable breeding generation. After that, the terms for them are different, but it’s not very important for us, since we won’t be the ones breeding them.”

“We won’t?” asked Isra.

“Well,” said Alfric. “We could raise bastles, or clandes if we find plants, but we’ll be away from any potential farm for most of our time, so we would need someone involved in plant and animal husbandry, and we would need to be able to pay them.”

“Why are those sandwiches so big?” asked Verity, looking at what Mizuki was preparing. The sandwiches had grown in complexity and height as Isra watched, and were now in the final stages of assembly.

“Are they too big?” asked Mizuki, lowering herself until the sandwiches were at eye level. “I don’t think they’re too big.”

“How are we meant to fit them in our mouths?” asked Verity.

“We’ll cut them in half,” said Mizuki, making a chopping motion with her hand, then taking down one of the knives from the wall.

“Is that actually going to help anything?” asked Verity.

“Personally, I like a sandwich that you need a strategy to eat,” said Alfric.

“Can you add some egg to mine, or is it too late?” asked Hannah.

“I’m not making you a fried egg,” said Mizuki as she cut the sandwiches.

“Och,” said Hannah. “Not fried, a hard boiled one, sliced thin.”

Mizuki stopped cutting and blinked at her. “Are you serious?”

“It’s traditional,” said Hannah. “Don’t look at me as though I have a second head, ay.”

“Traditional to Cairbre?” asked Alfric.

“Where else?” asked Hannah.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “The seminary?”

“They don’t eat eggs there,” said Hannah, rolling her eyes. “Too oblong.”

“What?” asked Verity. “You’re making that up.”

“‘s’true,” nodded Hannah. “In the seminary, there are much pains taken to eat only that which brings us closer to Garos. It’s silly, of course, but the thought is that it might help with a better awareness of what it means to be a cleric, for it is said in the Book of Garam Ashar, ‘The studious man spends his life in devotion to his subject of study, lest he split from his path.’ The only real way to be an expert is to devote yourself, mind, body, and soul, to live, breathe, eat, and dream the object of your obsession.”

Isra was watching Hannah as she spoke. It wasn’t the first time she’d quoted the Book of Garam Ashar. When she did, her voice changed somewhat, with her accent becoming less thick, as though she was mimicking a teacher. Isra’s bookshelf was quite short, but she had all six of the holy books. She had read them all at least once. She’d hated the Qymr Mos, but the Book of Garam Ashar was inoffensive, if a bit strange.

“Wait,” said Mizuki. “Was it just hard-boiled eggs, or were fried eggs fine?”

“Just hard-boiled, ay,” said Hannah. “Take a form with asymmetry and give some symmetry to it, and that would be no problem.”

“Are we ready to eat?” asked Alfric. He’d been eyeing the sandwiches.

“I don’t keep hard-boiled eggs in the house, so we’re good to go,” said Mizuki. “Keep in mind the dining room hasn’t been used in a few years, and I didn’t have time to dust.”

“I dusted,” said Hannah.

“Oh,” said Mizuki as she scooped up the plates. “Well, thank you.”

The dining room was just off the kitchen, and was dominated by a large wooden table. It was, curiously, square, and set in the middle of a square room. There was seating for eight, and Hannah shared a side with Mizuki.

“Whoever built this place liked symmetry,” said Hannah. “It’s refreshin’. Reminds me of the seminary.”

“The worship of the gods is a little different in Kiromo,” said Mizuki. “They have a philosophy of ‘living by the gods’, and one of Garos’ domains there is buildings. So buildings, according to Kiromo philosophy, have to be really in line with Garos, if they’re going to be places of importance. When my grandfather came to Pucklechurch, he was a powerful, important guy, and he wanted a place that would serve as a kind of … well, temple, which is why the house is the way it is. The timbers of the house are actually all from a single tree, and the stones are all from a single block.”

Hannah had been eating her sandwich, but stopped as Mizuki talked. “They are?”

Mizuki nodded. “All imported from Kiromo by my grandfather when he came. The tree was, ah, a giant cherrywood, I think, a huge tree almost as thick as this entire house. They don’t cut them down often, but he had a thick part of it or something.”

“Well then I can’t work on the house now, can I?” asked Hannah.

“You can’t?” asked Mizuki.

“It’s a religious rite,” said Hannah. “A split tree or stone like that is probably testament to Kesbin.”

“God of Nothing?” asked Alfric. His sandwich was halfway gone, and Isra had hardly touched hers. “Why?”

“Division and subtraction are aspects of Kesbin’s will,” said Verity. “A divided tree or divided stone is a powerful invocation.”

“I should have thought of it,” said Hannah. “I saw the testimony to Garos in the design of this place, but failed to see the others.” She clucked her tongue. “This will need some thinkin’ on.”

“Can’t you just do it anyway?” asked Mizuki. “You’re not a cleric of Kesbin, right?”

“Already I’ve done too much,” said Hannah. “An invocation like this, strong as it is, is nothing to be trifled with.”

“But what happens if you do?” asked Mizuki. “Like, how would it be bad?”

“Oh, probably nothin’ much,” nodded Hannah. “Most likely we’d get a visit from a cleric of Kesbin, if it was noticed. They can levy fines through the hexmaster, same as any church.”

Mizuki relaxed. “And that’s it? We wouldn’t be,” she hesitated. “Hexed?”

Hannah laughed. “Imagine that!” she said. “Imagine thinkin’ in this day and age that you’d be hexed of all things for makin’ changes to a house!”

Mizuki scowled. “Well I don’t know, do I?” she asked. “I’ve never run afoul of the churches.”

“Yes you have!” said Hannah, still laughing. “You have loads of times.”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “But not like … sacrilege.”

“Well,” said Hannah. “It’s fine.”

“What’s a hex?” asked Isra. These were decidedly not in the holy books.

“It means six,” said Alfric. Isra had known this. “But in this context, a ‘hex’ is a godly curse of some kind, administered by a cleric of the six gods.”

“What does it do?” asked Isra. She had been eating away at her sandwich as the others talked, and was now almost finished.

“Varies by the gods,” said Hannah. “They’re not really used anymore, except in dungeons, and Garos has the weakest of the lot, aside from Qymmos. Might be better to think of a hex as the opposite of a miracle, or blessin’, or whatever you want to call the things that a cleric like me can do.”

“A spell,” said Mizuki, nodding. Hannah gave her a look that suggested disagreement, but said nothing.

“You deal in healing though,” said Isra, feeling confused. “What harm could you do?”

“Oh, well, not much as yet, but I’m still just a journeyman,” said Hannah. “And there’s not much ability to practice the sorts of things I’d need to call on. But if a cleric of Garos wants to hurt a person, she’ll lay hands on him. There are two general methods, one easy and clean, the other hard and brutal. The first one, the easy one —” she hesitated. “Does anyone mind me sharin’ this over lunch?”

“I think I’m done anyway,” said Verity, pushing her plate forward. She’d eaten only half of what Mizuki had prepared. “It was delicious, but there was simply way too much of it.”

“I’m done too,” said Alfric. He looked at Verity’s plate. “Unless you mind me taking that other half?”

“Be my guest,” Verity replied. Alfric reached over and plucked the half sandwich up.

“I don’t mind,” said Mizuki. “Unless it involves guts.”

“And if it does involve guts?” asked Hannah.

Mizuki had taken a bite of her sandwich, and took a moment to chew and swallow it before answering. “I don’t like guts.”

“Well,” said Hannah. “The first method of attack, for a cleric of Garos, and again, I can’t say that I’d fare too well if I tried, not in combat, but I s’pose it’s somethin’ that’ll get tested sooner than later — the first method is easy and clean. It’s just the reverse of symmetrical healin’, isn’t it? You find a wound on their body, and mirror it on the other side. One slash across their skin becomes two, a puncture gets doubled and they bleed out twice as fast. Now, obviously it’s not great, because you have to be touchin’ them, and they have to already be hurt, but I could manage it, if I had to.”

“And the second?” asked Isra.

Hannah eyed Mizuki, who was wolfing down her sandwich like she was worried someone was about to say something that would make her lose her appetite. When she’d swallowed the last bite, she gave a thumbs up to Hannah.

“Well, the body isn’t all symmetrical, as a sad matter of fact,” said Hannah. “Even leavin’ aside the ways that arms, legs, skin, and so on are different if you’re not symmetricalized, there are places where we’re just plain squiggly.” She patted her stomach. “And yes, that includes the guts. The guts weave back and forth inside the body like a drunkard on his way home. And since the body is so otherwise symmetrical, a cleric like me could lay hands on someone and make the guts suddenly mirror themselves.” She shook her head. “Nasty way to die, because it’s not fast. Usually with symmetrical guts you bleed out before you can starve. And there’s no way to fix it, because that kind of thing is beyond even the highest cleric of Oeyr.”

“Welp,” said Mizuki. “Definitely glad I finished before you said that.”

“The heart isn’t symmetrical either,” said Isra.

“No, it’s not,” said Hannah. “And you could kill someone that way too, it would just be a smaller target, harder to do, and a killin’ hex from Garos, well, the point isn’t just in the killin’, if you catch me.”

“You’re talking about traditionally though,” said Alfirc. “It’s not something that clerics do now, because they’re not in the business of hexing.” This was directed at Isra, and she appreciated it.

“Oh, ay,” said Hannah. “And shame on me if I made anyone feel different.” She looked around the table at the other four. “It’s part of the old ways, the very old ways. You’d get in a lot of trouble if you did any of that on a person.”

“What are the other hexes?” asked Isra, mostly out of morbid curiosity.

“Ay,” said Hannah, thinking for a moment. “Let me think for a moment and remember.” She drummed her fingers on the table, then looked around. “Is this too much?”

“I’m done eating, so I’m going to take a walk,” said Mizuki. “I’d rather not get into the gruesomeness of it.”

“I’ll accompany you, if that’s alright,” said Alfric, getting up from his seat and taking his plate. “Can I clear anyone else’s plates?”

“I should actually probably do dishes first,” said Mizuki.

The plates were cleared away, and then it was just Hannah, Isra, and Verity.

“You want to hear, ay?” asked Hannah.

“Yes,” said Verity. “I’m interested.”

“Well,” said Hannah. “The hex of Oeyr, God of Emergence, is usually through breakin’ somethin’. Sometimes bones, sometimes makin’ rips in your muscles, especially your heart.” Hannah tapped her chest. There were two full sections of the Oeya Ashar devoted to ‘defects’, but in Isra’s opinion, it was a relatively small area of what the holy text focused on. Oeyr was not the God of Disorder or God of Asymmetry, but the God of Emergence, how things followed rules with sometimes surprising consequences. And yes, chaos and defects were often a result.

“The hex of Bixzotl, God of Copies,” said Hannah, “Is in copyin’ somethin’ internal to you, like growin’ you a new heart, which kills you before the copy can fade. The worse one is copyin’ all your blood, which also kills you.” She rubbed her chin. “I don’t think that Qymmos, God of Sets, has a hex, but to tell you the truth, I may be wrong and shouldn’t have spoken with such authority earlier. Handy people, but not so good at the physical. Then there’s Kesbin, God of Nothing, and Xuphin, God of Infinity. Kesbin is easy, you just get somethin’ removed, and at its worst, from an archbishop or the like, the whole of you just vanishes. For Xuphin, it’s usually cancer.”

Isra frowned. “You gave their titles.”

“Well,” said Hannah. “I did. I … wasn’t sure you knew your gods, ay? Meant no offense by it.”

Isra kept frowning. She didn’t know what to say in response.

“Thank you for going through that,” said Verity. “It was informative.”

“Like I said,” Hannah shrugged. “Hexes aren’t really used against people anymore, and shame that they ever were.” She looked at Verity. “Kept your lunch?”

“Why wouldn’t I have?” asked Verity. “The dead things we saw in the dungeon were far worse than any description you could have given.”

“Good,” nodded Hannah.

“We have the gods in Tarbin,” said Isra. “I have the six holy books in my home. I’ve read them.”

Hannah nodded. “I meant no offense,” she said again. “I only thought there were things you didn’t know, and it might be a way to say for you so you didn’t have to sit and wonder, or feel like a dunce by askin’ about it.”

“Not that you’d be a dunce just because you didn’t know something,” said Verity, rushing to follow Hannah.

“It was a kind gesture,” said Isra, making an effort to relax. Sometimes with the animals, they realized that they had made a mistake and took some time to calm down. She endeavored to be better than them. “Thank you for the thought.”

“No problem,” said Hannah. “Now, since you’re here and all, can we finally see what you can do?”

Chapter 19 - I Suppose You're Wondering Why I Gathered You Here

Alfric and Mizuki walked together. He was following behind her as she went down a trail behind her house, one that had clearly been put into place quite some time ago. It wasn’t in need of much care though, and Mizuki happily walked along.

“I’m not squeamish,” she said, looking back at him.

“No?” asked Alfric. “No one said you were?”

“I don’t know why Hannah likes to talk about gross things, that’s all,” said Mizuki.

“She’s a cleric,” said Alfric. “She’s trained as a healer. She’s learned how to deal with injuries and disease.”

“Well, fine, but she doesn’t have to talk about it,” said Mizuki. “Especially not at the dinner table. She doesn’t have to delight in,” she waved her hand, “Hexes and things.”

“I’ll talk to her,” said Alfric.

“I can talk to her myself,” said Mizuki, swatting away a branch that was in her way. “I’m just complaining to you because you get it, right?”

“I do,” said Alfric. He had already wished a few times that Hannah was more circumspect in what she said.

“I feel bad, because I know she had some hurtful business with her guild or something, but I kind of get why that would be,” said Mizuki.

“Yeah,” said Alfric. This was the first he’d heard about something going wrong with Hannah’s guild, but it seemed like the kind of thing he’d want to ask Hannah about later, rather than getting Mizuki’s version of it. “But we’ve just gotten over the bump with Verity, so I’m hoping that we can keep things nice and level going into the next dungeon. Intra-party strife can kill a party quickly.” It was also quite difficult to predict, in his experience.

“So I should just shut up?” asked Mizuki, swatting aside another branch.

“You should understand that we’re all in this together,” said Alfric. “We don’t have to like each other, but it does help things. Try to find common ground. Try to build bridges. Talk to each other.” These were his father’s words coming out of his mouth. He hoped that his father was right.

“Well, okay,” said Mizuki. She stopped, and Alfric stopped behind her. “We’re here.”

Alfric looked ahead, and saw that they were in a circular clearing, which had clearly been made that way by human hands. There were saplings at the edges of it, attempting to reclaim the space, and the grass was tall. In the center of the clearing was a giant rock, twice as tall as Alfric and as thick around as a wagon. It was covered with lichen, but there were carved runes visible on it.

“What is this?” asked Alfric.

“Magic stone,” said Mizuki. She walked forward, brushing past the tall grass as she moved along the thin trail, until she was standing next to it.

“What does it do?” asked Alfric.

“Oh, I have no idea,” said Mizuki. “It’s ancient stuff, at least two thousand years old, maybe even more. Same with the portal, right? A bunch of runes telling you stuff, and no one knows how to read them.”

“There are people in Dondrian that know,” said Alfric.

“Well, sure, I didn’t mean that it was lost,” said Mizuki. “But you go off the color, or whether they light up, right?”

“We do,” said Alfric. He frowned as he looked over the stone. When the Editors had made the change that had given every hex a dungeon, it had been an enormous benefit for the world, even if it hadn’t happened exactly how they wanted it. The stone collar around the dungeon post-dated that change, obviously, since the dungeons were ancient, before recorded history, even among the feil and dwodo, so long ago even those long-lived creatures didn’t know where they’d come from. It was still quite old though, and Alfric treated it with a certain respect because of that. This seemed to be of the same class of thing, and Alfric felt a reverence toward it.

It was a respect that Mizuki clearly didn’t share, because she had begun to climb it.

“What are you doing?” asked Alfric.

“There’s a thing at the top,” said Mizuki, who was using the runes carved into the rock as handholds and footholds. From the way the lichen and moss on the stone had been disturbed, it didn’t seem like it was her first time. “I didn’t know if they have these in the city or not.”

“We don’t,” said Alfric as he watched her hoist herself up onto the top of the stone. “What does it do? Should you be messing with it?”

Mizuki was catching her breath from the climb, and now standing high above Alfric, looking down at him. “I’ve done this dozens of times before,” she said. “It makes me happy.” She knelt down and pressed something on the top of the stone. It immediately lit up, with the runes all glowing blue for a moment, then pulsing slightly at a slow pace.

“What does that mean?” asked Alfric.

“No idea,” said Mizuki cheerfully. “But from the color and the pulse, I think it’s an all-clear of some kind. Blue means there’s nothing to be worried about, or maybe the job is done.”

“Who put this here?” asked Alfric. He guessed that it had been moved in the last hundred years. “Why?”

“Dunno!” Mizuki called down to him. “Watch this!”

She crouched down until her butt was nearly touching the rock, then launched herself into the air. It wasn’t a jump, or not just a jump, because she continued on up for what had to have been a hundred feet. That high up, a fall would have killed her, but she fell slowly, spreading her arms and then gliding in a gentle circle around the stone. Alfric watched her carefully, worried that she would suddenly plummet to her death, until she was low enough that a fall would only injure her, nothing a cleric couldn’t fix. She kept on gliding in circles for as long as she could, then stopped in place and dropped the last two feet to the ground.

“Impressed?” she asked, grinning at Alfric.

“I am,” he nodded. It was spectacular. Alfric had always liked seeing displays of magic. “You used the magic of this thing, whatever it was doing?”

Mizuki nodded, still grinning. “Countermagic, but yeah. It’s just about the only thing that gives me enough power to fly, and then only once a day. I think my record is half a mile, and I could have gone further if I hadn’t gotten stuck up in a tree.”

“It’s impressive,” said Alfric. “I just wish I understood what you’d actually done.” He looked at the stone behind her, which was once again inert.

“There’s a balance to magic,” said Mizuki. “You do something magical, you shift the balance of the aether, and when it’s out of balance, that’s where someone like me can come in. Whatever the stone is doing, it’s very global, so it leaves an imbalance toward the personal. But it’s also very heavy on information, which means that it leaves an imbalance toward the physical. My best guess is that this is some kind of information gathering doodad.”

“And you do this a lot?” asked Alfric. “You activate it?”

“Sure,” said Mizuki, shrugging. “It’s not a big deal.”

This possibly explained why the Pucklechurch dungeon had been a bit harder than it should have been, but he decided not to mention it, on the off chance that she would feel that she was to blame. “And could you do other things?” Alfric asked. “Other than flying?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Mizuki replied. “So long as it’s in the realm of personal and physical, anyway. Why, did you want to spar me when I have super-strength?” She dropped into a fighting stance with truly atrocious form, holding up her hands but shaping them like blades, not fists.

“I think not,” said Alfric, looking up into the sky, to the height she’d reached. “If you can fling yourself that high, you could probably punch through steel.”

“Are you calling me fat?” asked Mizuki, her hands on her hips.

“No,” said Alfric, blinking. “Of course not, you’re —”

“Lighten up, city boy,” said Mizuki, rolling her eyes. “When I make a joke, you make a joke back, did no one teach you that?”

“Um,” said Alfric. “I was taught not to make jokes at the expense of others.” He frowned. “You’re saying that I should have called you fat?”

“In a joking way, sure,” said Mizuki. “I know that I’m skinny. You’d say ‘Well I’m not calling you fat, but that outfit isn’t doing you any favors’, and that’s not even that funny, but I’d understand that you were just being, I don’t know, not a stick in the mud.”

“Sorry if I’ve been a stick in the mud,” said Alfric. “But I want to get this party going. It might not feel like it, but we’re at a critical point.”

“I get the distinct feeling that everything feels like a critical point to you,” said Mizuki. “Ready to go back?”

Alfric looked around the clearing at the collections of yellow and purple flowers that were blooming. “Was this it?” he asked. “Was this what we came here to do?”

“Well, yeah,” said Mizuki. “It was neat, wasn’t it? I don’t normally show people.”

Alfric looked at her. She was smiling. “It was neat,” he said. That seemed like the diplomatic thing to say. The undiplomatic thing was that it seemed dangerous on several levels, which was what his mind immediately went to. But it was neat.

“It’s just about the coolest thing I can do,” said Mizuki. “And I guess I handle blood and guts worst out of the whole team, but I do have skills of my own.”

“I don’t think anyone thinks less of you for not liking blood,” said Alfric. “I don’t like blood, I just conditioned myself to have less of a problem with it.”

Mizuki waded through the weeds and started down the path. “Oh yeah?” she asked. “How’d you do that?”

“I took up work in a slaughterhouse when I was fifteen,” said Alfric. “I knew that if I wanted to be a dungeoneer, I would need to be able to handle that kind of thing. I also tried to get an apprenticeship with one of the churches so that I could see injuries up close, but I think they knew what I was up to and didn’t want a tourist.”

“Wow,” said Mizuki. “That’s nuts.”

“It worked,” said Alfric. “So it’s not that nuts.”

“You’ve really been training for this your entire life?” asked Mizuki.

“Not my entire life,” said Alfric. “But most of it, yes. And since my parents were both dungeoneers, I kind of grew into the family business. It’s expected that everyone in the family will go take a tour of some dungeons. I’d have gone even if that wasn’t the case though.” People tended to assume there’d been some pressure from his parents, but if anything, they’d both been fairly circumspect about it.

“And you think this is the team for you?” asked Mizuki. “Because I have to say, I’m not looking forward to doing it again, even if I will do it again, and I’m pretty sure that your original plan was to go through them fast. I mean, I was the first one to say yes, right? So in a sense, you and I are the core of the team. And we should be on the same page.”

“I was hoping for more,” said Alfric. “But there aren’t many people like me, who want to make a career out of going in the dungeons. It’s too dangerous, with too much travel.”

“Hannah would do it,” said Mizuki. “So there’s one.”

“Getting a team together is hard,” said Alfric. “It’s so much harder than it sounds at first. The second time I tried to put together a team, I put out an open call, and I got lots of responses, but half of them weren’t remotely qualified, and nothing seemed to gel together. We got all ready to go, then two of them flaked out on me, and because of that, the others left.” He had elected to lower his standards a bit after that.

“So which is this?” asked Mizuki. “Your third time trying to make a team? Fourth?”

“Fifth,” said Alfric. “I tried recruiting younger, in Junior Adventurer League, and that fell apart too. I tried recruiting older, and got a few people, but not what I considered enough, not to justify the money we’d need to get somewhere we could make a start. It was myself and two others for a bit, and we talked about taking the dungeons as a team of three, but a team of three trying to rise up through the ranks … well, it was a lot of risk without a healer, and three is more dangerous than I wanted to deal with.” And there had been other complications, which he was still hoping he could hold off mentioning.

“So what was the first time?” asked Mizuki.

“Ah,” said Alfric, swallowing. “Probably a story for another day.”

“You got them all killed, didn’t you?” asked Mizuki. It sounded like a joke, but it was far too serious for that.

“What?” asked Alfric. “No, they’re all very much alive.”

He was saved further questions by the end of their trip, which brought them into the back of the house. There, Hannah and Verity were standing around Isra, who was speaking to an assembled group of woodland animals.

“What the gates is this?” asked Mizuki, who was moving slowly.

There was a lot of variety among the animals, though Alfric didn’t know all their names, since many of them were likely native to the region. Squirrels he recognized, though they were larger than he was used to, and there was something like a squirrel, with a much smaller tail. There were mice, rats, and something similar to a rat with different, elongated paws. There were a huge number of birds, and Alfric noticed more in the trees, sitting on every branch. And beyond that, there were lizards, snakes, turtles, and frogs. A few of them were probably dungeon varieties, released into the world long ago, but it was hard to say which ones. The long-legged skinks and three-eyed birds were likely candidates, and Alfric had always felt that there was something suspect about turtles.

“Hannah said there wasn’t much wildlife about,” said Isra. “I had only wanted to prove her wrong.” To the animals assembled before her, she spoke. “You may go. Sorry if I wasted your time.”

Almost all at once, the animals dispersed back into the woods, going their separate ways. The birds were the loudest of them, with the flapping of their wings, but it wasn’t long before it was just people standing around again. Alfric approached cautiously.

“They just kept coming,” said Verity, who seemed stunned. “How were there so many of them?”

“They avoid people,” said Isra. “They hide away.”

“Very impressive, it was,” said Hannah, nodding. “And I’ll readily admit to bein’ wrong. Makes you think, I suppose, about the woods and what’s in them.”

“We were unlucky not to get a bear,” said Isra. “They come near here.”

“What?” asked Mizuki. “Can you tell them not to?”

“I will pass it along,” said Isra, nodding.

“You actually will?” asked Mizuki.

“I will mention it to a bird, and hope that it tells the local bears,” said Isra, shrugging. “Birds enjoy any favor that involves song, but bears can be stubborn, lazy creatures.”

“Okay, but how did you not realize you were a woods witch until yesterday?” asked Mizuki. “How!?”

Isra frowned. “I knew that the animals stayed away from the town,” she said. “And when I came into the town, I saw that no one seemed to care. There are certain animals who live domestic lives, and these were allowed in town, but I never saw anyone calling other types of animals in, so I thought … I thought everyone could do that, but didn’t, because it was impolite.” She seemed flustered. “I saw no one speak to the birds in the trees, and I thought it was because … because they had some taboo I didn’t understand. And some people did speak with the birds, but in a different way, and I thought that was just … a part of it.”

“What’s a taboo?” asked Mizuki.

“A thing you’re not supposed to do,” said Hannah.

“But why?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, for what reason?”

“Och, it varies, ay?” asked Hannah. “Usually, for a taboo, you don’t know why, you just know it’s not to be done.”

Mizuki frowned. “Sounds made up to me.”

“Really?” asked Alfric. “There’s nothing you don’t do without knowing quite why you don’t do it?”

Mizuki thought about that for a moment. “I guess there are some things we don’t talk about. But mostly that’s because there are some weird feelings about them.”

“What kind of things?” asked Verity.

“Well I’m not going to talk about them, obviously,” said Mizuki.

Verity rolled her eyes. “‘They all, somehow, knew of the unspeakable,’” she said.

“What’s that from?” asked Mizuki.

“A poem, The Contradictions of Man, it’s,” Verity hesitated. “A classic.” She seemed to think that saying that might be cause for offense, and Mizuki seemed like she was going to take offense.

“Moving on,” said Alfric. “Isra, do you think you would be able to use your abilities in a dungeon? Most commonly, a druid would bring in a single well-trained animal. Something large, like a cougar or a bear.”

“I don’t think a bear would want to go into a dungeon,” said Isra.

“A bird then, to start with?” asked Alfric. “Something that would help us to scout?”

“It seems dangerous for the bird,” said Isra.

“And you wouldn’t put a bird in danger?” asked Alfric. “Not to potentially save our lives?”

“Wait,” said Mizuki. “Is now the time to talk about how doing that dungeon was completely unlike fighting three raccoons?”

“Och, not what I said, was it?” asked Hannah. “What I said was that each monster was like fightin’ three raccoons. Obviously there’ll be more than one monster in the dungeon, ay?”

“Well,” said Mizuki. “It was also unlike fighting a couple of sets of raccoons in a row.”

“Have you fought many raccoons?” asked Isra.

“What?” asked Mizuki. “No, not at all.”

“So you’re only guessing?” asked Isra.

“I’m not even the one who started in with all this three raccoons business!” Mizuki exclaimed.

“Well, if you’re askin’, no, I don’t think whoever came up with the three raccoons comparison had ever actually fought three of ‘em,” said Hannah. “But stranger things, ay?”

“The primary risk with dungeoneering is that you’ll run into something atypical,” said Alfric. “There’s a principle called variance, and much of what you do when planning for a dungeon is to minimize variance as much as possible, and plan for it as best you can. The Pucklechurch dungeon was on the upper side of normal, maybe even the high upper side of normal. It might have been the specific conditions, or it might have been us, or it might have been random chance. Either way, we’ll go into the next dungeon planning for it to be just as difficult, if not moreso, and then when it’s easier, we can be happy about it. I do want to point out that I was the only one who got hurt, and that I’m shouldering most of the risk.”

“But to be clear,” said Verity. “You could have died in that first dungeon.”

“Yes,” said Alfric, not wanting to weasel about. “I could have died. We all could have died, though it would have taken a spectacular bit of bad luck for that to happen. At the end, when we were fighting that final creature, I wasn’t sure that we would win, and before Isra stepped in, I was debating calling a retreat. Something like that, where we’re forced to back our way out of the dungeon and leave everything of value behind, is a much more likely bad outcome.”

“I’d have healed him back from far, far worse than he got,” said Hannah. “I won’t go into it,” she nodded to Mizuki. “But so long as it doesn’t cross the midline,” she pointed to her sternum, “There’s a fair bit I can deal with. Even across the midline, there’s all kinds of help I can be, and if Garos can’t provide, there’s other healin’ to be had, for the extent of the universe is not symmetrical, so it is said.”

“I don’t think that I’ll bring an animal into the dungeons,” said Isra. “It doesn’t feel fair to me.”

“It’s not necessary,” said Alfric. “With your bow being as good as it is, I’m hoping that we’re well on our way to outpacing the dungeons.”

“Meaning?” asked Verity with a frown.

“Elevation makes the dungeons harder,” said Hannah. “Goin’ by what Alfric said, we were all second elevation, ay? But after the dungeon, perhaps not.”

“We should all still be second,” said Alfric. “Unless someone was right at the cusp and got taken over it. Checking with the censusmaster is on my agenda.”

“His agenda,” said Mizuki, who wasn’t quite able to hold in her smile.

Alfric looked at her. She seemed to take some joy in teasing him, which he didn’t think was right to begrudge her. It was nice to see someone smile, at least, even if it was at his expense.

“Housing for myself,” he said, holding up a finger. “Working out travel and dungeoneering expenses, commissioning some local to make or adapt more pieces of armor, getting a better lay of the town, making contacts with the other clerics, sending off a letter to the arm of the local League office to notify them we have a party … there are probably some others, but I have a list.”

“A list!” giggled Mizuki.

“It goes next to my other lists,” said Alfric. “Like the list I use in the morning to figure out which sock goes on first.”

“Hey!” she said. “That was pretty good. Solid effort.”

Alfric gave her a grin.

“Well, I’ll come with you to see the clerics,” said Hannah. “And maybe look over the letter you’re sendin’, if you don’t mind.”

Alfric did mind, but he suppressed the urge to act on it. It was better to have someone look over what you’d written before you sent it, especially if you wanted to make a good impression. The local arm of the Adventurer’s League was important, because they could give him access to bigger, better keys depending on how their progress through the dungeons went. Furthermore, there would be a record on file of his accomplishments, which meant that if or when this party fell apart, he would have something to point to when he went looking to join up with other parties, though his sterling record in the Junior League didn’t seem to have counted for much.

“Alright,” said Mizuki, clapping her hands. “Enough business. I am formally opening an invitation for all of you to live here for as long as this lasts, take it or leave it.”

“I already live here,” said Verity, raising a hand.

“Ay, I’ll take you up on it,” replied Hannah. “Though I may still go to the temple for a bath every now and then, so long as Lemmel keeps lettin’ me.”

“I have my own place,” said Isra.

“Well, yeah, just offering,” said Mizuki. “If you wanted to be with the party or anything, no big deal.”

“Does the offer extend to me?” asked Alfric.

Mizuki looked him up and down. “Why wouldn’t it?”

“Because he’s male,” said Verity, her voice quite flat.

“Well,” said Mizuki, “It doesn’t matter to me, so long as you’re not going to be, I don’t know. Doing stuff.” She gestured vaguely. “Male stuff.”

“If we need to make some ground rules,” Alfric began.

Mizuki sighed. “Just don’t be weird about it,” she said. “And if you’re not weird about it, I won’t be weird about it.”

Alfric nodded. “Verity, Hannah, is that acceptable to you?”

“Fine by me,” said Verity.

“So long as you aren’t weird, ay,” said Hannah with a grin.

Alfric rubbed his face for a moment. “I believe in being forthright, so I’ll say, now, that I have absolutely no intentions of ruining what is, on paper, a great dungeoneering party with flirtation or romance of any kind, and to the extent we can avoid interpersonal problems, I want to do that. If we can do that with rules, great, we’ll make rules, but if it’s better to just have some mutual understanding, then great, we can do that instead. I care about the dungeons. The goal of this party is dungeons.”

“We hear you,” said Mizuki. “You can calm down.”

“I’m calm, I just — I don’t want to be preemptively accused of anything,” said Alfric. Familiar feelings were welling up, and he did his best to tamp them down.

“Didn’t mean to besmirch your honor,” said Hannah.

“It’s not the Red Ages,” said Verity. “We’re not going to treat you like a fox in the henhouse.”

“Wait,” said Mizuki. “Do we just have a total ban on romance within the group?”

“It worries me that you’re asking that,” said Alfric.

She pointed a finger at him. “You’re the one who wanted to make sure that everything was clear. And Hannah is,” Hannah raised an eyebrow, “She’s a cleric of Garos, right?”

Hannah rolled her eyes. “Such a reputation we clerics have,” she said. “And I told you it was both, though none of you are my type, thank you very much.”

“Romance is inadvisable,” said Alfric. “I think we can leave it at that.”

But his mother hadn’t been quite so staunch about that. She had said, when the conversation came up at the dinner table, that you shouldn’t go into a dungeoneering party with the notion that there would be anything like a romance, but that with time, being close to the same group of people, it was natural for attraction to develop, and if it was mutual, and it wasn’t going away, then it could be a beautiful thing that would grow and flourish.

There was absolutely no way that he was going to say that out loud.

Chapter 21 - Sitting in a Song

It was Mizuki who thought to invite Isra to the Fig and Gristle, for which she was grateful. There was a part of Isra that felt she should be living in the same house with them, especially because it was so much better of a house than the one in the woods she’d inherited from her father, but there was also a comfortability to that old house, and the memories it contained.

Isra had never been to the Fig and Gristle before. It was a handsome place, if slightly sagging, with a warmth that came from the lights on inside. She could hear Verity’s music even before she stepped inside, but once she’d crossed the threshold, a lightness washed over her, as though someone had removed a burden from her shoulders. She looked around and found Alfric, Mizuki, and Hannah easily enough. They had a place for her, and by the looks of things, had yet to order. As soon as Mizuki saw her, a slender arm shot up and frantically waved her over.

“You made it,” said Mizuki as Isra sat down. “You didn’t say whether you would.”

“I wasn’t sure,” said Isra.

“I can pay for your meal,” said Mizuki. “If that’s it.”

“It’s not,” said Isra.

“She’s actually very good,” said Hannah, leaning over toward Isra. Hannah’s eyes were on Verity, who was strumming away with her lute, playing a song whose lyrics were barely audible. Something about a goose and a gander. “She’s weaving quite a few effects.”

“It might be part of why she gets so tired,” said Alfric. “Every time she plays, it feels like she’s pushing herself to her limit.”

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “I think if you actually pushed her to her limit, people wouldn’t be able to move. They’d just sit there, enraptured. I get why you crossed the continent for her.”

“It’s beautiful music,” said Isra. Her eyes were on Verity, and the way she cradled her lute, intently playing it, eyes partly closed. Sometimes Verity would smile as she sang the lyrics, usually at a softer, sweeter part, and there was something intensely beautiful about her then, as though being a conduit for the song had cast a spell on her.

“Alright,” said an older woman, who came up to their table. “You’ve four now, are you ready to order? Two options for meat, four for sides, and two for dessert, which I’ll ask about later on. It was up on the board, but I can repeat it now for you, if you’d like.”

“Herbed chicken thighs, sweet potatoes, and the other one, something about vegetables?” asked Hannah.

“Sure,” nodded the woman. She looked expectantly at Isra, who hadn’t seen the menu.

“The same for me,” Isra said.

“I’ll have the fish,” said Mizuki. “And the veggies, with the cheese bread.”

“Cheese bread is good,” the woman said, nodding. “And you?”

“Chicken,” said Alfric. “And two servings of vegetables, please. I’ll take a poached pear after all that. And to drink, a round of ale, on me.”

“I’ll get our second round then,” said Mizuki.

“You just feel like spendin’ money, ay?” asked Hannah.

“I’m a very generous person by nature,” shrugged Mizuki. “But we’re rich, right? So why not enjoy it? Give me the chance, and I’ll spend money on people.” She looked at the three of them. “That’s not rude, right?”

“In Dondrian, it would be greeted with suspicion,” said Alfric. “It’s not rude, but it would ease everyone’s feelings if you said that you wanted to be paid back at some point. So if I offered to buy a round, then you offered to buy a round, you’re not being rude, and because you followed suit, I’m not being rude.”

This sounded like insanity to Isra, but it was the familiar insanity of social situations. She wondered whether Alfric had laid it bare for her, and decided that he probably hadn’t. He simply wasn’t that deft. There was something nice about being with people from different cultures, with differences in expectations. She wasn’t the only one on uneven ground.

“So we have to do four rounds of ale?” asked Hannah. “Three is my limit, especially if we’re going for a long walk tomorrow.”

Isra had never had ale before, but didn’t want to say this out loud, because it would once more mark her as different from the others. Knowing that she was a druid had helped to put some of her life into context, but it was only a part of it. She had been raised by a man from Tarbin, one who kept to himself out in the woods. Her customs were different, and Alfric, who should have been an ally, seemed to be so much a member of his big city that his ancestry seemed irrelevant.

The ales came, and not long after them, the food, served on heavy ceramic plates. Isra picked at hers with a fork for a moment before taking a bite, and she was surprised to find how good it was. She was familiar with all of the ingredients in principle, as all of it was local, but she had never had cause to eat chicken before, and the combination of them was, to her unsophisticated tongue, masterful. She had no idea how it could have been accomplished. Isra didn’t do much in the way of cooking, other than preserving, which she’d done less of since getting the chiller. How did someone turn chicken, salt, butter, and herbs into something like this? It seemed impossible.

“I think she saw us eating,” said Mizuki, whose mouth was half full. “She turned up the effect.”

“The effect?” asked Isra.

“Making things taste better,” said Alfric. “It’s one of the things bards are used for, sensory enhancement or dampening. There’s a bit of an emotional effect in what she’s doing too, making everyone feel a bit happier, more at ease.”

“I don’t feel at ease,” said Isra.

“Works with what you have,” said Hannah. “But she’s probably goin’ the other way with it, not deadenin’ the stress, but enhancin’ the,” she waved her hand. “The other one. A sense of —” she stopped and took another bite of her lemon whitefish. “Even without the effect, this would be good.” Whatever word she’d been searching for, it seemed as though it was going to be left unfound.

Isra ate some more, and there was a general silence. “There are bards at every tavern?” she asked, once she’d finished with the chicken. She liked to eat her meals taking each item in turn, and as she looked, she saw that the same was true for Alfric, but not for Mizuki or Hannah, who were alternating their bites between each of the things on their plates.

“Almost every tavern,” said Alfric. “It’s part of the point of a tavern. Verity is something special, obviously, but I’d wager you can find at least one half-ring bard in every hex this size.” He took another bite of his vegetables, a slice of potato, and Isra watched the way he held his fork. He pointed it down, like an extension of a grabbing motion, and the method he used reminded Isra of a raccoon’s fastidiousness. That of course brought to mind the comparison of dungeon monsters to three racoons, which had been ridiculous.

“But not many druids,” said Isra.

“No,” said Alfric. “Not many.”

“Easy enough to make them,” said Hannah. “But it’s hard to get volunteers, ay. The number of women who want to go through childbirth alone, and raise a child for three years, is precious slim. And of course a druid can be a bit of a troublesome child, if you don’t mind me sayin’.”

“Troublesome how?” asked Isra.

“Oh, with notions of plants and animals, that’s all I mean,” said Hannah. “There are a few stories I’ve heard, about children who took in rats as friends, or who wouldn’t eat their dinner because it had once been an animal. That’s all.”

“What’s wrong with being a friend to a rat?” asked Isra.

“They’re vermin,” said Alfric. “They eat our food and spread disease. I don’t mean to say it so harshly, but I know there are things that you’re only learning now, and I think it’s best to help you learn them. Take no shame in it.” Isra liked hearing that, and she did like the way Alfric spoke. He was direct and to the point in a way that other people only rarely were, and he had both an understanding of the unwritten rules, as well as a willingness to put them into language.

“But if a rat were your friend, you could ask it not to do those things,” said Isra. “I understand the point, but surely they could see the boy’s view when they talked to him?”

“To be honest,” said Hannah. “I’m not so sure such a boy ever existed. Might just be a funny story.”

It hadn’t even crossed Isra’s mind that someone would find humor in such a story. A boy who had made friends with a rat, a boy who couldn’t understand why that wasn’t allowed, a boy who was right in what he did, ridiculed? Perhaps she was misunderstanding the story, or perhaps there was more to it that would make the humor clear, but Isra found herself not wishing to hear more.

Instead, her eyes returned to Verity, who had ended one song and immediately started the next. There was a way she blended the songs together, so they seemed to be part of the same overall structure, and Isra had no clue how this had been accomplished. She knew a few traditional Tarbin songs that her father had taught her, but most of her time was spent listening to the birds, if she had a need for music. And while it was true that there was beauty in the birdsong and the clarity of their notes, there was no possible way that they could compare to what Verity was producing, all by herself, in this small tavern.

Isra had thought so in the dungeon as well, and when Verity had woven speech into the lyrics of her song, Isra had felt a giddy joy that she hadn’t let cross her face, because no one else seemed to be feeling it. And then after they’d cleared the dungeon, Isra had listened in pure amazement to the song Verity wove on the way home, and that one, she was fairly sure, had no magic to accompany it, but felt just as lifting and sweet.

They were close enough that Isra could see Verity’s forearms tense up at particular points as she played her lute, and watch as Verity’s slender fingers played across the strings of the lute’s neck.

“She’s using the flute,” said Isra.

“It’s actually called a lute,” said Alfric, sounding apologetic.

“No,” said Isra, rolling her eyes. “The flute we pulled from the dungeon.” She gestured to Verity. “She’s got extra fingers on each hand.”

“Huh,” said Alfric. “That was fast.”

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “We were testing it the other night, the extra fingers come with something else, a kind of,” she tapped her head, “Thing.”

“Enhancement?” asked Alfirc.

“Ay, but anythin’ could be an enhancement, couldn’t it?” asked Hannah. “Not a very useful term.”

“It changes how you think,” said Mizuki. “For me, it was like I’d been handling a knife using extra fingers my entire life. For her, all the training translates. It’s actually a pretty good piece of kit.”

“I wonder if anyone else has noticed,” said Alfric, looking around.

“I don’t think they’d make a thing of it. Entads are more common here, in some ways,” said Hannah. “Not uncommon for people to have one or two. Different in a big city like Dondrian, right?”

“In some sense,” said Alfric, furrowing his brow. “The general rule is that entads flow toward the population centers, but … my guess is that you’d point out that dungeoneering is easier out in rural areas like this, so people run dungeons as a rite of passage, and any that aren’t immediately sold off end up in private hands, especially those that are bound and can’t move.”

“Ay,” answered Hannah, taking a drink of her ale. “Small stuff, mostly, but there’s quite a bit of it around, and every now and then, someone lucks out.”

“Like Isra,” said Alfric, nodding. “That bow,” he sighed.

“It’s a very nice bow,” Isra agreed. She looked at Verity, who was still softly playing away, her eyes half-closed, gentle words on her lips to accompany the strumming of her lute. “I’m surprised she doesn’t have a magical instrument.”

“She did, in Dondrian,” said Alfric. “But like most of its kind, it was borrowed from one of the larger guilds at great expense, rather than owned by her outright. If she’d taken it with her to Pucklechurch, she would have been tracked down to retrieve it. From what her parents said, it allowed for an entire orchestral score to be produced from a single instrument.” He shrugged. “Perhaps she wouldn’t want me talking about it. She didn’t seem to have liked her life in the city.”

“She seems happy without all that,” said Isra. She looked down at her food, which was only half-eaten. She’d been eating slower than the others, and hadn’t yet touched her ale. She took a tentative sip of it, and wrinkled her nose. It was fermented grain, mildly poisonous, but in a way that people seemed to enjoy. Grimacing and trying to get used to it, she drank more, then went back to the food to get the taste from her mouth.

“I don’t know that ‘happy’ is the right word for Verity,” said Hannah. “Not yet, anyhow. Some people take some time to find themselves, especially if they’ve been told their whole life that they were somethin’ they weren’t.”

“Ah, I do love that clerical wisdom,” said Mizuki, grinning. She’d drained her ale, and had been trying to get the attention of the woman who ran the tavern so she could have another. Her cheeks were slightly flushed. The glasses of ale were quite tall.

“Oh, shove off,” laughed Hannah. “I spent years of my life becomin’ wise, you’d best believe I’m going to share that wisdom any time I can.”

“Entads,” said Mizuki, returning to the previous topic. “I’m hoping for something great. Something to serve as some fuel for the casting. They usually don’t disturb much.” She waved her hand, gesturing, presumably, at the aether.

“Travel is the big one,” said Alfric. “With it, we won’t have to make a production of going to the dungeons, or at least less of one. There are lots of different possibilities as far as travel entads go —”

“And you’ve got them separated into categories and tiers,” said Mizuki. “Yes, yes.”

“You’re not interested?” asked Alfric. “Because I was just going to share because I find it interesting.”

“Ay, go ahead,” said Hannah. “The little one is just a bit flushed with the ale.”

“The little one?” asked Mizuki. She looked at the others, then down at herself. “Am I the little one? I am,” she nodded. “But I’m also the old one. Respect your elders, Hannah.”

“Two years does not make you my elder,” said Hannah.

“There are three categories,” said Alfric, plowing on in a way that Isra found somewhat admirable.

“None of this matters though, right?” asked Mizuki. “Because it’s just a roll of the dice what we find.”

“Are you drunk off a single glass of ale?” asked Hannah.

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “I’m loose, and leaning into the looseness.”

“What’s the first category?” asked Isra.

“Conveyance,” said Alfric, happy to have a listener. “My boots are an example. They help move you along faster than you could otherwise go, or with less effort. The flying rug is a prototypical example, but technically mounts also belong in that category. The second category are point transfer, which includes both portals and teleportation, along with some others that are close enough. Those are usually the best, though entads often come with limits or restrictions. There’s a rod which allows whoever holds it to teleport anywhere they can think of as often as they please, and if we found something like that, well, we’d be rich beyond our wildest dreams. And then the third category is point travel, those things that let you go to a specific place, or type of place. My mother has a statue that she can teleport to from anywhere in the world, but another example would be something that lets you hop from one fountain to another. The distinction between the second and third is the restriction on where you can go with it.” He seemed satisfied with having gotten that out, and Isra was pleased that she had prompted him.

“And leylines,” said Hannah. “That would make four.”

“Leylines are for leycraft and cartiers,” said Alfric. “It’s pretty rare for an entad to interact with them. And the natural portals are the fifth, if we’re counting extras, but then we should also include ships and things.”

“But entads can interact with leylines, ay?” asked Hannah.

“It would be a combination of the first and third categories,” said Alfric, seeming to think about it. “And if we got something like that, something that could simulate a leycraft … it would change our entire approach, I think. The map would look different for us.”

“There’s a cartier who’s based out of Pucklechurch,” said Hannah. “Though I think that’s because she’s got a family here. There’s actually an interestin’ history of leylines in Pucklechurch.”

“There is?” asked Alfric.

“Ay,” said Hannah. “You didn’t know? I was sayin’ for Isra’s benefit. You never wondered why the great big church was here?”

“I did,” said Alfric. “It has to do with a leyline? But there’s no leyline that runs through here, not for a dozen hexes. I know, because I had to plot a route.”

“Ay, there not being a leyline is somewhat the point,” said Hannah. “Some five hundred years ago, there was a nice thick leyline goin’ right through the mid-point of the hex, and this was durin’ expansion and all that. So they saw this place, and they thought to themselves that it would be a good place for a city, so they put some money toward it, includin’ a great big church, though it’s a pittance compared to the temples of Dondrian, I’m sure.”

“But then what happened?” asked Alfric.

“The church was almost done, the roads finished, a few people moved in, and then the leyline shifted,” said Hannah. “And all those plans went right down the drain.”

“Ouch,” said Alfric, wincing.

“Well, it was a big deal, because there was so much money in developin’ the line for use,” said Hannah. “And there was some hope that it would shift back, but alas, as rare as a leyline shift is, it’s even more rare for it to go back to how it was.” She clucked her tongue. “But we’ve a nice big church here, and though there’s some grumbling about maintenance, it’s what the town’s known for. There was a terminal too, hundreds of years back, but they took that down and recovered what they could.”

“I never knew that,” said Mizuki.

“Really?” asked Hannah. “I suppose if you grew up here, maybe you’d never question it.”

“Kind of makes sense though,” said Mizuki. “Why they’d build such a thing in the middle of nowhere. Because it wasn’t the middle of nowhere.” She turned to Alfric. “Do you think this has something to do with the big ol’ stone in my backyard? Like it was there for a reason?”

“It could be,” shrugged Alfric. “But you said that it was information gathering, and I don’t know what that has to do with a leyline. Besides, that stone is older than the church by probably a thousand years, if not more.”

“What stone?” asked Hannah.

“There’s a stone in the backyard,” said Mizuki. “I’ll show it to you tomorrow.”

“We’re leaving tomorrow morning,” said Alfric.

“Dessert?” asked the woman who ran the Fig and Gristle.

“Poached pear for me,” said Alfric.

“Same,” said Isra.

“The pie’s a crumble?” asked Hannah. The woman nodded. “Then that, I suppose.”

“Ooh, a crumble for me too,” said Mizuki. “And ales for everyone, but double for me, two glasses right next to each other.” She pointed out a spot on the table where the two glasses should sit.

“Not sure I want a drunk sorc in my tavern,” the woman frowned.

“Three isn’t enough to get me drunk,” said Mizuki.

The woman nodded, collected their plates, and left.

“We’re walking at least twelve miles tomorrow,” frowned Alfric. “Even a mild hangover is going to be torture.” He looked to Hannah. “Can you do anything about that?”

Hannah laughed. “Not in our domain, I’m afraid. You’d need Kesbin, and we’ve got no cleric of Kesbin, as I believe I said when I was makin’ introductions.”

“I will be completely fine,” said Mizuki. “Besides, we’re celebrating, right? I felt like we didn’t have a proper celebration after the first dungeon.”

“So we’d celebrate before and after?” asked Hannah.

“Seems reasonable to me,” shrugged Mizuki.

Isra was feeling what she probably thought were the effects of the ale, a kind of warmth and, yes, looseness that pervaded her body. Everything felt more fluid somehow, as though she had better control of her body, or was more living in the moment. It was a nice feeling, and she had a better understanding of why people imbibed this poison. Her eyes kept going back to Verity, and this music that they were all here to enjoy, though the others seemed content to talk over it.

The desserts arrived not too much longer after that, and there was a general silence as they ate. Between the chicken and the pear, it was more than Isra normally ate in one sitting, but it was too good for her to stop, especially with the music backing it. There were complex flavors to the poached pear, spices and herbs, honey and butter, and Isra wondered whether she could learn to make such a thing if she put her mind to it.

“Could you teach me how to cook?” Isra asked Mizuki. The question came out without her willing it, and in hindsight, that seemed to be the work of the glass and a half of ale.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Um, of course! But I don’t have any idea how to teach someone to cook, I just kind of … do it, I guess.”

“So it’s not teachable?” asked Isra, thinking that perhaps it was like sorcery, where you had to be born into it, at least a little bit. This didn’t seem likely, but you never knew.

“No, it is,” said Mizuki. “But — we’ll try, I just don’t know how I’m going to start. I don’t remember how my parents taught me. And my whole life, I’ve never taught anyone anything, so.”

“So I will learn to cook, and you will learn to teach,” said Isra, nodding.

“Yes!” laughed Mizuki. “Great. And we’ll burn things along the way.”

“We will?” asked Isra.

“Oh, sure,” smiled Mizuki. “You can’t learn to do anything without breaking things along the way.”

“A very common outlook, for a sorcerer,” said Hannah. She set her spoon down, having eaten the last bit of her pie. “This was a good idea, and I’m glad we got to hear Verity play without the threat of monsters.”

“She’s said that after a set she’s usually done with people,” said Alfric. “So I’d be cautious about pushing her to engage too much when she’s done, which probably won’t be for another quarter bell or so.”

“Are we sticking around?” asked Mizuki, looking at her one empty mug and one full one. “Because if we’re not, I’m going to have to down this one in a hurry.”

“Best not to get sick before a day of travel,” said Alfric, who had nonetheless finished his.

“I was thinkin’ that we’d wait for her to be done and accompany her home,” said Hannah.

Alfric nodded. “Then a game, to pass the time?”

“You play games?” asked Mizuki, giving him a suspicious look. “Seems inefficient.”

“I play games very efficiently,” said Alfric, giving her a smile. He rapped his knuckles against the table. “Seems flat enough, which means we can set up for ring-knock.”

“Never played,” said Mizuki. “It’s with rings?”

Alfric nodded. “We won’t play for keeps though. You set up rings, on their end, then take turns rolling toward the other person’s rings, trying to knock them down.”

“Not sure the table is flat enough for that,” said Hannah, wiggling the edge.

“Well, we’ll try,” said Alfric. “Not for keeps.”

Once the plates were once again cleared away, and their bills were settled, they set up the game according to Alfric’s instructions. He seemed to be the only one to have played it before, but it was simple enough. When someone was going, everyone set their hands on the table so that they could stop the rolling ring from going off the table. It was fun enough, Isra supposed, but mostly because of the exclamations of the others, rather than the actual game itself. She found herself smiling at Alfric’s groan of defeat as she sent one of her rings careening into two of his.

After a few rounds of this, the music stopped, and Isra felt the warmth and openness slowly fade from her. Her eyes went to Verity, who had rolled her sleeves back down. She had a calm, impassive face as she packed up the lute, but there was a hint of a satisfied smile there.

“Ready to go?” asked Verity once she’d come over. “I asked Cynthia to pack me up my dinner, so you don’t have to wait.”

“Ay, the music was lovely,” said Hannah.

“Thank you,” said Verity with a modest bow. “I felt nervous, having the four of you there.”

“I’m glad we came,” said Alfric. “It was a good time.”

“Well, we should get going,” said Verity. “I get hungry after a set. Normally I had Cynthia leave my food up in my room, but we still have to walk across town.”

“Let’s go then,” nodded Alfric, standing up.

They left once Verity had taken a small covered dish from the kitchen. Again, Isra found herself watching the bard, but this time there wasn’t the excuse of watching a performer at work.

“Can I carry that for you?” Isra asked as they walked.

“Oh, thank you,” said Verity, handing it over. “You enjoyed the music?”

“Very much,” nodded Isra. “I do wish I could have heard it without the other noise.”

“Tavern music is meant to fade into the background,” said Verity. “And at certain moments, it’s meant to catch your attention and let you get lost in it. It’s meant to fill in gaps in conversation. I can’t say that I’m all that good at it.”

“You were spectacular,” said Isra. “Beautiful.”

“Well,” said Verity, blushing. “Thank you. But I just play what I want to play without thinking too much about what I’m doing or why. It’s a very relaxed way of doing it, and probably not what’s best suited to a busy tavern, but Cynthia has never told me to do anything different, and if I don’t have any pressure on me,” she shrugged. “I would rather play something that’s beautiful to me.”

“You’d make the songbirds jealous,” said Isra.

Verity smiled. The other three were walking slightly ahead, engaged in their own conversation. “I suppose you’re going back to your home soon? It’s getting late. I have a lantern you can borrow, if you need.”

“I can make my way in the dark,” said Isra. “It’s one of those things I had thought everyone could do.” She was silent for a moment, feeling the warm dish in her hands. “If there’s a bed, I may ask Mizuki if I could stay the night. I already packed my bag and left it there.”

“There’s a bed,” said Verity. “You’d be in the room with me, where Mizuki’s sisters used to sleep.”

“If that’s not a problem,” said Isra, feeling flushed. The ale hadn’t quite left her, it seemed.

“I have to warn you,” said Verity. “I do have a tendency to sing in my sleep.”

Isra smiled. She was quite looking forward to it.

Chapter 20 - Temple Politics

They got the party channel exactly seven days after the party had formed. Hannah was pleased, but she’d been in a number of parties before, and party chat always came with some problems.

It was an open question why the Editors had done as they’d done. The actual thought that went into the Editing was enormously complex, beyond the ken of a young cleric, but some of the effects that Editors of ages past had placed upon the world certainly had to be the result of unknown limitations they were working under. The hexes were certainly one of those places where limitations seemed most obvious, because the positions of the warp points were, most of the time, somewhat inconvenient. Hannah knew, of course, that hexagons could be used to tile a plane, that was fundamental knowledge for any cleric of Garos, but the world wasn’t a plane, it was a globe, and the hexagons were imperfect (and there were, in theory, pentagons somewhere). Given that they couldn’t have perfection, it seemed to Hannah that they should have gone in the direction of Oeyr, and simply made the hexes around cities. The math of it was a bit beyond her, but it seemed like it would have been better. But no, the answer was probably that the Editors were working under some unknown constraints which explained why they’d done things as they did. Or, possibly, they’d made a mistake: that was true of the dungeons, probably, given how dangerous they were.

The party chat was a different thing altogether. It was, obviously, good to be able to have parties, which came with many benefits, and it was good to be able to talk to one another without needing to worry about how far apart you were. But the question that had literally kept Hannah up at night on multiple occasions was why there was no way to turn the thing off.

<Testing,> said Alfric. His voice reverberated in her head, and Hannah got a distinctly unpleasant sensation while watching his lips, which weren’t making any real sound. People always sounded different in the channel, which had something to do with the way it stole the words from your lips and made them available to others. From what Hannah had read, people sounded more like they sounded to themselves. Alfric’s voice was rich and mellow, and still fairly deep.

<I hear you,> replied Hannah.

<Hello?> asked Isra, who was the only one who wasn’t in the house with them.

<Hi!> said Mizuki.

<We should establish some ground rules,> said Alfric. <I think the first is that we don’t use the channel for anything that can be said out loud.>

<Agreed,> replied Hannah. <Second rule is no talking while anyone is asleep.>

<Does that mean we can’t use it when someone is napping?> asked Mizuki. <What if we don’t know that they’re napping?>

<You can use the channel to say that you’ll want some peace and quiet,> said Alfric. <Unless there’s business, we’ll respect that. But I don’t think any of us take naps.>

Mizuki guiltily raised her hand.

<Isra can’t hear that,> said Alfric. <Isra, Mizuki just raised her hand.>

<Thank you,> came Isra’s disembodied voice.

<Naps are traditional in Kiromo,> said Mizuki. <I don’t actually know why, but that’s what grandpa said. I like to take cat naps.>

<That’s fine,> said Alfric. <Additionally, I think it would be good for us to have a daily check-in, if we’re not all together in person, just so we all know each other’s plans.>

<Ugh,> said Mizuki.

<I agree,> said Hannah. <Ugh.>

<Fine, fine,> said Alfric. <But maybe if we’re all in different hexes.>

<Will we be?> asked Mizuki. <Ever?>

<Scattering to the six winds seems unlikely,> said Verity. <But if it happens, yes, we can do check-ins.>

<I think that’s all I have for now,> said Alfric.

<Just try not to be annoyin’,> said Hannah.

<Goodbye,> said Isra, and that, at least, had a note of finality.

“I kind of wanted to play with it more,” said Mizuki. They were all sitting in the dining room together, with the remains of their lunch in front of them. “It’s been a bit.”

“Well, it’s not for playin’ with,” said Hannah. “Though I suppose it might have been good to set aside some time for it, to get it out of your system. That’s what they do for the fresh little acolytes.”

“You know I’m the oldest one here, right?” asked Mizuki. “And I have been in a party before, it’s just been a few years.”

“So long as we’re not using the channel to do music,” said Verity with a sigh. “I have nightmares of playing with a quintet and having the people sitting next to me talking into my ear while I’m trying to play.”

“Actual nightmares?” asked Mizuki.

Verity nodded. “There was a lot of pressure. It’s part of why I live here now. There’s no one at the Fig and Gristle that pushes me to do more, or do better, or sing differently, or add more effects. Everything is on my own terms.”

“I can see why you didn’t want to do dungeons,” said Mizuki. “I mean, also the risk of being killed.”

“There wasn’t any pressure in the dungeon,” said Verity. “Or … the pressure was for something, it wasn’t just someone trying to squeeze me because they thought I needed squeezing, it was me trying my best to give you all what you needed. And in that sense, it was rewarding, I suppose.”

“Part of a party is trust,” said Alfric. “We trust you to do your part, and to have a good understanding of what’s best in any circumstance. The plan right now is to head southwest as soon as we have armor and the channel, do the dungeon in Traeg’s Knob, then continue on to Liberfell, which I’ll do with Isra, and whoever else wants to come with. It would make sense to do the Liberfell dungeon, but it’s a larger city, and that means more rogue mana, and I’d like another five or so easy ones before we make an attempt at Liberfell or Tarchwood or someplace bigger.”

“While we’re in Liberfell, we’ll want to get somethin’ to capture beasts,” said Hannah. “Or at least some pots to put live plants in. Isra may not be able to soothe the monsters, but she can help with anythin’ else, to see whether it’s worth it to take out, or safe.” She nodded to herself. “We’ll take the storage book in, naturally, which can probably help. Have we tested whether things can live in it?”

“I put in a grasshopper,” said Alfric. “When I pulled it out an hour later, it was dead. I tried again by putting a grasshopper in a bottle with a cork in it, and it was fine. I think it continues to live in there, so if we put an animal in, it’s just a question of whether it has enough food and air.”

“A ventstone then?” asked Hannah. “Those are pricey.”

“Do I need to be here for this?” asked Verity. “I was going to go practice my music for a bit and get ready for my session at the Fig and Gristle tonight.”

“You’re still going there?” asked Alfric.

“Yes,” said Verity. “It’s where I went off to last night.”

“You don’t need the money,” said Alfric.

“That’s right,” nodded Verity. “But I feel some obligation to Cynthia, and I enjoy playing for a crowd, knowing that I’m making their lives a little better for as long as the tune stays in the air.” She shrugged. “I’m not going to give it up just because I have more money than I need. It was never really about the money, it was just a comfortable place to play some songs.”

“Do you mind if I come by?” asked Alfric.

“Of course not,” said Verity. “But … why?”

“I enjoy your music,” said Alfric. “And that way I can take a break from relying on Mizuki for food.”

“I really don’t mind,” said Mizuki. “Except for chopping veggies, cooking for more people isn’t actually all that much more work.” She looked at Verity. “Do you prefer to eat before or after?”

“After,” said Verity. “I play better when I’m a bit hungry.”

“Then I’ll have something for you in the chiller,” said Mizuki with a nod.

“I have a standing offer from Cynthia for food,” said Verity. “There’s usually something left at the end of the dining hours anyway.” She paused. “Thank you for the offer though.”

“Why don’t we all go?” asked Hannah. “Make a night of us, the three of us together, listenin’ to Verity? I don’t think I’ve heard much of her tavern songs.”

“I suppose,” said Mizuki. “You would all tell me if you didn’t like my cooking, right?”

Alfric laughed. “Mizuki, the food you cook is on par with actual professional cooking in Dondrian. If you wanted to stop being a sorcerer, you could legitimately make it as a professional chef.”

Mizuki blushed. “Well, I suppose. But I think I would end up hating it, if I was forced to do it every day. Instead, I choose to do it every day.”

“It was the same with me and music,” said Verity. “I love music, plucking the strings, finding melodies, and even the magical aspects of it, but when it was an obligation, I felt like hanging myself from the rafters.” She paused. “Sorry if that was too morose.”

“You let us know if you ever need some time,” said Hannah. “Alfric has a notion to push us through the dungeons, and I think there might be somethin’ to that, but we don’t want you hatin’ the party. We want you to be happy you’re goin’ on trips with us.”

“Personally,” said Mizuki. “I think it would be great to go into a dungeon if we didn’t have to worry about the monsters. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just waltz in, pick up some new entads, then waltz out?”

“But then everyone would do it,” said Alfric.

“Och,” said Hannah. “You’re not one of those that thinks the Editors made the dungeons full of monsters on purpose, are you?”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Alfric. “But I do think that the way things are has a certain, I don’t know. Niceness to it?”

“The monsters are nice to you?” asked Mizuki. “The ones that tried to rip you up and claw your face?”

“Well, yes,” said Alfric. “The dungeons are wild, they’re one of the only wild places left in the entire world. Everything has been mapped and tamed, except for the north. The beastmasters will track and find anything that’s all that dangerous, we have programs for keeping things contained and safe, it’s been a century since we’ve had a war … but the dungeons are the one place none of that is true. And if you could just go in and grab what was there without a fight, without risk, then I don’t know. I don’t think I would be so enamored.”

“You wish there were still wars?” asked Mizuki.

“No, it’s not that,” said Alfric. “It’s … I don’t know. I don’t know how to say it without sounding like I wish that the world were a violent and wild place again, because that’s not what I want.”

“It’s common,” said Hannah, nodding. “For a particular kind of person, the peace and prosperity of the modern age feels like bein’ in a pen.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “Well, I don’t understand it. All I ever wanted was to be safe and comfortable. Which I mostly am.”

“I said I was going to go, so I should do that,” said Verity, getting up from her spot. She turned to go, then remembered her plate, and took it to the kitchen before going upstairs.

“Well, we have some time until dinner,” said Hannah. “I was about to go into town and see if Lemmel needed some help, and Alfric, you’d said you wanted introductions to the local clerics, was that right?”

“It was,” Alfric nodded. “And now is as good a time as any.”

“Then what am I doing?” asked Mizuki, pouting somewhat. “I’m just going to be left to my own devices?”

“Try not to cause trouble,” Hannah suggested. “Read a book.”

“I’ve read all the books,” said Mizuki.

“I brought some from my room,” said Hannah. “Though they’re mostly romances, I should warn, ay?”

“I could go for a romance,” said Mizuki, perking up. “You’re fine if I go in there and pick one out?”

“I’ve no secrets,” Hannah replied.

She and Alfric put their shoes on, sitting side by side as they did so, then took off down the path that led away from the house. Mizuki’s grandfather, it was increasingly clear, had been quite well-off, given how extensive the area he’d owned had been, and how nice the house was. That wealth didn’t seem to have transferred down to Mizuki though, and the girl seemed to live hand-to-mouth most of the time, perhaps because she seemed possessed of a certain indolence. Hannah wasn’t one to judge though, if it kept her happy, though it wasn’t clear whether that was the case.

“The team is goin’ well,” said Hannah as they walked.

“So far,” said Alfric. “I was worried that we would have a rocky start.”

“Talked to the censusmaster, ay?” asked Hannah.

“Yesterday,” said Alfric, wincing. “Isra and Verity are both third now. I should have brought it up while we were all on the channel. I don’t think that substantially changes things, but common wisdom is that it increases the risk. They both must have been on the verge.”

“Or Isra knowin’ she’s a druid and not a ranger has changed things,” said Hannah, nodding. “Happens, though rarely.” Elevation wasn’t one of the more considered aspects of the world, in Hannah’s opinion. Sometimes all you could do was look at the Editors’ work and cluck your tongue.

“Very rarely, in the case of someone being a druid without knowing it,” said Alfric.

“Ay,” nodded Hannah. “Still some mystery with that, isn’t there?”

“Some,” said Alfric. “And her circumstances are unusual even if we discount the druid stuff.”

“More so than your own?” asked Hannah. “Or Verity’s? You certainly grabbed a complicated set of people.”

“Complicated people are more likely to be available,” said Alfric. He said that like it was self-evident.

“Well, I s’pose,” said Hannah. “Who were the alternates, by the by? You said there were two of them, I was wonderin’ whether it’s anyone whose names I know.”

“Kell Westling, a wizard who mostly works with farmers, though he’s on the younger side, and only first elevation,” said Alfric. “The second alternate was Micah Skybloom, an apprentice blacksmith, but he’s third elevation, and in his mid-twenties. He seemed strong, but I was hoping to have that role covered.”

“Ay, Micah,” said Hannah with a sigh. She had already talked to him with Mizuki, and had been thinking about him in her off time, turning the idea of him over in her head. “He propositioned me.”

“Propositioned?” asked Alfric.

“For marriage, when I first came to town,” she said.

“Without knowing you?” asked Alfric, who seemed alarmed.

“We’d met a few times,” said Hannah. “It’s a custom, down south, to make such a proposition if you’ve a good feelin’ about things, or if you’re properly smitten. The idea, then, is to have a long engagement, a year or more, to see if you’re truly a match to be wed.”

“And,” said Alfric, working through that. “You turned him down?”

“There are times I wish I hadn’t,” said Hannah. “But it was tradition he was anglin’ on, and tradition didn’t appeal to me much, so it was clear he had the wrong of me. Micah is the sort to like a muscular woman wearin’ pants, I think, and there’s some appeal in the tall and burly, for my own tastes, but … well, to do it in that way, to have a love that grows and blooms over time rather than startin’ with a spark,” she shook her head. Micah had felt a spark, that was clear enough, but Hannah had only seen the appeal of him. “I don’t think it was wrong of me to say no, mind you, but there’s a part that wished I’d said yes. I still see him ‘round, of course, in a town as small as Pucklechurch, and he’s been quite decent about it, no hard feelin’s. Perhaps in five years, once I’ve had my fill of the dungeons, I might see if he’s still available, or kick myself because he’s sure to have found someone. To settle down now, though, have children …”

It was easier to say to Alfric, knowing that he wasn’t likely one to gossip. Talking to Mizuki, well, that meant trying to think about her words. Something said to Mizuki, who had friends in town and an open mouth, could easily end up in the ears of someone else, and it was too early to know whether Mizuki could be bound to secrecy, or trusted with private feelings. Not that these were secrets, mind, just things that were a bit delicate.

“And do you think about that?” asked Alfric. “Marriage?”

“Worried I’m not goin’ to be patchin’ you up if I have a husband or a wife?” asked Hannah, smiling at him.

“Just curious,” said Alfric. “But yes, it would also be unfortunate to lose you because you wanted to start a family.”

“Ay,” nodded Hannah. “But no, I s’pose down the line I might be through with bein’ wild and free, and if Micah is still available, he seems like a good sort to settle down with, but I’ve got dungoneerin’ I want to do, travels through the hexes of the world, all that sort, and to take a husband or a wife and then leave them seems a bit cruel, to my mind, or at least unreasonable.”

“And it would be?” asked Alfric. “A husband or a wife?”

“Ay, well,” said Hannah. “I am a cleric of Garos. I had a few girlfriends in the seminary, and it was nice enough. My mind goes to men more often though, so she would have to be, well, somethin’ special, which is what we all hope for, isn’t it?”

“I guess,” said Alfric.

“And you?” asked Hannah. “Any romance, prior to this part of your life?”

“There was a girl,” said Alfric. There was an obvious and immediate hesitance, not just in his words, but his whole character. “She was … someone special. I’d known her since we were small. And then things didn’t go as they should have gone.” He shook his head, maybe because he knew he was being too circumspect, though Hannah thought it more likely that he was just thinking on it. “My parents are both dungeoneers. Their advice was that I’d be traveling so much early on that it would mostly be about brief encounters, and that I should take what I could from them. Then, when I was older, I could have longer, more stable relationships. The dungeons at my parents’ level, they take three or four days to clear, and they don’t do more than one a month, if that.”

“Seems like too much risk of death,” said Hannah. He’d changed the subject from the girl, and hadn’t been terribly deft about it, but Hannah let it be. No need to get everyone’s history right off the bat, in her opinion.

“Maybe,” said Alfric.

“I warn you now, there’s a point where I might bow out,” said Hannah. “I can take punishment better than most, I can handle wounds, but if you’re lookin’ for someone to go with you all the way, someone who’d want to go down into the infinidungeons of Dondrian, I don’t think that’s me. Or any of the others, for that matter.”

“I know,” said Alfric. “I don’t expect that. What I expect is to raise my elevation and get some experience under my belt.”

They had been talking for some time, and when they’d reached the temple, they’d stayed outside, in the shade of the building, continuing their talk. Hannah found Alfric nice to talk to, at least when he wasn’t going on about dungeons, and even a little bit when he was. It was clear that he had his own story to him, but one of the things she’d learned in seminary was that everyone had their own story, and it was just a matter of listening to it. More than that, you could find reflections in their stories, and places where two stories would line up with one another. Alfric’s experience of wanting a wild world to tame wasn’t unique in the slightest, but that was part of what made it interesting. It was common, especially for young people, and that was where some of the lure of the dungeon came from.

For Hannah, the lure of the dungeon was distinctly different. Alfric liked that there were things to fight, at least in some sense. He liked that it was unknown. But for Hannah, it was the glimpse into the raw elements of reality. Dungeons were created, constructed, pulled from the raw mana and aetheric disturbances, all by some force that the Editors (in her opinion) clearly didn’t quite have a handle on. The dungeons reflected, in some way, the will of the gods and the shape of reality. Going into a dungeon and finding what was there was, for Hannah, a religious experience, a way to become closer to Garos and interpret his philosophical approach. It was hard, as in the real world, to separate out Garos from the others, but there was something there, she was sure of it, even if it had been a source of disagreement in both the seminary and the guilds. Dungeons reflected the real world in some ways, but they also reflected something else, and that something else was what captivated Hannah. She expected to make no major discoveries about the nature of Garos, but she did think that it would bring her closer to him. Already, her meditations felt like they’d borne fruit.

They went first to the section of the temple devoted to Xuphin, who was represented by the twisted ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail, looped to make the symbol for infinity.

“Pann Wellings,” said Hannah, bowing slightly to the tall cleric. “This is my party member, Alfric Overguard, we’ll be doin’ dungeons together, and he thought it best to meet people, especially if we need to come here for healin’, I suppose.”

“A pleasure,” said Pann, holding out her hand. Alfric took it and gave her a firm handshake. He was staring though, just a bit, impressed or perhaps intimidated by her height. She was seven feet tall, and rather than being lanky, as some tall people were, she had a statuesque quality to her. Xuphin was the God of Infinity, sometimes labeled as the God of Increase, seeing as infinity was rarely achievable in the real world, and enlarging themselves was something many of her clerics did. The gods did not have genders, as such, but many people referred to them as though they did, often with some disagreement. For Hannah, it largely depended upon her mood.

“The pleasure is mine,” said Alfric, who was at least keeping his composure. “I apologize for any awkwardness on my part, it’s been some time since I’ve seen a cleric of Xuphin this close up.”

“And what do you think?” asked Pann, gesturing to her body. “Some find it grotesque, especially on a woman.”

“That was the furthest thing from my mind,” said Alfric.

Pann gave a delighted laugh. “And where are you from?”

“Dondrian,” said Alfric.

“Ah,” said Pann, clucking her tongue. “But they come much bigger than me there, don’t they?”

“They do,” said Alfric. “But they’re mostly men, and from the pews in the back of the temple, some of the, um, effect is lost.” He was still looking up at her.

“Too large does start to create some problems,” said Pann. “‘Increase is not always without limits’, from the book of Xu Phinnas, volume nine, verse thirteen. There are obviously the practical considerations, like the length of your bed or how much you want to keep bumping into doorways, and there are physical considerations, like whether your heart can pump the blood it needs to, or your muscles can support your bones.” She said this with the practiced tones of someone who had said it all before. It was common, among clerics, to explain their particulars over and over again to the laity. “At any rate, if you’re concerned about healing, I can go over what you need to know before coming to me.”

“I know it all,” said Alfric. “I’m well-prepared. I thought it would be better to have an introduction now than when I come to you blinded and needing new eyes.”

“Oeyr is often better with that sort of thing,” Pann nodded. “But I take your meaning.” She turned to Hannah. “And you? Leaving Lemmel all alone?”

“Is he broken up about it?” asked Hannah. “Cryin’ his eyes out every day I’m gone?”

Pann laughed. “Not in the least, but I did think he liked your breads. I miss the smell of it in the mornings.”

“Och, all you had to do was ask, I’ll bring some by tomorrow, and praise be to Xuphin,” said Hannah. She gave another bow, then ushered Alfric out.

“Got a thing for tall women?” she asked, keeping her voice low as they crossed the temple.

“There’s something striking about her,” said Alfric. “Not just the size though.”

“Pretty, I agree,” said Hannah. “Married, unfortunately for you, though I suppose Xuphin herself was thought to take many partners, in keeping with her nature.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that,” said Alfric.

“Well, I wouldn’t judge, of course,” said Hannah. “Though it’s the first time I’ve seen the light of interest in your eyes.” They made it to the other side of the temple, devoted to Bixzotl, God of Copies. The statue was of twin wolves.

Obbrech was, unfortunately, in the middle of a meeting with a young woman, so Hannah only gave him a wave, and he gave her a brief nod before returning his attention to the woman. Obbrech wasn’t too much older than Hannah, a handsome man with a clean-shaven face and fastidious appearance. He was often occupied with young women, which seemed to irk him, perhaps since it was the same young women in a steady rotation, always asking for more of his time.

“Well, Obbrech is busy, and I know that Lin is out, so I suppose this trip will be a bit of a waste,” said Hannah. “Lin is the cleric of Oeyr, and we’ve got no cleric of Kesbin, at least at the moment. So that leaves only Filera, who’s our cleric of Qymmos, and she’s a cranky one.”

“She can help with entad identification,” said Alfric.

“Ay, but you’ll find a cleric of Qymmos in any larger town too,” said Hannah. “Certainly in Tarchwood or Liberfell.”

“You don’t like her?” asked Alfric.

“We had a discussion a few months back,” said Hannah. “Lasted most of the night, and neither of us left happy. Religious matters, mostly my opinion on her god and hers on mine.”

“So you’re saying that if I introduce myself, I should just not have you with me?” asked Alfric.

“Och, no, I don’t want to make a big thing of it, I suppose,” said Hannah. “Let’s go.”

The statue of Qymmos, God of Sets, was a many-armed man, with each hand holding a different implement. Traditionally Qymmos was supposed to be represented by an octopus, and it was the only one of the six statues in the large central room that wasn’t an animal, which irked Hannah to no end. They should have either been all people, or all animals, but not this awkward mix. Of course, she’d talked to the head of the temple, which was Filera, and she’d laid out the costs involved in commissioning a new one, and that had been the end of that conversation, because there was nowhere for the money to come from, and Hannah seemed to be the only one bothered.

“Filera Bosc,” said Hannah as she entered the room. Filera was sitting with her plants, as usual, and reading a book, also as usual. “This is Alfric Overguard. He’s a member of my dungeoneering party, here to make some introductions, because there’s a good chance we’ll want your services.”

Filera got up from her chair, rising slowly and setting her book to the side. She was a shorter woman, with blonde hair that she wore tied back. Her dress went down to her ankles and covered her arms to her wrists, and there was something incredibly and deliberately severe about her.

“I charge for entad identifications,” said Filera as she took Alfric’s hand. That’s what she said, by way of greeting, and immediately Hannah felt herself irked.

Alfric nodded. “Most do. It’s expected.”

“I’m letting you know now so that there’s no confusion later,” she said. “Overguard, she said?”

Alfric stiffened slightly. “Yes.”

Filera was looking at him as though she was reading his life story, which given her profession, wasn’t too far off the truth. “Qymmos is sometimes called the God of Information,” she said. “But I’ve always thought, if she needed to be called the god of something other than Sets, she should have been called the God of Categories.”

“Yes,” said Alfric, standing there.

“Which god do you follow most closely?” asked Filera.

“Xuphin’s philosophy has always appealed to me,” said Alfric. “Though … I can see the appeal of Qymmos as well, so long as I look at it from a certain angle.”

“She’ll try to draw you into theological talk, if you let her,” said Hannah.

Filera gave Hannah a grin, then turned back to Alfric. “And what is that angle?”

“I don’t particularly like to organize things into sets or categories,” said Alfric. “But it is useful. Where I think I’m on the same page as Qymmos is in seeking new things. The philosophies of the others don’t have as much of the same appeal toward seeking. But I can’t say that I would have made a good acolyte of Qymmos, because once everything is pinned in place, I start to lose interest.”

Filera nodded. “Seekers are often of Qymmos, but a seeker, once they’ve found what they sought, can become something different altogether.” She tapped her lips. “Alfric Overguard,” she said, tasting the name. “I’ve changed my mind. I’ll do your entad identifications for no fee, so long as you come speak to me about the dungeons you’ve been in.”

“Of course,” nodded Alfric, relaxing.

“To a fruitful relationship,” said Filera. She smiled at him, and he gave a nervous smile back.

When they left, Hannah was frowning, but she saved her words until they were out of the temple.

“She’s an odd one,” said Hannah. “And I take it from the way that conversation went, she saw somethin’ in you?”

“Maybe,” said Alfric. “Though … I can’t be sure what, obviously.”

“Does she have blackmail against you?” asked Hannah. It was hard to see how a cleric of Qymmos would get that, since there were limits to how deep they could go in such a short time, and it wasn’t like they could just extract your deepest darkest secrets.

“No,” said Alfric. “If it’s the thing I think she knows, then no, it’s something I expect to tell you and the others once we’re better friends. I doubt you’d think less of me.”

“But it’s not somethin’ you want to say now, is the impression I get,” said Hannah. “And you know somethin’ about Verity that you’re keepin’ back too.”

“Like you said, we all have our — I don’t even want to call them secrets, because it’s not as important as all that,” he said. “But you don’t need to know my life story, and I don’t need to know yours, not for us to be going into dungeons together. I swear on my life it’s nothing that puts anyone in danger. And I swear that if it becomes relevant, I’ll tell everything. But I want to wait a bit, and I think that’s my right.”

“Ay,” said Hannah, slowly. “And here I thought I was the one with a rich inner life.”

Chapter 22 - The Journey More Than the Destination

Mizuki was finding that she didn’t actually like traveling that much. Six miles was a long way to walk, especially if you were going to do a dungeon at the end of it. The dungeon was also a mile and a half off the warp point, so that was seven and a half miles. Then after the dungeon, there would be another six miles of walking, either to Liberfell for the night, or all the way back to Pucklechurch. She liked walking, but she didn’t like it that much. The one big bonus was that she was with people that she found herself somewhat comfortable with.

She was also very slightly hungover, though it had helped that they’d set off later in the day, after a light breakfast. She drank lots of water, and an herb that Isra had given her, which helped.

“We should have gotten a cart,” said Mizuki. “Or a mount. We have the money.”

“And you know how to ride, ay?” asked Hannah.

“No,” said Mizuki. “But it can’t be that hard.”

“The birds are hard,” said Alfric. “And there are limits on how much weight they can carry, though you might be able to manage it, actually. The lizzo are finicky and slow. A good mount is one of the most sought after of the possible beasts you could find in a dungeon.” He glanced over at Isra. “With your abilities, I’m hoping that if we come across the opportunity, we might be able to capitalize on it.”

“You’re not supposed to take animals out,” said Hannah. “Not unless you have the equipment for it to make sure it won’t get loose. And anything a person could possibly ride, we wouldn’t be able to fit in the book.”

“I know, I was thinking down the road,” said Alfric. “I’ve heard that in Kiromo they’ve been trying to breed bigger sheep, strong enough to pull a cart, but I don’t think they’ve had much luck. And in Tarbin they have cats, but they’re mostly for show. Most likely we’ll have a travel entad before any of that becomes relevant for us. Maybe we’ll even have one later today.”

“I hope so,” said Mizuki. “I am not looking forward to the walk back.”

“I think I’ll go to Liberfell after we’re done in Traeg’s Knob,” said Verity. “I have the money to spend the night there, and I told Cynthia that I wasn’t coming back. Besides, it would be nice to see a bit of a bigger city.”

“It’s nothing in comparison to Dondrian,” said Alfric.

“Nothing is anything in comparison to that monster of a city,” said Hannah.

“Well, are we all going to Liberfell?” asked Mizuki.

“Those of us that are still alive at the end of the dungeon,” said Hannah with a little laugh.

“Hannah,” said Alfric.

“Oh, just a joke,” she said. “This one is in the middle of nowhere, should be easier than Pucklechurch was. Obviously I don’t expect anyone to be hurt, and if they are, I expect me to be able to patch them.”

“From what I’ve heard, the warp point is at the top of a hill,” said Alfric. “So at least on the way to Liberfell, we’ll have a downhill stretch.”

“It’s a popular place for sleddin’,” said Hannah, “If you can stomach the walk in the winter.”

“Yeah, I used to do that when I was little,” said Mizuki. “Not many people live in the hex, and the warp point is in a nice place. You just sled down, then warp back to the top. Kind of terrifying though. And obviously it’s late spring.”

“Sorry,” said Verity. “What’s sledding?”

“You don’t have that in Dondrian?” asked Mizuki. “You just, uh, slide down a hill, usually on a — do you know what a sled is? It’s like some wooden boards with metal runners.”

“And people do this for fun?” asked Verity.

“It’s loads of fun,” said Mizuki. “The biggest hill near Pucklechurch isn’t really good for it though, you need a bigger one, like at Traeg’s Knob, which is all the better because you can just warp up instead of having a hike.”

“There’s a handful of houses near the warp point,” said Hannah. “Not so much of a town though, just a waystation. Some of it’s public, a place to warm yourself on a trip, or if you’ve come for the sleddin’.”

“We don’t get much snow up north,” said Verity. “A dusting in the middle of winter, usually, but nothing more than that. My first winter here, I was shocked by how much it built up.”

“And yet you didn’t wear pants,” said Hannah, shaking her head.

“I’m wearing pants now,” said Verity, lifting up her dress to show that indeed, she had pants on beneath it. It was not, in Mizuki’s opinion, the most flattering outfit. Mizuki had pants too, but she hadn’t wanted to walk in them, not when it was going to be a mildly warm day. She had bought a pack, and put the pants and a few other things into it, along with her gloves, boots, and a thicker shirt. She also had the helmet she’d gotten from the blacksmith, and then almost left it home because of how stupid she looked in it, but better to look stupid than to be stupid.

There were similar changes all around. Perhaps it was Alfric, or perhaps it was Hannah, but they were all treating it like they were an actual dungeoneering party. The helm had been more expensive than Mizuki would have liked, but she was very easily getting into the habit of thinking that money wasn’t a real concern.

“Traeg’s Knob is hilly, verging on mountainous,” said Alfric. “That should mean tougher monsters with thicker skin, if a bit slower. And because it’s less inhabited, we’ll expect less in the way of finished goods or worked rooms.”

“Bit of a surprise there was so much in Pucklechurch,” said Hannah.

“Variance,” shrugged Alfric. “Knowing that a leyline used to run through there … it might have been that.”

“Or the big stone in my backyard?” asked Mizuki. She hadn’t had a chance to show Hannah, in part because of the mild hangover.

“Well, possible,” said Alfric. “If the Pucklechurch hex was a part of the leyline, then there’s a good chance that there are older ruins there, even if they’re buried deep. Many of the oldest cities were built along leylines.”

“Seems an argument for local knowledge,” said Hannah. “If you’re wantin’ to go through all the local hexes, maybe best to ask around first, to see if there’s somethin’ you don’t know about the place?”

“It didn’t end up mattering,” said Alfric. “We made it through.”

“Still,” said Hannah. “The dungeon we find in Traeg’s Knob, it pulls from a hundred twenty square miles or so, doesn’t it? Hard to know what might be buried there.”

“Well, yes,” said Alfric. “But firstly, I’m not terribly worried about it, and secondly, part of why we’re going to Liberfell is that we’re going to seek out the Adventurer’s League office, which will hopefully have details on each of the dungeons, just in case there’s something for us to know. Now, we could go there first and hit the Traeg’s Knob dungeon on the way back, but then we wouldn’t be able to sell what we get from there. Sometimes they also have rooms, but they’re usually pretty shoddy.”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “I’m not sayin’ that we should do different, or that I wanted you to take a day to go to Liberfell on your own just to get some information that probably doesn’t help us.”

“You were just saying,” said Alfric, nodding.

“So, we’re unbalanced now,” said Mizuki. “In terms of elevation? But we’re also more prepared, a lot more prepared, and Isra’s got her bow. Is this more or less dangerous?”

“It’s very hard to say,” said Alfric.

“Probably more,” said Hannah, shrugging. “But not so much more that I’d worry. And who really knows, with variance.”

“Ideally,” said Alfric. “You accelerate in terms of gear. There are some graphs for expected difficulty, but it’s a lot of math, and depends on a few too many things. Twenty dungeons down the line,” he held up a hand in Verity’s direction, “Not that we’re committed to that. But if we ever got there, or if I got there with another group, I would hope that I was at least keeping pace, going into a dungeon with a much better entad weapon, ideally a spear, full plate armor, and a few other things.”

“A spear?” asked Isra. “Not a sword?”

“The sword was my father’s,” said Alfric. “It’s a family heirloom, and a good weapon, but there are too many advantages to a spear, so long as it’s sturdy and light. A spear gives you reach, and reach means that you’re staying away from claws and fangs. They’re more nimble, they give better leverage, they can pierce through thick hide better … but the dungeons don’t always give you what you want, and I don’t want to spend funds on something like that, not at the kinds of prices a properly good entad can have.”

“Personally, I’ve been loving my spoon,” said Mizuki. “It’s properly handy.” She had brought it along, just in case.

“I know, I know,” said Alfric. “There’s no point thinking about it, or making a wishlist, but it’s something that every dungeoneer does.”

“So you’re saying if I want to do this, I need a wishlist?” asked Mizuki.

“Do you want to be a proper dungeoneer?” asked Alfric.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “I wouldn’t say that I liked the first one too much. But there were a lot of rings for the trouble, a neat spoon, and some stories to tell.”

“Well, as for my list, if everyone is supposed to have one,” said Hannah, “Healin’ is through my hands, so longer hands might be nice.”

“Longer … hands?” asked Verity.

“Arms, or hands,” said Hannah. “And of course somethin’ symmetrical would be nice, some armor, a weapon perhaps … hard to say, but there’s a lot I might like.”

“I’d like something for the garden,” said Verity.

“That’s not really the kind of thing we’re talking about,” said Alfric.

“Why?” asked Verity.

Alfric hesitated. “It doesn’t help … with the dungeons.”

Verity laughed. “Oh, how dare I want something that won’t help with the dungeons. Why, that’s against the rules.”

“I knew that it sounded stupid even before it was out of my mouth,” said Alfric.

“Well,” said Mizuki. “Something for cooking, I think.”

“Something that would make meals?” asked Hannah.

“No, nothing like that,” frowned Mizuki. “I like cooking, I don’t want something that takes the fun out of it. But something like, say, a knife that chops things for me, or a bottle that never runs out of oil, or something like that.”

“A magical instrument might be nice,” said Verity. “Though nothing too stressful.”

“I told them about the lute you used in Dondrian last night,” said Alfric. “I hope you don’t mind. I didn’t think that you might like to keep it private until it was out of my mouth. I apologize.”

“Oh,” said Verity. “No, I don’t care. Thank you for considering it through, even if it was after the fact.”

“He said it made you sound like an orchestra,” said Hannah.

“It did,” said Verity. “The sound could fill a concert hall, and did, on a few occasions. But it was taxing to play and made my head feel too full of melodies. I was thinking, if I could have another entad lute, that I might like something softer.”

“You’re unlikely to get a lute,” said Alfric. “We’re all unlikely to get exactly the thing we want. There’s too much variety.”

“Well, it’s a wishlist, anyway,” said Verity with a sigh. “Oh! Something to keep my hair from needing to be washed or combed.”

Mizuki looked at her. She did have the longest hair of any of them, though with Isra wearing a headscarf, it was hard to say whether she might have had Verity beat. Hannah had more hair, or at least it seemed like that with all the curls, but Verity’s was longer.

“Clothing might be nice,” said Hannah. “Something that protects against the elements?”

“A dress that would stay warm in winter,” said Verity.

“A dress I would look good in,” said Mizuki, frowning a bit. “I don’t know what it is, but every time I put on a dress, I look like a goon.”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “And it’d take magic to make that not happen, you think?” There was something very innocent in her expression that made the insult all the more funny, and Mizuki cackled.

“I would like an animal, I think,” said Isra.

“A dungeon animal?” asked Hannah. “They’re dangerous, ay.”

“You’ve said,” replied Isra.

“Well, just so you know,”said Hannah.

“Anything from an egg is much less likely to be dangerous,” said Alfric. “And given you’re a druid, you’ll know better than we do what kinds of things might have a good disposition.”

“I’d like flight,” said Mizuki. “To fly into the sky, like a bird.” She spread her arms.

“I think I’d enjoy being a fish,” said Verity.

“Bein’ a fish?” asked Hannah. “Not just swimmin’ and breathin’ water like one?”

“I suppose either would be fine,” said Verity.

“Alfric,” said Mizuki, looking at him. “Are you thinking that’s not practical?”

“Oh,” he said. “No, it’s very practical, but I’m not dense enough to think that’s why Verity wants it. There are underwater dungeons. Every hex has a dungeon, or at least very nearly, and a great many of them are underwater, given how much area the oceans cover. But for us to tackle one of those, we’d have to all be able to breathe underwater, and honestly, underwater dungeon clearing has always sounded hellish to me.”

“People do that?” asked Verity.

“It’s my uncle’s specialty,” said Alfric. “He’s got an entad that gave him gills, and the rest of his party has similar.”

“But no sky dungeons, huh?” asked Mizuki.

“There are,” said Alfric. “But only in the sense that there are places where a dungeon entrance rests on a floating island.”

“Floating islands?” asked Isra.

“Far to the west,” said Alfric. “A long way away. I’ve also heard that there are some far to the east, beyond Tarbin, but it might just be the same set once you’ve wrapped around the planet. There’s some disagreement on that score, I can’t remember why. And possibly more, I suppose, if you could go north past the Barrier Storms. I had always wanted to, when I was a child.”

“You didn’t always want to be in the dungeoneering business?” asked Mizuki.

“Oh, I had wanted to be lots of things,” said Alfric. “But when I was old enough to read, I read stories about the people who’d died trying to explore past the Barrier Storms, and I learned that all the pirates had been captured or put down three hundred years ago, and that the whole of the planet that could be explored had been explored, and that left the dungeons as the one thing I wanted to do.”

“I wanted to be a musician,” said Verity.

“And … now you are?” asked Mizuki.

“I’ve gone back and forth on whether it’s what I want to do with my life,” said Verity. “I like being a musician, but I’m not thrilled with being a bard. In the long run, I don’t have any idea what I want to be. Perhaps just this.”

“Well,” said Hannah. “I got into bein’ a healer from a sideways angle. I had thoughts of bein’ somethin’ else, part of somethin’ more, and alienist seemed right to me until I learned more of the gods. Then there was just somethin’ about Garos that set my thoughts aflame, and if you’ve got the mindset for it, then the best thing to do, for your role in society, as it were, becomes healin’.”

“I wanted to be a mother,” said Isra.

There was silence for just a bit.

“A mother?” asked Mizuki. “Just that?”

Isra nodded. “When I was five years old, I saw a woman taking a herd of her children to drink from a well. It seemed very nice.”

“I don’t think herd is the right word,” said Alfric.

“What is the word?” asked Isra. “There were many of them.”

“There isn’t a word, funny enough,” said Hannah. “Is there?”

They all pondered this for a bit.

“Maybe it’s the way you said ‘herd’,” said Mizuki. “Like you were talking about animals, goats or sheep.”

“Mmm,” said Isra, frowning.

“And you, Mizuki?” asked Alfric. “What did you want to be?”

“Oh, I don’t think I wanted to do or be anything,” said Mizuki. “I think I was disappointed when I found out that you needed to do something. Seemed to me like it would be better to sit around all day, play with cats, go catch frogs, swish sticks through the air, read a book, take a nap … I guess I’ve always liked cooking, but when I was thirteen, we found out I was a sorc, and it was pretty clear that was the job that would let me do what I wanted, so long as I helped people out with things from time to time.” She shrugged. It felt like a lame answer, after what they’d said. Or if not lame, then at least immature. She was very aware that she wasn’t a hard worker, and maybe that accounted for some of the difference.

The conversation shifted after that, to talk of food, and later, to talk of clothing, which featured Alfric giving a characteristically in-depth talk on what was best for both traveling and going into a dungeon. Then, after that, they talked about the winter months, and Hannah seemed to think it very important to tell everyone that unless they’d been far to the south, they’d never experienced a true winter.

And then they were at the markers for the hex border, where Mizuki asked for a brief rest before they went through.

“Doesn’t it make more sense to rest after we’re through?” asked Verity as she sat down on a nearby rock.

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “Here, at least, it’s a nice day. Once we’re past the markers and we do the warp, who knows? Six miles away, and at least a little bit up, it might be cold and damp, right?”

“I suppose,” shrugged Verity. She had her own pack, which, like Mizuki’s, was slung over one shoulder. From this, she pulled out a waterskin and took a long drink. “Another mile and a half to go?”

“Just about,” said Alfric. “From what I’ve heard, the way should be pretty easy to find. And once we’re there, it’s the second dungeon. We’ll take a bit of a break before we go in. Is everyone feeling up to it?”

“I guess,” said Mizuki.

“Oh, I’m eager,” said Hannah. “Too long between, in my opinion.”

“I’m prepared,” said Verity. “Not eager though.”

“I’ve practiced with the bow and arrows,” said Isra.

“And?” asked Alfric.

“It depends on what we run into,” Isra replied with a shrug. “To draw and aim while walking alongside an arrow is more difficult than I thought.”

“I’m sure you’ll do well,” said Alfric. He turned to Mizuki. “You think it’ll be easier on you?”

“Casting?” asked Mizuki.

“Mentally,” said Alfric, tapping his head.

“Should be easier the second time,” said Mizuki. “Right?”

“Not always,” said Alfric. “For some, they build it up in their head. The first time they go in, they underestimate, and then the second time, they overestimate. I just want to help you any way that I can.”

“But not the others?” asked Mizuki.

“The others too,” he nodded, and he sounded so earnest that it was hard to take offense at the implication that she was the weak link. Her hackles, which had begun to rise, went back down.

“Thank you,” said Mizuki. “But I think I’ll be fine.”

Alfric nodded, and took a drink from his own waterskin. It was a warm spring day, with a nice breeze, but they had all worked up a bit of a sweat from walking. For a moment they just sat there, stretching their legs, and Mizuki wished that it could just be this, sitting around with — well, ‘friends’ was probably pushing it, but they were party members, and that was something. If the whole of the business could be walking places with friends, she’d have no qualms about being a dungeoneer, not if it was with these people.

Then the break was over, and they went through the pillars that marked the hex boundary, far enough that there’d be absolutely no risk of winding up back in Pucklechurch, though Hannah thought that was a rather silly concern.

Mizuki’s ears popped from the pressure difference when she arrived at the warp point with the others, and she stepped out of the small, covered landing to take in the view. It had been quite some time since she’d been to Traeg’s Knob, probably at least five years, with her parents, come to think of it, though she’d been a bit old for sledding. For all she could remember, it was her first time in Traeg’s Knob when it wasn’t winter, if she didn’t count just passing through.

The view was gorgeous, with the woodlands unmarred by farms and a large lake that stretched out away from the bottom of the hill in one direction. No one picked the warp points, they were just the center of every hex, and it was the sort of thing that people complained about, from time to time, though not about the one in Pucklechurch, which was almost exactly in the center of town. Traeg’s Knob was a large hill though, which seemed perfect to Mizuki, better placement than other warp points ended up being, at least from her knowledge of the local area. The air was crisp up on the hill, and the skies were clear, with the breeze that they’d felt six miles away more of a proper wind. Mizuki could tell that the heat was bleeding from her skin, and in another five minutes, she would probably be cold, but she had a pack with her change of clothes in it, so that didn’t matter so much.

“So untamed,” said Alfric. “Hardly any houses.”

There were a few, but he was right, there weren’t many. A few of the public places were up on top of the hill, and there were houses there too, but no more than five. A few more were down at the edge of the lake, each of them with its own small dock, but those numbered no more than five either.

“How many people in the whole of this hex?” asked Mizuki.

“Not many,” said Hannah, nodding. “A hundred, all told. A square mile of land each, I would think.”

“The five of us together could almost swing a vote for hexmaster,” said Verity. “Do they even vote, when it’s this size?”

“You’d better believe they do,” replied Hannah. “And they’re properly fierce about it, most of the time. The fewer people in a hex, the more power each of the masters has, comparatively. And of course, most of them know each other, save perhaps those at the hex edge, which can make it more bitter.”

“The system of masters wasn’t designed for a hex with a population this small,” said Alfric.

“They have more wilderness than Pucklechurch,” said Isra.

“Ay,” said Hannah. “But Pucklechurch itself is fairly wild. Not too much of it is farmed.”

“A quarter,” said Isra.

“A quarter,” agreed Alfric, though Mizuki had no idea how he’d know that. “But that’s not much, by the standards of a truly civilized place.”

“I don’t think I would like civilized places,” said Isra.

“No, perhaps not,” said Alfric. He took a deep breath. “Shall we?”

“We shall,” said Hannah. “Lead the way.”

They walked down the dirt path, which was well-maintained, and in a few places where it got steep, there were stone steps placed into the earth. Mizuki wished that she had a walking stick, and was on the lookout for one, but the trees were mostly pine trees, which seemed less likely to give up a proper walking stick than a maple. She wondered, idly, whether she should buy a staff in Liberfell. A staff seemed like a proper sorcerer’s implement, though she was afraid some wizard would come by and accuse her of pretending at wizarding. Wizards used their staffs — staves? — for something, though Mizuki had no idea what, and it probably depended upon the wizard. There were only a handful of wizards in Pucklechurch, and she’d given them all a wide berth, given the historical disagreements between their two professions.

The shade of the trees down the path was a welcome change of pace from the fields they’d been walking beside in the Pucklechurch hex, and Mizuki found herself enjoying the damp, earthy scent and the cool air on her skin so much that she was surprised when they reached the portal to the Traeg’s Knob dungeon. She had, momentarily, forgotten that they had come all this way with a goal in mind.

“I need to change,” said Mizuki. She gestured to Alfric that he should turn around, and he did promptly and without questioning it. “I won’t be long.”

“Do you want me to turn around too?” asked Hannah.

“What?” asked Mizuki, who was halfway through removing her top. “Why?”

“Well,” said Hannah. “I don’t know, because you don’t want me looking?”

“Uh,” said Mizuki, still frozen in place.

“I just thought,” said Hannah. “Seein’ as you want him to turn around because it wouldn’t be proper, and it wouldn’t be proper because of his assumed interest, that you might want me to turn too.”

“I was told this wouldn’t be long, though I am enjoying the view of the woods,” said Alfric, who apparently could crack a joke, when he set his mind to it.

“I’ll turn,” said Hannah, turning her back to Mizuki. “Not that I have an interest, mind, but it’s the assumed interest, I s’pose.” She kept her back turned. “Though I’d think it would be enough for you to trust that I wouldn’t leer, even if I did have interest in your body, which I don’t, same as Alfric.”

Verity and Isra had both turned too, without saying anything about it, and Mizuki was left to hurry putting on her dungeoneering outfit as quickly as she could. She hadn’t meant anything by asking Alfric to turn, it had just been, well — he probably would have turned without being asked, or at least looked away as though she wasn’t in a state of undress, and Mizuki felt foolish for having made even a minor thing of it, along with feeling a bit peeved that Hannah had called attention to it. And now, with all of them turned away, Mizuki was feeling a deep embarrassment about the whole thing.

“Done,” said Mizuki as she put on her helm.

Hannah turned back around and burst out laughing. “You look so cute!” she said.

“You were the one who helped me pick this out,” said Mizuki, crossing her arms.

“You look like a little boy playing soldier,” said Verity, who was looking Mizuki up and down.

“It’s for safety,” said Mizuki. “Sorry I didn’t pick up some sexy dungeon clothes.”

“I think having Hannah pick might have been a mistake,” said Isra, who was furrowing her brow.

“Well it is functional,” said Hannah. “Not my fault that Mizuki looks odd in that kind of thing.” That Hannah was wearing almost exactly the same outfit, with a button-down shirt, long pants, and heavy boots, seemed to not be an issue to anyone, even Mizuki. It was, Mizuki reflected, because that kind of look suited Hannah, who was more heavy set and had a look of cheerful, if serious business about her. Mizuki was, comparatively, a wimp.

“You know, I have the most raw destructive potential of anyone here,” said Mizuki. “By a wide margin.”

“I can’t take a threat seriously when you’re wearing that,” said Verity. “I’m sorry, I just can’t. It makes you look tiny.” She stifled a giggle and bit her lip to keep from smiling, and Mizuki didn’t think she should look that amused.

“Well I personally think that she looks adorable,” said Alfric, grinning at Mizuki.

“Like a newborn fawn,” said Isra, nodding.

“Does no one take my threats seriously?” asked Mizuki. “I have fireballs.”

“Like a puppy barking at you,” said Verity. “I’m sorry, it’s probably the fit of those clothes, we’ll get you something better when we’re in Liberfell, something that’s not so silly. This isn’t working.” When she said ‘this’ she gestured vaguely in Mizuki’s direction.

“Kill you all,” said Mizuki, pointing at them. “I mean it.” She knew, of course, that this would only make her look more ridiculous, but that was part of the fun.

“There there,” said Alfric, patting her on the helm. She grinned up at him.

“Well let’s not play a game of who could kill whom,” said Hannah with a laugh. She turned to the dungeon. “We’ve got a dungeon to explore.”

Chapter 24 - 10% Dungeons by Volume

Isra drank from her waterskin and tried her best to rest her arm. There were limits to how many times she could draw her bow in a day before the arm simply gave out and refused to pull, and she feared that she was hitting that point far too early on. They had said five to ten rooms in the dungeon, and she didn’t know whether that counted the first one or not, but if they were halfway done, she didn’t think she would be able to fire the bow by the end of it.

<Hannah, can you do something for my arm?> asked Isra. She was rubbing her shoulder, trying to make it feel better.

<I can try,> said Hannah. She went over and gripped Isra by the left bicep, then frowned a bit. <Your right is bigger than your left.>

<I use the right to shoot,> said Isra, not quite understanding.

<You’re not symmetrical,> said Hannah. <If I had symmetricalized you before the dungeon, it wouldn’t be a problem, I’d just do a simple mirror left to right and you’d be nearly as good as new. But if I copy left to right now, then you’d lose muscle mass and tone, and not have half the power you do now. If I mirror right to left, you’ll have two sore arms, which does no one any good. A partial mirroring is beyond me.>

<Okay,> said Isra, rubbing her arm. <Thank you.>

<Ay, sorry I can’t do more. If you want to be symmetricalized, we’ll set aside a day for it, but it’s not somethin’ that can be undone,> said Hannah with a nod.

Isra nodded back, and dipped her fingers into the small pouch she had with her to pull out some turmeric root, which she chewed on for a moment before washing it down with water from her waterskin. The herb wouldn’t work instantly or completely, but it was good for sore muscles, which she was sure to have once the day was done, at least at the rate they were going. The bow was both a blessing and a curse, powerful, but also demanding.

Isra thought back to what Verity had said about the magical lute she’d once used, a whole concert in the form of a single instrument. She wondered whether entads had a tendency to do that in general, to push people to their limits simply by virtue of what they allowed a person to be capable of. Isra looked at Verity, who was taking a long drink from her own waterskin. Her helm was off, revealing sweat-damp hair that was sticking to her face.

Verity had said, during a long conversation the night before, as they lay in beds on the opposite sides of the room, that she felt a bit silly being a bard, singing to people who were throwing fireballs or swinging a sword, but Isra hadn’t thought that was true at all. She hadn’t, at the time, found a way to say any words of encouragement. It was noble and bright to give strength to others, to sing in the face of danger.

<Is everyone ready?> asked Alfric as he put his helm back on.

<Ready as I’ll ever be,> said Mizuki, slowly getting to her feet. She’d spent quite some time finding the driest spot on the floor she could, as far from the dead wolves as she could be. They were unsettling, though they’d been the closest to a normal animal that Isra had yet sensed. She’d been slower than Mizuki when it came to the vines, and in retrospect, it should have been obvious. The dungeons were different though, her senses dulled. The creatures in them were possessed by something.

<Ready,> said Hannah, as she put on her helm too.

It occurred to Isra that she was the only one without a helm. She simply hadn’t thought about it. A helm wasn’t something you wore out in the woods, even when tracking dangerous game, which she had done only twice before, both times to collect a bounty from the local beastmaster. In some sense, going into a dungeon was like those hunts had been, but with less uncertainty over when and where the danger might be.

They left the room with Alfric, as always, in the lead, and Hannah and Mizuki close behind him. Verity began her song, and Isra listened closely to the half-spoken lyrics, which seemed to be about a long sea voyage. Isra knew only vaguely of the sea: the closest she had ever been to it was the open water that Tarchwood sat on the edge of, and that was, according to Alfric, a large lake rather than a sea. Still, the song was nice and sweet, with a bit of melancholy that Verity seemed drawn to. Isra liked it, and reflected that she hadn’t heard Verity sing a bad song yet.

Isra had her magical bow drawn and an arrow nocked, so when the fighting started, she was ready to pull. The creature was shaped almost like a human, but as it unfolded from behind its rock, it became obvious that it was much taller, twice Alfric’s height at least. It had a single bloodshot eyeball that dominated its face, and teeth sticking out from the skin beneath it, without any seeming mouth to accompany them. The hands were four-fingered and disproportionately huge compared to the body. By the time it had picked up a rock to hurl at them or bash them with, Isra had loosed her first arrow.

She walked after the arrow as it continued on its leisurely flight through the cavern. She nocked another arrow and brought it to full draw, then released it, aiming squarely for the eye of the cyclops.

What Isra was used to was bow hunting, where the first shot was the most important, because it was the one made against a stationary, unaware target. That was where she was best. In a dungeon, there was so much less range, and the demand, especially with the entad, seemed to be to place as many arrows into the target as quickly as possible. Isra had been practicing every day since leaving the dungeon, getting used to the new bow, which seemed to have a much higher draw, and the new arrows, which had a different weight and flight. She’d been working her arm to build up the kind of endurance a dungeon seemed to require. It hadn’t been long enough for any of that training to take effect though.

She managed to loose three arrows as she walked, all aiming for that central eye, hoping to blind the creature, or at least injure it seriously enough that Alfric wouldn’t risk getting crushed. The arrow she’d been walking beside had been lower down, aimed at its belly or groin, because if she’d aimed high, she wouldn’t have been able to follow along with the bubble of warped time.

As the slowed arrow was about to strike, Isra turned herself around and quickly nocked another arrow, firing it away from the monster as soon as time started moving forward at its normal pace. This allowed a second bubble of slowed time, which she followed back away from the creature, resting her arm as she walked. She glanced back as she moved, trying to see whether and where she’d hit. All four arrows had struck it, but only one had hit the eye, and its head was snapping backward from the force of the impacts. She didn’t think that it would be seriously hurt, given the durability of the last big one, and she took her place beside Verity, turning back around to face the monster and preparing to let loose another volley, if it seemed to be doing anything helpful.

The monster crashed to the ground with three arrows in its head, and the flame that Mizuki had been halfway to conjuring in her hands died away. They waited for a moment, but the monster didn’t move.

<Was that all Isra?> asked Mizuki.

<Yes,> said Alfric.

<I didn’t think that would kill it,> said Isra.

<You didn’t think that three arrows fired directly into its eye would kill it?> asked Mizuki.

Isra frowned at her. <Most of these things are tougher. I hit the other in the head and it didn’t seem to notice.>

<Good work,> said Alfric. <Let’s move on and preserve Verity’s song.>

He continued without waiting for the others, and they fell in behind him, down yet another tunnel, one of two in the room. The tunnels seemed to branch, each room revealing two more, and Isra rubbed her arm again. She wasn’t sure how many arrows she could fire in a day, but she put no more than five in her quiver when hunting, and when she practiced, it was no more than perhaps twenty in a day, or forty if she was practicing in the morning and evening. With the magical arrows, which had yet to break, there was no worry about having to spend more money at the fletchers, or more time fletching her own arrows, but it was still a concern. She was going to have to work up to the stamina that the dungeons required, or hope that Hannah could help.

The next room had a small pool, with tiny glowing fish that swam around in it, but no monsters to speak of. Resting against one wall was a wooden staff, so natural that it might have been possible to mistake for a branch. There were stalactites and stalagmites, and it gave the feeling of being deep in a cave, which in a sense, they were.

Alfric knelt down next to the pool and looked into the clear water at the fish there.

<Mizuki,> he said. <Can you see an entad down there?>

Isra felt the magic of the song shifting, likely to aid Mizuki, and once again, she looked over at Verity, who was strumming away. The bard looked calm, but she was holding magic in place, and Isra knew that took some effort for her, and couldn’t be continued indefinitely.

<Some kind of long thing, maybe a sword, yes,> she said.

Alfric nodded, then slowly lowered his hand into the pool. The fish rushed to it at once, concentrating their glow, and Alfric pulled his hand back, shaking it with a grimace until two of the fish whose teeth had sunk into were dislodged.

<Hannah, be ready to heal,> he said.

<Ready,> said Hannah, moving to his side.

Alfric plunged his hand into the shallow pool, all the way to the bottom, and pulled something rusted up from the bottom. He used his spare hand to pull off the glowing fish and toss them back in the pool. The blood from his arm turned the water cloudy by the time he was finished. The wounds were healed almost at once as Hannah laid hands on him.

The sword itself seemed to be in terrible condition. It was covered in seaweed, rust, and barnacles, with the metal chipped and cracked.

<Save that for later, with the staff,> said Alfric, setting it next to the piece of wood. He looked into the pool. <No point in killing those.>

The room after that had black, long-legged things, like deer on stilts with a horrible grimace on their faces, and Isra let loose, taking more care to aim than to be quick about it. She got one of the five and injured two more, then barely got her hands up in time when Mizuki announced a fireburst to kill two of them outright. Alfric moved in quickly, sword flashing, and Isra aimed at the melee, trying to get a shot, which didn’t end up needing to be done, because he dispatched one, then the other, with only minor wounds. The whole thing was over in a blur, an encounter that almost immediately jumbled itself up, the details becoming indistinct under the relentless pace of their dungeon crawling.

They worked their way back, past the dead giant and into the room where a mussel-covered corpse was still sitting beside a pool of water. The mussels had fallen off, leaving pocked white skin below.

The next room was different from what came before, open at the top to let in moonlight that didn’t match the daylight of the other room, and trees that seemed to grow straight up from the shiny black stone, their roots weaving in and out of it as though it were dirt. Isra could feel the trees, thick pines that shared something in common with those on the outside, but with a warp to them, an internal wobbling rather than a solid cylinder of the trunk.

In the center of the clearing was a bear, and Alfric stayed well back from it, because it was as big as a house. It was resting, but not quite sleeping, with its back turned toward them. From time to time, it would huff and sigh.

<I don’t know that we can kill this thing,> said Alfric. <We’re not equipped to punch through its vitals.>

<It’s too large to get through the door,> said Mizuki.

<Which is why we’re staying back,> replied Alfric. <We can skip this room. I don’t think fighting that thing is worth an entad, if there’s one in there.>

<Trees are magic,> said Mizuki. <Ectad material.>

<Which we have no way of chopping or carting,> said Alfric. <Not worth it.>

<You’re the one that said a full clear was best,> said Hannah. <And there might be a room beyond still, or two. Otherwise we’re done.>

<I don’t want a level of risk we’re not going to find acceptable,> said Alfric, his voice firm. <Mizuki can hit it once, maybe twice, but Isra’s arm is close to giving out, Verity has been holding songs, and we’re already getting at least six entads from this dungeon.> This was a mild surprise to Isra, who hadn’t been tracking the things left behind. <There might be no upside in doing this fight, not when it’s incapable of getting through the entrance. We don’t kill for sport.>

<Vote?> asked Hannah.

<On what?> asked Alfric. <If we try this, it’ll be with Mizuki lobbing shots, us trying to get the creature stuck in the doorway, hitting its face, and maybe trying to wedge my sword in its mouth.>

<Sounds like a vote,> said Hannah, nodding. <Aye.>

<Aye,> said Alfric, sounding reluctant.

<Aye,> said Mizuki, squaring her shoulders.

Isra looked at Verity, who was still playing, and saw the bard give a slow, circumspect nod of her head.

<Aye,> said Isra.

Mizuki came to the front, at the mouth of the cave. She breathed a shaky breath.

<Is it too late to change to a nay?> she asked.

<I’m going to yell for it,> said Alfric. <Aim for the head with everything you’ve got. We’re trying to get a killing blow.>

<Okay,> replied Mizuki. There was a disturbance in the air, around her fingers, and Isra felt the song shift. Something changed in Mizuki, and the air began to crackle around her. Isra could feel it in her skin, and the air warmed around them.

“Aaaah!” screamed Alfric. “Aaahah!”

<Get ready to cover your ears,> said Mizuki.

The house-size bear rose, slowly, and turned to face them. ‘Face’ was likely the wrong word, because it was simply a collection of eyes that seemed to have been placed on the head at random, along with black things like leeches that hung from where its mouth should have been, each of them as large as a human arm. It warbled at them, and as it began to move, Mizuki struck. For a moment, it was like the air had been sucked out of the room, but it wasn’t just air, it was something else as well, a void in the aether that Isra could feel, even without being a mage.

The spell had been directed, focused, and still the blowback from it hit them all hard enough that they staggered. Mizuki hadn’t used a fireball, or a fireburst, or the one with lightning, it had been different, almost a beam, energy in a more pure form, cleanly directed.

Half of the bear’s face was missing, and there was a hole of charred flesh in it so large that Isra thought she probably could have crawled inside.

Still, it lumbered forward, as though not aware that it should be dead.

Isra fired her bow, aiming for the eyes, hoping to blind, and stepped after her arrow, firing more. She was feeling it in her arm, too many firings too close together, but she pressed on. Looking at the ruins of its face, trying to remain calm, she aimed arrows not just at the remaining eight eyes, but at the side of its head as well. There was a spot where it’s head had been which was now charred meat, and on the other side of that was something, which wasn’t protected by the same thick hide.

<Hannah, go,> said Alfric, but it was said while Isra was in the bubble of warped time, so the sounds were stretched out.

When the first arrow she’d shot hit home, Isra backed up. A glance behind her showed something unsettling though: Verity and Mizuki were both on the ground, with Mizuki trying to rouse Verity. The song had ended.

When Isra looked back to the bear, she saw Hannah and Alfric there. Hannah was on the thing’s ruined right side, and Alfric was on its left. That Hannah was going to touch the creature was both obvious and insane, because it had sharp shovel-claws that were each the size of a person’s head. Isra fired another arrow, her arm stinging, and watched the creature’s paw go toward Hannah in slow motion as the arrow crept forward. Isra had thoughts of attempting to move Hannah, but it was too hard to affect the world when time was slowed, and she had too little time to do anything about it. She watched in horror as Hannah was hit to the side, lifted up off her feet and careened into one of the trees. She struggled to her feet, but the creature had turned its attention to Alfric, and he was without backup.

The bear hit him with its claw, a slow, lumbering hit, and his shield was ripped from his hand, leaving only his sword, which he gripped with two hands as he backed up. Isra fired another arrow, this time at the leech-like appendage dangling from its face, which was swinging up to Alfric. She struck it, twice in quick succession, but the beast still had its claws. Slowed down time was giving Isra time to think, and that was giving rise to fear, which Verity wasn’t there to tamp down.

“Stop!” shouted Isra at the top of her lungs, as the bear raised a paw to bring down on Alfric.

To her surprise, the bear stopped what it was doing and looked at Isra. It had arrows sticking into its face and a giant cavity on the right side of its body, but there was still, somehow, a dull curiosity, all of it directed at her. It wasn’t going to listen, that was clear, but it had felt the words.

The left half of its head vanished, replaced by a mirror of the same charred damage. For a moment, Isra thought even that might not be enough, but the monster collapsed to the ground after a moment of swaying.

<Retreat,> commanded Alfric. <To the tunnel.>

They all moved back, with Alfric and Hannah both limping, until they got to where Mizuki had, somehow, dragged Verity out of harm’s way.

“She sucked the magic out of me,” said Verity, lolling her head. “I didn’t know a sorc could do that.”

“Well I didn’t either!” said Mizuki. “One minute it felt like I was the most powerful sorcerer in the world, the next you were collapsing, and somehow that stupid bear wasn’t dead.”

<It’s dead now,> said Alfric, looking at the giant corpse. There was enough meat there to feed a village for an entire winter, a body so big that it would take a week just to dress it, if not more. It was good meat too, Isra could tell. She’d eaten bear only once before, hunted by someone else, and it had taken some effort to get rid of the gamey taste, but it had been fatty and delicious. <Are you okay, Verity? Do we need to get you out of here?>

“I’m fine,” said Verity, getting to her feet with a groan. Her lute had been left on the ground, and she went to go pick it up. “I’ve never experienced something like that, to have the song snuffed out like that.”

“More than snuffed out,” said Mizuki. “I used it. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, you just expanded what I was capable of, and I wanted to take that thing out with a single hit, and I didn’t realize how much I was taking from all over.”

“We share blame,” said Verity, stretching out and then looking her lute over for damage.

“You share credit, more like,” said Hannah, gesturing in the direction of the beast. “Not our best decision, to take on a thing like that, but we did it, together.”

Isra opened her mouth to protest that she’d done nothing, that her arrows had been useless, but the beast had stopped when she’d told it to, and that had probably saved Alfric’s life.

“We’ll take a break,” said Alfric. He had stopped using party chat, perhaps because everyone else had too. “But we still have half the dungeon left to do, because we need to collect our winnings and then get to Liberfell. The storage book is nearly empty, and we’re going to fill it up with as much as we possibly can.”

“Less in this one than the one before,” said Hannah. “Less worked goods to take, and unless we’re choppin’ those trees, less in the way of ectad things.”

“Which means less work,” nodded Alfric. He looked past the corpse of the bear. “And it’s possible that there are more rooms left.”

“I’ll need a longer break, if you want me to sing,” said Verity.

“I’m really, really sorry,” said Mizuki. “If I’d realized what I was doing —”

“It’s okay little boy,” said Verity with a sigh. She reached a hand up to touch Mizuki’s face. “You did your best.”

Mizuki smiled, then made to bite Verity’s hand, and they laughed together for a moment before finding a place to sit together.

“Isra, can you scout ahead?” asked Alfric. “Just to see whether there’s a door or not. An arrow there, an arrow back. I’ll come in an instant if there’s trouble, but I think we’re done with at least this room.”

Isra nodded. “Of course.”

“I cracked a rib,” said Hannah, as Isra prepared. “Fixed now. Let me look at you, Alfric, you took a bit of a hit. Present your profile to them, ay? Better for the healin’ that way.”

Isra loosed the arrow and followed, walking slowly and keeping her eyes peeled for anything moving, though it was difficult, with time slowed so much. She passed close by the corpse of the bear, following the arrow’s flight as it slowly dropped due to gravity, and prepared her second arrow as the first was about to hit the ground. There seemed to be no other doors though, no corridors or tunnels, just trees that were rooted in obsidian, and a piece of large oak furniture with a curious dial set into its front. Isra was keen to investigate, but she had told Alfric she’d be back, and she fired off another arrow back the way she’d come, ready to deliver the news that they’d finished the dungeon.

Alfric was right though. Their work had only just begun, because with the fighting over and the dungeon apparently fully cleared, it was time to go through all the work of taking everything of value.

Chapter 23 - This One is Actually About Dungeons Too

The entrance to the dungeon was the same as it had been before, a tube of packed earth, but when it opened out into the first room, there was nothing like a house or building. Instead, it was a little grotto, with stalactites hanging from the ceiling and a trickle of water coming down. The only path forward was through the stalactites, where the light from the lanterns could barely reach.

<Party chat only,> said Alfric. <No sense alerting anything to our presence.>

<Let me know when I should play my song,> said Verity.

<Packs down first,> said Alfric as he slipped his off and onto the ground. He drew his sword and shield, getting comfortable with the grip of them and changing his stance. He was always rather serious, Verity thought, but here, it seemed to suit him more.

Verity slipped her own bag off and placed it on top of a rock, where she hoped it would stay relatively dry. There was practically nothing in her pack aside from her waterskin and some eggy bread that Hannah had baked that morning, and some nuts that Isra had brought. Her lute was already in her hands, with the finger flute tied tight against the calf of her left leg, giving her as many fingers as she pleased to play the lute with. The lute itself was tuned and ready to go, with a few tests of it before they went in.

Verity was wearing a helm, the same as Mizuki, and had practiced singing with it on. She didn’t look nearly so ridiculous though. In the mirror, she’d thought that she could pull off the look of a battle bard.

<Plan for a longer engagement this time,> said Alfric. He turned to the others and made sure that they were ready. <Song now, please.>

Verity had prepared a few songs, and chose one of strength in the face of the foreboding, whose lyrics fit with the dark, cavernous dungeon better than the other songs she had on hand. It was a song of mythology, hearkening back to a very old story of the first person to ever delve a dungeon, Helgi of Amanth, though told in a somewhat more whimsical way than was orthodox. Helgi was almost certainly apocryphal, so Verity felt no shame in making changes.

They heard the first monster before they saw it, as Alfric was making his way beside the small trickle of water that went along the tunnel. It was a sound like a thousand crickets in the night, a buzzing that was so loud it was almost painful. The light affixed to Alfric’s chest illuminated only a larger cave with a pool of water and two more tunnels coming off it, and he crouched low, shield forward, until he was at the edge of the pool. Moving carefully, as though not to disturb the ground, he touched the tip of his sword into the pool and sent electricity arcing over the surface of it.

Almost at once, a creature rose up, breaching the water and roaring with the same buzzing sound, now even louder and higher pitched. It looked almost like a man, but covered in tiny black mussels, which were vibrating and apparently making the noise, which changed in timbre as it surfaced. The room of the cave they were in was fifteen feet tall, and he stood nearly ten, even with his legs down in the water.

<Fireball,> said Mizuki, and Verity screwed her eyes shut. Even with them closed as tight as they would go, she saw the flash of it, and when she opened them back up, there was a faint afterimage. The monster had lost one of its arms, which continued to flop around in the water. With the other arm, it was going for Alfric, who was yelling at it and trying to hold its attention. It was all happening frighteningly fast, so fast that if Verity had stopped to think, her mind would have ground to a halt. She focused on the song, and held its magic, boosting Alfric.

Three arrows zipped through the air, all one after the other, and Isra had moved across the room, right at the edge of the pool the monster had risen from. She fired again, and the arrow struck the thing in its chest, cracking a few of the mussels there, but it seemed unperturbed by the damage, even as the arrows vanished back into Isra’s quiver.

<Tough armor,> said Alfric as he swiped at the monster’s other arm. <He’s strong.> As if to punctuate it, the monster brought its arm down, and while Alfric brought his shield up to meet it, the force of the blow brought him to his knees. He rolled out of the way of the follow-up attack, wincing, and got back to his feet.

<Hexing,> said Hannah, barreling her way forward toward the pool.

<Too dangerous,> said Alfric, whose eyes went wide as he saw her moving in.

<Distract it?> asked Hannah, hesitating at the edge of the pool.

<Go, now,> said Alfric. He rushed forward, screaming at the top of his lungs and waving his sword wildly in the air. It arced with electricity, more as a threat than anything else.

Hannah moved forward, and Isra shot again, three more arrows in quick succession, this time with two of them flying wide. She’d been aiming for the head rather than the chest, and with the smaller target, landed only one.

As soon as Hannah was in the water, Verity changed the magic, putting almost everything onto the cleric and doing her best to enhance the clerical power. It was a difficult thing to do, given that Verity had no clerical power of her own, and only a vague sense of what the godly connection was like. It was so much easier to enhance those things she had some personal familiarity with, when the song could be drawn from her own life in some way. In their practice, it had gone poorly, but Verity did it all the same, as they’d planned.

The monster’s other arm fell off as though severed by a giant invisible blade, and Hannah splashed back away from the leg she was touching, soaked to the bone and moving as quickly as she could.

The monster, disarmed, roared with the vibrations of a thousand small mussels, loud enough that Verity almost lost the thread of the song. The creature staggered once, moving toward Alfric as though it meant to slam its head into him, but Alfric easily stepped to the side, and the monster fell to the ground.

<Strength,> he said, though Verity had already been shifting her magic in that direction. He brought his sword down with multiplied strength, severing straight through the monster’s neck, then without hesitation, stepped up onto its back and plunged the blade into its center. The monster, or what was left of it given that it had neither head nor arms, shuddered once and then was still. The small mussels all slowly opened, like a hand releasing a blade in death.

Alfric was breathing hard, and Hannah was soaking wet, but everyone seemed to be okay. Alfric moved his head from side to side, then released his grip on his shield and flexed his hand a few times.

<Good fight,> he said.

<Not three raccoons,> Mizuki said.

<Higher elevation,> said Alfric. He turned to Hannah. <Good work.>

<Ay,> she said.

<You stopped when I told you to,> he said.

<Ay,> she said again, removing her helm and shaking her voluminous red hair to get it free of water. Verity hadn’t seen it, but Hannah must have been fully submerged in the pool at some point, perhaps when scrambling back. <You’re the one with the most trainin’, and I’m no fool.>

<Thank you,> said Alfric. There was relief in his voice. <I was worried you’d charge ahead.>

<I’m no fool,> Hannah repeated. <Just a brave girl who knew what needed doin’.>

<I held back,> said Mizuki. Despite the fact that she’d contributed just the single fireball, she was breathing heavily, and her eyes were wide. Verity shifted the song again, dampening a bit of the fear and anxiety, and she saw gratitude in Mizuki’s eyes. Fear was one of those funny emotions, which could increase itself if left to fester. <Should I have held back?> asked Mizuki. <You were just so close to it that I thought I might accidentally kill you.>

<No, you shouldn’t have killed me,> said Alfric, shaking his shield arm a bit. <He hit pretty hard. Hannah, can you look at my arm?>

Hannah came over to him, still dripping wet, and laid her hand on his bicep. <Minor fracture,> she said after a bit. <Not a full break. Easy to repair if it’s a hairline. I’ll fix it.> That took a moment of concentration on her part, and when she stepped back from him, Alfric rotated his arm around, testing the range of motion and feeling for any pain.

<Very good, thank you,> he said.

<Tell me if you break your arm in the middle of a fight,> said Hannah.

<I didn’t know it was broken, only that it was hurt,> Alfric replied. He looked at Verity, who was keeping up her song. <Come on, let’s get moving, left side first.> He moved around the pool, looking into it for a moment but continuing on. Verity was torn between finding his perseverance admirable and foolish. <Good shooting, Isra,> he said, turning back to look at her.

<The arrows didn’t seem to do much,> she said.

<No, they won’t work against everything we face,> said Alfric. He had shifted his stance as he got to the entryway. <You did what you could with impeccable aim. Get ready.> This last bit was addressed to the group as his light began to illuminate the tunnel.

The next room of the cave was even taller than the one before it, and it was less natural, a fat cone going up thirty feet, with vines creeping through the dark along one edge. At the top of the cone, the sky was exposed, letting down a shaft of light that illuminated a crumpled pile of skeletons laying on the ground, which Verity noticed just as she was thinking she was happy for the light.

Alfric charged forward and brought his sword down on the skeletons, shattering bones, but after the first strike, when nothing had moved, he held back, staring at them with suspicion for a long moment before relaxing.

<Sorry,> he said. <Monsters sometimes disguise themselves.>

<Vines,> said Mizuki, then right after that, <Fireburst.>

Verity had been strumming her lute and murmuring her song, the better to keep it going, but when she heard the word ‘burst’ she immediately released the instrument, letting it swing around her neck by its strap, and clamped her hands onto her ears.

It was no surprise that Mizuki was using fire: the grotto they found themselves in was a wet place, and that would naturally color the ambient aether, at least as Mizuki had explained it. She had gone on in brief about how her spells worked over dinner one night, and the basics of it were that it was largely a thing of coloring and cast-offs and opposites.

She had also explained the difference between a fireball and a fireburst. The first was a gob of fiery hotness, while the second was a fiery explosion. She had demonstrated once, in the backyard, and then Verity had asked her to never demonstrate again, and to give ample warning, because a deaf bard would have a much harder time doing her job.

Verity could feel the blast wave from the fireburst strike her in the chest, and it felt, for a moment, like her heart had stopped. It was incredibly loud, even with ten-fingered hands clamped down hard on her ears, and she was only thankful that she’d been given a warning, because if she hadn’t been, she’d have been doing the whole rest of the dungeon with ringing ears, or more likely, just gone home.

Bits of flaming vine as thick as Verity’s wrist fell to the ground around them, and she yelped when one of them hit her on the shoulder, which Isra pulled away almost the moment it had touched her. Through this all, Verity had been trying to keep the song going, but it was like a top spinning out of control, wobbling all over the place with the sharpness of the fireburst having practically shaken her head loose. At the last moment, she was able to save it, pulling it back into place, but it was a close thing.

<They were moving,> said Mizuki. <Now they are not.> She seemed quite pleased with herself.

<Good eyes,> said Alfric. <I didn’t quite get my hands up in time.> He held up his shield and sword, showing how hard it would have been. <Very loud. Chat is coming through fine though.>

<Earmuffs for next time,> said Hannah.

<Sorry,> said Mizuki.

<It’s fine,> said Alfric. <Let me know if you hear anything.>

<Take a break, ay?> asked Hannah.

Alfric looked at Verity, who was still holding the song. <Keep going,> he said.

There was another tunnel leading away from the room, and as they moved, Verity gave the skeletons a wide berth, just in case they had been saving a surprise for later. She was always at the back of the group, and with the party formed, she could have stayed at the entrance and given them nearly the same effect, but then they’d have had to rely on party chat for her to know who needed what at any given moment, and one of the benefits of a bard was being able to adapt to conditions, boosting whomever needed it when they needed it.

The song Verity had planned was quite the long one, but she’d been through all the prepared verses, so began freewheeling through new lyrics, all of them almost under her breath. The best bards could be completely silent, without need for audible music or vocals, but whenever Verity had tried, it had felt especially draining, too disconnected from the actual song for her to keep it up for very long.

The next trial the cave had for them was quite different, and came at Alfric with a sound like whispers. It took some time for Verity to recognize them as a swarm of something resembling a moth, and she shifted her magic to Alfric’s constitution, hardening his skin as best she could, and backing up so the swarm wouldn’t get to her. Alfric’s sword was particularly useless against a swarm of insects, so he simply covered his face and curled into a ball.

<Fry them, Zuki,> he called through the chat.

<Need some energy,> she said. <Not enough in the air.>

<Charging,> said Hannah as she placed her hand on her own chest, and at the same time, Verity did her best to shift the song for Mizuki’s needs, providing strength to Alfric in the hopes that the cast-offs from the song would translate into something that their sorcerer could use.

A moment later, lightning sprang forth from Mizuki’s hands, lighting up the room and the tunnels beyond it for a moment, which illuminated an overturned boat. The power Mizuki was using lacked direction or care, and Verity felt some of it hit her too, but it was a mild shock, nothing more. It was, however, quite fatal to the swarm of moths, and arced between them, lighting them on fire as it did. Mizuki stopped as soon as most of them had dropped, and Alfric, bloodied about his face, stood up to swat at the last of them, using the electricity from his own sword to try to fry more. It took quite some time to get the rest of the stragglers, but once they had, Hannah rushed forward and laid hands on Alfric again, closing up the wounds on his face.

<Can’t get them all, I don’t think,> said Hannah. <You’ll have wounds on the cheeks.>

<It’s fine,> said Alfric, touching his bloodied face for a moment, then taking a handkerchief offered by Hannah. <I think that’s the best we could have done against bugs. They’re notoriously difficult.>

<Sorry if I zapped anyone,> said Mizuki.

<You zapped everyone,> said Isra.

<Sorry!> Mizuki said again, her voice slightly higher pitched. <I was trying to get it to spread.>

<Let’s keep on,> said Alfric.

The pace felt relentless, and Verity felt a moment of unpleasant guilt as she reflected that this was largely for her benefit, so she wouldn’t have to spin up a second song until they were at least halfway through.

The path split again, this time giving them a choice between a corridor of ancient stonework and a narrow tunnel of damp rock that Alfric would have had to squeeze through. He took the one to the left, the stonework one, and Verity followed behind, keeping the song steady, and giving the party as much in the way of additional reflexes and defenses as she could. She was most worried of surprise attacks, especially after how the last two rooms had gone. A sudden attack from the shadows could kill before anyone could do anything about it, and while Alfric had his shield, the shield was only good if he could move it to block whatever was coming at him.

The brickwork continued on even as the corridor ended, this time opening up into a place that looked like it once had human habitation. Alfric’s lantern illuminated a rotting bed in one corner and a bookshelf that unfortunately seemed to have the rotted out remains of books. It was larger than a normal bedroom though, and larger than the study that might have been suggested by the broken desk. Everything was covered in either slime or moss, even though it was completely dark with no source of light. The dampness seemed more pronounced than in other rooms. Humidity wasn’t great for her instrument, and Verity was going to tune it again and hope for the best when they had a chance to rest.

<Animal,> said Isra. <Beneath the bed.>

Alfric tensed and crouched low, his sword ready for a thrust. Verity shifted the magic once again, giving him strength, the better to run something through.

<Hostile?> asked Alfric.

<Yes,> said Isra. <Very.>

There was a growl of warning, then a ball of fur came from beneath the bed, and it was only once it had tried to bite at Alfric that Verity saw its form, like a wolf with patches of missing skin and horns of jagged rock. Alfric thrust his sword at it, and the wolf dodged to the side, then in a blur of motion, there were two of it instead, the other ball of fur hurtling toward Mizuki. It didn’t have time to regret that mistake, because it was almost instantly incinerated by a concentrated jet of white hot flame from her hands that continued on past it and started the floor and wall on fire. Mizuki retreated, scrambling backward while trying to keep her hands out in front of her.

When Verity looked back at Alfric, the wolf had multiplied again, and there were three of it, all trying to bite at him, stopped by a combination of his greaves, his sword, and his shield. When Verity noticed blood coming down his leg, she realized they’d been more successful in their attacks than she’d thought.

Isra appeared beside Alfric in a flash, holding her bow taut, and almost right away, she shifted position again, which was accompanied by the thwipping sound of arrows and the whimpering of wolves. The wolves multiplied again with a blur of fur, but this time the copies seemed to be wounded as well, and collapsed after taking a few steps. When Isra’s quiver had refilled, she took more shots, carefully this time, with each shot going straight through a skull. She had a look of grim determination on her face as she took each shot, and because of the way the bow warped time, she seemed to go from releasing an arrow directly to holding a new arrow at full draw.

By the time she was finished, Hannah had already gotten through healing Alfric.

<Bixzotl,> said Hannah. God of Copies. <That could have gone wrong quickly.>

<It didn’t,> said Alfric, though the floor was stained with his blood, and he was breathing hard. He turned to Isra. <Thank you.>

<We should be about half done,> said Hannah. <A break would do.>

Alfric turned to Verity. <Stop, or keep going?> he asked. For whatever else you might say about him, Alfric knew his business, and he was letting her weigh the cost of starting up a new song with the benefits of a break. Verity was grateful that he’d put it in her hands rather than deciding for himself.

<A break,> she said. <Please.>

<Thank the gods,> said Mizuki.

<Ten minutes,> said Alfric. <Then we’re back to it.>

Verity could have let the song unwind itself at once, but she brought it to a proper conclusion, finishing out a verse of the increasingly nonsensical and ahistorical song.

Chapter 25 - A Post-Dungeon Pickle

“I want to get this out of the way now,” said Alfric, as they sat and recovered. “We shouldn’t have fought the bear. Things were going well, but we got overconfident, and I should have put my foot down. When you’re dungeoneering, you shouldn’t get that close to dying. So I apologize for not being a better leader and allowing that level of risk.”

“We did fine,” said Hannah. “We were barely hurt.”

“We were lucky,” said Alfric. “I don’t want to rely on being lucky. The room was potentially valuable but optional.”

“I really thought that I could kill it straight off,” said Mizuki.

“You can’t rely on conventional biology,” said Alfric. “But the real problem was that we didn’t make an immediate retreat and we didn’t follow the plan. I saw Verity go down and my instinct was to get in the way and protect her. I should have grabbed her and ran as fast as I could. I should have been shouting commands.”

“Don’t be hard on yourself,” said Hannah. It was, in her opinion, an overreaction. Perhaps she had simply been inured to the prospect of injuries by seeing how close a person could come to death and still be pulled back by a cleric of even moderate skill, let alone a team of clerics devoted to different gods. Alfric had the dagger, and all he’d have to do was make it to the dungeon entrance before getting whisked to the temple. She did feel a bit of guilt though, because she was the one who’d been pushing for it, and it very well could have gone wrong.

“I’m fine,” said Verity, waving off Mizuki. “Sorry for falling, I just … lost the song more than I’ve lost any song before.”

Hannah could feel many things, but whatever had happened to Verity, it was beyond her. The bard seemed like she’d be alright though, she was just a bit dazed, and had even offered some music to help with the looting, if they needed strength to carry things. Alfric hadn’t thought that it was necessary though, not with him and Hannah being as strong as they were, and make no mistake about it, Hannah was strong. Alfric had also thought that Verity had too much a tendency to push herself, but he seemed somewhat reluctant to share that with Verity, and either she hadn’t picked up on the hints, or she’d been ignoring them.

Once they’d finished their rest, they moved as a group through the dungeon, clearing the branches they’d gone through backward, bringing things that they couldn’t stuff inside the book back to the entrance. Alfric had been excited by the wooden wardrobe, though they’d no idea what it actually did, and it was going to be a right pain to carry all the way to Liberfell, if they could even manage it. Alfric could just barely lift it on his own, and needed Hannah’s help to actually move it anywhere, but six miles across uneven terrain, especially with the crags and roots that were on the paths through Traeg’s Knob … well, that was a fool’s game. Alfric thought that it could be warped, so long as it was resting on his foot, but Hannah was extremely skeptical of that, given how heavy it was. If the warp failed, then he wouldn’t just have six miles, he’d have twelve, and anyway, they’d been planning to go for Liberfell, not back to Pucklechurch. The whole thing was a logistical nightmare, but Alfric seemed enthused by it, as though this was one of the parts of dungeoneering that he most enjoyed. Hannah didn’t quite understand it, but that was fine.

They put as much of their personal equipment into the book as they could, now that the dungeon was assumed safe. To hear Alfric tell it, you couldn’t ever really assume that a dungeon was safe. He had said it like it was a rule written down somewhere, which was probably the case. “You do not Know what is in the dungeon,” he’d said. “Even if you’ve cleared the dungeon, even if you have entads that can tell you what’s in there, even if you have personally checked, you do not know what is in the dungeon, and because of that, the dungeon is never safe.”

But they had done a lot, and had a long way to go before they’d be back to proper civilization, so there was no sense in wearing their helms or lugging around their armor, no sense getting sweaty because of the layers.

They had eight entads in all, a good haul, and Alfric was quite hopeful that the wardrobe was the prize of the lot, not just because it had been guarded by the bear, and not just because if it was worthless they’d have to leave it, but because he seemed to take some joy in the large, uncomfortable entad.

“My dad used to tell me stories about entads like this,” he said. He was smiling. “You only really have a problem with them early in your career, when you can’t shrink things down or stuff them away, or just deal with them somehow. For him there was always some fun in it. There was one, a table, nearly four feet across, six feet long, which he navigated down the roads with his friends.”

“What did it do?” asked Mizuki.

“It was a map,” said Alfric. “A big map that went almost to the edges of the table, with bumps where the hills or mountains were, and little square bits where there were houses. I think he sold it to one of the Dondrian hexmasters, but I don’t really remember that part of the story.”

“There’s no reason that it’ll be good just because it’s big, ay,” said Hannah. “Just as likely it’ll clean the laundry you put in it.”

“That would be pretty good,” said Mizuki. “I hate laundry day.”

“The dial,” said Alfric, pointing to the front of the wardrobe. “It’s got six notches, that’s certainly suggestive. Six cardinal directions?”

“Six gods,” said Hannah, folding her arms.

“Six fingers,” said Verity, smiling as she held up a modified hand. She was still somewhat out of it, not her usual self, and Hannah was slightly worried.

“Six spirit gates,” said Mizuki.

“Those are just an extension of the gods,” said Hannah.

“No?” asked Mizuki.

“Well, there’s some argument on that score,” said Hannah. “The point is, lots of things that six might mean, and since it’s an entad, just as well possible that it’s six outfits it can store, or something like that.”

“I have a good feeling,” said Alfric. After the fretting and post mortem, he seemed to be in a good mood, perhaps because they had managed to win against the bear. Hannah hadn’t expected him to suggest a retreat, not when he seemed to put so much emphasis on how you could only do a dungeon once. It made her like him a bit better, knowing that he’d argue for safety like that, even if she thought he’d been a bit overcautious. It made all his talk about being the first line of defense and running away if it got to be too much seem less like the shallow words of someone who just wanted a party.

After an hour and a half, they’d assembled a pile of things in addition to the entads. Isra had insisted on taking some of the bear meat, which she also insisted was good to eat, and that had been stuffed away in the book, nearly a hundred pounds of the stuff, wrapped up in butcher’s paper that Alfric had thought to bring along. The trees were ectad material, and a fairly valuable one, which could be refined into growthstone, but they had only a handaxe, and Alfric didn’t think they were worth the effort. There were also, according to Isra, eggs up in one of the trees, though so high up and with so many branches that it was hard to see how they’d get them.

“We should do entad testing,” said Mizuki, who’d changed clothes now that the dungeon was more or less finished. Hannah had to admit that she did look a lot better in her normal clothes. “What if there’s something that helps us take a tree out? That would be worth it, wouldn’t it?”

“It might,” said Alfric with a sigh. “We have the staff, the sword, the wardrobe, the coin, the rope, the goggles, the rock, and the dagger. None of those are likely to be of any assistance, except for the wardrobe. I think you just want to do entad testing.”

“To be fair,” said Mizuki. “Entad testing is like, the best thing about being a dungeoneer, right?”

“It’s seeing new things,” said Alfric.

“Money,” said Isra.

“Well, I enjoy seein’ these worlds, even if there is a lot tryin’ to kill us,” said Hannah. “But I agree with Mizuki, it makes more sense to test first, just in case we can take a tree.”

Dividing up the entads for testing was a bit of a mess, and Hannah grew to understand why Alfric preferred to have it done once they were out of the dungeon, though he seemed to place more emphasis on the idea that dungeons were never safe. If they bound to the entads, then there was no point in having people test too much, and to test them before, well, people got attached to things, then hoped for a bind. She could see how it might be messy.

Hannah ended up with the rusted sword, which was damp to the touch even after having been out of the water for a half hour. The barnacles and seaweed seemed to be a part of it, rather than having grown on it, and after trying for some time, she couldn’t pick them off. Given the appearance, Hannah expected it to have something to do with water, but it took her quite some time to figure it out, mostly because she was reluctant to go into either of the dungeon’s two pools. Eventually, she decided on filling her mouth with water from a waterskin, and that was enough to confirm that yes, it had the obvious effect of allowing a person to breathe underwater. Hannah was hopeful that there was more to the sword, since it didn’t seem like it would cut that well, and breathing underwater wasn’t all that good unless you were a pearl diver or some such.

No one else was done with theirs, so Hannah went and picked up the coin, which had been hidden under the bed in the stonework room. It was big, almost as big across as her hand, and it was a bit funny to see a coin, given that the world had switched over to rings ages ago. She flipped it in the air, felt something change, but she wasn’t able to figure out what it was before the coin came back down and she caught it in her hand.

She tried again, this time more focused, and she could feel it a little better in her senses, though it was hard to identify exactly what she was feeling. It was a sense of rightness, she supposed, like she was more sure of herself.

She was still flipping the coin, trying to figure it out, when Alfric came over.

“There are a number of duds,” he said. “I’m somewhat convinced that the wardrobe is what I think it is, but if it is, it’s not likely to work until we’re out of the dungeon, and … well, the obvious limitation is that it might not take itself with it, if it can help us to travel.”

“Bad business, tryin’ to predict entads,” said Hannah, shaking her head as she flipped the coin again. Whatever it was doing, it felt good. Perhaps that was the extent of it.

“The dagger lets you know how aware of you someone is,” said Verity. “It seems like the kind of thing we shouldn’t sell.”

“Do we need it?” asked Alfric, raising an eyebrow.

“No,” said Verity, frowning. “I meant because I wouldn’t want it to end up in the wrong hands. It’s the kind of weapon a thief would love. Or an assassin.”

“Is that why you were behind me?” asked Mizuki, who was standing upright on top of the staff, which had grown to twice its size. “You were trying to stab me?”

“I was trying to discover what it did,” said Verity. “But yes, I was quite certain that you weren’t aware I was creeping up.” She shrugged. “If it doesn’t bond, we sell it, I guess. I don’t think assassins are actually all that common anymore.”

“I want this staff,” said Mizuki. “It’s neat.”

“Better balance?” asked Alfric, looking up at her.

“And it extends,” said Mizuki. She kicked out a foot, which caused the staff to go the opposite direction, but somehow she was able to stop it, balancing with the staff going one direction and her body going the other. “I always wanted to be an acrobat.”

“We shouldn’t keep entads unless they help with dungeoneering,” said Alfric. “Better to sell them at Liberfell and try to get something we actually need instead.”

“The goggles let me see … something,” said Isra, who had them on. She was looking at them, one by one. “Changes in people,” She pointed at Hannah. “I can see the symmetricalization, I think.”

“Ooo,” said Hannah. “Interestin’, that. Can I try?”

Isra took the goggles off and handed them to Hannah, who slipped them on. It was quite a production, given the volume of her hair.

“Well now,” said Hannah, looking at them one by one in turn. Her eyes went to Alfric, and she peered at him through the thick glass. His armor and clothes seemed to strip away from him, and she could see his dark skin beneath it. Beneath that she could see his muscles and bones, all of it laid out in vivid color, hard to make out except for the places that were highlighted, those being certain areas of the bones. “How many bones have you broken in your life, Alfric?” asked Hannah. “Seems a fair few.”

“Injuries while sparring, mostly,” said Alfric. He pointed to his left arm. “Can you see the place where you healed the hairline fracture?”

Hannah nodded, then took the goggles off. “Seems a bit pointless, at least for me,” said Hannah. “It shows the body, which is good, but I can know all that just from touchin’ a person, and what I care about is what’s hurt, not what’s been changed by another cleric.”

“We’ll mark it as a dud,” said Alfric, nodding. “But it’s probably of use to someone, somewhere.”

“Can we smuggle entads out in the book?” asked Mizuki. “To get them not to bind?”

“If you could get around binding, we would do it,” said Alfric. “It’s always better to have something unbound.”

“Unless you think someone is going to try to steal it,” said Verity.

“Yes, right,” said Alfric. “It’s almost always better. I can go over the scenarios for what happens if you try various workarounds, but I fear you’d make fun of me.”

“Me?” asked Mizuki, as she improbably climbed down from the staff. “You besmirch my honor?”

“If you don’t care, you don’t care,” said Alfric. “And it doesn’t matter, we’re following protocol for entads. The most you can do is send someone out with an entad you want them to bind to, and even that doesn’t work the vast majority of the time, because it can bind across the party link.”

“And if you break the party while you’re in the dungeon?” asked Verity, whose head was cocked to the side.

“The dungeon created itself for the party, in a manner of speaking,” said Alfric. “Even if we broke the party, so long as we’re here, we’re all linked to it.”

“Well, I’d like to take the staff out,” said Mizuki. “If no one minds. I was thinking on the way in that I wanted a walking stick, and the universe has provided for me.”

“I’ll be carrying the wardrobe,” said Alfric. “But mostly because I’m the only one that can lift it. I don’t think we should spend too much time on picking out who carries what entad, not when most of them don’t seem like they have personal interest for us.”

Hannah nodded, then looked at the rope. “What does that one do?”

“Shifts itself,” said Alfric. “It’s hard to explain. When you’re holding it, there’s a feeling of it sliding under your finger, but the ends don’t move when it does that. I feel like it might be good for climbing, but I think it would complicate knotwork, so I’m unsure.”

“And the rock?” asked Alfric.

“Oh, I did that one,” said Verity. “It lets you go to a garden.” The rock was one they almost certainly would have missed if it weren’t for Mizuki.

“A garden?” asked Alfric.

“Like an imaginary garden?” asked Verity. “I asked Isra, and she didn’t see me move. It was like a mental thing. An imaginary garden.” She shrugged.

“Mental effects are very rare,” said Alfric, frowning. He moved over to the rock, which was pale, with lots of holes, and weighed so much Hannah felt fortunate that it would probably fit inside the book. Alfric touched the rock, and then looked around not seeming to see them. Then he pulled away from it. “Odd.”

“It was an imaginary garden, right?” asked Verity. “Interesting, but not useful.”

“Wait,” said Alfric. He reached down and touched the rock again, and this time he moved while he was touching it, using his other hand to pluck something from just above the ground. When he released the stone, a yellow flower appeared between his fingertips. “Not imaginary,” he said, looking at the flower. “Still not useful, but far more interesting. We’ll test the limits before we sell it.” He paused, then looked over at the wardrobe. “Wait.”

“Test it first,” said Hannah. “See if you can bring a stone in, then see if you can bring it back out.”

“I will, I will,” said Alfric. “But if we can use the garden as an extradimensional space, that’s a substantial upgrade from the book.”

A round of somewhat disappointing testing followed. Rocks could be dropped into the garden, and so could flowers, but not entads, and not anything metal. The garden was the same every time, a sunny space with lots of flowers and plants around, in a little meadow that seemed to recede into the distance faster than it should have. It was Isra who had the best ideas for poking at the edges of the entad’s ability, and while they couldn’t get any other entad ‘inside’ of it, they did have some luck with other organic things, even those that hadn’t come from the garden in the first place.

“We could put one of the trees in there,” said Alfric. He seemed quite excited by the prospect. “Right?”

“I don’t think so,” said Isra. “It would be too big.” They’d all had their chance with the stone, and Isra had spent considerable time with it.

“A person is organic,” said Mizuki. “Do you think you could put a person in it?”

“Do you want to try?” asked Alfric.

“Obviously we would try an animal first,” said Hannah.

“Right, of course,” he nodded. “But if we can fit a person, especially if we can keep them in their clothes —”

“I’m not going naked, thank you very much,” said Mizuki.

“I wasn’t,” said Alfric, before stopping himself. He looked at Mizuki. “Will you ever stop giving me guff?”

“I suppose someday we’ll retire from the adventuring life,” said Mizuki. “And then we won’t have cause to see each other.” She rubbed her chin. “But not until then.”

“Sorry, Alfric,” said Hannah, “But do you really want to try to bring a tree into that garden? That would mean cuttin’ down a tree, which as you’ve said, we’re not much equipped for.”

“Mizuki?” asked Alfric.

“I said I wasn’t going naked,” she replied, putting her hands on her hips.

“I want you to chop down a tree for me,” he said. “Do you think you can do that?”

Mizuki rubbed the back of her neck with her hand. “I … guess? When Verity charged me up, I sucked the aether flat, so I’m not sure there’s much left there, or how fast it will flow back.” She looked over at Hannah. “How are you doing for juice?”

“I’m a cleric,” said Hannah, rolling her eyes. “My connection to godliness is not about ‘juice’. It’s about whether and how much I comport with the will of my god, and how much I try to stretch things out of sort. And in that respect, it may take some time for Garos to see my devotion to him in the proper light.”

“You’re out of juice,” said Mizuki, nodding.

Hannah sighed. “To do somethin’ like I did with that bear, a hex of that nature, marks me as a bad cleric, at least in the short term,” said Hannah. This was a contentious position within the clergy, but the good thing about talking to laity was that they weren’t in a position to argue, not that Hannah had ever backed down from argument. “Minor wounds, scratches and the like, I can still manage, and maybe I could do a broken bone or two, if they were very minor, like the break Alfric had to his arm, but if you need me to fuel somethin’ for you, then no, I probably can’t.”

Alfric and Mizuki set off to the room with the trees, with Alfric carrying the rock using both hands, while Hannah stayed back, ostensibly to get things ready, but mostly because she wanted a rest. Isra and Verity were in quiet conversation with each other, and Hannah didn’t want to disturb them, especially since they were the two quiet ones, and seemed to be getting along.

Her part in attacking the bear had put a strain on her relationship to Garos. She had felt it when she laid hands on the bear, that it wasn’t quite right, and she’d done it anyway. The problem was that Garos was about patterns, and trying to reflect a wound of that size and irregularity, especially on a creature of such scale, and one that wasn’t terribly symmetrical to begin with, just didn’t have the feeling of completing a pattern, not to Garos.

What Garos liked was nudging something into symmetry, and saying that he ‘liked’ it was probably an understatement. Nudges were so easy that they happened without needing all that much effort or will. If you had a grid of sixty-four pebbles, and just one of them was a bit out of alignment, well, that was simplicity itself to get it to conform, and this was one of the things that acolytes did as a training exercise. But those same sixty-four pebbles, all in a cluster together, couldn’t be put into that same grid without serious pulling on the godly connection, and if you pulled too much, Garos might let go of the rope.

Hannah wasn’t worried about her clerical connection. She knew Garos, understood Garos, better than most of his clerics, and while she’d made a big ask, any weakness of the bond was just temporary. She still had her lesser powers, though she’d use them sparingly for the rest of the day. Taking the arm from the monster covered with clams hadn’t been so much of a strain, because the asymmetry was more clear. Who liked a monster with only one arm? The trick, the way to model it in her head, was not to think of it as a missing arm, but only a line of damage, and that had made things smoother. But with the bear, it had been such irregular damage over such a wide area.

Hannah clucked her tongue. The party was more or less safe, so she’d done her part. Whatever trauma Verity had suffered, it was magical in nature, and seemed to be temporary, with their bard now returned to high spirits. And though she and Alfric had been banged around, and too much of that wasn’t good for you, they both still seemed to have their wits about them. A cleric of Qymmos could check them over easily enough, just to be sure, ideally one in Liberfell, but she wasn’t terribly worried. It was the people who refused treatment you had to worry about, and Alfric seemed more sensible than that. He was a good lad, if a bit too focused on the dungeons.

Hannah went to go sit beside Verity and Isra, who had been chattering away about, if Hannah understood correctly, pickles.

“So, girls,” said Hannah. “Another dungeon done.”

“Or mostly done,” said Verity, nodding. She stretched out her legs. “I’m quite hungry, but nothing we packed seems like it suits me.”

“Trail food isn’t the best,” said Hannah, nodding. “Perhaps once we’re in Liberfell, we can look at gettin’ somethin’ like a magical spoon that’ll make whatever meal you want.” That was wishful thinking, because it was likely to be far too expensive. “I suppose if I’ve got a list of what I’m after, it’s for somethin’ that would make food.”

“I want a hot meal,” said Verity with a sigh. “If you could just lift a cloche up, and find something waiting for you.”

“Food replacement is rare, ay,” said Hannah. “And a good thing too, or what would the farmers end up doing?”

“My family had two of them,” said Verity. “Mostly for emergencies, though. Entads, not farmers.”

Hannah whistled. “Must have cost them a fair few rings.”

“I suppose I don’t know,” said Verity.

“You were sayin’ about pickles?” asked Hannah, looking over at Isra.

“I packed some,” she said with a shrug. “In the book.”

“I do love a pickle, if you don’t mind?” asked Hannah. She got up and went over to where the book was sitting. “They’re a traditional food.”

“I brought them to share,” said Isra. “They’re traditional for my people too.”

“I think they’re traditional for all people, aren’t they?” asked Verity. “Anywhere you need to preserve things.”

“Oh, I’ve no idea,” said Hannah as she leafed through the pages. The book was quite a good entad, but it did take some time to find what you were searching for, and more time to extract it. Alfric had already talked about replacing it, but he seemed to know there was no sense in that, not at this point. “We’ll have to ask Mizuki what they do in Kiromo. I know ‘sobyu’, but I don’t know if they do anythin’ with a cucumber, which is, to my mind, the pickle people mean when they talk about pickles.”

But at that moment, as Hannah was extracting a pickle from the crock, Mizuki returned, looking quite pleased with herself. Alfric trailed behind her, lugging the rock.

“We felled not one but two trees,” said Mizuki. “It took some time, but they’re stored in the garden, and we might even be able to get them out of there.”

“I’m skeptical,” said Alfric. “It might be that they’re just stuck in there. I didn’t want to try getting them out in case they got stuck, and we’re going to have to find a nice, flat field, or a large yard.”

“And also,” said Mizuki, holding out her hands. “Eggs.” In her small hands were three eggs, one of them a speckled blue, the other two a brown and a white one.

“She worked hard to get them,” nodded Alfric. “But we don’t have a way to safely remove them.”

“Just put them in the book,” said Mizuki, nodding in Hannah’s direction. Hannah got the sense this was a conversation they’d already had together. “Ooo, are those pickles for everyone?”

“They are,” said Isra. “It won’t work to put the eggs in the book. Eggs need air.”

“What?” asked Mizuki. “That’s not — they’re eggs. Self-contained.”

“No,” said Isra.

“What do you mean no?” asked Mizuki. “You’re telling me that eggs breathe somehow, despite not having a mouth?”

“They do,” said Isra.

“Well that’s,” said Mizuki. “How do you know?”

“I’m a woods witch, apparently,” said Isra, her voice level.

“I think she’s right,” said Hannah. “For what it’s worth. And if we had a ventstone, we could put that in with the eggs to keep them breathing, but —”

“I don’t think that would work,” said Alfric. “Pressure would build up until equilibrium, but then the air would be fouled from the breathing, and the ventstone would be doing nothing.”

Hannah frowned. “So you’re saying a ventstone and a voidstone?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “And yes, it would be quite expensive.” He looked to Isra. “Can you tell what these eggs would need to hatch?”

“Yes,” said Isra. She didn’t elaborate further. “I don’t think they’re dangerous, or hatching soon.”

“They were in a nest up in one of the trees,” said Mizuki. “That means that it’s a bird of some kind, I think, but there was no sign of any actual animal.” Looking now, Hannah could see the scratches. “But if we don’t know what they need, or if Isra thinks that they’ll hatch into something bad, then at least we can have an omelette.”

Alfric sighed. “We’re really just not equipped for dungeon eggs.”

“You really think that eggs breathe somehow?” asked Mizuki, holding one of the eggs up. She was holding the other two in one hand, and Hannah thought that of the whole party, Mizuki was perhaps the one she trusted least with eggs.

“When you smoke an egg, the smoke goes through the shell,” said Isra. “They do need to breathe.”

“Sorry,” said Hannah. “When you smoke an egg?”

“A hard-boiled egg,” said Isra. She had her arms crossed and dropped them a bit. “Smoked, for flavor.”

“That sounds delicious,” said Hannah. “Absolutely delicious.”

“I will make one for you sometime,” said Isra, nodding. She walked over to Mizuki and touched each of the eggs in turn. “It’s hard to tell what creature these are. All the same sort, I think. Not particularly dangerous though. None have the same,” she shook her head. “The same anger of the dungeon monsters.”

“Eggs, and very young animals, tend to work out better that way,” said Alfric. “We can transport these eggs to Liberfell, if they’re not going to hatch in the next day or so, and we can get an incubator there, but then we’ll have to bring it all back to Pucklechurch with us, unless we can sell the eggs. We’ll want to get it all handled today though.”

“And we’ve this wardrobe,” said Hannah, giving it a skeptical eye. “I suppose, Alfric, that you and I are to be the ones to carry it six miles through uneven woodland trails?”

“Of course, if you’re up for it,” he said with a smile. He seemed to have a deep affection for that wardrobe. “But there’s a chance that we can use it to skip straight to Liberfell. Six notches on the dial, and I’m hopeful that means six cardinal directions. A wardrobe is big enough to step into.”

He kept up his good cheer as they all ate some of Isra’s pickles. They were a touch sour and a touch salty for Hannah’s taste, but there were so many herbs and other things packed in with them that the flavor was hard to beat.

And once their break was done, and Isra was cradling the three eggs, they left the dungeon, off to Liberfell.

Chapter 27 - Too Much Talking

“You’re not in a guild, are you?” asked Mizuki as they walked away from the warp point. “I guess I assumed you weren’t, but I don’t actually know.”

“I am not,” said Isra.

“Well, I am,” said Mizuki. “Sorcerers are notoriously territorial, given there’s a limited amount of magic floating around, and limited jobs for us to do, so we tend to guild up in order to make sure we’re not stepping on each other’s toes. It also helps with finding work, if there’s something that needs more than one of us, or a job the other is passing on, or something like that. It’s a small guild, very local, only about twenty, but I’m in it.”

“I see,” said Isra, but Mizuki wasn’t sure she did.

“Anyway, there are a pair of sisters who are sorcerers out of Liberfell, and we’re in their territory. I sent out a message to the guild, just to let them know I was on my way, and got back an invite for breakfast with them tomorrow,” said Mizuki. “I’d also sent a different message asking about a woods witch, and they said they’d be in touch with her. I didn’t say anything about your situation, since I didn’t know, you know? But if you wanted to come to the breakfast, which’ll be tomorrow morning, maybe you could get some answers, or at least have an introduction made.”

“That would be good,” said Isra. “Thank you.”

“I think there might be a guild for woods witches,” said Mizuki. “And if there is, you could get in that way.”

“I don’t know anything about guilds,” said Isra.

“Yeah, I hear you,” said Mizuki, nodding. “They’re tough, and each one is its own thing.”

Mizuki was taking in Liberfell, which she hadn’t visited in quite some time. The streets of Pucklechurch were mostly packed earth, save for a strip down the main section of town that was cobbled, but in Liberfell, it was proper stonework all the way around, going from storefront to storefront, and only little gaps for patches of grass or shade trees at regular intervals. The number of stores and the height of the buildings was probably the other main thing, along with the small streams of smoke and vapor that came up from various buildings. There was a mage collective in Liberfell, with their own little section of the city, and they had engines running in a number of the shops. The whole place thrummed with aether, and Mizuki could feel the possibilities taking shape in her mind, not that she was actually going to do anything. Mages didn’t like when people messed with their things. There was a valley below Liberfell, which part of the city hugged, but they weren’t close enough to see it.

“So many smells,” said Isra.

Mizuki sniffed the air. Isra was right, there were a lot of smells of the city, from the bakeries, the restaurants, the crafts districts, all layered on top of each other, so that it was hard to pick out any individual one. Did a woods witch have a better nose? Or was that just Isra? Mizuki didn’t know, and when she thought about it, she decided that Isra probably didn’t know either.

“We’ll deal with the eggs first,” said Mizuki. “Which means probably going to the edge of the city, but,” she scanned the shop signs, looking down the street, “We’ll ask in an entad shop.”

She set off, and Isra followed after. Isra was the one with the three eggs, which were set in some bedding in the top of Mizuki’s bag, which Isra was carrying. Her hand stayed near them, making sure that they were safe and wouldn’t break. It was possible, especially with three, that they were valuable, something that in twenty years time might be the next chicken, but it was equally possible that they were worthless, or wouldn’t hatch.

The entad shop was a nice place, filled with all kinds of things, but as Mizuki’s eyes looked across them, she saw that fully a quarter of them weren’t magical at all, either there to make the place look more important than it was, or, more generously, henlings. She’d been in the shop once before, hoping to find something that gave off enough magic that she could get some use out of it, but the kinds of effects that were best for a sorcerer didn’t come cheap. Most entads did their work without making many ripples in the aether.

She chatted with the shopkeeper for a bit, a young man with a winsome smile, who, in the course of talking bastles, revealed that it was his father’s shop, which he and his sister planned to take over some day. Mizuki was a bit envious of someone with a family business, especially one as interesting as entad sales, because all she had was a family house and sorcerer’s blood, which had done its irregular skipping of generations. The boy seemed a bit nervous at the mention of sorcery, which wasn’t an uncommon reaction, but she did her best to put him at ease, and to talk about what entads she might buy, or possibly sell. She told him that they were dungeoneers, which was more or less true, and that seemed to interest him, which in turn led to her showing him the three entads they had with them, Isra’s bow and Mizuki’s staff, though it wasn’t technically hers yet, because the dust hadn’t settled on their second dungeon run. She saved the spoon for last, and he seemed suitably impressed by it.

Eventually Isra reminded Mizuki about the eggs and their quest for a bastlekeeper, and the shopkeeper, Rolaj, was happy enough to give them directions and then draw out a map when Mizuki felt a bit confused. Mizuki promised that they would be by with Alfric when he got into town, and with that, they were on their way.

“That seemed to take a long time,” said Isra as they left.

“Did it?” asked Mizuki. “It’s not like we’re in any rush.”

“All we needed were directions,” said Isra.

“I’d say Alfric had rubbed off on you, if I didn’t think you were just like this,” said Mizuki with a sigh. “What do you get from being direct and to the point? Besides, it was nice to meet Rolaj. Don’t you like meeting people?”

“He looked at me too much,” said Isra.

“Did he?” asked Mizuki. “Maybe he was interested.”

“Interested?” asked Isra.

“You know,” said Mizuki. She looked at Isra. “Okay, maybe you don’t know. Interested in courting. I don’t know how that’s done in Tarbin, or what your father taught you. I’d thought Rolaj might be interested in a date.”

“Or interested in the headscarf,” said Isra. “Or my darker skin.”

“Are people usually interested in that kind of thing?” asked Mizuki. “I suppose people ask me about Kiromo, not that I have all that much to tell.” She shrugged. “I think he was either trying to be polite and include you, or he was just more interested in the mystery. If you’re quiet, people will want to know what it is you’re hiding. In your case, it’s that you’re a woods witch, plus probably some other things.”

“Other things?” asked Isra.

“Well, I’ve got no idea why your parents would come all this way from Tarbin just to settle outside of Pucklechurch and not really talk to anyone,” said Mizuki. “For my grandfather, he wanted to establish a community away from the Kiromon Emperor, and Pucklechurch had some kind of spiritual significance. So I figure there’s probably some kind of story about your parents, even if you might not know it.”

“Maybe,” said Isra.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “There’s a hotel, we should get rooms before we go wandering off to the bastlekeeper.”

This, too, took some time, but there was nothing in the party chat from Alfric and the others, and Mizuki imagined that they were still lugging that stupid wardrobe up a hill. She didn’t envy them, especially Verity, who seemed like she would rather have been done with songs for a bit. Mizuki settled on a large suite for the five of them, and though there were only four beds, one of them was a large bed for two, which seemed acceptable. The price made her eyes pop a bit, but divided five ways it wasn’t actually that bad, so long as they only stayed a day.

“Okay,” said Mizuki as they stepped out of the hotel, having dropped off most of their things in their room. “To the bastlekeeper.”

“Do you need to talk to everyone so much?” asked Isra.

“Huh?” asked Mizuki. “The clerk? I was only being polite.”

“He didn’t need an explanation of why we were in Liberfell,” said Isra.

“So what should I have said then?” asked Mizuki. “That I needed a room for five people?”

“Yes,” said Isra.

“But don’t you see how that’s rude?” asked Mizuki.

Isra frowned. “Do you speak this much with everyone?”

“I don’t know, I like being friendly, and polite,” said Mizuki. “It’s just chatter.”

“I would like to be the one to speak with the bastlekeeper,” said Isra.

“Sure, fine,” said Mizuki. “Just … don’t be rude. Not that I think you would be.”

The directions took them across the city, to the outskirts. Liberfell was on a bit of a hill, and at certain spots Mizuki wished they could stop and take in a nice view of the valley, but Isra seemed to be the wrong walking partner for that. The river that ran through the valley was thick and slow, and most of the streams in the Pucklechurch hex fed into it. She’d heard that if you had a good enough raft and were willing to put in the work of navigation, then after a big rain you could go all the way from Pucklechurch to Liberfell, floating along. Mizuki had nearly done that with some friends, but there had been a bit of drama between them after she’d kissed one of the brothers, and the rafting plans had ended up falling through.

Mizuki kept these thoughts to herself, worried that she would annoy Isra. She wondered whether Isra had ever kissed someone, but kept that question to herself, because it seemed too intimate a thing to ask someone who was basically a stranger, and more of a stranger than anyone else in the party. It was the kind of thing you talked about with a friend, not a workmate.

Eventually, if they kept doing dungeons, they might come to understand each other.

The bastlekeeper had a large building, but only the front of it was open to the public. There were numerous animals in cages or glass tanks, with handwritten signs giving descriptions of what was inside. Some of them weren’t proper bastles; Mizuki saw what looked like a perfectly ordinary bunny, and a common stilt-legged skink, which she’d caught a few of in her childhood just while walking in the woods. Still, some of them were unknown, birds with iridescent feathers and mice that walked on the ceiling of their tank, and it was certainly interesting. True to her word, Mizuki allowed Isra to take the lead in talking to the bastlekeeper, an elderly man with wild grey hair.

“We have three eggs,” said Isra, opening up Mizuki’s bag and showing them to the bastlekeeper. “We’d like to incubate and raise them ourselves.”

“Ay?” asked the old man, bringing some glasses up from around his neck so he could take a closer look. “How long out of the dungeon, or are these bred?”

“No more than a few hours since they were taken,” said Isra.

“Ay, well,” said the old man, nodding. “You’re dungeoneers then?” He had a bit of Hannah’s accent, though different in the particulars.

“We are,” said Isra, nodding. “They’ll require heat and good airflow. They’re still living.”

The old man frowned. “Well, before we get to all that, I’m Perrin Carthaigh, only licensed bastlekeeper for three hexes out, and the best for six out.” He held out a hand, and Isra reluctantly shook it. “You’re looking to incubate them on your own, ay? And how do you know what they’ll need, if they’re not bred?”

“I’m a woods witch,” said Isra.

“Oh, ay?” Perrin asked. “And you know Dom then?”

“No,” said Isra. “She’s the local woods witch?”

“Ay, or close enough to local,” nodded Perrin. “She comes by from time to time, just to help. She knows better than any cleric how to care for these creatures, even a cleric of Qymmos.”

“The incubator,” said Isra. “We need the heat of a summer’s day and a gentle wind.”

“All business, you young ones,” said Perrin, shaking his head. “Well, the problem with an incubator is you’d need me to sign off, and I don’t know what kind of animal will come from those eggs, if it’s an animal at all, which it very well might not be.”

“It’s the domain of the hex beastmaster, right?” asked Mizuki. “So we could go talk to them?”

Perrin pointed to himself. “I’ve been the beastmaster for nigh forty years.”

“Ah,” said Mizuki.

“So you won’t sell us an incubator?” asked Isra.

“Well, I didn’t say that,” he replied. “If it were just a single egg, I might think that’s fine, but three means that there’s a risk you have a breeding pair of whatever this is, and that runs its own risks. There are horror stories I could regale you with, ay, though I don’t get the sense you want me to, cases of a thing being born that lays a clutch of a hundred eggs in the woods.”

Isra nodded. “You offer services. You would raise them for us.” There was such prickliness to Isra that Mizuki felt herself cringing at the exchange and wanting to step in to smooth things over, but she’d promised to let Isra take the lead. It was a promise she was quickly regretting.

“Ay,” he nodded.

“And if we say no, you have the authority to take the eggs from us by force,” said Isra, folding her arms. It wasn’t quite an accusation, if only by technicality, and Mizuki winced.

Perrin laughed. “By force?” he asked. “Might have escaped your attention, young one, but I’m going on seventy, and while I’m fit for my age, my age isn’t a fit one. You think I’d chase you out of the hex for wanting to keep an egg? That might be how they do it in Tarbin, but in Inter, it takes more than that to get in the bad graces of the authorities. Do you know why I’m the beastmaster, ay?”

“No,” said Isra, arms still folded.

“Because I care,” he replied. “And because I have the skills. I’ve gone out into the woods and the valleys more times than I can count hunting down things that dungeoneers have accidentally let loose. Now, you’re new to the game, that’s clear enough, and you’ve got some problems with authority, that’s clear enough too, but you and I, we work together, not against each other. Clear?”

Isra relaxed a little. “Clear,” she said.

“You raise beasts for people,” said Mizuki. “You’d sell us an incubator, then raise two for us, with a fee or something, with us raising the third?” She was just saying something, anything to let the rudeness fade away into the distance.

“Ah,” said Perrin, nodding. “You people always do have a head for business.” She wondered whether he meant ‘people from Kiromo’, but if he did, he was wrong, because she had a horrible head for business. “A fine offer, and one I might have made myself, given the chance.” He raised an eyebrow in Isra’s direction. “No hard feelings, ay?”

“I meant no offense,” she said.

“It’s suspect, my position and profession,” he nodded. “A conflict of interest. Many have pointed it out, over the years, and I’ve had arguments against me having both — the business and the role. But I’ve kept Liberfell safe, and for most, that’s argument enough.” He cleared his throat. “Now, in terms of payment. Is it the two of you, or a party?”

“A full party,” said Isra. “Based out of Pucklechurch for the time being.”

For the time being? The notion set Mizuki on edge, just a bit, because it was her home, but she supposed that she would reluctantly agree that yes, ‘for the time being’ was correct. She had no idea what she would do once the time came to make a decision on whether to keep pursuing this crazy career.

“And you have a way to carry something back there?” he asked.

“We do,” said Isra. “So long as it’s no more than a foot and a half to the side. We’re also looking for a good way to take plants and animals out of future dungeons.”

“As the beastmaster, I like to hear that,” he nodded. “Taking out eggs like this,” he gestured at the eggs, sitting in the bag, “Is questionable, but you’ve done well with them, if you haven’t left one out in the wild somewhere. So, as I’m hearing you, I’d raise two of these, hand over some manner of containment, and sell you an incubator. And when I say all that, I’m hoping that you have the rings to pay upfront, but if you’re new to the game, I doubt you do.”

“We do, actually,” said Mizuki. “We made out well on our first dungeon.”

“But we’ll be looking for a good deal,” said Isra. She gave Mizuki a frown, and Mizuki shut her mouth tight.

“Well, it’s about risk,” said Perrin, rubbing his stubble-covered chin. “Risk for me, or risk for you. If I take the two eggs, and try to hatch them, I can take a gamble, or let you take the gamble. I’m in the mood to gamble, if it gets a disgruntled woods witch on my side. Let’s say I’d do the care and feeding part, in exchange for the first clutch of eggs from a breeding pair?”

“If it is a breeding pair,” said Mizuki.

“It is,” said Isra.

“It is,” agreed Perrin, tapping the side of his head.

“Wait, do you know what kind of thing it is?” asked Mizuki. “From being beastmaster?”

“Nothing like that, but I do get sex, if it’s there,” he said. “And I’ve already seen these three listed, which are the same kind of creature, if you didn’t already know that.”

“We did,” said Isra, with a casual air.

“But it remains to see what they’re like, and whether they’ll grow,” he said. “So what I’ll propose is I take the male and the female, and you take the spare female, and we’ll call the first part of their life square, the labor and such paid for by that first clutch of eggs, if we get one. And that just leaves the incubator you want and the containment, which will depend on the particulars.”

“Let me see what you have,” said Isra. She turned to Mizuki. “I’d like to do this without you.”

“O-kay,” said Mizuki, frowning. She turned to Perrin. “She’s new to people, don’t mind the offense.”

“I’ve been dealing with dungeoneers my whole life,” he said. “They’re usually a brash bunch, especially if they’re in the creature game, and they come into our community not having the slightest clue about who we are or how we do things. You can trust me to have a thick hide.” He gave Isra a quite unexpected fond look.

They went into the back area, leaving Mizuki alone. She was trying not to feel offended, and somewhat failing. It was probably true that she shouldn’t have said that they had a lot of money to spare, but that was the kind of thing that just came out. It was friendly to say, wasn’t it? And if the old man saw something to like in Isra, then Mizuki decided that it was her job to keep her mouth closed and let the two of them get along. Maybe he was used to dealing with creatures that snipped and snapped.

She was waiting in the room with more of the common things when a girl came in through the door. She was obviously the adventuring sort, wearing a form-fitting breastplate and greaves, and with some kind of weapon at her hip, like a spear the length of her forearm. Aside from the metal, she wore black, including black leather boots that showed a fair bit of wear and dirt from the road. Her hair was short, cut to just below her chin, and the tips of it were purple. Mizuki’s eyes were looking at her face when she spoke.

“Perrin’s in the back, is he?” the girl asked.

“Eyes,” said Mizuki, because the girl had brilliant purple eyes, brighter than eyes should be, almost like they were reflecting light that wasn’t there. She wore makeup, far more than seemed sensible for an adventurer, with a dark shade of lipstick and some smoky eyeshadow.

“The name’s Lola, actually,” she said, holding out a hand.

“Mizuki,” said Mizuki, taking her hand. “Sorry, I’ve never met someone with purple eyes before.”

“That you know of,” said Lola with an impish smile.

“I … suppose,” said Mizuki, wondering whether there was a possibility that she’d met someone with purple eyes and simply not known about it. It seemed unlikely. She looked the other girl up and down. “You’re a dungeoneer?”

The other girl gave an energetic nod. “We’re only recently to Liberfell though, planning to station out of here for a month or so, maybe more, and hit up everything in a three-hex radius. You?”

“Uh,” said Mizuki. “I’m a dungeoneer too.”

“Well I knew that, silly,” said Lola, rolling her eyes. “The only other option was that you were here to buy some spotted toads, but you definitely don’t seem like the type. I was just wondering how long you were planning to be in the area.”

“Just a day in Liberfell,” said Mizuki. “We’re … out of Pucklechurch, I guess.”

Lola nodded. “I haven’t been, but I’ve heard it’s such a sweet little town. Any tips for when we do the dungeon?”

“We had, um, bad variance,” said Mizuki. She had known a fair number of people who had been in dungeons in some capacity or the other, but ‘dungeoneer’ as a title seemed to imply something else entirely, not just doing a small handful of close dungeons with some friends, which occasionally happened in Pucklechurch, but someone who was going to devote their life to it for as long as they could. “Good loot.”

“Ooo, what did you get?” asked Lola. “Something good?”

“My f-friend Isra,” said Mizuki. “She got a bow that slows down time. We got a book too, for storage, and it can tell you some about items.”

“Entad identification?” asked Lola, raising an eyebrow.

“No, it doesn’t seem to be,” said Mizuki.

“Well, there are other solutions,” said Lola, nodding. “Tell me about your team, who’ve you got? You’re … some kind of mage, I’m guessing. Hopefully your friend can use a bow?”

Mizuki was feeling … well, not dizzy, exactly, but off balance. There were too many pointed questions coming in too fast, and the girl, Lola, had an intensity that matched her brilliantly purple eyes.

“I’m a sorc,” said Mizuki. “Isra is a ranger. Alfric is a … I don’t know what you’d call him, a fighter?” She wasn’t sure whether she should be saying any of this. Surely there was no harm in it, right? Someone knowing their party composition, or which dungeons they’d hit, that didn’t matter, the dungeons were different for everyone, and if a dungeoneering team went in to do a dungeon right after you, it didn’t change all that much. There wasn’t any point to being coy.

“Alfric,” said Lola, tapping her lips. “Interesting name. Last name?”

“Overguard,” said Mizuki.

“Of the Dondrian Overguards?” asked Lola, stopping and looking at Mizuki with wide eyes. There was something like playacting in how she said it, a theatricality that lowered her opinion of the girl.

“Um,” said Mizuki. “Yes?”

“They’re a very big deal,” she said, nodding. “A dungeoneering family, one of the best.”

“I knew his parents were dungeoneers,” said Mizuki.

“But you’re local, right?” asked Lola. “I mean, I know a bunch of Kiromon settled here.”

“Uh, I guess,” said Mizuki. “There’s a Kiromo neighborhood in Liberfell. I’m from Pucklechurch.”

“But that’s weird, isn’t it?” asked Lola. “That he would come out all this way to recruit people?”

<Through we go,> said Hannah over party chat. <How are you finding the city of Liberfell?>

“One sec,” said Mizuki, “Party chat I need to answer.” She turned to the side.

<Very interesting,> Mizuki replied. <And a bit intimidating.>

<We’ll be there soon enough,> said Alfric. <Can you warp so we can meet up? Or give us a location?>

<We’re in the middle of business,> said Mizuki. <We’ve got rooms at the Dragon’s Arm Hotel. I told them to expect you if we were out.>

<Thank you,> said Alfric. <We should meet soon though. We’re leaving the wardrobe in Traeg’s Knob and hoping that no one does anything with it. The rest of today can be for selling what we have. I’m hoping that I can find a floatstone so we have less trouble bringing it back to Pucklechurch. Talk to you later.>

Mizuki turned back to Lola, who was giving her an expectant look. “Problems?”

“No,” said Mizuki. “I don’t think so.” She looked to the door that Isra had gone through, wondering what had taken so long, then back to the strange girl with too many questions. “Sorry if you’re waiting on Perrin, my friend will be done in a bit.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Lola, waving a hand. “I was just going to check in on some bastles we left with him, I’ll come back another time.” She turned to the door, then back to look at Mizuki. “It was nice to meet you Mizuki. Hopefully our teams run into each other. Tell Alfric he still has my love.”

“Wait,” said Mizuki. “You know him?”

“I’m sure he’ll fill you in,” said Lola, giving Mizuki a wink as she backed out the door. “See you!”

Mizuki stared after her. Alfric was going to have some questions coming his way, that was for certain.

Chapter 26 - Liberfell

There was a language to entads, though Alfric spoke it only poorly. They were unique, always, but there were commonalities to them, some of that just because they drew from the hexes, which had commonalities of their own. There were effects you’d expect to find on boots rather than knives, or chairs rather than towels. Chairs were for sitting and knives were for stabbing, and function typically followed form. But beyond all that, there was commonality of definitions, a shared understanding the entads had of what was what.

The example that Alfric had been taught involved rabbits. Let’s say that there was an entad wand which made rabbits explode when you pointed the wand at them and said a word. Well, rabbit was just a word that people attached to a concept, and there were loads of different breeds of rabbit, along with strange creatures that were only a bit like a rabbit. The dungeons could produce all kinds of things, and they pulled on what was in a hex, so given the prevalence of rabbits, it wasn’t uncommon for dungeons to spawn something similar to them, or a monster that might take the same general shape. What, then, counted as a rabbit? Well, it didn’t really matter, since nothing in the world hinged on rabbits in any way, but the point was that entads would always give you the same answer, even if they’d been pulled from dungeons on opposite sides of the world. A wand that exploded rabbits would affect all the same things as a wand that made rabbits double in size. There were thick tomes, which Alfric had never read in full, which went into the minutiae of all these ‘entad definitions’, the most important of which weren’t about what entads considered to be a snake or entads considered to be a rabbit. No, the truly important bits were underlying principles like what a portal was, and what an extradimensional space was, what a memory was, what an emotion was. There were hundreds of concepts like that, and Alfric knew most of it, either through lessons from his parents, from tutors, or simply from reading. There was, still, an enormous variance between entads, what they could do, and how they could do it, but the commonalities were invaluable to any adventurer or merchant looking for a quick identification without having to pay a cleric of Qymmos.

Hexes were a concept that entads ‘understood’ quite well, which made sense, because early Editors had plastered the concept over the known world to lay the groundwork for warp points and dungeons and all manner of other things.

He was not, therefore, particularly surprised when the wardrobe, once carried outside the dungeon, began to work as he’d predicted. Six was an auspicious number, after all, and travel entads never worked inside the dungeons unless they were like his boots, local in nature. Still, he was particularly pleased that it allowed travel of any kind, and beyond that, that it hadn’t immediately bound to any of them. When the door was closed, the dial could be turned, and once it was, the door would open up to elsewhere. It didn’t take particularly much tinkering with it to figure out the orientation of the dial, not with Isra looking through and making judgments about the hexes that could be seen beyond. Not fifteen minutes after Alfric had removed it from the dungeon, he could look through the wardrobe to either the Liberfell or Pucklechurch hexes, though every time the dial moved, it seemed to show a different (and possibly random) part of the hex it was pointed at.

“Very, very, very good,” said Alfric, nodding.

“Can you get back if you go through?” asked Mizuki, peering through the wardrobe’s open doors at the grassland beyond. Isra seemed to know, just from looking, what direction that was from them, even though she’d never been in most of those hexes.

“We’ll have to test,” said Alfric.

“But we could get stranded, yes?” asked Mizuki.

“If you go through, you can just use the warp,” said Alfric, shrugging. “So you’d be stranded in the sense that you’d be in Liberfell without having to walk six or seven miles, yes.”

“But we’ve no reason to think the wardrobe comes with, ay?” asked Hannah.

“This is true,” said Alfric. He looked the wardrobe over. “My guess is that it’s one-way travel to the hex of your choice. We don’t know how repeatable it is, whether it might have daily limits on use or weight or some other parameter … this will almost certainly have to be looked over by a cleric of Qymmos, because each test sends us a minimum of six miles away.”

“Less than that, I’d think,” said Hannah. “Take it to the hex border, fiddle with the dial, and try to end up with the portal in view, ay? In theory, you have a hundred feet to walk from wardrobe to portal.”

“Right,” said Alfric, feeling slightly embarrassed at the correction. “So, I think what we’ll do, if we are all planning to end up in Liberfell, is to have Isra and Mizuki go through, talk with us over party chat about what it was like, then warp into town. Then Hannah and I can carry the wardrobe to the hex edge with Verity’s help, and hopefully we can warp it in.” He was somewhat unsure of this part, but it seemed like the only way to deal with it.

“It’s over the weight limit, ay?” asked Hannah. “Even if you stripped down to nothing.”

Alfric thought about this for a moment. He hated to admit it, but she was right, and by a fair margin. “Okay,” he said. “Well, there are public rooms back near the warp at Traeg’s Knob, and houses. We can,” he paused. “Well, we don’t have a way to lock it up, which is a problem.”

“Lock it up?” asked Hannah. “Who’s going to steal it, ay, when it’s so much a pain to move?”

“I’m in favor of the plan where I leave right now,” said Verity. “I need a proper meal, something hot. Could I possibly go do that while the two of you figure out logistics, or would that be horribly rude?”

Alfric bit his lip. “If we’re carrying it uphill to the top of Traeg’s Knob, would you think you had it in you to give us a song of strength? I’ll leave it to your discretion, because you know your own needs.”

Verity grimaced. “I suppose, but that means that I have to sing and walk.”

“Well, I’m out of here,” said Mizuki. “Isra? You too? Because I don’t want to walk back up a hill that I’ve already walked down, and someone needs to get us some rooms at Liberfell.”

Isra hesitated. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve never been.”

“You’ll love it,” said Mizuki. “I’ll make sure they don’t hurt you.”

“Hurt me?” asked Isra.

“It’s a joke,” said Mizuki. “No one is going to hurt you in Liberfell, and if they do, I will personally set fire to every single house.”

“And that’s another joke,” said Isra.

“See?” asked Mizuki. “This is going to be fun. Portal boy, one portal please.”

“Portal man,” said Alfric, giving her a smile. “Coming right up.” He spun the dial, then opened the door again.

It wasn’t the city of Liberfell, but rather, a field that must have been somewhere near it. Mizuki stepped through, then immediately tried to go back, just for the sake of testing, and hands went through an invisible plane, exposing red meat and bone. Alfric knew enough to know this was just visual, seeing into her body, but it was still horrifying. Her mouth moved, but there was no sound.

<Use party chat,> said Alfric. <We can’t hear you.>

<I can see the doorway, but can’t come back,> said Mizuki. <Hands go straight through.>

<Coming,> said Isra, who stepped in as Mizuki stood off to the side.

<Let us know your plans, we’ll be getting some rooms,> said Mizuki. <And figuring out what to do with the eggs.>

<The local League office might have rooms, but they’re usually in poor condition. You can check there, or just go to a hotel. Let us know over chat if you have problems,> said Alfric. <We can be in the center of Liberfell in an instant.>

<No need to worry,> said Mizuki. And with that, she cast the warp, disappearing to the center of her hex, where Liberfell was. Isra quickly followed, and Alfric shut the wardrobe after them.

“This is a really good entad,” said Alfric. “It’ll save us an enormous amount of travel time. Even if it’s hard to move, if we center it in whatever hex we’re basing out of, that’s thirty-six miles we don’t have to walk. And if we can get it to work with something else, we could cut out travel time altogether.”

“You’re excited about this,” said Hannah.

“And getting ahead of yourself,” said Verity.

“Well, sure,” said Alfric, shrugging. “But it’s one of the vitals, or at least a good piece of the puzzle.”

“And an absolute pain to move,” said Hannah, sighing.

“Let me see if it’s really over the weight limit,” said Alfric. He grabbed the wardrobe and tipped it so that it was resting its weight on him, then quickly made the sign for the warp. The worst case scenario would be if he’d misjudged where the weight was, and ended up at the top of Traeg’s Knob without the wardrobe, which would mean a bit of a trek back, but no, the warp simply failed.

He tried again with most of his armor removed and his sword laying on the ground, hoping that he could squeak under the limit, but it didn’t work, and he stepped back from the wardrobe, sighing. Hannah had been right. He’d known that she’d been right.

“Ready?” asked Alfric. “It probably makes more sense for you to be at the front rather than the back, so I can take the bulk of the weight. It’s heavy, but shouldn’t be too bad for us. A hundred pounds, maybe?”

“A hundred pounds, uphill nearly a mile and a half,” said Hannah with a sigh. “And it’s more than a hundred. Plus another fifty for the book. Well, let’s get to it, ay.”

Verity elected not to use her lute, perhaps because they were moving uphill, or because she was tired, but that left only her voice, which turned out to be quite sufficient for something as simple as granting Alfric and Hannah strength. The song she chose was one about a pair of squirrels attempting to bring a large apple home, wrestling it between themselves to get it to their tree. It was a jaunty little tune, but also slightly mocking in a way that reminded Alfric of Mizuki’s preferred mode of humor.

The climb was a tough one, even with the help, and what had been a nice ramble down the hill was a slog going up. It was all made far worse by the fact that they’d done a dungeon in between. Alfric was sure that his muscles would be killing him the next day, and the prospect of simply leaving the wardrobe behind in Traeg’s Knob became more attractive with every step he took.

They took frequent breaks, and halfway up, took a longer one.

“Not sure I appreciate the lyrics of these songs you’ve been singin’,” said Hannah. “Two squirrels trying to wrestle an apple up to their tree? A man who can’t get his hand from a jar because he’s grabbed a hold of too many pickles?”

“All in good fun,” said Verity. “If it really bothers you, I can find something else to sing. It’s a pleasant day, and my work, as I see it, is done. A warm meal, a hot bath, and a soft bed, those are the three things left today.” She took a long drink from her waterskin. Almost everything she was able to put into the book had been put in there, save for her bag. Alfric was carrying the book, but wishing that he’d sent it with Isra.

“Nah,” said Hannah. “Silly songs for a silly trip. I’ll let you know if it rankles. I’m not shy.”

“The silliness is a part of it,” said Alfric. “It’ll make a good story some day, even if my legs have turned to jelly by the end of it.”

“And that’s what you’re in it for?” asked Verity. “The stories?”

“Some,” shrugged Alfric. “The stories, the glory, the money, the adventure, the way we’ve got a chance to play our role in the history of the world. Something new and interesting around every corner, things that no one has ever before set eyes on, items that are absolutely unique. Camaraderie, and the close-knit relationship of a dungeoneering party, like brothers.” He hesitated, then looked at the two of them. “Or sisters, I suppose.”

“It does sound nice, when you put it like that,” said Verity. “But it’s a very rosy view of something which, as we experienced not too long ago, can be very dangerous and scary, not to mention, well … brutal. Gory.”

“Ay, but I’d prefer Alfric’s view,” said Hannah. “Seems a better way to look at it. And there’s a feelin’ of accomplishment, ay.”

“There is that,” nodded Verity. “I felt awful after Mizuki stole the song from me, not that she meant to, but seeing what we could accomplish together, there was a part of me that considered doing this for a longer time might not be such a bad thing. It was the first time I ever felt … I don’t know. Powerful.”

“Really?” asked Hannah. “You’re a first class bard, so far as I know such things.”

“Well, thank you,” said Verity. “But being a bard … it’s always about others.”

“You know you’re speaking to a healing cleric, ay?” asked Hannah.

“Yes, but you ripped the arm off that one monster, and killed the bear outright,” said Verity.

“There’s nothing wrong with a life lived for others,” said Hannah. “That’s what a cleric does, more or less, between the healin’ and the fixin’ and the talkin’ to people about their problems and how the perspective of the gods can help them.”

“I suppose,” said Verity. “For me, it was always about the different ways the music could make people feel. I wanted to create, and have others revel in that creation. But being a bard means that the effects come first, over and above the melodies and the lyrics. The term we use is dissonance.” She shrugged. “That’s why I ran away, if I’m allowed such melodramatic framing. There was a horrible tension that I couldn’t figure out how to deal with.”

Alfric wondered whether she really did believe that. She had said nothing about being a chosen of Xuphin, and how that was a struggle in and of itself, or how the terrible weight of expectation had pressed down on her. It was hard, hearing her talk, to know how much was left unsaid because of Hannah, and how much was left unsaid because the godly imprint on her was something she refused to think about. It was hard for Alfric to know, and harder still to know how he could ever broach that subject with Verity.

“Alright,” said Hannah, slapping her thighs. “Time to get a move on, if we’ve gotten our rest in. I’d like to hit Liberfell by nightfall.”

They continued on up the hill, carrying the heavy wardrobe while Verity followed behind them, singing. This time the songs were a bit less jovial, and Alfric, having nothing better to think about beside where his next step was going to be, thought about what she might be trying to say with it. That first song was one of a king going into battle against his enemies, which was either a very old song, from the time of kings, or something of Verity’s own invention. By the second song it was obvious that she was speaking of power, and how it felt to use it. Verity sang about wizards who brought down lightning bolts and knights who slew dragons, and there was something very old, but also very strong about it. It was also rousing in a way, something about the melody that brought forth the feeling of battle, and Alfric found himself moving faster because of it.

They reached the top of Traeg’s Knob, then rested for a bit more, before finally moving it into one of the public rooms, which was thankfully unlocked.

“Do you think we could get someone to lock this place up?” asked Alfric, looking around.

“Why?” asked Hannah. “No one is going to steal a wardrobe, we’ll have trouble enough getting it out of here on our own. Besides, this isn’t like Dondrian, where people don’t know each other. There are, as we said when we got here, probably not more than a hundred people in the whole hex.”

“I suppose,” said Alfric. “But it’s valuable.”

“I do have to say,” said Hannah, “That I don’t fancy the thought of lugging this thing another twelve miles back home. It’s closer to two hundred pounds than it is to one hundred. I don’t know that I could get it delivered before my arms gave out.”

“Well, I’m going through, if that’s alright with you,” said Verity. “Hot meal, hot bath, warm bed. Also, I need to pee.”

“Ay, should have gone in the dungeon,” said Hannah. “That’s what I did.”

“Gross,” said Verity.

“You’re the one who mentioned it,” said Alfric, though it was common practice to evacuate in the dungeon, which would essentially vanish as soon as everyone had left. It was a part of the overall checklist for a dungeon exit, along with double checking that you had everything you needed, and making sure that you weren’t carrying out anything that you didn’t mean to.

“Well, through we go,” said Hannah, once Alfric made a note. She looked over as he wrote it, and saw that it both explained the entad and welcomed people to use it while it was sitting there, which was more than she thought she would have put in. <Through we go,> she said for the benefit of Isra and Mizuki. <How are you finding the city of Liberfell?>

<Very interesting,> Mizuki replied. <And a bit intimidating.>

<We’ll be there soon enough,> said Alfric. <Can you warp so we can meet up? Or give us a location?>

<We’re in the middle of business,> said Mizuki. <We’ve got rooms at the Dragon’s Arm Hotel. I told them to expect you if we were out.>

<Thank you,> said Alfric. <We should meet soon though. We’re leaving the wardrobe in Traeg’s Knob with a note and hoping that no one does anything with it. The rest of today can be for selling what we have. I’m hoping that I can find a floatstone so we have less trouble bringing it back to Pucklechurch. Talk to you later.>

“Somethin’ odd about that, wasn’t there?” asked Hannah. “The way she spoke.”

“It’s Mizuki,” said Alfric. “But we’ll see her in a bit, and if it was odd, then she’ll get a chance to explain very soon.”

“Hot food, hot bath, warm bed,” said Verity, repeating it like a mantra. “There are entads that get a person clean in a hurry, aren’t there? Add that to my wishlist.”

The three of them went through together, and Alfric was thankful that he’d had the foresight to do some testing on whether the wardrobe’s orientation with respect to what direction it faced mattered (it did not) and had the further foresight to etch into his mind which of the notches would take them to Pucklechurch and which would take them to Liberfell.

They came out in farmland, then immediately used the warp to go to the warp point. Alfric went last after making sure that neither of them had any problems. This at least, was a proper warp point, one that had a building around it, though there was no attendant to make sure that the area was clear, nor any security of any kind. There was a chair for an attendant though, which was something. Alfric stepped off quickly, his legs aching from carrying the wardrobe, and moved to the door once he’d made sure that Verity and Hannah were both safe and sound.

The Dragon’s Arm Hotel was one of the larger buildings in Liberfell, and easy to find given that it had a sculpted dragon sticking out from the side of the building.

“Hot food, hot bath, warm bed,” said Alfric. He had almost all his money with him, and kept his hand at his side, something he hadn’t felt compelled to do in Pucklechurch. Liberfell was perhaps half again as large as Tarchwood, but it had much more than twice the feeling of being in an actual city. There had been other reasons to go to Tarchwood, mostly to scope it out as a location for a future dungeon run, and its location on the huge lake, but Liberfell was the bigger of the two, and Alfric wondered whether he’d find better or worse prices on both the entads and ectads. It was a city built on a hill, with a river winding its way in the valley below, and a portion of the city down there where river shipping took place, grains and textiles sent on rafts and flat-bottomed boats to elsewhere, eventually ending up at another city on the coast of the ocean, more than two hundred miles away. The streets were brickwork, mostly flat and easy to walk on when compared to the roots and ruts of Traeg’s Knob, and the air had a different smell to it, that of industries and cooking fires. It was still nothing like Dondrian, but it was closer than Alfric had been in quite a while.

Once they’d gotten into the hotel, it was easy enough to identify themselves and get their keys from the man behind the front desk. Verity requested food be brought up, and paid immediately. They were on the fourth floor, as Mizuki had apparently sprung for a suite, one that the five of them were going to share for the night. It seemed a bit extravagant to Alfric, and he hoped that he wouldn’t have to pay out too much, even if they weren’t terribly worried about money at the moment. The stairs were murder on his aching legs, and he collapsed into one of the beds before reluctantly removing his equipment and the pieces of armor he’d still been wearing. Verity was running a bath in one of the suite’s two bathrooms, and Hannah was busy in the other, taking a quick shower.

It had been a good day, if a long one, and not quite done. The team was coming together. There was a good chance they’d at least stay together for the next five dungeons, the ones surrounding Pucklechurch, and they just needed to be a bit lucky in what they found for it to be easy to make the case for what came next. Travel time was the biggest barrier, but the wardrobe would help with that, especially if Alfric could find something that would let them transport it.

There was a bit of party chat over the course of all this, reporting of locations and things like that, and Alfric mostly ignored it. You couldn’t turn party chat off, but you could sleep through it, if you trained yourself in it, and Alfric nearly napped while he waited for his turn in one of the bathrooms.

But then Isra and Mizuki returned to the hotel, with their own things to report, and Mizuki had news about what they’d been up to.

Chapter 28 - It Takes Two

Verity had finished her bath by the time Mizuki and Isra came back from whatever they were doing. The bath had been a proper bath, one with scented soaps that Mizuki apparently didn’t keep stocked at her house. Verity was going to have to spend some time in Liberfell buying a few things. She had gotten used to rather rough living at the Fig and Gristle, which had been necessitated by wanting to stretch her funds as far as they went, but with all the rings from their first dungeon, and a more permanent home with Mizuki, it made sense to stock up on all the little things she’d been missing, like lotions and scents. Perhaps she would buy another dress or two.

When she came out of the shower in her bathrobe, a meal from downstairs was waiting for her, and she didn’t feel the need to stand on ceremony, instead digging in right away. The suite had a nice little seating area, with a table for four off to one side. Mizuki was talking about how their time had gone, as presumably Alfric’s recounting of the trip up the hill carrying the wardrobe hadn’t taken much time to tell.

“Alfric, do you know someone named Lola?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said slowly. He was instantly on guard. “Why?”

“Purple eyes?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Alfric. “But I don’t doubt she might have acquired them in one way or another since I last saw her. Mizuki, are you saying that Lola is in the city? In Liberfell?”

“She said — well, she said a lot of things, but one of the main ones was that she was a dungeoneer, and she was going to be based out of Liberfell,” said Mizuki. “We talked for a bit, until I got the sense that maybe I was saying more than I should, and then she just left. But she said, um, that you still have her love.”

Alfric groaned and laid back on the couch, closing his eyes.

“Should I not have talked to her?” asked Mizuki. “Because if I wasn’t supposed to say anything about the party, it’s kind of on you for not giving me a heads up.”

“It’s fine,” said Alfric, still sitting with his head back.

“Is it?” asked Hannah. “Because you don’t have the face of a man who’s fine.”

“There’s a very long story I have to tell, and really don’t want to,” said Alfric, sighing. He sat up. “I’ve known Lola since we were little. Our parents intended us to marry, or not ‘marry’, it’s complicated, but we’re pacted. Technically, we’re still intended to be, but the only reason anyone thinks that is still going to happen is that we haven’t told our parents how much things have deteriorated between us.”

“Okay,” said Mizuki. “So she’s your ex?”

“It goes far, far deeper than that,” said Alfric. He screwed his eyes shut. “I have a confession to make.”

“Another?” asked Verity, who had been eating a pressed sandwich that rivaled the one that Mizuki had made. Like that one, it was hard to eat in a dignified way.

“Lola is a chrononaut,” said Alfric. It seemed like saying the words pained him. “And … I am too.” This he said with actual anguish, as though the words were being extracted from him at great expense by circumstances beyond his control.

There was silence in the room.

“Wait,” said Mizuki. “How many times did — how many times did you try to recruit us?”

“You can go back in time?” asked Isra.

“I can live a given day two times, sometimes three,” said Alfric. “Yes. And to answer the question, Mizuki, anything that I’ve done with this party, I’ve done only once. My family has very strict rules about disclosure, and I’ve followed them to the letter. More than to the letter.”

“We didn’t do the Pucklechurch dungeon twice?” asked Hannah. She wrinkled her nose. “It was only once?”

Alfric let out a sigh. “Yes,” he said. “Everything was only once, Pucklechurch, Traeg’s Knob, any personal time we’ve spent or conversations we’ve had. This is my first time living today. The only way I would have chosen to do it over would be if something horrible happened.”

“Wait,” said Mizuki. “Why didn’t you tell us that? I would have been way more relaxed about the whole thing if I’d known you could just undo it all.”

“How do we know you’re not lying?” asked Verity, setting her food down.

“That,” said Alfric, gesturing at her. “And that,” he said, gesturing at Mizuki. “Those are both very good reasons not to breathe a word of it to anyone.” He shook his head. “Lola.”

“If she hadn’t come along, when would you have told us?” asked Verity.

“I was planning to,” said Alfric. “I just needed to build up trust, to build up the team, to get us working together. Maybe it would have been tonight, if things were going well, or at least after the next dungeon.”

“You understand why it’s hard to trust you,” said Verity. “Why might we think that you’re hiding things? More things, that is?”

“I never lied,” said Alfric. “Just … lies of omission.” He seemed to really believe this, and to see it as a defense. Verity found herself enormously frustrated with that line of thinking.

“That’s the magic you know,” said Mizuki. “You’re a chrononaut.”

“Yes,” said Alfric. “But —” he turned to Verity. “If people know that you can do the day over, they’ll worry that you’ve done the day over, and there’s no proof you can offer them. Some people get it into their head that you’re just … I don’t know, an evil person, or someone who’s casually playing with their life.”

“Wait,” said Mizuki. “This Lola person too?”

“Yes,” sighed Alfric. “And if you’re wondering whether she’s had a conversation with you before, whether this is her second time through the day, then the answer is probably yes.”

“Seems a good power for a dungeoneer to have,” said Hannah. “But you’re the one who gets to decide whether to use it, ay?”

“I would use it if anything happened to any of you,” said Alfric. “And then you’d have no memory that anything bad had even happened, and I would have to disclose whatever did happen that required the power to be used.”

“Or you would just lie,” said Verity. It felt bad to say it, once the words were out, but the possibility needed to be put out there by someone, and she seemed like the only one to do it. Her emotions were getting the best of her.

“I wouldn’t,” said Alfric. “And if I had told you right from the start that I had this power, you would have had the same thought, that perhaps I was lying, or you would think that you were safe, and didn’t need to worry, and — it’s a gift of my bloodline, it is, but the way people deal with it is … why I wanted to wait to tell you. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry, but you don’t disagree with the general approach you took,” said Verity, gripping her fork. She had mostly forgiven him for agreeing to spy on her for her parents, but it was still there in the background of their relationship. If she hadn’t hit her limits, she might have started in on a tune to keep her frustration and suspicion down.

“What can I do to make it up to you?” asked Alfric.

“I think I need to take a break from all this for a moment, it’s been a long day,” said Verity, standing from her chair. “No one use the party chat for a bit, please, I’ll be in my room.” She took her plate with her, because she wasn’t done eating, and retreated to her room, closing the door behind her.

There was a temptation to eavesdrop on the conversation in the other room, but Verity resisted. She had been a proficient eavesdropper in her childhood, but it was mostly by way of listening in when people thought she was absorbed in something, rather than putting an ear where it wasn’t wanted.

Instead, she thought about Alfric, and what was to be done about him. Did she like him? Well … probably the least of all of them. He was everything that she didn’t like about Dondrian, pushing too much, focused too much, wanting too much from everyone else. He had been giving them all time to adjust to what he wanted from them, but he was doing it in a way that made it clear that was what he was doing. Verity could see what someone might like in Alfric, without particularly liking it herself. Did she want to keep going down this path of dungeoneering with him? Well, the answer was both yes and no. She liked almost every aspect of it aside from the dungeons. To be a part of a team, to train together, to live together, to travel and see new things, to have interesting magic, and sing songs for people who were quickly becoming friends? Well, it was nice. The monsters were much less nice, but her role in the dungeons was in some ways a pleasing challenge, a test of her skills as a bard.

She wondered how much more Alfric was keeping from them, but her guess was that it wasn’t all that much. The name Overguard did ring a bell, but only vaguely. Dungeoneers weren’t usually high society, even if they had quite a bit of money. If they were a family of chrononauts, that explained some of their success.

Verity had her own secrets, of course, and she wondered whether she’d be better viewing Alfric’s status as a chrononaut as something similar to her own Choosing as Xuphin’s own. She hadn’t told anyone, and it didn’t matter to her, it was only a pressure that came along on top of everything else. If people knew, they might treat her differently, and it wasn’t as though they had a right to know, not when it wasn’t impacting them in the slightest. And if Alfric was telling the truth, then there was the same lack of impact, save for there being a large safety net beneath them. No repeated days, no conversations she didn’t remember, no second or third attempts at dungeons. He’d intended to tell them, but was holding off, because the mere knowledge would cause problems. It wasn’t so different, and Verity had no plans to tell any of them that she was Chosen. Through that lens, she could understand Alfric a bit better, and she felt a bit of shame at how she’d handled things.

Verity ate her sandwich while hunched over on her bed, trying not to get crumbs on the linens. It was a nice bedroom with a far larger bed than she needed, and she wondered who was paying the cost of it.

With her food finished, she laid back in bed. She was tired down to her bones, not just from the long hikes, but from the magic she’d used. Bardic stamina was something built up over time, and Verity already had more capacity to go the distance than most people ever had, but with whatever Mizuki had done, and with the sheer length of the dungeon, she was about as drained as she’d ever been. It was clouding her thoughts. She should have refused to give them a song for moving the wardrobe and simply gone with Isra and Mizuki, but she’d wanted to do her part for the team. Beyond that, she was socially drained, as there’d been too much talking and time with people, with not too much of a break. She laid down, trying to ignore the dim murmurs from beyond the door. Whatever Alfric’s problems were, she would learn about them later, when her mind was in a better place for it.

She napped, very briefly, going in and out of sleep. She dreamed, a nightmare where she was the one carrying the wardrobe up a steep hill, being encouraged on by her mother.

Two hours later, the murmuring beyond the bedroom door had long finished, and there was a brief, soft knock.

“Come in,” said Verity with a sigh. She hadn’t been fully asleep, and didn’t feel even slightly rested.

To her surprise, it was Isra, dressed in a fresh set of clothes and looking slightly damp from a bath of her own. “There are only four beds,” she said. “Mizuki had wanted this one for herself to share with one of us.”

“Ah,” said Verity. “I can move.” She had already moved her things in earlier, before Mizuki had returned.

“Mizuki said that it was fine,” said Isra. “But it would mean that you need to share.”

“With you?” asked Verity.

Isra nodded.

“That’s fine by me,” said Verity, sighing. “How did it go out there?”

“We heard more about Alfric’s life,” said Isra. She moved over to the bed, and Verity scooted over. She was still dressed in the hotel’s bathrobe. “He blames Lola for much of his misfortunes.”

“I’m sure he does,” said Verity. “Sorry,” she said. “That wasn’t very kind of me. Maybe she’s truly awful. He’s a good man in very many ways, but very Dondrian.”

Isra shrugged. “He should have told us he could swim through time, but I understand why he didn’t.”

“Do you think he would have said, if he’d had to redo a day?” asked Verity.

“I don’t think he’s lying,” said Isra. “But I’m not the best judge of character.”

“If only he were a wolf, right?” asked Verity, smiling.

“It would simplify things,” nodded Isra, returning the smile. There was often something shy about her smiles, like she was embarrassed to show her teeth.

“I guess I wasn’t thinking about whether he had lied,” said Verity. “More about … well, if he would lie, if it came to that. If we went into a dungeon and one of us died, and he had to redo it, do you think he would say, or just try it again without telling us?”

“I think he would tell us,” said Isra.

“I suppose I do too,” said Verity, nodding. “Probably in a blunt way.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to talk to you. I was going to sleep.”

“I don’t mind the company, if it’s you,” said Verity. “But don’t let me keep you from sleep.”

“I’m not sure I’ll be able to sleep,” said Isra. “My arm is sore, but there are too many thoughts. The day was long.”

“I think being a dungeoneer probably means that you end up with a collection of very long days,” said Verity. She paused, wondering whether to offer. “I can sing you to sleep, if you’d like.”

“You can?” asked Isra.

Verity nodded. “Lullabies,” she said. “They were never a speciality of mine, but you work with the sleepiness a person has and amplify it. It has its uses.”

“I find your singing beautiful,” said Isra. “I would take any chance to hear it.”

Verity found herself blushing. It was too high of a compliment. “Would you mind if we talked, just for a bit, first? To get me settled.”

“Of course,” said Isra with a yawn. She hesitated. “Do you mind if I undress?”

Verity shook her head. She was planning to change out of the bathrobe and into her underthings, as she’d already taken everything she needed out of the book.

Still, it was somewhat of a surprise when Isra removed her headscarf. They’d slept in the same room at Mizuki’s the night before, but Isra had left it on. Here though, she revealed curly brown hair that had been pinned back in several places. It was a bit odd, never seeing a person’s hair, and it was strange how weird it felt to finally see it after so long of having it hidden. It wasn’t clear to Verity why it was done, only that it was Tarbin custom.

Verity decided to go ahead and get changed too, which was accomplished fairly quickly. There was something vaguely anxiety-inducing about getting naked with someone else in the room, but it was only Isra, who had given no sign of that sort of interest, and Verity’s chemise was quickly on. There was a small part of Verity that wondered whether Isra staying with her was motivated, but Verity had misread signals before, and the reason they were sharing a room at all was because of Mizuki, who had definitely not had that on her mind. By the time Verity was finished, Isra had gotten under the covers. It was early for sleep, but Verity had the feeling that once her head was against the pillow, it wouldn’t take long for her to be out.

“What did you want to talk about?” asked Isra, once they were laying side by side beneath the covers. It was hard not to read it as intimate. Verity wasn’t sure that she’d shared a bed with anyone since she was little.

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “How is being a druid?”

Isra chewed the inside of her cheek for a moment. “There’s so much other people don’t know.”

“I imagine so,” said Verity. They were lying in bed together, side by side, looking into each other’s eyes. Verity found herself looking for rhymes for ‘brown’ (drown, crown, gown), then thinking of more poetical synonyms (mahogany, umber, chestnut). There was a particular shade, russet, made from madder and woad, and Verity was on the verge of a good lyric when Isra turned away. Verity turned away as well, slightly embarrassed. She’d been staring without saying anything.

“I spoke with the beastmaster, who was also the bastlekeeper,” said Isra, speaking up to the ceiling. “I looked at his animals. He had a lifetime of experience and as much power as a hex can grant. He had entads to tell him things. Still he was fumbling and blind.”

“Did he manage though?” asked Verity. “Mizuki said he had a large shop.”

“He managed to make money,” said Isra. “But many of his bastles died along the way, for as much as he tried to help them. Where they live, what they eat, the things they want to do … he was ignorant.”

“You felt bad for the animals,” said Verity. With her head against the pillow, she was feeling sleepy.

“I felt bad for the man,” said Isra.

“Felt bad that you were better?” asked Verity.

“No,” said Isra, glancing over for a moment. It was a bit of an awkward conversation, with the both of them staring at the ceiling, and both clearly fairly tired. “To devote yourself and have nothing come of it is sad.”

“He’s probably raised hundreds of bastles,” said Verity. “Thousands, even. He’s helped people with new pets and farmers with new animals. I don’t think it’s right to judge ourselves against perfection, and I certainly don’t think it’s right to judge others against perfection.” That was how Verity had been judged for what seemed to be most of her life. “Did he seem happy?”

“He did,” said Isra. “He responded to a slight with kindness.”

“A slight?” asked Verity, glancing over. “From you or Mizuki?”

“From me,” said Isra. “An unkind assumption. Unintended. Still, he was warm to me.”

Verity wondered whether Isra had issued an apology, and decided that she probably hadn’t. “Mmm,” she said, for lack of anything better to add.

“What’s it like to be a bard?” asked Isra, some time later.

Verity had already started to drift off to sleep, and her eyes fluttered open, the promised lullaby forgotten. She turned to the side, and found that Isra was turned too. They looked at each other for a moment. Isra had her piercings out, and up close, the small holes in her skin were clearly visible. Again, Verity found herself constructing lyrics, and it took her a moment to remember what the question had been.

“There’s a song to a person,” she said. “There are notes that resonate with them. Perhaps it’s less like a sound, and more like … acoustics, knowing how the notes sound in a particular room, then trying your best to weave them together.” She made a little tune to demonstrate the point, something to pull on the sweetness of Isra, but with her overworked mind and sleepiness, it didn’t last more than a few bars. Still, she could see the change in Isra’s face, a smile on her lips that reached up to her eyes, like they were sharing a joke together. There was nothing shy about it.

“Can you do that again?” asked Isra, almost as soon as the song petered off.

“Tired,” said Verity. Really, she shouldn’t have pushed it, but it was always tempting when things felt that they could readily flow. Even the song she’d sung up the hill, a simple song of strength, had been pushing it. A song for Isra, tugging on and enhancing her sweetness, was beyond even that, and risked her losing her ‘voice’ for a few days, which had happened twice before.

“I wish I could feel like that all the time,” said Isra.

“You can,” murmured Verity. The world kept slipping away as her thoughts descended into dreams. The last thing she was fully conscious of was feeling the heat of Isra’s body through the blankets.

Chapter 30 - Noodles

They went down from the hotel room and out onto the streets of Liberfell, walking without much direction for a bit.

“Do you like Kiromon cooking?” asked Mizuki.

“I can’t say I’ve had it much,” said Hannah.

“Noodle shop,” said Mizuki, pointing. “I’ve been there before, it’s very good, but very traditional. Or Plenarch traditional, meaning they use local ingredients, but, you know what I mean.”

Hannah wasn’t sure she did. “Well, we can give it a try,” she nodded. “I’ve liked what you’ve made, so far.”

They went into the shop together, and quickly found a table. It was off-hours, and the place was quiet. There were little glass bottles with long necks sitting on the table, one of them clear and the other a dark brown. The menu, such as it was, was written up on a board on one wall, in chalks of three different colors, though there were only six things they seemed to make, most of which were the same noodle soup with some variants. Before too long, a woman came over to them.

“Your order?” she asked, without a trace of pleasantries.

“Spring noodles,” said Mizuki, giving her a smile.

“For me too, ay,” said Hannah.

“Oh, and a bottle of wine to share,” said Mizuki. “And a plate of sobyu.”

The woman nodded, then went into the kitchen, which was visible from their table over a short wall. As Hannah watched, a girl about their age climbed up a small ladder and stood on a long wooden arm of some sort, which slowly lowered as she stood on it. She was gripping a pole bolted to the wall and had clearly done this many times before.

“What’s that?” asked Hannah, pointing.

“Noodles,” said Mizuki. “The dough gets pressed through a little thing with holes in it and drops right down into boiling water. I’ve tried for years to make it on my own, and I have no idea what keeps going wrong. Apparently there are a lot of bad ways to make noodles.”

“How do you make them at home?” asked Hannah. “I don’t recall seein’ such a thing.”

Once the girl had lowered to near the floor, she hopped off and picked up a giant wire mesh net, which she used to do something that was just barely out of Hannah’s sight, but the sound of water splashing around could soon be heard.

“I have the equipment to make it for a small batch,” said Mizuki. “This is just the kind of thing you need for a big kitchen. But yes, part of it is getting the dough through the holes. I’ve always been terrible with dough, and baking in general.”

“Seems like the sort of think I can help with,” said Hannah with a nod. “I love to bake, far more than I enjoy puttin’ together a meal, though I can do that too, if you ever need a day off cooking. I can’t say that I’ve much experience with noodles, but I have quite a bit with doughs, and it can’t be that difficult.”

“Please don’t let them hear you say that,” said Mizuki. “These people are masters of their craft.”

Hannah hadn’t meant it like that, only that to get a basic proficiency, for most things, took very little time, and to become a master took quite a bit of dedicated effort and sometimes years of doing only that thing. She’d meant that getting it to the point where they were decent noodles didn’t seem too hard.

It took a surprisingly short time for the noodle dishes to come out. The noodles were thin and brown, twisted up into a ball, with a number of things finely sliced and placed on top, along with an upside down half of a soft-boiled egg. There were more colors than Hannah had expected, especially the broth, which was a purple-pink.

“It’s a beetroot sobyu broth,” said the woman as she laid the noodles down. “Topped with pear, pork slices, cucumber, and egg.” She laid a small pot down next to them. “Mustard, to stir in.” She pointed at the two bottles. “Vinegar halfway through, to change the taste.” She didn’t say which of the two bottles, but she likely meant the clear one. The ‘sobyu’ plate was set down next to them without comment. It had nine small piles of various colors, each something pickled, with a focus on color.

Hannah dug in with the long two-tined fork she’d been given, twisting up noodles and trying to get as much as she could from each bite.

“The sobyu is for both of us,” said Mizuki, gesturing at the plate she’d ordered. “Best in little bites, with some noodles. Different from the kind I make, but still, you know, sobyu.” She filled her wine glass and drank it down, a little faster than Hannah thought appropriate, but then again, it had been a long day.

They ate together, with nothing from the two of them but murmurings about how good everything was. There was something to the sobyu that took a bit of getting used to, but everything in the bowl of noodles was quite fresh, and she enjoyed the contrast with the salty, sour sobyu, which was apparently a catchall term for something pickled. The meal was very light, by Hannah’s standards, the thin strips of pork not leaving much of an impression on her stomach, but the noodles were nice and chewy, and in no time at all, she was drinking from the bowl to get the last of the broth. She finished far before Mizuki, who seemed to be a bit of a slow eater.

While they’d been eating, two boys around their age sat down at a table near them. They seemed oblivious to their surroundings, but Hannah wasn’t oblivious to them, in part because they were wearing adventuring gear. Mizuki and Hannah had both cleaned up and dressed themselves in their usual outfits, which for Mizuki was culottes and a loose blouse, and for Hannah was trousers and a buttoned down shirt. The boys, by contrast, were wearing heavy clothes, and clearly had a few entads between them, along with weapons kept at their sides: a hammer for the taller one with lighter skin, and a dagger for the shorter one with heavier armor. What drew Hannah’s eye the most was the taller one’s sigil on his chest, which was that of Oeyr, God of Emergence, and that was either a feature of entad armor, or more likely, marked him as a cleric.

She’d been listening in on their conversation as she ate.

“Well, it’s been going a bit slowly, that’s all I’m saying,” said the taller one.

“Josen lost an arm,” said the shorter one.

“Yeah, and obviously that’s not ideal,” said the taller one. “And I’m sorry that I couldn’t do much more for him, but it’s not like he had to go through his whole life without an arm, is it? He was out for barely a day.”

“I don’t think it was like that for him,” said the shorter one. Hannah was trying to peg him, and thought that maybe he was something. He had an air of magic about him. She couldn’t see magic like Mizuki, but there was a way that certain people carried themselves. “I think for him, it was probably the worst day of his entire life, and that’s saying something, this far in.”

“He got it back though,” said the cleric. He seemed like a stubborn sort. “And yes, I wish that I’d been able to reconnect it, but —”

“No one blames you for that,” said the other. He took a breath. “But he’s been talking about bowing out.”

The cleric let out a low groan. “Where are we going to find a fifth?”

“A wizard fifth, at that,” said the short one. “Or some other kind of offensive. But I think the better question is what she’s going to do when she finds out.”

“She’s harmless,” said the cleric. This had the feeling of a well-worn conversation between the two.

“She is absolutely not harmless,” said the small one. Hannah had, by this point, pegged them as both belonging to the party of this ‘Lola’ creature, and if she were an alienist, and the tall one was a cleric of Oeyr, and they had a wizard somewhere with an arm missing or reattached, then that really narrowed down what role the shorter boy could fill. Hannah was guessing that he was a bard. “Do you understand that she lies through her teeth about everything and does every day at least twice? She knows us, what makes us tick.”

“She’s really not that violent though,” said the cleric. “I mean, you’ve seen her, she doesn’t sink into it in the dungeons. It’s all the same stuff that he always argued about, rumors, things that sure, maybe happened in undone days, but you have no way of actually knowing. And in my opinion, she just doesn’t have it in her.”

“Other stuff though,” said the probable-bard. “Manipulation? Digging for secrets? Flirtation?”

“That, yes,” admitted the cleric. “And maybe more than flirtation. Those rumors I take more seriously.”

“Would you ever?” asked the bard. “If she came to you?”

“Not something I want to talk about,” said the cleric.

“Because if you would, then there’s a chance she did,” said the bard.

“Oh, that was great!” said Mizuki, pushing forward her bowl, which was empty. She didn’t seem to be aware of the other conversation, which was going on not too far away, loud enough that the eavesdropping hadn’t presented any difficulties. Loud enough that Hannah didn’t feel too bad about violating the expectation of privacy, more to the point. “Were you serious about learning to make noodles? Because we’re not going to be in Liberfell all that long, and it would be best for you to learn what you can from these people, if they’re willing to teach us. We could get a few tips.”

“Those two boys over there,” said Hannah, speaking low, and nodding her head in their direction. “Dungeoneers. Part of Lola’s party.”

Mizuki looked over at them, conspicuously staring, then gave a wave, and at that point, Hannah had no choice but to turn and look at them, putting on a smile and giving them a nod.

“Hey!” Mizuki called, louder than she needed to be. “We’re Alfric’s new party.”

Hannah sighed as Mizuki got up from her seat and went over to them, then she followed after. There was an entire conversation that they really should have had, and Mizuki had elected to be impulsive, which was to be expected from a sorc. She was also on her second glass of wine, which probably didn’t help matters.

“Alfric’s new party?” asked the cleric. “Sorry, you mean Alfric, Alfric Overguard, is here, in Liberfell?”

“Mizuki Yono,” said Mizuki, placing a hand on her chest. “Team sorc. This is Hannah … Carthaigh, cleric of Garos.” She stumbled over the last name, but got it eventually.

The cleric turned to the bard. “Why is Alfric in Liberfell?”

“The better question is why are we in Liberfell,” replied the bard. “But we’re being rude.” He turned to Mizuki. “Grig Tinsmith, bard, Mardin Longshore, cleric of Oeyr. Vertex.” The last word hung there like it was supposed to hold some meaning.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Mizuki. “Now, what horrible secrets is Alfric hiding, if any?”

“Mizuki,” said Hannah.

“What?” she asked.

“I don’t think this is the way to go about whatever you think you’re goin’ about,” said Hannah.

“If he’s got horrible secrets, we want to know, don’t we?” asked Mizuki.

“Ay,” said Hannah. “But I’d be worried about rumors and bad feelin’s.”

“Well I’m not going to take anything they say without a grain of salt,” said Mizuki. “But Alfric didn’t say not to talk to them, and they’re here, to be talked to, so what am I, involuntarily bound to silence?” She was a bit worked up, it seemed, and Hannah backed off.

“I don’t think he had any horrible secrets,” said Grig. “He was just a stick in the mud with a bit too much of his parents’ doting.” He shrugged. “And maybe a little bit full of himself, though I guess we never saw him in action to see if he could back it up. I think he could have, personally.”

“He can,” said Hannah.

Grig nodded. “But horrible secrets … well, there were rumors, as you say, but it was the same kind of thing you always hear about chrononauts. The ‘world without consequence’ stuff.”

“Which I never bought into,” said Mardin.

“But you still broke a party you’d formed with him?” asked Mizuki.

Mardin shifted. “Well, Lola — how much do you know?”

“Most things,” said Mizuki, which to Hannah did not feel at all true. “Lola came along and wanted to sink things for him by taking away what he’d built up. But what’s not clear is why you’d agree.”

“It was his self-reliance thing,” said Grig. He crossed his arms and looked mildly defensive. “The Overguards, in the adventuring world, are pretty famous. There’s a trophy in the League called the Overguard Trophy. There’s a maneuver called the Overguard maneuver. There’s a place where the Junior League does training called Overguard Hall. It’s … kind of a lot. A lot to live up to, but Alfric always seemed like he had absolutely zero problems with that. The problem for us is that we were getting pretty much nothing out of it. His family has a huge communal vault, and he was allowed to pull two low-tier items from it. They could have outfitted everyone in the party five times over.”

“Ten times,” said Mardin.

“Ah, so it was about money,” said Mizuki. She looked satisfied with that explanation.

“Not money,” said Mardin, shaking his head. He seemed less defensive, even though what Mizuki had said felt like a base accusation of greed to Hannah. “It was about entads, which were going to have a pretty significant impact on our ability to actually do the dungeons. Alfric, basically from the start, years ago when we all met in the Junior League, was talking about how it was important to find storage and transport and kit up as quickly as possible. But there was a whole vault full of it!”

“It might have been one thing if his parents hadn’t allowed it,” said Grig. “But he’d always get sanctimonious about it and lecture us on the virtue of self-reliance and the adventure of cobbling things together, making do, stuff like that. I don’t know if he ever asked them or not, but to us it was always the same thing, like he was telling us we should be happy about starting from virtually nothing.”

“It’s what he likes,” said Hannah. She folded her arms and frowned. “You should have seen him goin’ on about a heavy piece of kit we got. He was happy as a clam about luggin’ the thing around.”

“Right,” said Grig. “But just for myself, my parents weren’t poor, exactly, but between the Junior League and my tutoring, and my sisters, they struggled a bit. They were never on the dole or anything, but … Alfric’s family had this gift, this amazing gift that allows them to fit into all kinds of useful roles, all of which have a pretty high pay, plus the Interrium gives them some kind of pay just for existing, and benefits if they have kids. And that’s on top of being able to live each day a few times, which gives them more time to gain skills and knowledge, and their ability to try things and fail horribly without consequence.”

“It’s easy to preach self-reliance when you’ve got an easy life,” said Mardin. “I mean, he was always aware of how much easier things were for him, it wasn’t like he was actually preaching. Most of the time, anyway. But we were still getting the raw end of the deal, it felt like. We weren’t going into it for the glory, we were going because we could make a lot of money if we did enough dungeons, or even relatively few of them. It was money that we could use to pay for a better house for our parents, or money to take vacations.”

“We’ve been at it for pretty much a year,” said Grig. “We’ve got fifty-four dungeons under our belts. Not to sound like I’m bragging, but we’ve already got enough to retire.”

“Not enough to retire,” said Mardin, rolling his eyes. “But we do have enough in the way of bound entads that if we keep the party together, we can set up shop in Dondrian and start a business that will let us coast forward.”

“And you got there because of what Lola could provide,” nodded Hannah.

“We might have gotten there with Alfric,” Grig said. “It would have taken longer, but the end point would be the same. And,” he looked at Mardin. “Alfric wasn’t like Lola, he wouldn’t have come here on a whim. A whim which, clearly, wasn’t a whim, because it was all in service of getting to Alfric.”

“Maybe,” said Mardin. “Not the kind of thing we should be saying without at least talking to her first.”

“She actually came and spoke with me,” said Mizuki. “I met her. She seemed like she was definitely here for him.”

“Not that you know for certain,” said Hannah with a sigh. “Grig, Mardin, it was nice to meet you, but we worry your noodles are gonna get cold.”

Mizuki turned to her. “I don’t think that I know enough,” she said. “About who Alfric really is, and whether we’re under threat from Lola. She was intense. Maybe I didn’t get that across as much as I should have.”

“She’s harmless,” said Mardin.

“Yeah, that’s a point of disagreement,” said Grig. “But if it’s the version of the day she’s going to keep, then yeah, she hasn’t ever done anything that would rise to the level of an actual crime.”

“See, that’s the kind of phrasing that really doesn’t help me,” said Mizuki. “Alfric was the same.” She pulled a chair from one of the other tables and sat down to join them without asking. “I need to know specifically what she did.”

When they didn’t seem to mind, or at least didn’t push her away, Hannah reluctantly grabbed a different chair and joined. Mizuki seemed intent on pushing things, and her friendliness was being turned into a bit of a weapon. Hannah wondered whether she even knew she was doing it.

“Well,” said Grig. He seemed, at last, to be thinking about how much to share.

“No one knows,” said Mardin. “It’s all rumors.”

The woman who was serving came over with their noodle bowls, and Hannah asked whether she could have a second. There was a brief pause as there was some rearrangement, with another table being brought over and seats being swapped. Hannah and Mizuki ended up sitting cross-wise from each other, which felt a bit unusual once they were there, but didn’t warrant correcting.

“Okay,” said Grig. “I’ll hold off on my noodles until Hannah gets hers, and then I can tell you about the rumors.”

“Appreciated,” nodded Hannah. “I’d rather get them more in-depth from Alfric, but if Mizuki is going to insist,” she shrugged.

“There were rumors about both of them,” said Grig as Mardin slurped his noodles. “But early on, it was mostly about her, saying … well, saying that she’d been off doing some social exploration in those undone days. The chronos have a reputation for being a bit fast, since they can live each day twice or more, and some of the rumors around Lola were about as bad as they came. Some of it was violence, some of it was relationships, and she got treated like — well, like an adult, by a lot of people, starting early on. That made it a bit hard for people to hang out with her.”

“Happened before our teens,” said Mardin between bites of noodles.

“Well, right,” said Grig. “Maybe when she was eleven or twelve. We didn’t know her then, and didn’t really know her until she was in the Junior League, and then only by reputation. I think she went to a nice school early on, then switched over to mostly having tutors.”

“And the rumors,” said Mizuki. “They were … that she’d killed people?”

Grig nodded. “In the undone days, yeah,” he said. He shrugged. “Like with a lot of rumors, it’s hard to know where they came from, and given they were undone days, it seems like Lola would have been the only one to know. Or maybe she levied threats against someone, telling them what she’d done to them, but those could easily have been lies. Hard to say. The other side of it was a bunch of rumors about her being with all kinds of guys, which — it’s even harder to know where those rumors came from, but I have an easier time believing it.”

“What does she say?” asked Hannah.

“Nothing,” said Grig. “She rolls her eyes and moves on. We don’t … really talk though.”

“Fifty dungeons and you don’t talk?” asked Hannah. Her order of noodles came, and she began to dig in.

“We talk business,” said Grig. “We don’t talk about how she felt about the rumors, and whether they might be true. She um, doesn’t really have compunctions about lying, and we’ve caught her doing that before. Not in that she was trying to screw us over, just … stuff that she’s said that wasn’t actually what happened. Her response was with all the undoing, she has a bit of trouble remembering what actually happened, but, eh. It’s a weak response.” He paused. “And she knows that’s what I’d say about her, but if you could refrain from just repeating it outright. We are going to want some information in exchange for this, you know that, right?”

“Fifty dungeons in a year?” asked Mizuki, ignoring the question. “That seems low, compared to what Alfric wanted.”

“It is,” said Grig. “We’ve had some setbacks. Lola is kind of in charge of the whole thing, which makes sense, given how much more information she has, and how she’s basically been bankrolling us, or was at the start, but … well, when Lola says that we tried a dungeon and failed at it, so we need to take a day off, it’s hard to know whether or not she’s telling the truth or just wants to spend the day doing other stuff. We can’t contradict her, and if we don’t have a reset in our pocket, we don’t want to risk actual death, so we’re kind of at her mercy.” He paused. “Again, she knows all that, and with her, I’m sure she’d have gotten that from me in one of the undone days, but —”

“He’s painting a bad picture of it,” said Mardin. “There are limits to what Oeyr can provide and reasons not to hit a bunch of dungeons in a single day, even though we do have a small team of porters and agents.”

Grig, at least, had the classic manner of a man who had all kinds of issues that were piling up and a deep need to spill them out to someone. It was something that Hannah had seen at the temple quite a few times, and her guess was that the issues he was raising were ones that he went over in his head on a near daily basis. Mardin was more reserved.

“Porters?” asked Mizuki.

“People they pay to handle things for them,” said Hannah. “We’re sellin’ entads and ectads on our own, but at a certain point, you pay people to do that for you, a counterparty. You get someone who specializes in bastles, in the entad markets, and at the higher levels, you have your own ectad refinery. The biggest dungoneerin’ teams have twenty or thirty people in their employ.”

“More than that, depending on how much they want to keep in-house,” said Mardin. He seemed to be taking over talking as Grig ate. “And unfortunately for us, all that is under Lola’s control, and she’s … well, got her own things going on, as evidenced by us being in Liberfell as a way to be close to Alfric.”

“And him?” asked Mizuki. “What are the rumors about him?”

“The same, mostly,” said Mardin. “Though a lot of those rumors we got straight from Lola, and the ones we didn’t might have originated from her after their falling out. I knew through the guilds that he was having a lot of problems finding a party, and some of that might have been from her poisoning people against him. I didn’t really take it that seriously, because it’s what happens when people have a bad breakup, but if we’re here because of him, that means that it’s suddenly party business.”

“Which isn’t great,” said Grig. “There’s a good chance we’ll be seeing more of you, and not just because dungeoneers working in the same area often cross paths.”

“Not that we’re not looking forward to it,” said Mardin, giving Hannah a smile. Hannah had dated a cleric of Oeyr, for a few short weeks, and while she’d been a lovely partner right up until the end, it wasn’t something that Hannah had any interest in repeating. There were too many philosophical differences.

“In the sense that you seem like fine people,” said Grig. “But in the sense that there’s probably some coming clash between Alfric and Lola, no, it’s been nice meeting you, but we don’t actually want to see you again.”

“Shame,” said Mizuki. “I’ve never met a dungeoneer before.”

“Absolute nonsense,” sighed Hannah. “You’ve met loads.”

“Retired dungeoneers,” said Mizuki. “They’re a different breed.”

“All the same,” said Hannah.

“And not career dungoneers,” said Mizuki. “Not people who do it day in and day out for two or three decades.”

“Take an axe to my neck if I’m still doing this in a decade,” said Grig.

“It’s not that bad,” said Mizuki. She frowned at him. “Is it?”

“How many have you done?” asked Mardin. It was the first time they’d asked for more than surface information.

“We finished our second today,” said Mizuki. She rolled her eyes. “But it wasn’t bad, it was frantic and punishing, but not bad.”

“So you’re a very fresh party,” said Grig. He seemed like he was opening the way for them to say more, but Mizuki’s attention was still on Mardin, and Hannah wasn’t going to say much.

“And you think that’s how you’ll feel fifty-four dungeons in?” asked Mardin. “After you’ve been beaten and bruised more times than you can count, after you’ve seen horrible things happen to your friends, after you’ve been through the selden dungeons, where you have horrible monsters and almost nothing in the way of loot?”

“A chrononaut should help with that, ay?” asked Hannah.

Grig and Mardin looked at each other. “It’s been a point of discussion,” said Grig.

“She’s said she doesn’t like undoing things just because the payout is bad,” said Mardin. “Which I understand.”

“And it’s better than normal dungeoneers get,” nodded Grig. “But it’s still the kind of thing that makes you think that maybe you can just settle for a modest existence in the city with what you’ve got.”

“Look,” said Mardin. “Alfric is a good guy, even if he’s a bit tightly wound. You don’t need to worry about him. We wish him well, even. There’s no bad blood on our end. He’ll probably be with you for long enough that he can get his elevation up and have a bunch of dungeon runs under his belt, then get into one of the more serious dungeoneering parties that needs a fifth, or fall back on his family, or … something. But if it’s just a few dungeons he’s got you together for, he’ll probably be a stand up guy.”

“You think he’d just leave us?” Mizuki frowned.

“Nah,” said Grig. “Alfric will sit you down and go over things in detail, giving you a firm timeline and trying to make it a smooth process. He’s a stickler like that. Which, like we said, means any claims about him having done and then undone some unsavory things kind of ring hollow.”

“I trust him,” said Mizuki, nodding. “I just wanted to know.”

Grig shrugged. “Now you know.”

And it was apparent that this was the other reason they had been so forthcoming: guilt.

“We’re going to have to talk with the others,” said Mardin. “We’re going to have to have a group meeting without Lola to talk about the fact that we went quite some distance over to Liberfell on short notice in order to be around Alfric.”

“Seems likely,” said Grig, sighing. He looked at Mizuki. “We have some solidarity through this, if the Alfric-and-Lola situation comes to a head? We’ll look out for each other, as the uninvolved?”

“Of course,” nodded Mizuki. “It’s been a pleasure to meet you both.”

There were murmurs of assent, and Mizuki and Hannah paid and then left. Hannah was surprised that they hadn’t been pressed further on what they knew of what Alfric had been up to, but she was grateful that she hadn’t had to stonewall them, and worse, to make Mizuki do the same. Guilt, again, seemed like it might have saved them from having to be evasive or lie. ‘That guy we suddenly abandoned for a better payout with someone we don’t really like, how’s he been doing?’ It would have taken some brass ones to ask, but in their position, Hannah would have done it.

“Do you ever feel like you’re really, really on someone’s side?” asked Mizuki. “And you don’t know why, exactly, and you’re trying to work it out?”

“Can’t say I’m too familiar,” said Hannah.

“Well, that’s where I am,” said Mizuki. “I’m feeling like I want to defend him against the world. It … probably doesn’t make that much sense. I wanted to sit with them to get more from them, so I could be sure that he wasn’t, I don’t know.”

“The whole point is that you can’t know,” said Hannah.

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “But I know. I feel it in my bones.”

“You care about him,” said Hannah, nodding. She could feel herself slipping into her clerical mindset, the one used for helping people with their problems. “Not that you shouldn’t, or not that I think there’s a real risk of you gettin’ hurt, but you’re seein’ him as a victim.”

“I am,” nodded Mizuki. “He is.”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “I didn’t say otherwise.”

They were silent as they walked to their hotel, perhaps because both of them were thinking, or perhaps because Mizuki had worked herself into a bit of a state. When they went into the hotel room, Mizuki went looking for Alfric, but as it turned out, he was already asleep, even though the sun was still not quite set. For her own part, Hannah was eager for rest, but she worried about Mizuki, and whether their sorcerer would still feel the same iron loyalty in the morning.

Chapter 29 - Historical Revisionism

That Alfric was a chrononaut was, in some sense, a surprise, but in another sense, made certain things fall into place. That was almost certainly what Filera had seen in him during their encounter at the temple, and it explained some of his rush to get things moving when they’d all started out. He’d wanted to do as much in a day as possible, because that way, if things had gone poorly, he could have started the entire thing over. Perhaps he hadn’t even been thinking like that, it was just something that had been ingrained in him by a whole family who had that ability. Hannah wasn’t entirely sure.

“Is Verity going to be okay?” asked Mizuki, looking at the closed door. “Also, that was going to be my room.”

“She’ll be fine,” said Hannah. “Alfric had a safety net he didn’t tell us about, and he wasn’t keen to use it.” She hoped Verity would be fine. She furrowed her brow and looked at Alfric. “But why didn’t you want to go after the bear then?”

“We had done well enough,” said Alfric. “I didn’t want to put anyone in danger.”

“But if one of us had died,” said Mizuki. “You’d just … redo the day? Make different choices?”

“If I’d been on the second day through, I’d have postponed the dungeon and not risked it without the ability to undo it,” said Alfric. “And, obviously, I would have told you all what had happened.”

“Obviously, ay?” asked Hannah. She pursed her lips. “The temptation wouldn’t have been there to make some excuse?”

“I don’t want to pretend to have a purity that I don’t have,” said Alfric. “I would have lamented the fact that it had to be that way. I might even have thought hard about whether it was possible to not follow through on the commitment to disclosure. But I want this party to last, and I was always going to tell you eventually, it was just a question of whether it would be on my own time or whether it would be necessitated by a reset.”

“But you told us now because you were worried that this ‘Lola’ was going to say something?” asked Mizuki. “Or that she already had?”

Alfric hesitated. “Yes,” he admitted. “Not ideal.”

“But as I said,” Hannah frowned. “It’s a safety net he didn’t tell us about, and there’s good reasons not to.” Something else slipped into place, which was the way Alfric had reacted when there was some question about his honor. He was protective of it, because a chrononaut depended upon trust. Otherwise people might think he was lying about days that had been redone, and whether days had been redone. Or, possibly, he was defensive because people had questioned his honor before on this very issue. He seemed to be handling it well. “Decent reasons, anyhow, since I’m not sure about ‘good’.”

“Wait,” said Mizuki, looking at Alfric. “You’re worried that I’ll do something risky if I know you could just undo it?”

“You did something risky without knowing that I could undo it,” said Alfric.

“Well,” said Mizuki. “I mean, yeah, people do risky things all the time. You have to take risks in life.”

“Chrononauts call it risk hazard,” said Alfric. “If people know there’s something that can protect them, they’ll take more risks, which makes things more difficult for us when we’re trying to undo things and get a good day in place.”

“I guess,” said Mizuki. “But shouldn’t we take more risks? To get more from the dungeons?”

“If you died — you understand that seeing a party member die isn’t something that I want to have to go through?” he asked. There was something about the way he was handling the conversation that was … well, like he’d had it before. Hannah didn’t think he was lying, just that he’d probably had these kinds of conversations many times before, and been mentally preparing himself to have this talk with them. “That not only would we have to delay a day for safety’s sake, but that I’d have to go through more brutal fights and injuries in a newly created dungeon whose layout and contents I wouldn’t know? Going through the dungeon that first failed time would be for nothing aside from the experience of it.”

“But you like dungeons,” said Mizuki.

“I’d lay off him,” said Hannah. “He’s the one taking beatin’s for us. Makes sense not to want more.”

“Just trying to understand,” Mizuki shrugged. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“I’m not sure I understand the scope of your powers,” said Isra.

“I can undo a day,” said Alfric, turning to her. This, too, seemed like it was something he was well prepared for, but there were obvious mundane reasons for that. “Not a full day, just back to the witching hour, in the dead of the night, before the sun is up. That’s the common point for all chrononauts, varying a bit by how far east or west they are.” He had a particular way of talking to Isra, which she seemed to take to, and Hannah resolved to mimic it as much as possible the next time there was something that Isra didn’t know. The girl did seem to know quite a bit about religion though, more than expected. “It’s the same for all chrononauts, only a single day back in time, with the only thing that varies being how many times we can do a day. My second time through a day I’m fine, but a third time through, I feel somewhat ill, and I can’t do a fourth. My parents can both do six, and I’ve heard of people being able to do as many as twelve. It takes some conscious effort, so I can’t do it if I’m knocked out, and it happens automatically if I die. There’s a complicated system of priority, but for now I think all you really need to know is that Lola takes her days before I take mine, meaning that either this is what she’s settled on for today, or the events of today that were impacted by her will be undone, and we’ll have no memory or experience of this conversation.”

“You said that you had an arranged marriage,” said Isra. “With this girl.”

“With Lola, yes,” said Alfric. “And not a marriage, necessarily, just a pact that we would propagate the power, and if we didn’t, we would find replacements for each other. Chrononauts have chrononaut children, but only if they breed with other chrononauts.”

“Seems the wrong word there, ‘breed’,” said Hannah. “You’re saying it’s recessive.”

“No,” said Alfric. “Or not quite. It doesn’t skip generations like some recessive traits do. If you have any non-chrononauts in your family tree, you don’t have the power.”

“How’d the first chrononaut get born then?” asked Mizuki.

“Unclear,” said Alfric. “Legend goes that seven hundred years ago in Tarbin, three large families either chanced into it or somehow earned it from one of the gods, and careful marriages saved the line from going out. Those careful marriages aren’t as necessary today, because there are so many of us, but they’re still practiced to make sure there’s another generation.”

“But you didn’t want to marry her,” said Isra. “Or have her children.”

“It’s complicated,” said Alfric. “But no.”

“She seemed a little intense,” said Mizuki. “A little frightening.”

“She was always like that,” said Alfric. “And she was always cavalier about using her power, much more than we’re supposed to be.” He hesitated. “She’s an alienist.”

“A potent combination,” said Hannah. “If things go wrong with how she tries to bind, she undoes and tries again, ay?” Alienists were scary, mostly because the binding needed to be done with utmost care, and if it wasn’t, then people could die. Flaws in the binding could also crop up later on, resulting in self immolation, or decapitation, or worse. It was something people didn’t go into unless they had both the natural aptitude and tolerance for risk, but for a chrononaut, at least some of the problems could be swept to the side.

“The extent of the risks she’s taken,” said Alfric. “The things she’s done and then undone … there’s no way of knowing. Entads don’t work with our power. The most you could do is comb through her memories, but if there’s a method of involuntary memory combing, I haven’t heard of it. There were suspicions though. Things she knew that she shouldn’t have known. Metaphors that she’d drop which … weren’t the kind of metaphors that someone would make unless there were certain things they’d done and seen. She admitted a few things to me, mostly petty crimes and social transgressions, but there was often the hint of something more. She said that she’d stabbed someone once, but she never revealed who, because we got in a fight about it.”

“Is there a chance she killed me?” asked Mizuki, eyes wide.

Alfric’s lips went thin. “It’s not clear if she’s ever killed anyone. I don’t want to slander her. It’s all rumors, and I know how rumors that you can’t possibly refute can be. I … would think it likely that she’d spoken with you before, but unlikely that she tried to hurt you.” If it had come to that, an alienist against a sorcerer … well, Hannah didn’t know enough to say, but her money was on Mizuki unless it was a surprise attack. The problem was that it very probably would be a surprise attack.

“She sounds horrible,” said Isra. She had her arms folded and was watching carefully.

“She wasn’t,” said Alfric. “I mean … you have to understand how it is for us. We live through days that we know aren’t going to matter. She came into her ability early, around ten, and I think at that age, she felt more of a need to push the boundaries. And then after that, when we were older, she knew exactly how far the boundaries could be pushed, how easy it could be to steal things, how people would react if she said something obscene, and — all of that would have been fine, maybe, bad things that got undone, but I never played those games with her, and she didn’t like that.”

“You never did any of that stuff?” asked Mizuki. “You never once insulted someone who you knew wouldn’t have any memory of it?”

“When I was younger I wasn’t perfect.” He took a breath. “I went into dungeons,” said Alfric. “Alone.”

Mizuki gaped at him. “City dungeons?” she asked.

“Ones on the city outskirts,” said Alfric. “Using a key that I stole from my parents. I just … wanted to see what they were like. I never made it out alive. Six times total. It was something Lola and I bonded over, though we probably shouldn’t have.”

“And then later on you had a fight and went your separate paths, ay?” asked Hannah.

“Not quite. I had plans,” said Alfric. “I was a part of the Junior Adventurer’s League, training, getting ready, recruiting a team, training with a team. I had maps and plans,” he turned to Mizuki. “And yes, I know, that’s very funny.”

She frowned. “Not in this context, no.”

“We were a week, a week away from heading out,” said Alfric. “We were just waiting for our last member to turn seventeen. Then, very suddenly, I was out of the party, and it was her party instead. I don’t know how long she had been working on it, but she pulled the rug out from under me.”

“And that’s why you have us,” said Isra.

“No,” said Alfric. “No, she was going to undo it, if I bowed to her will. If I was going to be her … partner in crime, I suppose, on those undone days. There were arguments that nearly swayed me. I wouldn’t have any memories of the transgressions. But I said no, and that was that. I undid the day, trying to get to them, to talk to them, but she’d laid all the groundwork. It was like a trap that had been waiting there, hidden, and the only way to get her not to use it would be to convince her, which I failed at. I don’t even think she wants to be a dungeoneer. So the reason that I’m here, with this party, is because I didn’t want to bend for her. I didn’t want to be that kind of person, even if I wasn’t going to remember it.”

“And her turning up here is no coincidence,” said Hannah, nodding. “Seems a thorny situation we find ourselves in.” She was very careful to include that ‘we’. Alfric needed help, that was clear enough, and it was better to reinforce that they were a team. It would probably also do to say it out loud.

“No coincidence?” asked Mizuki, looking at Hannah. “Meaning that she followed Alfric here?”

“It seems likely,” said Alfric. He let out a groan and slumped against the couch. “All I want is to be left alone.”

“Like Verity does,” said Isra. She still had her arms folded and a cool expression on her face.

“Point taken,” said Alfric. “I’m hoping she’s more upset about keeping the secret than she is about the ability, because if it’s about the ability, there’s nothing much that I can do.” He sighed, then stood up. “Are there any other questions that I need to answer before I take a bath and then sleep the sleep of the dead?”

“Are we in danger here?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Alfric. “Absolutely not. Lola isn’t what I would consider a good person, but she’s not going to assault anyone, even in an undone day.” In Hannah’s opinion, his conviction was just slightly lacking. “And if anything happens to any of you, from Lola or anyone or anything else, I’ll undo it and protect you.”

“Well,” said Mizuki, who seemed somewhat warmed by that. She looked at the door to the room. “Is Verity just going to sleep in my room?” asked Mizuki. “Because that’s the one with the big bed, and I was going to share it with someone, but I don’t just want to go in and say that’s what we’re doing. I should have arranged it over the channel, sorry.”

“I’ll see if she wants me to sleep next to her,” said Isra. “We shared a room last night.”

Hannah felt like she was the only one that noticed that offer from the usually quiet Isra. It was good that they were finding friends in one another, and she wondered whether it was something more, though neither of them were giving any of the usual signals.

“So no other questions, especially about the chrononaut stuff?” asked Alfric. “We can talk about this more in the morning, and on the way back, but I’ve done too much today, and my body is aching.”

“You’ll tell us, if you ever reset the day?” asked Hannah.

Alfric hesitated. “I’ll tell you if I saw you that day. I do, from time to time, take a day off and go out to train on my own. I’ve done that, since we’ve known each other. I leave a note, when I do.”

“So if there’s a day when we see a note, we’ll know you’re going to undo the day?” asked Mizuki. “What do we do then?”

“Act normal,” said Alfric. “There’s no good protocol. Keep your head down, do your work, don’t take risks, don’t try to find me. We can talk about some of the ethical questions later, so I can have your opinions, if you still want to be in a party with me.”

“Why wouldn’t we?” asked Mizuki. “You can literally undo it if I get a scratch. Seems good.”

“People have complicated opinions,” said Alfric. “I’ve been dealing with those opinions for years. I won’t take for granted that you don’t feel awkward about it, or that you don’t hate me for it. It’s one of the reasons I was putting it off.”

“Go take your bath,” said Hannah. “You stink of dungeon. And we’re a team, ay? If she needs it, I’ll help you smooth things over with Verity, but I don’t think she’ll need it, she’s just tired.”

Alfric nodded, then trudged off to the bathroom.

“Wild,” said Mizuki once he was gone. “So we were never in danger this entire time?”

“Seems like,” said Hannah. “Puts him in a bit of a different light.”

“Does it?” asked Isra.

“The ‘nauts are tricky ones,” said Hannah. “They’ve a reputation for both taking risks and being conservative, but I’d guess they’re more than their power, and I confess I’ve never met one.”

“More than their power?” asked Isra.

“Most people are, more than their power, more than their profession,” said Hannah, nodding. “You’re more than a druid, Zuki is more than a sorc, and I’m more than a cleric of Garos, though I hew close to the mold.”

“Zuki?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t know what people say about druids,” said Isra.

“We should probably go over that,” said Mizuki. She rubbed the back of her head. “The other woods witch, Dom, is part of the whole reason that we’ve come to Liberfell. I’ve got no idea whether she comes from the same ‘mold’ as a typical druid, but you should at least know what to expect.”

“Distant, a bit haughty, comfortable in their own skin but not around others,” said Hannah. “Save that you eat meat, and bein’ from Tarbin, I think you’re close enough.”

“They don’t have druids in Tarbin?” asked Isra.

“They do,” said Mizuki. “Probably. At least, I haven’t heard otherwise. But coming from Tarbin means that you’ll be different from a normal woods witch anyway, right?”

“I suppose,” said Isra.

“Territorial,” said Hannah, snapping her fingers. “At least, so I’ve heard.”

“But they also congregate, right?” asked Mizuki.

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Hannah. “It’s more like … well, like a family reunion, ay?”

“Never had one,” said Mizuki, shaking her head.

“Aunts and uncles come from all over, and you see them like you were old friends,” said Hannah. “And then you go back to your respective corners of the world, not expecting to see them again for another year or two.”

“Oh, yeah, that does make sense,” said Mizuki. She turned to Isra. “Druids are definitely like that. And I’m seeing from your face that it’s not helpful to you.”

Isra shook her head. “I’ll talk to Dom. She might understand me better.”

“Can I see the incubator and the containment?” asked Hannah, moving across the room to where they had been stashed. When they’d gotten back to the room, Isra had been carrying them, and Mizuki had been much more interested in talking about the mysterious girl, which in fairness, was the more interesting thing to talk about. Then after that, there had been the whole business with Alfric being a chrononaut.

“I need to eat,” said Isra. “Are we all on our own tonight?”

“For food, I think so,” said Hannah. “We’ve made no plans, and Verity’s already wolfed something down.”

“Are you up for finding something with me?” asked Mizuki. “Liberfell has some great food.”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “Isra?”

But Isra only shook her head and slipped out the door.

Hannah looked down at the incubator. “Expensive, was it?”

“The old bastlekeeper seemed keen on her,” said Mizuki, nodding in the direction of the door. “After I talked to the crazy girl, Lola, I went into the back to see what was taking them so long, and Isra was just going through the animals, one by one, telling him what they each needed. ‘This one needs a small rock in its gullet’ or ‘this one needs more fresh air’ or ‘this one needs natural moonlight’. She was amazing. She was just tossing it all off, like it should have been obvious to him, and he was hurrying to keep notes and ask her questions. I’m not sure that she even saw what she was doing as labor, but by the end of it, she’d probably saved him hundreds of rings, and he gave us what we needed and insisted that we don’t pay him. It does make me wonder how much the other druid might have been charging, and whether Isra inadvertently undercut her. Probably something to talk about. Usually she’s got more of a head for business.”

The egg was in a heavy glass jar, sitting on a bed of linen fibers, and affixed in place with wires, which led down to a wooden base at the bottom of the jar. Also affixed with wires were two stones.

“Ventstone, to give it air,” said Mizuki. “And a warming element, to give it the ‘heat of a summer day’. You should have seen her going through what he had for stock, touching them. She had no idea what temperature she wanted in terms of degrees, but she could rest a finger on the element for like, two seconds and say that it wasn’t warm enough, or was too warm. She was smelling the ventstones.”

“Does that work?” asked Hannah. She didn’t know enough about ectads. “Do they … smell different?”

“I’ve got no idea,” said Mizuki. “If you’d asked me before today, I’d have said not, but,” she shrugged.

“We’ll have to get a voidstone to make it work with the book. And this,” said Hannah, moving over to the second acquisition, which was a stack of cages made out of a thick wire mesh which could apparently be folded. They were folded up, so they could pack flat. “Not somethin’ we could put into the book.”

“No,” said Mizuki, frowning. “But if you want it entirely sealed, that’s way more expensive.”

“Ay,” said Hannah, giving the folded up cages a dubious eye. “Not sure that we’ll be able to pull out much, using these.”

“Small things,” said Mizuki. “We could have taken some of those flying books out.”

“Ay,” said Hannah, sighing. “Well, Isra will be the expert on the bastles, I expect.” She stood up. “Now, to find something to eat?” She wondered whether Mizuki was going to want to talk more about the chrononaut business, but it seemed like the girl needed more time.

“I’m starving,” said Mizuki. “And I know a few good places around here.”

Maybe it would take her quite a bit of time.

Chapter 32 - A Tree From A Stone

Knowing that Lola was around in Liberfell put a bit of fear into Alfric.

Being the only chrononaut made things simple. It was only him, and it was always the first time the day had been done. With a second chrononaut, he was put in the position of everyone else, which he had never found himself enjoying. Was this the first time through? Was it going to be wiped away like chalk washed from a slate, living on only in the mind of someone else? Or was he going to be blindsided by something that had happened in an undone day? He trusted the people in his family to tell him if they had some kind of interaction with him, since they did that on a regular basis, but with Lola, there was the opposite of trust. She was almost solely responsible for everything bad that had happened to him. She was every bad thing they said about chrononauts.

They were still, in some technical sense, pacted. Alfric had gone to his parents and explained things, then gone to her parents and explained things, and this was taken to be a temporary spat between the two of them, as much as he’d said that he wanted nothing to do with her. He was never going to marry her, or have children with her. To have children, his children, be raised by her seemed unconscionable.

In quiet moments, when he was feeling the pain of her departure, he wished that she would somehow die. He didn’t wish violence on her, and of course had no intention of taking offensive action against her, but if she could just … not exist anymore. He felt guilty for these thoughts, but that didn’t stop them from coming.

Chrononauts interacted with each other on a system of priority, and Lola had come into her power first, by quite a few years, despite them being the same age. This meant that she got to live the day “first” in some technical sense, but it also meant that he could respond to whatever it was she ended up doing. Overall, he wasn’t certain which position he would prefer to be in, because there were advantages of either. That was the way it was though, and Alfric knew there was no choice but to live out the day and not think too much about what might be happening with the flow of time.

“The hotel lobby has pastries,” said Hannah. “That’s a good enough breakfast for me, if it suits the two of you.”

“I don’t think I’ll have breakfast,” said Alfric.

“Me neither,” said Verity. She had gotten up late, as predicted, but not as late as she normally did. “My stomach still isn’t quite used to it, even with almost a week of having Mizuki cook for me.”

“Well, I can eat as we walk then,” said Hannah. “We’ve things to sell today, and a trip to the local League office.”

“We need to get the wardrobe back to Pucklechurch,” said Alfric. A thought occurred to him. “Better to get it back sooner than later.”

“You’re still worried about it getting stolen, are you?” asked Hannah.

“I’m worried that Lola knows about it,” said Alfric. “And if she knows about it, then yes, there’s a possibility that she’ll steal it from us.”

“I don’t really understand why she hates you so much,” said Verity.

“I don’t either,” said Alfric. “We were pacted, and we were friends beyond that, but … I don’t know why she’s intent on interfering. If she is. I don’t know why she’s here.” Certainly if the previous day was viewed from the perspective of ‘everything that happened was what Lola wanted to have happened’ it didn’t seem all that bad. She had stirred the pot, but not to within the limits of her ability. She hadn’t planted rumors, and apparently hadn’t even told Mizuki that they were chrononauts.

“I mean no offense,” said Hannah. “But how do you know she was responsible for it all? Your other failures.” She said it very gently.

“I was wondering that myself,” said Verity. She was less gentle.

Alfric felt a sourness in his gut. “It’s a fair question,” said Alfric. “She admitted to taking the party, and doing it to manipulate me. I think she must have tried other methods before doing something so extreme, and it obviously took some planning on her part. Relationships between chrononauts are complicated though, because you end up knowing someone through undone days, and most of what passed between the two of us probably happened in days I never experienced.” He could feel himself hesitating when it came to the core question. “She did take the party though, and that was first for leverage, which failed, and then for spite. As for everything else, the rumors seem like they have her as the obvious source, unless people suddenly decided to make things up about me at the same time she left with the group. Actual sabotage … I don’t know. For too much of it, she was on the other side of Inter. Not that she couldn’t have used travel entads, and her family has good ones, but … I don’t know. It seems implausible, to do it and not get caught by anyone.” It was entirely possible that some of the failures were his own, beyond the problems that Lola had created.

“The rumors might have started because you had a group collapse on you,” said Hannah. “Just playin’ the imp, since I don’t know, of course. There were rumors about her, after that, weren’t there?”

“I suppose,” said Alfric. “Uglier than the normal rumors about her.”

“Four men and a woman,” said Hannah, clucking her tongue. “I can practically taste the rumors.”

“I’ve never really understood that,” said Verity. “They get that women and men can sleep with each other in any combination, don’t they?”

“Well, ay,” said Hannah. “And let me tell you, at the seminary, where symmetrical sexuality was more of a given, people would jump on any two women spendin’ time together as cause for gossip. Alfric, do you think she would?”

“Would what?” asked Alfric.

“Have a relationship with any of them,” said Hannah. “Just out of curiosity.”

“This is the ectad shop I was told about,” said Alfric. He was still lugging around the book, which had the stone in it, which in turn had the two tall trees they’d managed to get into it. He was going to be happy when he could go without carrying around fifty pounds of book. His legs needed a rest. “And no, I don’t think she would, but when she left, she made it clear that I didn’t know her as well as I had thought.”

The ectad shop was on the edge of town, as ectad places often were, since they needed somewhere to house their equipment. Wilch, over in Tarchwood, hadn’t had the full setup, but this place seemed to have it all. There were big vats for distilling down materials and grinders for reducing stone to dust, or furnaces for melting metals. Ectad materials came in a variety of different forms, which then had to be refined in various ways, all of which had to be done differently depending on what the end result would be, especially because they usually started ‘expressing’ partway through the process. A half-completed waterstone would start leaking water, which would create all kinds of problems if the ectad engineer wasn’t prepared for it.

“Wait,” said Alfric as a man walked over to them. “Wilch?”

“Nah,” he said. “Wilch is my brother.” He shook his head. “Not even twins, and we get mistaken for each other all the time.” He held out a hand to Alfric. “You must be the up-and-comer. I got a guild message about you. Name’s Besc.”

Alfric shook hands. Besc had the same build as Wilch did, barrel-chested and a bit of fat on what were probably powerful arms. They were both mostly bald, with wild hair and a thick beard, and a wide nose that marked them as having Chelxic ancestry. “Pleasure to meet you,” said Alfric. He looked around the yard. “We have two trees, but they might be a pain to get out, and any assistance you could give would be great.”

“And these trees,” said Besc, nodding. “They’d be the ones lodged up your butt?”

Verity burst out laughing, and Besc smiled at her, chuckling to himself. “Only a joke, only a joke,” he said. “Wilch told me about you, and I take the shots I see.”

“The trees are inside an extradimensional entad,” said Alfric, not quite sure how to deal with this sort of man. “You access it through a stone.”

“And how large are the trees, kworma?” asked Besc. It was a Chelxic word of affection, one of only a few that Alfric knew, and meant something like ‘friend’, though was used more casually.

Alfric held his arms out. “Three feet wide, about.”

Besc whistled. “A good haul then.”

“Hopefully,” said Alfric. It was quite a lot of wood, overshadowed by the bear but probably the most valuable thing in that dungeon. “They’re of the growth variety. You handle that here?”

Besc nodded. “Wilch probably told you we have a better setup here. This one is the family business, the one in Tarchwood was taken over by Wilch about ten years back. It’ll take time and effort, and growth is harder to process than the others, but I can handle it.”

“Getting it out of the stone is the first thing,” said Alfric. “It felt like a miracle that we were able to get them in, and I’ve been worried about whether or not we’d be able to extract them.”

He took his pack off and extracted the book, quickly flipping to the page that had the stone and then pulling it out. The stone itself was also heavy, but with the book, it wasn’t so bad. He set the stone down on the ground, thankful that it took a tiny mental push to activate, and looked at it for a moment. It was pale, with lots of vesicles. He touched it, and felt himself transported to the garden, though he knew that he was still present in the normal world. The two trees were exactly where he’d left them, immense and probably impossible to move without cutting them up, which was a problem, given that you had to stay touching the stone in order to stay ‘in’ the garden. The trees were huge, a valuable find that they wouldn’t have been capable of removing without the stone, and it had only just barely been done, with this further complication.

It was the kind of thing that had attracted Alfric to dungeoneering, the same as the uncomfortably large wardrobe. He couldn’t quite explain what the appeal was.

“You can touch it,” Alfric said to Besc. “See what we’re dealing with.”

Besc moved forward and tentatively touched the stone, then kept his grip there for a moment. He stayed right where he was, but it was clear that he was looking around at things that the rest of them couldn’t see. He moved his hand from the stone, then stopped to look down at it.

“Well,” he said. “Any secrets to this stone, or is this what we’re working with?”

“You can bring in organic things,” said Hannah. “And take organic things out. Entads work, if they’re completely organic, and ectads work too. Not glass, not metal, not stones unless they’re unworked. You’ve got to keep your hand on the stone though, or you’ll end up out of the garden.”

Besc whistled to himself. “Thorny,” he said. “Chengu. But with what’s there, I see profit in it for both of us.” He let out a sigh.

“We’ll try getting the trees out the easy way first,” said Alfric. He looked around the area. “We should be able to put a tree along this road, if I can get it out. If I can’t, then I think we move on to raising it up high enough. The way we got the trees in was by momentarily ‘catching’ them as they fell.”

“Seems dangerous, kworma,” said Besc, rubbing his hairy chin.

That wasn’t the half of it, since Alfric had been working with Mizuki, and she was using whatever was available in the aether, namely, immense amounts of tightly focused fire. He’d been lucky that she hadn’t killed him in the process.

Alfric picked up the stone and repositioned it so that if the first tree came out, it would be laying across the road, then went into the garden, made sure that it was lined up, and reached over to touch the tree. He tried to set his mind on it, to will it into his grip and bring it out.

This didn’t work, but Alfric hadn’t been optimistic enough to think it would.

“Alright,” he said. “The easy way didn’t work.” He turned to Besc. “Do you have floatstones I can use?”

Besc grimaced. “I do, but what happens to them when they’re in that space? Besides, it’s a delicate operation, using them, and usually I’d have chains, but I don’t think that would be possible.”

“Ropes then?” asked Alfric. “They’re made of hemp or flax, and should be fine to go through.”

“How much buoyancy would you need to lift one end of those?” asked Besc. “We’re probably talking in the hundreds of pounds, and that runs some real risks, especially with just rope to hold things down, and a hand on the stone at all times.”

“A foot should work too,” said Hannah. “That would leave two hands free.”

“Ah, well,” said Besc. “Still a lot of problems to be solved there.” He stepped forward and placed his hand on the stone again, then put out a hand toward where the tree was in that other space. “My guess is fourteen thousand pounds, all told. That’s a rasan of raw material, but it’ll take quite some time to process. I can do, say, a thousand pounds a week, if that. And with two? That’s half a year of work.”

“He’s already trying to talk down the price,” said Hannah. “I can respect that, ay.”

“I can’t pay for it all,” said Besc, shaking his head. “Not at anywhere near a proper rate. Just being upfront, kworma. I can do the processing and pay you once I have the money coming in, but nearly thirty thousand pounds? Not sure who would handle this kind of thing, if not me. Wilch doesn’t have the equipment for it. That means you’d be going, oh, up to two hundred miles away, maybe more.”

“Probably all the way to Plenarch,” said Alfric, sighing. “Which we’d almost certainly need a portal for, and that will be down to timing, along with what’s probably a long hike.”

“We’re not in a rush, are we?” asked Hannah.

“No, we’re not,” said Verity. “So long as we can come collect in six months time, it seems like it would be fine.”

“I suppose,” said Alfric. “But we can’t do anything until the trees are out.” If they could get the trees out in the first place.

“Just making sure that we’re on the same page,” said Besc. “It would be a shame to do all this and then come to a disagreement, and so long as you know the terms, once the labor is done. There’s the matter of terms,” he said. “The wood will take time to process, and the product — well, it would be better if I had a buyer for it before I started putting it into molds. Growthstone is good for a lot of things, but it’s best for dungeon plants. For something like this, not that a half-year job is usual, I’d take seventy percent.”

Alfric grimaced. It was on the high side. Knowing the people out here, there was probably nothing like auditing services, though it wasn’t clear how much money they’d get from the sale in the end, and whether the services of an auditor would be even remotely worth it. Besc did own all the equipment, and had the knowledge to run it, the assistants to help with labor, and would be doing most of the labor himself.

“Sixty-five, for a first-timer,” said Besc. He had, perhaps, mistaken Alfric’s waffling on the deal for an attempt at bartering. Alfric didn’t particularly like bartering or haggling, but it seemed painfully common in the region.

“Sixty,” said Hannah. “With this kind of volume, the work is easier, and you’re makin’ more off it, ay.”

“My equipment, my labor, and if you want to go elsewhere, you’ve got a few days of work ahead of you,” he said. “Sorry, but that’s how it is.”

“Fine by us,” said Hannah. “We didn’t have much else planned.” She moved to the stone and began to pick it up, as though she was actually going to put it back in the book, after all that.

Besc sighed. “Sixty then, you cheeky kids.” He held out a hand, and Alfric shook it. Besc chuckled. “Sorry for pressin’ it, but I had to try, eh kworma?” He looked to Hannah. “Would you really have gone to Plenarch?”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “Best not to bluff, because then someone might call you on it.” She gave him a wide smile.

“You be careful of these Cairbre women,” Besc said to Alfric. “They can be fierce.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Alfric.

Besc looked at his workshop. “Before we try the floatstones, we’ll lever it up. I don’t think I have the floats for that much weight anyhow.” He looked back at Alfric. “You’re a big strong dungeoneer, can you swing a hammer?”

“I can,” said Alfric, frowning. “But why?”

“To get a wedge under,” said Besc. “With a long length of wood, and a wooden hammer, we can try elevating it up, and from there we might be able to do a rope, and from there if we can do it in a secure way, the floatstones, though that’s its own problem, since the mountings I have for the ballast are metal. Might be worth it still to make wooden ones, but we’ll see.” He rubbed his face, looking down at the pocked stone. “I don’t know of anyone with a storage entad that could be used for the transfer. The best I know is two thousand pounds, my friend Geoff, but it’s half metal, so probably wouldn’t make it through. Might be a better way to go about it though. Or we could get a cleric involved …”

“I’m a cleric of Garos,” said Hannah.

“Well, not too much help there,” said Besc. “I was thinking Oeyr, to fracture it into pieces, though that would create some problems … can you move the stone?”

“Move it?” asked Alfric.

“Move it in the garden,” said Besc, looking down at the stone. “Pick it up and put it somewhere else.”

Alfric swore. “I never even thought of that. In my defense, we’ve only had it for a day, but — it’s worth a shot.”

He touched the stone, entered the garden, then used both hands to pick the stone up, which did, in fact, seem to work. It meant that he would be able to arduously maneuver around by hefting the stone, and better, possibly just strap it to his back, though the fact that he was still moving in the normal world, completely blind to what was around him, was a fairly significant drawback to the whole thing.

It took a few hours, and Alfric half expected Verity and Hannah to slip away, but they stayed through it, which he appreciated. A cleric of Kesbin was summoned, and once it was explained to her, it all went a little bit easier. Division into parts was a part of Kesbin’s domain, and with enough time and preparation, it was possible for the cleric to make precise cuts along centerlines. This naturally required some pay, which turned out to be somewhat significant, given that it wasn’t the sort of thing that a cleric could do without limit. With Hannah helping though, each ‘cut’ only needed to be halfway through before Hannah could make it symmetrical.

It was nearly noon when they got the first piece of tree out, but once that was done, the rest of it seemed to go faster, in part because the smaller sections of the two trees were easier to work with. Pieces came out, one by one, and once they did, Besc went at them with a huge axe, chopping them into more manageable sizes, which were then carried off by his assistants.

They gathered a little bit of an audience as time went on, mostly friends of Besc who wanted to see what was going on, but also a few people who seemed to have nothing better to do than to stop and chat. Partway through, perhaps because she’d been in conversation with some of the people who were watching, Verity started to sing, though she didn’t lace the song with any magic. She seemed happy enough to sing, and Alfric was pleased that she seemed to be in high spirits. Verity hadn’t liked her life at the conservatory, but she did like music, and seemed like the sort of person that would have pursued it even if there was no magic involved.

As a show of friendship, Besc bought lunch for everyone who’d had a hand in the effort, including Alfric’s party. Alfric had suspected that it would be Chelxican food, but was mildly surprised that it was instead from a Kiromon place. They were ginger-pork sandwiches, made with a milk bread and some kind of crunchy breading on the pork, and Alfric wondered whether this was something that Mizuki knew how to make.

“Not so many people from Chelxic here,” said Besc. “Liberfell has at least a thousand from Kiromo, though most of the old timers went back home, and the people left are the ones who were raised here. The change of Emperors was a big thing.”

“There are a lot of Chelxican people in Dondrian,” said Alfric. “I miss the food.”

“A true kworma,” laughed Besc. “Our father, gone to the Spirit Gates now, came out here because the city offered him good pay. I can’t say it’s wrong, but there’s a lot we miss. I’ve got three little boys who aren’t going to taste yucra or tuntre unless we make a long trip, and even then, it won’t be from Chelxic.” He wiped his mouth. “Do you ever think about going back to Tarbin?”

“My family has been in Interim for five hundred years,” said Alfric. He shrugged. “I don’t even really know what it’s like there. We’ve been Inter for more than a dozen generations, Inter for longer than most of the Interim has been Inter.”

“Ah, well, your roots don’t go away,” said Besc.

Alfric wasn’t so sure about that, but it was hard to know. His family was unique in more ways than one, and he didn’t really have much to compare them to. Perhaps Besc was right, and he would be able to find something in common with people from Tarbin, but he somewhat doubted it. Of course, Tarbin was a conglomerate nation, stuck together from many component peoples and provinces, and his own family traced their history back to North Tarbin, but he knew relatively little about it.

“Well, that took longer than expected,” said Hannah. “And no sign of little Lola.”

“No, thankfully,” said Alfric. His thoughts went to undoing the day, and the unhappy prospect of doing all that work over again, though if he had to, he thought that he’d probably be able to do everything a lot faster and without so much thinking the problem over. “We still need to visit the League office. I don’t really want to spend the night in Liberfell again, but it’s seeming more and more likely that at least one of us will have to stay behind to finish up with lingering business.”

“You have your dagger, don’t you?” asked Verity.

“I do,” said Alfric. “It’s back in Pucklechurch, at the temple, so I can return to it, but I’m not going to leave the four of you behind. I can take one person with me, maybe, but part of the reason we’re here is to see if there’s a solution for taking all four of you.” He’d tested it with Mizuki two days before, and the two of them had gone with her standing on his feet, but he hadn’t had the armor then, and it was close to the weight limit.

“Do you think Mizuki’s idea would work?” asked Verity.

“Which was that?” asked Alfric.

“Going into the garden naked, carried in,” said Verity.

“You wouldn’t need to do that, if it were possible,” said Hannah. “All you’d need is to take off your metals, I’d think. But like I said, we’d want to test with an animal first, just to make sure you can breathe the air there.”

“Tie it up with some twine,” said Alfric, nodding. “Since we wouldn’t be able to put a cage in there. Okay, we’ll add that to the agenda.”

“I thought you should know,” said Hannah. “That we — me and Mizuki — ran into a few of your old teammates over noodles. Grig and Mardin. We talked a bit. Mizuki blabbed, but less than she might have.”

“And they talked?” asked Alfric. He felt a weary resignation, more than direct apprehension.

“They seemed guilty about it,” said Hannah. “And had nice things to say about you, more or less. Seems like there’s some trouble within their party, much of which is down to Lola.” She shrugged. “I think Mizuki just wanted some assurance that we weren’t in bed with a viper, and so far as I could tell, she did feel assured.”

“Good,” said Alfric. “That’s what’s important.”

“They said,” said Hannah, “Well, that at least some of the split was over money, or at least equipment. I just wanted to let you know that for me, at least, that’s nothin’ I care too much about.”

“No?” asked Alfric. “Can I ask why not?”

“Your perspective, if I understand it, is that you need self-determination,” said Hannah. “You need to know that your life isn’t just down to the circumstances of your birth, that your success is from the sweat of your brow. I can respect that, and it’s a common enough sentiment, enough so that we’re taught about it at the seminary.”

“It’s partly that,” said Alfric, nodding. He looked over at Verity.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever felt the same,” said Verity. “I wanted my successes to be my own, I suffered under the pressure and from wondering whether I was being praised for my actual talent or — circumstances beyond my control.” She still hadn’t told the others that she was a Chosen of Xuphin, and Alfric hoped that she would, in her own time. “But I would never take pride in using worse tools.”

“That’s the other part,” said Alfric. “Going into a dungeon kitted out with world class entads, it would mean … well, being a tourist, basically. It wouldn’t be the same thing. I’ve tried to explain this before, and I don’t think that I’ve gotten any better at it, but to me, it would suck everything marvelous and wonderful about dungeoneering from the experience. And I know, I say that as someone who can,” he lowered his voice, “turn back time, and who comes from a very rich family, and was given every single advantage, but slicing through a dungeon with autonomous blades and foot-thick armor, incinerating anything that came within a hundred feet of us, then picking up entads that we’d have no use for, which would get sold off … I don’t know.”

“I understand the feeling,” said Hannah, nodding. “There’s no fun in winning a game that you’ve cheated at, at least in my experience.”

“I don’t want to say that going into the dungeons is a game,” said Alfric. “It’s not, I know it’s not.”

Hannah put a hand on his knee. “I’m not here to attack you. You’ve got your ideology, and while I don’t know that I quite agree, I don’t think it’s bad, and I hope you know that I’m not going to ask you to leverage,” she waved her hand, “Whatever advantages you have. And I doubt that Verity feels differently.”

“I left a lucrative career,” said Verity. “And a family of means.” She had been mostly silent. “Different reasons though.” She shrugged. “I don’t think you see it as a game. I think for you, it’s … something else. A pretty song you don’t want stripped of its melody.”

The metaphor didn’t track for Alfric, but there was a feeling to it that he could see the sense in.

“We’re here for you,” said Hannah. Her voice was soft and warm. “History won’t repeat itself, not with us. I can’t speak for the others, but for myself, you’re a good partner and a worthy leader.”

Alfric nodded, and hoped that it was true.

Besc came over as Alfric was finishing his sandwich. “Thanks for the help. We’ll stop in periodically to see how you’re progressing.”

“Don’t expect much for another week or two,” said Besc. “Should I hold one for you? Dungeoneers tend to like having a spare growthstone.”

“Unless you have a buyer,” said Alfric, shrugging. “We haven’t found any seeds or plants yet, so it’s not urgent.” With Isra, they could do some plant identification, and perhaps that would allow some level of comparative advantage. Most plants and animals pulled from the dungeons were worthless though, and it was a numbers game in terms of finding something that was good enough for propagation or cultivation.

<We’re finally done at the ectad seller,> said Hannah. <What are the two of you up to?>

<Done with breakfast, done with lunch,> said Mizuki. <Isra wanted to go for a hike around some of the local woods and parks, and I decided to go with her. We’re looking for rocks and plants.>

<I collect them,> said Isra.

<Seems good enough,> said Hannah. <We have more business, and we’re hoping to finish up by nightfall so we can take the dagger back to Pucklechurch. We were going to do your idea and hide away inside the garden.>

<Seems scary,> said Mizuki. <What if we get stuck?>

<We’ll do testin’ first,> said Hannah.

<Well, we’re continuing on with our hike,> said Mizuki. <Let me know when you’re ready to go and we’ll meet at the warp point.>

Alfric was glad to hear from them, and to know that they were okay. Business was continuing along as normal, and there had been no signs of Lola or the others, for which he was grateful. He still couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all going to go south.

Chapter 31 - Delicate Arrangements

When Isra woke, she found that she and Verity had moved together at some point in the night, close enough that their legs were pressed against each other, and one of Verity’s hands was touching the bottom of Isra’s rib cage. Extraction from this situation took a fair bit of time, mostly because Isra was trying her hardest not to wake Verity up, but some of that time was also spent with a tracker’s eyes, seeing how they had come to be touching. They had both moved toward the center of the bed, but it had been Isra’s leg which invaded Verity’s space, and Verity’s arm that had invaded Isra’s.

Isra had vague memories of sleeping next to her father as a little girl, snuggled together under the covers in the winter, but when she was old enough, her father made a bed for her, and they had bunks, away from each other but in the same room, so she could hear her father’s snoring. Her only other experience with sleeping next to someone was with a pack of wolves she’d kept in the house for a week during a particularly bad winter storm.

She had the urge to do that with Verity, to curl up next to her like they were two wolves with a storm howling outside. She wondered whether that was a normal thing to feel, but given that the rest of them had different rooms, she suspected that it was not.

She was the first to rise, and spent some time in the common room of their suite, reading from a book that Mizuki had left there the night before, originally borrowed from Hannah. It was a romance novel, of the sort that Isra had only read a few of before, focused on a naive young milliner and a much older wizard who lived in a local castle. There were ten books in Isra’s home, plus the six holy books, and Isra had read all of them from cover to cover many times. It had only been in the past year that she’d discovered there was a small library in Pucklechurch, and then after that, discovered that at a library you were allowed to take whatever books you wanted if you promised to bring them back in good condition. Isra came into town on market days and always stopped at the library to return what she’d read and get something new. There was something that felt both social and intimate about reading, even if she wasn’t sharing what she read with anyone else.

Hannah and Alfric were next to wake up, and they exited their rooms at virtually the same time. Alfric was dressed casually, without any of his armor, just a buttoned down white shirt that was slightly open at the neck, and a pair of well-tailored trousers that was secured with a leather belt. Hannah was wearing nearly the same outfit, though her clothes fit her far less well, and they were far different from each other in almost every other way. If they noticed the similarity of their outfits, it went uncommented on by either.

“So,” said Hannah. “I s’pose we’ll do breakfast?”

“Mizuki and I were supposed to go see friends of hers,” said Isra.

“How was Verity?” asked Alfric.

“Good,” nodded Isra.

Alfric shifted. “I’ll try to spend some time with her today, if she’s amenable. We have things we need to do, primarily selling some of what we got from the dungeon. It would give us a good opportunity to talk.”

“Or give her space,” said Isra.

“Perhaps give her space by not talkin’ about the things she doesn’t want talked about,” said Hannah. “But still be there with her, in case she wants to.”

“I suppose,” said Isra. She looked over at the doors and pursed her lips. “It will be some time until they wake up.”

“Schedules are off though,” said Hannah. “Verity went to bed earlier than she normally does.”

“We spent some time talking,” said Isra.

“Oh,” said Hannah, leaning over and looking at the book. “And how’re you findin’ that one?”

“It’s not to my tastes,” said Isra, frowning at the book.

“Ay?” asked Hannah.

“They’re … men,” said Isra. The young milliner and the older wizard both.

“Ay,” Hannah said again, this time not as a question, but rather, with a hint of aggression, like she was getting ready for a fight.

Isra shrugged. She didn’t know what she was supposed to be feeling, or why Hannah might be upset. “It doesn’t matter,” said Isra, setting the book down with no intention of ever picking it back up. She had nothing against romances, but there was something in how the book was written, in how it portrayed the characters, that she hadn’t liked. To try to put it in words would assuredly embarrass her in front of people who seemed to respect her prowess in hunting and fighting.

“Ay,” said Hannah, softening somewhat. She picked up the book and looked at the bookmark that Mizuki had placed in it. “I’ll have to speak with Mizuki when she wakes and see what she has to say about it. I suppose I only told her it was a romance, and it might not be to her tastes either.” Isra was confused by what that might mean, and let it pass.

It took Mizuki quite some time to rise, and Isra wondered what arrangements had been made with these sorcerers that meant they could be so relaxed about their schedule. Plants and animals had rhythms and patterns, responses to the natural conditions, but humans were different, responding to the bells and scheduling things around them. The bells, at least, depended upon the rising and setting of the sun, but there was still something off in people, who would wait for the right bell to open a store, even if they were already there and behind the counter. If you knocked on the door just a few minutes before the right bell, you were rude.

So Isra wondered, as Hannah and Alfric talked about dungeons, whether these sorcerers they were planning to meet were a different sort of people. It made sense for breakfast to be at a certain time, because breakfast involved a certain amount of labor, and unlike animals who could eat what they wanted, with humans, food was best eaten when it was hot. Isra wondered if that, cooking, was what separated humans from animals. Perhaps it led to all the other things.

Mizuki came out of her bedroom, still stretching, with a smile on her face. “These beds are great.”

“Good sleep?” asked Hannah.

“Absolutely great,” said Mizuki. She looked at Alfric. “How are you?”

“Fine,” he said. “Sore.”

“Next time only use one of your legs when hauling the wardrobe,” said Hannah. “That way I’ll be able to take out some of the soreness.”

Alfric laughed. “I’ll be sure, thanks for the tip.” He’d looked quite grim when he’d gone to bed, but seemed better with a long sleep. Isra wondered whether this was his first or second time doing the day.

“Ready for breakfast?” asked Mizuki, looking Isra up and down.

“I suppose,” said Isra. “You’ve heard from the guild?”

“From the twins, yes,” said Mizuki. “They’re ready to go, but I think we’ll have a bit to wait while the breakfast is being made. More of a brunch than a breakfast, I think, but it should be fun. And Dom will be there to answer your questions, and mine, which is good, right?”

“Good,” said Isra, though she could feel a tightness in her stomach. When she had said yes to Alfric’s proposition, she hadn’t thought that it would lead to anything beyond a momentary adventure. Now, she was on the verge of an understanding of herself and her place in the world. It had been unasked for.

After some brief goodbyes, with Verity still sleeping in, the two of them left.

Did Isra like Mizuki? It was a question she turned over in her head, as she often did with questions she asked herself.

Speaking with Alfric was nice. He was good at explaining things, and he seemed to feel a great deal of empathy and understanding for her. With Verity, there were comfortable silences, and what felt like an agreement that they could both be quiet. But speaking with Mizuki, while it had a buzzing constancy to it, demanded little of Isra, and in that respect, was pleasant. Waiting around while Mizuki spoke to others at great length was less nice.

Mizuki knew how to cook and was generous with that talent, as well as generous overall, offering her rooms and attempting to be a good host. That uninhibited warmth was a point in her favor.

But did Isra like Mizuki? Did she instinctively want to spend more time with her? It was hard to say. There was something nice about Mizuki, perhaps the way that she seemed to place no particular expectations on other people. She was an easygoing girl. But Mizuki knew the rules of the world, in a way that Isra did not, and it was clear to Isra that as much as Mizuki was free-spirited and rules-breaking, Isra’s own breaking of the rules was somewhat looked down upon.

The conversation shifted from topic to topic with only minimal input from Isra. Mizuki talked about chrononauts, and Alfric, and how rumors could be spun from the aether as surely as a wizard making magic, which wasn’t actually how wizards did it, and then she talked about someone named Bethany, who apparently had slighted Mizuki in the distant past, which was now forgiven, but not so forgiven that it wasn’t worthy of comment.

The house was a stately one in a neighborhood that seemed to be filled with stately houses, though the yard was somewhat small in comparison to what people had in Pucklechurch. It was wrapped with a brick wall that had become overgrown with vines, and the vines continued on over the wooden siding of the house too, though they were somewhat more managed there. The gardening was, to Isra’s eye, conspicuous, with plants that didn’t like each other terribly much crowded in together. No doubt someone thought that it looked nice, but it was distinctly lacking in beauty, and given that edible plants were packed in with poisonous ones, she doubted that it served any possible function.

“The flowers are nice,” said Mizuki, leaning down to sniff one.

“Yes,” said Isra, hoping to be blandly inoffensive. It took her mind a moment to catch up. The revelation that she was a druid, and saw the world in a way that was distinctly different from others, changed the texture of this exchange. Isra had assumed that this was some kind of social nicety of the sort she had trouble with, because that’s what those sorts of things usually were. But with her newfound knowledge, she could see that Mizuki simply saw the world in a different way, a dull and blind way, and to Mizuki, the statement was true, rather than a social lie. “No,” said Isra. “The flowers shouldn’t be there. They’re watered and coddled, clipped.” It might have been fine if it was like the battlefield of the forest, plants fighting each other for nutrients, water, and sunlight, but it wasn’t even that.

“Ah,” said Mizuki, straightening. “Well, I think they look nice.”

“They’re like a caged animal,” said Isra. “A cat with his claws cut off or a dog with its tail docked.”

“You, um, don’t like gardening?” asked Mizuki.

“Gardening for food respects the nature of the plant,” said Isra. “This sort of gardening is offensive. I think I understand it better now though.” It was a painting done by a blind man. Perhaps if you could only feel the paint, rather than see it, you might think it was nice.

Mizuki gave her a thoughtful nod, and Isra felt relief that she wasn’t pressed for more.

They were let in after a sharp knock on the door by someone wearing a strange outfit that Isra only belatedly realized was a uniform. She had read of uniforms in books, but never seen one in person, aside from what the clerics wore. Or, perhaps she had seen uniforms, and simply failed to recognize them as such.

They were led into a room where two women were already waiting at a table, though no food was yet in sight. The two women wore almost identical dark blue dresses whose exaggerated shapes, especially in the shoulders, helped to obscure their bodies underneath. Based on their hands and faces though, they were both skinny in a way that Isra had only rarely seen before. They were identical, down to the smallest wrinkles. They were in their fifties, or perhaps even older, possessed of a certain weariness and disaffection. They did not smile or stand to greet Mizuki, though they did exchange brief pleasantries.

“This is the woods witch I told you about,” said Mizuki as they sat down at the broad oak table. “Isra, this is Floren and Doreda Brangle, the local sorcerers in Liberfell. Floren, Doreda, this is Isra Jamin, from Pucklechurch.”

“We extended an invitation to Dom,” said the one on the left, Floren. “We’ll get this breakfast started without her, and hope she comes later.”

“She’s a solitary one,” added Doreda. She said this while looking at Isra, and the obvious question seemed to float in the air. Isra didn’t deign to answer it.

“Well, we appreciate it all the same,” said Mizuki. “I feel like it’s been years since I’ve been over here.”

“Too long,” nodded Floren. She raised her hand and snapped her fingers, and someone in a uniform came in through a side door, which swung open. The room they were in was fairly small, only big enough for the long table and some chairs, but it had large windows, and there were more plants next to the windows, giving it some sense of openness and life.

“You can request whatever you’d like,” said Doreda.

“Two fried eggs, gelatinous center,” said Mizuki without missing a beat. “Three slices of bacon, some fruit, I don’t care what, and some kind of pastry. And a glass of whatever juice you have.”

The woman nodded, then looked at Isra.

“Two chicken eggs, boiled,” said Isra. “Oatmeal with honey and jam.” She had seen someone eat that, and read about it in a book, but never actually had it. “Three slices of bacon. And … fruit.”

“Will you have the eggs hard or soft?” asked the uniformed woman in a pleasant voice.

“Soft,” said Isra, guessing from context.

“The usual for me,” said Floren.

“And me,” said Doreda.

There was some silence until the woman left, which Isra thought was curious. If the woman could hear the snapping, surely she could hear everything they were saying.

“Now then,” said Floren. “How was your second dungeon?”

The question seemed abrupt to Isra, before she remembered that these three were all in a guild together, and Mizuki likely hadn’t just talked to them about the druid business, she had probably included quite a bit more. Knowing Mizuki, perhaps lots more.

“Good!” said Mizuki. “Actually, quite good. We didn’t get as much of a haul from the second one, but we made out well, I think, and we have some eggs incubating, which I have a good feeling about. Though I do have a professional question.”

“So early?” asked Floren. “Very well.”

“There was a giant bear-thing,” said Mizuki, frowning as she tried to remember. “It was the size of a house. And our bard was putting all of her effort into a song specifically for me, some kind of blended amping up of my power. It was like I was electrified, in a good way, able to feel the aether like it was an extension of my skin. I drew on everything I could, and focused it into a powerful spell that still somehow managed not to kill the bear. The thing was, I … hurt our bard somehow. I didn’t just break the song, which would have been bad enough, I … took something from her?”

“Ah,” said Floren. “Comes from youth, and indolence as far as your studies go, and not having been in enough parties. Your bard will be fine, but likely laid out for a week or so.”

“No,” said Mizuki, frowning. “She was up and singing within an hour or two.”

“Then she comes from good stock,” said Floren, raising an eyebrow. “Most can’t handle it so well.”

“Right, but what happened?” asked Mizuki.

“You pulled from her,” said Doreda. “There are mechanisms within a bard’s mind that affect the aether. They share some similarity to the constructs a wizard can build, though they’re much more tied to the individual, and personal to them.”

Mizuki frowned. “So I didn’t just break the spell she was casting to power me up, I broke … her?”

“A piece of her, yes,” said Doreda. “It’s not advisable except in case of emergency, and as my sister said, it typically makes a bard useless until they recover. There’s also a chance that there won’t be a recovery. Sometimes a wound heals back wrong, not the same as it was before. It has to do with the party, which makes people exceptionally vulnerable to each other when it comes to magic.”

“It does?” asked Isra. This had not been mentioned to her when they’d asked her to join the party.

“Oh yes,” replied Floren. “There is a marking to magic, a way in which our magic is ours and not others.”

“There is some defense against magic which is not your own,” said Doreda, “Though it’s trivial to circumvent, in most cases. Your party members have no such protections against your magic, though they do gain some of the innate protections that you have against your own magic.”

“Meaning,” said Mizuki. “That I’d have a harder time killing Isra?”

“It would be difficult in the same ways that killing yourself with magic would be difficult,” said Floren. “By no means impossible.”

“So you’re saying that I touched some part of what it means to be a bard,” said Mizuki. “I … broke it open.”

“Something that she’d likely been cultivating for a few years,” nodded Floren.

“For nearly her whole life,” said Isra.

“Well, all the more impressive that she was able to bounce back,” said Floren. “Or it could be that the collapse was only partial, that you managed to stop what you were doing, or any number of other things.”

“Thinking about the damage, I find it unlikely I only took a part of it,” said Mizuki. She tapped her fingers on the table. “So all I need to do is never do that again, huh?”

“Unless it’s an emergency,” said Floren. “A matter of life and death that’s worth risking your bard.”

“We’re probably not going to run into that,” said Mizuki. She did a poor job of suppressing a smile. “Our party leader is a chrononaut.”

“I’m not sure he wants that to be public,” said Isra. He had not, after all, informed them of it until forced to.

“Yeah, I guess,” said Mizuki. She momentarily looked worried, but it passed quickly. “Well, it’s a real boon for us, and I’m still kind of trying to figure out what it means, but if we go into the dungeons, he can just undo everything if it goes wrong.”

“Unless he’s knocked unconscious,” said Floren.

“Or there’s a problem he doesn’t know about until it’s too late,” said Doreda.

“Well, okay,” said Mizuki. “But it’s nice to have, right?”

“Perhaps,” said Floren. “Opinions on chrononauts and their role in both society and our personal lives vary.”

“We’ve never met one,” said Doreda.

“Well, I’m excited,” said Mizuki, folding her arms.

The food was brought out, and the conversation quieted down as they ate. There was something to the presentation of the food that Isra couldn’t quite put her finger on, a way in which the things she requested had been laid out on the plate, which was unlike other meals she’d had before. The thinness of the plates and bowls that everything was served on seemed to be a part of it, though Isra couldn’t fathom why it was necessary for them to be that way, especially when they seemed so thin. Soft-boiled eggs, as it turned out, were eggs that had been boiled for less time, and Isra was pleased with herself for having figured that out without incident.

It was all delicious, and the oatmeal, while it had a strange texture, she enjoyed it more than almost everything else. It was sweet in a way that her own cooking rarely was.

The clinking of utensils on plates and bowls was interrupted when a tall woman dressed in several bulky layers came in and took a quick seat.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said as she settled in. Her eyes moved to Isra. “You’re the baby druid?”

“I guess so,” said Isra.

“Odd, for someone not to know,” said the woman, who was no doubt Dom. There was something masculine in her features, and a depth to her voice. Isra found it somewhat alluring. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen,” said Isra. “I think my father knew. He must have.” That was something that had been on her mind. “I didn’t, until recently.”

“But you haven’t asked him about it?” asked Dom. She turned to the serving woman who had come in and said, “Three eggs, boiled soft, and a bowl of oats like the girl has.”

“I didn’t ask because he’s dead,” said Isra. “It happened five years ago.”

“Ah,” said Dom. “A shame, but I’m glad I didn’t stick my foot in it with a pain that’s fresh. Your mother?”

Isra hesitated. “She died in childbirth.”

Dom froze for a moment. “Hmm,” she said, her eyes burning a hole into Isra. “Do you know enough to understand why I would be suspicious of that?”

“Yes,” said Isra. “I was told a druid only comes from a child who has the company of her mother.”

Dom nodded. “And if your mother died in childbirth, you were then raised by …” she trailed off, allowing Isra to fill in the gap.

“My father,” said Isra.

“And what did you do for milk?” asked Dom.

Isra frowned. “I don’t know.”

“If you’re a druid, you can’t have a wet nurse, not unless it’s an animal wet nurse, and —” Dom paused, looking down at Isra’s plate. “Is that bacon on your plate?”

“Yes,” said Isra.

“You understand a pig is a sort of animal?” asked Dom.

“I do,” said Isra. She tried not to be insulted by the question, and failed.

“Odd, to meet a druid who hasn’t come to the same conclusions about the consumption of meat,” said Dom. “Not the oddest thing about you though.”

Isra frowned. “Sorry.”

“Well, don’t be sorry, it’s your own choice, but you’ve spoken with animals, haven’t you?” Dom frowned. She was moving fast, with a sort of impatience that Isra was unaccustomed to. “Have you?”

“I have,” said Isra. “They seem not to have the same minds that we do.”

“Well, no, I’ll grant that,” said Dom. “There’s nothing complex in the thinking of a pig, but there is quite a lot that’s simple. You almost wouldn’t call it talking, but it feels like talking, and of course when you have an animal with you, it takes on something of you.”

“It does?” asked Isra, not quite following.

“Certainly,” said Dom. “Haven’t you noticed that they have moods to match your own?”

Isra thought about that. “No,” she finally said. “I haven’t noticed. I’ll watch for it next time.”

“Druids are rare,” said Dom. “And we’re a poorly understood breed, even more than sorcs, where we find some common cause.”

“It’s impossible to make a sorcerer though,” said Floren. “That’s one of the primary places we differ.”

“As well as having completely different powers,” said Doreda, nodding.

“All the same, misunderstood,” said Dom, waving a hand. “Tell me, what do you do, aside from having lived in the woods alone for what seems to have been most of your life?”

“I … hunt,” said Isra.

“Oh?” asked Dom, with deliberate calm. “What do you hunt?”

“Deer,” said Isra. “Foxes. Rabbits. The least agreeable of animals.”

“So you discriminate?” asked Dom. “You pick and choose which ones aren’t worthy of life?”

Isra stayed silent for a moment, trying to collect her thoughts, which were swirling. It wasn’t that she thought that a deer wasn’t worthy of life, it was that certain creatures seemed to lack the nobility of others, and if there was a twinge of regret when she loosed her arrow, it was lesser with something like a deer. She didn’t seem to think that she was unique in that regard, not when people kept certain animals as pets and ate others. The decision of what to eat and what to keep seemed, to her, somewhat arbitrary, but she had made her own arbitrary rules on the basis of how she felt about those animals, and it worked for her, in the sense that she’d made peace with killing certain animals and not others.

“I don’t want to talk about this,” said Isra. She turned to the twins. “Thank you for the food.”

“Settle down,” said Dom as Isra started to rise. “You’re right, it’s an inappropriate thing for us to talk about. You didn’t come here for that. Stay, and I can talk about the things that you did come here for.”

Isra settled back in her seat. “I’ve heard stories about us.”

“People think we can do many things, and we can,” said Dom. “But the things they think we can do aren’t always possible. I offer that by way of caution.”

“We can talk to plants,” said Isra. This was not something she’d ever really tried until a few days ago, and seemed to take both skill and patience.

“Talk is perhaps not the right word,” said Dom, nodding. “But it’s close enough. Things take on a bit of you, when you interact with them. They get some of you when you get some of them. Trees … they need more of you, and have less of themselves to give. Other plants have even less. The way I think of it, and druids aren’t all the same in this way, everything that I touch becomes a bit of me, at least for a time. Once you realize that, you can exercise it, more than you’ve been doing naturally.”

Isra frowned at that, thinking. “They have their own personalities,” she said.

“With animals?” asked Dom. Isra nodded. “Well, they do have rudimentary minds, of a sort. But it’s also because of how you view them. That matters. One of the things you’ll learn, if you haven’t learned it on your own, is to view the world in different ways and draw out aspects of what you see.”

Isra frowned. “How do I do that?”

Dom laughed. “Well I have no idea how you view the world, do I?” she asked. “So how can I tell you how to view it in a different way? It’s like trying to give you directions to a place without knowing where you’re starting from. And I have to say, you seem like you’re in need, but having a baby druid as an apprentice isn’t what I’ve agreed to here.”

“That’s fine,” said Isra. “I only need to know.” It felt like there was more to that thought, but it was complete on its own, and Isra left it there. ‘I only need to know everything’.

“Your powers, such as they are, extend to everything in the natural world except people,” said Dom. “That includes rocks, by the way, though if you thought trees were slow, you’ve seen nothing of the thick-headedness of a rock.”

“Uh,” said Mizuki. “Rocks can’t think though?”

“And trees can’t move,” nodded Dom. “They don’t have muscles. Once you realize that being a druid means having a part of yourself in the world, and the world inside of you, it gets to be a lot easier.”

“But not other people,” said Isra.

“Other people, no,” said Dom. “Not worked materials either, metal being the worst of them, with glass a close second. It would be handy to know a person in the way you can know an animal, but no.”

Isra pursed her lips. That would have been beyond ‘handy’, just to know people like she knew the flowers and the pines, or the martens and the voles. And if druidism worked in the way that Dom said it did, then having a bit of Isra in the people around her, and a bit of them in her, would have cured all her woes as far as people went. She would understand them, and they would understand her.

Dom got her food, and ate it quickly, the eggs going into her mouth whole, and the flavored oatmeal following it down after that. Isra stayed silent, finishing her own food, even the bacon, which was apparently taboo for a druid. Mizuki made small talk with the twins, mostly involving what she’d done in the dungeons, as well as some technical details with regard to the magic that Verity and Hannah were able to provide. Mizuki, at least, seemed to be enjoying it.

“Well,” said Dom once she’d finished. “I have some outstanding questions about your father and how you could possibly be a druid, but I can read the room well enough to know that can wait for later. What’s left, I think, is to ask whether or not you’re in a guild, and whether you’d want to join ours.”

“I’m not in a guild,” said Isra. “I never have been.”

“I can give you an invitation, and it will be voted on tomorrow morning, though you’re sure to be in,” said Dom. “It’s a guild of druids, most of those in the Greater Plenarch, about a hundred all told. They’ll have questions of their own, I’m sure, but you don’t need to give them much in the way of answers. There’s some matters of etiquette that I’m sure your party members will fill you in on. And with that, there are things I need to attend to.”

“Wait,” said Mizuki. “I had a question about dungeons.”

“Dungeons?” asked Dom. “Meaning?”

“Why can’t she do the animal control thing in a dungeon?” asked Mizuki.

Dom looked between Mizuki and Isra. “You’re a dungeoneering party?”

“Er, yes,” said Mizuki.

“Oh,” said Dom, sitting back in her seat. “Not very usual, for a druid.”

“You don’t call yourself a woods witch?” asked Mizuki.

“What?” asked Dom. “No.”

“There’s a madness to the creatures in the dungeons,” said Isra. “A madness that their children don’t share.”

“Yes,” said Dom. “Only toward people, and not typically each other.” She shrugged. “A mistake of Editors long, long past, and apparently impossible to rectify. Probably, anyway, they’re tight-lipped. You be careful, going into the dungeons, that you don’t let it infect you.”

“Infect me?” asked Isra.

“The world takes on a part of you, and you take on a part of the world,” said Dom. “That applies just the same to the dungeons. The better you are at extending your being into the world, the better the world will be at extending itself into you. It’s something you’ll want to be careful with. Close yourself off to the world when you go into a dungeon. Practice closing yourself off to the world, so that you can’t hear the birds or the clouds.”

“It’s dangerous,” said Isra. “In dungeons. For me more than others.”

“A bit,” said Dom. “Worth it for your team though. You’ll know what’s good to eat and what’s not, what can be taken, hides that can be skinned, plants might bear fruit. You’ll know stones that can be grabbed and processed for ectads.” She shrugged. “We’re in demand. Join the guild. We can do it now.”

Dom had a well-worn piece of paper with the instructions written on it, and they went through the motions together, and the invitation was extended and confirmed. It wouldn’t be until tomorrow morning that the vote went out, and the day after that when Isra got her first message. She was nervous about it.

“We’ll help you as best we can. You’re unusual, as far as druids go, but you’re still a druid, and we have certain ways of looking at the world.” Dom stood up once again. “It was good to meet you, baby druid, even if you’re not so much a baby as we usually get.”

“It was good to meet you too,” said Isra, though she was feeling like a stone had been dropped into her stomach.

When she’d been told that she was a druid, it had felt as if everything was going to slot into place, as if this would explain everything. It had, in a way, but only in one way, and now, looking at Dom, seeing a fairly normal person, and being told that she was unusual by the standards of druids, and wasn’t expected to fit in with them … well, the stone-in-the-stomach feeling wasn’t going away. If anything, it was getting worse.

Chapter 34 - Woods Witch

“You’ve been keeping track of where we’re going, right?” asked Mizuki. It was becoming clear that if she was going to continue along with this profession, she was going to need better shoes. There was simply too much hiking involved.

“No, I haven’t,” said Isra, not glancing back. “Why would I?”

“Uh, so we don’t get lost?” asked Mizuki. It felt like they were deep into the woods, though the area they were in was technically a park, one with marked trails.

“I think that ‘lost’ is something other people get,” said Isra. She had a soft and quiet nature that quite appealed to Mizuki, along with a confidence that was reassuring.

“Well, so long as you’re by my side,” said Mizuki. “We’ll probably want to get going back fairly soon, I need to go see that boy about a date.”

“Mmm,” said Isra.

“I don’t suppose,” said Mizuki. “That you’ve dated?”

“No,” said Isra.

“They do it differently in Tarbin?” asked Mizuki.

“They do,” said Isra. “There are matchmakers.”

“Down in Cairbre they basically do a series of ‘engagements’,” said Mizuki. “Or one engagement, if you’re lucky. It’s much less of a big deal to break an engagement off. I was actually with a guy who wanted to do it that way, but I laughed it off, since it seemed so ridiculous. We ended up doing some normal dates, and it didn’t work out, which seemed like basically the same thing as a failed engagement, I guess, if you squint.”

“Matchmakers seem like they make more sense,” said Isra.

“They do, I guess,” shrugged Mizuki. “But I grew up in Pucklechurch, where there wouldn’t have been much of a point to it. There were seventeen kids in my year, and I knew them all through comp.”

“Comp?” asked Isra.

Mizuki looked at her, or rather, the back of her head. “Compulsory schooling?” she asked.

“Ah,” said Isra. “I knew about that. I hadn’t heard it called that.”

“And your father … opted you out?” asked Mizuki. You could do that, technically. Mizuki had begged her mom for it for a brief few days when she’d had a big fight with another girl at school, and been denied.

“I guess,” said Isra. “We didn’t talk about it.”

“Anyway,” said Mizuki. “In Kiromo, relationships are religious, and it’s kind of like having a matchmaker, but the matchmakers are clerics. And I still wonder how it’s done in small towns like Pucklechurch, where you know every single possible partner by the time you reach puberty. And most people are paired off early, so.” It had almost happened for Mizuki, but then she’d had a falling out with her possible-husband, and after that, it had mostly been a series of brief courtships that never went anywhere, even the ones that had briefly seemed intense and promising. At twenty-two, it was getting harder and harder to find someone her own age who was unpartnered, and she had this sinking feeling that she was going to eventually settle with someone older, a widower, perhaps. So she knew how it was done in Pucklechurch, yes, but she didn’t know how it was done for her, specifically.

“You think that Rolaj might suit you,” said Isra.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Well, I don’t know, he seemed nice. I’m a big believer in giving people a chance. He is young, but I’ve spent the last few years just doing basically odd jobs with no real stability, so maybe that balances out a bit.”

“Odd jobs?” asked Isra.

“You know, if someone needs some sorcerous might,” said Mizuki. She sighed. “Not that it comes up often, but I can clear a tree from a road faster than just about anyone. Of course, some of my time is spent tracking down magic and trying to make something useful out of it, but there are precious few things that allow me to make real money. The will-o-wisps were always the best for it, but kind of a pain.”

“How do you make money with a will-o-wisp?” asked Isra.

“Oh, they have a rare all-destroying thing,” said Mizuki. “Normally, it’s like … there’s some kind of magic that eats up wood, and that allows me to do creation of wood, kind of? But for the will-o-wisp, for whatever reason, it’s anything you want. I pick gold every time, since it doesn’t matter if it’s misshapen and it’s easy to test and sell. So yeah, before this dungeon thing, I was going out during the time for will-o-wisps, just a bit after dinner, trying to get close enough to them that I could use some of what they did to the aether.” She shrugged. “Not hard work.”

“People don’t farm them,” said Isra, almost like a question.

“People have tried, but you can’t,” said Mizuki. “They’re easy to kill, too, so every time someone tries to capture one, they end up with a dead will-o-wisp. Or at least, that’s what I’ve heard from the other sorcs. They’re a much-loved creature by sorcs everywhere, but they’re also one of the reasons that we tend to stay away from each other. Them, or things like them. It’s kind of a lonely profession, in that way.”

“They’re not a creature,” said Isra. “They’re something else.”

“The will-o-wisps?” asked Mizuki. “Sure, I didn’t mean to say they were one particular kind of thing, I was just kind of talking freely. You know, I sometimes consider myself an adherent of Qymmos, but other times I just wonder what the point of it is. Categories and things. I dunno.” They passed a leafy plant, and Isra stopped to caress it before moving on. It seemed like Isra feeling free to do weird things in front of Mizuki was a good sign.

“I don’t like Qymmos,” said Isra.

“Yeah?” asked Mizuki. That didn’t seem like all that much of a surprise. Qymmos, God of Sets, was one of those gods that people tended to feel strongly about. By contrast, Oeyr was one that people took a fair amount of time to actually grasp, and that shielded her from both love and scorn.

“The thoughts laid out in the Qymr Mos are muddled in a way that the others are not,” said Isra. “Qymmos feels like a god out of step. The infinity of Xuphin or the symmetry of Garos exist in our world, in part, and they want us to see the beauty of those things.” She shook her head. “That’s not true for Qymmos.”

This … wasn’t the sort of answer that Mizuki had expected. Religion was a bit of a weak point for her, and she didn’t know how to respond. “Huh,” she said, for lack of anything better.

“I haven’t spoken with the clerics much,” said Isra. “I have only gone to worship a few times.”

“Oh, I almost never go,” said Mizuki. “I did, when I was little, with my family.” And on holy days, and when it was an Oeyr sermon, and a few other times, like if someone suggested she should. Temple days were social events. The more Mizuki thought about it, the more she thought that ‘almost never go’ was maybe a lie. “So most of what you know comes from, what, your father?”

“I’ve read the holy books,” said Isra. She hesitated for a moment as they walked, perhaps waiting for Mizuki to add something. “Is that unusual?”

“Not really,” said Mizuki. “You’re supposed to. But there’s also a kind of, um, guidedness to it? Like, in the month we were reading the Qymr Mos, we had a cleric come into class for an hour or two to explain things, and a lot of us didn’t end up reading the actual book.”

“A month for a thin book?” asked Isra.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “No, sorry, I forgot you didn’t go through it. Usually the teacher breaks things up into sections, so the ‘month’ was really more like one or two hours a day.”

“And you did this with the other children your age,” said Isra.

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “Everyone born between the start and end of the year, which usually ends up being around twenty kids, but sometimes there are big years.” She tapped her lips for a moment. “I don’t know how it’s done in Tarbin, or in Dondrian, or even in Kiromo, but in Greater Plenarch a teacher sticks with their students from basically the year they’re born until we’re out of comp.”

“Like another parent,” said Isra.

“Kind of,” said Mizuki. She shrugged. “We had a good one, Miss Liko. She left right around the same time my parents did. I kind of miss her.”

“It sounds nice,” said Isra.

“It was,” said Mizuki. “I mean, I’d never want to go back to school of any kind, but I enjoyed comp. So you were just out in the woods that whole time?”

“I was,” said Isra. “Hiding.”

“I might talk to the hexmaster about it, if that’s okay,” said Mizuki. “You’re eighteen, so there’s nothing to worry about, no risk that, I don’t know, anyone would try to adopt you. But I do want to find out how much they knew about you, and how you, um, slipped through the cracks, no offence.”

“I hid,” Isra repeated, shrugging. “I could usually tell they were coming from a mile off.”

“Yeah, but they could still have put in more effort,” said Mizuki. A young girl living all alone wasn’t the sort of thing that was supposed to happen, druid or not. “When I think of you being out there, all on your own, or I guess with animals, it makes my heart break.”

“You’re very sentimental,” said Isra, after a moment had passed.

“Well, we’re a party now,” said Mizuki. “We look out for each other. Your pain is my pain.”

Isra didn’t seem to quite take that in the spirit it was intended, and Mizuki shut up for a bit, taking in the woods. It seemed a bit odd to be going on a walk after they’d done a pretty grueling six miles the day before, but Mizuki liked being out in nature, and she had her walking stick, which helped with balance. Every now and again, she would use it in a fancy way, vaulting herself over a rut or branch with ease.

The woods were nice and pleasant, and while Mizuki knew the names of very few trees, she spotted what she thought were twin oaks, growing in pairs, and a number of birches, clearly identifiable from their papery skin, which she’d loved when she was younger. In certain places, the undergrowth seemed to vanish save for small grasses, as the canopy blocked out light, and they were treated to moss-covered logs and stones. It gave the same sort of feeling that walking into the large temple in Pucklechurch sometimes did, both in the silence and the grand, open space. She was glad that she’d asked to come along.

“Do druids date?” asked Isra. Mizuki was mildly surprised, because Isra didn’t seem to enjoy starting conversations.

“I’ve got no idea,” said Mizuki. “I don’t see why they wouldn’t. But you’ll be able to ask your guild in another day or so. And even if they say they don’t, which I don’t know why they would,” Mizuki shrugged. “Being a druid,” sadly, she let the idea of using ‘woods witch’ die, “is kind of like being a sorc, I think, where people have all these ideas about what you’re like and what you do, and none of it changes that you’re just a person with your own stuff going on. You don’t need to be the way that other people think you should be.”

“That’s a lesson found in books,” said Isra. “No one seems to believe it though.”

“Well,” said Mizuki. “Yeah, you can run into problems if you’re too different, or different in the wrong ways, I guess. And people will make their own judgments about you, which is probably fine if you’re a fairy princess, but not so much if you’re depending on the kindness of strangers, or having a job, or getting customers, or whatever.” Mizuki tapped her lips. “But I don’t think any of that applies to dating, if you’re a druid, because it’s not like the other druids are offering you anything, and if they have a problem with you finding a boyfriend, I’ll be first in line to help you drown them.”

Isra faltered. “Drown them?”

“Um,” said Mizuki. “It’s a Kiromon saying. I think there’s something like it in Inter. It’s just an expression.” She wracked her brain trying to think about where it came from. Something from the Abohan Dynasty? A buried memory slowly resurfaced. “Drowning kingdom officials was, um, a traditional punishment.”

“Why did the kingdom do that?” asked Isra. There was a bit of alarm in her voice.

“Well, the kingdom didn’t do that,” said Mizuki. “It was the village folk. The kingdom had officials who lived in every village as part of taxes and other stuff, administration, I guess, and they were mostly jerks, I think, but sometimes one of them would cross a line, and the villagers would get together to drown them in a local pond. They did it with drowning because then people could say that it was an accident, and the kingdom kind of looked the other way, because if you were enough of a jerk to be held down by a dozen villagers, you probably deserved it. Grim, I know, but those are the kinds of stories my grandfather was full of.”

“You would help drown someone for me,” said Isra.

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “I guess. Depends on what he had done. I don’t know you well enough to know what your standards for drowning someone are.”

“When I was thirteen years old my father died,” said Isra. “I was left all alone. One of my father’s friends, a man named Angun, came to our house bringing food and condolences. He tried to poison my drink, something to make me sleep, but I could tell that something had gone wrong when my back was turned. When I refused to drink, he subdued me and stole everything of value from the house.”

“Wow,” said Mizuki. Again, she felt a tightness in her chest, like her heart was being squeezed. Isra already seemed like someone who perhaps didn’t need to be defended, but who Mizuki would gladly defend anyhow. Imagining little doe-eyed innocent Isra being assaulted and taken advantage of like that, well, Mizuki felt a great deal of pain and anger, and she took a moment to wipe away a tear that had been forming.

They walked in silence for a bit, and though Mizuki had thoroughly lost her bearings, she felt like they were going back the way they’d come. It felt good to walk, especially if they were going to be able to take a shortcut back to Pucklechurch when the end of the day rolled around.

“I guess finding him will be the first step,” said Mizuki. “And then getting away with it will be the hard part. I don’t know what kind of entads the Greater Plenarch province has for doing detective work, but we’d want to figure that out. If we made it look like an accident, they wouldn’t do a full investigation, but we’d really want to know what we were going up against.”

“I don’t think that’s what I want,” said Isra. She was hesitant. “When you talked about drowning someone, my mind went to him. I want what was stolen returned to me. I want justice.”

“Oh, good, I was getting worried, I have no idea how to kill a person,” said Mizuki. She shook her head. “I mean, I know how to kill a person, in theory. Magic is supposed to be pretty good at it. But I’d have been way out of my depth.” She took in a breath, and was feeling better about it. If Isra had immediately started talking about logistics, well, Mizuki would probably have gone along with it, but it might have ended up as one of those things she went along with because it seemed like a good idea, then turned out to be a very bad idea. Still, screw that guy. “Did you ever report the crime?”

“I was thirteen,” said Isra. “They would have taken me from my home.”

“Probably,” said Mizuki. “I can’t imagine what I would have done in your situation. I was just asking because now that you’re old enough, they can’t do that, so you could report the crime and maybe get a bit of help from the province, depending on what was taken.”

“It was five years ago,” said Isra. “He could be halfway across the world. Or not even in Inter.”

“Sure,” shrugged Mizuki. “But going to the authorities couldn’t hurt. There are some fabulous tracking entads out there, if there was something in particular you wanted to get back. And if it’s justice you want,” she shrugged. “Sorry if this isn’t anything you wanted to hear, it’s just what I’d do, in your shoes.” Mizuki wanted justice too.

“There were entads,” said Isra. “Five of them. There were also a number of rings stolen.”

“Good entads?” asked Mizuki.

“Some,” shrugged Isra. “A feeding spoon. A bottled garden. A dagger that went through the air like a whisper.”

Mizuki felt questions coming, and swallowed all but one of them. “A bottled garden?” she asked.

“It was small,” said Isra. She stopped her hiking and turned back to Mizuki and showed with her hands, something no larger than a cabbage. “A seed dropped into it would shrink down and grow quickly, usually within a day. A miniature. We had a small tin of seeds that we’d saved. It gave us oranges in the winter.”

Mizuki nodded, though she had more questions about the bottled garden. It sounded neat. Were they eating miniature fruits? Could you pull a whole tree from it? How were they getting the fruits out? She had lots to ask, because it seemed like an interesting thing to have, with lots of complications. Talking excitedly about something that Isra had lost, especially something with sentimental attachment, seemed like it would be a big and obvious misstep though, and for once, Mizuki was able to shut her mouth in time.

“Is it okay if I talk to Rolaj about it, or not?” asked Mizuki.

“About the entads?” asked Isra. “No.”

“No, it’s okay, or no, it’s not okay?” asked Mizuki.

“It’s okay,” said Isra.

“I don’t mean to butt in with your business,” said Mizuki. “I just thought … maybe it would be worth a shot. And if you’d like, I can go deal with reporting the crime.”

Isra was silent. “Why?”

“Um, I’m hoping that it would help get this,” she waved, trying to find the word, “resolved?” asked Mizuki.

“Why are you doing it for me?” asked Isra.

Mizuki shrugged. “I’ve been alone for a bit. I have lots of friends in town, and had a series of boyfriends, but I know what it’s like to not really have someone to depend on, not that the community hasn’t been good for me.” She’d been looked after and checked in on when her parents left, but it wasn’t really the same. “Hannah came in and said the house looked neglected, which I guess is true, and Verity came in and said that my garden was terrible, which was definitely true. But here I’ve got a chance to do something for someone, even if it’s just stuff like dealing with the hexmaster for you, or talking to a bunch of entad people about what’s gone through their stores in the last five years. Those seem like things that you might not want to do, or that you’d find annoying, and I won’t say that they’re exactly things that I’m good at, but I don’t think I would find them annoying. And if I did find them annoying, I’m willing to be annoyed for your sake.”

They walked together for a bit. Mizuki worried that she was overstepping. That series of boyfriends had taught her that she had a tendency to come on strong, or form attachments quickly, and sometimes, that screwed things up, or the initial affection flared up so bright that it burnt itself out. She was really, really hoping that she wasn’t doing that with Isra, but if she squinted, it seemed like it might be a part of the same pattern.

“I was wrong about the world,” said Isra.

“Yeah?” asked Mizuki.

“Yes,” said Isra.

In a normal conversation, this was where Isra would elaborate, so Mizuki gave her some time. It was pretty clear that Isra wasn’t all that used to talking to people, and maybe didn’t understand certain aspects of it, like following up on a profound, sweeping statement, especially if it was particularly vague.

“And in what way were you wrong about the world?” asked Mizuki, unable to wait as long as it seemed to be taking.

“It’s less complicated than I’d thought,” said Isra. “There’s more good in it.” She glanced back at Mizuki. They were coming back to Liberfell proper, with the sounds of the city around them. “Knowing that I’m a druid, that I experience the world in a different way … it’s brought everything into focus. The people of Pucklechurch were just blind and deaf, ignorant of the world. They weren’t liars. They thought I was strange, not because I was an outsider, but because I had abilities and senses. I was strange.”

“I would think that would be kind of nice,” said Mizuki. “Being able to make sense of a whole bunch of confusing things?”

Isra nodded. “You’re very nice,” she said.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Well, thanks.”

“I wish that I had met you before last week,” said Isra. Mizuki was listening closely, and she wondered whether she’d only imagined hearing Isra’s voice catch.

Mizuki diverted to lighter fare for the rest of their walk, and kept the conversation afloat on her own, but Mizuki had quite liked their talk, and it seemed that Isra had too. Mizuki found herself making a list in her head of all the things she needed to do, and the ones involving Isra went to the top of it. Alfric would be so proud of her.

And if they did find the man who hurt Isra, well, Mizuki wasn’t planning to actually drown him, but she was going to keep her options open.

Chapter 33 - Possibilities

As they stepped into the entad shop, Verity was contemplating what she was going to buy, if anything. A musical instrument wasn’t a must for a bard, but it could be helpful in many ways, and it was how she’d been trained, as well as being her preference. The problem was that entads didn’t tend to have the most convenient forms to them, and a dungeon was as likely to produce a baryton or a viol as it was to produce a drum or a lute. In fact, the dungeons would also produce instruments which bore only surface similarities to the kinds of things a luthier would make, bespoke items that seemed as though they had been manufactured by some alternate alien world. The many-finger flute, which she kept strapped to one leg, was useful in that it could make some of those instruments usable when they otherwise wouldn’t be, which Alfric had brought up days ago. She’d appreciated the insight.

The lute was Verity’s preferred instrument, the one she practiced with every day, but like any self-respecting conservatory-trained musician, she was well-versed in musical theory and had practiced to some level of proficiency with many different stringed instruments. Still, if she found a proper entad instrument, there was likely to be a transitional period where she simply wasn’t up to snuff with it, and she loathed the idea of giving up her lute, which she had a long, fond familiarity with.

The entad shop was a small one, by comparison with some of the enormous places available in Dondrian, but it was nice and cozy, in a way that a lot of places in the area seemed to be. In Dondrian, many of the shops seemed to be using their space as a way to seem grand and imposing, but in a place like Liberfell, where land was plentiful and the population was relatively small, there was no need for that, so they went with making it as welcoming as possible. It was an interesting difference, and one of the things that had made Verity happy that she’d chosen to come so far away from the big cities.

Verity found herself mildly impressed that Alfric had been carrying around the fifty pound book for so long. She was, at least, glad that she wasn’t the one who had to do it. She busied herself with looking at entads while Alfric and Hannah talked to the shopkeeper, a boy around their own age.

Each of the entads in the shop had a little card next to it, which described the effects of the entad and its particulars, including how it had done on something called a scratch test, and some details of its provenance and testing. The costs weren’t listed, which was somewhat traditional in these places, since each entad was, by definition, unique.

There was a pencil that would never run out of lead, a matchbox that could make matches out of plain sticks, and a pillow that could change size. Verity stopped at a dictionary that would give the definition of any word you spoke aloud, in any language, with the caveat that it would give made up definitions if the word didn’t exist.

“Kworma,” she said.

The definition appeared within the pages of the book. ‘Kworma: noun, Chelxic word for friend or ally, often used as a term for a customer or conversational partner.’

“Besidle,” she said. She didn’t think that was a word.

‘Besidle: verb, coming up to a friend who doesn’t know you’re there.’

Verity took some joy from this small thing, but she had no use for it, and surely it would be priced for someone who needed to know a lot of words for their profession. There was a temptation to spend the whole rest of her time playing with the thing, making up words and seeing what it would give her for definitions, but she moved on.

There was a brick that jumped around like a frog (which had been put into a metal cage), a quill that could do sums for you, and a hair clip that could do your hair in various complicated braids. That last was sure to be expensive, as cosmetic entads often were. As Verity moved deeper into the store, she could tell that she was getting to the more useful and valuable things, especially as many of them were larger in size. A full suit of armor sat on a mannequin, and would surely cost many thousands of rings before even considering its magical property, which was apparently the ability to make anyone who struck it see through the eyes of the wearer for a full minute.

Possessed by some impish desire, she tapped the armor on the chest, and when that wasn’t enough, she struck it harder, rapping against the plate.

It was only after she’d done it that she realized that the mannequin didn’t have any eyes to see out of, but that was apparently not a problem, since she saw out of the visor anyhow. She could still feel her body, and hear through her own ears, but it was undoubtedly quite disorienting. She watched herself waving a hand. It wasn’t like looking through a mirror, because a mirror would reverse everything: she was seeing herself as others saw her. Tall, for a woman, poised but somewhat sullen. She smiled for herself, and tried on various faces to see whether they suited her better. There was a sort of smile that she had learned for performing in concert halls, the kind that she could keep in place at the end of a performance when the audience was clapping and giving their adulations. She did the smile for herself, and could immediately tell how false it was, a smile meant to save strain on the muscles and be visible from a distance.

A minute was a long time, and Verity stayed where she was, waiting for it to wear off. It was a bit too much for her, seeing herself. She had a tendency to focus on the negatives, but that was largely because an honest appreciation of how she looked wasn’t necessary for playing her role. Fixing what flaws and issues she could see was, so she’d learned a critical eye from a young age.

By the time the effect lifted and Verity had her own sight back, she had decided that something needed to be done about her look. She had moved halfway across the world, but kept the same appearance, with the exception, sometimes, of less makeup. There was still something so severe about it, the neatly composed concert musician. Side by side, she thought that someone could mistake her for being the same sort of person as Alfric. Stolid. Was that the word? She went over to the dictionary, and confirmed that it was. She appeared stolid, and didn’t particularly like that.

The very back of the store had a variety of weapons, which she had little interest in, but beside them, there were a handful of musical instruments, five of them hanging from the wall. There was no lute among them, but there were two different drums, an overly long stringed instrument that was probably played standing up, a mouth harp, and a very complicated wind instrument that was covered in valves and pipes. She read their descriptions, though she had no interest in buying any of them. Drums were decidedly not her area of interest, and both the stringed instrument and the tube with its valves seemed like they’d be nightmares to take into a dungeon. The mouth harp was more interesting, but it would mean giving up singing, and lyricism was one of Verity’s favorite aspects of music, though she didn’t consider herself to be terribly good at it.

“Have you found anythin’?” asked Hannah.

“No, I think not,” said Verity with a sigh. She gestured at an area close to the instruments. “So many weapons they have here.”

“Well, sure,” said Hannah. “The only people who buy them are dungeoneers, and a dungeoneer doesn’t need to hold onto a sword once his career is done. Beyond that, you don’t tend to need more than one weapon per person. So they sit and rot on the shelves, waitin’ for someone to pick them up. Prices are usually not too bad. And, I s’pose, they don’t actually rot or rust or what have you, so stock can stick around like a bad smell.”

“And instruments get snatched up,” said Verity, frowning at the five that were there. “Because every tavern of any note has a bard in it.”

“Well, ay,” said Hannah. “But not every entad instrument has any actual use to a bard.” She pointed at the placard next to tall stringed instruments. “No tavern bard is going to need to send out spectral blades, ay?”

“There have been times it would have been nice,” murmured Verity.

“Actual problems?” asked Hannah, raising an eyebrow.

“Not really, no,” Verity replied. “Just people getting drunk and demanding songs I didn’t know or didn’t want to sing. When you’re working at a tavern, you’re there for them, the customers, but some of them take it a bit too far.”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “We both work in service to others, by our natures. Better, in the dungeons, or worse, do you think?”

“Better,” said Verity. “I consider you my friends.” It felt slightly embarrassing to say that out loud so soon, though they’d been spending quite a bit of their days together, and it had gotten quite intensive quite quickly. Hannah gave a smile, and the embarrassment faded. “So far, no one has made demands of me. Even Alfric has been understanding. He thinks I know my job better than he ever possibly could, and is content to let me do what I think is best. I have to admit that it wasn’t what I’d expected of him, especially after our first meeting.”

“He’s given me no notes either,” said Hannah.

“You know, I never thought about how similar our professions were,” said Verity. “I would suppose we have similar stories.”

“Ay?” asked Hannah, who seemed doubtful.

“Are there ever people who come in for healing and think they know more than you?” asked Verity.

“Oh,” said Hannah. She let out a little laugh. “Oh, ay, well, it comes with the territory. I won’t call them idiots, but there’s some roleplay we do at the seminary, and you get to hear all kinds of stories to prepare you for what you might run into. I understand it, I do, it’s their body, which they’ve known their whole life, but some of that confidence people have is quite misplaced.”

“Well, people have their own ideas about bardic magic,” said Verity. “And usually they’re arguing with me while I’m trying to play a song and can’t respond to them. So the choice is to stop and have it out with them, or attempt to communicate without words, or speak to them within the lyrics, or — there’s no good way to do it.”

“I’d thought you liked bein’ a tavern bard,” said Hannah, putting a bit of question in her voice.

“I did,” said Verity. “But mostly when it’s going smoothly, when I’m allowed to do whatever I want and read the room in the way I choose. I like the freedom and choice, and yes, I like to help people with their woes, or at least to help them enjoy their meals.” She sighed. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do with myself when Cynthia replaces me at the Fig and Gristle.”

“You’ll be with us,” said Hannah, shrugging. “Grow food in the garden, practice your music, find a nice boy in the village … seems like we’ve got the tools now to do the five dungeons left around Pucklechurch without all that much hassle. So far as travel time goes, that means Pucklechurch can be our base for quite a bit longer, enough that we can do two hexes out without needin’ to camp.”

Verity nodded. Her eyebrow had gone up at the ‘nice boy’ comment, but it seemed incidental, and not worth correcting. She’d have expected a cleric of Garos to use the neutral ‘partner’, and a small part of her wondered if she was a bit too unobvious about her inclinations. “And this is how I become a dungeoneer, slowly, without even realizing it.”

“Ay,” said Hannah, smiling. “But it’s not a bad life.”

“You’ll back me up, if I tell Alfric I need time to rest?” asked Verity.

“Of course,” nodded Hannah. “Though I don’t expect you’ll need backup, he’s a good lad. Now I need to go tend to him, and make sure he isn’t fumbling the sales.”

Verity nodded. It was good to talk to Hannah. It was good to have all of them, even Alfric, though he sometimes rubbed her the wrong way.

Thus far, Verity had spent next to no money from the first dungeon, let alone what they’d get from the second, even if it seemed like the payout would be lower. As she walked along, she entertained the notion of actually purchasing one of these things, even if there was no direct need for it, or even if it was just for fun. She thought it was the kind of thing that Alfric would hate, but perhaps she was being a bit too harsh on him.

The person that Alfric reminded her most of was her mother, and a few people that her mother surrounded herself with. It wasn’t enough to grow plants in the greenroom, they needed to be displayed for guests and entered into competitions. Verity entered into the Dondrian Gardening Society, not against her will, exactly, but after a bout of coercion and a discussion with her mother about the importance of being seen and making connections. Of course, the Gardening Society was really only tangentially about gardening, and Verity had grown to hate it. There had been a particular day when she’d come to one of their luncheons with a pot full of succulents and received exactly two comments on it (both compliments, thankfully) followed by several hours of discussion about the latest fashions, the newest places to eat, the events of the last week’s society ball, the theme of the upcoming party, on and on until it felt like her ears would bleed. It wasn’t enough to like plants, you needed to like plants with a purpose, and in fact, forget the plants, devote yourself instead to the purpose with the plants only as set dressing.

In fact, the things that Verity had taken an interest in seemed to fall into two distinct categories. The first were things that would look good for the family, which were lauded and praised, given trainers and tutors, and made into something proper and perfect. The second were things that wouldn’t look good for the family. Those, Verity was simply not allowed to do. If she ever pressed the issue, there would be a talk, and she would eventually back down. Martial arts had been a particular weakness of hers, and while she was at the conservatory, she had snuck out to see bare-knuckle brawls on three occasions until she’d been caught by the conservatory’s housing director. It hadn’t been the violence she’d been so attracted to, nor the men (as the director had opined), but the idea of throwing yourself into something, pitting yourself against danger using nothing but your will and training.

When Verity’s mother had found out, they’d had a talk about it, and the suggestion had come up that perhaps if this were Verity’s new area of interest, she might enjoy being a part of the Greater Dondrian Fencing Club, or at least attend a few of their exhibitions. Verity hadn’t thought that sounded all that nice, but she’d gone to one with her mother all the same, partly by way of apology. Fencing was perfectly alright, but not so different from any other sport, where the rules seemed like they got in the way of things. The injuries sustained in fencing were tiny things, barely even worthy of a healer, and they stopped for them every time. With a cleric of Garos and a cleric of Xuphin on hand, it seemed like they should have been able to go much further, but no, it was tightly constrained. While she was certain that it had its own rich history and depth of technique, as most sports did, she couldn’t help but be bored.

Verity kept looking at the entads in the shop, hoping that one of them would spark her interest. There were a few articles of clothing, carefully hung on mannequins, of which the shop seemed to have a few. Most of the clothes seemed a little redundant, like a shirt that would go rigid as steel if you tried to pierce it, or a sweater that would keep you warm in a snowstorm. They did what clothes and armor already did, but a little bit better or easier. There was a pair of pants that would kill any bug that got within ten feet of it, which seemed a bit excessive. Only a third of the entads could resize themselves in any way, and they were carefully marked. Thinking back on what Hannah had said, it seemed likely that resizing was a more common property, but that it was easier for resizing items to find a home and go into active use.

“Those pants are amazing,” said Alfric as he came over. He looked at the tag on them and frowned. “Not resizing though.”

“They’re probably too small for you,” said Verity. “They look like a better fit for someone Mizuki’s size. Or smaller. A child’s pants.”

“It might be possible to alter them,” said Alfric. He looked them over. “Bah. It’s tricky, with entads.”

“I know,” said Verity, nodding.

“Are we talkin’ entad alteration?” asked Hannah. As she came over. “Because I know a thing or two.”

“We were talking about how we all know a thing or two,” said Verity. She gestured. “Alfric wants the pants.”

“Seems rough, from a size perspective,” said Hannah, rubbing her chin. She looked at the tag. “Because you just got done goin’ up against a horde of insects?”

“Partly,” said Alfric. “They’re notoriously tough to deal with. But for alteration … maybe I could ask Mizuki to wear them, and if we ran into bugs, she could just move forward to handle them.”

“Even for her,” said Hannah. “I’d think you’d have to split the seams on the sides, then hope that the magic held.”

Alfric checked the tag again. “It doesn’t say what counts as wearing them,” he said.

“They need to be on your legs,” said the shopkeeper, who Verity had heard introduce himself as Rolaj. “I’ve had a few people come take a look at them, but it’ll either take someone quite short, or a cleric of Kesbin, or an actual child. My father has told me not to let them go unless it’s for quite a sum though. We’ve actually used them for labor a few times, with my sister wearing them. Cleaning out infestations, mostly.”

“I suppose that’s a better use than dungeoneering,” said Alfric, nodding. “You could practically make a living on it, going town to town.”

“Dungeoneers go from town to town,” said Rolaj. “It could be work you did on the side, while recovering from the toll of the dungeons.” He looked hopeful. The sale had been completed, and Verity guessed that with what they’d sold, there were some rings in their pockets. “Imagine this, you go into the town, ready to head for the nearest dungeon, but before you do, you put up a notice in the town, or put in word at the local taverns, that you’re available for pest control. It’s an easy way to make a few hundred rings, I would guess.”

“We’d have to talk to Mizuki about it,” said Hannah.

“Mizuki?” asked Rolaj. “Oh, are the three of you … her party?”

“You met her?” asked Alfric.

“Yesterday,” said Rolaj. “We talked for a bit. Is she … I hesitate to ask this, because it feels a bit unprofessional, but is she partnered?”

“Partnered?” asked Alfric.

“No, she’s not,” said Hannah. “Though I don’t know that she’s open to a relationship.”

“I think she probably is,” said Verity.

“And is she … interested in men?” asked Rolaj. His hopefulness was almost painful.

“I don’t think we know,” said Alfric.

“Definitely men,” said Hannah.

“Men,” nodded Verity.

“Oh,” said Rolaj. “I just — the woman she was with, I’d thought — there seemed to be something there.”

Hannah laughed. “Between those two?”

“Sorry,” said Rolaj. “I didn’t mean to embarrass myself, I just misread.”

“Ay, but how?” asked Hannah. “Granted, I’m a cleric of Garos, but it seems a hard thing to mistake, that’s all.”

“A mistake, nothing more,” said Alfric.

“I thought I saw jealousy,” said Rolaj. “That’s it.”

“Ah,” said Hannah. “Now that, I s’pose, I can see.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “And should we send her your way, our Mizuki?”

Rolaj was already blushing, but the blush deepened at that. “I’d appreciate it, yes, if you think she’d be receptive.”

“We’re in Pucklechurch,” said Alfric. “I don’t imagine we’ll be through Liberfell all that often.”

“I’m not expecting much,” said Rolaj. “I was just … thinking about her, since she came through yesterday.”

“Well, for my own part I’ll put in a good word,” said Hannah, nodding. “You seem like a good enough sort.”

“I’ll let you shop,” he said, backing away. “Let me know if you have any questions, and I apologize for any awkwardness on my part.” He bowed slightly, and returned to his position behind the counter, which, in Verity’s opinion, made the whole thing even more awkward.

“I haven’t seen anything interesting,” said Verity. “Or rather, I’ve seen a great many things that are interesting, but they’re either priced too high or of no practical use.”

“We have enough rings that you could get something fun,” said Alfric. “There’d be no harm in that. I saw you talking to that dictionary.”

“Well, yes,” said Verity, looking over at it. “But unless I want to start singing nonsense songs, I don’t imagine that I would get more than a few hours of entertainment out of it. Not what you’d pick, I’m sure.”

“Well, no,” said Alfric. “I see two spears, and if you don’t mind me, I’m going to go look at what they do.” He ambled over to the back wall with all the weapons. He had a grin on his face, which Verity thought was somewhat unusual for him. He looked like a better, more compelling person when he was smiling.

“Well, better to talk to Mizuki now,” said Hannah. “Just in case we were wrong and she’s not so interested. But then it falls to us to let the poor shopkeep down.”

“Go ahead then,” said Verity.

“I was hopin’ you’d volunteer,” said Hannah. She sighed when Verity didn’t budge. <Mizuki, it seems like the shopkeeper Rolaj at the Chixli Emporium is a bit sweet on you, and would like to see more of you, if you’ve got any interest.>

There was silence for a little bit, long enough that Hannah wondered whether Mizuki had gotten the message.

<Neat!> the reply finally came. <He’s cute, right?>

<He said you met him,> said Verity.

<I did,> said Mizuki. <I was asking whether you found him cute.>

<Not particularly my type,> said Hannah. <But he’s got a sweetness to him.>

<Not my type either,> said Verity. He’s a man, after all.

<He seems young for you,> said Alfric.

<Ask him his age,> said Mizuki.

“Are we really doing this?” asked Verity.

“How old are you?” Hannah asked across the store.

“Eighteen,” he replied back.

<Eighteen,> said Hannah.

There was a bit of silence. <Is that too young?> asked Mizuki.

<Four years seems like a large gap,> said Alfric.

<That would be like you dating Isra,> said Verity.

<I’m an adult,> said Isra. She spoke differently over party chat, as though she was attempting to be loud and clear. It was subtle, but definitely there. One of them would have to take her aside and explain that wasn’t necessary, and Verity imagined that it would probably be her.

<Well, I’m gonna go for it,> said Mizuki. <And if it turns out he’s too immature, that won’t be the first time I’ve had that problem, age being an issue or not.>

<Good luck,> said Hannah. She moved over to where Alfric was standing and looking at the spears, and Verity did too.

“This one,” said Alfric, pointing at a thin red one with a gilded tip. “Capable of extending to eight times its length, and per the scratch tests, extremely difficult to destroy. It also exerts force when extending, which means if I could get it under a monster and wedged against the floor, I could use the power of the entad to drive it through the flesh or armor.” He moved his finger down, to point at something that looked less like a spear and more like an enlarged toothpick, pointed on both ends and made of wood. “Or this one, which penetrates the opposite side of whatever it touches and can teleport the wielder.”

“Is this a test?” asked Verity.

“No,” said Alfric. He raised an eyebrow. “Just looking for opinions.”

“Ay, well,” said Hannah. “Seems the second one might put you into more difficult situations, away from your healer, which isn’t a good place to be.”

“True,” nodded Alfric. “The best case scenario for it is a monster with armor on the front but not the back. I’m not sure that either is necessarily that good, though if I had to go with one, it would probably be the first. There the primary benefit is being able to lengthen or shorten the spear at will, which can be valuable in combat. Normally you choke up on the spear if you need to get closer to the opponent.” He held his hands out in front of him, which was apparently meant to demonstrate.

“Is there a reason you don’t approve of Mizuki dating?” asked Verity. She’d been rolling the conversation over in her mind, and the question had come to her unbidden. She’d only said it out loud because it was Alfric, and he seemed to prefer directness.

“Not really,” said Alfric. He looked somewhat uncomfortable. “My mind goes to certain scenarios where we lose her as a team member, or where it interferes with our ability to run dungeons. I’d be happy for her, I enjoy her company and I want the best for her, but … as far as replacements go, sorcerers are rare, and wizards come with their own problems. Finding a wizard who wants to do a dungeon is a bit of a tall ask.”

“So it’s about her utility?” asked Verity. “And I suppose the same goes for me?”

“Teams fall apart,” said Alfric. “Parties disband. The last year has given me a lot of experience with that. I’m trying to be realistic and to plan for the worst case scenarios.”

“Once burned, twice shy,” said Hannah, nodding. “I can understand where he feels it, and how he worries. Most likely, Mizuki will go on a date or two with Rolaj and have a brief liaison, but there’s a chance she’ll find somethin’ more in him, and then declare she’s out of the party, which would be a problem for us all, considerin’ we’re livin’ in her house. Not to say that we don’t want her to be happy, ‘cause of course we do, but if you’re Alfric, you’re lookin’ ahead to see the stick through the spokes. If it’s all well and good, there’s nothin’ that needs doin’. It’s not about utility, per se, I don’t think, it’s wantin’ to make sure that if somethin’ bad happens, he’s prepared for it.”

“It’s also a little about utility,” said Alfric. He frowned. “And a bit selfish, I’ll admit to that. Do you think it warrants an apology?”

“No,” said Verity. She paused. “I’d wondered whether, perhaps, it was a bit of jealousy on your part.”

“Jealousy?” asked Alfric. He looked over at the counter. “I don’t have any interest in Rolaj.” He grinned, making it clear that this was a joke.

Verity waited for Hannah to press the issue, but for whatever reason, the cleric didn’t, and while Verity had some interest in the subject of why that was a joke, she’d been taught that it was best to let such subjects pass if those involved brushed them aside.

“Do you think you’ll get the spear?” asked Hannah. “I s’pose you trained with all kinds of weapons.”

“Hammers, blades, and spears,” said Alfric. “Though not equally with all three. Quite a bit of my training was in the fundamentals, meaning how to adapt to unique circumstances and how to train with new equipment. It’s entirely possible that we’ll go into the next dungeon and pick up a trident that’s as good as Isra’s bow, and I’ll end up using that for the rest of my adventuring career.”

“And that’s the sort of thing you like,” said Hannah. “It’s like carryin’ a wardrobe up a hill.”

“In a sense,” said Alfric. “Dungeons and entads both offer unique challenges.” He hesitated, perhaps hearing how that sounded: too polished and soulless. “I really like knowing that there’s not some rule somewhere telling me how to do things. I like feeling like I’m on a frontier, out in the wild.”

“Seems a bit misplaced to me,” said Hannah. “Bemoanin’ the settlement of the world when you’re only eighteen. But I think I’ve come to understand you better than I did yesterday.”

The bell attached to the door jingled as someone entered, and it was only after she saw Alfric freeze in place that Verity turned to look. She’d expected the enigmatic Lola, but it was someone else, a tall man wearing blue robes that had stars at the bottom. The staff he carried, as well as the bangles, marked him as a wizard. At first Verity thought he was old, but the more she looked at him, the more she thought that he was just prematurely balding.

“Josen,” said Alfric. He had a scowl on his face.

Chapter 36 - E7 Report

Party:

Lola Underhill – alienist, chrononaut, E7
Josen Park – wizard, E7
Grig Tinsmith – bard, E7
Mardin Longshore – cleric of Oeyr, E7
Marsh – warlock, pyro (delayed service), E7

My favorite tutor when I was growing up was my math teacher, who spent a month of our time talking about variance. Variance is important for chrononauts, part of our bread and butter, but I was deep in the guts of the Junior League at the time (mostly because of a boy), and it’s even more important for dungeoneers. The upshot from that tutor’s lesson was that luck doesn’t exist, and a cold streak doesn’t mean that you’ll keep being cold.

Still, we’re on a cold streak.

At the end of the Pate’s Knob dungeon, Marsh blasted a monster with a jet of fire hot enough to melt rock and destroy anything of value that was behind the creature. We’d been in the dungeon for hours, and he was getting irritated and tired. It was a dumb thing to do, and he knew it. The bad luck for us was that the monster wasn’t just immune to fire, but fed on it. It grew to three times its size and flicked one of its six spindly tendrils out and absolutely destroyed Josen’s left arm. Most of his shoulder went missing with the arm, some of his mage stuff got obliterated, and he lost four entads in the process. Mardin grabbed him by the collar and hefted him out, which left the three of us to face the thing down, and Marsh was useless unless we wanted someone else to lose an arm, or worse. Really, Josen could have died pretty easily. Any of us could have. We did manage to kill the thing and get almost nothing for it, but it was just me, alone, with Grig backing me up on vocals.

After, there was a lot of argument about whether to reset or not. There always is, they just never remember, because I’m the one undoing things. Sometimes it’s obvious, like if one of them dies, not that it’s happened much. Other times I need to be convinced. Losing a good entad? That’s a maybe for me. Obviously we’re not bounding through the dungeons for the great view, we’re going to make money, and losing an entad, especially a good one, can throw the whole enterprise in the garbage. In that case, always better to do it over. For Josen though, the four lost entads were piddly crap, ‘irreplaceable’ entads that he’d taken a fancy to. One gave him better finger dexterity, I remember, and I don’t remember what the others did, but they were all minor trinkets, aside from the bracer, which was part of a pair that stopped working. It doubled his strength, but he’s a wizard, and it unfortunately bound to him, which was the only reason he ended up with it.

Mostly they were just complaining because things had gone wrong. They always complain. I made them count up the costs incurred against the winnings, and made them do the math, which I always do. Sometimes it comes out in favor of letting it ride, but more often, they call for me to undo. This time, Josen was a bit out of it, mostly upset about the arm thing, with some recriminations and accusations. He wanted the whole dungeon undone, mostly because he thought losing the arm was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. He didn’t appreciate me saying that it was the worst thing he could remember. There was some back and forth I won’t get into, but I pointed out that while it could be undone, I was the one putting in more labor. It felt like the twentieth time we’ve had this conversation, and I don’t know how many of those have stuck, but it feels like probably a few. They’ve run nearly fifty dungeons or whatever, but I’ve run closer to eighty. It all just keeps getting undone.

Undoing things is not free! I have to actually live through the day! I’m doing twice the labor!

These reports are supposed to be a place to gripe about your teammates, right?

It’s not like the payout was all that great either. We had thirty rooms total, which stretched us to our limit, and we got fifteen entads, only three of which were any good, and none of which we’re planning to keep. Ectad junk. A handful of eggs. Some seeds. More than enough to pay our way, but not a big contribution to the endgame. The whole team is feeling sour, and they wish that I had undone it, but I’m far more burnt than they are. We handed most of the stuff off to the counterparty and let them deal with it.

We started out with great equipment and a clear plan, and now it’s just a matter of going through the motions. We’ve got enough now that we can live in relative comfort, not that it was ever in question for me. One of the things they don’t talk about in Junior League is how to deal with problems in the party, and half of me wants to go see a cleric about it, though I’ve got no clue which one.

And that was it, all there was for that entry. It was as though Lola had gotten bored halfway through.

As a dungeon report, it was basically useless, saying nothing about the general character of the dungeon and very little about the threats that might be found there. It likely wouldn’t have been all that useful to Alfric, given how much higher their elevation was, and the difference in what they were bringing into the dungeon, but part of the point of dungeon reports was to get a sense of the range of probabilities. You weren’t supposed to read just one of them, you were supposed to read a bunch of them and then get a general sense of the dungeon’s shape. Sometimes there were commonalities. A report like this though, one that detailed nothing, was worthless for that purpose.

As insight into the party, the dungeon report was revealing. It was hard to know whether the things Lola had said were accurate, especially since she must have known that Alfric would be reading it, but all the same, it had the ring of truth. Lola was tricky in that way though, an accomplished liar who knew that people would more readily believe her if she offered some vulnerability or let them in on a secret, or simply told them what she thought they wanted to hear. He had seen her do it with others, and she’d talked with him about it. She just didn’t take lies and manipulation all that seriously. Everyone lied, in Lola’s opinion, and everyone manipulated to some degree or another. It was normal and natural to her. Alfric hadn’t agreed, had never agreed, not just because of how he’d been raised, but because it seemed normal and natural to him that people should say what they mean and mean what they say. All of it called into question the report, naturally.

If it had been Alfric in her position, he’d have worked out some kind of monetary exchange with Josen to compensate for the loss. It was the loss of entads, payment to the clerics, and labor for remaking mana constructs, measured against the labor for Alfric of another dungeon. It seemed there was likely some kind of equitable exchange to be had there. It was the sort of thing he’d suggest to her, if they were still on speaking terms.

The second entry from Lola, for Traeg’s Knob, was much less illuminating. It had been similar to their experience, with a wet place and mostly natural interior, though they’d faced tougher monsters and more rooms. It was a bit of a surprise just how similar they’d been, but based on the timing, Lola’s party must have done Traeg’s Knob within a day or two of Alfric’s.

Alfric took some time to read through other reports, but most of them were terrible in one way or another, either sparse on details, or with far too much in the way of extraneous details. It did seem like Pucklechurch was a more difficult place than most expected it to be, and Alfric supposed that was due to a higher concentration of magic there, either from the artifacts that had been left there, or the leyline that had once run through it. Pucklechurch was a place of power, but an old and weak one.

“I think there are worse places to stay,” said Verity as they finished their tour of the League house. “Relatively few people around though, for all that they have three rooms of five beds each.”

“Most parties who do the local dungeons are themselves local,” said Alfric. “And most parties who are from outside the region looking to do a full clear will camp, rather than staying in town, or they’ll have their own ways of getting around, or their own mobile housing, which means they don’t need to use League housing.”

“So why have it?” asked Verity. It was rare that she showed any interest in dungeoneering, and Alfric was thankful that she seemed curious.

“It probably gets used with some frequency,” said Alfric. “Though the ideal time for doing easier dungeons is early spring, like I said, so we’re probably in a lull right now.”

“And we could have stayed here for free rather than going to the hotel?” asked Verity.

“Probably,” said Alfric. “Some of them charge, but having met Priya, I doubt this one does.”

“It’s good for a town to have dungeoneers come through,” said Hannah. “Most try to make it easy. Same reason we don’t get taxed.”

“We don’t?” asked Verity.

“Why, were you keepin’ a ledger?” asked Hannah.

“I don’t think I’ve ever paid a tax,” said Verity.

“You should look into that,” said Alfric, frowning a bit.

“We used to have someone who did that kind of thing for us,” said Verity. “An accountant.”

“Sounds expensive,” said Hannah, wrinkling her nose.

“If we’re on this for long enough, we’ll be picking up people,” said Alfric. “Someone to handle the money is usually pretty vital. Vertex has a counterparty, which would probably be two porters, a merchant, a coordinator, and an entad specialist, though a counterparty usually splits up their duties a bit more than that, and with fifty dungeons done, my guess is they’re not quite there yet. Maybe two or three people.”

“You planned that far in advance?” asked Verity, raising an eyebrow.

“It’s the family trade,” said Alfric. “A counterparty is the natural outgrowth of a mid-level dungeoneering party. At a higher level, there can be more than one counterparty, though it would be a bit unusual for them to travel to every dungeon, depending on what entads are available.”

“And your parents employed hundreds, ay?” asked Hannah.

“Not for dungeons, no,” said Alfric. “They do a handful a year, maybe a large handful. But once you have enough entads, you’re usually able to build some kind of business around them, and those businesses employ hundreds. Maybe more.”

“It was a joke,” said Hannah, sighing.

“Ha ha,” said Alfric.

“How far away from hiring someone are we?” asked Verity.

“Not far at all,” said Alfric. “If we can use the stone to move the whole party through the dagger, then it might make sense for us to hire a cartier, though if we’re going at a more sedate pace through the dungeons, it wouldn’t be full time.”

“There’s a cartier who services Pucklechurch,” said Verity. “She comes by the Fig and Gristle every now and then. She’s a friend, of sorts. Xy.”

“A friend?” asked Hannah.

Verity gave her a look. “Yes.”

“A special friend?” asked Hannah.

“A bit special, yes,” nodded Verity.

“Oh, ay,” said Hannah. She seemed a bit flustered. “Sorry for the confusion, earlier.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” said Alfric. Neither of them offered any comment. “Relevant to our core mission?”

“No,” said Verity. “Definitely not.”

“Well, I’ll speak with her then, and see what her terms would be. It would only be once a week, running the dagger over to whatever the next dungeon is,” said Alfric. “And then, I suppose, running it back and getting it in position. In theory that would allow us to stay in Pucklechurch for a long time, especially if she’s using our wardrobe to cut down on distance.”

“Well, I’ve had enough talk about dungeons for the day,” said Verity. “It seems like the last thing we need to do is to figure out whether the stone can hold us.” She hesitated for a moment. <Are the two of you done with your walk?>

<Just finishing up,> said Mizuki. <What’s up?>

<I was hoping that you could get an animal for us to do the stone testing with,> said Verity.

There was a brief silence. <What kind of animal?> asked Isra.

<As close to a human as possible,> said Verity. <Not a bear.>

<A squirrel?> asked Isra. <Will it be okay?>

<She’s holding a squirrel in her hand at the moment,> said Mizuki.

<In theory it will be fine,> said Alfric. <We’ll just tie it up, put it down in the garden area of the stone, then pull it back out. If all that works, then we can try with people.>

<Why would we tie him up?> asked Isra. <Why not just tell him to stay still?>

<Oh,> said Alfric. <Right. But what happens if the squirrel takes off? We don’t want it stuck in the garden.>

<A squirrel doesn’t want to be stuck there any more than we do,> said Isra.

<Well, we can meet up at the warp,> said Alfric. <I think we’re done for now.> He gave Hannah a questioning look, and she nodded.

“We’ll have to use this place next time,” said Verity. “I think I would like it better than a hotel. All together?”

“It’s more traditional accommodation,” said Alfric. “Though different regions of Inter have different ways of handling the inevitable flow of adventurers. Ready?”

They both nodded, and Alfric doublechecked he had everything he needed and then cast the warp.

He’d had a knot of tension at warping, because this was the most likely place for him to run into Lola and the others, but instead it was just his people, quickly moving off the warp before the attendant could wave for them to move.

“Nice to see you guys again!” said Mizuki. “Productive time?”

“Mostly,” said Alfric. “We got the ectad stuff squared away and spoke with the rep at the League office. They have rooms there, by the way. All empty, it seemed. But we’re not staying here tonight, not unless there’s something we need done. We can be back home in an hour.”

“Heh,” said Mizuki. “‘Home’.”

“You know what I mean,” said Alfric, flushing slightly.

“No, I liked it,” said Mizuki, grinning.

“I have the squirrel,” said Isra, pulling it from a pocket. It poked out from in her hand.

“We should move somewhere a bit more quiet,” said Alfric. They were still in the warp room, though off to the side. In the city, if you stuck around, people would give you dirty looks, but then again, the whole thing was a lot different. As they stood there, someone came in and took a moment to orient, then walked off toward one of the exits. It was so casual.

They found a park easily enough, one with a rotunda and a good view of the valley that Liberfell was built above. Again, Alfric worried that he would see Lola and the others, but there was no particular sign of them, only people sitting around and playing in the wide green area. Three children had a disc that they were throwing between themselves, and Alfric felt curious about it, but there was work to be done.

Isra touched the stone, which had been brought out of the book, and held the squirrel in her hand. When she went to set it down, it vanished.

“It’s in,” said Isra, removing her hand from the stone. “I told it to wait by the stone. You did some damage to the plants with those trees.”

“Sorry,” said Alfric. “But I don’t think the other side of the stone being a garden is, er, relevant. And there’s technically some risk of the flowers spreading to the outside, though I would be surprised if they were either dangerous or worth anything.” He frowned and looked at Isra. “Are they?”

“I don’t think we could sell them, no,” said Isra. “But I like them for their own sake. Not everything in nature can be used by humans. They aren’t any variety I’ve ever seen.”

Alfric nodded. “And they are pretty. We’ll try to be more gentle with them. If it’s possible for a person to go in there, maybe we can transplant them away from the central area, but I do have to warn you that I’m already drawing up plans for the interior.”

Isra frowned slightly and looked at the rock. “How long were we going to leave it in there?”

“I was thinking five minutes or so,” said Alfric. “Then Hannah can check the squirrel over for issues, and we can send it on its way and, hopefully, put the four of you in so that I can use the dagger to get back. You won’t be in there for longer than five minutes, I shouldn’t think, and then we’ll be back in Pucklechurch.”

“Do people ever get trapped in entads?” asked Mizuki.

“Not to my knowledge,” said Alfric. “If I thought there was a risk, I wouldn’t be doing it.”

“I guess if we get stuck, we can just undo it,” said Mizuki. “There’s no real risk.”

“There is a risk,” said Alfric. “It’s a risk that I have to do this day all over again, and explain that I allowed this to happen, and then, if things go wrong, there’s not the same cushion of safety. Look, you cannot depend on chronomancy, it makes things so much harder for us, unless there’s an explicit plan in place.”

“Always with the plans,” said Mizuki, rolling her eyes. “But fine, I will refrain from doing anything too stupid just because I know you’ve got my back. If I do something too stupid, it will be for normal reasons.”

“Thank you,” said Alfric. He turned to Isra. “You can probably pull the squirrel out now.”

Isra nodded and bent down to touch the stone again. She held out her hand, and a squirrel appeared in it. She looked him over, and there was something unutterably odd about the way it moved in her hand, being a party to the inspection, showing her his tail and stretching out his legs. At one point, the squirrel looked right at Isra and opened his mouth, showing its teeth.

“He seems fine,” said Isra. She handed the squirrel over to Hannah, who seemed extremely skeptical. Clerics were called on as vets with some regularity, but Alfric didn’t imagine it was a particularly strong point for her.

“Seems fine indeed,” said Hannah, after a few minutes.

“Alright,” said Alfric. “Then I guess we can do this here. Metal off, and we see if we can put a person in, and then see if we can get a person out.”

“I volunteer to go first,” said Mizuki. She pointed at him. “No nudity.”

Alfric saw the grin on her face, and found himself smiling. “If you say so.”

Mizuki set down her bag, which had her helmet in it, then set down her dagger as well, which she hadn’t once used in any capacity that Alfric had seen. Once that was all done, she stepped over to him. He ducked down and took her outstretched hand, then touched the stone. When he looked over, though he could still feel her small hand in his own, he couldn’t see it, and she wasn’t present in the garden world.

“Try stepping up onto me,” said Alfric. “Step on my foot?” He couldn’t see her, and it felt as though he was in another place, but he was still between worlds. He felt the pressure on his foot, then Mizuki appeared there, in the garden.

“I can see,” she said. “Do I just … step off?”

“Probably,” said Alfric. “Try to step into the garden, if you can.”

Mizuki stepped off of Alfric. As she did, she disappeared from his view of the garden, and when he released the stone, he saw her standing there in the park beside him.

“Well shoot,” said Mizuki. “That didn’t do what we wanted.”

“Let’s try again,” said Alfric. “I’m going to actually hold you this time, and release you.”

“Okay,” shrugged Mizuki.

There was some unavoidable awkwardness with picking her up, namely in terms of where to place his hands. Eventually he was holding her in both hands, one under her knees and the other under her back. She was lighter than he’d been expecting. She wrapped her arms around his neck to give her a bit more support.

“Now I just need to touch the stone,” said Alfric. He look down at it and sighed. “Shoot.”

“Here, I’ll lift it up,” said Hannah. She went over to the stone and hefted it up for Alfric to touch, which didn’t actually help matters all that much. The stone appeared, in the garden, to be floating in the air. Alfric touched it and Mizuki hopped down. She was still standing in the garden, independent of the stone. “Works!” she said, throwing up her hands. She looked around. “We should get some furniture in here. This could be a place to camp.”

“I’m going to release my hold on the stone now,” said Alfric. “I want you to come over and try to exit from it on your own. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Mizuki.

Alfric let go of the stone. Even if you couldn’t get out of the stone on your own, it might be possible to have someone pull you out, but it needed to be tested. He waited for five seconds, worried that she might panic, but after a moment, she appeared standing beside the stone.

“Works both ways,” said Mizuki. “Shame you can’t go in without help.”

“You might be able to,” said Alfric. “Stand on it, barefoot, and try to launch yourself into the garden? We’ll do some testing of it. The point is, if we just repeat all of that, we can get everyone into the stone, then everyone out of the stone, and skip all the walking it would take to get back to Pucklechurch. And so far as I’m concerned, we’re done here and can go.”

“I was going to set up a date with Rolaj,” said Mizuki, frowning. “But I suppose I can do that with a letter.”

No one else had any pressing need to stay in Liberfell, and Alfric was thankful for that, because he wanted to leave behind Lola and her people. What remained was to get everyone stripped of their metal, which there was a surprising amount of. Some of it went into the book, but quite a bit of it would have to be carried, along with the stone. Once that was done though, they went into the stone one by one, and then Alfric went about picking all the pieces of metal up, mostly armor and weapons that had been too big for storing away. He double and triple-checked that they weren’t leaving anything, because it was a long way to go.

Then, with barely more than a thought, he was standing in the Pucklechurch temple, a place he’d chosen because of its close proximity to a cleric in the case of an emergency. They were in the room used by clerics of Garos, though Lemmel didn’t seem to be there.

“It feels great to skip a long trip,” said Mizuki.

“It does,” nodded Verity.

“Well, we’re going to have to go back to Traeg’s Knob in order to get the wardrobe,” said Alfric. “And it will need to be brought back to Pucklechurch somehow. I was able to negotiate with Besc for some floatstones to rent, which means that I should be able to either bring the wardrobe back single-handedly, or with the help of a volunteer. I’d like to do that tomorrow.”

“It’s likely been fine for a day, and will likely be fine for a week,” said Hannah.

“All the same,” said Alfric. “Is there a volunteer?”

“Och, fine, I’ll go,” said Hannah.

“Can I just go one way?” asked Mizuki.

“Um,” said Alfric. “I guess I could cut you with the knife, then have you come when I get there? But the two of us can probably handle it.”

“I’d like her with,” said Hannah. “She’s probably not much for carryin’, but if it’s awkwardness you’re worried about, she can probably help with the steerin’, and that way we can switch off and make better time.”

“Sounds good,” said Alfric. “And now, it’s high time we headed home. Our second dungeon and most of its associated business is complete.” Leaving aside the appearance of his old party for now. “I think we’ve earned ourselves a rest.”

Chapter 35 - Alumni of the Junior League

The Adventurer’s League was in charge of all matters related to the dungeons across Interim, and predated the actual conglomerate country by quite some time. It had originally started as a trade association, but through the many centuries it had been around, it had eventually come to be nationalized, and served as a semi-independent arm of the Interim government. The League were the ones who put locks on the dungeons, dealt with what repairs were needed, created maps of where the dungeons were, tracked dungeon status, and most importantly, authorized who would be allowed to go into the dungeons. Anything that came out of the dungeons was for some other department to deal with, but anyone who wanted to go into the dungeons fell under the authority of the League.

The League had set a strict age limit on dungeoneering, under the rationale that the younger you were, the less likely you were to have proper training, and the more likely it was you would make bad decisions. But because there were always enthusiastic young people wanting to get into dungeoneering, the Junior League had been formed, and its mandate was to get these young people ready.

Alfric had entered into the Junior League as young as possible, age twelve, and immediately found it to be a bit of a disappointment. For one thing, it was simply too little time, only twice a week for a few hours. The other big problem was that it didn’t seem to be taken very seriously by either the other members, or by the adults who were running the thing. It was more social than practical, an ‘activity’ for kids to do. They went on too many field trips that were only loosely tied into dungeoneering, like going to the Dondrian Metropolitan Zoo to see all kinds of examples of monsters, most of which were docile forms grown from dungeon eggs, or hostile forms tucked behind smoked glass. If it had been accompanied by a frank discussion from a dungeoneer about the varieties of monsters found in dungeons, Alfric wouldn’t have minded it so much, but no, they were just wandering between exhibits, gawking at the captured monsters.

It was on one of those pointless trips that Alfric had properly met Josen. They had been in Junior League together for nearly a year, but had known each other only by name. While the others were playing around and staring at the monsters in their habitats, Josen had been looking through a small pane of glass he held in his hand. Alfric approached cautiously.

“Is that an entad?” he asked.

“No,” said Josen. He stood there for a moment, looking through the piece of glass and giving the impression that he was hoping their conversation was done. “It’s meant to be a method of seeing the aether, but I don’t think it’s working.”

“If it’s not an entad, what is it?” asked Alfric, frowning.

“I’m a wizard,” said Josen. “It’s a mana construct anchored to the glass. But like I said, it’s not working. If it was, you’d be able to see it too.”

“I tried wizardry,” said Alfric. “My teachers didn’t think I was very good.” Anyone could, in theory, be a wizard, but in practice, if you didn’t have the proper aptitude, you would be forever behind those who had it. Working five times as hard just to tread water wasn’t something that Alfric had thought was a big deal, not at the time, but his parents had told him no.

“It’s the only thing I’m good at,” said Josen. He looked down at the non-functional pane of glass in his hands. “Usually. This is complicated.”

“Most wizards can’t do anything until they’re much older,” said Alfric.

Josen nodded. “My mother and father are both wizards. They trained me early.”

“My mother and father are both dungeoneers,” said Alfric.

This was the first time that Josen showed anything like respect or interest toward Alfric, and from that point on, they gravitated toward each other at Junior League. Josen was most interested in wizardry, and spoke about it often, which Alfric listened to patiently, understanding relatively little. Josen had a seriousness to him that the other Junior League kids seemed to be lacking. His interest in dungeons was largely mercenary, mostly to get what entads he could and make as much money as possible. When they were fifteen, they did some math together, and found that ten years of dungeoneering would see both of them set for life, even using conservative estimates for both time traveled and days per dungeon.

They had dreams together, in their own way. Alfric’s dream was always of gearing up and meeting the challenges of the dungeons, while Josen’s were largely about the constructs he would build when he had virtually unlimited access to mana stones. Alfric didn’t quite understand the compulsion, even though Josen spoke about it often. All Alfric knew, all he thought he needed to know, was that Josen had grand plans and was going to be along for the ride.

Party composition was a hot topic in the Junior League, especially since one of the points of the organization was to get everyone ready to eventually embark on actual dungeoneering. The Junior League was where plans were made and parties were formed. By the time they were fourteen, it was obvious to both of them that they were going to form the core of a party, and from there, they had a number of discussions about who the other three might be. Alfric considered a bard to be an absolute necessity, because a skilled one could act as a multiplier on the entire team, allowing what felt like circumvention of the five person party cap. A cleric was another must, at least until later on in their career when healing could be done almost entirely through entads, though a cleric would still be helpful even then. Alfric favored clerics of Oeyr, largely because they could stop people from dying and had good offensive power when they weren’t doing that, but Garos was a close second, because they were able to directly cancel out a wide range of damage. Other clerics could offer utility of one kind or another, but nothing like the raw healing power of those two. That left the last position to fill, and they’d gone back and forth on that one. Eventually, more by chance than planning, they’d come across Marsh, who was a triple threat, being both a warlock (locking things in place, or in relation to one another) and a nascent pyro, as well as a proficient fighter.

By the time they were all sixteen, the party seemed like it was fully together, and while there were arguments, sure, it seemed like they were going to go out and conquer the world, figuratively speaking. They spent quite a bit of time together, and while Alfric did his best to keep them on track, it was only natural that they’d become friends. It was always Josen who was closest with Alfric, and privately, Alfric thought of the two of them as being the core of the team.

And then Lola had taken it all, but it wouldn’t have been possible for her to do that without their help.

~~~~

“Josen,” said Alfric. He couldn’t keep the disdain from his voice.

“Alfric — what are you doing — what are you doing in Liberfell?” The shock was clearly visible on his face. He looked at the door he had just come through, as though he was going to run away, which was laughable, because Alfric knew from experience that he could almost double Josen’s speed, even without the stride boots.

“Did you get my letters?” asked Alfric. There had been three of them over the past year, all without a response.

“I did,” said Josen. “But I didn’t — didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry.”

“The others I understood,” said Alfric. “We’d had our disagreements about funds. But you were always on my side in those arguments.”

“She — she came to me last. She had already gone to Grig, Marsh, and Mardin. She’d gotten them to agree to break the party. She knew that I would be the toughest, and she had someone lined up to replace me.” Josen was wringing his hands. “The decision was mine, she said. I could stay with you, and try to cobble together a new party from scratch as quickly as possible, or I could go with her and carry out your plan.” He repositioned his staff and ran his fingers through his thinning hair. He’d lost quite a bit more in the past year, his hairline continuing its steady march backwards. That had started around fifteen, horribly young for it, and Alfric had always felt a bit bad for him. “And then you spent a year floundering, and … I’m sorry, but it felt like I made the right decision.”

Alfric already knew quite a bit of this. He’d tried to undo Lola’s sabotage, and spoken with all of them. But that attempt had itself been undone by Alfric, in part because he’d realized that Lola had put in too much preparation too many days in advance. The deal had been all but done, it was just a matter of her executing it. He could still remember the look in Josen’s eyes, the mixture of sadness and defiance, but for Josen, this was their first time seeing each other since the betrayal.

“How many dungeons?” asked Alfric.

“Fifty-four,” said Josen.

“One every six days,” said Alfric. “That’s slow.”

“You overestimated the pace,” said Josen. “And there have been setbacks along the way. Days lost for no good reason. We’d be doing better if we had you, but I’m doing better than I’d have done if you and I had to build up a party from scratch. I’m sorry, but you know it’s true.”

“If you’d stuck by my side, I’d have been back up and running in a month,” said Alfric. “Less, even. I wouldn’t have looked like someone who was cut for some nefarious reason.”

“It wasn’t personal Alfric,” said Josen. He had a pleading look in his eyes. “You were the one who always said we should treat it like a business. You said we should give ourselves the best shot at success. It was just … that it happened to be that the best shot for me was without you.”

Alfric felt his fists clench into balls. “Well, I hope you’re happy.” He moved forward, and Josen stepped back. Alfric continued on his way, out of the shop, which jangled the little bell. “Tell Lola I have no interest in seeing her.”

Josen seemed like he had many things to say, but they stayed on his lips, and then Alfric was out into the streets of Liberfell. He found himself clenching his jaw. Josen was right, it wasn’t personal, but perhaps that was what made it hurt so much. They had been best friends, or at least he’d felt like that, and in the wake of the party break, there had been nothing but dead silence.

“That was rough,” said Hannah, who’d come out of the shop right after Alfric.

“Bad blood,” said Verity. “We’ll get going soon. No need to meet the rest of your old party.”

“We still have work to do in Liberfell,” said Alfric. “And we need to find an animal so we can test the stone and make sure we can get home easily.” His blood was pumping, like he’d just been through a battle. A part of him wanted to go back and have it out with Josen, a long, drawn out conversation, but it felt too painful.

“Are you okay?” asked Hannah.

“No,” said Alfric. “Josen and I were friends.” He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to center himself. “Sorry I didn’t introduce you.”

Verity gave him a somewhat pitying smile. “I think in this case we can forgive the breach of decorum.”

“Let us know if there’s anythin’ we can do for you,” said Hannah. “If you need, I can deal with the rest of what needs to be done in Liberfell and you can go back. Or, if you prefer, I can handle Lola.”

“Handle her?” asked Alfric. That sounded like possibly the worst idea he’d ever heard. “No, I don’t want anyone talking to her. I want her out of my life.”

“I’m a cleric,” said Hannah. “We’re trained to mediate disputes, especially between two people who had somethin’ like a romance.”

“I want nothing to do with her,” said Alfric. “If you feel the need to talk with someone, go talk with the other members of her party and try to convince them that she’s been hoodwinking them.”

“Do we think that’s true?” asked Verity.

Alfric looked at the entad shop. Josen was still in there. “We should move,” said Alfric. “We still need to go to the League office.”

“I can do that, if you want to hole up, or leave Liberfell early,” said Hannah.

“No, I’m the one with special dispensation, and I want to do it,” said Alfric. He started walking, trying his best to remember the directions he’d been given the day before. “And for your question, Verity, he said fifty-some dungeons over the course of a year, which is slower than planned, and obviously she brought them all to Liberfell so she could see me, which she didn’t tell them about. They should be at least seventh elevation by now, and doing harder dungeons than the ones found in the area, at least if they want to maximize their risk to income ratio. If they’re not following the plan, then it’s almost certainly because of her.”

“It’s an accusation that you’d want proof to back up,” said Verity.

“I know,” sighed Alfric. “And if I hadn’t felt like stabbing him, it would have been good to talk with Josen to get a better understanding of what they’ve been going through. That way I might have been able to convince him, or one of the others. Sorry, I just — I wasn’t properly prepared for this. I woke up this morning and thought to myself that I would just go about my business.” He’d thought he was prepared, that he’d gotten a handle on things and his head straight. Clearly that wasn’t the case.

It wasn’t terribly far to the League office, and Alfric again did his best to steady himself before pushing open the door. It was an ornate building, with columns on either side of the heavy brass-plated door, a style that wasn’t much seen in this part of the world. The building was old and a bit run down, with some chips taken out of one column. Above the door, on the second floor, there was a stone inscription, which marked it as being the one-time home of Liber Cosmetics, which had apparently been established more than a hundred years ago.

A slender, reedlike woman was reading beside an unlit fireplace when they came in, and she stopped only slowly, putting a bookmark in place as though she was saying an extended goodbye to a loved one. She had blonde hair that was starting to grey, contrasted against darker skin, and she wore a long dress that nearly touched the floor when she stood up. Her feet were bare, and she was unadorned in any other way as well, a relatively plain person.

“Priya Voyt?” asked Alfric.

“Yes?” she asked. Her voice was high and thin, almost unpleasantly so, and she looked Alfric over like he was a fish she was worried was rotten. “Oh,” she said. “You must be Alfric. I was told to expect you.” She stepped forward and held out a slender hand, which Alfric shook. She barely moved her hand at all and let it quickly fall from his. “You have a party?”

“I do,” nodded Alfric. “Five members, with two dungeons done. My provisional status allows me to do another three before any registration, but I’d rather get the registration done quickly, just so it’s out of the way. I have reports written for the two dungeons we’ve done, which were Pucklechurch and Traeg’s Knob. Neither seemed to have notes left by other teams.”

“My,” she said, drawing back slightly. She looked at Verity and Hannah. “Would any of you like some tea?”

“I don’t s’pose you have tuber tea?” asked Hannah.

“I do!” said Priya, clapping her hands. “Do you know, I’ve never come across someone else with a keenness for tuber tea? Do you prefer the corms, the leaves, or the petioles?”

Hannah froze for a moment. “To be honest, I don’t think I’ve heard any of those words before, aside from leaves.”

“The corms are the tuber itself, the petioles are the stem that connects the leaves to the stalk,” said Priya. She waved a hand. “I’ll get the petioles, they’re my favorite for tea, though they’re best with a spot of honey, if you don’t mind.”

“Honey would be lovely,” said Verity.

It was becoming clear to Alfric that this was going to be one of those conversations, the kind that went on aimlessly before it finally got around to the matter at hand. It was something that sometimes just happened, and unlike a negotiation or a proposition, it seemed like there was no ulterior motive at play, no need to psychologically soften each other up. Alfric’s requests were perfectly within the rules of the Adventurer’s League, and there was no element of diplomacy necessary. But it seemed that he’d been overruled, and so he resigned himself to a cup of tea and a rather slower run of things.

To his surprise, Priya pulled a giant axe down from the wall. She set the head of it in the fireplace, and the axehead was suddenly engulfed in flames, burning brightly. She left it unattended, then walked over to a cupboard and took down a large kettle, then spent some time filling it from a sink. This first floor was wide open, but separated into different areas by the arrangement of furniture, and it seemed that in addition to being a common area, there was also a dining table and a little kitchen. If it was like most Adventurer’s League places, there would be a few rooms in the back where traveling parties could come spend the night for a very modest fee. In fact, it was entirely possible that this was where Lola and her party were staying, though with half a hundred dungeons under their belt, it seemed likely that they could find better accommodations.

Only once the kettle had been placed on the flaming axehead did Priya return her attention to Alfric.

“You’re of the Dondrian Overguards, yes?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Alfric. He was thankful that bit of information was out, so he wouldn’t have to explain it to the others.

“I partied with your mother, for a time,” said Priya. “Fearsome woman. Tough as nails.”

Alfric frowned. “When were you with her?”

“Early in her career,” said Priya, waving a hand. “We went our separate ways. I’d had a falling out with Fossy, if you know him.”

That was, to Alfric, Uncle Fossy, a bear of a man who often showed up to family dinners. “I do,” he said.

“I’m retired now, obviously,” said Priya. “But in my time, I ran two thousand dungeons.”

That gave Alfric pause. “That’s a good record.”

“A good record?” she asked. She gave him an incredulous laugh. “There are perhaps twenty people of my generation who have run more.”

Alfric looked around the room, trying to re-evaluate. He’d been to a few League houses over the years, as one of those things done as part of a field trip in the Junior League, and this one had its own eccentricities, but didn’t seem like it was all that much out of the ordinary.

“I don’t live here,” said Priya, sighing. “Though I do spend quite a bit of time here, and I’ve built up a nook.” She gestured to one of the chairs by the fireplace, where there were books on a shelf and a table with snacks. “I handle some of the administration across all of Greater Plenarch, but this is my favorite haunt. For my home, I own a demiplane.”

Alfric nodded. “A heavy investment.”

Priya laughed again. “You have a way of understating things.” The tea kettle began to whistle, and Priya went over to pull it off the flaming axe, which she touched on the side and put out. The kettle was then brought over to the kitchenette area, and she brought four ceramic cups down from somewhere and set them on the counter, along with a small pot of honey. “I’ll make the tea and then, yes, to more serious matters.” She dropped a ready-made sachet from one of a dozen tins into the kettle, then swirled the water inside around for a bit. “So, Alfric, you have business to conduct.”

“Yes ma’am,” said Alfric.

“You want official recognition of your dungeons in preparation for asking me for a second level key, is that right?” asked Priya.

“No,” said Alfric. “I’m not intending to take a key until we’ve exhausted all of the lower dungeons in the area. I’ve been told that it’s better to get things in when you have a chance, rather than attempting to get credit for ten or twenty at once. Further, we were in the area, and I wanted any information you had on the surrounding dungeons. I already have a key from Dondrian and special dispensation for party formation and expedition from my time in the Junior League. I don’t think there’s anything that we ‘need’ from you at the moment, and probably not for another few weeks, or …” He looked at Verity. “Months.”

“Well, good to know,” said Priya. “Better not to rush things. You have a good party composition,” this she’d have known from a letter he’d sent, “And from the information I’ve gotten back from Dondrian, a good pedigree, if a bit of trouble in the management aspects.”

Alfric nodded. He didn’t like his ‘pedigree’ following him, but he could accept responsibility for how the parties he’d tried to form had fallen apart. “I’m hoping there won’t be any problems?”

“Nothing that I can see,” said Priya. “I’d like to talk to each of you before you get the second key, but I don’t expect there will be any issue. My role here is mostly to stop those who haven’t done the slightest preparation, and to serve as a line of communication. I don’t think we’ll have any issues.”

“There’s another party operating here,” said Alfric. “Lola.” He watched her eyes for recognition and saw that the name was familiar. “There’s some bad blood between us, I should warn you.”

“Unless it happens in the dungeons, which is impossible, or it happens to the dungeons, which seems unlikely, it doesn’t concern me,” said Priya with a shrug. “I suppose you might have a fight in the League house, but I’m hoping you know better.”

“Has she asked about me?” asked Alfric.

“No,” said Priya. “But she did go looking through the dungeon reports, and leafed through them like she was trying to find something. You are welcome to submit what reports you have.”

Alfric hesitated. If Lola was in Liberfell, there was nothing to prevent her from coming back here and looking through the dungeon reports again. He didn’t want her reading them, though in the long term, it couldn’t be helped.

“Perhaps I’ll hold onto them for the time being,” said Alfric. “If I could read what you have?”

“Certainly,” said Priya. “They’re public, open to anyone. They are kept in a magical tome, which needs to be kept on site.”

“Are they staying here?” asked Verity. “Lola’s group?”

“They’ve taken a name, Vertex,” said Priya.

“Ugh,” said Verity, making a face.

Alfric stayed silent. He had liked the name when he’d picked it, but hearing it out loud, it did sound a bit … off.

“Well, they can’t all be winners,” said Priya. “I suppose if you had a name, you’d have declared it already?”

“We can come up with one now,” said Hannah.

“No,” said Alfric. “Mizuki would never forgive us if we did. And if we’re going to have a name, then we can take our time on it, especially since we’ll be having downtime later anyway.”

“Well, I’ll start thinkin’,” said Hannah. “Somethin’ to do with animals?” Alfric gave her a brief shake of the head before she could mention that Isra was a druid. It was better to play that close to the vest for as long as possible, which given Lola, probably wasn’t all that long.

“We can save it for later,” said Alfric. “I’ll get on those reports. We were planning to spiral out from Pucklechurch, and I need to check whether that’s sensible.”

“But why a spiral?” asked Verity.

“Well,” said Alfric. “In theory, it makes the most sense to do adjacent hexes in order to minimize travel time. The original plan called for making a base in the middle of nowhere, then doing dungeons in roughly a spiral, which would mean there’s always only six miles of travel between dungeons.”

“Assuming a straight line seems unwise,” said Priya.

“Approximately six miles,” said Alfric. “But it seems pretty clear that we’re not doing it that way, so … sorry, just going by the old plan, rather than the new one.” He wanted to go look at the reports, but the conversation was feeling like molasses, the kind that was nearly impossible to leave without rudeness.

“The new one where we don’t push ourselves too hard?” asked Verity.

“Yes,” nodded Alfric. “Besides, between the wardrobe and the dagger, there’s not as much benefit to a spiral pattern.”

“I’ll grab the book that has the reports,” Priya finally said. “If you’re looking for the ones that Vertex submitted, they’ll be the most recent ones for Traeg’s Knob and Pate Knob.”

“Just those two?” asked Alfric. She kept saying ‘Vertex’ rather than ‘The Vertex’, and he wondered whether she was making a mistake, or if they’d dropped the article from the name.

“Just those, in the week they’ve been here,” said Priya. “They might have done more and not put in reports. There’s no need to write a report.”

“The League gives special allowances for advancement, with reports as one of the metrics,” said Alfric.

Priya blinked at him. “Does it?”

“It was offered as an incentive five years ago,” said Alfric. It seemed difficult to imagine that she didn’t know this, but if she was a retired or semi-retired adventurer who had landed in this position by virtue of her skill in a dungeon … well, her core competence was probably not in administration. “From what I understand, report rates had been abysmal, and they thought it would be better for everyone if they had more of them.”

Priya shook her head. “Idiocy. Leverist idiocy.”

“If the incentive is there, I’m going to do it,” said Alfric.

“They should be instilling values in the Junior League,” said Priya. “We’re all supposed to be in this together, helping each other because it makes the world a better place for us all. And instead, we have the leverists putting in one of their levers and of course the result is a spate of low-quality reports put in only because people are hoping to get something from it.” She waved a hand, perhaps sensing that Alfric wasn’t a receptive audience for a rant against the leverists. She picked up a big book from back in the recesses of the open room, then returned to them. “It’s not to leave the premises, so you’ll have to read it here. It’s an entad. You can add your own reports, and they’ll become a part of it. The index at the start updates itself.”

Alfric nodded and moved over to the book. It was larger than the party’s storage book, with a metal frame around the outside that seemed like it was adding quite a bit of undue weight. He placed it on the table next to the kitchenette and opened the cover, which showed him the index.

“A wortier worked on this?” asked Alfric. He was looking at the circles at the top of the index page. “A very, very skilled wortier?”

“Yes,” said Priya. She’d come over to look at the book with him. “I came out of the dungeoneering game with rather a lot of money, and I spent some of it here. The book itself is nothing special, it just eats up the dungeon reports, corrects some spelling, and makes it all in the same font.” She leaned past Alfric and pressed one of the circles, the one labeled ‘Places’, and the index rearranged itself, listing out the roughly hundred hexes in this region of the Greater Plenarch province. But it wasn’t just the index that was rearranging, because the page numbers had changed as well. The entire book had been rearranged by placing a thumb against the circle.

“I’ll leave you to it,” said Priya. “I’m past my normal time here, you were lucky to catch me when you did. If you ever need anything, at least between sunup and sundown, there’s a bell you can ring, there on the mantle.” She pointed, and Alfric saw a brass bell he hadn’t noticed before. “I don’t always drop what I’m doing to help out, but I do come eventually, in a half hour to an hour. Make sure you have someone here. If that bell gets rung and there’s no one to meet me, I will find out who rang it, and they will wish they’d had a bit more courtesy. It was nice to meet you. Give your mother my love the next time you see her.”

“I will,” said Alfric. He wondered whether his mother knew that an old friend was working here, and decided that she probably had known. Both his parents had deep connections. And given that this woman ‘just happened’ to be here when she did administration for seven regions of the province, well, Alfric wouldn’t be terribly surprised if this meeting was because of a favor changing hands. Not help, per se, but something like it.

Priya disappeared with a puff of air, and Alfric looked at the book for a moment, then pressed the circle that marked ‘Reporter’. The list changed again, this time growing much longer, bleeding onto the next page. It didn’t take Alfric all that long to find Lola’s name, and he flipped to the start of her entries.

“Goin’ right to it?” asked Hannah. “No pretense of lookin’ elsewhere?”

“No,” said Alfric. “In theory, they could all walk through that door at any moment. And if Lola submitted reports already, my guess is that she did it with the intention that I would read them.”

“Why are you reading them if you don’t want to talk to her or any of them?” asked Verity. “It seems to me like you want a clean break.”

Alfric paused and thought about that. “They were my party,” he said. “They were … what I had wanted, what I’d thought I had. I want to see how they’re doing. I want to know.”

“You want to know whether your plan would have worked?” asked Hannah.

“I guess,” said Alfric. He looked down at the page. The words weren’t rendered in Lola’s handwriting, but as he started reading, he could tell that it was her voice.

“We’ll leave you to it,” said Hannah with a sigh. “Verity, would you like to tour this place?”

“Of course,” said Verity. “It will be interesting to see how normal people do things.”

Alfric ignored them. He was already engrossed.

Chapter 37 - Cartier

The prospect of a day with nothing going on had, at first, seemed like it would be nice and pleasant, a chance to work in the garden, perhaps, or laze about once the ritual practice was finished, but then, in the morning, the rain clouds had begun to hang heavy in the sky. Verity woke up too late to see the party off, but there was a note and a cold breakfast in the chiller for her, thoughtfully left by Mizuki, who seemed to really be going out of her way to be a good host. Verity didn’t normally eat breakfast, but she had a feeling that was going to change if they kept pushing it on her. She had no strong aversion to breakfast, nor affection for the Dondrian way, she just woke late enough that it seemed sensible to wait until lunch.

<Isra, is it going to rain today?> asked Verity as she sipped a cup of hot tea and ate a cold hard-boiled egg.

<I moved the clouds up so they’ll sweep across us,> said Isra. <I wanted to give them good weather for moving the wardrobe. It should be done by fourth bell. The plants need the rain.>

<Okay, thank you,> said Verity. She tapped her foot for a bit and thought about what to do with herself. There was enough time to get to the heart of Pucklechurch, but once there, it would probably start to drizzle, and Verity wasn’t all that sure she wanted to be around people all day. She had half a mind to see whether Isra wanted to do something together, but Isra was used to being alone, and the only thing for them to do was in the garden, which would mean rearranging the weather. Verity didn’t want to impose, and Isra was right, the plants did need it.

She settled in for some music practice instead, though wasn’t feeling particularly creative, and went to old songs instead of new ones, classic pieces that she’d played in concert halls and at the occasional private party. Most of them were wordless, or meant to be accompanied by more vocalization than she would be able to give them. Without her concert lute, the sound seemed small, though the living room of the house had surprisingly good acoustics.

She thought about the next dungeon, and the one after that. The stress and pressure of dungeons was manageable, especially since everyone seemed to be understanding about wanting to relax and take it slow. Mizuki was an ally in that, but even Alfric, for all he was champing at the bit, seemed to take most of his actual pleasure from oddball things like hauling a huge wardrobe up a hill. He hadn’t made it difficult for her. Perhaps he would, in the future, but Verity somewhat doubted it. He was nice. The lies he’d told were small and understandable. She actually somewhat liked him.

The rain started while she was in the middle of playing, and the change in humidity made the strings feel sluggish and slow. She stopped and put her lute away, feeling somewhat frustrated. She’d be playing again at the Fig and Gristle later in the night anyhow. It seemed like Cynthia was going to take a long time in finding a new bard, though that wasn’t terribly surprising. Verity had been playing for not much more than room and board, and someone who took her spot would probably not come from in town, they would come from ads posted far away, presumably with a more favorable arrangement.

There was nothing to do in the house as it rained. There were a number of books, including those brought over by Hannah. It seemed that Hannah had a particular affection for romances involving exclusively men, which wasn’t in the slightest what Verity had an interest in reading, especially as they seemed to be soaked in maleness. Mizuki had two books from the local library, both of which seemed to be overdue and unread, one a dense history of a man named Alcaran, the other a light adventure story. Neither held any particular interest for Verity.

Eventually, and somewhat despite herself, Verity began to snoop. She consoled herself that this wasn’t exactly snooping, given that she lived in the house, and she kept away from the bedrooms, where people might be keeping things that they really did want kept secret. But she snooped all the same, going down into the basement, looking around in the kitchen but making sure not to put anything out of place, taking stock of the wine cellar, and so on. She looked at the places where things had been, holes in the wall where a nail might have once held up a picture. There were no great revelations from this exercise, only a better sense of the history of the building, which seemed to have accumulated quite a bit of age, despite not being all that old.

She did, however, find a quite nice umbrella, and on a whim, or perhaps because she was bored, she decided that she was going to venture out into the rain.

Verity did like the rain, but rain was better from the inside with a hot cup of tea, listening to the raindrops beat a staccato on the roof. There was something nice about the smell though, and even the wetness in the air. It brought a vibrancy to the plants, a color that they didn’t normally have in the sun.

The walk took her into Pucklechurch, and from there it was a question of where to go next. It wasn’t a market day, the taverns held no appeal given that Verity still technically worked at one, and there was nothing she wanted to shop for, though she had brought her rings. That left the temple, for a bit of prayer, never her favorite thing, or trying to get out of the rain by finding some kind of activity to take part in. On rainy days in Pucklechurch, people did some extra baking, the quilting circle gathered, and the woodworking space got crowded with amateurs using the communal equipment. Verity idly wondered whether there was some kind of gardening group in Pucklechurch, but if there were, it seemed unlikely that they were meeting on a rainy day. Besides, while it was exciting to be back in a garden again, she was worried that the Pucklechurch Gardening Society, or whatever it might be called, would have all the same problems as the group she’d belonged to in Dondrian.

Verity was saved from having to make a choice when she saw the town cartier, who she ostensibly had some business with.

Xy Longstride wasn’t, in a technical sense, the ‘town’ cartier, but she did service Pucklechurch, bringing in mail and goods from elsewhere, along with larger packages on occasion. She was a sprightly girl, not too much older than Verity, and yes, Verity did have some interest. Xy had a kind of rough and tumble way about her, and they hadn’t interacted all that much, aside from a few pleasantries at the Fig and Gristle. The timings had been a little bit suspect in the past few weeks, made mostly in the evenings, when Verity was working. Xy had even stopped by for dinner a few times and listened to Verity play, but if the attraction was mutual, Xy had never acted on it.

Verity didn’t really understand girls. She’d had one brief flirtation at the conservatory that went nowhere, and felt like it might have been imagined, save for the memory of a kiss being burned into her brain. The Church of Garos quoted one in ten women being interested in women, but that left nine in ten of them decidedly not, and it sometimes felt, to Verity, like finding a needle in a haystack. There were exceptions, of course, obvious signals like wearing a pin of Garos, but the number of girls who wore such a pin seemed to be far less than one in ten.

Xy wasn’t wearing such a pin, but there were other signals, like a particular haircut that seemed to be universally worn by that kind of woman, and an outfit that was slightly boyish, overalls that stopped just below the knees. She was the kind of girl with a grin almost permanently plastered on her face, eager and ready for anything. Xy was the sort of girl who was like catnip to Verity, in the sense that around such a girl, Verity got nervous and started doing things that didn’t make a lot of sense.

“Hi!” said Verity as she came over to Xy. The cartier was standing out in the rain eyeing a package.

“Hi Verity,” said Xy. The rain didn’t seem to be touching her: it was some kind of entad, Verity was pretty sure, but it was hard to see what was happening to the water as it fell. “I heard you joined a party to go raid dungeons?”

“Oh, right!” said Verity. Her voice felt like it was an octave too high. “Yes, a week ago. It’s really been pretty great.” There were too many superlatives, but it was the kind of problem that became apparent only once the words were out of her mouth, impossible to correct in the moment.

“I fought some monsters,” said Xy, nodding. She looked at Verity, taking her eyes off the package for the first time. “Ten dungeons, which is kind of a lot. It’s how I got this thing.” She pointed to a flask that hung on her hip. Verity had never seen it before. “Keeps me dry, but needs to be emptied every ten minutes or so when it’s raining, which is a pain when I’m on the move.”

“Yeah,” said Verity. She was nodding too much. “Exactly.”

“So you’re done at the Fig and Gristle?” asked Xy, who seemed to have abandoned whatever she’d been in the process of. “Aww. I’ll miss your music.”

“Well, I won’t be done done,” said Verity. “But I’m going to get replaced, and no one is clamoring for an encore. So.”

“Are you sure they’re not clamoring?” asked Xy. She smiled at Verity and cupped a hand to her ear. “I, for one, hear it. People like your music. I like your music.”

“Thanks!” chirped Verity. “But we might actually see some of each other, since there’s some dungeon work.”

“A counterparty?” asked Xy. “Awesome. Yeah, I’m in, totally. You have some way of contacting me?”

“Um,” said Verity, who was very quickly realizing that she was a bit out of her depth, having only half-listened to Alfric, or only half been instructed, she didn’t know which. “I don’t think we have anything yet. We’re going like once a week, so when you’re in Pucklechurch, I guess we can leave you a note at the mailbox?”

“Nah, we’ll figure something better out,” said Xy. “I’ve always wanted to be a part of a counterparty. Do you want me for transporting you, or the stuff?”

“Um, both?” said Verity. “Sorry, someone else should have done this, I’m not really a part of the management end.”

“It’s cool,” shrugged Xy. “We know each other, kind of. Tell you what, give me a week or so to get things in order, then I should be able to divert for you. I do charge, but I’ll take my payment in cut-rate entads if that’s alright with you, the stuff that’s barely more than a henling.”

“I’ll talk to Alfric,” said Verity. “He’s our party leader, he’s super great.” She felt the conversation skip a beat. “Our sorcerer, Mizuki, got a spoon that can turn into almost any spoon you can think of.”

“Yes!” said Xy. “That’s absolutely the kind of thing I would love to have. Of course, half the fun is just playing around with them, so I guess I’ll talk to your guy and see if I can do a bit of that too.”

“Oh, Alfric isn’t,” said Verity. “He’s not really my guy. Just a party leader.” This felt, in immediate retrospect, like an inane and stupid thing to say. “But yeah, you should talk to him, we’re all living in a big house down the lane, though he and most of the others are moving a big wardrobe over from Traeg’s Knob.”

“Cool,” said Xy, nodding. “Well leave me a note at the mailbox for next time I’m in town, and I’ll figure out where to go from there, shouldn’t be long before I’m back, and I’m definitely interested in being a counterparty, especially if the pay is good.” She looked down at the package at her feet. “I’ve got to get this done, nice talking to you, as always.”

“Yeah, you too!” said Verity. For a moment she stood there awkwardly, but having nothing better to do, she moved off down the street like she, too, had business to attend to.

Verity was not good at flirting. She also wasn’t good at sending out the right kind of signals, or picking them up from other people. In theory, this was something that she should talk to Hannah about, because Hannah, by her position as a cleric of Garos, should know all about it, but Verity felt some embarrassment on that score. She wondered whether things had gone as poorly with Xy as it felt like they’d gone. The catnip effect had felt particularly strong. Verity couldn’t help but remember her cat drooling heavily next to a sprig of catnip it had torn apart.

It was also possible that Verity had a faulty reading on Xy, and that Xy simply wasn’t interested in women in that way. The same thing had happened with Mizuki. That first night, when they’d come back from the dungeon, Verity had thought there were signals, or flirtation, or something like it. Mizuki had offered to make food, then offered to top off her wine, then offered her a room, and when Verity had laid down on the bed … well, she had thought that Mizuki was going to come over and at least lay down with her, and from there it wouldn’t have been long until they were kissing. Verity had mentally prepared herself for it. She was ready. Eager, even. But the moment had passed, and Mizuki seemed unaware that it had even been a moment, which meant that maybe it had all just been in Verity’s head.

The same had happened with Isra, when they’d shared a bed together. It had felt like perhaps there was something there, some signals getting exchanged, but Isra hadn’t made a move, and Verity hadn’t wanted to make a move in case it was just another misreading, and also because she was a coward when it came to love. So the moment, if it had been a moment, had passed. Verity was left to wonder whether she’d been imagining things. She had been rather sleepy.

Verity had sat in the pews with her family and listened to enough sermons from clerics of Garos to know the common wisdom: just ask. Of course, asking might indicate to the other person that you were interested in them, and that could be awkward, but it was better than dying alone. The clerics never said that, but it seemed to be the gist of things. And obviously there was a lesson there for everyone, because the same problems plagued everyone, all mankind. That was a common refrain of the sermons of Garos.

“Parents think that they know the inner lives of their children,” the cleric had said on one of those days. “When they are young, this might be true, because their inner lives are simple, if no less rich. But when they grow older, parents have a tendency to think they know everything their child is going through. They think they know the thoughts that go through the heads of their children. And sometimes, I’m afraid to say, our understanding of our children turns out to be wrong. The assumptions we’ve made about what they’ve been thinking about, and what they’ve been up to, and how they feel, is not what we’d wished or hoped, and sometimes, our thoughts do not align, whether we feel anything about that misalignment or not. It can hurt, to have this idea of someone close to you, and to find out that it was an illusion you’d built up in your mind. We must, nevertheless, soldier on. If you find yourself faced with someone who is not as you’d expected them to be, you must readjust your perception of them, reorient, and not allow it to affect you overmuch.”

Verity’s mother had been there, at that sermon, and seemed to take the lesson as it applied to the fellowship of Garos.

“We have the Brumal Ball coming up, and I’d like for you to look your best,” said Verity’s mother as she fussed over a dress-in-the-making. The tailor was one of those obsequious cowards who showed deference to every little request, and it felt like the little bows had been moved three times. “There are a number of eligible bachelors there, and it’s none too early to be thinking about courting.”

“I’m not interested in the bachelors,” said Verity.

“Well, I know you’re only fifteen, but you’re a woman now, and it can take some time for a match to be found, so better to start early. You’ll not get married until perhaps twenty, that gives you five years to find someone, and if you comport yourself well, we can ensure it’s a good match.” She was playing with the fabric, trying to figure out where the darts would go to best emphasize the bust. Verity was, through this process, little more than a mannequin.

“I’m not interested in being with a man at all,” said Verity. Her heart was in her throat. What was she worried about? A bad reaction, perhaps. Her mother had plans for her, and in the past, anything that interfered with those plans was cause for both alarm and recriminations.

“Oh,” her mother had said. “Well, bachelorette then.” There was a brief pause. “A smaller pool to draw from, but let me see, the Elthfield girl would be a good match, or the Kyllip girl. Verity, you should have told me sooner, I’ll have to put out feelers and make some new lists.”

And while Verity was occasionally chided for not having told her mother sooner, that was as much as was ever said about it. The plan required some reorientation, but nothing had substantially changed. Her father hadn’t even spoken to her about it, not that she’d necessarily wanted him to.

It was just everything else her parents had a problem with. The idea that Verity could say “oh, I’m not that interested in playing so much music” was inconceivable, and reckoned to be a mistake, or an act of rebelliousness. Doing something else with her life, like seeing the world, or playing in a tavern, or even something acceptably traditional like being a gardener, was simply dismissed out of hand. She had tried, at one point, arguing doctrine with them, letting the cleric’s words come out of her mouth, but her parents had not listened, and there seemed to be no way to make them listen.

She was going to have to have Alfric send them a letter soon. They’d sat down to do it, but there were relatively few places in the house that were private, and none of them had a desk to write at. The bigger issue was that Verity didn’t know quite what to say, and didn’t feel fully comfortable sharing as much as she probably needed to share with Alfric. That, writing the letter, was something she should have been doing on a rainy day when there was nothing pressing, but it was also something she wanted to put off for as long as possible. If she sent a letter to her parents, or had Alfric send one with information about her, there was a decent chance that they would try to follow up, or worse, come to Pucklechurch. She wasn’t about to put that past her mother, and the thought made her nauseous.

She took a moment to clear her mind as she went about her aimless walk through Pucklechurch. The rain had let up a bit, becoming just a gentle drizzle, and looked like it would move more toward being a mist.

Verity turned her mind to the third dungeon. Dungeoneering was a bit like being a professional musician, in a sense, particularly in terms of both training and always looking forward to the next gig. ‘Playing’ in a group as well, when she thought about it, though that metaphor was a bit strained. The goal for Verity was to execute better, and that seemed to involve the magical side of musicality, which she had only reached the bottom rungs of.

Progressive melodies were the next obvious step, but easier, and perhaps more pressing, were party melodies. The magic of a party made everyone just a bit the same, melding their essence in chiefly magical ways, and if you knew the right techniques, you could draw on that enforced sameness. Bardic magic worked with what was there, but what was there, for a party, meant the entire party. Properly constructed, a party melody could multiply Alfric’s strength not just by his own strength, but by the strength of the entire party. Admittedly, he was the strongest of them by a wide margin, but their combined strength had to be at least double. The same went for almost everything else, though the uniqueness of their individual talents did them little favor.

And beyond that, there were more complicated party melodies, those that took the confusion of personhood to a greater extreme. Some entads worked only for a specific person, but in a party situation, it was possible to blur that line a bit. And because the party link persisted no matter the distance between members, it was also possible to sing a song that would affect someone on the other side of the world. The same was true for guilds, but to a much lesser extent, and it was unheard of for a bard to be able to perform a proper guild melody before the age of thirty. A bard could heighten that confusion, though it was a matter of degree, and there were some obvious problems with attempting to maintain complex melodies, since at a certain point, trade-offs had to be considered.

So far, there seemed to not be all that much use for that kind of melding. Isra’s bow could probably be confused into working for someone else, but there was no reason to do that. Alfric’s dagger could, perhaps, take the entire team, but they already had a workaround for it. There was probably something on the horizon though, some entad that they would find in the next five dungeons, or the next ten, or however many they ended up doing.

Verity was slowly starting to come around to the idea that this might simply be what she did with a fair chunk of her life. Aside from the very end, the second dungeon had gone swimmingly. There was quite a bit to like about bardic music in a dungeon, as opposed to in an auditorium. In the dungeon, she was given free reign, and if anyone had been second-guessing her, they had wisely kept their comments to themselves. There was room to experiment with the magic, to try new things that might not entirely work.

Verity didn’t have her lute with her, but she began to make her way back to the house, and sang herself a song as she did. It would have been easier with so-called standard lyrics, but she couldn’t resist the urge to make up her own.

“She runs to the leylines, and tacks to the wind, she screams through the forests, and I wish we were twinned,” Verity sang. “I’d strip off her clothes, and look at her bare, we’d tongue each other, and not have a care.” It was too lewd, and it felt like ‘tongue’ was both awkward and had too few syllables. Verity did like a good cheat, but ‘tuh-ung’ felt awful to say. ‘Finger’ had the right number of syllables, but it was so lewd that even just thinking it in her own mind left Verity blushing, let alone saying it out loud. She knew a fair number of bawdy songs, but there seemed to be relatively few of them about women, and she’d never actually performed one for an audience.

“Butterfly feeling, your touch is so healing,” Verity sang. But that felt too much like it might be about a cleric, and while Verity probably would have accepted a proposition from Hannah, they weren’t exactly on the same wavelength, or at least it didn’t feel like it. Of course, Verity had absolutely no idea what she was doing when it came to romance. She didn’t know how to give off signals, or to read signals. “My love I conceal, can’t wait to reveal.”

The bardic melody depended, in part, on holding the song in your head, and spinning up new lyrics definitely made things much harder. Still, it felt like she was getting to a party melody, though a simple one, increasing her own strength as though she were as strong as the five of them put together.

“Pinkish-red lips, gentle curved hips, tied-back blonde hair, are you aware, of the nervousness running, through my spine and my veins? Do you think of my heart, and what it contains?” It was all rubbish, but it was a nice kind of rubbish at least, free and honest, found in the moment.

“Who is that song about?” asked a familiar voice from behind her.

“Eep,” said Verity, turning around. Xy was standing there in what remained of the rain, which was disappearing before it could touch her. “No one.”

“No one, but blonde?” asked Xy, grinning. Her blonde hair was tied back. “Sorry, didn’t mean to sneak up on you, but I thought I would check out the house before I left, so I knew where it was.”

“You heard all that?” asked Verity. She felt mortified, and was incredibly glad that the ‘finger’ line hadn’t been said out loud.

“Most of it, I think,” said Xy. “I was hoping you’d hear me, but the rain covers up a lot of sound. Sorry, I didn’t mean to listen in, if it was … private.” She bit her lip, which did a bad job of hiding her smile.

“No, um,” said Verity. “I was … I thought you weren’t interested. In me.”

“Yeah?” asked Xy.

“And I guess I’m still not sure,” said Verity. She was fidgeting with her umbrella. She felt a bit useless.

Xy laughed. It was a high, pretty laugh. “Do you like to be teased?”

“Um,” said Verity. “Teased?”

“Some people don’t,” said Xy. She was still giving her winning smile. “I wouldn’t want to tease you, if it was just making you uncomfortable.”

“I don’t think I do like being teased,” said Verity.

“Then I won’t tease,” said Xy. “Yes, I’m interested, depending on what you’re interested in. I don’t come into Pucklechurch that often, usually every few days, and my schedule is a bit tight, but we could go on a date, and see how we get on together. Longer than that … it would be your first time?”

“Yes,” said Verity. “More or less.” She was, thankfully, able to stop herself from launching into a story about the conservatory. “Sorry if it’s … obvious.”

“There are probably some things for you to learn,” said Xy, nodding. “And I am more than happy to teach you.” She took a step forward, and Verity felt herself sway. “I’m sorry I don’t have the time now. But now that I know you’re interested, and you know I’m interested, the next time I come to Pucklechurch, we’ll have a good time together.”

Verity nodded. “I’m looking forward to it,” she managed.

Xy grinned, then took off the other way, moving with a cartier’s speed. Verity had no idea where the nearest leyline was, but cartiers were always moving toward one or the other of them, and Xy ran fast, sixty-miles-an-hour, out of view in a heartbeat.

Verity was left wondering whether this was what swooning was like. She was blushing, that certainly couldn’t be helped, and the cool of the rain felt good against her hot skin. That Xy didn’t seem to be too interested in anything long term, that she had put in qualifiers, all that did nothing to reduce Verity’s warm feelings.

When she got back to the house, she laid in one of the chairs, smiling and soaking in it.

Chapter 38 - Jockey

“You know,” said Hannah as Alfric attached the floatstones to the wardrobe, “It’s quite likely that in another dungeon or two, we’ll have somethin’ that makes this wardrobe useless.”

“You’re saying this is probably pointless?” asked Alfric. He grunted slightly as he strapped the floatstones down. They were using chains, with cloth padding so as not to scratch the wood.

“I’m sayin’ that I’m preparin’ myself for all this work bein’ for nothin’,” said Hannah.

“It wouldn’t be for nothin’,” said Alfric. He glanced at her to see how she’d taken the tease about her accent, and she grinned at him. He’d done a terrible job. “We’ll still have the entad back in Pucklechurch, and if we don’t need it, we can sell it. Besides, I don’t want to have, in the back of my mind, some worry about whether someone is going to steal this.” Thankfully, they had not. Alfric had seemed unreasonably worried about it, especially after knowing Lola was in the area, but it was sitting right where he’d left it, without a scratch, still totally functional.

“No one is going to steal it,” said Mizuki. She rolled her eyes. “Besides, if someone stole it, there would be like, eight possible options. It would be easy to track down.”

“If someone has a storage entad, they could just hide it away,” said Alfric. “In fact, that’s the most likely way that it would get stolen.”

“So there’s also a chance that the next dungeon we do, we’d get one of those for ourselves, and make this whole wardrobe moving thing pointless?” asked Mizuki.

“Well,” said Alfric. “Yes. But traditionally speaking, I would expect a third storage entad to come with some restrictions, and the wardrobe is large and unwieldy, likely to hit several different limits on weight, size, or something else.”

He stepped back to look at his work. The floatstones seemed to be secure. He tugged at the chains, making sure that they would hold. Hannah did too, just to double check his work, which he seemed to approve of.

“The big problem with floatstones is that there’s no way to stop them from floating,” he said. “These two provide two hundred pounds of lift, which means that if you want them to not go floating off, you need them to have two hundred pounds of ballast, preferably more.”

“Which is just about the only use for the loadstones, ay,” said Hannah.

Alfric took the two of them, each smaller than a dinner plate but fifty pounds a piece, and put them into the book, which he’d had Mizuki bring when she teleported to them using the knife. Loadstones were practically worthless, but he needed to bring them back to Besc, and that meant carrying around the book, which meant fifty pounds of extra weight. Alfric was eager for another storage entad, and there had been quite a bit of discussion about limitations and methods the night before, all leading up to this. Mizuki had come in later, leaving Hannah and Alfric to walk together, which had passed mostly with idle conversation. Perhaps Hannah should have taken the opportunity to talk about a few sensitive matters with him, but it didn’t seem like he would have taken it in the spirit it was intended.

“So if you screwed this up, the wardrobe would go floating into the sky?” asked Mizuki.

“And we’d never see it again,” said Alfric. “Unless you could fly after it, I guess.”

“It’s not, unfortunately, something I can do on demand,” said Mizuki.

“You can fly, Mizuki?” asked Hannah.

“Yeah, I’ll show you tomorrow,” said Mizuki. “Or later today, if we get back in time, which we should.”

“I’ve always wanted to fly,” said Hannah, nodding. “It’s a bit useless in most dungeons, but if there’s somethin’ for fun that I’d want, it would be some way to soar through the air.”

There was an older tract on Garos that Hannah had once read, which posited that people walked along the ground by the will of Garos, since the ground defined a symmetry between the ground and the sky. It was the sort of spurious writing that seemed to have filled the library in the seminary, with many pages devoted to all the ways in which this metaphor worked and did not work, and where the dichotomy between ground and sky might be explained by other gods. Hannah had no problem at all with thinking of the ground and sky as being counterparts to one another, it was the kind of exercise that she liked, but the writer hadn’t seemed to have been of the opinion that he was having a flight of fancy, he was much more making grand statements about the gods and how they had made the world. It wasn’t even settled whether or not the gods had made the world, and though Hannah was of the opinion they had, it rankled when she saw someone simply take it as fact without adding a whole host of caveats.

A more interesting symmetry, in her opinion, was between the sea and sky, where you could transpose birds to fish and vice versa, and that was the kind of thing that seemed ripe for a good prayer session. Hannah had never particularly wanted to swim in the ocean though, not like she wanted to fly through the sky.

She refrained from saying any of this out loud. The laity tended to accept religious talk and the quotation of scripture, but there were limits, and Alfric was likely to be spotty on the finer points of theology, to say nothing of Mizuki.

“Okay,” said Alfric. “Seems like with the book as additional ballast, this whole assembly will only be about twenty pounds. I think we’re ready to go.” These were approximate guesses, and based on their disagreement about the wardrobe’s actual weight, Hannah mentally revised his estimate upward.

They set off out of the room they’d been in, with Alfric and Hannah maneuvering the wardrobe. It only weighed thirty pounds or so, but it was bulky, and beyond that, it still had mass to it, meaning that it was slow to get moving and then once moving, slow to stop. The trip back was going to be a long six miles, though Hannah was fairly confident that they would get into the swing of things.

“Better for me to be in the front,” said Alfric once they were out. “That way if it runs someone over, it’ll be me, and hopefully you can heal me up.”

“Always willin’ to take a hit, that’s what I like about you,” said Hannah.

“I can think of lots of things I’d rather be liked for,” said Alfric.

“No, she’s right,” said Mizuki. “It’s very fetching, how you offer to get stabbed for people.”

“You know what, I’ll take it,” said Alfric, grinning at her. “And if you ever need someone to get stabbed, I guess I’m your guy.”

“Have you been stabbed before?” asked Hannah.

“Oh, many many times,” said Alfric. “My father gave me a lot of training with clerics on hand to heal me. It was pretty enviable, I feel. Besides, I’m a chrononaut, so there are experiences possible for me that aren’t possible for someone else. I’ve been stabbed, burnt, decapitated, strangled, you name it.”

“Well that’s horrible,” said Mizuki.

“I wasn’t pushed into it,” said Alfric. “My parents offered, and I said yes.” He shrugged. “In their opinion, it was better to know what trauma felt like in a safe, controlled environment before having to experience it in a dungeon, and I agreed. Still do, actually. If the first time I ever got burnt was while my life was on the line, I’d be far less likely to handle it well.”

“Yeah, I would just … not do that,” said Mizuki. “But also, isn’t your life never on the line?”

Alfric sighed. “It is, and it isn’t,” said Alfric. “I really, really need to drill into your head that resets are not ‘free’ and that these things still happen, for me. People think about chrononauts as though … well, as though you’re at a dinner party and make a joke that lands poorly, so you get to try it over. That’s not how it is at all though. You have to go back, wake up, do everything else you did that day, run errands, have conversations, do chores, and then finally, twelve hours later, you get back to the dinner party, and you have to explain that it’s your second time through, or if you don’t, you have to hope that you’re a good enough liar that you can sit through the same set of stories with only minor variations and remember not to mention anything you shouldn’t have knowledge of.”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “Bein’ a chrononaut sounds like more trouble than it’s worth.” Her voice was dripping with sarcasm.

“Well,” said Alfric. “It’s just … not what people think. That’s all I was trying to say.”

“I get it,” said Mizuki. “But Hannah’s got a point, that complaining about having a really really great power is a bit, um.”

“Myopic?” asked Alfric.

“On what planet is that the word I was searching for?” asked Mizuki. “I have no idea what that even means.”

“It means your eyes don’t work right,” said Hannah. “Nearsighted.”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki, frowning. “I guess that fits.”

“Because I’m not looking at the bigger picture,” said Alfric. “And I do understand that. Sorry. I’ll try to complain less.”

“Well I don’t know I want that,” said Hannah with a sigh. Most of this conversation was conducted toward the back of his head as they went down the road. “It’s somethin’ important to you, and obviously there are some pent up feelin’s about it, ay? So we want you to share, I’d think, but also to realize that it is a gift you’ve got.”

“It’s mostly a safety net,” said Alfric. “When I think about the benefits, it’s in the context of not needing to worry about worst case scenarios, or sometimes, being able to take more days off. I think about ninety percent of my problems would go away if people had the right perspective on it.”

“Same with sorcs,” said Mizuki. “If people could understand that most of the bad stuff we do was just chasing something in the aether, we’d be a lot better off.”

“You did come into the temple explodin’ things,” said Hannah.

“I created explosions,” said Mizuki. “That’s very different from exploding things.”

“And why did you do this?” asked Alfric.

“There were energies there,” said Mizuki, shrugging. “I thought that I might be able to make a construct.”

“Like a wizard?” asked Alfric, who didn’t seem to be all that educated in terms of magic, or at least, preferred to let other people be their own domain experts he could lean on.

“Kind of?” asked Mizuki. “The aether is complicated, but yeah, there are ways for a sorc to do more long-term kinds of things, in the right circumstances, stuff that would last a month or so.”

“But instead, an explosion,” said Hannah.

“Well, right,” said Mizuki. “I hadn’t encountered that particular, um, disturbance before. So it makes sense that I wouldn’t get it right the first time.”

“I recall two explosions,” said Hannah.

“You know what I mean though,” said Mizuki. “What I should have done was to talk to a cleric, get permission, whatever, but then what if they’d said no?”

“That someone would deny you permission isn’t a good reason to not ask for permission,” said Alfric.

“Well, either way, it didn’t work out,” said Mizuki. She shrugged.

Hannah was very aware that this wasn’t an apology, not that one was really called for. Hannah hadn’t been the senior member of the temple then, and now wasn’t technically a member at all. Or perhaps she only technically was. But the fact that an apology wasn’t strictly called for didn’t mean that the lack of apology went unnoticed. From Hannah’s perspective, Mizuki had gotten carried away chasing after something shiny in the air, and somehow either didn’t reflect on how this painted sorcerers, or couldn’t connect the dots.

Before the conversation could go further, a young boy of around ten came riding up on a bird.

“You shouldn’t steal,” said the boy.

He was bare chested and scrawny in the way that young boys often were, and barefoot on top of that, wearing only pants. He was sitting on a small saddle, holding reins that went up to the bird’s head. The bird itself — well, Hannah knew very little about birds, only that she was likely too heavy to ride one, but it had blue plumage and a longness in both its neck and legs. Birds needed to be enlarged by clerics of Xuphin to be rideable by anyone but a child. Enlarged above a certain size, they’d just die. There was metal on the clawed feet and the beak, partly to protect the creature, and partly to keep it doing what it was supposed to be doing, which was carrying the rider.

“We’re not stealing,” said Alfric, who wasn’t sparing much attention toward the boy.

For his part, the boy seemed to be expertly riding the bird, and had brought it to a slow walk alongside the wardrobe. “You are too stealing,” he said. “The wardrobe belongs to Alfric.”

“I am Alfric,” said Alfric. “This is my wardrobe.”

The boy looked at him. “Prove it?” he asked, clearly trying the question out.

“How would he do that?” asked Hannah.

“I don’t know,” said the boy. “But anyone who read the note could say they were Alfric.”

“And who are you?” asked Alfric.

“I’m Bib,” said the boy. “My dad is the hexmaster of the Knob.”

“Yeah?” asked Alfric. “And can you prove it?”

“Your name is Bib?” asked Mizuki. “That’s not a name.”

“People call me Bib,” said Bib. “It’s not my name.”

“Well, either way, you can’t prove it,” said Alfric.

“I could get my dad,” said Bib, frowning.

“You could get someone to vouch for you, sure,” said Alfric. “But I have people to vouch for me.”

“I have never seen this guy before,” said Mizuki. “I actually just started following him because he was carrying the wardrobe. It seemed really suspicious.” She had a mad grin on her face.

“He asked me for help movin’ it,” said Hannah. “But now it does seem a little suspect. Alfric, if that is your name, is this a theft?”

“I’ll give you a cut of the proceeds if you stop asking questions,” said Alfric.

“Was I not already gettin’ a cut of the proceeds?” asked Hannah. “Well then, good citizen am I, doin’ work for a stranger for free.”

“You’re making fun,” said the boy. He was frowning at them. “I really don’t know if you’re stealing it.”

“We’re not stealing it,” said Alfric. “We pulled it from the Traeg’s Knob dungeon and just needed to store it at the common house for a day.”

“It’s the Hill House,” said the boy. “Where are you taking the wardrobe?”

“To Pucklechurch,” said Alfric. “Where we live.”

“And you’ll charge people to use it?” asked Bib. “That could make you a lot of money.”

“We’ll see what the limits are,” said Alfric. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it had some kind of limit on how many people can go through in a day, or a weight limit, or something else like that. And if it doesn’t have that kind of a limit, we’ll probably sell it to a big city, where it can get more use, or set up a business or something.”

“A business?” asked Mizuki. “For this thing?”

“Sure,” said Alfric. “Place it in Plenarch and charge ten rings for someone to use it.”

“Plenarch is a terrible choice, ay?” asked Hannah. “It’s on the coast, water in three of the six directions.”

“Well, maybe somewhere else then,” said Alfric. “I guess we’d also want to make sure it can’t end up dumping you in someone’s home.”

“Ten rings sounds like absolutely gouging people,” said Mizuki.

“You wouldn’t pay ten rings to skip six miles of walking?” asked Alfric.

“We wanted it in Traeg’s Knob,” said the boy, cutting in on a conversation that had moved its focus away from him.

“Who is ‘we’?” asked Alfric.

“My mom and dad,” said Bib. “They wanted it to stay in the Hill House.”

“Well, that’s not happening,” said Alfric. “Sorry. I said on the note that I was keeping it there only for a bit.”

“But you did pull it from our dungeon,” Bib ventured. “So we should have some say.”

“That’s not the law,” said Alfric.

“Well it should be,” said Bib, who seemed to have quite a bit of conviction about this in spite of being a shirtless boy riding a large bird.

“No,” said Alfric. “Because then you’d have someone whose job it was to camp out by the dungeon entrance, and to check to see what people came out with, and to make sure they weren’t ‘stealing’ from the dungeon. Those people, those dungeon guards, they’d be going up against five people who were well-armed with lots of magic and expertise in how to kill things. And on top of that, those five people are going to be gone from the area in short order, so it would be hard to catch them. Tell me, would you want to be sitting around a dungeon entrance, in charge of stopping powerful people from taking things out of it?”

“No,” said the boy. “I guess not.”

“He’s talkin’ spit,” said Hannah. “The real reason it’s not done is because if it were, dungeoneers simply wouldn’t come, and if they did, they wouldn’t have nearly the incentive to pick the dungeon clean. We wouldn’t have lugged this thing out of the dungeon if we had thought the locals would try to steal it from us.”

“The real reason,” said Mizuki. “Is that all the dungeons are under an ancient curse. If you try to accost people coming out of a dungeon, you’ll die in the next seven days.” She wiggled her fingers in his direction.

“You made that up,” said Bib.

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Mizuki.

“It’s very hard to say,” said Alfric. “Mizuki is a font of unconventional wisdom.”

“Well I think we should keep the wardrobe,” said Bib. He seemed stubborn, which Hannah liked in a child.

“Well, you’re free to think that,” said Alfric. “If you need to, go tell your father that we’re taking it, and I can quote the relevant laws to him, along with a brief history of why things are structured the way there are. There’s a real depth of governmental policy and extraction philosophy to go over.”

“Um,” said the boy. “I don’t think so.” He squeezed his legs on the side of the bird a bit, making it trot further down the path. “It was nice to meet you.”

“Have a good rest of your life,” said Alfric as they watched the boy go off into the distance.

“Think he’ll be back with his pa?” asked Hannah.

“No,” said Mizuki. “Alfric has successfully weaponized being boring.”

“It’s actually not that boring,” said Alfric. “There are a lot of stories from both sides, especially stuff before the League more or less had control, or in places where the laws were different. I just said it in a boring way.”

“It seems boring,” said Mizuki.

“You think armed conflict between professional dungeoneers and townspeople sounds boring?” asked Alfric. “The history is quite long. A lot of warp conflicts too, since any kind of taxation or extortion at the point of exit from the dungeon could just be avoided by warping out. But I won’t bore you with any of it.”

“You said a lot of things,” said Mizuki. “And I am interested in learning more, but I’m worried the answers are boring.”

“Warp conflict just means any kind of fight that takes place at a warp point,” said Hannah. “No need to use that kind of language for it.”

“But that’s what it’s called,” said Alfric.

“So you use the warp and end up surrounded by people with swords?” asked Mizuki. “Sounds horrible.”

“Doesn’t happen much these days,” said Alfric.

“He says, with a wistful sigh,” said Hannah.

“Well, you know me well enough to know what that’s about,” said Alfric.

“See, I think I’m fortunate,” said Mizuki. “All the things I really want to do are things that no one is going to stop me from doing, like making noodles with Hannah, or having a cup of tea.”

“The thing I really want to do, going into dungeons, just has the hitch of needing like-minded people,” said Alfric. “Aside from that, people are eager for me to do it. Most of the barriers have been stripped away, nothing like in the past.”

They walked for a bit. The weather was quite nice, which they had already said their thanks to Isra for. There seemed to be an unusual amount of butterflies about, but that might have been because of the area they were traveling through. A few of them, small blue ones, seemed to be attracted to the wardrobe, and they landed on it from time to time, just enough that it was noticeable.

“Do you think we’re going to see more of that child?” asked Hannah. “Or his father?”

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “But I know the law and I’m ready for a shakedown.”

“Does that happen?” asked Mizuki.

“Not often,” said Alfric. “There are a lot of things that surround the business we’re in though, things like counterparties and dungeon assistants and stuff of that nature. Shakedowns happen every once in a while, and you just tell them to piss off or suffer the wrath of the higher ups.” ‘Piss off’ sounded like unusually strong language coming from Alfric. “Hexmaster is probably the highest position in the hex, but if he gets the attention of the provincial chief, it’s possible the whole hex would face sanction.”

“I kind of feel like comp schooling let me down,” said Mizuki. “We never learned about any of this.”

“It’s nothin’ you would learn,” said Hannah. “No sense in teachin’ children about the way the world really works, and especially not the things which only help if you’re goin’ into a lot of dungeons.”

“Well, still,” said Mizuki. “I feel like I’m playing catch up.”

“There’s really not all that much you need to know,” said Alfric. “Honestly, of things I know, ten percent is useful, another ten percent is useful if a single person in the party knows it, and the other eighty percent is trivia. A lot of the useful things to know can just be taken as they come. And I really don’t want to bore you.”

“Alfric just needs to learn to punch up the borin’ stuff,” said Hannah. “I’m sure there are all kinds of great stories he’s got to tell. Alfric, you’ve gotta tell them as stories, it makes it less painful to get a lesson.”

“Is it a lesson for you?” asked Alfric. “I’d thought you knew a lot about the dungeon life.”

“Well, ay,” said Hannah. “But I was never in the Junior League, and my parents aren’t both dungoneers, so I imagine there are things you picked up that I didn’t.” There was a reason that she’d nominated herself as his lieutenant rather than attempting to take the reins from him. Alfric knew dungeoneering backward and forward, which was likely to be because his parents had imparted their fair share of knowledge, but also because he had a fiery passion for it.

“So you were saying about dungeon assistants?” asked Mizuki. “How is that different from this counterparty thing we’re going to have?”

“For the more popular dungeons, people set up shop outside them,” said Alfric. “But it needs to be a quite popular dungeon, because each dungeon is only done once in a person’s life, so it’s not all that common. And what you do if you’re setting up shop outside a dungeon … well, it depends.” He seemed to think about what Hannah had said. “My mom used to tell a story about coming out of a dungeon, half-dead, only to find a boy probably not much older than Bib who tried to get her to pay an exorbitant amount of money for healing. She was sitting there, bleeding, trying to negotiate with him, while explaining that most of her best stuff was bound to her and couldn’t be given away.” Hannah’s mind wandered to the missing bits of that story, like why his mother wouldn’t have just warped. There were answers, but they were the kind of answers that he’d decided the story didn’t need, or perhaps they were a sign of embellishment.

“That sounds kind of horrible,” said Mizuki. “Like, I feel like you thought it was a funny story, but it’s really not.”

“My mom found it funny,” said Alfric, shrugging. “It was a day she undid, because half of the party had died. She actually went and tracked down the kid, hired him on. She liked his initiative, even if it was callous.”

“Your mom sounds tough as nails,” said Mizuki.

“Oh, you have no idea,” said Alfric. “She holds a couple of family records.”

“For?” asked Mizuki.

“Most dungeons run, longest dungeon run, biggest haul from a single dungeon, most entads from a single dungeon, most dungeons in a day,” said Alfric.

“Isn’t she only in her forties?” asked Hannah.

“Late forties. There was a time she was running really hard,” said Alfric. “She had created a party composition specifically for not taking breaks, and then just kind of … kept going, I guess. They ended up with good entads for it. According to her, and I don’t know how true this is, there was a year when her party accounted for nearly ten percent of all new entads in Dondrian.”

“That sounds suspect,” said Hannah. “Not that I’d call your ma a liar.” Though there’d been something that he’d said earlier, about his original ambition being to do dungeons at a level not seen in decades, and it occurred to Hannah that perhaps he was talking about his own mother.

“Yeah, better that you don’t do that,” said Alfric. “I did ask her about it, but all she had to say was that she was told that number by an entad dealer, and maybe they would know, but,” he shrugged. “It wasn’t a boast she made often, but she did have a habit of boasting, at least when other dungeoneers were trying to puff out their chests. Mostly to put them in their place, I guess.”

“Think we’ll meet her some day?” asked Mizuki. “Because she seems neat.”

“I’d like to make a name for myself before I go back home,” said Alfric. “At least, say … twenty dungeons?”

“So half a year, at current rates?” asked Hannah. “I can’t see us goin’ too much faster than that, which I know isn’t what you want.”

“All that stuff with Lola aside, I’m going to dungeons and actually enjoying myself,” said Alfric. “And no one stole the wardrobe.” He shrugged. “Faster would be better, yes, but with two dungeons done, and a third on the way … I’m actually doing it now, which I’m grateful for.”

“You had a tough time of it before us,” said Hannah.

“My standard of living was high,” said Alfric. “I’m not going to complain about it more than I already have.”

“You have feelin’s though,” said Hannah. “Doesn’t do to let them go unexamined.” There was almost nothing about that in the Book of Garam Ashar, but plenty that Hannah had been taught at the seminary. People often thought their problems were small, and left them to fester, and that was true of their bodies as much as their minds.

The boy on the bird came back just about then.

“How about it?” asked Alfric. “Are we under arrest?”

“My dad isn’t the hexguard,” said Bib. “He would send someone else, if he wanted to.”

“Well, unless you’ve got a posse coming, I suppose we’re in the clear,” said Alfric.

“I have to apologize,” said Bib.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Alfric. He probably would have waved a hand, if he hadn’t been keeping the wardrobe steady.

“I have to apologize,” said Bib. “Dad said that if I didn’t I would get in trouble. So I’m sorry for saying that you stole it and that you should keep it here, and my dad told me that I should ask if I could make it up to you, because you’re not supposed to berate strangers, he said. And you’re not supposed to repeat conversations at the dinner table to them.”

“So you owe us a favor, is that it?” asked Alfric.

“I guess,” said Bib.

“Well, I’ll think about it,” said Alfric. “But we have nothing for you right now. That bird makes you fast, and I think we can use that, if your father is okay with you going a bit far from home.”

“I go where I want to,” said Bib, holding his chin high.

“Well then, remember me, because I’ll be calling on you,” said Alfric.

“Okay,” said the boy. He turned his bird around and sent it off down the trail again, this time without saying goodbye.

“You think you’ll be able to collect on that?” asked Hannah.

“No,” said Alfric. “But it doesn’t hurt to have a favor from a nosy little kid.”

“You like kids?” asked Mizuki, eyes brightening somewhat.

“I like them well enough,” said Alfric. “I was a mentor in the Junior League for a bit, when I was floundering.”

“I had thoughts of being a teacher,” said Mizuki. “But I wasn’t all that good in school, and to be a teacher you need to go off training for three years.”

“Three years isn’t so much,” said Hannah. “Not when you’re talkin’ about takin’ care of the little ones.”

“How long is seminary?” asked Mizuki.

“Five,” said Hannah. “Though you can do the final year as part of a placement, if you so desire. Most of it is just tryin’ to get the right mindset for Garos, which was never much of an issue for me.” She turned to Alfric. “Seems strange to me that you like children.”

“Why’s that?” asked Alfric.

“They’re just … not very serious creatures, it seems to me,” said Hannah.

“Depends on the kid,” said Alfric. “Some of them are very serious, and maybe that’s what I like: being the only person that sees that seriousness, and being the only one who will indulge it. In the Junior League, as a mentor, I was always on the lookout for them, the serious ones, when I wasn’t trying to keep my brothers in line.”

“Brothers?” asked Mizuki. “I thought you were an only child?”

“Why would you think that?” asked Alfric.

“You never talk about them,” said Hannah. “And you have that kind of energy, I s’pose.”

“I’m not sure I know what that means,” said Alfric. “Mizuki, can you come scratch the back of my head, or would that be weird?”

“It would be weird, but I’d do it,” said Mizuki. She walked past the wardrobe and reached up to scratch Alfric’s head.

“Lower,” he said, and then sighed with relief. “Honestly, I probably could have just carried this thing with one hand for a bit, but the more work we put into it, the more I worry that we’re going to drop it and make all that labor be for nothing. Thank you.”

“No problem,” said Mizuki. She stayed at the front with him, walking side by side. “So wait, how many siblings do you have?”

“Five,” said Alfric.

“There are five of you?” asked Mizuki.

“It would be six, if there are siblings,” said Hannah.

“That’s even worse,” said Mizuki. “How did your mother have six children while also doing near-constant dungeons?”

“Entad solutions, I would guess,” said Hannah.

“Yes,” nodded Alfric. “My mom always said that if she’d had to go through a pregnancy herself, she probably wouldn’t have had children. So we were all technically decanted, not born.”

“Things of that nature are usually reserved for the Church,” said Hannah, frowning a bit. Couples not being able to have ‘natural’ children was one of the serious issues, and while there were occasional entads that helped to deal with it, they were in perpetually short supply. The idea that someone had used one for convenience was, well … it seemed a bit selfish and contrary to the common good.

“My mom personally pulled six of those entads from the dungeons, if that’s what you’re thinking,” said Alfric. “All were donated to the Church of Garos.”

“Ah,” said Hannah. “That does make it a bit better.”

“‘Decanted’,” said Mizuki. “What, like pulled out of a bottle?”

“Yep,” said Alfric.

“Weird,” said Mizuki.

“Yep,” said Alfric. “Anyway, about five years ago, mom started slowing down. She went through a month-long dungeon and came out with several tons of loot and a different perspective. She’s been much more, uh, motherly since then. With mixed results.”

“Well now I really want to meet her,” said Mizuki. “She sounds like a blast.”

“Honestly, and I know this sounds like boasting, it’s very possible she’s one of the most accomplished dungeoneers in human history,” said Alfric. “But records are pretty poor, and a lot of the very best have had the incentive to puff up their accomplishments. It’s very, very unlikely that anyone really did complete fifty thousand dungeons, but I guess you never know.”

“Fifty thousand does seem unlikely,” said Hannah.

“Stepping foot in fifty thousand seems doable with the right travel entads,” said Alfric. “Actually clearing them of monsters and taking everything of value … much less so.”

“Why would you want to just step foot in a dungeon and then walk away?” asked Mizuki.

“Bragging rights,” said Alfric. “Or, maybe to catalog, if you could do that safely through entads or mana constructs or something.”

“I guess,” said Mizuki.

“I tried to work out the math a while ago,” said Alfric. “And it left me skeptical. It’s more than two dungeons a day for fifty years or something like that. Possible, but you’d need pretty much inhuman endurance if you were doing a full clear.”

“You were lookin’ it up because of your own ambitions?” asked Hannah.

“I want to be a great dungoneer, like my parents,” said Alfric. “But after how things have gone the last year, I’ve resigned myself to not setting any records.”

“Ah, the disillusioned and world-weary eighteen-year-old,” said Mizuki.

“Things lined up for us now,” said Alfric. “And it’s a slower pace than I had planned, starting out. But the team is good, and that’s worth quite a bit to me. Dungeoneering isn’t something you can do solo, not if you want to make any actual progress.”

“Dyin’ would be the bigger thing,” said Hannah. “Though I s’pose for you, it’s not as much a concern.”

“No,” said Alfric. “Not so much.”

Given that they were only technically carrying twenty pounds of weight, they were able to keep up a decent enough pace, and they took turns with the wardrobe after Mizuki realized that perhaps she shouldn’t just be with them for the company. It was under her watch that Alfric was almost crushed by the wardrobe, but they managed to right it without any injuries.

When they arrived in Pucklechurch, the ground was wet from a recent rain, and Hannah enjoyed the smell, which reminded her of home, where the rains seemed to be more common than Pucklechurch. Of course, the weather of Pucklechurch had quietly been manipulated by Isra for likely Hannah’s entire time there, so perhaps it wasn’t something about the region, but about Isra’s particular preferences for rain and sun.

“Now the question is whether we take it to the temple first,” said Alfric. “I think we do, since it’s on our way. That way we can have Filera take a look at it before we move it home, if we do move it home.”

“You’re keen on startin’ a business?” asked Hannah.

“I doubt that we’d make much, if the wardrobe works in volume,” said Alfric. “But if it does work in volume, there’s no sense in having it sitting where people have trouble using it.”

“We could have it there for the public good,” said Mizuki.

“We could, I guess,” said Alfric. “Would that pay off?”

“What do you mean?” asked Mizuki. “Like, you’re asking how or whether we would eventually make some money by, uh, having people bake us pies or something? Donations, like support comp and the temple?”

“The temple is largely funded through provincial tax,” said Hannah.

“Well, you know what I mean,” said Mizuki. “But … no, I don’t think we’d get back what we put in, if we just made the wardrobe free to anyone. That’s not the point, the point is just to help people out.”

“Right,” said Alfric. “Well, we’ll have the cleric take a look at it, and maybe any debate will be moot. I’m a strong believer in charity, but I’m not sure we’re in a position for it now.” Hannah looked back, and he seemed lost in thought. “Let’s say it’s a hundred rings a day, that would be twenty a piece, which isn’t all that much, but over time … and there would be expenses, I suppose, a lockbox, and not everyone would pay if we didn’t have someone watching the thing, which we couldn’t unless we gave a cut to a storekeeper.”

But they came to the temple, and managed to get the wardrobe through the door, steering it until eventually they were outside the Qymmos’ area.

“Hannah, do you want to make yourself scarce?” asked Alfric.

“Why would I want to do that?” asked Hannah.

“Prior religious disagreements?” asked Alfric.

“I’ll stay, if it’s all the same, I had nothing else to do today aside from doin’ my first proper bake in Mizuki’s house,” said Hannah. She wasn’t sure she appreciated the offer from Alfric, but on reflection, decided that it came from a good place, and that was what mattered.

“Filera,” said Alfric as they came in.

“Alfric, Hannah,” said Filera, nodding to them. She had her usual cool demeanor, and set down her book as soon they’d entered her area. She was always reading, and seemed to have a good mind for it, which was little surprise for a cleric of Qymmos. There was something very restrained about her, a feeling like she was holding herself back and always in control.

“Are you busy?” asked Alfric. “We have an entad we’d like you to look at. A few, actually, but the others aren’t with us right now.”

“I suppose I did say that I would do it for free,” said Filera with a sigh as they put the wardrobe down. She stepped closer to look it over, circling around it, though for a cleric of Qymmos, that wasn’t strictly necessary. “It’s a travel entad, but I gather you already know that, or you wouldn’t have taken so much trouble to get it here. It’s from Traeg’s Knob?”

“Yes,” said Alfric. “We acquired it two days ago, but took until today to get it here.”

“Mmm,” said Filera. She was still staring at the wardrobe, doing some miracles in her mind, finding the categories that the wardrobe belonged to, pinning it in place.

“What’s she doing,” whispered Mizuki, who’d moved close to Hannah.

“I’m no cleric of Qymmos,” Hannah whispered. “But she likely knows the so-called language of the entads, and is goin’ through it word by word to see what applies. They use somethin’ called a binary, a choice between two, splittin’ things down where they can.”

“That’s reductive,” said Filera. “And it’s a useless approach to entad identification, unless there’s a keyword that needs to be found.”

“Well then what are you doin’?” asked Hannah.

“I’m finding the sets,” said Filera. “Entads don’t fall into the natural sets, and their so-called language is the best way of finding their function, but right now I’m interrogating the function of the location mechanism. The wardrobe leads to a place in a different hex when selected using the dial, oriented as upward being north, but where in that other hex is in question, and there are standard mechanisms with variants. I’m trying to find out which one, and with what variants.”

“We’re most interested in how often it can be used, and in what conditions,” said Alfric.

“I’m intending a full analysis,” said Filera. She had a way of keeping her tone mild while saying something that seemed to be a rebuke. “It will take some time though, perhaps an hour, if you want my certification. If you’ll be talking, I’d prefer it’s just outside.”

“Well, I think I’m going home,” said Mizuki. “I’ll go see what Verity has been up to, then maybe start on dinner. Any requests? Easier to fulfill them now, while we’re not far from the shops.”

“Something light,” said Alfric. “Fish?”

“A good fish stew would do,” said Hannah.

“I have no idea how to make that, and it sounds disgusting,” said Mizuki. “But I can do fish and potatoes, and some kind of green thing. You always need a green thing.”

“Not always,” said Hannah.

“Well, when you cook, you can leave the greens out,” Mizuki shrugged. “I know Cairbre food is mostly whites and browns. Anyway, I’ll see you both later, it was fun.”

“She’s very likeable,” said Alfric, once Mizuki was out of earshot.

“She’s agreeable,” said Hannah. “Never makes much of a fuss, and I get the sense that would be true even if it were important that a fuss be made. She’ll tell people what they want to hear, and go along with ideas someone else suggests.”

“And you don’t like that?” asked Alfric.

“I like Mizuki,” said Hannah. “But I’m the opposite.”

“Disagreeable?” asked Alfric.

“I like to tussle with people,” said Hannah. “I like to challenge and be challenged. Mizuki is like pushin’ over a pile of wet paper. I like her, but my instinct is to push and prod, and I have to keep in mind that can’t really be done with her, lest she dissolve at my touch.”

“She’s different from what you’re used to,” said Alfric. “I can understand that.”

“No, I’ve met people like her before,” said Hannah. “At the seminary, I always held them in contempt, but that was because we were there for the glory of Garos, the ideas were the point of it, and some of them just crumbled when questioned or pressed. The seminary was a bit two-faced about it though.”

“And not in a good, symmetrical way?” asked Alfric.

“Har,” said Hannah. The more she thought about it, the more it was a little funny. “No, on the one hand they want, need, people who are passionate about Garos, who understand his fundamental nature, who eagerly seek to interrogate what he means, but on the other hand, there’s doctrine and keepin’ people in line.”

“Two hands and two faces,” Alfric nodded. He was grinning, and not seeming to take the conversation too seriously, which was a bit of a disappointment. Hannah liked his seriousness. He had a real ability and willingness to tussle, so long as it was a matter he cared about, which was to say, so long as it was about dungeons.

“It’s the same with the dungeons, isn’t it?” asked Hannah. “When you were in the Junior League, there were people who would wave off discussions of the dungeons? People who would accept what they were told, rather than speakin’ up and tryin’ to get to the bottom of things?”

“Yes,” said Alfric. He contemplated that and judged his words. “Absolutely. I don’t think I have that same desire to press that you have, but when told not to do something, or that we must always do something, the ‘why’ was important to me. Other people seemed to just accept it.”

“Because the ‘why’ might save your life someday,” said Hannah, nodding in agreement. “Or there might be an edge case, or some underlyin’ theory or somethin’. But some people just want instructions they can follow, rather than to think for themselves. And in our case, with sweet little Mizuki, she seems content not to think too much. That’s all.”

“And you find her agreeableness disagreeable,” said Alfric.

“Not much, no,” said Hannah. “But I have to remind myself who she is, or she’ll annoy me.”

“So far, I haven’t been bothered by it,” said Alfric. “She’s a surprisingly proficient sorcerer, for someone who doesn’t seem like she’s taken her education all that far, though part of that is that we’ve got a nice collection of casters. You let me know if there’s anything that I can do to grease the wheels between the two of you.”

“Och,” said Hannah. “I like her, but you have to understand me, that when you say anythin’, almost anythin’ at all, I’ll like to say ‘but’ and then hammer it out with you. So if you’d said that you didn’t care for Mizuki, I’d feel myself inclined to mount a defense, but when you said she was likeable, I went straight for the things I wasn’t so fond of. And that’s one of the things that people don’t like about me, which I think is fair. I tilt toward the contrary. I always have.”

“Good to know,” nodded Alfric.

“I think I will head out,” said Hannah. “If you think you’ll be fine movin’ the wardrobe on your own? I’m in a bit of a mood, and need some prayer, perhaps in the direction of Mizuki.”

“Of course,” said Alfric. “I’ll either bring the wardrobe by myself, or leave it here and we can get it tomorrow. It’s possible that I might be able to get it a temporary home in town, so we can start banking rings off it, but I guess we’ll see.”

“Thanks,” said Hannah. “For all you do. And for listening to me reflexively complain about someone who didn’t deserve it.”

Alfric nodded. “Go, clear your head, I’ll deal with Filera.”

Hannah thought about stopping in to speak with Lemmel, but she did need to clear her head, and instead, elected to go find a bench to sit on for a bit and pray.

Chapter 40 - Post Mortem

Isra was envious of Mizuki’s cooking. The meals Isra had in Liberfell and at the Fig and Gristle had been quite good, but they had been prepared by someone whose job it was to do such things. A person who had devoted their life to cooking would naturally be a good cook, that was right and fair. But Mizuki hadn’t devoted her life to cooking, it was only something that she’d done casually, and she still seemed to be so good at it, and at a young age. It made Isra feel like she had been missing something from her life, a skill that she had never developed when she’d been perfectly capable of doing so.

Worse, it was a skill that didn’t seem to come naturally to her like so many other things had, because the interplay of flavors largely didn’t involve the living world which she was so in tune with. She could tell whether food was good to eat or not, whether it had toxins, but what it would taste like was much more difficult, and the ways that the taste would change when paired with other tastes, or in the process of cooking, was even more difficult. She’d had her own difficulties when smoking meats or making pickles until finally arriving at something she found satisfactory. Mizuki seemed to know everything there was to know. The envy did nothing to dull the taste of the food. If Mizuki was serious about giving cooking lessons, Isra was going to take them. She’d kept a close eye on the food preparation, but had no real idea how such simple procedures had turned the base ingredients into an actual meal.

“Okay,” said Alfric. “The post mortem won’t take long, I don’t think, it’s just a matter of going over what happened in the dungeon, what went right and what went wrong, and trying to figure out what we can learn from it. Overall, I think we did pretty good, except at the end.”

“Because of the risk?” asked Hannah. “Or the outcome?”

“Both,” said Alfric. “But we’re going to go through room by room in chronological order, give brief thoughts on what we saw and how we responded to it, and what we might do differently next time. Mostly doing this is just a way of running the dungeon a second or third time in our minds, which means that we milk the dungeon for experience much more efficiently.”

What followed was quite a bit of talking. Isra stayed silent for most of it. It was interesting to get different perspectives on what happened, but her own part in the dungeons was relatively straightforward. If there was something to shoot, she shot it, using the slowed time from the bow to get as many shots off as possible, then using it a second time to retreat if necessary. In every fight, her contribution had been roughly the same, with the outcome being different largely because the monsters had their own biologies and defenses.

“So was this because I missed?” asked Mizuki, when they were discussing the giant man who’d been covered in mussels.

“Did you miss?” asked Alfric. “You blew the arm off.”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t trying to,” said Mizuki. “I was just lobbing the fireball at him and hoping that it would kill him.”

“Is that something to work on for later?” asked Alfric. “Aim? So far as I can recall, you didn’t have a single miss through the whole dungeon, so I don’t have any actual complaints.”

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. She shrugged. “Has it been working?”

“You had the majority of kills,” said Hannah. “But we’ve been facin’ what seems like more than our fair share of the big, slow-movin’ beasties, and those are what you’re best at.” She shrugged.

“We can’t really tell you what to do or how to do it,” said Alfric. “We’re not sorcs. Part of a post mortem is for you to reflect on what you’ve been doing and whether doing things differently would have been better. I have no complaints and no advice.” He hesitated. “Aside from, perhaps, not doing everything all at once?”

“Um,” said Mizuki, who seemed quite confused. “Meaning?”

“You work off aetheric imbalance, right?” asked Alfric. “So in theory, rather than doing a single giant fireball, you could do two smaller ones? Mostly I was thinking about the deer we fought, and how a single large attack is less effective against multiple targets.”

“Hmm,” said Mizuki. She held out a hand and wiggled her fingers, and a series of pings, almost in unison, came up from the glasses of wine and water that were sitting around the table. “Like that?”

“I don’t know what you just did,” said Alfric.

“Applied force to all of the glasses?” asked Mizuki. “You heard the pings, right?”

Alfric gave a helpless shrug. “I did, but … yes, if you can do that in the dungeon with lethal force, it would be great. It was one of the only problems we ran into with the deer fight.”

“We … didn’t fight any deer,” said Mizuki.

“The black things,” said Isra. “With large heads. They had legs like deer.”

“Oh, those,” said Mizuki. “Right, I didn’t think of them as deer at all, more like a big black version of the long-legged skinks. I hated those.”

“Well, we’ll get to them,” said Alfric. “Does anyone have any more on the mussel man encounter?”

“Arrows did nothing,” said Isra. “I was just standing there waiting for someone else to kill it.”

“Some will be like that,” nodded Alfric. “Others will drop from a single well-placed arrow. Part of what we do, when dungeoneering, is to work a flowchart, and part of what we need to do, as a team, is to figure out what the flowchart looks like in practice. Mizuki putting down as much magical firepower as possible right from the start will probably be the default, and Hannah going in for a hex against something that’s already been injured is another good staple. So Isra, your role will be to loose arrows unless that doesn’t work, and if it doesn’t work, then … I don’t know. You did really well up close at the end of the first dungeon, but I don’t expect you to do that, not when you don’t have a good melee weapon or the proper training to use it. Not everyone is going to be good in every scenario, and that’s okay, so long as we have everything covered and plans for these different scenarios. Sometimes, you’re going to be able to kill whatever we find almost instantly.”

“I’ll need symmetricalization,” said Isra. “I don’t have the stamina for longer dungeons.”

“Symmetricalization, training, entad support, and learning when to hold off,” nodded Alfric. “Dungeons require a lot of physical exertion, especially for you and me. We should all be building up stamina as much as we can, and if we’re not doing that by running dungeons, it should be in other ways, like going for a morning run.”

Mizuki laughed. “No, absolutely not, thank you.”

“Well, something then,” said Alfric. “It’s not as important for you, but it would be good if you were able to sprint for two hundred yards without getting too winded. Being able to run away from danger is where physical fitness is going to count the most, for you.”

“Fine, point taken,” said Mizuki. “But if you think for even a moment that I’m getting up at first bell to go running, you’re absolutely insane.”

“We’ll figure out something,” said Alfric. “It’s your heart and lungs I care most about. Running, rowing, things like that?”

“What am I going to row?” asked Mizuki. “We’ve got a pond, I guess, but we’re light on lakes.”

“I lift stones,” said Hannah. “Usually just the one side though.”

“Stones?” asked Mizuki. “Like, rocks?”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “There are lots of forms. What you need most is a nice craggy rock that your hands’ll stick to. I have two, back in my room at the temple, and will need to transfer them over, or find some new ones.”

“You just pick up and then put down rocks?” asked Mizuki.

“Over and over,” said Hannah, nodding. “It’s about as boring as it sounds, but I like to have somethin’ to occupy my body when doin’ prayers. If I do it here, it’ll be outside, where I can drop the stones without too much worry about breaks or dents.”

“I’m not sure that I’m going to do that either,” said Mizuki. “Though I guess I could try.”

“Lifting weights won’t really get you the kind of benefit I would think you’d want,” said Alfric. “You want to work the heart and lungs, rather than gain strength, not that it would hurt to have both.” He waved a hand. “But that’s neither here nor there, because we’re still in the middle of our post mortem, and there’s quite a bit more ground to cover.”

They talked about each fight in some detail. Isra found it particularly interesting to get the perspective of Verity, whose effects could be felt but not seen, and whose own view of each fight involved carefully watching all the others to see what was needed in any given moment. It also gave her an excuse to look at Verity, which she’d found herself doing quite a bit over the past few days.

“I feel bad that we were rushing on my account,” said Verity. “But if you want a song of that strength, it probably is necessary.”

“I trust you to know your own music,” said Alfric. “But I do think that I want to take the next dungeon a little more slowly. I think going from fight to fight is preferable for a number of reasons, but the fights are physically and mentally exhausting, and if they’re difficult or prolonged, there’s a limit to how many of them I can do in a row before getting gassed. The balance there is how warmed up and ready to go I am, and battle rush certainly helps to get through things.” The term, ‘battle rush’, was unfamiliar to Isra, but from context, she thought he might mean the whole body felt electric in a moment of intense combat.

“You’d like weaker but longer?” asked Verity.

“Well. When you change the fundamental nature of the song in mid-stream it creates problems too, right?” asked Alfric. “If we could have something more all-purpose that might be better, but I don’t want to make a request that betrays my ignorance as a layman.”

“I can try,” said Verity. “There are also some exercises that I can do over the next few weeks to work on my sustain. They’re incredibly boring, but if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s putting in the time and effort into something I find boring.”

“You’re a very good gardener,” said Isra.

“Just a bit of self deprecation,” Verity smiled. She had a lovely smile, made more lovely by the fact that she used it sparingly.

“The other thing I wanted to talk about, when it came to rushing, was knowing when to call it quits,” said Alfric. “But we can save that for when we talk about the bear.”

“We don’t need to talk about the cyclops or the deer, right?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, Isra killed the cyclops right away, what’s there to talk about? And we already touched on the deer things.”

“I think the cyclops is actually a really good example of when to hold back, actually,” said Alfric. “The basic assumption of a dungeon is that there’s a single monster or group of monsters in a room, but ‘room’ isn’t necessarily the fundamental unit of a dungeon, and sometimes monsters will come in from elsewhere, either as part of their normal behavior, or when they hear fighting. Mostly what sets them off is presence, but not always. So Mizuki, it might make sense to let Isra fire a probing arrow and see how that affects things before you lob a fireball.”

“It’s easier to hit something that’s not moving,” said Mizuki. She had her arms folded across her chest. “Besides, I’m limited by the room, it’s not like there’s a point in saving it. Isra can only shoot a bow a limited number of times per day, especially if we’re tearing through the dungeons as fast as we can.”

“That’s what I was talking about,” said Alfric. “You want to save the aetheric imbalance in a room for when it’s most needed, especially because there’s no way to get it back. It would be saved for tactical retreats or adds — additional monsters.”

“I get it, I guess,” said Mizuki. “Still seems like the kind of caution that could bite us in the butt.”

“Maybe,” said Alfric. “Something to think about, anyway. I’m only relaying conventional wisdom. Adds are one of the most fundamentally difficult aspects of a dungeon, and we haven’t had to deal with that yet.”

“We had those wolves,” said Mizuki.

“That’s different,” said Alfric. “But yes, we did well to contain them before they got out of hand. Isra, you did particularly good work there. I don’t know what kind of limiter they had, if any, but fast action seemed like it was the only way to get out of it. For my own part, I think being more verbal about what was happening might have gotten that fight done sooner.”

There was more discussion, and for Isra, it was a bit too much. She imagined sitting and talking about things like it was a muscle you had to exercise regularly and which you could build up strength in. For her, that conversational muscle was underdeveloped. She had come over to the house and spent some time talking with Verity, then some more time in the kitchen before dinner, and then the dinner itself, and it was all adding up to make her a bit anxious. Perhaps Alfric sensed this, or was feeling the same, because he moved the topic of conversation to something he seemed to really want to talk about.

“We shouldn’t have fought the bear,” said Alfric. “I think doing it got us the majority of the value in the dungeon, but I still think, in retrospect, that it was a risk we shouldn’t have gone for, and the fact that it worked out perhaps sends the wrong message about what the acceptable level of risk is.”

He waited for a moment, and there were some glances around the table.

“I think you may be right,” said Hannah. “And I’m sorry for pushin’ the matter. We were ridin’ high off a series of rooms we’d handled well, and —”

“I think we’d have been fine if I didn’t knock out Verity,” said Mizuki.

“Well, that’s another thing,” said Alfric. “We need to be able to handle the unexpected. Being a dungeoneer is about the unexpected, because you’re always seeing things that haven’t been seen before, and put into situations which, at best, share some common features to things other people have seen. In this case, the unexpected thing was an accident of magic, but in the future, it might be something else, an entad misfire, a monster, a dungeon feature, or something like that. There’s a saying in the dungeoneering world, that every dungeon is your first dungeon.”

“What kind of sense does that make?” asked Hannah.

“It’s a warning against complacency and overconfidence,” said Alfric. “By the time you’ve done twenty dungeons, or a hundred, you might have lost that edge you had in the first dungeon. You might let your guard down. But dungeons, almost by definition, can surprise you. The bear, if that’s what we’re calling it, really should have been killed by Mizuki’s overpowering strike, but the truth is that anything could have happened, and a large creature is usually more dangerous, just by virtue of his size. The bear could have split in two, or been powered up by the assault, or shrank down, or … anything, really.”

“How close to death do you reckon we came?” asked Hannah.

“I think we were within spitting distance of one of us dying,” said Alfric. “Better communication, better response to the unexpected, better follow-through on plans … all would have helped. I don’t want to belabor the mechanics of the fight, it’s more about the feel, the flowchart, the shape of our approach. Better to not have done the fight though, even if it did get us the best entad of the dungeon and some trees that will hopefully pay out.”

“And the eggs,” said Isra. Their lone egg had, somehow, become her responsibility, which she was quite pleased about. No longer would she simply be the archer of the group, she would be the archer and keeper of the egg. It was nice to have two jobs.

“Those too,” nodded Alfric. “Mostly long-term things. I’m not hopeful about the eggs, because there are many things that can hatch which don’t serve any useful function at all, but in theory, we could still sell them to a zoo or a collector. At any rate, that’s all that I had for the post mortem, and now it’s time for you all to add whatever you’d like.”

“I need to get better about rushin’ in to apply a hex,” said Hannah. “And better about coordination with you for it, but that’s about it. Might be helpful for people to call out injuries, though Alfric aside, we didn’t have much injury to speak of.”

“I’ll have you do symmetricalization to me,” said Isra. This was something that she’d been mulling over since they’d finished the dungeon.

“It would be good,” said Hannah. “But I’ll speak with you about what all it involves, so you know what you’re in for, and we can restrict it to the arms and chest, if you’re mostly about the draw.”

“And the healing,” said Isra.

“Naturally,” said Hannah. She seemed somewhat reticent, and Isra had no idea why that might be.

“I have nothing more to add,” said Mizuki. “I was going to read a book.”

“I don’t think I have anything more to add either,” said Verity. “I need to practice and think about what less intensive songs would look like. I might send off a letter to someone I know asking for advice, though there’s a good chance it would get back to my parents, and, well. I worry that if they found out I was a dungeoneer, even if only a temporary one, they might take action.”

“We still need to write a letter to them,” said Alfric. “I can do it, but if you want input, which I think you do, you need to stop putting it off.”

“Fine, fine,” said Verity. “You are obviously and annoyingly right.” She gave him a limp smile.

“It looks like we’re done here then,” said Alfric. “Thank you all for participating, I hope it was painless and productive. We’ll probably do this after every dungeon.”

“There was one more thing,” said Isra.

“Yes?” asked Alfric. He seemed genuinely surprised that she had something to add, probably because she preferred to remain silent for most of it, watching the others.

“I just wanted to say … there’s a wrongness to the dungeons,” said Isra. “The animals and plants can’t be felt as much. Nothing listens to me very well. I’m sorry that I missed as much as I did, and I will try to do better.”

“It’s fine,” said Alfric. “You were recruited for this team because I’d heard good things about your ability as a hunter. There’s something we call ‘dungeon madness’, which just means that about ninety-nine out of a hundred animals will attack you. We don’t know why it happens or how to stop it, and I really don’t expect you to be the one to crack it, because while druids are rare, and druids who go into dungeons are even more rare, they’re not so rare that someone else hasn’t already tried whatever you might think of. Just in case you were thinking about beating your head on the problem.”

“I was,” said Isra. She had been cautioned about opening herself up too much, but she was still exploring what it meant to be a druid, and it seemed that some experimentation was in order.

“Wait,” said Mizuki. “Chickens don’t attack people.”

“Dungeon madness is first generation only,” said Alfric. “It doesn’t affect eggs, or the extremely young if it’s not an egg. In dog equivalents, you’d need to be pulling out a two-day-old puppy. Everything else though, you’re looking at taking care of something that will be trying its best to kill you. It’s still sometimes worth it to take the adults though, if you can extract a breeding pair. There are setups where you can take care of the animals without interacting with them. I don’t think we’ll do that, but with Isra, it’s a bit tempting.” He turned to look at Isra. “We can talk about it more later, if you’d like, but I don’t want to bore anyone, and this has gone on long enough already. Too much talking.”

“Later,” nodded Isra. Again, she had a comfortable feeling. It was nice that Alfric understood her. “I do also need some help with the guild things, if you can.”

“Of course,” said Alfric. “I’d forgotten all about that. You’re connected with experts, so perhaps they can help you.”

The dinner over, and the post mortem finished, they all went their separate ways, though Isra found herself staying around the house, not quite wanting to leave and return to her empty house. She went through the garden beds in the back and looked at the work Verity had done, peering deeply at the plants to divine their secrets and make guesses about what a person might have planted them for.

Halfway through, Verity came out to practice, and played a song, one laced with magic that undid hidden knots of anxiety, and by the time it was finished, it seemed too dark for a walk through the woods. The bed at Mizuki’s house in the shared room with Verity was becoming, it seemed, familiar.

Before she went to bed though, Isra pulled Hannah aside. “Can we talk for a bit?”

“Of course,” nodded Hannah. “Did you need help with the guild?”

“Yes,” nodded Isra, though that wasn’t the primary thing she’d wanted. Alfric had already offered.

They went to Hannah’s room together, where there was a little desk, and Hannah pulled the chair out for Isra, taking the bed for herself.

“Now, the thing about guilds is that it’s mostly a matter of how you think into it,” said Hannah. “Think to open up the forum, try that now.”

Isra did. She’d done it once before, when she’d had a dim awareness that it was there, in the morning, but she’d done little else with it. “Done,” she said.

“Now, you should see a few messages there,” said Hannah. “A message comes with a header, which is what it’s about, a name, which is who sent it, a date, which is when it became a part of the guild logs, and then the message itself.”

“There’s only one message,” said Isra, frowning. It appeared in her mind’s eye, and had all the features that Hannah had talked about. It was listed as being from Dom.

“Oh,” said Hannah. “Well, it’s possible they do a regular purge, that’s not too uncommon. Anyone who posts a message can delete it, and if everyone agrees, the log can be kept somewhat clean. There’s no real need to do it, but some do. And you could open it?”

“Yes,” said Isra. All this took was another thought. “The message is short.” It, too, appeared in her mind’s eye.

“Well, the only real things left to know are how to make a message, and how to reply to someone,” said Hannah. “You just sort of … talk into it, if that makes sense, but it’s not like the party channel, where it uses your voice, there’s transcription to words, and if you think at it, you can alter it down to the letter, though few people do that. In some guilds you’ll see people make pictures out of letters, but it’s a bit frowned upon.”

“Okay,” said Isra. The phrase ‘pictures out of letters’ didn’t make sense to her, but it didn’t seem like something she’d do by mistake.

“Why don’t you try to reply to the welcome message?” asked Hannah. “And just tell me what you said, so I can make sure it’s good.”

“I don’t know what to say,” said Isra.

“Oh, something simple,” said Hannah. “Just, ‘Thank you for inviting me to the guild, it’s my first time, so let me know if you have any rules that need to be followed.’”

Isra put down that, more or less, and repeated it back exactly to Hannah. The message seemed to hang there in her mind, even when she wasn’t paying attention to it, and as soon as she returned her attention to it, there it was, in full, each letter capable of being moved.

“Now, to send, it’s just a bit of a push, more focused intent than anything else you’ve been doing,” said Hannah. “You don’t need a header for a reply, though some people put that in, and your name and the date, those are just a natural part of it.”

“It knows my name,” said Isra, who could see it in her mind’s eye..

“Same as the census does,” nodded Hannah. “Have you sent it?”

Isra pushed with her mind, and the message slotted itself into place.

“Now, you should know that no one will be able to see it until tomorrow,” said Hannah. “It happens sometime in the middle of the night. If there’s another reply to that same message, they’ll be in the order they were put in, and the same goes for any new message.”

“You’re talking about mechanics,” said Isra. “But I don’t know what I should be doing with it.”

“Oh, ay,” said Hannah. “But most of that will depend on the guild. The best thing to do, in my opinion, is to just watch how things go. See what they say and how they say it, and follow their lead, whether they go short and terse or write long essays back and forth.”

“There might be hidden rules,” said Isra.

“Well, almost certainly,” said Hannah. “And ways of doin’ things that are unique to them, or just the way things have always been done. Maddening, probably.” She shrugged. “Watch the headers, some guilds use abbreviations, and watch how messages end, sometimes people use that to say who they expect to hear from. Remember that anyone can see and respond, and that you can’t see messages from others that are in queue. It’s quite annoyin’ to get three identical responses to someone on the same topic.”

“And that’s all there is to being in a guild?” asked Isra. “Talking?”

“Oh, no,” said Hannah. “There are guild halls, though they’re not terribly common, and there are bits of magic that work with the guild, includin’ bards. But I don’t imagine any of that applies, and I get the sense you’re done talkin’ about this for now.” She gave Isra an expectant look.

Isra shifted. “There was a reason that I wanted your help instead of Alfric’s.”

“Oh, ay?” asked Hannah. “And why would that be?”

“I … don’t really understand why Verity is going to be with Xy,” said Isra. “Or how.”

“Ah,” said Hannah. “So it’s my expertise as a cleric of Garos, is that it?”

Isra nodded.

“And were your questions more of the mechanical variety, or of the hidden codes and language?” asked Hannah.

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “I understand animals better than humans.” She looked down at her hands. She had become so familiar with embarrassment over the years that it was difficult to remember that she wasn’t supposed to be embarrassed around these people. They had, so far, been very understanding. “I don’t even know when humans have their mating season, and I don’t think I’ve ever experienced it.” She looked up. “If I had … I would know, wouldn’t I?”

Hannah at first seemed amused by this for some unknown reason, and then concerned, also for an unknown reason. “Isra … humans don’t have a mating season.”

Isra frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean they don’t — there’s no season for fallin’ in love, for us to desire another in a romantic way, for wantin’ sex,” said Hannah. The last bit was said with a frankness that Isra appreciated. It was a topic that people seemed to like to dance around, and in books, quite a bit of it seemed to be skipped over, with only the implication left behind. Isra hadn’t even realized that the implication was there, the first few times she’d read a romance.

“But then when a woman goes into heat is … random?” asked Isra.

“We don’t do that,” said Hannah. “At least, not to my knowledge, and I think I would know.”

“Oh,” said Isra. She sat with her hands in her lap, thinking about that. It seemed so wrong and confusing, that humans were uniquely missing a vital, fundamental part of their lives. They had rules of their own that they probably followed, but also these rules were the ones that people didn’t talk about very much. Looking at the animals, Isra had just thought, well, that it was the same in humans, and that she just hadn’t gone into heat yet. She had thought that romance would make a bit more sense then.

“Do you want help, findin’ a partner?” asked Hannah. “Or … someone to decode for you, if I understand your problem with that kind of thing?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “I don’t understand what Verity wants with Xy.”

“Well, again, I have to ask, do you mean mechanically or emotionally?” asked Hannah. “Because it seems to me, if the talk around the kitchen had you confused, that there’s not meant to be much of emotions involved, and that can be a bit fraught, if you ask me.”

“And … mechanically?” asked Isra. “Because … they wouldn’t mount each other.”

Hannah then explained, in some detail, what might happen between the two of them. This included some lessons in anatomy that clarified a few things for Isra.

“There are some books with illustrations, back in the temple,” said Hannah. “I can show them to you. And obviously the mechanics are different for a man and a woman, at least some of the time, and I could show you then too. Best to be forthright about it, especially with you, I think.”

“I see,” said Isra. She’d felt increasingly bad as the discussion had gone on, and was left, by the end of it, feeling rather glum.

“Are you okay?” asked Hannah.

“Fine,” said Isra.

“You know, I am a cleric,” said Hannah. “And I’ve been trained to talk to people about their problems, to give them advice, to help them figure things out. Beyond that, anythin’ you say will be in confidence, not shared with anyone else. It’s a bit delicate, given that we’re in a party together, but better to talk, in my opinion, even if the thoughts are half formed.”

“It makes me feel sick,” said Isra. “Imagining them together.”

“Ah,” said Hannah. “Well, that’s somethin’ that you’ll have to deal with, and I can help you with that — sick in what way? Sick like lookin’ at moldy food? Revulsion?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “No. Sad.”

“Mmm,” said Hannah. “Well.” She cleared her throat and there was silence in the air. “And do you ever think about bein’ with other people? Men or women? Bein’ kissed or touched?” The question was very gentle, reminding Isra of the way that people sometimes approached forest animals they were worried about scaring off.

Isra felt like objecting, because she’d had those thoughts, but it wasn’t like she’d actually been in heat. But apparently that wasn’t something that happened to women, and men presumably didn’t have any rutting behavior, so it was possible that the thoughts which had entered her mind were just the normal levels of desire that people had, and acting on them was natural, if the kind of thing that people just didn’t talk about.

“I think I might be done for now,” said Isra, standing from the chair. “It’s … thank you for the help, with the guild things, and the other, but — I need time to think, on my own.”

“Of course,” nodded Hannah. “And once your thoughts are in order, I’d be happy to talk with you again, especially over what you feel and how to handle it. You should know that for people your age, it’s not always so clear how to grapple with these things. This is universal, more or less, figurin’ out how things are for you.”

“Thank you,” Isra said again. She was feeling warm toward Hannah, grateful in a very tactile way, like she’d been rescued from drowning. It felt good, to be told that she was perfectly normal, especially after she’d been corrected on what felt like a fairly major misunderstanding about human mating.

Isra brushed her teeth with the miswak twig, used the bathroom, and went to bed. Verity was already there, in a nightgown but not yet asleep.

“How did talking about guild things go?” asked Verity. She had a small bottle of something beside her, and was rubbing something white onto her skin. “Lotion,” she explained. “Helps to keep the skin nice, would you like to try some?”

“Sure,” said Isra. She came over and sat next to Verity, and rolled up her sleeves so she could apply some lotion to her arms.

Verity talked for a bit about lotion, and the regimes that she’d used back in Dondrian, different soaps and ointments that were meant to keep the skin perfect. Isra listened, but she also kept her eyes on Verity. Everything that Hannah had said echoed back and forth through Isra’s mind, like a wave of thunder.

Eventually, Isra went back over to her own bed, and they shuttered the lights.

It took Isra some time to fall asleep though. She kept running things through in her mind’s eye, trying to test how she felt about them, as Hannah had asked her. She imagined nuzzling Verity, or kissing her, or their bodies entwined beneath the sheets. It caused her to be possessed of a restless energy, and made sleep come slowly.

Chapter 39 - Holy Numbers

Alfric, having nothing better to do, came back into the room with Filera early. She was still standing there and looking at the wardrobe with her eyes narrowed. There was no longer any inspection of it, only a sharp gaze. Alfric found himself a chair and calmly waited.

The party was getting along well, and he included himself in that assessment. Hopefully Lola would forget about him, or be convinced not to chase him down, though both of those seemed like they had a rather slim chance. If Lola’s party broke up … well, that would be the opportunity that Alfric had once dreamed about, a chance to put everything back together again and do it how he’d always wanted to do it. He felt a pang of guilt, since it would mean leaving the Pucklechurch party he’d formed. The feelings were more complicated than he would have imagined. It was a combination of Lola’s report on problems with the party and his growing affection for the Pucklechurch team, he thought.

“Sixty-six times a day,” Filera said into the silence.

“An auspicious number,” said Alfric.

“Less than you’d think,” said Filera. “Sixty-six is eleven sets of six. It only has two sixes in the number because of how we choose to count. Better would be seventy-two, which is twice six sets of six. Thirty-six is particularly auspicious, as it’s six sets of six.”

“Okay,” said Alfric. He rubbed his chin. “As a matter of doctrine, or preference?”

“Doctrine,” said Filera. “But as with all matters of doctrine, there are detractors.” She turned her eyes from the wardrobe to Alfric. “Sixty-six times a day should give you some ability to make money with this, though I imagine you’d be better off selling it to someone in a larger city. You’ve probably already surmised that the dial orients itself with north being up and similar relationships for the other settings. The entad uses a somewhat simple unidirectional doorway function, centered on a random ‘safe’ point of land within a hex, avoiding structures out to around ten feet and people out to a hundred feet. If there’s no safe space to create the door, it will attempt one of the surrounding hexes, and if none of those are suitable, it will go further.”

“Meaning?” asked Alfric, frowning.

“I’m in the business of identification and information, not monetization,” said Filera with a shrug. “Is your question about the function, or how to use that function?”

“It could be put on a ship and allow access to land no matter where on the oceans you are,” said Alfric, after a moment of thought. “But I have a hard time imagining that we couldn’t get more from it by just charging people for passage in a large city.”

“So there is some intellect there,” said Filera, giving him an approving nod.

“You need a keen intellect, if you’re going into dungeons,” said Alfric. “It helps with not dying. I’m available to talk now, if you are.”

Filera regarded him. “I suppose I am.” She gestured for him to sit down, and offered tea and snacks, which he declined. He wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted from this, but he was willing to indulge her if it meant that she would spend some time identifying entads for them. It was somewhat rare for an entad to dramatically rise in value when a cleric of Qymmos had a look at it, but there were definitely exceptions to that, including those with command words, or those whose apparent function cloaked a deeper, richer function.

“Clerics of Qymmos are of two minds when it comes to dungeons,” said Filera. “I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a schism, but it’s emblematic of two very different approaches to our god. For some, the dungeons are an endless source of new things to categorize, a paean to our god. For others, they’re a mockery of that same desire to categorize and systematize.”

“And which camp do you fall in?” asked Alfric.

“The former, naturally,” said Filera. “That’s part of why I wanted to speak with you. Do you go to clerics often?”

“Only for healing, not council,” said Alfric. “In Dondrian, I attended a weekly sermon, usually with my family. We were in rotation, a different church every week save for an expectation on holy days. The same six churches though, and a community of turners with us.” The term, ‘turners’ was somewhat derisive, but appropriate, in Alfric’s opinion. “I suppose it’s different here, when you’re all in a single temple.”

“It is,” said Filera. “There’s a weekly sermon, which rotates through the gods. In my opinion, the community is closer for it, but I imagine there are arguments for doing it the other way. People have their own understanding of the churches and their place within the community. The social aspect has always seemed, to me, irreplaceable.”

“Can I ask … why I’m here?” asked Alfric. “You must have people coming in all the time to hear about their problems. I want to make sure that your part of the deal is satisfied, and maybe I could do better if you’d tell me what you want me here for.” That felt like it was perhaps too direct and to the point, in a way that the people of the region didn’t care for.

“I find Pucklechurch a bit tepid, frankly,” said Filera. “The problems that people come to me with are ones that I do take some joy in solving, but I can already tell that I’m not cut out to stay here for the rest of my life. And that’s where you come in, an outsider who I can vicariously live through. You’re never going to be more than an outsider, and my guess is that you’ll be moving on in a few months, so for once, I think that I’ll get something out of talking, rather than giving my time and attention.”

“You’re … lonely,” said Alfric.

“No,” said Filera. “Or I wouldn’t quite put it like that. There’s something that possesses the young, a need to wander and explore, to see the world, and I had my own chance at that, a dozen dungeons, which was more than enough for me. But the life I have now, and the people in it, fall into certain distinct sets, and the friends I’ve made in Pucklechurch, beyond just the congregants, don’t satisfy the itch.”

“Well, I can do my best, I guess,” said Alfric. “Did you want to hear about the dungeon?”

“If you would, please,” she replied.

Alfric essentially just repeated what was in the report. He wasn’t a natural storyteller, and he could feel that it was a bit dry, but had no idea how to correct for that. He wanted it to be descriptive and evocative, but gravitated toward the facts too much.

“Forgive me for stating something we both know, but you’re a chrononaut,” said Filera.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “They know now, but didn’t at the time.”

“You expressed reticence to engage with the bear,” said Filera.

“Having to redo a dungeon when we’d already gotten a fair amount from it didn’t appeal to me,” said Alfric. “Nor did the idea of dying, or my teammates dying.” He had a very clear mental image of Mizuki getting sheared in half with one of those enormous shovel claws, though if it had been able to get Mizuki, it was far more likely that he would have already been dead by that point. “And a little bit I … don’t enjoy fighting the monsters as much as I thought I would.”

“No?” asked Filera, with an arched eyebrow.

“My mother doesn’t like fighting monsters, and she’s, well, possibly the most proficient dungeoneer in the world,” said Alfric. “She’s good at it, but being good at something doesn’t mean you have to like it. My father, on the other hand, seems to find some pleasure or glory in the fights, like it’s a chance to test his mettle, to best one of these creatures. And I’m competent at it, I feel, but the monsters are the thing I like least about dungeoneering. I keep hoping that a switch is going to flip and I’m going to find it exciting in the way my father seems to, but it’s, well … like doing dishes, I suppose. I take pleasure in the job being done, and I guess I don’t mind doing it, but it doesn’t fill me with the same kind of glee that I wish it did. I want something to flip over inside me so I’ll suddenly feel exhilaration from it, but so far … well, it seems like I take after my mother more.”

“And that explains some of your reluctance to engage with the bear,” said Filera.

“A small sliver of it,” said Alfric. “This is all in confidence, right?”

“On my oath as a cleric,” nodded Filera. “There’s no need to share it with anyone else, and I have no idea why someone might want to know.”

And that led Alfric to talking about Lola and the party that had been taken from him, which took some time.

“You think that if she knew we’d been talking, she would try to get information from me?” asked Filera.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “The more I talk about it, the more it’s obvious to me that I should probably confront her and clear the air, but everything is so poisoned between us that I’m not sure that’s going to be productive.”

“You’ll have to let me know how that drama resolves itself,” said Filera. “You gave me more than I’d hoped, and I hope talking about things has been a help to you, but I have other duties to attend to. I visit the elder’s home every day, and it’s getting close to the time for me to be off.”

“Thank you for listening,” said Alfric. “And for the identification.” He looked over at the wardrobe and wrinkled his nose. “I’m going to take that with me, I suppose. I’m mostly worried about the floatstones, which I need to return to Liberfell.”

“Are you planning to make some rings from it in town?” asked Filera. “Because you’re welcome to leave it here for the next few days, at least until you find a place to install it.”

“That would be great,” said Alfric. “I’ll take the floatstones off and leave it, let people know they’re free to use it while it’s here. Better to get the word out so that we can start making money off it.”

Alfric took his time removing the floatstones and was grateful that he was able to do it indoors, where they might crack a ceiling tile, but wouldn’t go shooting off into the sky. It took quite a bit of work to marry them with the loadstones that had been stuffed in the book, but once it was all done, the wardrobe was standing there in the temple room looking almost like it belonged there.

On his way back home, or ‘home’, as it were, he began composition of a guild message, one asking for advice on whether actively wanting to fight monsters was a necessary part of it. He knew his mother’s opinion on the matter, but there were members of the family whose thoughts he’d never heard. He didn’t think that it would be likely that he’d ever send the message, but it was still good to compose it, because it helped to get his thoughts in order.

There were aspects of fighting monsters he liked. He enjoyed figuring them out, taking all the rules he’d learned and putting them into practice, assessing the situation and what it called for … but the actual insertion of a sword into flesh left him feeling nothing in particular. He liked to win, certainly, but the actual fighting, not as much.

When he got to the house, Mizuki was in the middle of cooking, and the other three were in the kitchen with her, talking about plans for the garden. Alfric was mildly surprised to see Isra there, especially because he hadn’t heard anything over the party chat. Had she come to the house to see Verity, or had she just figured that they had returned?

“It’ll take the three of us,” said Verity. “Mizuki to tell us the names and what they’re used for, if she knows, Isra to figure out what’s local, and myself to actually execute the plan.”

“Sorry,” said Alfric. “I know I’m coming in late to this, but is there a reason that Isra couldn’t just do it all?”

“I like gardening,” said Verity. “And gardening is work, even if you’re a druid. Isra will help, and I’m sure it will be a far better garden for it, but I’ll be the one putting in the work.”

“It’s mostly going to be focused on Kiromon things,” said Mizuki. “I don’t actually care that much for traditional Kiromon cooking, but it’s nice to be able to draw from the same set of ingredients that my parents used to. Oh, and Hannah and I are embarking on a journey of noodle-making. Hopefully we can make something edible.”

“I do like a low bar for success,” said Alfric.

“But we should talk about the next dungeon,” said Hannah. “Isn’t that right?”

That hadn’t been what Alfric had intended to say at all, but it was a segue that seemed like it was worth taking. “We have options for the third dungeon. I read a fair number of the dungeon reports, and we’re going to aim for something that has a good chance of being easy for once. We need to rest though, and we need to start doing informal drills.”

“Drills,” said Verity, making a face.

“I said informal,” said Alfric. “But the point I’m trying to make is that I don’t want us to be going in with undue risk, and looking back at the last dungeon, it really seems like we did. We hit high variance, but —”

“Question,” said Mizuki, who was cutting up a fish. “Is variance a real thing, or is it just something that you say to make people more likely to go into dungeons?”

“It’s a real thing,” said Hannah. “I’m not sure the second dungeon was all that high variance though, aside from the bear at the end.”

“I put in a report to my guild,” said Alfric. “They agreed it was high variance, and proposed some possible explanations, though there was nothing remotely like consensus, and variance doesn’t really need an explanation.”

“Next time you write a report, tell your mom I said hi,” said Mizuki.

“We try to keep things professional,” said Alfric. “Though we do follow a heading system to separate out messages that are more … frivolous.”

“Fancy,” said Mizuki.

“Not really,” said Hannah. “Most larger guilds have such a thing.”

“I joined the druid’s guild,” said Isra. “This morning.”

“Oh really?” asked Verity. “You should have said, I’ve been going on about the garden and you had actual news to share. Though I suppose you haven’t heard anything from them yet.”

“There was a welcome message,” said Isra. “I think I need some help writing a reply.”

“You just think it,” said Alfric. “It’s pretty easy, I’ll help you with it later, if you’re going to be sticking around.”

“Isra is the beneficiary of always planning for an extra person,” said Mizuki as she continued cleaning the fish.

“I didn’t mean to intrude,” said Isra.

“You didn’t,” said Mizuki. “You can treat this like your house, and the spare bed in Verity’s room like it was your bed. But you should have used the party channel to let me know that you were going to be eating with us, and then I could have gotten a bit more food so we don’t need to stretch.”

“But you prepare more than we need,” said Alfric. “So it’s not actually a burden.”

“You’re going to lecture me about contingency planning?” asked Mizuki, momentarily stopping her knife work. “And I never said it was a burden, just that I like to plan out food, and it’s easier to do that when I don’t have to walk back to the shops right before dinner. Think about it like this, if we’ve got someone claiming the extra plate, what are we going to do if we have a random visitor?”

“How likely is that?” asked Alfric. “Do you get random visitors often? The kind that you’d feel obligated to have a meal ready for?”

“Well,” said Mizuki. “No.”

“Um,” said Verity. “I talked to the town cartier, Xy, today. Alfric, you’ll need to arrange things with her, but she’s shown some interest in being the first member of our counterparty.”

“Oh,” said Alfric. “That’s great news. But when you say town cartier, you mean she serves a wide region?”

“She does,” said Verity. “We would want to give her as much advance notice as possible, and I suppose I’m not entirely clear on what her duties would be, so the whole conversation was light on specifics.”

“Friendly though?” asked Hannah, keeping her voice casual.

“That’s something that I’d actually like to talk with you privately about,” said Verity. “It’s not really something I have all that much experience with. The, uh, mores and things, if there are some specifics.”

“Wait,” said Mizuki. “Are you going to be dating this girl?”

“Well,” said Verity. “That’s part of what I wanted to speak with Hannah about, because it seems like the arrangement she was interested in was being something less than partners.”

“Well you can talk to us too,” said Mizuki. “I know all about partners.”

“And you’re good at relationships?” asked Verity.

“Oh,” said Mizuki, deflating somewhat. “Well. Quantity has to count for something, right? Otherwise what was I doing with all those boys?”

“Ay,” said Hannah, raising an eyebrow. “What were you doin’ with all those boys?”

“Perfect chastity, no doubt,” said Verity.

“Well,” said Mizuki, blushing. “Chastity is only a virtue for Kesbin. But the point is, I have plenty of advice to offer. And if a boy came to me saying that he wanted ‘something less than partners’, that would raise some alarm bells, unless I was also looking for something less than partners, but I don’t think that usually turns out well.”

“With due respect,” said Hannah. “I did go to the seminary and spend quite a bit of my time learnin’ best practices for relationships of all kinds, but especially those between two women, platonic or otherwise. It’s among the duties I’m expected to perform as a cleric, givin’ advice. But that said, I do agree that I raise an eye at ‘less than partners’, unless that’s what you’d like. You don’t seem the type though.”

“I don’t?” asked Verity. “For all you know I’ve been with dozens of women.”

“Have you?” asked Hannah, voice quite innocent.

“No,” said Verity. “But I’m not sure what ‘type’ I seem like.”

“A sheltered life of parental pressure aside, and that’s just me readin’ between the lines, you seem like the type to go for the first girl to show strong interest in you,” said Hannah. “And from there, a relationship that moves quickly, because you like things to be sorted away. Then you’d get all the problems that come from that, the quickness, mostly things comin’ to a head some years down the road as you realize that you never built a solid foundation. But I’d be happy to hear your take on what you like and who you are, if that was all a load of feathers.”

“I like to think I’d be more circumspect in my partners than that,” said Verity. “But you’re probably right in the broad strokes. It’s a prophecy that I, well, … think there’s some merit to.”

Hannah shrugged. “A lot of bein’ a cleric, the community aspects of it, anyhow, is about puttin’ people into broad categories as quick as possible, then goin’ through as you talk to them and seein’ all the ways they don’t fit, or where your assumptions are wrong, and they will be wrong, because people aren’t made for categories.”

“Is that what clerics do?” asked Mizuki, who was washing her hands. The fish was all laid out and seasoned, ready for the oven. “I guess I never really go in.”

“You should,” said Hannah. “You’d find some use in it, I think. Most people do. Though some more than others, I s’pose.”

“I’ll speak with Xy,” said Alfric. “She’s local, which is good, and she’s probably not going to be looking for full-time employment, which we couldn’t pay her for, and which we don’t have enough work to justify. Thanks for making the first contact.”

“You don’t approve of me being with her?” asked Verity.

“I don’t think you want to hear my personal or professional feelings,” said Alfric. “I stayed quiet for a reason.” He glanced at Isra. She’d stayed quiet too, and he wondered whether that was because she had nothing to contribute, or whether he had an ally in her.

“Well, I think I do want to hear it,” said Verity. “‘Want’ is probably a strong word. I’d like to hear your objections, in a way that I probably wouldn’t have if your opinions were offered without me asking for them.”

“I want you to be happy,” said Alfric. “I think a strong relationship with a member of a counterparty isn’t a bad thing, and isn’t likely to interfere with the business of dungeoneering in the same way that a relationship with a member of the party is. The counterparty isn’t engaged in potentially life-or-death situations with us, where tensions might run high and where depending on each other can be crucial. And one of the necessities, when it comes to a party, is all the partybound things, a pressure that’s not there for the counterparty. But at this stage, unless I’m mistaken, Xy is the only local cartier. Out in an area like this, she’s probably paid by the province, or by Interim itself. Most other cartiers move to the cities for better pay, or ply trade routes and ley lines. So if we lose Xy, there’s probably no replacing her until or unless we have the money to get someone for that exact purpose, which we’re quite far from being able to do.”

“Understood,” said Verity. She frowned. “But she’s — we’re not anything yet.”

“I know,” said Alfric. “And I think that you’re within your rights to have a messy relationship with someone we’re in some kind of business with. Keeping a coherent party is what’s most important. And perhaps a fling would be good for you, if part of why you left Dondrian is because of the expectations of your parents.”

“My parents expected flings,” said Verity. “Socially appropriate flings that would help me make a splash, but all the same. When I was still figuring things out, she had given me some very frank advice on that. Etiquette and protocol.” She made a face. “I don’t know if I would find it more palatable if she’d been talking about women instead of men, but I doubt it.”

“Well I’m here for you, if you have questions,” said Hannah. “Or you could speak with Lemmel, if you’d prefer someone who’s not a friend.”

“Better a woman than a man though, right?” asked Alfric.

“Perils of a small town,” said Hannah, shrugging. “Not everywhere can be Dondrian, where you have thousands of clerics.”

“Well, like I said, it’s nothing yet,” said Verity. “And nothing much to fuss over.” She did seem a bit pleased about the fussing though, happy that she could share some of her joy. Or perhaps she was just happy about the prospect of having found someone that reciprocated her interest.

“Part of the reason to have friends is to fuss over romantic choices,” said Mizuki. “But if you’d like some privacy, let us know.” She turned to Isra. “I don’t suppose you’ve had a partner?”

“No,” said Isra, who had mostly been silent through all this.

To Alfric, this felt like an implied question about Isra’s sexuality, but he couldn’t quite tell whether her answer was a rejection of the question or a misunderstanding of what was being asked of her. She seemed a bit put out by the conversation, though that could well have been Alfric’s imagination.

“Dinner is going to be ready pretty soon,” said Mizuki, who was moving vegetables around in a pan on the stove. “Fish doesn’t take long to cook. We’re doing Kiromon flavors, if that’s alright with everyone, including a bit of lakeweed.”

“There aren’t lakes in Kiromo though,” said Hannah.

“Well, no, it’s adapted,” said Mizuki. “And there are lakes, but they’re mostly on the inland section, what used to be Mien. Nothing like the Proten Lakes though. The flavor of lakeweed is different, but it’s close enough. Grandpa used to import bales of dried seaweed, which he sold to some of the other immigrants. It was a side business, I think. Now we mostly make do with what we get from the Proten, and a few farms there.”

“I’m not sure I’ve ever had seaweed,” said Alfric. “What does it taste like?”

“A little fishy, which is why it goes well with fish,” said Mizuki. “It’s got a very green and, um, watery taste? Hannah made some bread to go with the meal, and it’s got some lakeweed in it too, so hopefully the flavor agrees with everyone. It’s not so much a ‘safe’ meal.”

“Safe, in this context meaning something you’ve made before?” asked Verity.

“Um,” said Mizuki. “I’ve made it before, but haven’t gotten feedback from anyone, and it’s not one of my staples. There are some recipes, like my stew, that I have down to a fine art, and each batch turns out more or less the same, depending only on the ingredients or what spin I’m putting on it. But there are other things where I don’t have a good feel for the cooking time, or the proportions, and it comes out different. This is one of those.”

“It’s a high variance meal,” said Alfric. He grinned at her.

“Well,” said Mizuki. “Yes. But if you’re about to compare dungeoneering to cooking, no thank you.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Alfric. “If you see some parallels, that’s on you.”

“Oh no,” said Mizuki, pressing a hand against her forehead. “He’s in my mind, making me think thoughts.” She made a pained face. “Variance minimization. Entad allocation. Attack tier pattern vectors.”

“See?” said Alfric. “I knew you were listening.”

“Did any of that mean anything?” asked Mizuki.

“Uh,” said Alfric. “Well, there’s not a lot that you can do to minimize variance, the focus is more on ensuring that you’re prepared for variance and you minimize the impact it has on your dungeon runs. That means bringing along plenty of equipment like axes, ropes, pitons, sacks, ladders, or whatever else.”

“We didn’t bring a ladder, did we?” asked Hannah.

“No, but we will for the third dungeon,” said Alfric. “It can fit in the stone, which can fit in the book, so it wouldn’t add all that much weight, and serves as a form of insurance. I’m still hoping that we get a better storage entad, but the book and the stone together get us about ninety percent there. In terms of how the second dungeon went, I think we did fairly well on the entads, but they’re support entads that help with logistics, rather than directly helping us to do the dungeons.” Alfric hated to bring it up, but they really did need to do a post mortem, especially now that they had some space to breathe and time to independently think about things. It would have been better to do it the night of, or the night after that, but things had come up, and he’d been feeling off kilter. There was a bit of silence as he tried to weigh his words.

“Oh, the post mortem,” said Mizuki, unprompted. “You’d mentioned it, and I think we can do it tonight. After dinner works for me? I’m fairly sure that none of you have plans.”

“Works for me,” said Verity.

“Me too,” said Hannah.

“Mmm,” said Isra, in a way that seemed like assent.

“Verity?” asked Alfric. “You’re not playing at the Fig and Gristle tonight? We can work around that.”

Verity very briefly looked at Mizuki, who gave a minute shake of her head. “No,” she said. “I’m taking a night off from that, and would have wanted to arrange it ahead of time anyhow.”

“What’s going on?” asked Alfric. He looked between them. Something was going on.

“Mizuki felt bad,” said Isra. “She was thinking of something to cheer you up, and settled on either a post mortem or dungeon school. Or both.”

“I don’t know that I need cheering up,” said Alfric.

“From the Lola thing?” asked Mizuki.

“Ah,” said Alfric. “Yeah. Well, I really appreciate it. I’m not sure what dungeon school would be though.”

“You know,” said Mizuki. “Like, you just tell us all the things we need to know about what dungeons are like, or something.”

“The problem is that there’s a lot,” said Alfric. “But I’ll do my best to distill it down and we can have something like a class on dungeons, if that’s what you want.”

“I want to be better at this dungeons thing,” said Mizuki. “And I thought it would make you happy to have a post mortem without feeling like it was a matter of pulling teeth to sit us all down for it, or like you were the one pushing things forward. I figured that sometimes it must feel like you’re carrying the team forward, which seems like it would get exhausting. It would have been better if we could have just left it at that though, without you knowing that we’d set things up ahead of time.”

“Well, either way,” said Alfric. “I really do appreciate the gesture, and the willingness. There’s a lot that people find boring, and yes, post mortems and training tend to be a part of that. But that can wait until after we’ve had dinner, and there are other things to talk about.”

“Like Verity’s cartier?” asked Mizuki.

“I’m hoping that the subject has been exhausted,” said Verity.

“Or cooking,” said Alfric. “Or the garden, or other things.”

“Sounds great,” said Mizuki. “Fish is done, vegetables are too, and we’ve got bread with butter, so I think we’re ready to eat.”

Chapter 41 - Meddling

There were some ways in which cooking for quite a few people was more work than cooking for one, but an aspect of it that Mizuki hadn’t considered was the work involved in transporting raw ingredients. Not buying them, since that was easy enough, but if she wanted to bring home enough food for the five of them for the next two or three days, the pounds really started to add up, enough so that her large, trusty bag was digging into her shoulder. It was also hard to cook for five because it seemed impossible to make enough that there would be leftovers for the next day, which meant that cooking was something that needed to be done every day. When she’d been alone, if she didn’t feel like cooking, she could just live off the same pot of stew for a few days.

Something was going to have to be done about it, but Mizuki didn’t quite know what. It was making cooking into a larger part of her life, and in the process, making cooking perhaps a little less fun. So far as she knew, none of the others could really cook, so it wasn’t like they could be depended upon to take up some of the slack. Hannah was the exception, and Isra seemed like she wanted to know how to cook, but … well. Mizuki was keenly aware that this was a problem of her own making. She had offered to cook and said that it was no problem. She had dismissed help with elements of the work where help would be appreciated. She had no idea how she was going to say, ‘Oh, actually, some days I just won’t feel like cooking’ or ‘I know that I waved off your suggestions that I take it easy, but actually I shouldn’t have done that’. It seemed awkward and unpleasant to do that.

“Mizuki, so good to see you’re intact,” said Marta, who seemed to be genuinely happy that Mizuki was there for market day. “How was the second dungeon for you?”

“Oh, it was an adventure,” said Mizuki. “We fought a bear the size of a house.”

Marta waved a hand. “You’ve got to be more realistic with your exaggerations, no one is going to believe that.”

“Very much not an exaggeration,” said Mizuki. “We really did.”

“And how would you have beaten such a thing?” asked Marta, giving Mizuki a raised eyebrow.

“By sucking all of the magic out of the room and breaking our bard,” said Mizuki. “And then having Hannah rush in to double the damage and nearly get herself killed.”

“Well, you be careful,” said Marta, frowning. “Dungeons don’t get very dangerous until you’re higher elevation, so if you’re having trouble now, it might be a sign that things aren’t for you.”

“So far it’s seeming like it’s extremely dangerous,” said Mizuki. “How many did you say you did?”

“Twenty-eight,” said Marta. She seemed to feel some pride in that, though she wasn’t quite puffing out her chest. “Of course, I was a wizard back then, filling a bit of your role, I suppose, though in a different way.”

“I’d meant to ask about that,” said Mizuki. “Why give up wizardry?” She’d known Marta for ages, though only as a purveyor of meats and other foodstuffs.

“There’s always work for a wizard, and I was a normal enough wizard for a time, but it’s intensive, mindful work, and never really gets less so,” said Marta. “Eventually I wanted to slow down, but if you slow, you start looking at all the equipment and thinking that it’s a load of money you’re not making the full use of, like sitting on a chair made of gold, so at a certain point I sold off all my mana stones and switched over to dealing in food, which was my husband’s work.”

“I guess it’s not the same for a sorc,” said Mizuki. “We don’t have equipment, or really all that much training or anything. There’s nothing to give up.”

“Some wizards go into a sort of retirement and keep enough stones around for little things,” said Marta. “And I did, for a year or so, until it was clear that I was going to rust away.”

“Do you regret that?” asked Mizuki. “Switching vocations?”

“Oh, not at all,” said Marta. “Firstly, I think it’s better not to live a life of regrets, but secondly, I think that we can view our lives as having different phases to them, when sometimes it’s appropriate to be one thing, and other times it’s appropriate to be another. But I’m not sure that there are so many parallels between us, because being a wizard is, if you’ll forgive me, much more of a steady job.”

“True,” nodded Mizuki. She looked down at the selection of meat. Marta’s husband was the butcher, and he had a skilled hand as well as some entad support, which allowed the meat to come out looking clean and perfect, almost an abstracted version of itself.

“You’ve been cooking for the whole house?” asked Marta.

“I have,” said Mizuki. “And they seem quite appreciative.”

“Five is a fair number to cook for,” said Marta. “You make sure you’re getting your worth from them, on that front and the other.”

“The other?” asked Mizuki.

“Dungeoneering,” said Marta. “Now, I’ve no idea how good you are in a dungeon, but we’re a bit alike, wizards and sorcerers, and my guess is that you do most of the killing. It’s a good position to negotiate from, if they know your worth.”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Oh, I would never do that, we’re, well, friends now. Mostly.”

“I like you quite a bit, more than my other customers, but don’t let them know it,” said Marta. “You’re always pleasant and cheerful, but you can’t negotiate to save your life.”

“Which is why I’m such a good customer?” asked Mizuki with a smile.

“Which is why you need to make sure no one is taking advantage of you,” said Marta. “I’m very serious about this. I know your family went back to Kiromo, and you don’t really have anyone, but just because someone is a friend, or just because you want to be nice, doesn’t mean that you should let them put too much on your shoulders.”

Mizuki had known Marta for a long time, and Marta was among a group of women who had made sure that when her parents left, Mizuki was more or less taken care of while she was alone in that big house. For the most part, it was in little ways, like occasionally bringing her food, or offering to help her out, or sometimes sending a son or grandson to do some chores, occasionally as a pretense for courting. These women had, perhaps, disagreed with the decision to leave her all by herself, or were just fulfilling their community obligation, but it had been nice to have someone looking out for her, even though the support and check-ins petered off over the years as it became clear that Mizuki could handle herself.

It was still somewhat shocking to get such a forceful heart-to-heart with Marta. It wasn’t unwarranted, necessarily, but Mizuki hadn’t been expecting it. It was all true, that she was agreeable, and sometimes felt like she was missing out because of it, especially when it came to the odd jobs end of things, and the phrase ‘oh you can just pay me what you feel is fair’ had passed her lips a few too many times. Alfric was the one holding the purse strings though, and he was too upstanding to give her anything less than she was owed, but she was cooking for the whole house, and perhaps offering a bit too much and waving away too many reasonable objections.

“I’ll think about it,” said Mizuki. “Thank you.”

“I’m sorry to get so serious on such a lovely day, and of course I know it’s not my place,” said Marta. “We had all assumed that you’d be married by now, but if that’s not in the cards for you, and no reason it has to be, then you won’t have a partner to lean on and shore up your weaknesses, I’m sorry to say.”

“I’ve got the party now,” said Mizuki. “But yes, I’ll make sure that I’m getting what I deserve. Not that there have been any problems. Alfric has been great, and he’s the one who’s in charge of all the money.”

“Good,” nodded Marta. “Now then, what can I get you in terms of meat?”

“You know, with Isra being such a good hunter, I should probably just see if she can bring some meat in,” said Mizuki. She said it very apologetically.

“She came by trying to sell dungeon meat,” said Marta. “And saying that she was a woods witch, which I suppose must be true, because it would be too outlandish to say otherwise. We couldn’t buy what she was selling though, not when there’s so much risk it will turn out to be poisonous or inedible. And of course if you plan to go with that, I wouldn’t fault you for it. Dungeon meat can be good eating.”

“I think it will be some time before I want to start experimenting with new meats,” said Mizuki. “Especially because by the time I had a good understanding of bear meat, the last of it in the whole world would be gone.” She looked at the selection. “Chickens, perhaps? I was thinking slow-roasted, with vegetables, something that’s not too much work, that can sit in the oven for an hour or two and be poked and prodded a bit.”

“That sounds lovely,” said Marta. “Oh, and I should let you know that Basil got in a selection of Kiromon spices, but would probably let you have first crack at them if you went over there today. Seaweed, their roots, things like that.”

“Why’d she do that?” asked Mizuki, wrinkling her nose. “Not that much demand for it, with most of the Kiromon families gone.”

“Either she had a good deal on it, or she thought that people might be nostalgic,” said Marta. “You know, when your grandfather came here with the other families, we regarded them as a bit strange, but I grew up with your mother and father, off by a few years, and there were lots of us who played with them and went to their house for food. You remember your parents would sometimes make food for the community? There are a fair few of us who miss that.”

“Is that a hint?” asked Mizuki. “That I should bring something in for temple day?” She smiled. “I don’t think I’ve ever cooked for that many people.”

“Well, think about it,” said Marta. “Ingredients would be supplied for you from the community fund, and we’d get you some helpers. There are some younger kids who have yet to learn how to cook, and it’s good for them to see someone work. Or just bring something to potluck next time we have it. If money is an issue —”

“It’s not,” said Mizuki. “The dungeons have done us well.” Though it was clear that the rings weren’t going to last as long as she’d thought they would, and that dungeons in general weren’t going to be quite so lucrative as that first one.

Once the chickens had been bought, wrapped, and put into her satchel, Mizuki decided that she would go see Basil to see what kind of spices were available.

Basil was a plump woman who was always moving around like she had something of great importance to get to, and Mizuki wasn’t sure that she’d ever seen the woman rest once. Basil was unmarried, and at her age, unlikely to ever be married, which Mizuki had heard through the grapevine was entirely by choice, rather than a lack of options when she was younger, or anything like that. Basil’s hair was greying, and she had slowed a bit since Mizuki was a child, but she was still in constant motion, hurrying around to get one thing or another done.

Her shop wasn’t really a ‘shop’, it was more of a loading and unloading place, a central point for larger shipments from elsewhere, including things the farmers needed. Basil had catalogs and contacts in the wider world, and if you needed something beyond what Pucklechurch could provide, there was a good chance that she could get it for you, though it might take some time. She had a personal entad she used to make trips into Plenarch once a week, and there was quite a bit she brought back from there, some of it by request with a few rings for her trouble, and other things that she stocked in her shop on a more speculative basis.

When Mizuki entered, Basil was talking with a tall boy, Kell, the local wizard, who Mizuki had steered clear of ever since he’d come into town. As pleasant as Marta had been about it, wizards and sorcerers did not mix, and the bad blood between their two tribes ran deep. A sorcerer could destroy magical constructs that a wizard had spent weeks or even months on, and there had been times, in the bad old days, when sorcerers were employed as wizard hunters, and consequently, times when a wizard would kill a sorcerer on sight. None of that was true now, but it was still the kind of history that sat there in the past, informing the present.

Strangely, he seemed to be talking about the same spices that Mizuki was there for.

“You have a good selection, and some authentic sauces,” he said. “Most of the stuff we get in Pucklechurch comes from Liberfell, and most of that is made from local ingredients that were on hand, including a lot of lake substitutes.”

“Enjoy your time in Kiromo, did you?” asked Basil.

“In most respects,” replied Kell, nodding. “It was only two months. It’s a lot different from Inter, but more the same than different, I think. Less welcoming, in a lot of ways. More formal.”

“Well, I never was one for travel, especially through a portal,” said Basil. “I’ve done it only twice, both times when I had no better option. There’s something creepy about it, passing through those tunnels.”

“Well, it’s the only good way to get to Kiromo,” Kell shrugged. “I didn’t mind it too much, but it might look different to someone who doesn’t have a mage’s eyes.”

Mizuki was looking at Kell while trying not to stare, which was hard to do. She could see the magic around him, in his implements, though less than she might have expected. He was holding a staff, and for that matter, so was she, but his staff had magical embellishments that a normal person wouldn’t even be able to see, all of them hovering like a cloud around the staff head. It was hard to see what kind of magic it was, but wizards typically went with pure force, shaped in different ways, along with something they called a reservoir, where raw materials resided that they filled from their mana stones. Mizuki didn’t know all that much about wizards, except that being so close to him, in the same room, meant that if it somehow, improbably, did come to blows between the two of them, it was already too late for him, because she’d have the magic apart before he could even get started with using it.

It would never come to that, of course, and Mizuki had never used her magic against another person, not on purpose, but her mind still went there sometimes when there was a bit of a threat.

Not that Kell was a threat. He seemed nice enough. He had the bookish look that wizards often went for, and while he wasn’t wearing full robes, his shirt was loose and long, with sleeves that had a bit of a drape to them, not quite a wizard’s ‘uniform’, but near enough, and nicely tailored.

He chose that moment to turn and look at her.

“Mizuki!” he said.

“Um,” she said. “Kell?”

“It’s good to see you, I keep meaning to talk to you at the temple, but most weeks you’re not there, or you slip out as soon as the sermon is done.” He was beaming at her.

“Talk to me about … what?” she asked.

“Just, to uh, reconnect?” he asked.

“Reconnect?” asked Mizuki. “You just moved here two months ago, right?”

“Oh,” he said, looking slightly put off. “You don’t remember me?”

“I,” said Mizuki. “Uh.” She felt like she should have been listening to rumors a bit more, because she was certain that if she had met him, then the rumor mill would have had something to say about him. Mizuki wasn’t normally forgetful, not when it came to gossip, but it seemed like she’d missed something vital.

“Lay off her, Kell,” said Basil, stepping forward. “She was three years above you, and you have to remember that when you’re younger, you don’t care all that much about the littles, not with that big a gap. To not remember is expected, and if you didn’t, it’s because you filled your head too much with ideas. ‘Reunion’.”

“Sorry,” said Mizuki. “I have zero memory.” She was looking at his face, trying to connect it to something that might have been buried deep in her subconscious.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I guess you stuck out a lot more than I did.” He looked down at his staff. “You don’t remember me going off to wizarding school at ten?”

“Wait,” said Mizuki. “Did we used to call you … Elk?”

Kell gave a sheepish grin. “Yes. I go by Kellan now, which is my actual name, though it’s Kell for short.”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “You’re the same person.” That slotted quite a few things into place, and made sense of some of the gossip about Kell, and how everyone seemed to have known him as soon as he came into town.

“The one and only,” he replied, grinning at her.

“I’m really very sorry, but I still don’t really remember you,” said Mizuki. “I mean, I have a vague recollection of everyone down through at least five years below me, but … were we friends?” She was racking her brain trying to think about it.

“We live on the outskirts, technically outside the town,” said Kell. “My mom and I came in for temple sermons, and I came in for school, but I never really hung out, not with the older kids, not when I was ten.”

“But I left an impression?” asked Mizuki.

“You were awe-inspiring,” said Kell, shrugging. “You used to use your magic on the playground, do you remember that?”

“Sure,” said Mizuki. “I got in trouble a few times. I don’t really use magic in public anymore.” She thought about that. “Much.”

“Well, I went off and got magic powers of my own,” said Kell, holding up his staff. He grinned at her.

“You’re not worried I’m going to break things?” asked Mizuki, looking at the magic that was held in place around the head of the staff.

“Are you going to break things?” asked Kell.

“No,” said Mizuki.

“Then no,” he said. “Actually, I was thinking that maybe we could partner up from time to time. I read up on sorcerers at the wizard academy. There are some interesting things that we can do together.”

“There are?” asked Mizuki. “We — sorcs — don’t really have training, and no one said anything about wizards to me, except that I should do my best to stay away from them.”

“Oh,” said Kell. Again, he seemed a little disheartened. “Do you take the wizard and sorcerer feud seriously?”

“No,” said Mizuki. “I mean, I guess not. It’s old stuff.”

“It’s not that old,” said Kell. “It’s the kind of history that sits there in the past, informing the present.”

Mizuki frowned a bit. “Is that from something?”

“It’s from the Zotl Bixium,” said Kell. “There was a sermon a few weeks ago.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “It’s weird how those things get into your head without you even realizing.”

“Bixzotl is a favorite of wizards,” said Kell, nodding. “Mostly because we do the same things over and over.”

“God of Repetition,” said Mizuki. She looked over at the large crates of spices. “You’re here for the same reason I am?”

“I suppose so,” said Kell. “Bethany thought that I might want first crack at things.”

“Do you cook?” asked Mizuki, raising an eyebrow.

“I can follow a recipe,” replied Kell. “Can you cook?”

“It’s basically the only thing I’m competent at,” said Mizuki, smiling a bit. “You’ve actually been to Kiromo?”

“I’m half Kiromon, like you,” he said. “Again, it’s kind of funny that we grew up three years apart and you have virtually no memory of me. I’d be offended, if I offended easily. I came over to your house a few times, when our parents were doing things together.”

Mizuki shrugged. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s fine,” said Kell. “So long as you don’t call me Elk.” He hesitated for a moment. “Well, it was good to see you, even if it’s basically the first time for you. I should get going.”

“You’re not going to buy anything?” asked Basil, who had been standing off to one side for most of the conversation, pretending as though it wasn’t taking place in her shop and she wasn’t eavesdropping, which she almost certainly was.

“Oh,” said Kell. “Well, yes, a bottle of enyo, nienyo, tekon, then four ounces each of um, tene, eri, and nibyu. Please.”

The transaction was completed somewhat awkwardly, and Mizuki couldn’t help but notice that Kell had a lot of rings on his string. That wasn’t all that unexpected, since wizardry was a skilled trade, and once they’d paid for their mana stones, they started bringing in quite a bit of money. They didn’t have the raw destructive potential of a sorcerer, but they had quite a bit more utility and fine control.

Once Kell was gone, Basil turned to Mizuki. “He seems smitten with you,” she said.

“Does he?” asked Mizuki.

“It’s a good match, if you ask me, historical enmity aside,” said Basil.

“I’ve actually got a date with a guy over in Liberfell,” said Mizuki.

“Tough to make it work over that distance,” said Basil. “It’s a shame Kell never seemed to have made much of an impression on you. He seems sweet.”

“He does,” nodded Mizuki. “I don’t know.” He did seem sweet, like the kind of boy her mother would have picked for her. Maybe that was the thinking, back when they’d been young.

“Not to your liking?” asked Basil. “You know, when you partied with Alfric, we thought maybe that would finally be your match. But I take it there’s no movement on that front?”

“There’s no front,” said Mizuki. “He’s not interested in me, and I’m — well.”

“Interested in every boy?” asked Basil.

“I like boys,” shrugged Mizuki. “It’s hard not to look at one and see all the good qualities. I see Alfric’s good qualities. There are things that would be good about partnering with him. Um, don’t let him know I said that.”

“But is the same not true for Kell?” asked Basil, raising an eyebrow.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “It’s really hard to say. I don’t remember him. There was a little boy we called Elk, and I can picture him in my mind, but he didn’t leave much of an impression, and … I don’t know. Are you trying to set me up?”

“Historically, we’ve had little luck with that,” said Basil. “We just want you to be happy.”

“I’m happy where I am,” said Mizuki. “The party has been good for me, and I like having people in the house.”

“It’s temporary though, isn’t it?” asked Basil. “That’s what you said, last we spoke.”

“It’s temporary,” said Mizuki. “But there’s a part of me that wishes it weren’t. If we somehow manage to get through the next two rings of dungeons, we’ll be traveling further afield, and … well, eventually we’ll have to leave Pucklechurch.”

“I don’t think that would be so bad, if you were with people you like,” said Basil. “I know after your fallout with the Pedder boys you retreated for a bit. And there are others who you’ve had your disagreeable moments with.”

“True,” said Mizuki, frowning. Some of this she’d relayed directly to Basil, and other bits of it had surely been collected as gossip. “You’d miss me though, right?”

“Oh, many people would miss you, but no one goes dungeoneering forever.” Basil shifted. “And perhaps some of the problems of the past would be forgotten in that time?”

“The boy troubles,” said Mizuki.

Basil nodded. “I’m sorry you’ve had problems. Too many things not working out. Never a game I was too interested in playing, but for those that play it, I know it can hurt.” She stepped back and looked at the Kiromon goods. “Was there anything you wanted?”

“Oh, all of it,” said Mizuki. “It’s all dry goods and shelf-stable sauces, and I need to stock up on the staples anyway. It’ll take some work to get accustomed to things that are actually made in Kiromo though. Can I ask why you got these? Marta said something about wanting to sell to people for nostalgia.”

“There’s a strong Kiromon influence in this town, thanks in part to your grandfather. Most of us grew up around a few Kiromon foods, at the least,” said Basil. “But the bigger part is that Kiromo is putting more of a focus on exporting now, and I don’t mind admitting to you that the prices are good. They say that with the current Emperor, there’s a chance that Kiromo will be absorbed into Inter within a generation.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “But that won’t make traveling there any easier.”

“Have you thought about taking a trip?” asked Basil. “I suppose you’re busy with your party now, but once that’s concluded? It’s been some time since you’ve seen your parents. Your sisters?”

“Maybe,” said Mizuki. “But if I went, I know there would be pressure to stay, and with the portals, it would be at least a month there. Someday, maybe. You know, if I didn’t know better, I would think that you were trying to get rid of me.”

“I want you to be happy, and I’m not sure what happiness will look like for you, if you stay in Pucklechurch.” Basil placed her hands on her hips. “You don’t seem to have the need to leave, not like some of them get, but to see the wider world, even if you end up back here … you’re treading water, and I’m afraid that you’ll end up drowned if you keep at it. That’s just my opinion, and I know you haven’t asked for it.”

“No, it’s welcome,” said Mizuki with a sigh. “I know where I am in life, and I know it’s not quite where I want to be. Thank you.” Her eyes went to the goods. “Okay, let me buy this, but I’ll be back later once I’ve taken stock. It looks like we’ll be eating Kiromon for a bit, and I’m going to have to remember how that goes.”

By the time the transaction was concluded, Mizuki’s satchel was about as full as it could get, and it weighed quite a bit. She trudged back to her house, mulling things over, but once she was there, she had people to talk to, and the uncharacteristically gloomy thoughts had left her.

“So,” said Hannah. “I know you’ve gotten the ingredients by now, but I was thinkin’ that I could cook tonight.”

“Really?” asked Mizuki. “Do you cook?”

“Ay, and I’ve said as much,” said Hannah. “But you didn’t seem to take it seriously, and I confess I’m better with baking, and if I’m bein’ honest, the kind of things I like to cook are the ones that seem most like it’s just another bake. Meat pies, egg bakes, a terrine from time to time. And you’re properly good at it, while I’m just good enough that no one complains.”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Well … yes, I would like that very much, just for tonight.”

“I’m happy to take a load off for you,” nodded Hannah.

“Can I ask — did you talk to someone in town?” asked Mizuki.

“About my takin’ a turn to cook?” asked Hannah.

“Yeah,” said Mizuki.

“Well,” said Hannah. “Ay. It seems a lot of people in town know your business.”

“I’ve definitely been getting that feeling today,” said Mizuki. “More than usual, anyway.” It seemed as though there had been a bit of a friendly conspiracy going on. She didn’t mind that people had been talking about her life, but she did wish that they’d had a few less criticisms, or possibly that she’d given them less to criticize. “Did you come from a small town, originally?”

“Oh, ay, smaller than Pucklechurch even,” said Hannah. “A scant hundred people, and I was related to most of them. And then I was in the seminary, and there were so many people from all over the world, with a big city beyond the seminary’s walls. But having seen both ends, I have to say that I like a smaller place like Pucklechurch. Large enough that you don’t know absolutely everyone, small enough that you mostly see the same faces. And small enough that people will make some well-meanin’ interventions.”

“Well,” said Mizuki. “I like it. But I wouldn’t mind seeing what a proper city is like, if Liberfell doesn’t qualify.”

“If we can stick together, we’ll probably have our chance,” said Hannah. “Now, let me know what you have for ingredients, and I can try to make a Mizuki meal.”

It turned out okay. If Mizuki had been invited over to a friend’s house and been served the chicken and vegetables that Hannah made, well, Mizuki wouldn’t have complained. The seasoning wasn’t quite what Mizuki would have done, and the chicken was a bit overcooked while the vegetables were a bit undercooked.

Still, it tasted all the better because Mizuki hadn’t been the one to make it, and she felt grateful that people both inside the house and outside of it were watching out for her.

Chapter 42 - Singing Slow

When Cynthia broke the news, Verity was surprised how much it stung. The Fig and Gristle had found itself a new bard, one who was taking up Verity’s old room. It was made all the more awkward by Verity being informed of this when she’d shown up with her lute in hand, ready to sing for the night. There was a part of her that wondered, earlier, whether she would feel good about losing her job, but no, it was mostly just a sort of emptiness. She’d known that she wasn’t going to be at the Fig and Gristle forever, that was part of the reason she’d agreed to go dungeoneering in the first place, but to have that chapter of her life finally closed felt awkward and unwelcome.

Having nothing else to do with her night, Verity brought her lute in anyhow and ordered a plate of food, waiting for the new bard to start up. She did have some loyalty to the place, where she’d lived for what felt like quite a long time. The patrons had gotten used to her, and she to them. There were some who she saw almost every night, and groups who congregated on certain days of the week. She wondered whether they would even notice the difference, or whether it would reflect poorly on her to have a replacement, but it was entirely possible that the new bard was actually good.

When the new bard took the small stage, the first thing Verity noticed was how shockingly young she was. Verity would have been surprised if the girl was older than fifteen. She played a lute too, which made the evaluation all that much easier, and from the outset, as the lute was being tuned in preparation for playing, Verity could tell that the girl was, at the least, not conservatory trained. Once the song actually started, Verity winced. It was acceptable quality, for a place like this, but Verity had instructors who would have beaten her if she’d played that poorly. The girl’s form was poor and strained, her tuning was slightly off, and she was doing a poor job of keeping the rhythm.

The magic was even worse. It was the kind of thing that Verity had been doing since the age of nine, a weak tune that made the food taste better and lightened some emotion, but did both those things without any real power.

The girl had long blonde hair tied back in a braid and a pleasant look to her, and for all that Verity could see every flaw in the music, the new bard seemed to be enjoying herself and the production of the music. The song sounded like an original, though in the eight months or so that Verity had been playing at the Fig and Gristle, she hadn’t been able to memorize the entirety of the local tunes, just the majority. The girl’s voice was nice and mellow, but it was nice in the way that raw clay was nice, something that needed to be worked and trained.

Verity ate her meal and listened, composing a critique in her head that she wasn’t unkind enough to ever actually share. When she was halfway through the meal, Verity’s mind began to wander from the music and the magic around her, and to the more advanced problems of her own. As she saw it, the most major issue she faced in the dungeons was that of stamina, which in her opinion likely descended from the particulars of her training.

When a bard performed in a concert setting, it was usually full tilt, as heavy as possible without regard for being able to continue on past the end of the piece. When a bard was in a dungeon, however, sustain was one of the most important things, because it allowed more time to regroup between encounters and less of a need to rush. Holding the song and not having it drain her when there was no need for the effects, that was something that Verity had never really learned, because there had never been much need. What she needed was to be able to carry the magic down to its lowest level, barely a heartbeat of a tune, and ideally, to do that without needing too much of her focus. Then, when there was an actual fight, she could rouse the song into its full power and give the party what they needed to defeat whatever evil was in front of them. She knew that this was possible, but it was difficult, and learning it was more difficult because she had no one to talk to and learn from.

While she ate her dinner, she spun up a song of her own, going along with the half-ring bard and providing a companion piece. Working with another bard was always difficult, and doing it without them knowing it was harder still, especially with one as unskilled as this one. But reducing her own magic to a minimum was, Verity thought, a bit easier this way, because her magic could float on top of the other magic, barely perceptible to either of them, but still there. She reduced it even further, until it was at the edge of even her own perception, following along with one beat in every four, then one in every eight.

Then Verity tried to go down to one in every sixteen, and she was surprised that she was able to hold it for a few measures, but then it wavered like a candle flame in a light wind, and Verity wasn’t able to recover it. It had been a small bit of muttered magic though, kept going through a tapping of her foot and a bit of humming, and there was very little of the usual feeling of being exhausted.

Verity went again, trying to get the magic down to a bare minimum, though she wasn’t sure that she’d be able to do it without existing music to serve as a guide. This time she was able to hold it at one-in-sixteen for an entire verse before it wobbled and fell apart like a top losing the speed necessary to spin.

It was quite the opposite of what she’d been trained for, and went against some of the musicomagical philosophy she’d been taught since she was young. Her tutors, and later, the conservatory, had emphasized consistency of impact and a kind of boisterous playing that went at magical production with gusto, and they had never taught her how to do what she was now attempting, minimizing the impact of her magic, stringing it along without contributing much, focusing on maintenance.

After nearly two hours, with a half-eaten dessert that was now room temperature in front of her, Verity had spun up and then petered out nearly a dozen songs, in what was probably a record for her. She was feeling the strain of it, and she didn’t feel anything she’d been able to do would be at all useful in the dungeons, but she felt like she’d made some good progress, and if she could get better, then in a month, perhaps they would be able to stay on the same song while taking ten minutes for healing and rest before moving on to the next room.

For all Verity’s criticisms, the half-ring bard managed to go quite a while, keeping up the minor effects for a longer set than Verity normally did, though obviously it used less power when the effect was so weak. It was clearly a strain on her though, and Verity hoped that the girl wasn’t on the verge of injuring herself. It was her first night at the Fig and Gristle, and clearly she was trying to make a good impression, but it wasn’t as though Cynthia was spoiled for choice, and even a middling bard like this would probably be staying for at least a few weeks.

To Verity’s surprise, when the bard had finished her set, she came over to where Verity was sitting and slipped into the chair without asking.

“You’re Verity, right?” the girl asked. She was flushed and sweaty, a clear sign that she’d gone too far with her playing, but she had a wide smile on her face. She held out a hand, and Verity took it. “Clemency.”

“Is that your name, or are you asking?” asked Verity.

“Both, I suppose,” replied Clemency. “I thought it was funny that we had similar names, when I heard about you.” They were both virtue names, though the name ‘Verity’ was among the more traditional virtue names, tracing back a further lineage than a name like ‘Clemency’.

“The lute gave me away?” asked Verity, nodding to the case that was sitting on the table, up away from foot traffic.

“You were doing some bardic work, weren’t you?” asked Clemency, quirking an eyebrow. She seemed exhausted but happy. “I thought that was a bit unusual.”

“Sorry,” said Verity. “I was trying something. I hope I didn’t interrupt you. I was trying to bring the magic as low as I could go without stalling out.”

“You got down to one in thirty two very briefly there,” said Clemency. “I was quite impressed.”

“You have a good ear,” said Verity. “Or a good head for magic.”

“I’m not very good yet,” said Clemency, looking sheepish. “But I didn’t start until two years ago. I can do it better in my head than with my hands. I think I drifted out of tune for a bit, sorry.”

She had started out of tune, but Verity elected not to say that. It was the curse of any professional that they heard and saw flaws that others didn’t. “You’re doing well,” said Verity. “I’m glad that my leaving won’t mean that the Fig and Gristle is without music.”

“Cynthia said that you’d decided to become a dungeoneer,” said Clemency.

“It’s more like an opportunity came to my door,” said Verity. “Which I suppose is now your door. It’s a bit of pressure, but nothing like playing a concert hall.”

“You’ve played a concert hall?” asked Clemency, eyes wide.

“In Dondrian, yes,” said Verity. “The Ellusifé twice and the Pallonia once.” It occurred to her after she’d said it that this could be seen as bragging, and following that thought, it occurred to her that this was saying a bit too much. “It was less of a big deal than it maybe sounds like, these were spotlight events rather than purely on merit.” But the clarification didn’t seem to have the intended effect, because Clemency was still staring at her with wide eyes.

“But then why are you —” she choked back the question and looked at her hands.

“Here,” Verity finished for her. She mulled over the question, trying to find a good way to say it, one that would hopefully communicate everything there was to say on the matter. “For a bard in Dondrian, there’s a lot of pressure, at least if people think as highly of you as they did of me. When everyone is congratulating you on a performance you know you made a hundred mistakes on, when you get invitations to play at important places and they expect you to glad hand for three hours after an hour long performance …” Verity trailed off. She could see that she wasn’t getting through to the girl, and these sorts of problems weren’t ones that she could relate to. “I don’t mean to whine. We were a family of some means.”

“No, not at all,” said Clemency. “We all have our problems.” She smiled. “I hope someday those are the sorts of problems I have. I’ll consider it a mark of good luck that I’m taking a position you vacated.”

Verity gave her a small smile. “I hope that you get everything you wish for. And thank you, for stopping by. There’s a good chance that I’ll see you around Pucklechurch. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help make it a good transition. Cynthia was kind to me, and I have some affection for the place.”

“We could sing together some night?” asked Clemency. “I don’t know if you’ve ever done that, aside from whatever you were trying, but I’ve always wanted to. I doubt Cynthia would pay for it, but I would take a loss, if it meant —”

“We’ll figure something out,” said Verity, before the other bard could go any further. She had to suppress the urge to give the girl half a string of rings right then and there.

When they’d said their goodbyes, and Verity had a short chat with Cynthia, who seemed apologetic, Verity was left to walk home, carrying an unplayed lute.

She had known, when she’d sought out the job at the Fig and Gristle, that she wasn’t going to be there forever. To settle down and be a tavern bard at eighteen … there was something she found a bit sad about that, though she could see how it would be possible. It had happened to better people than her, she was sure. There was a song, she recalled, about a man who sat down to rest for a moment and then realized a decade later that he had once been moving, but was so covered with moss and leaves that he couldn’t get up. It was her favorite kind of song, a jaunty tune about a depressing subject. When Alfric had come calling, Verity had already been starting to wonder whether she was going to end up at the Fig and Gristle forever. In fact, there was a chance that if the right girl had come along to woo her, she would have put down proper roots.

And it was possible that the same thing might happen with dungeoneering, if she wasn’t careful. Her excuse for not wanting to do more than just the six around Pucklechurch had been that she didn’t want to do all that walking, but with the travel entads, and with the other members of the party becoming friends, she could easily see them still doing this same thing fifty or a hundred dungeons down the way. Thousands … well, that she couldn’t imagine.

“We’re talkin’ next dungeons,” said Hannah once Verity had come in. “How was playin’?”

“There’s a new bard,” said Verity. “So playing didn’t really happen.”

“That’s a shame,” said Hannah. “I know you liked going there. If you’d like, the next time we’re all in Tarchwood or Liberfell, we can find a place where you can play for an audience.”

“I think it was the comfort and familiarity of the place,” said Verity. “Is Isra in?”

“No,” said Alfric. “And it’s getting late enough that I’m not sure it would be worth the trip for her. You’re welcome to try the channel though.” He was sitting with a glass of wine cupped in one hand. An open bottle was sitting on the table between him and Mizuki, half-drained. Mizuki’s face was slightly flushed. The house still smelled of the dinner she’d cooked, something buttery with chicken, and Verity almost asked whether there were leftovers, even though she’d already eaten.

“I think I’ll leave her be,” said Verity. “Though I suppose if she came, she could just take the spare bed.”

“It’s not really a spare bed,” said Mizuki. “It’s her bed, she just doesn’t use it most nights.”

“What’s the consensus on the next dungeon?” asked Verity.

“Nothing,” said Mizuki. “We’ve just been talking in circles.” She took a sip of her wine. “Speculating, which I’ve been informed by both of them is a stupid thing to do, and which hasn’t seemed to stop either.” She gestured at the bottle. “There’s wine, if you’d like to join us in our wild speculations that will come to no conclusion.”

Verity almost said no, but she changed her mind at the last minute and instead set her lute case down to take a seat.

<Isra, we’re drinking wine and making wild guesses about future dungeons,> said Verity. <I would appreciate you coming over, if you’re not busy hunting or something. If you spend the night, we might convince Hannah to bake some bread in the morning.>

<I’ll be over,> said Isra.

<Excellent,> replied Verity. <Looking forward to it.>

“Bread?” asked Hannah. “I can, of course, unless you’d like to make a show of convincin’ me.”

“Oh, I would adore that,” said Verity. “Make us beg you. You’ll all still be up once Isra gets here, right?”

“I’m late to bed most nights,” said Mizuki. “Especially after some good wine. It’s just about chilly enough to make a fire, I think. I’d thought we were done with cold spring nights. I’ll have to complain to Isra when she shows up.”

“I’ll go get some wood,” said Alfric. “Is there a wood pile in the back?”

“Um,” said Mizuki. “I kind of just grab logs from the forest. In the winter there’s a fully powered heating element.”

“Then I’ll go find some logs in the woods, I guess,” said Alfric. He rubbed his hands together and took off without another word.

“Always quick to pitch in,” said Hannah, shaking her head slightly. “I don’t think I could be moved for anything right now.”

“Too much food for everyone,” said Mizuki. “And then wine on top of that. But I suppose lighting the fire will fall to me.”

“You have a firestarter though, don’t you?” asked Hannah. “I could have sworn I’d seen one around.”

“Hush,” said Mizuki. “I don’t get many chances to use my mystical powers for good.”

“Or for evil, right?” asked Verity.

Mizuki bit her lip. “Oh, just a tiny bit of evil, now and then. You know, they say that evil is the spice of life.”

“I don’t think that’s what they say,” smiled Hannah.

“What are we talking about?” asked Alfric, who had come back in with armfuls of wood.

“What’s the spice of life?” asked Hannah.

Alfric set the logs beside the fireplace, then stood up with a thoughtful expression. “Verity?” he asked.

There was a chorus of groans from around the room, and Mizuki threw a pillow at Alfric, which he caught with expected deftness, as though he’d been trained for it.

“Sorry I wasn’t able to get proper logs,” said Alfric. “I did my best.” Verity looked, and saw that it was an awkward collection of wood, none of it properly split or chopped. This was something she hadn’t really thought about before, but for a wood fireplace, the kind that was only really for nostalgia or entertainment unless you were quite poor, you needed a fair amount of preparation. The fireplace was fairly wide, but not everything Alfric had brought in would fit.

“Are you going to apologize for that pun?” asked Mizuki.

“I stand by it,” said Alfric. He began stacking logs into the fireplace, or at least the ones that would fit. “Are you going to help me light this fire?”

“Sure,” said Mizuki, getting up from her chair and going over to the fireplace. “This is actually a bit more tricky than it seems though. Most things don’t want to start on fire, and if it’s at all wet, which stuff from the woods probably is, then the water needs to be cooked out before it will be properly on fire. I don’t want to use up the ambient imbalance in the room just to turn the outside of a log into cinders and then not have a flame.”

“Or I could just use a firestarter, if this is going to be a whole production,” said Alfric.

“No, it’s fine, I just need to concentrate,” said Mizuki.

“How much of that bottle has she had?” asked Verity.

“Not too much,” said Hannah as Mizuki crouched down by the fireplace. “We’ve been pacing ourselves. Not the sort of state where I’d be doing delicate work, but it might be different for sorcs.”

“It is,” said Mizuki, who was holding out a hand toward the logs. “We actually get slightly better after a glass of wine. There’s a lot of instinct involved. Wine lubricates the mind.”

“I wonder whether that’s actually true,” said Verity.

Flame came out of Mizuki’s hand in a gout and lit up the logs, sticking to them for a moment before the fire became more natural. Mizuki stepped back and smiled at the fire, then took another sip from her wine glass. She seemed quite pleased with herself. “Behold,” she said, holding her arms wide. She just barely kept from splashing wine from her glass.

“Not to undercut your impressive and important display of power,” said Alfric. “But I definitely could have done that too.”

“Firestarters are cheating,” said Mizuki.

“They’re not,” said Alfric. “But even if they were, I have flint and steel, and could do it that way.”

“You carry flint and steel with you?” asked Hannah.

“In the book,” said Alfric. “It was cheap, and there’s plenty of room for small things like that. I actually have a whole kit for making fires, including some char cloth. Wilderness survival sometimes ends up being important for dungeoneers, either within the dungeon or outside of it. I won’t say it’s common, but knowing how to start a fire might save someone’s life, or allow us to get at some loot we would otherwise lose.”

“Seems a bad idea,” said Hannah, “To light a fire in a dungeon?”

“Depends on the circumstances,” said Alfric, shrugging. “Obviously you don’t do it if you’re going to smoke yourself out.” He’d gone back to sit on the couch with Mizuki, and stretched slightly. “We still need to do dungeon school, ideally before the next dungeon.”

“You know what we need?” asked Mizuki. She turned to Alfric. “Do you mind if I have my legs on you?”

“What?” asked Alfric.

“So I can stretch out,” said Mizuki.

“Sure,” said Alfric. “Fine.”

Mizuki stretched out, resting her bare feet on Alfric’s lap and taking up basically the whole of the couch. “Nice.”

“You were sayin’ we needed somethin’?” asked Hannah. “Unless it was just to stretch out.”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “What we need is a name. All the cool adventuring groups have one.”

“Is it just me, or is ‘adventuring’ a weird euphemism?” asked Verity.

“It’s an old word for an old profession,” said Alfric. “Mostly it points at the element of luck. I think it’s appropriate.”

“Maybe,” said Verity. “But if I included it in a song, I would feel awkward about it, like I was using a turn of phrase for the sake of it.”

“I do prefer ‘dungeoneering’”, said Alfric. “It sounds more professional.”

“So for our name,” said Mizuki. “Do we want something professional? Is that a requirement?”

“If you have a weird name, you have to be good enough to make up for that,” said Alfric. “There are some stupid names where you think, ‘oh, that’s just some people who don’t take things seriously’, and there are other stupid names where you think, ‘oh, they take this so seriously that they picked a stupid name because it wasn’t going to matter either way’.”

“Got a whole philosophy, have you?” asked Hannah.

“‘The Vertex’ was a good name,” said Alfric. “But sadly, it’s taken now.”

“Do you really, honestly believe that it was a good name?” asked Hannah. “Because it calls into question your judgment.”

“It was good,” said Alfric, shaking his head. “Strong, simple, easy to remember. But not too in your face.” He turned to Verity. “You’re a bard, do you have any good suggestions?”

“Not at the moment,” said Verity. “I don’t have a good sense of what people choose in terms of party names. If they’re names like ‘Vertex’ the pool seems to be quite limited.”

“An adjective and a noun is quite common,” said Alfric. “Or a pun, or a place name.”

“Something Puckle?” asked Mizuki. “Puck means … fairy or demon or something like that.”

“I would worry about the rhymes,” said Alfric. Verity let out a little laugh.

“We could do something from scripture,” said Hannah. “‘The Hands of Man’ or ‘Reflective Children’.”

“Those are both terrible,” said Mizuki. “You’d make everyone think that we have hands like a man’s hands.”

“Or that we’re children,” said Verity, wrinkling her nose. “But I feel like at the rate we’re going, we’re going to have to settle on something that none of us like.”

“The Settlers?” asked Isra.

Verity turned to her as soon as she spoke. “Isra! You came!” She must have slipped in without making a noise, and was still in her outdoor clothing with thick layers, boots yet to be removed.

“I said I would,” said Isra. She gave Verity a hesitant smile. “Sorry, I should have knocked.”

“Nonsense!” declared Mizuki. “You’re welcome in my house any time, the bed upstairs is yours whenever that’s convenient for you, just let me know ahead of time if you’re going to be eating with us.”

“Is there a place to sit?” asked Isra. The living room had two armchairs and a couch, but the seating, normally enough for five, offered less accommodation because Mizuki was stretched across the couch.

“I can move,” said Mizuki, though she seemed annoyed that she was compelled to offer.

“You can sit with me,” Verity said to Isra. “This chair is a bit oversized.”

“It’s a tenyon,” said Mizuki. “It’s meant for two, if they’re close friends or,” but she didn’t finish the thought, instead taking a sip of wine.

Despite that, Isra moved over and sat in the chair with Verity. It was tight, but not uncomfortably so, and Verity felt pleased to be pressed up against someone. Isra was somewhat chilly, having just come in from the mild cold, but she was also nice and soft.

“I like Settlers,” said Alfric. “But it needs something.”

“What are we meant to be settling?” asked Mizuki. “The dungeons?”

“It just has a nice adventuresome quality to it,” shrugged Alfric. “I can’t explain it.”

“All the best lyrics are like that,” said Verity. “They have an unexpected fittingness.”

“Wait,” said Mizuki. “Because we’re not the perfect party, and you settled for us?”

“Well that makes me like the name a bit less,” said Alfric, frowning.

“I like it,” said Hannah. “But I’d rather not decide on anything at the moment, not when half of us are in our cups.”

“Which half?” asked Mizuki. “Do you mean me? Because I’m just warm and comfy. This fire is great.”

The fire was nice, and it warmed the room, but some of the warmth was coming from the wine as well, and Verity felt her cheeks getting a bit flushed. Isra was nice and warm as well. Verity hoped that their closeness wasn’t too intimate or unwelcome. Beneath that worry, there was curiosity about whether affection would be returned. Her mind practically raced at those thoughts, which she blamed on the wine.

“Did we decide on the next dungeon?” asked Isra, whose thoughts were apparently not on pushing their two beds together.

“Would you like some wine?” asked Mizuki. “Or actually, something to eat?”

“I would, thank you,” said Isra. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Not at all,” said Mizuki, though she certainly made a production of getting up from the couch. It was like in the final act of a play, when the hero looks like he’s been bested by the villain and must slowly rise in one last act of superhuman will and effort.

Once she had gone off to the kitchen, Alfric got up and tended to the fire, adding more logs.

“Not that one,” said Isra, and Alfric stopped with a log in hand. “It’ll smell.”

“Smell?” asked Alfric.

“It releases a smoke that stinks,” said Isra. “Borgswood.”

Alfric set the log off to the side and kept feeding the fire, glancing back at Isra every now and then. He prodded the fire with a poker a bit, moving things around, and there was something quite nostalgic about it for Verity. She remembered her father doing the same.

“So to answer the question,” said Hannah. “We’ve decided nothin’ at all about the next dungeon. Myself, I’m partial to movin’ eastward and possibly doin’ two back-to-back, with a longer rest after that.”

“There’s really no point, when we have the dagger to bring us back,” said Alfric. “We have five dungeons left a hex away, and all of those can be hit with a few miles of walking. Wardrobe to the hex, warp to the center, walk to the dungeon, dagger back home.”

“Depends on what we have,” said Hannah. “There are things too large for the book and not natural enough for the stone.”

“Seems like that’s an argument for only doing one,” said Alfric.

“Well, the other argument is that we’re already goin’ a hex away, and setting out with all our things, and it’s better to work two days with a week and a half of rest and trainin’ than to try to split it. Goin’ forward, seems like we’d be better off with a few intense days separated by longer rest periods, right? Double dungeons, if you ask me.”

“With the option to bail out,” said Alfric. “But it’s really not going to depend on me, I think it will depend on the others.”

“I like the dungeons,” said Mizuki, who came back in with a giant tray of meats, cheeses, bread, and fruit, as well as another bottle of wine in the other hand. “I hope this is enough.”

“It’s enough for six people,” said Alfric.

“Well I didn’t know,” said Mizuki. She pointed to two small pots that were on the tray. “Mustard and sobyu.” She sat down and began making herself a small sandwich, which wasn’t actually all that small.

“Do you actually like dungeons?” asked Alfric.

“Oh, they’re terrifying,” said Mizuki. “But I’ve been feeling like the days that we spend sitting around are kind of … wasted. It feels weird to be a dungeoneer that doesn’t do dungeons. Besides, we talk about them all the time. And we want to catch up with Vertex, right?”

“Do we?” asked Verity.

“Hopefully we’re not going to see them again,” said Alfric. “If we could go the whole rest of our lives without learning another thing about what Vertex has been up to, I would be fine with that.”

“Well, still,” said Mizuki. “I like doing the dungeons, though not the actual fighting, if that makes sense.”

“It does,” said Alfric. “But the fighting is the main thing. If it were just going into dungeons that had no monsters in them and clearing them out, we’d be a glorified moving company.”

“What’s a moving company?” asked Isra.

“People who come in and take all your things,” said Verity. “Then go put them in a new house or office or wherever. It’s a very Dondrian thing, I don’t think that exists in Pucklechurch.”

“You’d just get your friends to do it,” said Mizuki. “Unless it was a long move, in which case, I don’t know. My parents were going to sell pretty much everything in the house until I decided to stay. You’d need a lot of entad support to get everything out of this house and over to Kiromo, and they didn’t want to bother, especially not when the place they were moving to was furnished. Unsentimental people, my parents.”

“But you got it instead?” asked Hannah.

“Most of it,” said Mizuki, nodding. “But they always expected me to fold after a year and come to Kiromo, and to sell all the stuff when I did.”

“The point being,” said Alfric. “The dungeons.”

“How much wine have you had,” said Mizuki. “You’re having trouble stringing things together.”

“No, there was a point,” said Alfric. He smiled at her. “Whether we do two in a row or not. I don’t drink much.”

“Well, I’m cutting you off,” said Mizuki, taking the glass from him and downing the rest of its contents in a single swallow. “Eat some food, there’s apparently enough for six.”

Alfric nodded and began making a little sandwich of his own, piling up the cured meats.

“I could do two dungeons, back to back,” said Verity. “But separated by a day, and with an option not to do any. With Xy working with us, we can just have her run the dagger over to the next hex, right? No extra walking?” Perhaps it was the wine — she had already drained a glass — but the idea of a big project like that sounded nice. “I don’t want to end up sleeping in the woods.”

“Is that a problem?” asked Isra. She got up from where she was sitting with Verity, using Verity’s knee for support. For a moment, Verity felt like asking her to come back, but she was only grabbing food from the tray, as well as a glass of her own, and returned to her cozy spot beside Verity not long after.

“We’d need some supplies,” said Alfric. “Tents and bedrolls. Ideally we’d find something in the next few dungeons that would help us. Mobile housing isn’t hugely uncommon, but finding one would be a bit of good luck.”

“We could find a house in the dungeons?” asked Mizuki.

“Well, technically, yes,” said Alfric. “But mobile housing means,” he twisted his hand in the air, trying to find the words. “Anything that lets you have shelter, basically. Things you can shrink down and go inside, a tent that’s bigger once you’re in it, a space like the stone, which actually, when I think about, might be workable with some preparation.”

“We’d have to leave our metal outside,” said Hannah. “And I’m not so sure I’d want to be in there for a whole night.”

“True,” said Alfric. “But it might be a problem we can solve with some kind of entad chain. We’re actually less far than I’d thought in terms of reaching, um,” he waved his hand. “You know, when it’s all coming together?”

“Apotheosis?” asked Mizuki.

Alfric blinked at her. “Criticality?”

“We’re close to bein’ proper dungeoneers, is what he’s saying,” said Hannah. “Where our problems all have solutions, and we’re off to the races.”

“I budgeted ten dungeons,” said Alfric. “In the original plan.” He leaned a little bit closer to Mizuki. “I think we could end up doing it in five.”

“You really don’t drink much,” asked Mizuki. “Or were you just not paying much attention?”

“Both,” Alfric replied. He leaned back on the couch and closed his eyes. “Do you mind if I stay here tonight?”

“You live here,” said Mizuki.

“It was a joke,” said Alfric. “I can be very funny.” He let out a sigh. “Sometimes.”

“Come on,” said Mizuki. “Let’s get you upstairs.”

“Chronos aren’t supposed to get impaired,” said Alfric as he got to his feet. “We have a responsibility. A hangover comes back if you have to redo the day.” He looked at Mizuki. “Is that just very strong wine?”

“It is,” nodded Mizuki. She got up from the couch and put Alfric’s arm around her, though if she was trying to offer him some support, Verity wasn’t sure what good she thought she was doing. He wasn’t even that drunk, a bit sluggish but not swaying. They went off together, and Alfric was leaning on her a bit more than seemed entirely necessary.

“So, how long until they’re a couple, do you s’pose?” asked Hannah. She was looking at the doorway they’d gone through, and had waited until they were out of earshot.

“You think they’ll partner?” asked Isra. “Alfric said we shouldn’t do that.”

“Oh, I imagine if she waits for him to make a move, it’ll be quite some time,” said Hannah, nodding. “It’s not a good idea, for a number of reasons, but sometimes if the attraction is there, people can’t help themselves.”

“What are the reasons?” asked Isra.

“We already went over that some time ago, ay?” asked Hannah, raising an eyebrow. Her eyes briefly went to Verity.

“But between them you mean it’s especially bad,” said Isra.

“Well,” said Hannah. “Ay.” Verity looked at the empty couch. Isra hadn’t moved, which meant that they were in the larger armchair, the tenyon, together on one side of the fire, and Hannah was in the other with the empty space between them. It felt a bit uncomfortable to be so far away, but Verity didn’t want to move. Hannah drained the last of her wine. “There are a lot of things necessary for a good relationship, and I wouldn’t say that there needs to be some commonality, but if there’s not mutual interests or personalities that align, you need people who are good at dealin’ with each other’s peculiarities. And I think Alfric has his own way of doin’ that, which I’m not sure works in the long term, and Mizuki … I’m less sure about. So they might have a nice roll in the hay, but after that, seems like there might be issues.”

“Roll in the hay?” asked Isra.

“Sex,” said Verity. “But I think that’s probably more than enough speculation about them.”

Hannah shrugged.

“Is that a matter of doctrine?” asked Verity. “Thinking that people should be similar?”

“The church is wide,” said Hannah, obviously quoting something. “But it is a part of how the Church of Garos approaches things. Now a cleric of Bixzotl, she might say that it’s best for two people to be copies of each other, liking all the same things, being the same in every way, but … well, that’s not quite the same as symmetry, ay? People call them the twin gods sometimes, Garos and Bixzotl, but … ah, I’m goin’ on, sorry.”

“I don’t mind,” said Isra.

Verity didn’t particularly mind either, and it was definitely preferable to talking about a potential romance between Alfric and Mizuki.

“Well,” said Hannah. “It’s true that there’s usually some symmetry in a copy, especially a copy of somethin’ that’s had the imperfections — the asymmetries — removed from it. But symmetry isn’t just about repetition, it’s about patterns, the ways that you get that little moment of ‘ah ha’ when you see that this one thing, if twisted and lined up just so, maps onto the other thing. It’s very different, actually. There’s no appreciation of opposites from Bixzotl.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. “There is a beauty in the negation of a thing.” This also seemed like a quote.

“From the Keserbin,” said Hannah with a nod. “Exactly. And what I was sayin’ before was that if you come across your negation, or your partial negation, you have to be careful, because you might be natural enemies, but if you’re natural friends, then there are things that you’ll need to navigate, surely, and for that you need wisdom and maturity, and —”

“What are we talking about?” asked Mizuki as she came back down.

“Theology,” said Hannah. “Negation as a mode of symmetry, opposites and such.” It was a decent cover, and Verity hoped that Mizuki hadn’t heard too much, since the conclusion, which Verity happened to agree with, was that perhaps the pair of Mizuki and Alfric might be lacking in wisdom and maturity. If that were true, the lack of wisdom and maturity seemed like it mostly came from one side of that pairing.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Not really my thing.” She flopped back down on the couch, spreading herself out. She had her eyes closed, and seemed like she was ready for sleep.

“It’s temple day tomorrow, are you going?” asked Verity. “I think I will. I usually do. It’s an Oeyr sermon.”

“I hope it’s not plates again,” said Hannah with a deep sigh.

“Plates?” asked Isra.

“Do you ever do temple day?” asked Verity.

“No,” said Isra. “But I have read the books.” She seemed slightly defensive.

“There’s a sermon that clerics of Oeyr like to give,” said Hannah. “I’ve heard it probably five times now. It’s the parable of the broken plate.” She sighed. “I remember sittin’ through it at eleven, thinkin’ to myself, ‘oh, so that’s Emergence’, and every time after that I wanted to just go to sleep.”

“Every clerical order has their stock sermons,” said Verity. “I think they’re necessary.”

“True,” said Hannah. “Because there’ll always be someone who hasn’t heard it, or who needs a reminder. I s’pose I shouldn’t mind it as much as I do. For Garos, it’s usually the sermons on sexuality, which need to happen, but probably get old. Even I think they get old, and they were a help to me, growin’ up.”

“Me too,” said Verity. “But I don’t find them old. They’re … affirming.”

“Well, I’m going, if everyone else is,” said Mizuki. “Though I have trouble paying attention. Last time we had the plate sermon, he didn’t actually break a plate, which I thought was a shame.”

“I don’t understand half of what you’re saying,” said Isra. “I don’t think I can blame it on the wine.”

“Plates,” said Mizuki. “You break a plate, it breaks into pieces, and they look random, but the sermon is about how it’s not, it’s because there are underlying rules to, um, stress propagation and um, other things. There are rules, and those rules are mostly invisible to us until push comes to shove. Nothing is really random, the lines of fracture are all, um, deterministic, just hidden until the shattering comes.”

“Does Lin use those words?” asked Hannah. “Seems a bit much for a sermon to lay people.”

“Lin gets carried away,” said Mizuki. “I’m surprised you haven’t noticed.”

“I’ll listen closely,” said Hannah. “But I think it’s time for me to get to bed, if I’m to be ready for that in the morning, and if I want us to have some freshly baked bread when we get back.”

“Me too,” sighed Verity. She put a hand down on Isra’s thigh to push herself up, but found herself letting her hand rest there for a moment, just a bit too long to be strictly the touch of a friend. Then she did get up, because there was no signal back, and if Isra wasn’t interested, she didn’t want to make things awkward, not when they shared the same room.

Mizuki put out the fire with a pitcher of water from the kitchen then put away what was left of the food and wine, protesting to Hannah that she didn’t need help. They took their turns in the bathroom, brushing teeth and getting ready for bed, then retired to their rooms.

Verity was still feeling warm from the wine, and like she wanted some affection. If their beds had been larger, she might have suggested that she and Isra share one, like they’d done in Liberfell, but the beds were small enough that if they were in the same one together, they’d need to be practically on top of each other. Verity wouldn’t have minded that in the slightest, not when she was feeling the effects of the wine, but she hadn’t had quite so much wine that she felt bold enough to suggest it, or more, to just make a move. There was a possible pretense of just being friendly, but … well, it was paper thin. And Verity felt some duty to Isra, a need to help her with an understanding of the world and people in it. Exploring each other’s bodies seemed counter to that, almost exploitative, though they were approximately the same age, and Verity wasn’t exactly a seasoned professional.

Still, she stayed up, lamenting the separate beds and having private fantasies, until Isra had gone to sleep.

It had been easy to forget the Fig and Gristle when she was with the others. The dungeons … well, she could take or leave them, but it gave the party a focus, a purpose, around which they could organize. It was nice. For the night being the end of an era, her usual haunt as a bard no longer her own, she was feeling good and at peace.

Chapter 43 - Temple Day

It was the plate sermon again, and Hannah did her best to sit through it and pay attention. That was only fair. Though she’d left the temple, she was still a cleric, and had a seat up front, facing the congregation. She was wearing her chasuble, embroidered with symmetrically pleasing designs. Beneath the chasuble, which was the most visible part of the getup, she was wearing her clerical garments, those which held religious significance and were part of the ensemble. You couldn’t do buttons properly if you wanted your outfit to be truly symmetrical, so the robe, pants, and shirt were all made with seams along both sides, and the whole of it had been symmetricalized as much as possible while still taking into account the human body that it was meant to be covering.

There were more extravagant outfits for a cleric of Garos, ones which incorporated even more symmetry into their designs, but in Hannah’s opinion, they all failed when actually put onto a person. Wearing an outfit with sleeves at the front and back as well as the sides simply looked silly, if you weren’t going to go to the trouble of having a truly symmetrical body.

There was, among the clerical order of Garos, a tendency toward performative symmetry, a term seen only in a very few texts within the grand libraries of the seminary. In the eyes of Garos, things which were more symmetrical were better, but clerics and the laity didn’t have eyes nearly so good as a god’s. As a consequence, there emerged a natural focus on those elements of symmetry which were conspicuous, obvious to even the lay people, visible. It wasn’t just about whether something was symmetrical, it was about whether it looked symmetrical, and more, whether it looked like you had really gone out of your way and suffered some hardship to get it like that.

One of the reasons that Hannah loved Mizuki’s house was that it was symmetrical in an understated way. When you looked at it, you might say to yourself, ‘ah, that looks pretty symmetrical’, but then when you felt it, or did a closer inspection, you could see that great pains had been taken to get everything aligned just so, and where it needed to bow to concerns of so-called practicality, it seemed to do so grudgingly. The house was symmetrical for its own sake, or possibly for the sake of Garos.

The problems of performative symmetry which seemed to plague the Church of Garos weren’t unique, of course. Even just looking at the other clerics, Hannah could imagine that they had their own issues of the same sort. Pann, the very tall cleric of Xuphin, wore clothes of many layers, and Hannah had to imagine that just for the sake of practicality, it had been stitched in such a way as to make the layering more prominent, that it wasn’t actually roasting her. Performative maximalization, perhaps? And Lin, their cleric of Oeyr, was wearing a dyed chasuble, which showed splattering and streaks from a chaotic process.

But the whole point of Oeyr, at least as far as Hannah understood him, was that there was no such thing as chaos, that everything you could see emerged naturally from lower level rules. The dye was performative emergence. As a cleric of Garos, Hannah was painfully aware that at lower levels, there was asymmetry everywhere, and while Oeyr wasn’t the God of Asymmetry, the asymmetry was a natural result of emergent properties. The pockets of air in a loaf of bread were ‘randomly’ distributed unless it had been symmetricalized, but then, air pocket distribution in bread wasn’t a flashy form of emergence, so hardly anyone ever pointed to it.

That ‘unseen’ emergence was important to their god though, and so clerics of Oeyr trotted out the plate sermon at regular intervals.

“This is a plate,” said Lin, holding up a white plate. Lin, like Mizuki, had Kiromon heritage, and it was more visible on his face than hers, though Hannah had a vague recollection that he was from a different region. Kiromo had, at one point, been five different kingdoms, but the same consolidation that had created Inter had happened there too, and much of the factionalism had died down. For a moment, Hannah considered speaking with Mizuki about it, but it was very likely that Mizuki didn’t know much about it. “When we see this plate, we want to think of it as its idealized form, a circle with a raised lip, a complete, solid object. This is, like it or not, how we see most things. We think in terms of these solid objects, or these classes of being,” he nodded to Filera, cleric of Qymmos, “And this is good and useful — but this is not how the world really is.”

He threw the plate against the ground, and it shattered. It was dramatic, she could give the clerics of Oeyr that. Lin bent down and picked up two of the biggest pieces.

“We break things, and we see their jagged edges,” he said. “They look random to us — why break here but not there? But they are governed by rules. A plate like this one is made from clay, and while the potters do their best to work the clay into a smooth consistency, there are hidden patterns in the working. When a potter kneads the clay, they form layers, and to ensure that the plate won’t crack along those layers, they change the direction they knead in, folding the clay over, flattening it down, folding it again. What has happened to the clay remains though, and while it might take a microscope or a cleric’s touch to know, something of the process always remains.” He paused. “Some years ago, when I was in Plenarch, I went to a museum which had a number of entads on display that allowed some insight into the natural world. One of them was an entad that slowed time to a crawl within its diameter, so much so that it would kill a person outright at the boundary. I was able to see a shattering, that fraction of a second, slowed down to a whole afternoon. It was still surprisingly fast, but I had touched the plate before, and had known where it was most likely to crack when it struck the floor.”

Lin set the pieces of plate down. “Everything is like this. Everything is shaped by its history. There are fundamental rules to the universe, those that are hidden and those that are obvious, but they are there, and they govern us. Oeyr offers no guidance to us on the nature of the universe, whether or not we have free will, or other big questions that I’m personally not equipped to answer,” there was some light laughter, and Lin grinned, “But what we perceive to be random, or disordered, is merely a result of forces whose complexity is often beyond our comprehension. I think it’s something vitally important for us to understand, not just when the unexpected happens to us, but when we think about the world, and our place within it, and especially when we contemplate the rules by which we live our lives.”

This was veering a bit close to politics for Hannah’s liking, but she did her best to keep the frown from crossing her face. Looking at the gathered congregation, she could see her reaction to those words wasn’t the norm, but people didn’t always hear arguments when they heard them, not if they were delivered sideways. Her eyes went to her party, all of whom had come. They were sitting together, and Alfric seemed like he was the only one paying much attention. He had a frown.

“The two limits of a party are three and five,” said Lin. “Three to make a party or keep it, five to fill it. Forget for a moment those who made the parties as they are,” and fat chance of that, thought Hannah, “and think for a moment about the implications. Part of what I do, as a cleric of Oeyr, is to think through rules and what they mean, effects that follow directly and those that follow at a remove. Any time you do that, you’re communing with Oeyr, and I imagine that you do it frequently, as it is, after all, our nature as humans. For a party, it means that people will organize into units of five, that tables at taverns will seat five, and more, that fives become one of the modes in which we think, dividing in our minds a group into fives. If you party with friends, there becomes a wall between those friends inside the party and those outside. If you party with family, it’s a matter of who is in or who is out. The party unites, but as a consequence, it also divides. Rules, and their consequences.”

He began to pace the raised platform they brought out for sermons. “I had a cat, growing up, who would steal food from the table. I’m sure some of you can relate. He misbehaved, so my father, who had something of a temper toward bad behavior, would swat at the cat whenever it jumped up. The cat learned the rule: if it jumped up onto the table while my father was there, it would get swatted away. But the lesson the cat got from this rule was not that it shouldn’t jump up onto the table, but that it should only do that when my father was away, and the cat, being bold, would sometimes wait until my father was occupied with something else. It learned, and adapted, just in an unexpected way.”

Lin grinned, and some of the congregation were smiling along with him. It was a softening from his directly political talk, which might have been part of it. “Now I know what you’re thinking — did I really break a plate just to make a point? Doesn’t that seem a bit wasteful?” He smiled and held out his hand. The pieces of plate flew up into the air and reformed, perfectly intact in his hand. “Well, it was only for the sake of demonstration. Kids, don’t try this at home, not unless your plates are entads like this one.”

This got a good reaction from the crowd, but that might have been because of the display of magic.

From there, the sermon was concluded, and Lin gave the usual wrapping up, talking both about the schedule for the coming week and announcing the next speaker for the temple day, a visiting cleric of Kesbin, as it was quite close to a holy day, not that Kesbin was big on celebration.

And then it was finally over, and Hannah felt herself relax a bit, though there was plenty of duty left to go.

There had been perhaps three hundred people in the main hall of the temple, and it could have held twice that with ease, or three times that a bit less comfortably. Attendance was unusually good in Pucklechurch, though that might have come from the fact that the church was central to the community and a place for people to gather. In a normal rural community, you might expect a bit less than a tenth to come to any given temple day, since some people considered themselves adherents of only one god and didn’t feel inclined to come to other sermons, and there were people who were too old or infirm, and would be visited by clerics throughout the week. Children were often excluded from the sermons, taken to play outside as a large gaggle and supervised by the teachers.

There was a comfortability to rural life, Hannah thought, though they did things differently in Pucklechurch as compared to Cairbre.

Hannah did the usual glad-handing and checking in with people, and was asked about how the dungeons had been going nearly two dozen times. As a cleric, you got used to saying the same things over and over, and you became familiar with the modes of interaction with the lay people. She was in a somewhat difficult spot of having left the temple to go pursue other work but still being a part of the clerical community. This wasn’t entirely unusual, but uncommon enough that she fielded lots of questions. People also wanted to know about the wardrobe, and a few of the younger ‘followers of Garos’ wanted to check in with her, or give her updates on their dating lives.

Hannah found it all very energizing, but she could readily understand why other clerics sometimes had trouble with it.

“Good sermon,” Hannah said to Lin when their paths crossed. “I think it’s my fifth or sixth time hearing a plate sermon. My first time seeing the plate come back together though, I’ll give you that.”

“It’s on loan,” said Lin. He smiled at her. “We’ve had complaints about smashing the plates in the past, but I’m worried that children will just test their own plates for magic power.” He grinned at Hannah. “I hope it wasn’t too much of a retread.”

“I usually don’t hear so much politics in it,” said Hannah.

He shrugged. “Nothing overt. And the Church of Oeyr doesn’t hew to neutrality quite like the Church of Garos.”

“The Churches matter less than the community,” said Hannah, giving him a nod. “But you did well, I thought. I know you’ve said that you hate giving sermons.”

“They give me a case of the nerves,” said Lin, nodding. “But I do think it went pretty well. I think I need to work on my structuring a bit, and perhaps let it play out a bit longer, but I typically prefer my sermons shorter, truncated.”

They went their separate ways, and there was more talking, endless talking, including a bit of gossip, as well as some discussion of Lin’s sermon. The bit about the cat was, for some people, quite relatable, and they had stories to share with Hannah, presumably because they liked her.

While all this was going on, things were being put away, and the church was being reduced to its natural state. Hannah saw Alfric helping to move the pews back into their closets, which made her feel a bit of pride. He was an outsider, and it wouldn’t have been expected of him, which meant that he’d gone out of his way to lend a hand. Once that was done, drinks and food were set out, just a snack for the people who were milling about, and Hannah saw Mizuki there, speaking enthusiastically with one of the volunteers who was helping with things.

As the temple slowly emptied, Hannah collected her party. Isra had been sticking to Verity, and the two of them had been speaking with Cynthia, the owner of the Fig and Gristle. To Hannah’s surprise, it had been Isra who was doing most of the talking.

“Plants want to grow,” said Isra. “When people say that a plant is in the wrong climate, what they mean is that the plant has trouble getting what it needs, either in water, sunlight, or temperature. There would be no problem in growing a fig tree here, so long as you gave it what it needed.”

“And you could do that?” asked Cynthia, cocking an eyebrow.

“Yes,” said Isra. “If you have a fig whose seeds I could take. It would take a year or two to produce the first fruit, longer for it to be a reliable supply.”

“Well, I think I’d like that,” said Cynthia. “It would cut down on costs, that’s certain, though it would be a bit of an investment.”

“No,” said Isra. “We would do it for no charge, unless you’d want it done with ectad support.”

“You could do it without ectads?” asked Cynthia.

“Yes,” nodded Isra. “Though it would take more tending.”

“You don’t need to do it for free,” said Verity. She was touching Isra’s arm. “It’s the kind of thing you can charge for.”

“She’s a friend though?” asked Isra.

“Yes,” said Verity, barely missing a step. “But to put in that kind of work, to have it be a gift, is maybe a bit much.”

“Equal rights to the figs,” said Cynthia, holding out a hand. “And a meal on me, once a month. A fair trade?”

Isra nodded, and they shook hands.

“Ready to go?” asked Hannah.

“We are, yes,” said Verity. “Alfric is,” she looked across the room. “Talking to the tall woman.”

And indeed, Alfric was in conversation with Pann, the cleric of Xuphin, his head tilted up to meet her gaze. He glanced over at them though, and said his goodbyes, diverting slightly to point out to Mizuki that everyone else was ready.

“Well,” said Alfric. “That was an … interesting sermon. We’re ready to go?”

“Think so, yes,” said Hannah. They started moving, all together.

“If we’re going to be actually talking about the sermon, I have to say upfront that I wasn’t paying the most attention,” said Mizuki.

“Then what were you paying attention to?” asked Isra.

“Um,” said Mizuki. She glanced at Alfric. “The smith’s apprentice. Just daydreaming.”

“Don’t you have Rolaj?” asked Isra.

“He’s in Liberfell,” said Mizuki. “And we’ve been exchanging letters, yes, but it’s so slow, and if we’re going on dates, it’s going to have to be all spread out, at least until we get proper travel entads that make it less than a mile’s walk to Liberfell. And like I was saying, it was just daydreaming.”

“You could do things the Cairbre way,” said Hannah. “Propose marriage to him and see if it works out.”

“I don’t think I’d ever do that,” said Mizuki. “I hardly ever make the first move.”

“Women,” said Hannah, rolling her eyes.

“That’s not so unusual,” said Verity. “Is it?”

“It’s not,” said Hannah. “That’s the whole problem. Women don’t make the first move, whether that’s because they learned it or just how they are, and then lament that no one has come to them. It’s especially the case with women who want to be with other women. Can you imagine two women who both desperately want to be with each other, sitting across the room and makin’ eyes at each other, neither makin’ the first move?” Hannah glanced at Verity. “Well, I’m guessin’ that you can.”

“I never know whether they’re actually interested,” said Verity, shrugging. “It’s most likely that they’re not, right?”

“But Mizuki, if he asked, what would you say?” asked Alfric.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “Maybe … yes. Probably yes. At least how Hannah described the arrangement to me.”

“Are we going to talk about the sermon?” asked Verity. “I thought it was fairly standard, for Oeyr.”

“It was political,” said Alfric.

“It was,” nodded Hannah.

“It was?” asked Isra. It felt like a week ago, she might not have asked that question.

“All the stuff about intervention,” said Alfric, sighing. “Though I suppose that it’s possible to read it another way. There’s a problem with sermons, which is that they give clerics — preaching clerics — an opportunity to voice their opinion to a large crowd. The churches are supposed to be neutral with respect to politics, at least in most circumstances, but that’s not always the case, and there are arguments for them having more than just soft political power.”

“I don’t really know much about that,” said Mizuki. “You’re talking about Interim politics.”

“Global politics, actually,” said Alfric. “Anything the Editors do affects the whole world. Not that we have all that much ability to affect what they do, and not that the Editors can or do move with anything resembling speed.”

“But not everything they do is about ‘intervention’,” said Verity.

“Well,” said Alfric. “As said in the sermon, anything you do to change the world in any way can be seen as intervention, so whether you’re an interventionist or leverist or culturist or whatever camp you belong to, there are different ways of framing things and different lenses to view things through. The sermon was political, but it felt like leading the goat to the trough without actually making him drink. I was waiting for a call to action, but it never came.”

“This is going over my head,” said Mizuki.

“Mine too,” said Isra.

“At least you have an excuse,” said Mizuki.

“Well,” said Alfric. He glanced at Hannah. “Unless you’d rather take this one?”

“Go right ahead,” said Hannah.

“Well, the Editors make the grand rules of the world, though they keep quite a bit secret, mostly because they’re worried about people trying to break things open or otherwise wreck their work,” said Alfric. He was starting further back than Hannah thought was necessary, but looking at Isra, perhaps he was right to do so. “The magical spells that anyone can do were all created by the Editors, as were the structures themselves, the parties, guilds, hexes, provinces, and nations, along with the roles within those, and a number of other things. Each of those changes, even minor changes, takes quite a bit of effort on the part of the Editors, but it also takes a bit of buy-in from — well, in the past it was funding from multiple kingdoms, but now it’s enough to get one of the bigger nations.”

“Which is why they engineered that there be large nations,” said Hannah.

“Well,” said Alfric, waggling his hands. “Unclear.”

“Much of what he’s saying is unclear,” said Hannah. “Built together from bits and pieces, rather than resting on good authority. The Editors are immortal, with their own ways and means.”

“I can let you go, if you’d like,” said Alfric.

“Och, go ahead, just helpin’,” said Hannah. She didn’t take a particularly dim view of the Editors, but she knew what history there was to know, and most of it, when taken together, painted them as simply human, even if they didn’t participate in society. Even their proposals were presented without comment, no attempts at flattery, bribery, threats, or concessions, though that might have been because of their own odd politics.

“So the Editors make their plans, then they come to Inter and ask for material support to get the change implemented,” said Alfric. “And if the nation says yes, that’s all good, it usually takes a few years but whatever needs to get built does get built, and then when the change is done, it all gets torn down and the rule, or whatever they’ve done, is a part of the world.”

“And there’s been some duplicity in the past,” said Hannah. “Because there’s no proper way to audit the Editors, and they hold their secrets close to their chest.”

“Well, yes,” said Alfric. “But on the whole, they’ve moved the world in the right direction.” He raised an eyebrow at Hannah. “You’d agree with that, wouldn’t you?”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “I’d say that you’d be hard pressed not to agree, but I’ve spoken to enough people who have their resentments of one kind or another, who think the Editors are hypocrites, unelected in spite of them makin’ votes so prevalent. And other arguments, naturally. But it’s said that no one alive can quite grasp how horrible the world once was, and I’m inclined to agree with that sentiment.”

“Oh,” said Alfric. “Isra, I was going to say, we should probably talk about voting, and what to do if a vote happens. I’d assume that they covered that in comp, but if you were out in the woods … I don’t want you to be surprised by it. And ideally, we would get you to be eligible for a vote, if you’re not already.”

“What do I need for that?” asked Isra.

“Just some basic civics and general knowledge,” said Alfric. “There’s overmagic to take care of the rest of it. I didn’t ask the censusmaster about whether you could vote or not, but my guess is that you can, there just hasn’t been a vote in Pucklechurch.”

“Last one was four years ago,” said Mizuki. “My first and last. She would have been under age.”

“Explain it to me in more detail later,” said Isra. They were approaching the house. “Along with all the other things you’ve been talking about. I know you weren’t trying to be opaque.”

“Sorry,” said Alfric. “I’ll try to get you up to speed, it’s not very complicated.”

“It’s insanely complicated,” said Verity.

“No, it’s like the sermon,” said Alfric. “Simple rules, vast and terrifying consequences.”

“What a wonderful description of politics,” said Mizuki. “Now, who wants lunch?”

Chapter 45 - Visitors

Mizuki wasn’t entirely sure where the idea of the double dungeon had come from, but she found herself getting excited by it. There was an element of gambling to going into dungeons, and Mizuki felt that the only reason she hadn’t lost enormous amounts of money gambling was that she hadn’t ever really had the opportunity. When she’d been in school, she’d made bets with people all the time, but it was usually over small things, like a game of marbles, or a race, or something like that.

The fact that there were things to be found in a dungeon that could be found literally nowhere else, and that the others were willing to let her keep some of the cool things, made the prospect of two dungeons in a row seem enticing. She had her spoon and her staff, and in her mind, she could already see the pile of assorted knick-knacks they’d get, each of which might have some wondrous or at least interesting quality to it. All she needed was to picture a blanket, and then her mind would go, ‘a blanket that’ and fill in all kinds of blanks. A part of Mizuki really wanted to visit Alfric’s house, because it seemed like the whole place would be coated in entads.

But the morning before they were going to go, Lola had shown up at Mizuki’s front door.

“Hi Mizuki,” she said. Her eyes were still purple, but she was wearing more casual clothes this time, a blouse with a skirt that was a dark purple, nearly black. She had a smile on her face.

“How did you find this place?” asked Mizuki, staring at her.

“I just asked around,” said Lola with a shrug. “People in Pucklechurch are very friendly. Is Alfric home?”

“Go away,” said Mizuki. She was holding the door only part way open, the better to slam it in Lola’s face if she tried to come in. “He doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“Well, I think that’s for him to say, isn’t it?” asked Lola. There was, again, an element of play-acting, deliberately false innocence. But Lola had to know that was the impression she was giving off, and she was doing it anyway. It gave Mizuki a horrible feeling that Lola was playing at some unimaginable level of deception, but it was very possible that this was only how Lola liked to see herself. “Has he been spreading rumors about me? Because if he has, well, I don’t think that’s very nice of him, and more than a bit hypocritical.”

“I’m not letting you in my house,” said Mizuki.

“Or what, you’ll kill me?” asked Lola. She grinned.

“That may be the kind of person you are, but it’s not the kind of person I am,” said Mizuki.

“Aren’t you?” asked Lola. She cocked her head to the side. “How many times do you think we’ve met?”

Mizuki narrowed her eyes. “And what, I killed you?”

“Three times,” said Lola, holding up fingers. “It doesn’t accomplish anything, it just gets undone, but my guess is that you think you can figure out a way to disrupt my bindings, and as it turns out, you’re right, but it kills us both, along with everyone in a hundred yards of us. So try not to do it, please, and don’t cast aspersions, or anything else. Between the two of us, you’re the killer.”

“Well I don’t know why I would do that,” said Mizuki. “But I probably had a good reason.” She looked closer at Lola, trying to use her sorcerer’s sight, and could see only a faint limning. Lola wore a discreet necklace that seemed to be an entad, and a ring on each hand that were entads too, along with black boots, but she wasn’t soaked in magic like Mizuki had always thought an alienist would be. Lola wasn’t moving, just standing there and smiling. “Fine, I’m going to go talk to him, but then he’s going to say that he doesn’t want to speak with you, and you’re going to go away.”

Lola gave a happy nod, and Mizuki backed away slowly, not wanting to take her eyes off the girl.

Mizuki went through the house and to the living room, where Verity and Alfric were sitting on the couch together, a little too close for her tastes. Obviously Verity wasn’t interested in men, and obviously Alfric was a brick, but it poked at something in Mizuki’s mind, an instinctive dislike of their positioning. They’d been talking about Dondrian, a conversation that Mizuki couldn’t really join in on, having never come within a thousand miles of the place.

“Hey, unhappy news,” said Mizuki. “Lola is here, at the front door.”

“She is?” asked Alfric, standing up at once. “What does she want?”

“To talk to you,” said Mizuki. She shrugged. “I told her to get lost, and she said it was your call, so if you don’t want to talk to her, then I’ll tell her to get lost again, and if she doesn’t, then I’ll kill her.”

“Kill her?!” asked Alfric. He seemed alarmed.

“Well she’d just do the day over, so it doesn’t really matter, right?” asked Mizuki. “And she said that I’ve killed her three times before, so —”

“Absolutely do not kill her,” said Alfric. “I can’t believe you would — I’ll go speak with her.”

“I mean if she were visibly sick I’d know she was on her last loop, and she could be lying, so,” said Mizuki. “I mean if it’s just automatically undone it doesn’t seem like —”

“We’ll talk about this later,” said Alfric.

“Can I eavesdrop?” asked Mizuki. “If you’re at the window above the door, you can hear almost everything, and it’s hard to see you.”

“You’re asking permission to listen in?” asked Alfric. “You know what, sure, fine, better that I don’t have to report back, better that there’s no question about what was said.” He seemed annoyed, and Mizuki hoped that was because of Lola, not her request. She had asked, which she thought should count for something. While Alfric made his way to the door, Mizuki rushed upstairs and cracked the window in her room, being as quiet as possible. She knew for a fact that it was a good place to eavesdrop from, because her mom had done the same to her, many years ago.

“What do you want?” came Alfric’s voice.

“Just to see you,” said Lola. “To talk. You’re looking good.” Mizuki could hear her but not see her. Her voice was annoying, but maybe that was just the person it was attached to.

“This isn’t the first time we’ve talked,” said Alfric.

“Have you been looping and seeking me out?” asked Lola. “Because we’re not supposed to do that, are we? And it’s a bit hypocritical, don’t you think?” The false innocence was grating, as was the intentional childishness.

“Did you just come here to annoy me?” asked Alfric. His voice was hard and firm.

“I came to talk, and I thought we could do that like adults,” said Lola. “You know, it’s been a year, both of us have been through a lot, and — well, we’re going to have to make up eventually, now aren’t we? So we should have a heart to heart.”

“I’m not in the mood,” said Alfric. “If you want to talk, it’s going to have to be on a time delay. Write me a letter postmarked on the previous day, and you’ll get one back from me the day after that. No undone days between us. That’s the offer. The only offer.”

“Somehow I sense a lack of trust,” said Lola. “You know what, let me make you an offer: I’ll give you your party back — and they’ll be happy to receive you — and we can put the whole year behind us, as though it were undone.”

Alfric was silent, and Mizuki felt her heart beating faster. Would he accept? It felt like he would. He talked about those plans going up in smoke like it had been a personal apocalypse.

“What are the conditions?” asked Alfric. “That we become a couple again? That we go through with the pact? That I try my best to forget? I don’t see any of those things happening. And I’m building something here, Lola. I have a team.”

“Oh, well, your team, yes,” said Lola. “A musician who couldn’t hack it, an inept sorceress, a zealot of what has to be the least worthwhile god, and an untrained archer? And you, naturally, who fits in with them somehow.”

“Yes,” said Alfric. “They’re my team, and if you ever want to speak with me again, do it by letter. I’m done with you.” Mizuki was hoping that she’d hear the door slam, but no, he was apparently gracious enough to let her have the last word.

“I do love you,” said Lola. “I care about you. I shouldn’t have taken your team, I see that now, it was spite, plain and simple, or maybe not even that, wanting to follow through so you’d know that I would follow through. If I had backed down, how would it have looked? You’d have known that every other threat was hollow.”

“The fact that you were making threats at all is where you went wrong,” said Alfric. “In all the undone days, have I ever threatened you? Ever told you that I would ruin you if you didn’t do the things I wanted you to?”

“No,” said Lola. “You’ve been marvelously restrained. I can see why your side of our sprawling clan is held in such high regard. But that’s exactly the point, isn’t it? That iron restraint, even when you know there won’t be consequences for your actions, even when you know it’s not real. Don’t you ever want to hurt someone? Don’t you ever want to hurt me? I’d allow it. Please Alfric, just let loose every once in a while, stop being so incredibly uptight about everything. That’s all I want.”

“In writing next time,” said Alfric. And then he slammed the door. Mizuki stayed, peeking up over the window to see whether Lola was still there. Even after she saw the alienist leaving, she watched for some time, ready to duck back down. If Lola was lying, and they hadn’t come to blows in undone days, it was nice to think that it might have happened.

“So,” said Alfric from behind Mizuki. She let out a little eep and turned to look at him, ducking beneath the window. “How was that for you?” He sat down next to her beneath the window sill. He looked exhausted, though it was early in the morning and they had most of the day ahead of them. “You’re not inept, by the way.”

“I didn’t think I was,” said Mizuki. “But thank you. I’m inept at many things, but sorcery isn’t one of them, I don’t think. Untrained, maybe.” She let out a sigh. “She’s awful, and she’s been skulking around Pucklechurch, it seems like, trying to tease out our secrets.”

“I wouldn’t take anything she said as being the truth,” said Alfric. “But given that she came to the region specifically for … what she imagines to be a reconciliation, I guess, I would imagine that she has done the day over a few times, and has spoken with us as much as she was able, and talked to people in town. From my own experience, people are eager to talk to strangers.”

“Bethany,” said Mizuki with a nod.

“This might even be the first time she’s come here,” said Alfric. “I don’t think that’s likely, all things considered, but it’s possible.”

“And do you think she was telling the truth?” asked Mizuki. “About wanting you back, or giving you your party?”

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “I think she is tired of dungeoneering, and that spite didn’t carry her as far as she thought it would. And if she’s ready to be done, then there’s no cost to her in handing things over to me, so that tracks. But.” The word hung in the air.

“I’d really miss you, if you just left,” said Mizuki. “Not that I think that will sway you.”

“You’re starting to awaken to the possibilities of being a dungeoneer?” asked Alfric, turning his head to look at her.

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “But without you, I’m not sure that Hannah would be able to keep things together, and if we got a fifth, they wouldn’t be half the man you were. Which would mean that this nice, full house would very quickly empty out. If you’ll forgive me for being sappy about people that I really haven’t known all that long, the thing that I like about dungeons is that we’re doing them together. We’re friends, and I think if we did anything that I didn’t care for all that much, like I don’t know, making dresses or having a pottery business, I would enjoy it because I was doing it with the four of you.”

Alfric slumped down until he was laying on the floor, looking up at the ceiling. “Yeah,” he said.

Mizuki tucked in, pulling her legs to her chest. “But if you do go —”

“I meant ‘yeah’, I — I don’t know if I feel the same way, but to go back to that party, with all the bad blood between us,” said Alfric. “Along with all the complications, being behind on entads and elevation … and if Lola is trying to say that it would all be undone, surely she has to realize that’s not true? It’s a plate that shattered and can’t be put back together, and if you did put it back together, all the cracks would be obvious. And as far as our current party goes, yeah, I like you, and the rest. We’re building something here. If I admit that I like the feeling of building up a team and progressing through more than I enjoy the actual end, if I’m one of those saps who says that it’s about the journey more than the destination …” he sighed. That word, ‘saps’, felt vindictive coming from Alfric, maybe just because he normally used such mild language. “I like where we’re at. I like this house. I like being with you.”

“But?” asked Mizuki. It felt like there was something he was going to say after that, something that would negate all the nice words and good feelings.

“But nothing,” said Alfric. “I feel like I should try to take her up on it, to reconnect with the old team, let bygones be bygones, but I think about the kind of life that would be, and I think that I would rather be here, doing things a bit more slowly.”

“We’ve got that double dungeon coming up, right?” asked Mizuki.

“We do,” said Alfric. “But we both know that this party isn’t going to go all the way. We’re not going to ever attempt one of the infinidungeons, never have a weeklong trek through the bowels of a metropolitan dungeon — we’ll set no records and get no acclaim, we’ll just be pretty standard dungeoneers doing enough for us to make a living.” He turned to look at her. “At least, that’s my feeling of where we’re at, if we can stay together through the immediate crisis of Lola being here, and Verity eventually leaving us.”

“Nah, I think she’ll stay with us through thick and thin,” said Mizuki. “I’m not worried about her.”

“She’s been the most reticent,” said Alfric.

“Yeah, but she’s friends with us now, and with her parents being overbearing, and her not really having had close friends …” Mizuki shrugged. “It might be wishful thinking. Or maybe her parents will show up, and it will be all kinds of horrible, and they’ll talk her into coming back to Dondrian. But I think so long as we stay relaxed about it, she’s with us for good. She likes us, even you.”

“Ouch,” said Alfric.

“Well, you know what I mean,” said Mizuki. “Sorry, I didn’t —”

“No, I get it,” said Alfric.

“The one I’m most worried about is Isra,” said Mizuki. “But that’s mostly because she doesn’t live here, and she’s got other things going on. Seems to me that one day she’ll just up and leave.”

“Like your parents?” asked Alfric.

Mizuki pursed her lips and looked at him. “My parents didn’t abandon me, they were moving and they wanted me to come with, and I was the one who begged and pleaded to stay behind so I didn’t have to go to a country where I didn’t know anyone and barely spoke the language.”

“Sorry,” said Alfric. “But I know you’ve been a little, I don’t know.”

“Lonely,” said Mizuki. “Sure.” She folded her hands in her lap. “My place in Pucklechurch is a lot different than it was when my parents left.” Mizuki bit her lip. “How do you keep friends, make sure that it doesn’t fall apart?”

“You’re really asking the wrong person,” said Alfric.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Right.”

“Come on,” said Alfric, getting to his feet and offering her a hand. “Let’s go downstairs.”

“I suppose,” said Mizuki, taking his hand. He had a nice, firm grip. There was a lot to like about Alfric, even if he was a brick.

They went downstairs together, where Verity was sitting, having picked up a book in their absence. “How’d it go?” she asked. “Is this day going to get undone?”

“It’s quite likely, yes,” said Alfric. “But that doesn’t change anything. And it wouldn’t necessarily be Lola doing it, it could be any of the other chrononauts doing it incidentally while they go about their business. Lola was … I don’t know.”

“I was listening in,” said Mizuki.

“Oh?” asked Verity, looking at Alfric.

“I would tell the two of you everything anyway,” said Alfric. “You’re members of my party. The short version is that Lola offered me her spot on my party, and — I didn’t say no, and would like some time to think about it, but I’d wager she hasn’t told her team members about that offer, and I’m not sure she’s in a position to offer anyway.”

“So that might be it for our group?” asked Verity. She frowned.

“No,” said Alfric. “But this just happened, and I need time to think, not just about how I feel about things, but to figure out what Lola’s game is. Everything is a game, even the things she’s serious about. Maybe especially the things she’s serious about. I told her that we’d be using mail from here on out, and hopefully she’ll abide by that. It’s a way of ensuring that we don’t let time get in the way.”

“So the double dungeon?” asked Verity. “And the opera?”

“Those are still on,” said Alfric. He hesitated. “Is it bad of me to try to give this some honest evaluation?”

“That might have been her plan,” said Mizuki. “Throw some fire, see what lights up.”

“I know,” said Alfric. “But we know there’s discontent in her party.” He shook his head. “I’m trying not to get thrown off by it, but I wanted to let you know, and ideally, I would have some time to think. I’ll be in my room, if that’s alright with the two of you.”

Mizuki waited until he’d left to speak with Verity. “I’m really hoping he’s not ducking out.”

“He won’t,” said Verity.

“No?” asked Mizuki.

“What has Alfric gotten the most excited about, in his time here?” asked Verity.

“Um,” said Mizuki. “That stupid wardrobe?”

“Yes,” nodded Verity. “That, and teaching us things about dungeons, and plotting and planning. He’s got a strong energy when he’s laying things out and thinking things through. If he left to go be with his old party, what would there be for him?”

“I guess you might be right,” said Mizuki. It felt bad though. “I mean, we’re better than those guys, right?”

“Not at doing dungeons, no,” said Verity. “But better company … I would hope we’re better company than a group of people who stabbed him in the back.”

“Well I don’t know if I’d say they did that, the way that Mardin and Grig described it, I could sympathize,” said Mizuki. “They signed up to do dungeons, not to do dungeons while working their way up from the ground floor with no support.”

“Anyone sounds reasonable from their own point of view, if you listen to their version of the story,” said Verity. “The lesson, then, is to just not listen.” Mizuki laughed, and Verity gave a little smile. “I’m halfway serious. It’s how I eventually ended up dealing with my parents.”

“Well, I hope we keep Alfric,” said Mizuki. “And if we don’t have him, would you still want to do it? The dungeons?”

“I don’t know,” said Verity. She’d had her finger in the book through the whole conversation, and seemed like she wanted to get back to it, not in an impatient way, necessarily, but Mizuki was aware of it. “Who would be our fifth?”

“Well, ideally a chrononaut,” said Mizuki. “I really like having the safety net.”

“Lola?” asked Verity. She had a wide smile, as though she thought that was hilarious. “You can hire their services,” said Verity. “You get a letter in the morning if it’s not going to work out. There’s really no need for the person coming with us to be a chrononaut. Of course, chrononaut services are horrifically expensive.”

“Well, whatever,” said Mizuki. “I’m not going to line up anything until he says for certain that he’s out, I just wanted to know if you would still be here or not.”

“We could start a different business,” said Verity. “Though I’ve no idea what the four of us could do together.”

When Mizuki left Verity to her book, she felt marginally better about the whole thing, which was a bit of a surprise, given that Verity didn’t particularly feel like the comforting type.

Upstairs, Hannah and Isra were looking over the egg, which wasn’t far from hatching, and Mizuki filled them in after letting them talk about the herb dragon, or whatever it would actually end up being. Hannah, through clerical touch, had a better sense of the structure of the creature, but Isra had some intuitive sense of it, and had been practicing pouring herself into things, which allowed her a bit more insight. The creature would come out weak and feeble, like a human baby, unable to care for itself. This was all well and good, but Mizuki’s mind was still buzzing with Lola’s unexpected visit and the dilemma that she’d laid on Alfric’s lap.

Neither of them seemed all that concerned, Hannah because she had some faith in Alfric to make good choices, and Isra because she seemed to not care all that much, though it was hard to say with her.

And at the end of it all, Mizuki still felt nervous, like this was all going to collapse.

Given that the day was ‘free’, Mizuki elected to do something useful, and went down to the local government office, which wasn’t much more than a room with a few desks in it, used by the mayor and the others as a place for them to make notes and answer requests. In a hex like Pucklechurch’s, none of the positions were full-time jobs, so they only came in on specific days, and if you wanted something from them on some other day, you had to track them down. Mizuki had checked the schedule though, and knew that the censusmaster was in.

“I’d like to report a crime,” said Mizuki. “Someone stole things from my friend Isra roughly five years ago. The man’s name was Angun, and I don’t have a last name for him, but he lived out in the woods.”

Terra gave Mizuki a skeptical look. “And you’re the one reporting it, not her?” she asked. “Five years late?”

“Yup,” said Mizuki.

“Hmmm,” said Terra. She was on the older side, childless, which meant that Mizuki hadn’t had much cause to interact with her. She’d had the position for ages, and when she wasn’t sitting behind her desk, she was a woodworker of some skill, though mostly on the artistic side rather than plain, practical craft. “It would help if you knew whether Angun was a first name or last name, or a nickname.”

“Well, I don’t,” said Mizuki. “I’d heard that you can send out a blast, right? Talk to the other censusmasters and see whether they know anything? And he should be in your records from the past years. You were censusmaster then, weren’t you?”

“I was,” nodded Terra. “Wait, Isra, the girl who lives in the woods?”

“Yes,” said Mizuki.

“So she’s actually talking to people?” asked Terra. “Not just running away before anyone catches sight of her?”

“Well, about that,” said Mizuki. “It’s … kind of your job to have caught her, isn’t it?”

“There are limits to how much force we can apply,” said Terra. “Practical limits, for someone who can disappear without a trace, and political limits, if it’s just someone who wants to be left alone aside from bringing in meat on market days.”

“Well, she’s part of the town now,” said Mizuki. “I’m running dungeons with her. And five years ago, after her father died, someone named Angun robbed her, so I’d like to, you know … have that resolved.”

“Her father died?” asked Terra. She swore. “Worse than we thought then.” She had a grimace plastered on her face.

“She’s mostly fine,” said Mizuki. “And she was coming in on market days.”

“Mmm,” said Terra. “Well, I can go looking through the records, but the name Angun isn’t familiar.”

“He was probably in the woods,” said Mizuki. “One of those people with a small cabin that stays away from the rest of the people?”

“I’ll check,” nodded Terra. “And if I find him in my records, then yes, I can go send something out across the whole province, though it will take some time, especially for the smaller hexes to get back to me.”

“Good,” nodded Mizuki. “I’ve got descriptions of the entads that were taken too, if you need that for your investigation. I sent out letters to the entad dealers east and west, and we’ll see what I get back from them. I’ll let you know.”

“You’re trying to solve a five year old crime?” asked Terra. “And without the actual victim here?”

“I’m doing a favor for a friend,” said Mizuki. “If she had to come in here to speak with you, I think she probably just wouldn’t. There were a few years there when she was terrified that you were going to take her house, or arrest her, or some other thing.”

“And we probably should have,” nodded Terra. “To provide her a better life.”

“Well, I think she’s been doing well for herself,” said Mizuki. She almost let slip that Isra was a druid, but managed to keep that bit to herself. “You’ll let me know if you find anything? I just need to know where he lives, and I don’t imagine that he’s gotten all that much farther from Pucklechurch.”

“No taking matters into your own hands,” said Terra, frowning.

“We just want the entads back,” said Mizuki, which was a little white lie. “I should mention that there was an assault that happened with the theft, so a little justice wouldn’t hurt.”

“You should have mentioned the assault first,” said Terra. Her lips went thin. “Against a thirteen year old girl?”

“She wasn’t hurt,” said Mizuki. “Just frightened.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Terra. “That’s all she had? A single name, not first or last?”

“A name, and a timeframe, and descriptions of entads,” said Mizuki. “Do you think it will be enough?”

“I hope it will be,” said Terra, nodding. “But I’ll get back to you on it later, it will take some time for me to comb through the records. I can tell you right now there’s no one with that name, first or last, in the current census.”

“Thank you,” said Mizuki. She let out a little sigh. It felt good to have done something, even if it felt like she might be setting Isra up to go on a quest that would take her away from the party. Isra deserved some closure, and she definitely deserved to have her entads back.

“Wait,” said Mizuki, just before she was about to leave. “There’s a girl named Lola, can you tell me if she’s been in town?”

“Recently?” asked Terra.

Mizuki nodded.

“Yes,” said Terra. “Every day for the last six days.”

Mizuki swore. That did not bode well. She was going to have to hope that they could weather the storm.

Chapter 44 - Care Package

The worst thing about waiting for the other shoe to drop with Lola was that there was a good chance that it already had, in some undone timeline. Lola knew that they were in Pucklechurch, and once she got there, it would take her all of five minutes to get directions to the house, and at that point … well, she had options. She would talk with them, suss out their weaknesses, practice conversations, and prepare for the future. It had been three days since they’d left Liberfell, which meant three days that Lola could have been undoing, perhaps six attempts at doing whatever it was she felt like doing, unless she’d gotten to the next tier of power, which was entirely possible.

When they returned to the house, and Alfric saw the package sitting on the doorstep, his heart started beating faster.

“Weird,” said Mizuki as she approached it. “Mail service doesn’t usually run on temple days.”

“Wait,” said Alfric, moving in front of her and holding an arm out. “It might be troublesome.” The package was as long as his forearm, perhaps just large enough to hold a large loaf of bread, but if it was from Lola, then it could be nearly anything, including something like a dangerous animal. He took the note that was resting on top. It was addressed to him, without any of the accompanying information that someone would have needed to get it to Pucklechurch, just ‘Alfric’. With a sense of dread, he opened it.

“Oh,” he said a moment later. “It’s from my mom.”

“Your mom?” asked Mizuki. She looked at the note in his hands, and he passed it to her, because it didn’t say anything all that important. “It’s a care package?”

“Yes,” nodded Alfric. Relief surged through him, but also a bit of annoyance and embarrassment. The note was in her handwriting, on stationery that he recognized once he remembered to look at it, and while he wouldn’t put it past Lola to have done forgeries, a care package was very in character for his mom.

“It’s signed ‘your mom and dad’,” said Mizuki. “Why do you say mom?”

“She always signs things from her and dad,” said Alfric. “This would have been her idea though.”

“Wait,” said Hannah. “How did this package get here?” She had taken the note, and was looking at the front. “No address?”

“She almost certainly dropped it off herself,” said Alfric.

“What, from Dondrian?” asked Mizuki. “She just … came here for only long enough to drop something off and didn’t say hi?”

“Mom has entads,” said Alfric. This was an understatement. The family vault was quite large, and while entads were loaned to various parties and many of those taken from his mother’s legendary streak of dungeon runs had been sold, there were still an absolutely enormous number that had bound to his mother and were good for nothing except her personal use.

“Well I wanted to meet her,” said Mizuki. “She should have said hi.”

“I think she knows that would be unwelcome,” said Alfric. “For me, not for you. I’d wanted to do this on my own.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Mizuki. “Self-reliance is important to you.” She said this with understanding, rather than the sarcasm that he had been braced for. “But you’ll share what’s in the box, right?”

“Depends on what it is,” said Alfric. His paranoid thoughts were starting to leave him, though it was entirely possible that even if this was a legitimate care package from his mother, it had been tampered with by Lola. He put the thought out of his head, though he was going to be a bit careful when looking at what was inside.

They moved inside, and Hannah went upstairs to change into her regular clothes while Alfric opened up the box. Mizuki was hovering nearby, doing her best to look.

“Chocolate, a bottle of drosiril, stationery so I can write letters,” he kept taking things out of the box and placing them on the kitchen counter, “Fish jerky which I think is from my uncle, dried plums, foot cream which is probably from my brother —”

“Why?” asked Mizuki.

“It’s a joke,” said Alfric. “Not a funny one, but a joke.”

“Ah, so you share the same sense of humor,” said Mizuki, grinning at him. “Unfunny jokes.”

“And lastly, tickets to the opera, from my father,” said Alfric, laying them on the table with a sigh. “Along with what appears to be an offer to pick us up and pay for expenses.” There were five tickets there, and Mizuki picked one up to look at it.

“What, we’d just … go to Dondrian for the night?” asked Mizuki. Her eyes were wide. Perhaps everything he’d said about who he was and the resources his family had hadn’t sunk in for her yet.

“Yes,” said Alfric with a sigh. “And no, I don’t think we’re going.”

“What?” asked Mizuki. “Why not? I don’t even know what opera is, but it seems like it would be up my alley.”

“We’d need dress clothes,” said Alfric.

Mizkuki looked down at herself. “This is my temple best though.” It wasn’t her usual outfit, instead, something like a long robe with higher quality cloth and good stitching, emphasizing clean lines. She looked good in it, and was also wearing a bit of makeup, which she didn’t normally do.

“There are certain expectations for the opera,” said Alfric, feeling apologetic. “Especially if you’re going to be up in one of the private boxes.”

“Private boxes?” asked Mizuki. She looked down at the tickets. “Are these … pretty expensive?”

“Um,” said Alfric. “Not for my dad, no.” He hesitated. “But that’s because he has a controlling interest in the opera.”

Mizuki stared at him. “He owns an opera?”

“He owns sixty percent of the opera company,” said Alfric. “It’s one of the only creative endeavors our family has any investment in, mostly because he’s a fan. Um, aside from commissions and things, we do those too, and some patronage, but I don’t think that counts.”

“So he just one day thought to himself, gee, I should own this thing?” asked Mizuki.

“About fifteen years ago they were in financial distress,” said Alfric. “Dad helped work with some managers and moneymen on revitalization. It’s more complicated than just having enough money to buy a whole opera company, and there are tax and government things I don’t think you’d care about.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “Well, tell your dad that I want to go, and that I’m going to embarrass him by wearing this.” She gestured to her temple best.

“Mizuki, the whole thing would be excruciating,” said Alfric. “It’s one of the only fancy things that my family does, and it’s like being in a different world full of the worst people.”

“Did I hear there are opera tickets in the care package?” asked Verity. She sauntered into the kitchen, with Isra behind her. “I do quite enjoy the opera.”

Mizuki gave Alfric a raised eyebrow.

“My father loves the opera,” said Alfric. “Growing up, I went a fair amount. We have a private box.”

“You said your dad owned the opera,” said Mizuki.

“A controlling interest,” said Alfric. “Which isn’t quite the same thing.”

“Your father has a controlling interest in the Dondrian Metropolitan Opera?” asked Verity. She seemed incredulous.

“No, actually,” said Alfric. “The other one, DOPA, Dondrian Operatic and Performing Arts.”

“Oh,” said Verity. “Still very impressive.”

Alfric appreciated her words, but that correction was one he’d made a few times, and there was always a bit of mild disappointment from people, because it was the less famous and prestigious of the two opera companies in Dondrian. Controlling interest in it was still impressive, but much less so than for the Metropolitan Opera. There was a reason that the company had been having financial problems. The new management had largely turned things around, but it was still second place by a wide margin.

“Anyway,” said Alfric. “I suppose if you’re all interested, we could go, but clothing would be an issue,” he looked at his father’s note, “though one my father seems to be suggesting that he’d take care of? And I’m not sure Verity would want to return to Dondrian, even for just a night.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” said Verity, picking up one of the tickets. “Though I do adore Lerial and Marsc. And if it were for a single night, and if I could be guaranteed not to run into anyone I know …” She raised an eyebrow toward Alfric.

“There are ways we could make it work,” he said. “But it would take some doing. I think my father sent me the tickets mostly as a way to force me to bring up the opera, frankly. If we wanted a trip into Dondrian with his assistance … we could.”

“Well it sounds like a blast,” said Mizuki. “And I would probably get to meet your parents, right?”

“I don’t know why you’d want to, but probably, yes,” said Alfric. He looked at the three of them. “Does this make things awkward?”

“Why would it?” asked Isra.

“The money,” said Alfric. “Money, power, resources, they complicate things. A care package with bits and bobs to be eaten … that’s okay, but a big trip like this, it’s … I don’t want it to create problems.”

“If you don’t want us to go, we won’t go,” said Mizuki. She shrugged. “Sorry, I didn’t mean for it to be weird. We can forget it.”

“Forget what?” asked Hannah, coming back down the stairs. She had changed back into her usual clothes, and was looking much more chipper.

“Part of the care package was opera tickets,” said Mizuki. “Which apparently comes with transportation and some new clothes?”

“Temporary clothes, I would think,” said Alfric. “I mean, if I explained to my dad, he wouldn’t insist that you spend a lot of money to get formal attire. Resizing dresses from the family vault, maybe, or something. I’m not sure how much my dad thought this through, or what he felt the implication was.” The note said ‘along with anything you need to get here and have a good time’. It was vague, but he couldn’t imagine that his father would assume they all had the kind of dress clothes that would suit a night at the opera.

“And Alfric is worried about his family’s money makin’ things awkward?” asked Hannah.

“I am,” said Alfric. “A night on the town in Dondrian might be good, after which the thought might come into your head, ‘why can’t every night be like this’, and the answer will be, ‘because of a focus on self-reliance, which is stupid and I hate it’. These aren’t, um, completely paranoid concerns.”

“Well,” said Hannah. “I can’t say that I’ve ever longed to go to the opera. It’s a kind of musical play, right?”

“Er,” said Alfric. “Don’t let my father hear you say that, but yes.”

“I’ve given it some thought, and I like seekin’ our own fortune,” said Hannah. “I can imagine doin’ the dungeons the other way, where we were kitted out from the start in all the best possible gear, entads galore, and then each dungeon would be easier, certainly, but … well, it wouldn’t be the same. It’s a different sort of thing from acceptin’ a trip, an experience, if you will.”

Alfric gave a hesitant nod. It was more or less the conclusion he’d come to himself, but he knew it wasn’t how everyone else felt. Doing that way, fully kitted out, would turn it into grueling labor, rather than a proper adventure. There would be no surprise and joy at finding new things, because almost all of them would be sold off. And yes, he could see the viewpoint by which that made it all seem like a game, and that he was only able to have that kind of relationship with the dungeons because of his enormous advantages in life, not just being a chrononaut, but having parents who loved each other and had quite a bit of money on top of that.

“Well, I’d like to go,” said Mizuki. “If and only if it’s not taking advantage of our friendship.” She said that, but Alfric felt like she was humoring him and secretly quite hopeful that he wouldn’t say no.

“It’s my father’s offer,” said Alfric.

“I think I’d like to go too,” said Verity. “Though … I would need a disguise, and I didn’t take any of my fancy dresses with me when I came to Pucklechurch.”

Isra nodded slowly. Alfric was glad she was game, but it seemed apparent to everyone how out of her depth she would be.

“I would want a disguise too,” said Mizuki.

“Disguises for all!” said Hannah.

“Well, I’ll send a message to my dad through the guild,” said Alfric.

“You’re in a guild with your dad?” asked Mizuki. “I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Alfric. “Family guild.”

“So that’s how Lola knew where we were,” said Mizuki.

“I don’t think so, actually,” said Alfric. “The timeline doesn’t line up quite right. My guess is that one of my parents let it slip, though I don’t know for certain.”

“Because they don’t know things went sour between the two of you?” asked Hannah.

“They know a bit,” said Alfric. “We’re still formally pacted, which … is just not going to happen, but I can deal with later.”

“We’re not likely to run into her in Dondrian, right?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Alfric. “Even if she had that kind of entad support, she wouldn’t be going to the opera, not unless she knew we were going, so I guess … don’t tell her.”

“Don’t worry,” said Mizuki. “We’ll get you a disguise.”

“I think I’ll be discreet with my dad,” said Alfric. “Just to make sure.” He looked down at the care package. The rest of it was considerably less awkward than the opera tickets. “This is all to share, if there’s anything you want to try.”

“Can I have some fermented seed bar?” asked Isra, looking at the contents.

“The what?” asked Alfric.

Isra picked up the bar of chocolate, which was wrapped in thin paper with a bow on it.

“Oh,” said Alfric. “Yes, of course. It’s chocolate.”

“And what’s that?” asked Mizuki.

“Fermented seed bar,” said Alfric, smiling at Isra. “With sugar and milk.”

“Oh, so it’s like a Kiromon dessert,” said Mizuki. “We use beans a lot, bean syrups, bean pastes, things like that.”

“Um,” said Alfric. “I suppose. There are a few bars there, I’d suggest saving one or two of them for a milk drink. You melt it into hot milk, basically.” Chocolate was virtually unheard of this far to the south, and a relative rarity even in Dondrian, though it had recently been making waves thanks to a number of farms finally coming to their full productive capacity. He looked to Verity, and she smiled at him. A large cup of hot chocolate had been somewhat in vogue as an early morning drink when she’d left, and by the time he left, the fad had yet to run its course.

The care package was a bit embarrassing, but they had fun with it, especially since it contained a number of foods that Mizuki, Isra, and Hannah had never tasted before. The drosiril was a bit too sweet for them, and needed to be watered down: Mizuki refused to believe that it was made from a variety of cactus, and seemed a bit confused about what a cactus was, as did Isra, who knew of them but had never encountered one. That gave her a rare spot of ignorance about the natural world.

“So,” said Hannah, pulling a ticket over to inspect it. “If we are going to the opera, it seems as though it’ll be after our double dungeon?”

“If we go to the early performance, yes,” said Alfric. “We can easily push to a later date.”

“Are we really planning a double dungeon?” asked Mizuki.

“If one person says no, we don’t do it,” said Alfric. “I’m not married to the idea, but given it’s conditional on things going well in the first one, I do think it makes a bit more sense, especially if we’re taking longer breaks.”

“Double dungeon all the way, I guess,” said Mizuki. “Hey, we could even do three, if we really wanted to.”

“I’m looking at this as an adventure,” said Verity. “But three is too many.”

“Well I wasn’t serious,” said Mizuki. “Vertex doesn’t seem to even be doing them back to back. But going to have a night on the town after we’ve finished two dungeons seems like it would be great, assuming we haven’t been thrashed. I mean, after the two dungeons we did, we’re due for some easy ones, right?”

“That’s not really how variance works,” said Alfric.

Mizuki shrugged, as though this were a matter of opinion.

“What are we going to do with the egg, while we’re gone?” asked Isra. “It’s nearly hatched.”

“It is?” asked Alfric.

Isra nodded. “Within the next week. If I understand what we’re doing … that would be at the time we’re going to the first or second dungeon.”

“Can you, um,” said Alfric. “Help it along to hatch faster? You still don’t know what kind of creature it is, right?”

“We were lookin’ at it together,” said Hannah. “I could get a feel for it inside the egg shell, and Isra has her witchcraft. It’s got vestigial wings, a long body, some nubs of horns that will probably grow, and grinding herbivore teeth. We don’t think it’s dangerous, but it’s hard to say. Also, the wings might not be vestigial when it’s grown.”

“If it’s got magic, I can’t see it yet,” Mizuki volunteered. “I actually think my magic sight is getting a bit better, which is weird.”

A sorcerer or wizard’s acuity tended to increase with elevation, though it was, unhelpfully, not a constant. Alfric was going to check with the censusmaster before they did the next dungeon, but it would be for the best if they were all at the same elevation, and the only direction to go was up.

“I could rush it along,” said Isra. “But it needs time to grow. If it hatched now it would be weak, and we would still need to care for it. In its first week, I think it will need chewed up herbs.” She frowned. “Though I’m not entirely sure. I’ll know more after it hatches.”

Alfric rubbed the back of his neck. “We’re going to need to build containment for it, if we don’t want to just send it to the bastlekeeper.”

“And we’ll need a name for it,” said Mizuki. “It’s some kind of dragon, right?”

“It’s unclear,” said Isra. “I’ve never seen a dragon.”

“None of us have,” said Hannah. She turned to look at Alfric. “Right?”

“I’ve never seen one,” said Alfric. He glanced at Isra. “Well, I’ve seen pictures, and moving illustrations, and other things, along with the preserved remains of one in the Dondrian museum, but not a real, live dragon.”

“We should go to the museum while we’re in Dondrian,” said Verity. “Isra would like it, I think.”

“I’m not saying that it’s a dragon,” said Mizuki, still focused on Alfric. “Just like a dragon.”

“Dragons aren’t herbivores,” said Verity. “Mostly not, anyway.”

“Oh, and who is going to be in charge of chewing up herbs for this thing?” asked Mizuki. “I’ll volunteer, if no one else wants to.”

“I can do it,” said Alfric. “You already more than pull your weight.”

“You’re hoping that it imprints on you, aren’t you?” asked Mizuki. “I know your tricks. I will be the one who feeds the herb dragon.”

“Um, sure,” said Alfric. “I just meant that between this being your house, you having the most raw power of any of us, and cooking most of our meals, I didn’t want you to overwork yourself. If it does have some kind of imprinting behavior, you would be in charge of it, and then … I don’t know. I don’t want you to stretch yourself.”

Mizuki waved a hand. “Hannah’s offered help with the cooking, and I’m going to train Isra, who will surely take to it immediately.”

“Cooking seems difficult,” said Isra.

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “It just takes practice.”

“So the egg,” said Verity. “Are we bringing it with us into the dungeons, or stalling until it’s hatched? Or hatching it early, if we can?”

“I think we can bring it with us,” said Isra. “It will be able to stay in its container for at least a day or two. We should bring herbs with us though. I’ll go collect them.”

The rest of the day passed by easily, with a brief lunch provided by Mizuki and Isra. Putting sandwiches together was, apparently, Mizuki’s idea of the first step in teaching someone to cook.

After that, they had something that Alfric had been both looking forward to and dreading: dungeon school.

“We need to start with the basics,” said Alfric. “A dungeon is a half-created world, one spun up largely from ambient mana within a hex, created on an individual basis for a party, in accordance with all kinds of things, which we won’t go into here, because again, basics.” Mizuki’s hand went up. “Er, yes?”

“But it doesn’t matter whether someone else has been through that same dungeon before?” she asked.

“It does, and it doesn’t,” said Alfric. “Doing a dungeon does drain off some of its potential, but there are scaling factors in play, one of which is elevation. When we did the Pucklechurch dungeon at second elevation, we would only have had a minimal impact on the actual magical potential it held, and because we were lower elevation, we had less access to potential riches, though there’s a wide variance. Good question.” Mizuki beamed at him. “But in general, elevation rises with the number of dungeons done, and elevation increases both risks and rewards, though variance ensures that you’re not going to necessarily be able to tell, especially at the lower elevations, where we are now.” He paused, waiting for a clarification from Hannah, but it didn’t come. Elevation wasn’t bunk, but it was often subtle and uneven.

“Now, the three things I really want to drill into you today are the basic ‘rules’ of dungeoneering,” said Alfric. “These are all basic rules of thumb that will ideally keep us from getting killed, and they’re very fundamental elements.”

“Which we’ve been doing without?” asked Verity.

“Yes,” nodded Alfric. “That doesn’t mean they’re not important. The first rule: always have an escape strategy. As a general rule, travel entads don’t work within dungeons, though there are some exceptions, and the warp doesn’t either. That hasn’t come up for us, and hopefully it won’t, but you don’t plan on hopes. Things can go bad in a dungeon very quickly, and you need to be able to know where the exit is at all times, and have a plan for how you’ll get there. This also means thinking in terms of escapes and helping out your teammates if they’re incapacitated or injured.”

“But we’d reset, right?” asked Mizuki.

“Not necessarily,” said Alfric. “And depending on the circumstances, there’s a very real chance that I wouldn’t be able to, given my own incapacitation. Don’t rely on me undoing any mistake. Having an escape plan doesn’t always mean directly escaping, sometimes it’s just a matter of regrouping at the dungeon entrance. But obviously you can’t do that unless you get there, and the last thing you want to do when you’re running away is to end up going down a path that wasn’t the one you’d taken. It’s very easy to get turned around in a dungeon, and can be fatal. So, always have an escape strategy. We’ll do some orientation exercises later on, and if we run into elevation changes in a dungeon, we’ll do best practices, preparing fast exits for ourselves.”

“See, you’re making this seem really dangerous again,” said Mizuki.

“That very nicely brings us to the second rule, which is that you don’t know what’s in a dungeon,” said Alfric. “Dungeons are, by definition, unique. No one runs into a dungeon that someone else has run into before. They share similarities, like entads and monsters share similarities, and the dungeons are thought to pull from the raw material of whatever is in the hex, but they’re unique, and should be treated as such. You don’t know what’s in the dungeon.”

“But we somewhat do,” said Verity. She was frowning.

“Well,” said Alfric. “The rule is mostly about variance. We know what a dungeon is likely to contain, but there are things seen only every one in a hundred times, one in a thousand times, or more. Some of those things have been, yes, fatal, meaning that no one ever reported them, or more likely, reports of them haven’t reached our ears because the reporting was confused and panicked, the phenomenon unclear. Where people run into problems is when they assume that they more or less know how things are going to go.”

“And the variance is worse than it might seem,” said Hannah. “You say one in a hundred, and people might think that you’d need a hundred dungeons to see something like that. But no, if you see ten monsters in a dungeon, you only need ten dungeons. Ten dungeons to see a one in a hundred room. Less, with larger dungeons.”

“Right,” said Alfric. “There are distinctions to be made between high variance dungeons and high variance encounters. You can have a dungeon that’s just all-around harder, and you can have a fairly sedate dungeon with one extremely dangerous monster. But the point is, you don’t know, and so long as you think that to yourself with every dungeon, you won’t lose your edge, and you’ll focus on your awareness.”

“Fat chance of me losing my edge anytime soon,” said Mizuki. “I have trouble seeing how a dungeon could be,” she waved her hand.

“Rote?” Alfric supplied.

“Boring,” said Mizuki.

“The rule boils down to expecting the unexpected,” said Alfric. “Be able to make a quick pivot and not fall into old habits or training routines if something goes wrong.”

“Not that we have much training,” said Isra.

“No,” said Alfric. “But there’s a reason that training is often considered overrated for dungeoneers.” That was perhaps an optimistic read on their situation. “And at any rate, the issue of variance brings us to our next point, closely tied to it, which is that the dungeon is never safe. I know I’ve said that before, but it’s something I don’t think we’ve been doing a good enough job following. To give an example of a way in which a dungeon can be unsafe, there was a dungeoneering team that had ‘cleared’ a dungeon and elected to spend the night there, because they had quite a bit to load into their storage entads. They woke up sick from a poison halfway through the night and were barely able to escape with their lives.”

“But where did the poison come from?” asked Verity. “Surely not from nowhere.”

“It’s hard to say,” said Alfric. “They didn’t have the time to investigate, and once they were gone, there was no way to tell. It might have been leaching into the air from the rocks, it might have been from a monster they’d missed, it might have been something to do with chemistry,” he shrugged. “There are different ways that dungeons can be deadly, beyond just the monsters. There can be traps, plants, materials … all kinds of things. And with variance being what it is, you should never assure yourself that an area is ‘clear’ or ‘safe’. Even once we think we’ve killed every monster, we should always travel in at least pairs, and we should never sleep in the dungeon if it can be helped.”

“And that’s it then?” asked Mizuki after a moment had passed. “That’s dungeon class for the day?”

“Well,” said Alfric. “No, because we need to go in-depth on each of those. In the Junior League, they spent a day on each of those points, but with a lot of repetition, and I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t try to drill it in.”

“Sure,” said Mizuki. “So we’ll listen to you some more, and then go do something fun?”

“I was thinking that we’d do outdoor mock exercises,” said Alfric. “Long enough to take us to dinner? Or at least, until you need to start preparing for dinner.”

“Ah,” said Mizuki, shifting in her seat. “Well then. I suppose there’s more than I thought there would be, or you put in more preparation. Proceed.”

Alfric tried his best not to be boring, but he wasn’t sure that it was actually working. He tried to include anecdotes about dungeons, but he wasn’t sure that was working either. Of all the things he’d prepared for, being a teacher wasn’t one of them, though he did like to talk about dungeons.

The exercises he’d prepared seemed to be a bit better, though that might have been because they were out in the woods, doing something together, and without him droning on, they were free to talk about whatever they pleased while Alfric led. He was somewhat surprised that it was Mizuki rather than Hannah who helped him out the most, setting up sticks for orienteering exercises and untying the flags from the trees. Doing this outdoors meant that Isra wasn’t even slightly challenged, but the exercises were, in Alfric’s view, a bit more about drilling in the basics than actually simulating any part of the dungeon. Beyond that, they were good for team cohesion, calling out orders over the party channel and sharing what they saw in language designed for speed and simplicity.

And then it was over, with everyone a bit tired out. Alfric was happy that they’d done it, in part because it assuaged some of his concerns, but also because it demonstrated a level of seriousness about the dungeons that made him feel reassured that this group wasn’t going to dissolve into nothing like the groups he’d had before.

Still, when he came back in, he saw the opera tickets, and he worried that when they saw how his family lived, their minds would change.

Chapter 47 - Down the Dungeon

The trip to the third dungeon was much different than the trip to the second. The only thing required of them, early in the morning, was to head through the wardrobe to a hex which took its name from the small town there, Hie Point. This shortened the trip considerably. But another big difference was that unlike with Traeg’s Knob, or, in fact, Pucklechurch, the dungeon entrance was in Hie Point, less than a few long strides from the warp point. It made the entire thing feel shockingly close to Isra, a feeling that she was relieved the others seemed to share.

“It’s like we just stepped out of the door,” said Mizuki. “Warp to town, walk to the wardrobe, go to the hex, warp to Hie Point, walk here. We were sitting at home, and the whole time we were just a hundred steps away from here.”

“‘A properly equipped person is five steps from anywhere’,” said Alfric. It had the feel of quotation, but whatever the source, it was familiar to everyone else but not to Isra.

“It kind of gives me the creeps, to be honest,” said Mizuki. “Like things are too close to each other.”

“You would hate Dondrian then,” said Alfric. “Entads like the wardrobe are somewhat common, and quite a bit cheaper.”

“Why should they be cheaper?” asked Isra.

“Volume,” said Alfric. “A thousand people at a ring apiece gives you better returns than ten people at ten rings apiece. You still get things like the wardrobe out in the sticks, but there are a lot of backwoods in Inter.”

The building was marked with the sign of a dungeon, a ring with a thickened bottom, and it had a big, prominent label as well. The building was the most formidable one among the scant collection at Hie Point, the only one made from stone bricks rather than wood. As Isra looked closer, she saw that the bricks weren’t local, some kind of sandy stone that couldn’t be quarried anywhere in the surrounding few hexes, though her grasp of local geology did sometimes leave a bit to be desired. For all that it was imposing, it was also fairly small, likely only a single large room, and it was without windows. The outside of it had been marked by dungeoneers, the bricks carved into with various signatures, dates, and sigils, along with some ribald drawings of genitals. Isra smirked when she saw them.

When they went inside the building, it was relatively bare. There were benches along two of the walls, and in the center, a dungeon entrance, which had been left open. Unlike the others, it had a steeper descent, steep enough that it seemed like it might be difficult for them to make their way back up, especially if they were carrying something heavy. To bring up something like the wardrobe from within this dungeon … well, it seemed hard.

“The dungeon is open,” said Alfric, frowning at it.

“Does that mean someone is in there?” asked Mizuki. “Do we need to wait our turn?”

“No,” said Alfric. “Two teams can go into the dungeon at the same time, they just end up in different instances of the dungeon.”

“That doesn’t sound right,” said Mizuki.

“Well, it is,” said Alfric. “Assuming that they’re not at a very high elevation, it’s unlikely to impact us. Normally I would say it’s better for us to wait, but given some of the difficulties we’ve had, and the fact that we’re going to be facing down another dungeon tomorrow, I think it would be best if we just have at it. Except … well, I wouldn’t want them to lock us in.”

“We could leave a note,” said Verity.

“He’s thinking that this might be Vertex,” said Hannah. “Coincidentally came here at the same time as us, coincidentally just before us, and yes, better to avoid them.”

“‘Coincidentally’,” said Mizuki. “More like Lola planning it.”

“That’s the implication, yes,” said Hannah, sighing.

“She wouldn’t lock us in,” said Alfric. “And if she did, we could break through the dungeon door. If we wait around here, then we might run into them.”

“Might be some other group,” said Hannah. “It’s not like Vertex is the only other party in the world.”

“True,” said Alfric, but he seemed doubtful. “Alright, I think we’ll go in and leave a note. What did we decide on for a name? Settlers?”

“Seems to me like it needs something more,” said Mizuki. “But sure, it’s not like we can’t change it.”

“Any temporary name we pick is going to be the one we end up using forever,” said Verity.

“Not necessarily true,” said Mizuki.

“What’s the name of the country we’re in?” asked Verity.

“Fine,” sighed Mizuki. “Point taken. But I’m okay settling with Settlers.”

Alfric was in the middle of writing out the note when the other party came up from the dungeon. Isra hadn’t actually met or seen any of the members of Vertex, but based on Mizuki’s description of them, and the reactions of the rest of her party, Isra didn’t think that these were the same people.

They came up arguing, but their conversation died when they realized that they weren’t alone.

“Dungeon’s not worth it,” said the one woman among them. She was tall, tall enough that she was either a cleric of Xuphin, or had been altered by one. Her arm was bloodied, and drops were dripping down from her fingertips onto the ground. When Isra looked closely, she could see stains in the wood: it wasn’t the first time that someone had bled coming out of this dungeon.

“Do you mind me healin’ that?” asked Hannah, pointing at the arm.

“You’re a cleric?” asked the woman. Her eyes went over Hannah, either looking for some sigil or marker, or just not believing it based on how Hannah carried herself.

“Ay, Garos,” said Hannah. “We’re goin’ in soon, so I can’t spare much, but if it won’t clot on its own, I’d feel poorly for lettin’ you die.”

The other four scrambled up the steep entryway to the dungeon, all of them men. They were older, Isra thought, though it was hard to tell with the grime and the armor. Dungeoneering seemed to be regarded as work for the young, but these people were in their thirties, or possibly older.

“Anything you could tell us would be appreciated,” said Alfric.

“It was overly vertical,” said one of the men. “Bring rope, if you haven’t got some already. We ran out, partway through, and had to make do without. Brex fell and nearly broke his leg.” He nodded to one of the men who had limped over to a bench to catch his breath. “And a descent means you’re limited to what you can carry on your back, not that you’d want to climb like that, unless you’ve got good storage.”

“We filled ours,” said the woman. “Good rocks, but not much else. Too many injuries, too much pain.” Hannah had finished her healing, and the woman moved her arm around, testing mobility as though she didn’t trust the freely given aid. “Thank you,” she finally said, remembering her manners.

“Any dungeon you can walk out of,” said one of the men. He was fair-skinned, like Verity, and there was a bit of ethnic resemblance between them, a similar delicacy of features.

“I didn’t think it was that bad,” said one of the men. “We’ll come out five hundred rings richer, that’s nothing to sneeze at.”

“Five hundred rings, split five ways,” said the woman. “A day’s labor, too much travel.” She shook her head.

“Beats working in a field,” said one of the men, who was looking over his shield. It had a few marks on it.

“Does it though?” asked the woman. “Does it really?” She wiped blood from her arm, which did little more than spread it. She looked at Alfric with piercing eyes. “Have at it.”

Alfric nodded. “Wish us luck.” Without another word, he began his descent into the dungeon.

Isra went after him as the other group sat on the benches, recuperating. They seemed so grim and defeated, and the pleasant air among their own party seemed to have been snuffed out in an instant.

When Isra got down through the tunnel, she saw a fight already in progress. Alfric was illuminated by the lantern around his neck in an expansive room with pillars that stretched into the sky, and he was swinging his sword against something like a goat, but much longer in the midsection, stretching out like a snake. Without hesitation, Isra drew her bow and fired an arrow, walking along with it to cover the distance and firing a second arrow at nearly point-blank, sinking it directly into the creature’s head. It screeched, and tottered away, its long body following it.

<Kill it before it runs!> shouted Alfric in her head. He was slashing its side with his sword, and rather than blood, there were great quantities of black foam coming from it, stiffening as soon as they came into contact with the air.

Isra fired another arrow and walked with it, getting as close as she could to the thing’s head and doing her best to put her full draw into it. The symmetricalization had made things feel a bit off, but it was becoming more natural as she went, and no great impediment. Another time-bending arrow slowed things down, and she was able to place two arrows into the goat’s head from less than three feet away. It went down like a sack of bricks, all control of its body lost, and Isra had to hurry to the side to get out of the way as it rolled.

<Are you okay?> asked Alfric.

<Fine,> said Isra. <Usually they’re not in the starting room.>

<There’s always a chance of anything,> said Alfric. <And the room is massive. Combined with a runner, that could be deadly.> Isra looked up and saw how little of their light shone was actually reaching the ceiling. The pillars were wider around than any tree, and there didn’t seem to be quite enough of them. The edges of the room couldn’t be seen in the gloom. It felt like they were tiny creatures given the scale of the place.

<Aw, you started without us?> asked Mizuki, who’d come down through the tunnel, which was set into the stone wall.

<Early encounter,> said Alfric.

<Well,> said Hannah, who came in shortly afterward. <This is different.> She was looking at the environs, rather than the hundred-foot long goat that was lying dead.

<But why is it different?> asked Verity, bringing up the rear.

<It happens sometimes,> said Alfric. <Dungeons are unique. Hopefully it won’t be stocked with anything too dangerous.> He looked up at the ceiling. It seemed so high that there might have been clouds, and with how long the pillars were, it started to give Isra a sense of vertigo. <Big rooms are a problem. There might be almost anything in here. Usually you can count on a monster in a room, as much as you can count on anything in a dungeon, but here, we might be facing lots of them.>

<This whole dungeon might just be a single room?> asked Mizuki.

<It’s possible,> said Alfric. <Anything is.>

Hannah leaned down and touched the ground, screwing her eyes shut. <I can’t sense much,> she said, standing up. <I’ve been trying to work at this, mappin’ through symmetry, but … well, nothin’ so far.>

<Isra?> asked Alfric.

Isra looked around, frowning. Now that she knew more, the dungeons had taken on a darker tone, the madness of the creatures within it potentially something that could infect her, if given the chance to. She’d done some practice of her own, but it was difficult and unpleasant to do, like practicing being blind.

<There,> she said, pointing. <A doorway against that wall.> It was dark where she pointed, beyond the reach of their lights.

<How is this place so big?> asked Mizuki.

<Variance,> Alfric replied. <What’s the weather like?> It took Isra a moment to realize that he was asking Mizuki about the aether.

<Um, large,> said Mizuki. She looked around her, narrowing her eyes. <Which means small, for me, and I think I can make it into a tight focus. But it might just be this room. Um, let me test.>

She held her hand out at one of the pillars, and after a brief frown when nothing seemed to happen, went forward and peered at the pillar. <Okay,> she said. <It worked, but the hole isn’t very big.> Isra moved closer to see in the poor light, and could make out a hole that had been placed in the pillar, as big around as a ring.

<Was that just completely silent?> asked Alfric.

<Yes,> said Mizuki. <It would only be noisy if it was poorly done. Same thing with a fireball, really, they’re just harder to control. If I’m noisy, it’s a sign there’s wasted energy somewhere.>

<Good,> said Verity. <It will make songs a bit easier if I’m not half-deaf. I haven’t started yet, and probably won’t until we run into something or get to a door.>

<We’ll want to go through the whole room,> said Alfric. <And if it’s as big as it seems, then I doubt this goat thing was the only monster.>

<The meat is edible,> said Isra.

Alfric nodded. <Then we should take some time now to butcher it, though I’m worried that the labor will dull us too much.>

<We should drain the blood,> said Isra. <Nothing will make the meat go bad faster than leaving the blood sitting in it.> Though the goat seemed to have blood that foamed up black, which might make a difference. It was edible though.

They set about field dressing the goat, which took quite a bit of time, seeing as it was at least a hundred feet long. Alfric worked with Isra, doing most of the work, since they were the only ones with any experience. Hannah helped, but the two other girls were out of their element. Mizuki was thinking about recipes that used something like goat meat, though she still hadn’t used the bear meat that Isra had taken, which was sitting in a chiller at Isra’s place. The goat wasn’t actually a goat, because aside from being so long, there were quite a few other differences, like the hair being too coarse and bristly, the hooves not being cloven, and the way it had eyes at regular intervals along its spine.

Isra knew that dungeon animals didn’t need to make sense, but for something like this long goat, she struggled to understand it. There would be no way for something like this to survive in the woods, no way for it to weave between the trees and eat enough to have its fill. It would have been a grazing animal, most likely, but it would be too vulnerable to predation. Even if it didn’t have the dungeon madness that all these things seemed to have, it was an implausible creature, one which would have died not long after coming out unless tended to by a determined bastlekeeper. It was, she supposed, understandable that the dungeon animals she was familiar with were the ones that were capable of surviving outside of the dungeons, but it gave dungeoneering a bit of a ghoulish cast. They weren’t just fighting these mad animals, they were fighting animals that were doomed to death if they could ever have been left alive.

<Well, I hope everyone likes ribs, because I’m going to try making a big batch when we get home,> said Mizuki. <Shame about the foam blood.>

<How accurate is your understanding of whether it’s good?> Verity asked Isra. <Have you ever gotten it wrong?>

<No,> said Isra. <I can just … tell.> She didn’t know how else to express it. The idea that other people couldn’t tell was still hard to wrap her head around.

<Fair enough,> said Verity. <If we’re going to sell the meat, we’ll just have to have your stamp of approval on it.>

<A hundred feet of goat ribs is probably worth hundreds of rings,> said Alfric. <We need better storage for it as soon as possible. It would probably make good sense to create a section of the garden that’s frozen, though we’d need to construct a freezer house there.> The stone had been where most of the meat had gone, stacked into piles on top of one of several pallets that Alfric had prepared ahead of time.

<Are you good to go?> asked Hannah. <Not even taken more than twenty steps into this dungeon, and we’ve spent quite a bit of time and labor. I can’t do much to rejuvenate.>

<We’re good,> said Alfric, rolling his shoulders.

The equipment they weren’t carrying with them had been set right next to the entrance, with one of their spare lanterns sitting on top of it so they’d be able to find it, and the exit, if they were in a hurry. Alfric seemed nervous about it, given that they hadn’t searched through the entirety of the big room, and had no idea what was contained within it. The book, if destroyed, would cost them dearly, especially given how much was contained within it, but fighting his way through the dungeon with an extra fifty pounds on his back wasn’t something that Alfric seemed inclined to do.

<This place gives me the creeps,> said Mizuki. She was looking up at the pillars, which stretched up impossibly high. <Seems like a watermelon held up by toothpicks, ready to topple at any moment.>

<They might not even be pillars,> said Alfric. <It’s hard to see, but there might not be a ceiling.>

<Still,> said Mizuki. <It seems unsteady.>

<And yet you shot a hole in one,> said Hannah.

<A small hole,> said Mizuki.

<Bats,> said Isra, though she had no idea whether that’s what it actually was. It was something going through the air, between the pillars, and heading in their direction.

<Huddle up,> said Alfric. <Mizuki, you’re on point. Verity, charge her.>

Isra held tight to her bow. If it was a horde of bats, or something like bats, she wasn’t sure what they were going to do. What they needed was something that covered a wide area, and if Mizuki couldn’t do that, they would need a net, which wasn’t readily available. Against a hundred bats, which is what it sounded like to Isra, arrows would be virtually useless, capable of killing a few here and there, but not on the level they needed to. Isra had always found flocks a bit scary, in the way they seemed to have a mind of their own independent of the individual members.

They sat together for what felt like minutes but was probably much less time. The approach was irregular, not quite in a straight line, but it was still too dim to see until the creatures were quite close overhead.

They were nothing like bats. Their form was more reminiscent of a frog, a large one, maybe half the size of a person. They had too many wings on their back, eight or nine, thick wings that flapped incessantly, even when they were gripping the sides of a pillar. They had been jumping back and forth between them, sometimes gliding for a longer jump. From the time between when Isra first spotted them to the time they started dropping down around the party was perhaps twelve seconds.

Isra felt a bit of relief though, because these, at least, were something that the party was equipped to deal with. Two dozen of these things seemed like a lot, but Isra vastly preferred that to the idea of two hundred smaller things. She let the first arrow fly and stepped with it, moving toward one of the creatures she hoped was going to soon die.

She had worked with Alfric, in the days before this dungeon, planning for different scenarios. One of the things they’d come up with together was what he’d called permanent slowness, the idea that the bow could be used in such a way so that Isra was always under its effects. They had practiced, and Isra found it draining, but all that was really required to make it work was to have another arrow ready to fire the exact moment that the first arrow found its mark and time began moving forward at the normal rate again.

Isra aimed for center mass, hoping to puncture the lungs or hearts of the creatures, if they had such things. The tactic required her to be in constant motion though, and by the time she was firing her third arrow, she was already starting to feel it. Mizuki fired off her silent little spell, which tunneled straight through two of the creatures, but it seemed that was all the help that she would be. Hannah had unclipped a hammer from her belt and begun to swing it with abandon, and Alfric was sweeping his electrified sword through the air, cutting neatly through whatever creature came near him. He was protecting Verity and Mizuki.

Isra stalked the perimeter of the clustered party, moving faster than the creatures could, always firing another arrow as soon as the effect of the earlier one was done. With her chosen technique, she couldn’t shoot at the creatures above, because the bubble of slowed time would go beyond her, but the creatures had no range to them, and not all that much in the way of weapons. They were using their forelimbs to grab at people, and had their mouths open to bite with. One of them actually did manage to slip past Alfric and Hannah to grab at Mizuki, using surprising strength to pull her off her feet, and Isra fired a risky arrow at it, worried that she would hit one of her party members. She wasn’t able to follow the bubble either, and pulled an arrow as quickly as she could, jarred by the sudden return to normal time.

Alfric moved forward, fearless, with perfect form. He was positioning himself against the creatures, trying to make himself wide so that he could protect the others. He sometimes darted out to slash at one of the creatures, but always retreated, keeping aware of where the others were. The way he made it look so natural spoke to instinct, which must have come from incredible amounts of training, and Isra faltered for a moment, more focused on watching what the others were doing than playing her own part. It lasted only a fraction of a second, the thoughts swimming, and then she was in slowed time again, picking off more of the things. An arrow to the chest seemed like it was enough to slow them, but they weren’t quick to bleed out. Thankfully, their pitiful attempts at biting took more effort than they were capable of putting out when they had an arrow through the lung.

The fight ended without any fanfare. It was Hannah who got the last of them with a hammer to what passed for its face, a crunch that was sickening in the sudden silence. From there, it was a matter of clean-up, which Alfric handled without any sense that he thought it should be a job for someone else, which was how Alfric seemed to handle most things. He went through the gasping, bleeding creatures one by one, running them through to make sure that they were dead.

“Ugh,” said Mizuki. “That was terrible.”

<Use the channel,> said Alfric.

<It was terrible,> said Mizuki. She rubbed her leg where she’d been grabbed. <I was useless, sorry.>

<It wasn’t the kind of conditions you excel at,> said Alfric. <We should keep moving now that the song is going. Anything of worth on them?>

<No,> said Mizuki, when she realized the question was being asked of her. <Nothing.>

Alfric gave a nod, then looked at Isra. <Edible?>

<Gross,> said Mizuki.

Isra stared at the bodies. <There’s a mild toxin on the skin,> she said. <It would take careful butchering.>

Alfric looked at Mizuki. <They touched you, check to make sure that it didn’t get through the fabric.>

<I’m wearing layers,> said Mizuki, but she pulled up her pant leg all the same and looked at the area where the creature had grabbed her, then at her hand, where she’d been rubbing the leg. <All good, I think.>

<You would see a rash, I think,> said Isra.

<We should get moving,> said Verity. She was strumming her lute, softly, and singing almost under her breath. The single short sentence came out while she was playing without singing.

<Right,> nodded Alfric.

Verity had been practicing playing ‘slow’ as she called it, pushing the song down to the smallest thread of coherence so that it drained her as little as possible. The music had been filling the house in the days since their second dungeon, but often very simple tunes, kept so slow and low that there would only be small snatches of them. Isra had been mildly surprised by the amount of time and effort that Verity had put into it. For all that Verity seemed to hate the pressure of music, she had a way of devoting herself to it that Isra found enchanting.

They hadn’t gone too much further through the pillars before they saw a light in the distance, and not much further after that before it resolved itself as a doorway. The light wasn’t constant, like the lightstones they wore around their necks, but flickered and moved, like torchlight or a fire.

<We go in quiet,> said Alfric. <Mizuki, try to kill it quickly.>

<Gotcha,> said Mizuki. Her hands were shaking, Isra noticed. She was the least suited to dungeoneering, in spite of her obvious power.

The doorway was carved out of the stone wall, which stretched up enormously high. Above it, visible only from their lanterns, there were windows that had similarly been cut into the wall, though they were unlit. If there were some internal structure to this place, it would be at least ten stories tall.

They went to the doorway from the side, and Verity stopped playing her lute, instead singing directly into their party channel, the words silent to anyone else. She didn’t like doing it, Isra knew, because she found it harder to keep up with, and the effects were shifted slightly by having the music not in the world, but if they were trying to be stealthy, it was necessary.

Mizuki moved to the front, with Alfric right behind her, and crept around to peek through the doorway.

<It’s … some kind of monster,> said Mizuki when she pulled back. <Working at a desk, it looks like. Mottled skin, big ears. Do I just take the shot?>

<Yes,> said Alfric. <As soon as you do, pull back and I’ll move in, Isra, behind me, ready to put it down. Hopefully Mizuki does the trick.>

<It is a pretty good trick,> said Mizuki as she went back in the doorway. There was practically no sound from whatever she was doing, but she said, <Done,> and moved back. Isra could hear a wet gurgling before she could see the creature, which was slumped in something like a chair, its many limbs sprawled out, with a pen falling from its claws. There was a gaping hole in its back, through which it was leaking viscous green blood.

Alfric moved swiftly and drove his sword into the thing’s back on the other side, just to be sure, then turned his eyes to the room’s two exits, ready and waiting in case something came through. One went up, while the other was a door. When there was nothing, Alfric relaxed slightly.

The room had quite a lot of papers in it, not just piled up on the desk, but in cupboards without doors and pinned to the walls. Looking closely, Isra could see that most of them were maps of one kind or another, tracing the borders of provinces and countries that were unfamiliar to Isra, and quite possibly had been invented by the dungeon itself. The writing was unfamiliar glyphs.

<We’ll clear quickly,> he said. <Go through the rooms one by one. The stairs are narrow, but they’ll be second. There’s no knowing how high up we’ll have to go to make sure we’ve dealt with what’s here. Verity, check?>

<Fine,> said Verity once she got a chance. The magic of the song, at least as far as Isra could tell, was tamped down.

Alfric prepared himself to open the door and checked with the others. Space was in limited supply. He flung the door open, sword ready, and found that it was a cupboard stocked with bottles of ink and stacks of parchment.

<Okay, well,> said Alfric. <Upstairs then.>

Chapter 46 - Both Sides

“Now, the thing you need to know about symmetricalization is that it can sometimes feel a bit odd,” said Hannah. “What I’m most concerned about is your skill with a bow, but it’s not a deep concern, because all that stuff is in the brain, and the brain can usually adjust just fine. Ideally we’d have a longer time before the dungeon, but it’s not of grave concern.”

“How many times have you done this before?” asked Isra.

“Well, I do it on myself all the time,” said Hannah. “In the seminary, with other clerics, maybe a dozen times. But with someone like you, fresh and emergent, I’d say maybe twice.”

“It’s safe though?” asked Isra. There was a perpetual wariness to her, but it didn’t seem heightened.

“Well,” said Hannah. “Yes, if you’re askin’ whether or not I think there’s any significant risk to you. But if you’re askin’ whether there are risks, then I think I should say that there are. Beyond just your arm feelin’ a bit funny, there are ways that it can get screwed up. A poor job would leave you paralyzed, for example, and if I were stupid enough to touch your internals, you could die. Now, I’ll only be workin’ in specific areas, your extremities to start with. If anything were to go wrong, I’m not one to panic, and I’m not one to misunderstand the body in the first place.”

It was a long bit of chatter, but the kind of thing that was necessary when you were doing something elective and deliberate. There were many of the same risks even with normal healing, and in Hannah’s opinion, it might have been better if clerics of Garos went over that in detail too, but no one seemed to care.

Isra had stripped down to just her underthings, which in her case was a wrap for her chest and rather thin calico drawers. Perhaps in another week or two they might help to buy her some clothes, but it would pass without comment for the time being. The headscarf had been put off to the side, and Hannah had used a few bobbins to pin Isra’s hair in place, the better to keep it symmetrical and out of the way.

Hannah started with the legs, rather than the arms. While arms had a tendency to be asymmetric due to the dominant hand getting so much more use and wear, the same wasn’t true of legs, which largely had to be used in concert with each other. There were differences between the legs though, and Hannah got to work on them. The position of hair follicles, the networks of blood vessels, the positions of the muscles, the shapes of the bones, so much work to do that it needed to be done by feel more than by conscious effort, which was always a bit scary. Hannah had faith in Garos to guide her, a solid faith, but she liked to be a conscious instrument rather than a conduit.

Isra was laying on the bed in Hannah’s room, in the usual position, back flat, palms down, as symmetrical as possible.

There were choices to make, so far as symmetricalization. Should the left become like the right, or the right like the left, or should they both move toward the average? Some of it was purely aesthetic, but some of it was functional as well, questions of blood flow, muscle tone, muscle shape, skin, pores, hair, things that were invisible or nearly so except to Hannah’s sense of symmetry.

The legs took almost two hours, with the calves being a bit more work than the thighs. They were mostly silent during this time. It went faster the more Hannah got done: her power was at its greatest when she was working on something that was mostly symmetrical, and the more the body became symmetrical, the easier it was to make the rest symmetrical, which was two thirds of the point of symmetricalization in the first place. This was another benefit to starting on the legs first, because symmetrical legs made the process of symmetricalizing arms quite a bit easier.

“Okay,” said Hannah, once the hips and stomach were done, neither of them having been much work. “Time for a bit of a break. Empty your bladder, get a snack, walk around a bit and let me know how it feels.”

Isra got up from the bed and tentatively walked around Hannah’s room, curling her toes and stretching out her legs. She turned to look at Hannah. “It feels the same.”

“Good,” said Hannah. “It should. Full range of motion, if you please, twist all the joints and stretch all the muscles, let me know if you have any complaints. Some of what’s done is by instinct, and instinct can be wrong.”

Isra moved around the room, stretching and lunging, testing her legs. In truth, she’d been fairly symmetrical to start with, so Hannah wasn’t expecting any particular problems. Symmetricalization was more tedious than difficult, unless you were dealing with wild differences across the plane of symmetry.

Once Isra was satisfied with her body, she put on some clothes, including her headscarf, and left the room for a bit. Hannah got up and stretched her own legs, then headed downstairs to get some air before they went on to the second half.

“How’s it going?” asked Mizuki, stepping outside into the backyard with her.

“Fine,” said Hannah. “So far, anyway. We’ve the chest and arms left to do.”

“For you, is this some kind of … religious thing?” asked Mizuki.

“Is the application of godly powers to someone in accordance with my god a religious thing?” asked Hannah. “Is that your question?”

“I mean,” said Mizuki. “Is it … deeper than that? Healing is religious, but it’s also not, right? It’s practical. I don’t know, I’m doing the question wrong.”

“My mind is on Garos while I do it,” said Hannah. “Symmetricalization is a form of meditation. It brings not just the subject, but the cleric closer to Garos. The same is true for any awareness of symmetry, and correction of asymmetry. The body, in my opinion, isn’t the best subject, because there are elements that you can’t correct lest you kill a person, but the body is central to the person, so in that respect, it’s good.”

“Am I mostly symmetrical?” asked Mizuki. She held out an arm, and Hannah laid her fingers on the small girl’s forearm.

“Mostly,” said Hannah. “There are things I could change. A birthmark on your scalp I could remove or mirror, a few scars that I would take away, things I would even up. Your bottom teeth are a bit uneven.”

Mizuki pulled back and put her hand to her mouth, feeling her teeth. “Yeah, they are. You could fix that?”

“I don’t want you to think of it as somethin’ to be fixed,” said Hannah, frowning. “Bodies have their unique aspects to them, whether they’re symmetrical or not, and it’s down to us to accept them as they are. If you set down the path of changin’ things just because they’re not quite what you’d want, well, I think that’s dangerous, because there’ll always be somethin’ new. Now, if it’s about godliness, that’s another story, but don’t chase changes to your body in the hopes that it’ll fix somethin’ in your life. Better to learn to accept it, to live with it.”

“I’m not sure that’s me,” said Mizuki. She withdrew her fingers from where they’d been touching her bottom teeth. “I mean, I don’t think that I would have a problem with that.”

“Well, just pointin’ it out,” said Hannah. “And there are things that people change and are happier for, it’s not just destined to be a problem.” She sighed. “You know what, I think I was just lettin’ my lessons from the seminary come out when they didn’t need to.”

“Oh, sure,” said Mizuki, smiling. “I get that. I appreciated it, I think. And I was the one who asked, I guess.” She seemed happy to let the subject drop. She probably didn’t like to think of her life as something that needed changes, though it seemed apparent to Hannah that Mizuki had been quite lonely before their arrival.

“Well, I should get back at it,” said Hannah. “I’ve still got the arms and head left to do, and those are bound to be a bit more fiddly.”

“Good luck,” said Mizuki.

When Hannah went back upstairs, Isra was back out of her clothes and laying on the bed in Hannah’s room, but Verity was with her. Hannah made her presence known, but waited while they finished talking.

“So far it’s just boring,” said Isra. “It does give me time to think though.”

“Think about what?” asked Verity. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking down at Isra. Isra’s state of partial undress wasn’t something Hannah found titillating, but she wondered whether the same was true for Verity. They shared a room, on occasion, and Hannah wondered about what sort of looks passed between them. Watching them together, Hannah had little doubt that Isra’s feelings would be reciprocated, but it wasn’t her place to push either of them.

“Tarbin,” said Isra. “My father. The man who stole from me.” She shrugged. “This party. Whether I should move in. Seeing the wider world. Being different.”

“Lots of thoughts then,” said Verity.

“Yes,” said Isra, nodding. “An unusual amount?” She was looking up at Verity with doe eyes.

“For two hours, no, maybe not,” said Verity. “But you do have rather a lot to think about.” She turned to look at Hannah. “Would you mind if I sang for a bit while you worked? Or would that be distracting?”

“So long as your magic doesn’t get in the way of mine,” said Hannah.

“I wasn’t planning to use any magic,” said Verity. “Just something pretty to help while away the time. A performance for two.”

“Three,” said Isra.

“I suppose,” said Verity, smiling.

Hannah came over and made contact with Isra. It was slow, delicate work that took quite a bit of concentration, but the times she’d done this before, it had been in much noisier conditions, and she hadn’t found the silence to be all that helpful. The song was light and mellow, a nice spring song about buds and beginnings, and once Hannah had properly started, the music faded into the background of her mind, pleasant but out of focus.

The arms were more difficult than the legs, but not as much as Hannah had feared, in part because while Isra certainly used her right arm more than her left, she wasn’t engaged in heavy labor with it, and certainly wasn’t using her bow to such an extent that she’d begun to warp her body. Hannah had heard stories of archers who had visible deformation from years of military service, but Isra was a hunter, and one who was good enough that she was able to take out most prey with a single shot. She practiced with a bow quite often, but the difference between her arms was probably more down to other things. The bow just happened to be what she was most useful for in a dungeon, aside from, debatably, her druidic powers.

When Hannah was finished, both arms were as identical as they could be, the blood vessels following the same paths, the muscles equally strong on both sides.

“Your breasts are a slightly different size and shape,” said Hannah. “It’s not terribly unusual, but I’d wondered if you had a strong preference.”

“Does it matter for healing?” asked Isra. “Does it need to be done?”

“It does if you get stabbed in the chest,” said Hannah. “Either way I’d be able to heal you, it’s just a matter of how fast and efficient it is. If you’d prefer me to leave them alone, I could do that too.”

“Copy the left,” said Isra, placing her hand there.

Hannah hesitated, then nodded. In some sense, it was easy to think of the body as something divorced from the mind, but bodies were also tied up in self-identity. It was a topic of some discussion at the seminary, the kind of long, rousing conversations about the big things in life that Hannah dearly missed and hadn’t been able to replicate elsewhere, even within the guild. Isra seemed not to care all that much, and she was the one who had requested this change if it would make healing and endurance in the dungeon easier, but there was a small part of Hannah that wished they’d had a longer conversation on the matter, three or four hours of back and forth. That seemed a bit optimistic for Isra though.

The work continued apace, backed by music, which hadn’t faltered during the conversation. Hannah asked a few questions and got a bit of confirmation from time to time, mostly to make sure that no mistakes had been made, that there was still sensation everywhere, that Isra was in no pain.

“The only thing left is the face,” said Hannah. “But that, I can leave. You have piercings that would make it difficult anyhow.”

“I won’t be symmetrical though,” said Isra, with a slight frown.

“Full symmetricalization is impossible,” said Hannah. “Or it’s possible, if you kill a person. The guts are the biggest stickin’ point, and I won’t touch them. Besides, your face is already fairly symmetrical. The biggest thing I’d change would be the piercings, either adding extra or removin’ them, but I don’t think I’ll overstep, and the asymmetry seems to be a choice.”

“It is,” said Isra. “I think it looks better that way.”

“Well, ay,” said Hannah. “I’d agree.”

“You would?” asked Isra.

“I like symmetry,” said Hannah. “But to like somethin’ — to love somethin’ — doesn’t mean that you feel that there’s no beauty in anythin’ else. I don’t see a woman with her hair swept to one side and think that she’s ugly for it. So, I can work the face or leave it how it is, my suspicion is that the difference won’t be noticeable to anyone but — well, someone who’s got some intimate knowledge of your face, and my guess is you’re the only one.”

“Do what you’d like,” said Isra.

Hannah found that a bit frustrating, and ended up making almost no changes. What was important, so far as healing went, was the bigger stuff, or the cosmetic features that everyone had all over their body, like the positioning of hair, pores, freckles, and things like that.

“Done,” said Hannah, once she’d finished with a final check. “You’ll want to use your bow some. If it feels a bit awkward, that will go away with time, but we may want to cancel the dungeon, if you think you need to train up. You should be stronger with the left now, and I’ll be able to give you a refresher, if the right arm gets tired.”

Isra got up from the bed and stretched out as Verity brought her song to a close. There weren’t the same lunges as before, just movement of the arms, articulation of the fingers, and miming the motion of drawing with a bow.

“It doesn’t feel different,” said Isra, frowning a bit. “Which means you did a good job?”

“I think I notice a difference,” said Verity, whose eyes were moving over Isra in what Hannah didn’t think was a particularly clinical way. “But I might just be fooling myself.”

“Go get your bow and arrows,” said Hannah. “Let’s test it out.”

Isra got dressed once again, putting the headscarf back in place and her other clothes around her. This was all done in view of Verity, which struck Hannah as being somewhat improper, save for the fact that they shared a room together. There had been something about the way that they’d been sitting together that had seemed somewhat flirtatious, but it was hard to tell whether this was because of Verity, or Isra, or both. Hannah had misjudged Verity, but didn’t know whether Verity would be interested in Isra. It felt a bit improper, that relationship, though they were the same age. Verity had more experience with the world, even if Isra presented a quite hard exterior. She was still rooting for them, but she’d also want to be on hand to give them advice.

Once they were outside, Isra went to full draw, then frowned a bit and relaxed.

“Problem?” asked Hannah.

“I’m trying to figure out what to shoot,” said Isra. “Everything feels normal.”

“Well, you look good,” said Mizuki, who had naturally come out to watch.

“Different?” asked Isra, raising an eyebrow.

“Maybe,” shrugged Mizuki. “But good, I would say.”

“There shouldn’t be much difference,” said Hannah. “You’re probably foolin’ yourself, if you think you can see somethin’, not that I’d want to deprive Isra of compliments.”

Hannah went back inside, when it was clear that there was going to be some additional chatter, and found Alfric in the kitchen, where he was eating from the chiller.

“Hungry?” asked Hannah. “We’ve got dinner in not all that long.”

“I’ve been hungry,” said Alfric. “One of the things my parents said to me was that as much as training felt like it was going overboard, it wouldn’t compare to how it felt to actually be doing things. I think I’m still figuring out how to eat the right amount.”

“Well, you’re a growin’ boy,” said Hannah with a smile. “Just think how hungry you’d be if we were at your original pace? Two a day, was it?”

“In my defense, I was young and stupid,” said Alfric. “And no, not quite two a day.” He looked in the chiller, as if willing more food into it.

“Well, I was plannin’ to bake some egg buns for tomorrow, so we don’t have to think about food too much or depend on rations when we’re in there,” said Hannah. “Care to help, or failin’ that, get out of the way?”

“Sure, I’ll help,” said Alfric. “I’m always happy to put in the effort.”

“Ay, I’ve noticed that,” said Hannah. “It’s commendable.”

“I don’t know what an egg bun is, and I’ve never done any baking in my life,” said Alfric. “Hopefully that’s not a problem.”

“And you don’t know the kitchen either,” said Hannah, clucking her tongue. “Well, to start with, an egg bun is a bun with a hard-boiled egg cooked into it, and in this case, it’ll be cheese as well. The tricky thing about it is makin’ sure that the egg doesn’t overcook, and I’ve only done a few bakes in this kitchen, usually simple stuff, so this all might be for a result that’s short of perfection.”

“So the first step is to boil some eggs?” asked Alfric.

“No, the first step is to make the dough,” said Hannah. “That needs to sit for a bit, and only then will we do the eggs, because then we spend less time idly waitin’ for the dough.”

“The dough is on the critical path,” said Alfric with a nod.

Alfric was, as Hannah had predicted, pretty useless, but it was good to have him in the kitchen with her. Normally, she’d have given him some instructions, like getting him to pull out ingredients that she needed or something like that, but he didn’t know the kitchen in the slightest, and asking him to pull out a baking sheet would have required pointing out the drawer they were in, with more clarifications. It was easier to do it herself.

“Well, I could learn now and then my help will be worth more later,” said Alfric, once this was explained to him. “I should only need to be taught once, right?”

“I s’pose,” said Hannah. “And it would be good for you to learn where things are. What I’m doin’ now, a bake, is a bit different from what Mizuki is doin’, and there’s not much help you could ever be, not unless I could set you off makin’ a custard or mousse or some such.”

“I could learn to do those things,” said Alfric, shrugging. “If this is going to be our schedule, almost a week between dungeons, then I’m going to need to do something with my time, and selling things isn’t going to take up more than a day or two. I’ll need a hobby.”

“Dungeons already are your hobby,” said Hannah. “And you don’t need to change on our account.”

“I’m not even sure you can change a hobby,” said Alfric. He rubbed his head. “Not that dungeons are a hobby, they’re a career, but I take your meaning.”

“Well, now the dough is done, we’re on to eggs, and you can help with those,” said Hannah. “I do wish we had a clock, which was how I always used to do it back home.”

“They’re quite expensive,” said Alfric. “I’m a little surprised you had one.”

“Oh,” said Hannah. “Not a proper mechanical clock, a water clock, one that ran from the tank. It was a finicky thing though, and you couldn’t use water while it was going or it would throw things off. Four cups of water, that was what it took to make a perfect egg.”

“Well, we could do that here,” said Alfric. “If we have the tap open just a bit, we should have water coming out at a steady rate, right?”

“But we don’t have a reference,” said Hannah. “I s’pose we have the time to do some tests with the eggs, if you’ll eat them. I don’t like to waste food.”

“Or we could ask Mizuki,” said Alfric. “She’s got to know how long it takes to boil an egg, right?”

“Maybe,” said Hannah, but she felt a bit doubtful.

Mizuki was in the living room, reading. “Um,” she said in response to the question. “Usually I just do it by feel.”

“What does that mean, by feel?” asked Hannah.

“I don’t know,” shrugged Mizuki. “I just know how long it takes. But I also don’t usually boil eggs.”

This was approximately the outcome that Hannah had expected, and she and Alfric were left to do some experimentation of their own in the kitchen.

“I s’pose you had plenty of clocks in your house?” asked Hannah. “Having grown up rich?”

“No,” said Alfric. “Clocks don’t really have a point unless everyone else also has a clock, and timing things down to the second or minute isn’t all that useful, except for baking, and even then, not very much, since you’re going by sight, smell, and other things. At least, that’s what I’ve heard. You might think that because we’re chrononauts, we have a lot of interest in timekeeping, but it’s rarely as useful as you might think it would be.”

“Last I heard, there was some effort to make a timepiece with ectads,” said Hannah.

“Yes,” nodded Alfric. “It’s not really an effort though, they’ve made them, it’s just a matter of cost, and whether it would be cheaper than just making a mechanical one, or a calibrated hour glass, or something like that.”

“Hmm,” said Hannah. “Well, the system of bells works well enough for me, havin’ someone ring out the right time, but it might be helpful, when I bake, to know that I could step away for longer. It’s as Mizuki said though, quite a bit of it is about the feel rather than measuring things out. Of course, you can’t do that with ingredients.”

“Say, can you not use your clerical powers?” asked Alfric. “Touch the stove and sense the eggs?”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “I could. But it would be too many steps removed, unless I wanted to burn my fingers, which as it happens, I don’t, even if I could heal them back. And the changes that heat makes to a thing are a bit hard to sense, at that.”

They pulled the eggs out of the boiling water at various intervals, cracking them open one by one until they were at the right level of doneness. Alfric made himself useful by eating the ones that weren’t quite ready, seeming unconcerned by the raw egg, which Hannah had always felt was a bit of a snotty texture. Once the eggs were out and put in a pot of cold water on the chilling plate to stop them cooking, the two of them worked together on taking the shells off, which was a place where a second set of hands was rather helpful.

Later on, after another break for the dough to rise, they worked together, folding the egg into the dough along with some cheese. Hannah hadn’t made the egg buns in quite some time, and the cheeses available in Pucklechurch weren’t quite what she’d become used to in the seminary, but she’d made do and bought something that had a good smell to it.

“We really should establish a fund,” said Hannah. “A common pot for dungeon equipment, rations, meals at home, that sort of thing.”

“How would we make sure that no one took too much and everyone put in enough?” asked Alfric. “Paying in would be through a tax on dungeon earnings?”

Hannah let out a sigh. “There are times I think you get it, and other times I think you have so, so far to go,” said Hannah. “We’re friends, so we’ll just play it by ear. If you set things up like you wanted to do the dungeon loot the first time around, then people will get it in their head that this is all transactional, and that will sour them on it.”

“I suppose,” said Alfric. He seemed doubtful.

“I’ll have a think on it though,” said Hannah. “I’m a bit worried about how Mizuki does with money, no offense to her, especially if it’s quite a bit of money. My guess is that given the funds, she’d cook us ever more expensive meals with better ingredients, but I don’t know for certain.”

“Well, I agree it would be good for us to not depend on her generosity, and for us to have some way to funnel money toward her without her thinking about it like some gift she’s obligated to reject,” said Alfric. “In the meantime, I’m going to do what dishes I can, and occasionally bring home food for her to cook with.”

“Do you need or want help?” asked Hannah as he began to run the water. “I’m a bit surprised that you’ve done dishes before.”

“I have experience doing a lot of jobs,” said Alfric. “Self-sufficiency is one of the things that my family puts a lot of focus on, and that means learning simple tasks, even if we have the money to pay people to do them, or entads that do the work for us. My parents would have hated the idea of me being helpless in the face of menial labor.”

Hannah dried the dishes one by one when Alfric was done washing them, a useless little make work job when there was a drying rack that would have done it for her, but it did give her hands something to do while she waited on the egg buns to finish.

She finished them with an egg wash, and Alfric watched. “Why do you do that?” he asked.

“Mostly to make them look more fancy,” said Hannah. “There are a few things you can do, with bread especially, to make it seem like you put in more time and effort than you did. Designs on the top are one way, as are puttin’ some kind of garnish, but there’s nothin’ that beats an egg wash for time spent.” She’d done a bit of fancy scoring on the buns before they’d gone in as well, though that had some practical purpose in allowing the bun to hold a good shape.

“Wow,” said Alfric once they’d come out. They were a perfect golden brown with the glossy egg wash having done more than its share of the work. “These are great.”

“Don’t say that,” Hannah scoffed. “They look great, but we don’t make somethin’ like this to look at it. They’re not great unless they taste great. We’ve a dozen of them, that’s enough that everyone can have two, plus two extras. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll symmetricalize them.”

Alfric faltered. “Is that … necessary?”

“No, of course not,” said Hannah. “But it fulfills a need in me, and you can think of it as prayer, if you’d like.”

Alfric nodded, though it was clear he didn’t really understand. In Mizuki’s ‘juice’ metaphor, there were certain things that were draining and others that were filling, and this was one that Hannah had always felt was filling, in spite of its use of the power. There was something nice about it. Baking was the stuff of asymmetry: it was always so difficult to get things perfectly the same, uniform and neat. A bit of prayer made it so much better.

“I suppose I don’t really understand your interest in the dungeons,” said Alfric as he watched her. The dozen buns had been set out in a nice little pattern, which twelve was a good number for, and Hannah wasn’t just making each bun symmetrical on its own, she was making them symmetrical to each other, but doing it in such a way that they weren’t just clones. “It’s something that we’ve only briefly touched on before. You find the nature of the gods in them?”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “Dungeons expose some rawness of the world. They were, we presume, crafted by the Editors in some respect, with some presumed flaws, but they come from and reflect the world. The creatures, the plants, the rooms, I think they tell us more about ourselves than we might otherwise know. And ay, it’s the gods, of course. Even if things are asymmetrical, which is the excuse clerics of Garos typically give for not wantin’ to go in. For me, it’s the rawness. It’s meditation and prayer.” She shrugged. “I don’t know how better to talk about it. And, naturally, I won’t say no to the magic and the money. It’s nice to have somethin’ you like doin’ that can pay your way through life.”

“And if you didn’t have the dungeons, you’d have been a cleric,” said Alfric. He looked down at the buns. “Or a baker, I suppose.”

Hannah nodded. “I don’t expect I’ll do dungeons forever, but if there’s a moment in my life to be wild and adventuresome, I think this is it. But dungeons are where my heart is, at least for the moment.”

“Mine too,” nodded Alfric. “And I’m glad I found you.”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “You’re a credit. And let’s hope that tomorrow goes well, for both our sakes.”

Chapter 49 - Dungeon Drudgery

Whatever had happened during the time he’d been stone, it seemed to have rattled the team a bit. Alfric wasn’t sure whether it was just because he’d ‘nearly’ died or if it had been more about their topic of discussion, or perhaps the way he’d handled the tower, but things were a bit off, and he was hoping that they would run into something simple that would help them to course correct.

He’d been taught by his parents that it was a universal good to give people credit for what they’d done. It made them feel good about their accomplishments, and helped to highlight the fact that you’d been paying attention to the good things they were doing. This wasn’t just about dungeons, but about work relationships, and being part of a family together: his parents always thanked each other for doing routine chores around the house and for taking care of things for their family unit. It was something that he’d noticed and liked, and he’d tried to keep it up with this party, in part because it was polite, and in part because it was a good way to highlight what was working for them.

<Verity, good work with the song on the way up,> said Alfric. <I wouldn’t have been able to do it without you.> They walked through the large open room, with its ceilings so high the light didn’t seem to reach. It was the sort of place that Alfric had dreamed about, impossible and unreal, and he felt elated to be walking through it. He took his time, taking it in.

<I’m not sure that’s true,> said Verity.

They had decided to follow the perimeter of the room’s wall, hoping that they would find something else of note. There had been good loot in the ‘tower’, enough that Alfric thought they were unlikely to find another cache of that sort, but so far they hadn’t spied any ectad materials, which Alfric was also eager for, if only because he needed to make a trip back to Liberfell to return the floatstones to Besc, and it was better to do two things at once.

<It’s useful to have internal orientation, in a situation like this,> said Alfric. <We can call the exit north, the tower east, and we’re going south right now. The framing might help us to keep from getting too lost.>

<I can still see the light we left behind,> said Mizuki. Alfric could too; it was small and distant, but still there, a comforting sign. <I’m not sure we need a system.>

<Seems like there might be problems, if we’re not square,> said Hannah. <There’s a good chance this large room isn’t square, and that means we’d be off some degrees. Maybe enough to matter.>

<We’re not anywhere near that level of accuracy. Usually you pick a system to match the terrain,> said Alfric. <And as we accumulate equipment, we’ll have ways of marking our path. In a dark place like this, it would be good to have a stack of small lanterns, maybe with colored lenses.>

<Expensive,> said Isra.

<Yes and no,> said Alfric. <Reusable and resellable. Besides, if we’re going to Dondrian anyway, we can swing by specialty shops and get tiny lanterns that are purpose built, small, from one of the dungeon supply shops.> He had invested quite a bit of his earnings back into the gear, and was planning to do even more, especially if it helped them to extract value from the dungeons. Their early windfall was going to help them accelerate.

<There’s something ahead,> said Isra. <An opening in the wall, and something inside it. Alive.>

<Verity, could you — thank you,> said Alfric as the music began to play.

Alfric moved quickly, keeping low to the ground and watching his steps. His sword had stayed drawn, and his shield up, but he moved them into fighting position, ready for anything to come out from the barely visible opening, or as ready for anything as he could be.

Stealth, as a general approach to dungeons, was ill-advised. Moving silently was difficult, and you didn’t know ahead of time what kind of thing you were facing or what kind of senses it had. Alfric had still practiced stealth for the sake of completeness, but it was mostly in service of getting a first strike, rather than moving unseen. As he moved, he was doing a passable job, and Verity was keeping her fingers from her lute, which meant that the song was going on through the party channel. It made the song weaker, harder to maintain, and as soon as the fighting started, Verity would start using the lute as well. Still, Alfric could feel the strength flow through him. It was already, he noticed, a marked improvement from the second dungeon, which in turn had been a marked improvement from the first dungeon.

The thing must have heard them coming, because as difficult as moving stealthily was, moving stealthily with five people was much harder. It lurched out from the opening it had been sitting in, red and gelatinous, wobbling with little gel feelers spreading out across the ground. The light was poor, only coming from their lanterns, but the material it was made of could be seen through, showing a skeleton in the middle of it, as big as a bear but shaped more like a wolf. The ooze extended down around the bones, like a solid dome of material. It wasn’t clear, from a first look at it, how such a thing would be killed, but Alfric was going to do his best.

Isra began firing her arrows as the thing came closer to them. They went into the ooze but didn’t seem to hurt the creature all that much, until one of them struck bone, which seemed to do something. Verity started up her lute, adding body and fullness to her song, like battle music starting as the creature bore down.

And then it was to them, and Alfric was trying his best to slice through the ooze. Jellyfish, which this thing somewhat resembled, typically had some internal structure to them, and Alfric went with wide swings, hoping to cut through some invisible membrane or strut within the ooze. He backed up as it moved at him, not wanting to see what would happen if the ooze touched him, but the creature wasn’t all that fast.

The fifth slice managed to hit something, just a hint of resistance, and a chunk of the ooze fell to the ground, separated from the rest of it and seemingly inert. But it was then that another aspect of the battle revealed itself, because with that chunk slopped onto the floor, the creature was moving even faster. The texture of the fight, the emergent rules of it were beginning to take shape, that it would be about the bones, perhaps, or the skull that might have something important inside it. To slice off more and more of the creature was, perhaps, the way to go, but it would be a battle that got more difficult the closer to completion it was, and that was a problem.

<Going to try something,> said Mizuki. She stepped forward and thrust her hands out in front of her in a way that Alfric was skeptical was necessary, and a hole briefly appeared in the ooze. Then, the skull inside exploded, blasting apart into large fragments that were stopped from going anywhere by the ooze that surrounded them.

The whole creature slumped over and the skeleton inside settled to the bottom of the bubble of ooze, which was slowly leaking out and deflating.

<Huh,> said Alfric. He told his heart to slow down, now that the moment had passed. <Good work Mizuki, what was that?>

<Um, just a combination of things,> said Mizuki. <A very impressive and technical display of competence.> She smiled at him. <I’m actually a little surprised it worked. It was like three effects together, along with a bit of cast off from Verity’s song.> She turned to Verity. <Don’t get more efficient at singing, please.>

Verity was still singing, but she gave Mizuki a dirty ‘what’s that supposed to mean’ look.

<Come on,> said Alfric. <Verity is going, so we’re up against time.> He moved around the ooze, keeping an eye on it just in case there was a death rattle. Up close, he could see the holes that Isra had put into it, because it was leaking fluid from them in its death.

This opening was more organic, rocky and harsh, but with the flat wall it was set in, there was a discontinuity, reminding Alfric of a very precisely cut geode with its flat, polished face leading into a craggy pit.

<Are those eggs?> asked Mizuki. Her hand had gone to the lantern around her neck and she was shining it down the cave. The rocks were sharp, but back where she’d shown the light, there were hundreds of small translucent crimson orbs stuck to the walls, floor, and ceiling. <Um, what?>

<Likely the same thing,> said Alfric. <It might be better to eliminate them.> He turned to Isra. <Unless you think there’s some kind of use?>

<The gel would give you indigestion,> said Isra. <There’s probably some use, but … nothing that stands out.> She pursed her lips. <I don’t think.>

<Then it’s a question of whether to destroy the eggs or leave them be,> said Alfric. <We’re not equipped for a swarm.>

<The eggs aren’t close to hatching,> said Isra. <I think.>

<And there might be something in there, right?> asked Mizuki.

<I suppose,> said Alfric. They couldn’t properly see the back of the cave. <I’ll go in, it’s unlikely they’re close to hatching.>

He made his way through the cave as quickly as he could, trying not to disturb the eggs. There was something about eggs that had always creeped him out, perhaps because of a story his mother had once told him about a time her team had been wading through waist-deep water when hundreds of watermelon-sized eggs had started floating up from the ground and then started to hatch around them. It had been a bedtime story, because he’d asked for a scary one, and maybe he’d have felt differently about it if his brave and fearsome mother had vanquished the things with her party, but instead, she’d told him how she’d died and done the day over, which didn’t offer the kind of catharsis that a young Alfric had been seeking.

There was nothing in the back of the cave anyhow, at least, not that Alfric could see. It was possible there was something beneath the hundreds of globular eggs, but he thought it was unlikely, and he’d been taught not to be too exhaustive in searching out entads, because it was hardly ever worth it.

When he came back out of the cave, Mizuki was holding a spear, which on closer inspection was actually a bident with two sharp prongs.

<Where did you get that?> asked Alfric.

<Over there, just now,> said Mizuki, pointing toward a pillar. <Verity was boosting my magic sight, for lack of anything better to do, I think.>

<Could you tell me next time?> asked Alfric. <Over the party channel, please.>

<Sure, sorry,> said Mizuki. <But here, it’s for you, you were wanting a spear, and this is close enough.>

Alfric took the bident from her and turned it over in his hands. It was metal, which was good, but it didn’t look particularly sturdy. He would do a scratch test before actually using it. With entads, you never really knew: something that looked like it was made of wood, or that was made of wood, could be impenetrable, and contrarily, there were occasional metal entads that would dent as easily as plaster. The bident had a gentle curve that separated the main shaft into the two prongs, and the tips of them were sharp points, rather than barbed, which was good. It was relatively unadorned, with little in the way of embellishment, aside from rings around the length of it to help with grip.

<Good job finding this,> said Alfric. <We’ll test it later.> Verity was still singing, though she’d said she was working on singing slower to drain herself a bit less in the times when the magic wasn’t needed.

They continued on, with Mizuki holding her balance staff in one hand and the bident in the other.

Frankly, Alfric was hoping that there wasn’t much more to the dungeon. They had a lot of work ahead of them with the tower, and carrying things up and down nine flights of stairs was going to take a fair bit of their labor, but on top of that, they had this giant room to cross, and because of how he was handling their storage entads, keeping them away from the fighting, it meant that there would be significant amounts of hauling things from one end of this huge room to the other. Beyond that, there was so much open empty space that it would be very easy for them to miss a monster and end up in an unexpected battle while they were hauling things.

Toward what he’d defined as the ‘west’ end of the room, the walls started getting close to each other, forming a canyon above them with none of the thick and too-long pillars. Eventually it was so narrow that they had to walk single-file, which Alfric didn’t particularly like, since it meant the effectiveness of their artillery was reduced to almost nothing.

In the end, the narrow but tall corridor came to a door, which was equally tall, towering so high up that if there hadn’t been a hundred hinges, it would have been so heavy that it would have fallen down, and even then, Alfric wasn’t certain that the physics of it would really work, not under normal circumstances.

<Do we knock?> asked Mizuki.

<There’s nothing good that would answer,> said Alfric. He moved forward and used his shield hand to crack the door open. The shield was strapped to his arm, with a handle to hold it with. The door took quite a bit of effort to open, and once it was, Alfric got into a fighting position.

Beyond it was a wide room, though nothing as big as the one they’d come from. It had tiered seating leading down to a central area, like a classroom, but where an instructor would have stood, there was instead a tree, one with a few sparse leaves and a gnarled appearance, lacking bark.

<I can’t sense any danger,> said Alfric. <Move in slowly.>

This room, unlike the others, had some light beside what they’d brought in. Above where the tree was, far above where it was, a shaft of light was coming down from some unseen part of the ceiling, hitting the tree almost exactly. It was the kind of picturesque thing you sometimes saw in a dungeon, eerie because you’d never expect the lighting to work out like that in real life.

<I don’t think the tree is dangerous,> said Isra.

<Can you know that?> asked Mizuki.

<If it had volition it would be affected by dungeon madness,> said Alfric. <And if it were affected by dungeon madness, I think Isra would have a harder time with it. Right?>

<I think so,> said Isra. <I feel … ease.>

Alfric moved into the room, still moving slowly, watching his footwork, sword at the ready. He was half-tempted to just use the bident for its extra reach, but after the incident with being briefly turned to stone, he was much more of the opinion that he should be following protocol and waiting until the proper time and place for experimentation.

Eventually though, he relaxed, though the room had another door at the back, this one of less comically large proportions. <Isra, Mizuki, anything of value?>

<The tree has seed pods,> said Isra, who had come to stand beside him. <Value is hard to determine.>

<Nothing magic in the room,> said Mizuki.

<We can take some of the seed pods,> said Alfric. <There’s no harm in growing a novel tree, usually, and we can do more examination outside. Traditionally you’d grab some samples, leaves, bark, wood, and so on, to see if it’s something exploitable. Quite a bit of it depends on growing conditions and speed though.> Taking living things from the dungeons involved a lot of luck, but having a druid gave them a bit of an edge.

They moved forward, with Verity’s song still going slow, just an occasional note now and then to let them know it was going. Alfric was impressed that she’d been able to make so much progress in such a little amount of time, but then again, she was a prodigy and Chosen by the God of Increase.

The door led into a hewn stone passageway that turned at odd angles and eventually ended in a dark field of rather small proportions, with a fire pit smouldering in the middle of it. Alfric was on guard, because that implied some kind of creature that had made the fire, but as he circled around the room, casting his light up at what seemed to be the night sky, he saw nothing.

<Below,> said Isra. She had bent to press her hand against the ground. <Some kind of creature.>

The fire pit exploded upward, sending embers all around, which Alfric was able to block with his shield, and a centipede as thick as a barrel roared up from the ground, unfolding legs that were long enough to be a real threat, each of them tipped with sharp points. Again, Verity’s song picked up volume and tempo, and the music felt like an introduction to the monster.

<Firing,> said Mizuki.

Very suddenly, the centipede had a hole through its head, and the careful articulation of those razor tips went haywire. It was still living, though barely, moving as though it was drunk, with the many arms knocking against each other. Alfric stepped forward and put the full lightning into his sword, first slashing through arms, which gave way with resistance, and then through the belly, which split like a poorly made waterskin. He leaped back as the thing slumped over to see whether he’d done enough and could get out of the way of the spasming arms.

<Huh,> said Mizuki after a moment had passed. <That was easy.>

Alfric moved in and stabbed it again, wanting to be sure, and the oversized centipede made one last shuddering movement before it started leaking viscous golden fluid from the wound.

Isra stepped forward and touched the fluid with two fingers, then before Alfric could stop her, she brought it to her mouth.

<Honey,> she said. <Or something like it.>

<I am absolutely not eating that,> said Mizuki.

<We don’t have a jar to collect it with,> said Isra.

<There are about twenty large jars in the book,> said Alfric.

<How much money did you spend stockin’ the thing?> asked Hannah.

<Quite a bit,> said Alfric. <The book is good, if slow, and there’s no need for us to miss out on value.> He paused and looked around. <No more rooms, it seems. Verity, you might be able to break, if you need to.>

Verity brought her song to a conclusion, a lovely little song about a winding river, perhaps inspired by the canyon hallway they’d moved through. It wasn’t necessary for a bard to bring their songs to a close, just as it wasn’t necessary for a bard to come up with new songs for every occasion, nor invent their own lyrics, but Verity seemed to put quite a bit of focus on the craft. If she weren’t so proficient, Alfric might have tried to talk to her about it, but she was leagues beyond his understanding of her field.

<Good song,> said Mizuki. <Though you know, I keep trying to find meaning in the songs, and sometimes I wonder if you’re composing them without any meaning.>

<Oh, not usually,> said Verity. <I’m just singing. Quite a bit of what comes out is just about where I can find a rhyme. True songs are always better than what I sing, because someone can put hours of their life into three minutes of song, each bar worked and massaged until it’s perfected. This is just improvisation.> She hummed a bit. <The young girl would shiver / and pull her legs close / but the call of the river / was louder than most. That bit there, the slant rhyme, I think you can tell.>

<How are you doing for stamina?> asked Alfric.

<I have another two in me,> said Verity. <Or one long one. I’d prefer to do just one more though, I’m starting to feel it.>

<I don’t think we have all that much more to do,> said Alfric. <If any, actually. Just the northeast and northwest corners.> The other two corners had nothing, just expanses of wall crudely running into each other.

<This dungeon has been weird, right?> asked Mizuki. <More random than a normal dungeon. And a bunch of rooms that come off some central room, rather than, you know, a real structure or something. Yes, yes, I know that all dungeons are random, all are unique, but this one seemed, um, more random?>

<Well, none of us are seasoned now, are we?> asked Hannah. <We’ll be able to say in another ten dungeons or so.>

<We’re not done yet,> said Alfric. <And even once we think the dungeon is clear, we have to deal with taking things out of the tower.>

They searched the field, or what passed for a field, but found nothing of note, which meant that the entire room had been a fight without any real reward, not that it had been much of a fight to begin with. While Mizuki had essentially killed it in a single hit, the ease with which Alfric had been able to pierce it made him feel like it could have been handled fairly well without her.

Alfric carried a sack with him, and they stopped by the tree for long enough that he could take some samples of it, as well as collect quite a few seed pods, each of which was packed with hundreds of seeds. With ectad help, they could have an orchard in a matter of years, but they’d need some kind of expert opinion to know whether growing conditions would be right for it, and more importantly, if it was worth anything.

Once they’d gone out of the ‘canyon’, they continued to follow the perimeter of the immense room, but it just brought them back to the entrance, where their things were still sitting there.

<So, dungeon done?> asked Hannah.

<Yes, it seems like that,> said Alfric.

<Okay, I’m not saying that I liked it better that way, but it seems more appropriate to finish with one last big battle,> said Mizuki. <And this dungeon was a bit easy.>

<Easy is good,> said Alfric. <No ectad material, which is a shame, but we did fairly minimal work and got good rewards for it. That’s how our first dungeon was supposed to go.>

It had still been work, pain, and gore, but he was happy she was coming around, especially given that he hadn’t been able to prevent her from being grabbed around the leg. She was saying it was easy as … well, like she’d wished that it wasn’t, which was a bit how Alfric was feeling. The last two fights hadn’t been what he’d hoped, and he knew it was foolish to want them to be large, dramatic, skin-of-his-teeth battles, but it was still a feeling that was there, just a bit.

<I’m not complaining,> said Mizuki. <It’s just a matter of, I don’t know.>

<Structure or rhythm,> said Verity. <And I agree.>

<You don’t really go into dungeons because the experience of it is pretty,> said Alfric. This was a repetition of common wisdom rather than his personal thoughts. He didn’t want to say anything that would give Mizuki the idea that she shouldn’t be killing things in one shot if she could.

<Speak for yourself,> snorted Hannah. <That’s why I go into dungeons.>

Alfric put on his pack with the heavy book inside it and they made their way back toward the same place they’d come in, following the room’s edge. There was still a chance that they were missing a bit of the dungeon, since they hadn’t properly followed the edge of the northeast corner of the room, and after a bit of deliberation, they did so, taking a longer route to get to the tower and finding nothing.

From there, it was an exercise in loading things into the book. The corpses had begun to smell a bit, and Mizuki made a show of plugging her nose. The stairs had to be cleared, with the corpses stacked up in one room, then Alfric put down some sand on them to give some traction when they moved through the blood. The work went fairly fast, especially with many hands. Verity was tasked with managing the pages and putting things in, and the rest of them brought things to her, or at least those things that were small enough to fit in a page of the book. They were still nowhere near filling the storage book up, and Alfric could see that it would probably be with them for quite a while, simply because it had a high capacity.

The maps on the ground floor were a good find, in Alfric’s opinion, the kind of thing that went for a surprising amount at a henling shop. Most of them were impressive displays of craftsmanship in their own right, and for some, maps of imaginary places were good at firing the imagination, or at least giving guests something to look at when they were using the bathroom.

The entad table was a special problem, namely because there was no way to fit it down the stairway, and eventually Alfric settled for using the new wand on it, given that they seemed to have no other options. It came back out easily enough, but the style of it had changed. It was still rather simple, but with more tapering to the legs and a sharper curve to the lip of it. Whether the magic was still intact was a question that they couldn’t investigate until they actually knew what the table did, but Mizuki had opined that it was, at least, still an entad. Still, they were able to take the table out, which Alfric considered a victory.

By the end of it, they were all getting tired. It was moving day, in a way, except that the stairs were very steep and there were nine floors stacked on top of each other. They took a bit of a break halfway through, eating the egg buns that he’d helped Hannah make the day before, and then plugged on. Isra seemed fascinated by the museum, and insisted that all the cards went with all the curios, during which it was revealed that she’d never been to a museum before, which wasn’t terribly surprising.

<There’s a museum in Liberfell,> said Mizuki. <Just one big room, but it’s got a lot of stuff from the early history of the place, historical things and some samples of plants and animals.>

<Like a zoo?> asked Isra.

<No,> said Mizuki. <Stuffed animals in poses, so you know what’s native to the area.>

<You know, if we’re going to Dondrian with my parents’ assistance anyway, you could go see the museum there,> said Alfric. <It’s supposed to take a day for each of the four wings, so you wouldn’t be able to see the whole thing, but it’s one of the attractions.>

<There are a few museums in Dondrian,> said Verity. <The wizard’s college has one, there are two art museums, there’s a large botanical garden, lots of things to see and do. Visiting everything in Dondrian would take a month and a fair amount of rings.>

<Well, the Metropolitan Museum of Qymmos is free,> said Alfric. <I was just thinking that no one is all that interested in the opera itself, so it might be best for us to line up a few things, especially if we’re going our separate ways.>

<Are we?> asked Mizuki. <I was thinking that we’d stick together for all of it. We are a team, after all.>

<You’ll come with me to see the Garos Duomo?> asked Hannah.

<Absolutely,> said Mizuki. <I like fancy buildings.>

<It’s a holy building,> said Hannah, for whom the distinction seemed important. <But if you come with me, I can point out a few things. I’ve never been to Dondrian, but I’ve read about the place, and always wanted to visit.>

<It’s very symmetrical,> said Alfric. He looked for the next thing to go into the book, and it seemed as though they were finished. <Alright, I think we’re done here.>

<Great!> said Mizuki. <But I should warn everyone that I’m not cooking tonight, the dungeon put me a bit too much on edge.>

They left the dungeon behind, with all the usual checks to make sure that they weren’t carrying out anything that they didn’t want to, and to be sure that they weren’t leaving anything behind. Something left in the dungeon would be gone forever with no possible method of return.

They returned to the surface and did the same thing they’d done in Liberfell, taking off all of their armor and going into the stone, which left Alfric to then load up the book and hang onto all that armor. There was quite a bit more armor, with more pieces having been purchased in the intervening days, and the entire entad suit from the dungeon, but it only took a moment for the dagger to work its magic, and then Alfric was in the temple, unloading everything again as the girls popped out of the stone.

Everything seemed like it had gone well, even if a bit understated. Tomorrow, the plan was that they do it again.

They checked the bindings in the temple. The armor had bound to Hannah, which she seemed pleased by, and the blanket and table were both bound to the party. These were decent outcomes, depending on what the blanket and table did.

Filera looked at the haul when Alfric brought it in and told him straight away that their agreement didn’t extend to so many things, not at the level of depth she’d used on the wardrobe. He hadn’t expected that it would: a normal adventuring party would get either complete unknowns or a few hopefuls identified by a cleric of Qymmos, not every single item they pulled out. There were eight items taken from the dungeon, and together they would have taken her nearly a day.

Alfric set the ring and wand aside, since those had properties that were generally known and just needed a bit of additional testing. The blanket, which Hannah had repaired, seemed to remove the weight of everything completely enclosed in it, something they discovered while talking, which was useful but underwhelming, and didn’t need further investigation. Alfric was almost assuredly going to wrap the book in it, once they cleaned off the blood. That left the map, table, card, armor, and bident, and Filera offered to do two of them, requiring payment for anything beyond that.

“I can test the armor myself,” said Hannah. “I’ve yet to put it on, and can do that in my room in the temple.”

“Table we can figure out,” said Mizuki. “I’ll put it into the wand, and we can test it, should let us know whether it’s screwing up the entads or not.”

“I’ll give it a day with the bident to see if I can work it out,” said Alfric. “So that leaves the map and card, I suppose.”

It took Filera some time, and this time Alfric went to look in on Hannah rather than staying there the whole time.

“Any progress?” he asked when he was outside her door. It felt somewhat uncomfortable to be in the private part of the temple reserved for clerics, but he supposed things were a bit different in a small town, and it was certainly allowed.

“Still gettin’ dressed,” said Hannah. “There are all sorts of things I’ve never worn before, and I’m tryin’ to find somethin’ for underneath. Not much for clothes here, since I moved over.”

“Anything should do for now,” said Alfric, speaking through the door. “We’re just trying to figure it out.”

“Well,” said Hannah. “I’ll wear it no matter what, ay? It’s a complete set, resized to me, even if it did nothin’ at all I’d keep it. So better to figure out what goes beneath it.”

“A gambeson would be traditional,” said Alfric.

“Och, stop standin’ outside, you can come in, it’s just a body,” said Hannah.

Alfric hesitated, then came inside. Hannah was partly undressed, her legs bare, but she had finished with the top portion, putting on the gauntlets, the three pieces that went on her torso, the pauldrons, and other bits. It was largely conventional, though typically there would be two pieces for the torso instead.

Alfric kept his eyes off her bare legs and went to help her. Putting on armor was, traditionally, a two person job, and he suspected that he was the only one of the party who knew how to do it, so the duty would likely fall to him. Even with what he knew about the process, there were some straps and things that he didn’t recognize, and might have been dungeon inventions for all they knew. It took some figuring out for both of them. He helped her with the cuisses, without making a fuss about it.

“Should have done the bottom first,” said Alfric. “Mobility is going to be the big concern when putting it on, so better to leave your arms free until the end.”

“The arms I knew how to do, so I did them first,” said Hannah. “I feel like a chicken gettin’ trussed up for the oven.”

“Well, if you want to go out in this, you’ll be doing this process for every dungeon,” said Alfric. “It looks like it wouldn’t be too hard to use the bathroom in it, at least.”

“I’d been thinkin’ that I would get full armor eventually,” said Hannah. “I’ll be a bit sad not to come ‘round the smith’s so much.”

“Even with Micah there?” asked Alfric.

“He’s a pleasant sort, it’s just the moonin’ over me I could do without,” Hannah replied. “And even then, there’s a part of me that finds some flattery in it.”

“Done, I think,” said Alfric, standing up. The last boot had gone into place.

“Well, it’s mobile enough,” said Hannah, moving around the room. She picked up the helm and put it into place. It was handsome armor, a full suit with very few places for a blade to slip in, not with any filigree, but with good craftsmanship and a light color to the metal that reminded Alfric of silver. “Now let’s see what it can do, I s’pose. Would you care to hit me?”

“No,” said Alfric, shaking his head. “Defensive entads have too high a risk of adverse reaction. We could try tomorrow and then have a ‘safe’ reset in our back pocket, but I don’t want to risk a dungeon run that I think came out as a relative success.”

“Well, let me see,” said Hannah. She moved around more, muttering under her breath, thrusting her hands out in front of her, and doing a few punches and kicks for good measure. Alfric might have had a few comments on best practices for figuring an entad out, but he kept them to himself.

She finally got it when she picked up her hammer. Almost at once, the armor shimmered and moved like metallic water over her, encasing the hammer in a thin layer of the silvery metal.

“Hmm,” said Hannah. “An armored hammer? I’m underwhelmed, I must say.”

“Most entads underwhelm,” said Alfric.

Holding the silvered hammer, Hannah was able to move the armor around, adding more of it, until the hammer she’d started with was unrecognizable, and she was using two hands to hold a warhammer instead. As she’d grown it, the armor had lost pieces of itself, mostly from the extremities, but it was clear that if she’d kept going, she would have ended up without armor at all.

“Seems a good weapon,” said Hannah. “Though I’m not sure that I would want one so large. Though —” she hefted it. “The armor felt lighter than I’d have expected, and I s’pose the weapon does too.” She did a test swing of the warhammer, which was perhaps not that wise in such a small room, but managed not to break anything. “I think it’s all the benefits of weight with none of the drawbacks,” said Hannah. “Easy to swing, hard to stop.”

“So a better weapon than armor?” asked Alfric.

“I don’t know I’d say that,” said Hannah. “I’ll need to spar with you to see what the full abilities are, perhaps once we’re home. I’d like to wear this in the dungeon tomorrow, and it’s my hope that I can get used to it before we’re facin’ down monsters.”

Alfric nodded. “Well, hopefully I was a help. I’ll see you at home?”

“Ay,” said Hannah.

When he got back, Filera still wasn’t done, but he waited for a bit, trying his best to process the dungeon and what had happened there, readying himself for a post mortem that would eventually happen. The ring was the biggest thing, something that could have gone horribly wrong, but he wasn’t sure that he would have done any differently. Entads were quite unlikely to kill a person who put them on, so unlikely that entad testing was largely considered safe, incidents like the mythical flowerpot aside. Perhaps next time he wouldn’t offer to test entads himself, instead allowing one of the girls to do it … but he liked entad testing, and was willing to take a little more risk to be able to not have that duty done by someone else.

“The card will take a translation entad,” said Filera, rousing him from his thoughts. “It gives a brief description of the provenance of an item, including only the most relevant information, but the language it uses is unique to the item. I don’t think it’s terribly valuable, but entads that can give information are sometimes in demand, if it’s information that can’t be gotten any other way.” She handed the card to him.

“I think it might sell for something,” said Alfric. “But it’s not something we would use.”

“The map is a bit better,” said Filera. “You were having trouble changing it?”

Alfric nodded. It had just shown the same imaginary map that it had started with.

“Tap the compass rose three times,” said Filera. “That gives you a map of the area that you’re in.”

“But that’s it?” asked Alfric. “It’s just a map?” He took the map from her and looked it over. He could immediately see that it wasn’t just a map, because there were colored dots on it.

“It doesn’t update on its own,” said Filera. “You need to tap the compass rose three times. But the dots represent active parties, each color to a party, which means that you have some rudimentary ability to track people, so long as they’re in a party, and if you adjust the scale of it — finger on the scale marker there, back and forth — you could potentially have it be granular enough to see the movement of a single person.”

“Hrm,” said Alfric. “Good, but … well.”

“Intrusive,” she said.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “But this is useful, thank you.”

“I’ll write some documentation for both,” said Filera. “If they’re both sold, that will help you get a few more rings for them.”

“I appreciate it,” said Alfric. “And I’ll let you know how it went, when I have the time. Right now, I need to rest up.”

He said his goodbyes, taking his winnings, and went back to Mizuki’s house, which he did think of as home. The double dungeon was something he was surprised everyone was going along with, but he was happy for it, and if the fourth dungeon went as smoothly as the third, he was hopeful that they could increase their pace, if only a little bit. They had goat ribs for dinner in a heavy marinade that masked most of the flavor, something that he didn’t think was terribly necessary, and they talked about lighter fare than dungeons and monsters, taking the time to relax and rejoice in a job well done. They were, after all, doing it all again the next day.

But the next morning, after they had gotten ready for the second dungeon, they heard a call going up: there had been a dungeon escape, and it was all hands on deck.

Chapter 48 - Dungeon Denizens

The dungeons were terrifying, and Mizuki didn’t know how everyone else was handling it so well. For Alfric it was obvious, he was a dungeon freak, this was something he’d been training his whole life for. For Hannah, Mizuki could maybe see it too, she was a sturdy, no-nonsense kind of woman who had seen a lot of pain and suffering in her time training to be a cleric, or at least it seemed like that. And Isra, well, who knew about her. But Verity? Verity was supposed to be a prim and proper city girl, and she was somehow able to see all the blood and gore and keep on singing with perfect tempo and marvelous melodies, sometimes even improvising songs while monsters were trying to kill them. Sometimes songs about the monsters that were trying to kill them. Who was able to think of a rhyme for cyclops while looking at a cyclops? Verity had likened it to a concert performance, the stress and tension and fear bottled up and tamped down, but Verity also didn’t shrink back at the sight of blood, so maybe she was just built different.

If Mizuki hadn’t been the only one who felt that way, there was a good chance that she would have dropped out of the party. Dungeons were scary, and monsters were scary, and after her magic was spent, she was just kind of standing there uselessly, waiting for there to be enough magic in the air that she could get off a second shot. There was a trade-off, waiting for it to build up or choosing to use it as it was, and Mizuki was, frankly, terrified of screwing things up for Verity again. Having done it once, it was easier to see the shape of that internal magic, to trace back the effects of the bardic influence to see a nexus of something that was within Verity herself. Something breakable.

Alfric was, thankfully, a beast. He ascended through the tower-in-the-wall, and for most of it, Mizuki was just following behind in fourth position, after Hannah, who was there to heal Alfric, and Isra, who could occasionally fire off a careful shot. But it was almost all Alfric, boosted by Verity, who was singing without any line of sight, and presumably just blindly boosting him. She’d been learning quickly and practicing what felt like almost too much, though Mizuki had no real way of knowing. The effects couldn’t be argued with though, since Alfric would sweep through a room, killing the things where they stood, mostly silent as he moved, keeping them from raising the alarm.

The things in the “tower” were all of a sort, with too many legs and faces like moles, large teeth in the center but little at the sides, no lips, bulging eyes, floppy ears, and big, lumpy bodies. Their legs were little, disproportionate to their arms, and their flesh was warped and shiny, like scar tissue, not that Mizuki had seen all that much of it. They were positioned, in places, like people, two sitting at a table together, one under a blanket in a bed, none with clothes, per se, but they were using tools and weapons. There was a certain horror to it, seeing these things behaving like people. Mostly though, Mizuki just didn’t see them as they were, because by the time she got into the rooms, Alfric had already killed everything and was going on up.

He’d explained to them earlier that he preferred to keep up his momentum, in part because his heart started pumping hard and there was an excitement that ran through him, a storm of emotions and energy that didn’t lend itself to slow, deliberate movements with frequent breaks. He hadn’t called it bloodlust, but Mizuki wondered whether that was what it was. There was a lot of blood left in his wake, though it was green rather than red, which made her feel a bit better. Still, most of the killing in the early floors was against creatures that had been totally unaware of him, and the one who was bleeding in the bed seemed like it had been taking a nap or something.

Maybe because of the noise, which seemed minimal, or because there were more of them awake, there was some resistance from the upper floors. Alfric made a stand at the bottom of a flight of stairs, weathering improvised weapons thrown down at him. He flashed in with his sword from time to time, almost always getting a kill, and Isra’s arrows flew over his head from time to time, also usually resulting in a kill. The corpses piled up on the narrow stairs and the remainder of the creatures stepped on their fallen allies to get at Alfric, dying soon after they made their way to him. This, too, Alfric had explained: dungeon madness usually resulted in unchecked aggression, which meant that one strategy you could employ was to find a choke point and wait for them to come at you. It was a poor strategy in some ways, since it meant that you could only employ a single fighter and left the artillery unable to act, but there were some cases where it was for the best. He was displaying the strategy for them in gruesome detail. The air didn’t have the iron smell of blood, but rather, a different metal, maybe like just after she’d washed her copper pan.

Each of the rooms was small, no larger than Mizuki’s own bedroom, and there was hardly any access to the aether, which meant that Mizuki was totally useless through the whole journey up the tower. Once the battle on the stairway was finished, Alfric climbed up over the bodies, stabbing a few of them who weren’t quite dead, and Hannah went up after him, not seeming to care that she was stepping on dead things.

When it was her turn, Mizuki followed Isra, grimacing at the grossness of it. She didn’t particularly like dead things. She had mostly gotten used to butchering chickens on her own, but really preferred to have a butcher do it for her, even if it cost a bit more. Once they’d had their head and feet taken off and been plucked, it was easier to not think of it as something that had once been living.

Past the stairwell of corpses, it was a bit more palatable, just empty rooms that went up another few floors. They had things in them, a table with chairs, a dresser, a small kitchenette with an unfamiliar stove and a sink that, when tested, wasn’t connected to any tank.

The top floor was what looked very much to be a museum, if a very small one. There were lots of things behind glass in display cases, and next to all of them, paper cards with lots of vertical glyphs on them, unreadable but all with some kind of unifying design.

<How many of these are entads?> asked Alfric, looking around.

<Um, the armor,> the Mizuki. It was so much easier to see the faint emanations of entads when Verity was boosting her. The suit of armor was on a mannequin, big and visible. <Everything else, I’ll need some time to look closer, or Verity’s help, which we probably don’t want until the break is done?>

<We’ll strip everything we can out of here,> said Alfric. <Odd to have a display room like this though.>

<Extremely odd?> asked Hannah. <More than the large room out there?> She gestured out the window, where the black expanse of the room with tall pillars was sitting. They were high up, and Mizuki tried not to think of what a horrible fall it would be.

<I suppose not so strange,> said Alfric. <It reminds me of the family vault. Less cluttered. Smaller.>

<You said that dungeons depend on the people that come into them,> said Isra.

<Yes,> said Alfric. <Not like that though. Usually.>

They were all looking through the things in the small room, but Mizuki was the only one who had any real utility here, for which she was grateful. Still, entads were barely visible to her, and it was worrying to think that if she missed something, they might lose out on potentially thousands of rings. There were lots of things in this mini-museum though, and toward the end of her surveying work, Mizuki had to admit that she was going a lot faster, and not just because she was getting more familiar with the conditions. In the end, there were four things, including the armor, with the other two suspects being a ring — the kind worn on a finger, not money — and a stick that had been carved without changing its general shape. She might have tentatively called it a wand. The fourth and final one wasn’t one of the items on display, but instead, the little card of paper next to a cracked stone egg.

<So do we test this now?> asked Verity.

<Normally, no,> said Alfric. <But given how much need we have for a storage entad and how much easier it would make clearing, I think we’re compelled to. Be careful with the wand though, those tend to be combat oriented. Point it away from people.>

Mizuki held up the ring and looked at it. It was dark and iridescent, like a beetle’s shell. The outside had geometric lines and there was ‘writing’ on the inside, indecipherable. When Mizuki went to put it on her finger, it resized itself in her fingers, and she was so spooked that she nearly dropped it.

<Do you want me to?> asked Alfric.

Mizuki hesitated for a moment. There was something about the ring that felt, to her, evil, but she was pretty sure it was just her imagination acting up. <Sure,> she said. It felt better or safer in some way, though obviously there wasn’t a lot of risk from an entad.

Alfric took the ring from her and slipped it onto his finger, then turned to stone.

<Um, Alfric?> asked Mizuki.

He was frozen in place, and after a second, he began to tip.

Hannah rushed in though, and with effort and some help, got him back upright.

<Heavy,> she said. She held the statue in place so it wouldn’t tip again.

Through all this, the stone Alfric had not moved, unless you counted tipping.

<Alfric?> asked Mizuki. “Alfric!”

<Seems like he’s turned to stone,> said Hannah.

<Is that something his time magic can, you know, undo?> asked Mizuki. She could feel the panic rising. <He didn’t say, did he? He just said if he was knocked out for long enough, it wouldn’t happen on its own, not if he went into the next day without waking up. He could be dead, couldn’t he?>

<Calm down,> said Hannah. <Let’s get that ring off.> His clothes had changed to stone as well, but the ring itself was just as it had been, some kind of hard metal.

<What if taking the ring off means he can’t turn back?> asked Mizuki. <What if it’s time-based and without the ring on, he’s just stuck like that forever?>

<So what do you think should be done?> asked Hannah. She seemed mildly annoyed. <Wait it out?>

<I think we should wait,> said Verity. <Not all that long, ten minutes, twenty?>

<An hour,> said Mizuki. <I thought I read somewhere that a lot of entads use normal human times.>

<Did you, ay?> asked Hannah, raising an eyebrow.

<Alfric said not to stay in a dungeon long,> said Isra.

<Yeah, well, he didn’t leave us instructions for this,> said Mizuki. <He didn’t say ‘even if I turn into a statue that isn’t balanced right’.>

<We can prop him up,> said Hannah. <And take a break from entad testin’ for a moment. I’ll agree to an hour or so, then we try to pull the ring and see if that reverses it. If it doesn’t, we’ve got a problem. We can’t leave him in the dungeon, because there’d be no way to go back for him, we can’t communicate with the outside, and the thing I’d like to do, if just takin’ the ring off doesn’t work, is to move the statue out, but … well, he’s got to be at least four hundred pounds in this state. I’m strong, but not that strong. So that means we carry the garden stone up nine flights of stairs and try to stick him in it, but if that doesn’t work for whatever reason, for example, if the ring doesn’t end up comin’ off and the metal blocks him from goin’ into the garden, well … four hundred pounds, navigated down these stairs, seems like it’ll take some doin’, even with a song of strength.>

<But first we wait,> said Mizuki.

<Ay,> said Hannah. She sighed. <First, we wait.>

So they sat and waited. No one really wanted to deal with the other entads after what had happened with the first one, especially if Alfric was suddenly dead, bypassing his chrononaut thing, which seemed … well, possible, at least, if maybe not the likeliest thing. Mizuki still wanted to know what the wand, armor, and card did, but not if it was going to risk someone dying.

So instead, having nothing much better to do, and not wanting to move because the dungeon was decidedly not clear, they just sat and talked.

<Did they seem a bit too … human to anyone else?> asked Mizuki.

<The monsters?> asked Isra.

<Yeah, the monsters,> said Mizuki. <Not in form, obviously, but they were using tools and it seemed like they were living here. That one that I put a hole through on the ground level, he was holding a pen and it seemed like he was working on making a map. It was … well, unnerving.>

<They say you can find things like humans in a dungeon,> said Verity.

<Ay,> said Hannah. <That’s where the rumor comes from, that humans are a dungeon creature.>

<How much like human?> asked Mizuki.

<In the dungeons?> asked Hannah. <Ay, well, the person to ask has been turned to stone, but my guess, based on what I’ve heard, is that you get things that are a bit human fairly often, and the things closest to human are more and more rare the more human they are. Just like we wouldn’t think it too strange to run into somethin’ like a goat with a few features changed, but we’d be a bit incredulous about somethin’ that was exactly like a goat in all respects. Ay?>

<I suppose,> said Mizuki. She frowned. <But even if they look like people, they don’t act like people.>

<Only because of dungeon madness,> said Verity. <And if left alone, they’d just keep on pretending to be people.>

<But what makes them not people?> asked Mizuki.

<They’re invented by the dungeons,> said Hannah. <And more to the point, not covered under the same laws as you and I, though I figure most of that probably comes down to dungeon madness.>

<So if we came across a family down here,> said Mizuki. <We’d, what, kill them?>

There were some uncomfortable looks around the place they were sitting next to Alfric’s statue, which was balanced against the wall. It seemed possible that this was what they’d already done.

<I don’t know that we would,> said Verity. <But … do we just do it based on looks?>

<They’d die here if we left them alone,> said Isra. <Or they’d be unmade when we left the dungeon.>

<I feel like Alfric would know,> said Verity.

<Probably,> said Isra.

They all looked at the statue. In the dark of the dungeon, it wasn’t clear how much time had passed. Mizuki was grateful that she had her lantern.

<But he wouldn’t be able to just tell us the answer to what’s a, you know, moral question,> said Mizuki. <Right? I guess maybe he would.>

<It’s the sort of thing there’s probably a body of work on,> said Hannah. <I can picture the volumes of books in my mind’s eye.> She shrugged. <But I can’t say that I’ve read too many of them. Any of them, actually.>

<I’ll add one of those imagined books to my reading list,> said Mizuki. <Seems a bit convenient that it would be morally okay to go kill some people whose stuff you want.>

<Where’s this coming from?> asked Verity. <I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard you talking about … this kind of thing.>

<I don’t know,> said Mizuki. She looked at the statue again. <Worried, I guess. It’s the kind of thing my grandpa used to talk about, what’s moral, what’s right, what we do about it when there’s a messy reality out there. He talked a lot, in a way that — I don’t know, when you say that someone talks a lot, people think that it’s all hot air, but he was the kind of guy who talked a lot and it was just because there was so much in his head.>

<Still alive, right?> asked Verity.

<Oh, definitely,> said Mizuki. <Not even retired. You’ll probably meet him someday, at the rate we’re going.>

<We will?> asked Hannah.

<I mean, we’re going for a trip to Dondrian, right?> asked Mizuki. <And with the right entads, Kiromo is next door.>

<Some very expensive entads,> said Hannah.

<Sure, but we’re bound to have some in a bit, right?> asked Mizuki. <Even if we have to sell them or whatever, we could do a trip to see my family before we did.>

<I think you underestimate how rare they are,> said Verity. <Hex to hex isn’t much of a problem, and province to province can be done without spending an outrageous sum, but you’re talking about Kiromo.>

<Well, either way,> said Mizuki. She folded her arms, and a bit of silence descended on their group. <I miss Alfric. Has it been an hour yet?>

<Probably not,> said Hannah.

They talked some more, but no one’s heart was really in it.

<The worst part of this is that he’s the one who would know exactly how to handle this,> said Mizuki.

<I don’t think we’re useless without him,> said Hannah.

<I was feeling that way as he was going up the stairs and killing everything on his own,> said Verity.

<Me too,> said Isra.

<You were helpin’ him with your song, weren’t you?> asked Hannah.

<I was,> said Verity. <Full strength and speed, boosted by the whole party, but I couldn’t see any of what he was doing, and — well, he was leading, I was following. I felt useless, but I’m not ready to say that I was actually useless.>

<He could have done it all without us,> said Isra.

<Or he gave that impression, yes,> said Verity.

<He’s a singularly impressive man,> said Isra. Her saying that made Mizuki feel a little pleasantly warm. It was true, obviously, but maybe she also liked that Isra appreciated Alfric.

Hannah laughed. <That he is, and I doubt you realize the half of it, no offense. Even in Dondrian, I doubt they make any others like him.>

<Can we try taking the ring off now?> asked Mizuki. <I just want him back.>

<Sure,> said Hannah. She got up from the ground and propped the statue up so it was standing again, and reached down to touch the ring. <See, the thing I’m worried about is that skin stretches and squishes, and stone doesn’t, so it might not even be possible to get the ring off of — oh, no, there it goes, it’s resizing itself.>

And then Alfric was alive again, moving around, alert and a bit confused. It took him a moment to work out that everyone had changed places and he’d been moved just a bit, with some time passing that he wasn’t aware of.

<What happened?> he asked.

<Seems that the ring turns people to stone,> said Hannah, holding the ring out to him in her palm. <It gave us a bit of a fright, but it seems that the whole time we could have just taken it off you.>

<How long was it?> asked Alfric. <For me, it was instant.>

<About an hour,> said Mizuki.

<Less than that,> said Isra.

<Can you tell time?> asked Mizuki, turning to her. <Like, how many minutes it’s been?>

<No,> said Isra. <Not here. Outside the dungeon I can, from the movement of the sun and the moons.>

<But what if it’s cloudy?> asked Mizuki.

<I don’t think that matters for me,> said Isra.

<Well, anyhow, it was less than an hour,> said Hannah. <We weren’t sure whether the right thing to do was to wait, to take it off, to move you, or what.>

<Would your time powers have saved you?> asked Mizuki.

Alfric took a moment to think about that. <Probably not, no. It triggers automatically if I die, but if I don’t die … incapacitation is one of the primary ways to stop a chrononaut, other than just hoping that you kill them in enough timelines. I don’t know for certain whether this would count as incapacitation or death, but I would expect it was incapacitation.> He looked down at the ring for a moment, turning it over.

<It seems a bit useless,> said Verity. <Especially if you need someone to remove it for you.>

<Not at all,> said Alfric. <You could slip it on the finger of someone who was dying and get them to medical help. Or … well, for imprisonment.>

<Wouldn’t really be imprisonment, would it?> asked Hannah. <If they’re not alive?>

<There’s probably a question of definitions,> said Alfric. He looked around. <Sorry if I gave you a fright?>

Mizuki went forward and gave him a hug. There had been a part of her that really had been worried that he was dead, and maybe a hug wasn’t the right thing to do, and was a bit embarrassing, but she decided not to care about that. Alfric hugged her back, and he was surprisingly good at hugging. He let her be the first to let go, which she appreciated.

<Hey, it’s okay,> said Alfric. <It’s very unlikely that any entad you can wear will just outright kill you when you put it on.>

<Yeah, but it could, couldn’t it?> asked Mizuki.

<It could,> said Alfric. <Technically. And I have to say I’m glad you were worried, and I think you did the right thing in giving it a bit, just in case. And staying in one place, that was good too. There’s a chance that if the entad has no safety associated with it, and you had left me in the dungeon, I would be trapped forever.> He looked at the armor. <Did you find out what the other entads did?>

Mizuki laughed. <Did you think that we were going to test them all while we waited on you?>

<I’d somewhat hoped,> said Alfric. <We should at least test the wand now.>

<Are you sure?> asked Mizuki.

<Yes,> said Alfric. <There are lots of options. I’ll test it out the window first.> He picked the wand up from the shelf that it had been set on, then went over to the window, which looked out over the black. <Best to point this away from people.>

He aimed it carefully into the blackness, but nothing happened.

<Hrm,> said Alfric, holding it up and looking at it. <Might not be one that shoots or produces something. I’m going to try touching something.>

Mizuki was a bit unnerved. The idea of Alfric being suddenly dead from the entad ring had stuck with her, and he seemed to be brushing it off like it didn’t matter, or like there was no risk in testing anything else. She liked entad testing, but she could tell that it would take her some time to feel safe about it again, for all his assurances. What she wanted was a number, but even if he could give a number, she wasn’t sure that it would help her. How likely was an entad to kill you when you put it on? One in a thousand? One in a million? Higher? She wasn’t sure what the right number was to make her feel safe about it. Of course, the ring hadn’t killed Alfric, and maybe if the statue of him had fallen, it wouldn’t have shattered into pieces like it had in her imagination, but … still.

Alfric took the cracked stone egg and set it on the windowsill, then pointed the wand at it, which did nothing, and finally, touched the egg with the tip of the wand. The egg vanished with a slight shimmer, and Alfric frowned. He very tentatively moved his hand forward to the space where the egg had been, and it passed through empty space.

<What happened to it?> asked Hannah.

<Well, I’m hoping that it’s somehow stored inside the wand,> said Alfric. He held the wand in front of him, pointing it at the windowsill, and with a faint shimmer, it appeared again. <Nice.> He was smiling. <Storage, exactly what we need.>

<Wait,> said Isra. She moved forward and looked at the stone egg. <It’s not the same.>

<What do you mean it’s not the same?> asked Alfric. He peered at the egg, and for a moment, both of them were studying it together. <Huh, you’re right. The design is different and the crack is in a different place.>

<The material is what I noticed,> said Isra. <Still stone, but a different composition.>

Alfric’s face fell. <Well, that means that I can’t use it for what I wanted to use it for, which was storing the book in it.>

<What would happen if you used it on a person?> asked Mizuki. Her mind was still on Alfric getting turned to stone.

<Well, we’re not going to do that,> said Alfric. <The wand does seem good, but there’s more testing to be done with it, and it’s going to have to be careful testing, or testing with things that we don’t care about. Though if it spit out an entad with the same powers that only looked different, I suppose we could still use it for what I was hoping we could use it for.> He looked at Mizuki. <Do you still carry around that spoon?>

<I do,> said Mizuki. <But no, I won’t let you use it for testing, there’s sure to be something nearly worthless that you can test with, or you can wait until we can take it to the cleric.>

<Fair enough,> said Alfric. <Well, we have more dungeon to do, so let’s do some cursory tests on the rest of the objects, then make our way down the tower and finish up the dungeon.>

They did some minor tests with the piece of paper and the armor, but their functions weren’t immediately obvious. The paper showed changes to the writing when it was touched to something, but it remained in the same impenetrable language. For the armor, Alfric suspected that someone would need to put it on, and it did seem to resize itself, but no one wanted to go to the trouble of getting armored, not when it might be a dud, or hard to work with, and not when they were already wearing armor. Alfric was a bit circumspect about it, which made it difficult to get excited about.

They found three other entads on their way down, or Mizuki did, because she was the only one that could see them. One of them was one that she’d actually thought she spotted on the way up, a wooden table, and she had no idea how they were going to get it out of the tower, given that it was wider than both the windows and doors. It seemed like they would have to use the wand, but Alfric said that it was better to save worrying about it until later. The function of the table wasn’t immediately obvious. Another was a blanket on one of the beds, which had a hole through it and was covered in blood from where Alfric had stabbed through it to kill the creature underneath. The last was a map, one of the cartographer’s, which had an unreadable legend and seemed to show a place that none of them had ever heard of, which Alfric suspected might work better once they were out of the dungeon. All in all, it was a bit frustrating to have so many things with unknown purpose, but Alfric was somewhat insistent that they could go more in-depth once the dungeon was finished. If there was another entad incident, he wanted to be able to extract with all their winnings, rather than being forced to leave a dungeon’s worth of loot behind.

<We had a question, while you were stone,> said Mizuki. <About these, um, monsters.> She was trying not to look at the corpses. She’d have tried not to look at the corpses anyway, but the one that had been in its bed was making her have funny thoughts.

<Yes?> asked Alfric.

<They’re not people, right?> she asked.

<This is about personhood?> asked Alfric.

<I guess,> said Mizuki.

<We thought you’d know the thinkin’ on these matters,> said Hannah. <The schools of thought, the debates, and the like.>

<There’s uncertainty,> said Alfric. <The conventional wisdom is that it’s all moot, they’re doomed one way or another, from the moment the dungeon ‘creates’ them.> He paused, scratching his head for a moment. <I’m just trying to think about the short introduction to the topic. Um, yes, there’s a chance that we might run into verifiably thinking creatures in the dungeon. But they’ll have dungeon madness, so there’s not really a way for us to interrogate whether or not they’re thinking creatures. I mean, there are ways around dungeon madness, people sometimes take dungeon mad creatures out so they can breed them, all you really need to do is make sure that they’re not aware of anything that would trigger them.> He sighed. <Sorry, I should have prepared for this, it’s just … one of those things you talk about in Junior League and then kind of forget about.>

<So that mapmaker I put a hole in,> said Mizuki. <There’s a chance that he might have been a living creature with dreams and aspirations?>

<A very remote chance, yes,> said Alfric. <But the most likely scenario is that they’re not thinking, just going through the motions, just mockeries of intelligence. If we went through the effort to subdue them, to take them out of the dungeon, to get them some place where they could settle down so the dungeon madness didn’t have hold, the most likely scenario is that they would be incapable of communication even with the best of entads and unable to adapt to their environment. They might die of starvation without being force fed, or fall ill due to internal problems with their biology, or … a hundred other things. And if they were one of those rare creatures that could think, that had a language we could use to communicate with them through entad assistance, their minds would be full of holes.>

<Holes?> asked Mizuki. <Like, not knowing things?>

<Missing knowledge, corrupted memories, partial skills,> said Alfric. <There are very few instances of anyone actually trying to investigate the question, but … well, to give an example, which given the circumstances I would call pessimistic, that creature that was creating the map — it’s possible that it did have some skill at map-making, and some born knowledge of whatever region it was in the middle of mapping, but it wouldn’t know where it learned any of that, might not know how to feed itself or what its kind of creature eats, wouldn’t know its name, wouldn’t be able to understand why it was imprisoned or what dungeon madness was without a decade of attempts … and probably not even then, unless it was at the far tail end of what the dungeons create.>

<That sounds horrible,> said Verity. She looked genuinely crestfallen.

Alfric shrugged. <Sorry, I should have checked with the party, it’s just … conventional wisdom that even if they were, against the odds, capable of some modicum of thought, they would be like that sink, with a faucet but nothing hooked up to it, doomed and misconceived. The dungeons build things wrong. I think, looking at your faces, that I should stress that anything capable of actual thought in the way we would understand it is exceedingly rare.>

<The problem is there’s no way to check,> said Mizuki.

<Well,> said Alfric. <Usually, no. But in this case, I actually think we might get a suggestion.>

They moved downstairs and Alfric moved aside the corpse sitting at the table to point at the half-finished map that had been sitting there.

<Here,> he said. <A repeating line.> Mizuki moved closer to look, not liking how close she was to the dead creature, the creature she’d killed. The map was like the others, but in the section that hadn’t been filled in, there were strokes of a pen, some shoreline, but repeated like an echo, done over and over again until the ink was off the paper and on the wood. <My guess is that it was spawned with some kind of thing in its head about making maps, and the only thing it knew was to make that one line, so it did that over and over again until we showed up. Not thinking, just performing the same action. We were in this dungeon for quite a bit before we came here, especially with the goat?> His finger went to the map and the repeated line, then with a frown he picked up the pot of ink on the desk. <Empty, but no knowledge of how to refill it, if there was any awareness that it needed to be refilled, or awareness of emptiness..>

Mizuki breathed out. That did make her feel better.

<Do you want me to redo the day?> asked Alfric. <Just say the word and we can, and then we can have this conversation before you’ve done anything you might regret.>

<No,> said Mizuki. <No, it was just … I don’t know. Something I didn’t know about. Something I hadn’t given much thought. I thought, when people joked that humans came from the dungeons, that they were just joking, but it seems like it really might have been possible.>

<Yes,> said Alfric.

<Can you give me a number?> asked Mizuki. <Just, a number for how often there are thinking things in the dungeons.>

<Well,> said Alfric. <It’s not something that we know really, because it would be very difficult to determine, and —>

<I think she wants some reassurance,> said Hannah. <Not a digression into theory.>

<Okay,> said Alfric, frowning. <Well, if I can give you some history, about a hundred years ago, a small group tried their best to pull creatures that seemed likely to be thinking ones out, for their own reasons. I don’t know how many they got out, but the most they ever had were two partial successes, cases where they were able to have something approaching a back-and-forth, using heavy entad assistance. Two cases out of … well, hundreds, I would guess, maybe as much as thousands, and even then it was spotty. For a few more, they could get something like a fragment of a dream or memory. When we get home, we can look it up, or I can send for books, or there are people to talk with in Dondrian. If we’re talking about newborns, who aren’t afflicted with dungeon madness and don’t have their heads full of bad knowledge and half-known skills, it’s a bit better, there are some actual contemporary accounts, but I don’t think that’s what you’re asking.>

Mizuki nodded. That seemed unlikely then. It was nice that Alfric was taking her feelings seriously, especially if they went against the conventional wisdom.

<If we see anything more in this dungeon that looks human, we’ll maybe steer clear?> asked Hannah.

<Maybe,> said Alfric. <If we can. But they will be trying to kill us.> He frowned. <We’ll work on a party protocol later. This isn’t a good conversation to be having in the middle of a dungeon.>

Mizuki felt better about it. It helped to have Alfric there, explaining things, even if he wasn’t giving her what she wanted, which was a plain and clear message that these things couldn’t possibly have been anything remotely like people.

They continued on through the dungeon, and Mizuki tried to focus on her current role, which was putting holes in things.

Chapter 50 - Escape!

In times of trouble, the temple in Pucklechurch was to be used as a defensible rallying point, triage center, and command post. Hannah knew this, because when the plan had been for her to replace Lemmel, she’d gotten a bit of training in it, but for her whole time in Pucklechurch, nothing remotely worth worrying about had happened. Really, it seemed a bit of overkill to Hannah, given that it had been so long since war or natural disasters had been a concern for the country, and that chrononauts undid the worst of days anyhow. Still, it was in times like this that having a plan could save someone’s bacon, so it was good that there was a plan.

“There’s been a dungeon escape!” Pann called out to the open area of the temple where people were congregated. She was the tallest cleric, easy to see, and with strong lungs, which made her the best to announce things. She held a position of leadership among the clerics. “Chrononauts have been notified of the situation already, and if they don’t hear further, the day will be undone. We believe we are dealing with something fast-breeding and substantially dangerous, which means that community action is necessary. The escape is of unknown origin and so far confined to the Pucklechurch hex. If it’s serious, help will retroactively appear, but it’s our responsibility to deal with things as best we can. Your orders will come from our hex beastmaster, Partridge West, who will coordinate. Partridge?”

People were still streaming into the temple, some of them there for the protection it offered, others there because they wanted to help with the containment effort.

The beastmaster, who Hannah only vaguely knew, was a short woman with grey hair and a slight stoop, the kind of governmental official who stayed in their position for decades simply by virtue of having little challenge and a fair amount of institutional knowledge. Partridge was competent, at least as far as Hannah knew her reputation, but if there were no challengers to a position like that, then in Hannah’s opinion, there were limits on how organized someone would get. Their treatment of Isra — or non-treatment, as it were — had lowered her opinion of the Pucklechurch leadership by a healthy amount.

“I noticed it early this morning,” said Partridge, speaking to the crowd. “One unknown entry became one hundred and thirteen. That was when I sent a message for the chronos. An hour later, the unknown was at one hundred and fifty-seven. The location is three miles north, in the woodland there, and from the continued increase, it seems that either it’s a single adult laying many eggs, which isn’t so bad, or it’s continual fast breeding, which would be bad.” Hannah paid attention to the differences in what the two women had said. It was bad that they weren’t on the same page, but she tried to be understanding, given that it was all happening quickly. “Either way, there are a lot of them.”

“This is likely a day that will be undone,” said Pann, stepping forward again. “But you cannot allow that to color your response here. If we can deal with it on our own, all the better. But if we can’t deal with it on our own, we’ll retreat to this temple and wait the day out. The day is likely to be undone,” she repeated, “but if it isn’t, we don’t want a disaster on our hands. I don’t think we have the time for it now, but there have been incidents in the past where people have died because they thought that someone was going to reach back through time. Help yourself first and foremost, that’s the mandate.”

“We don’t know what this thing is,” said Partridge. “We’ll know more once we make contact, but what we’re hoping is that this is just a minor case, something that’s laying a clutch of eggs it shouldn’t be laying, and in a few hours, we’ll all be thinking that this was too much of a fuss. And as far as the chrononauts go, I should note that if the day gets unwound on account of this, it’s likely that they’ll call in the Pyros, and no one wants that.”

“I object to that!” came a voice from the crowd. He was a tall man that Hannah couldn’t recall seeing before, with a frankly outrageous amount of hair and a huge bushy beard that had been tied into braids. He quickly stepped forward to the small stage that had been set up, one normally used for sermons. “Look, the Pyros come in and burn things down, it’s what they do, but they’re a second line of defense after the Knives, and —”

“This isn’t a debate,” said Partridge. She was glaring at him. “It’s also not the time.”

“I’m a pyro,” he said with a smile, placing fat fingers against his chest. “And I want to help, but I need you to know that I’m not going to set the whole hex on fire.”

Partridge frowned at him. “Well, we don’t have the time to waste, so your help is appreciated, but a debate on public policy will have to happen some other time.”

“Oh, I’ll be long gone by then,” said the man. He retreated back into the crowd, going to join his friends, which Hannah noticed only belatedly were familiar faces. Josen, Mardin, and Grig she had all met, however briefly in Josen’s case.

<That’s Marsh,> said Alfric. <They’re all here.> Hannah could see that this was true, though Lola was short enough that it was hard to get a glimpse of her. They must have entered while Pann was talking, as had lots of people.

“We’ll split into parties and set out,” said Partridge. “Once we’re in the field, we’ll coordinate and set up extermination efforts there.”

<But why are they here?> asked Mizuki. <Seems like a pretty big coincidence.>

<Lola,> answered Alfric.

<You think she released something?> asked Verity, raising an eyebrow. <Would she do that? Put everyone in danger?>

<Yes,> said Alfric. <And if it went wrong, she would just undo it.>

<So then we make it go wrong,> said Mizuki. <Or kill her and the day just resets to undo things.>

<Let’s not be too casual about killing chrononauts, please,> said Alfric.

<Well I didn’t say it out loud,> said Mizuki, with a frown that was nearly a pout.

<I think that Pann has the right of it,> said Hannah. <Treat the day like it’s not going to be undone and do our best to help keep things contained. We’re a proper dungeoneerin’ party now, that means we’re probably one of the best frontline defenses.>

“Let’s move out people!” called Pann. “If you have a party, stick with them, if you need armaments, stop by the smith, more direction on combat will be given from the front!”

It took some time to get the mass of people moving. The dungeon escape, if that’s what it was, had been active for two hours, perhaps a little less, and while the response was relatively fast, it seemed like there might be as many as hundreds of the things. In the best case, there were just eggs that would need to be destroyed, and the creature, whatever it was, would be something docile, but if Lola had been the one to release it … well, then it seemed as though neither of those things were true.

There were perhaps a hundred people as part of the containment, all told, which Hannah felt was a little on the low side. It was a tenth of the population of the town, and no one expected children or the elderly to come with, but still, ten percent meant that some people were either cowering or working through the emergency, which was disappointing. A hundred people was still more than enough, but … well, in Hannah’s opinion, an emergency meant that everything should be running smoothly and everyone should be dropping everything to pitch in to help. Part of it was the chrononauts, which meant that no one was taking things too seriously. She felt a bit of empathy for Alfric, who had to deal with those kinds of attitudes quite a bit.

They made their way out of the temple, with some people stopping to grab weapons from the smith’s supply or otherwise prepare themselves, but the bulk of them were on the move.

<She’s coming over,> said Alfric, and almost as soon as he was finished saying it, a woman dressed in blacks with purple eyes was next to them, smiling like a cat who’d caught a mouse.

“Greetings!” she said. “I’m Lola, I don’t think we’ve all been formally introduced.”

“Lola, we really don’t need you doing this right now,” said Alfric.

“Nonsense,” said Lola. “We’re going to be doing this together, aren’t we? A hundred people, give or take, but we’re the best equipped out of them. Besides, Marsh here can just burn down the entire forest if it comes to that.”

“Yeah, I’m not planning to do that,” said Marsh. He was the hairy guy, with the hair especially notable given that he was, like the rest of the group, only eighteen. He’d have passed for thirty, though perhaps not if you were just looking at his eyes. The hair seemed somewhat impractical, given how much he probably worked with fire. “Good to see you, Alfric. I always kind of wondered what you’d gotten up to.”

“Marsh,” said Alfric. “I’m not really in the mood.”

“Were you guys going into a dungeon?” asked Marsh. “Or did you just get kitted out because you heard there was trouble?” He looked at Hannah’s armor, the full plate they’d gotten the day before. It wasn’t the sort of thing you wore casually, and it did take some time to put on.

“We had a dungeon planned for today, yes,” said Alfric.

“We did too,” said Marsh. “We were going to do the Pucklechurch one, actually, and probably still will once all this is done.”

Their two groups were walking together now, mostly because Lola had fallen into step beside Alfric. Hannah’s eyes went to Mardin, their cleric, and he shook his head, indicating that he didn’t really know what was going on or how they’d been roped into this.

“You were here when the call came up?” asked Alfric.

“Oh, no,” said Lola. “We were in Liberfell, where we have rooms, but we heard some commotion about something happening over in Pucklechurch, so we headed there as fast as we could.”

Alfric frowned. “Do you have the capacity to make instant trips?”

“More or less,” said Lola, giving him a happy nod. “We were outfitted very well, though not quite enough that we could base out of Dondrian. It’s just a matter of time though, really.”

“I didn’t ask about that,” said Alfric.

“Oh, well I was hoping that you were just making conversation,” said Lola. “Rather than asking what our capabilities were because you thought that perhaps I had something to do with this dungeon escape.”

Alfric was tight-lipped.

“Well, you’re her party, does she have an alibi?” Mizuki asked the boys.

“No,” said Grig. “She does not.”

“Oh come on now,” said Lola, casting him a mean look over her shoulder. “I was off getting breakfast pastries for the party, that was all. And I suppose you’re about to cast aspersions, little Mizuki?”

Lola wasn’t a big woman, and not more than an inch taller than Mizuki, but Mizuki didn’t take to the needling very well. Perhaps, as usual, she didn’t see any need for restraint.

“At least be honest about being evil,” said Mizuki. “You came here, released the beast, then went back to Liberfell for your party. I don’t know why you’d do that, but you definitely did it.”

“That’s a very serious thing to say,” said Lola, frowning at Mizuki. “So serious that in Dondrian, it would be illegal to say without some kind of proof to back it up. You’re saying that I committed a crime, and, well, that could damage my reputation.” She looked over at Alfric. “Did you know this little monster has killed me three times? You should watch out for her, she’s a live one.”

“I don’t want to talk to you,” said Alfric. “Whether you were responsible for this or not, we have no business together, and I said that anything you had to say would have to be through the mail.”

“Oh, but you can’t mean that’s supposed to apply even if we’re just bumping into each other,” said Lola. “We both happened to be in Pucklechurch, and Alfric, Vertex is just answering the call, the same as your party is.”

“No,” said Alfric. “I’m done. I can’t force you away from me, but I’m not going to respond.” He looked at Hannah. <Keep all discussion in the party channel, please.> In her opinion, it was something he would have been better to do sooner, if he was going to do it.

<Could I really get in trouble for saying she did it?> asked Mizuki.

<Intentional dungeon release, especially if it’s dangerous, can rise to the level of a serious crime,> said Alfric. <And if you accuse someone of a serious crime, especially in public, then yes, there’s a chance that you could get in trouble for it and have to show up in court to argue your side, which you’d want a barrister for.>

<It usually only applies to people of means,> said Verity. <People who might have something substantial to lose in terms of reputational damage.>

<Can’t we just do a trial by combat?> asked Mizuki. <And then I’ll just blow her stupid head off her shoulders and we can be done with it.>

<You’d do that to reset the day, right?> asked Verity.

<Sure,> said Mizuki. <Or, you know, the other thing.>

<Trial by combat hasn’t been practiced in a long, long time,> said Alfric. <And plotting to murder someone is also something that can rise to the level of a serious crime, so please be careful about what you say.>

Meanwhile, the other party was having a conversation on their own channel. Hannah couldn’t hear them, naturally, and had never learned to read lips, but it seemed like they were on the verge of shouting at one another, presumably over the idea that Lola had let loose some horrible monster in the woods, and now everyone was going to have to go kill it together, possibly at great risk to themselves.

“Hey,” said Marsh, who had maneuvered himself over to Hannah. “Are you single?”

Hannah laughed. “Do you really think this is the time and place?”

He shrugged. “Better to ask early,” he replied with a grin. “Because otherwise I’ll be thinking about you all day, and I don’t want that to be for nothing if you’re already taken.”

“I’m single, ay,” said Hannah. “And what makes you think I’d be interested in the likes of you?”

“Lola says that I’m your type,” said Marsh, jerking a thumb in the hellion’s direction. “And I can tell that you’re mine.”

“So this is a stitch up, is it?” asked Hannah, raising an eyebrow.

“Something like that,” Marsh grinned. “Well, I haven’t asked yet, and maybe I’ll save it for later, just in case one of us dies. But keep it in mind, will you?”

“Oh, ay,” said Hannah. “I can’t imagine what else I would have to occupy my attention with.”

The whole big group eventually came to a stop, and Pann started calling out orders.

“Anyone with a capacity for healing, come to me, we’ll also need runners, ten of them to get information back and to send out!” Her voice was loud and booming.

Hannah reluctantly moved over to be with the rest of the healers and other people who would be playing a support role, saying her goodbyes to the party. The cleric from Vertex, Mardin, separated from his group as well. There was probably some argument for both of them going to be in the field, but neither of them argued it, and having a place to bring people who were injured seemed like the correct thing to do. Between them all, it seemed very likely that they could cover almost any injury besides one that touched the brain or caused some other kind of instant death. Even a gut wound, which was notoriously troublesome, could be tended to by clerics in combination. Hannah took the map they’d gotten from the dungeon and handed it over to the cause, explaining how to use it in order to show positions.

“Don’t mind Marsh,” said Mardin. He, like Hannah, was in full combat gear, wearing his armor with the sigil of Oeyr on the face of it, a Golden Spiral inset within a representation of the first fifteen primes.

“I don’t,” said Hannah.

“Lola was talking you up,” Mardin explained. “And said some … questionably true things.”

“About undone days?” asked Hannah.

Mardin nodded. “She said that you and Marsh were thick as thieves, which — well, she doesn’t know that you and I met, but Marsh doesn’t seem like the sort you’d get along with, though you do seem like the kind of girl he’d go for, no offense.”

“Ay?” asked Hannah. “No offense? You think that low of his type?”

“I think that low of Marsh,” said Mardin. “If he weren’t so good at what he does, he’d have never made it on the team. He’s our Mizuki, if that helps. At least, from what Lola has said, which, again, is suspect. But I’ve met Mizuki, and I can see where she’d have said that. They’re both high energy, a bit flippant, possessed of a lot of firepower … literally, in his case.”

“Ay, and what’s with all the hair?” asked Hannah. “Seems odd, for a pyro.”

“It’s a mark of pride for them,” said Mardin. “Long beards and wild hair on a pyro are a sign that they’ve got very good control of their flames.” He paused. “Of course, there are ways to cheat that, since hair growth isn’t all that uncommon of an entad effect.”

“And you’re sayin’ that he cheats?” asked Hannah.

“It’s cheating in the same way that a flattering dress is cheating,” said Mardin.

Hannah nodded. “There’s no compact, per se, but he might give the wrong impression on purpose, and once I’ve got his bodice off, it will be too late.”

Mardin laughed at that..

<First contact,> called Alfric. <It’s a small creature, maybe as big as a rabbit, covered with leaves, wood, and other plants, which surround a flesh and bone core. This one is a juvenile, which means that either they’re growing very fast, or the adult is very large. And they’re aggressive, not too dangerous, but in numbers they could be a problem. Isra can control them, but she needs to be close enough.>

<Confirmed, will let the lady know,> said Hannah.

“Everything okay?” asked Mardin.

“Peachy,” Hannah replied.

“If I were to kill Lola, would the day reset right away, or would it keep on going?” asked Mizuki.

“What do you mean?” asked Alfric. “Also, please don’t kill Lola.” The number of times Mizuki had brought the option up was starting to get worrying.

“I just mean, if I undid her bindings and killed her, or just smacked her in the head, would we still experience it?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t think there can be an answer to that question,” said Verity. “Can there?”

“The day keeps going,” said Alfric. “But it’s not necessarily experienced. Honestly, a lot of family policy is just to not think all that hard about priority and undone days, unless you’re part of the coordination group. We each only see a fraction of what goes on, so it’s best to just remember your own part in things. Even if you see Lola dead, you should treat it like the day is going to keep on going, especially given that it’s Lola.”

“It’s only a partial lifecycle,” said Isra.

“What?” asked Alfric.

Isra had been carrying their first kill, which she had skewered through the head with an arrow before anyone had even seen it. She’d been looking deeply into it, though she claimed this was more difficult when it was dead, and apparently had come to some kind of determination.

“It doesn’t stay like this,” said Isra. “This thing, it will become … more. It’s eating plant material now, using it for the casing, which grows the bones and flesh, but when it’s larger, it will start to eat flesh and fur.” She looked up from the body. “That will make it far harder to kill.”

Alfric relayed that back to the ‘command’ post by telling Hannah over party chat. They’d made good time through the woods, and were at the ‘front’. In theory, each of the groups should have had a party member hanging back so that movement could be coordinated, but it was becoming increasingly clear that this was going to be a bit of a haphazard effort. Most of the time, ‘dungeon escapes’ were just a nuisance, because it was actually rather difficult for something dangerous to escape from a dungeon. Monsters couldn’t escape from the dungeon on their own, they needed to be carried out, or at least hitch a ride, and dungeon madness was a bit of a savior in that regard, since monsters would fight rather than try to sneak out. Any real killer of a monster was more likely to murder a party than escape though, which put some limits on what could get out. In short, there were a lot of limits in place that stopped it from being a major problem. What you got much more often were invasive pests, which had to be stamped out.

Most likely this would kill the day, and they would go off to the opera without having actually done a double dungeon, which was a bit of a shame, but not the worst outcome in the world. The beastmaster knew the location of every creature in the hex, and they would coordinate with the other hexes nearby and eventually direct people to kill the stragglers.

“Not a bad way to spend the day,” said Verity. “Better than a dungeon.”

“Yeah, but we’re not getting paid for this, and there’s no magic items at the end,” said Mizuki. “Plus what about my elevation?” She said this like it was a joke.

“I think I heard someone say that once the work is done there will be a lunch for all the volunteers,” said Alfric. “But this is more a matter of duty. We’d do it anyway.”

<There,> said Isra. She drew back an arrow and let it fly, zipping along with it as a blur. Alfric tried to track her, but as soon as she wasn’t moving again, she was firing more arrows and getting further away. Half a minute passed before she was done. <Eight dead. There’s a clutch of eggs here, piercing them now. They were eating the trees.>

Alfric moved forward and looked at what she was talking about. There were bites taken out of the trees, large ones, and a few seemed to have fallen down from the damage. By the time he got to Isra, she’d pierced holes in all of the eggs she’d found using one of her arrows, and was moving on to collecting the corpses of the ones she’d shot.

<A clutch is likely ten to twelve,> said Isra. <They’re not sexually mature when they’re still eating plants. Should I be saying all this to the party?>

<Ay,> said Hannah, from some distance away from them. <I’m standin’ close to Pann and Partridge, tellin’ them everythin’ you know. There’s some question about how you know, but I’ve stayed mum on that, since I don’t know if you want everyone knowin’ you’re a druid.>

<You can tell them,> said Isra. <It will help them trust what I say. I haven’t been silent about it in town.>

<Will do,> said Hannah.

“Partridge is the woman who came to me, to talk about me taking too much game,” said Isra.

“Well, you’ll be in her good graces soon enough,” said Alfric.

“Nine dead,” said Isra. “Out of — what did she say?”

“Around three hundred,” said Alfric. “We’ll have to find the eggs and destroy them, and more importantly, find the big one. You think that it will have flesh and bone on the outside?”

Isra hesitated. “I don’t know. It’s a very magical creature.”

Alfric looked down at the eggs. “Can you track it?”

“Possibly,” said Isra, though she looked a bit doubtful. Her eyes roamed the forest, and without another word, she set off, leaving the rest of them to follow behind her.

“Can’t you just … tell them to die?” asked Mizuki. “Like, shout out with your druid powers?”

“Animals don’t want to die,” said Isra. “Fear and panic can be overwhelming. It’s something I noticed when hunting. Even telling a deer to stand still has mixed results if it can sense anything like aggression from me. I’m trying now, to call any near us, but they have good hearing, and are wary.”

“Small and harmless though,” said Mizuki.

“Mmm,” said Isra. Her eyes were on the ground. “I do not think that applies when they are older.”

Chapter 52 - Teamwork

It was almost painful to see everyone again, especially under the circumstances. If Lola was behind it, then this was a part of her plan in some way, but there were so many moving parts to the day that it was impossible for her to have planned it all. She could easily have released the creature, knowing what it did from earlier experimentation, but she wouldn’t have been able to plot out the response, nor his own team’s response, nor where the creature would be going.

He recalled a conversation they’d once had, where they’d lamented the fact that people would just assume that whatever happened was what the chrononauts wanted to happen, which wasn’t at all true. Instead, the truth was slightly different: things that happened were those which a chrononaut wasn’t sufficiently motivated to undo. It was an enormous distinction, at least in some respects. And because things tended to turn out a bit differently each time just due to variance, sometimes the day that the chrononauts ended up with wasn’t the one that they really wanted, and because of that, doing a day over often felt like a roll of the dice. A day might not be ideal, but unless there was some major preventable calamity, doing it over came with certain risks.

The way the day was going was probably not exactly what Lola had planned, if she were behind the dungeon escape, but Alfric being back with the old team by reason of necessity seemed like the kind of thing that was among the best possibilities for her. He was never going to be the father of her children, he wouldn’t do his children the disservice of bringing them into the world with her as their mother, but that seemed like what she was angling for.

If she had simply come to him and apologized, groveled at his feet, or something less dramatic, they might have been able to have a cordial relationship, and his opinion of her might have started to improve. But if she’d been willing and able to do that, to talk things over like adults and engage in proper conflict resolution, they never would have ended up how they did. It was entirely possible that she was incapable of interacting with people in honest and forthright ways. She proved as much as soon as she saw him.

“So, working together again at last!” said Lola. She smiled at Mizuki, pointing. “Don’t kill me.”

“I make no promises,” said Mizuki.

“Hey, I’m serious,” said Lola. “Four times you’ve killed me! It’s frankly a bit insulting, not to mention unprofessional.” She was grinning.

“We’re going to work together, doing our duty as citizens to contain a threat,” said Alfric. “We owe each other nothing. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said Grig, speaking quickly before Lola had a chance.

“We should be able to make short work of it,” said Josen with a nod. “We’ll save the town and hope that the day doesn’t need to be reset.”

“It’s not that big a deal if there’s a reset,” said Lola.

“Less from you, please,” said Alfric.

“I mean, come on Alfric,” said Lola. “So long as the information goes back, we can catch this thing before it goes off laying eggs, and then no one is inconvenienced. You know, some people would say that we have an ethical obligation to undo the day.”

This was, in some sense, sensible, but it was Lola saying it, and if she had released the monster in the first place … well, there were different thoughts on undone days, but if Lola was using them to cause chaos, then if you found yourself in one, it seemed to Alfric that you had some obligation to stop her and minimize the risk of a bad day. If they got to the end of the day with no deaths, Alfric would be willing to live with the inconvenience to the town, if only because on a reset, Lola might do something worse, or gamble with their lives and get a worse outcome. Whether or not the province of Greater Plenarch would agree was another matter, but he at least had control over his own resets, and while he couldn’t control Lola, he could try to manage her.

“Do you mind if I come with?” asked a boy who was around their own age. Alfric looked him up and down. He had a staff and longer clothes, traditional dress for a wizard, but not the kind of thing that was best to wear in the woods.

“Kell?” asked Mizuki. She turned to Alfric. “He’s a wizard.”

“Sure,” nodded Alfric. He had been one of the two reserves that Alfric had considered when he’d first come to Pucklechurch, if he had the name right. “Your reservoir is full?”

“Half full,” he replied. “I was off in the woods taking on the small ones. But it’s important that the large one gets killed, right?”

“It is,” Alfric nodded. “Alright, come with, but we don’t have a spare party slot. Do you have combat experience? Any dungeons?”

“A month of mandatory combat training in Kiromo,” nodded Kell. “Three mandatory dungeons there as well. I’m not geared for it right now, but I’ve spent most of the morning retooling as much as I could.”

“Good,” nodded Alfric. With that information, Kell actually seemed like he would have been a much better get than Mizuki, though Alfric felt immense amounts of guilt for the thought. “Josen is the second party wizard, see if you can work together, Mizuki is the first party sorc, she’ll stay away from you.”

“She has my permission to blow up anything I have,” said Kell, who said this loud enough to let Mizuki hear. “So long as it’s for good use. I tend toward short-term builds anyway, it would mean losing at most a few days work.”

“You have an enormous reservoir,” said Josen, who had come to inspect the newcomer.

“I won a number of stones in a bet,” said Kell. “And like I said, it’s part of a strategy.”

“Mmm,” said Josen, which Alfric took to mean that he didn’t think all that much of the approach. Alfric had seen Josen with other wizards before, and so far as Alfric could tell, Josen didn’t give out praise lightly, not unless they were at the upper echelons of wizardly power. Constructive criticism bordering on disdain was his usual approach.

They moved through the woods as a big group, ten of them in total with Verity ready on the party channel. Isra was in the lead, and the two parties generally stayed on their own sides, with Kell as a bit of a buffer.

At first it was silent, and then people began talking. Marsh seemed taken with Hannah, which wasn’t the biggest surprise, but Hannah was … well, it was hard to tell if she was flirting, but she certainly wasn’t rebuffing him. That was a bit more of a surprise.

“You’ll try to only get burns on half of you, aye?” asked Hannah.

“It’s a bad pyro who burns himself,” smiled Marsh. “But if a burn will get me your healing touch, it might be worth it.”

This seemed a bit grotesque to Alfric, who considered burns to be one of the worst kinds of injuries if they weren’t treated immediately. Hannah rolled her eyes, but she smiled when she did it, like it was a joke she was groaning at rather than something unpleasant.

“So, mandatory military service, that sounds exciting,” said Lola. She had sidled up next to Kell.

“It was only for a month,” said Kell. “I’d thought that I would stay, and one of the conditions for that is comp service for a term of two years, so I wanted to get a start on it.”

“We get something like that,” said Marsh. “One month intensive, just to make sure I don’t burn anything down and can come to the defense of the nation if they ever really need me to.”

“Only a month?” asked Hannah. “Seminary makes you go a lot longer to be a cleric.”

“We’re coming up on it,” said Isra. <Song now, please.>

The song started at once, which Alfric could feel but not hear, and at nearly the same time, Grig started his own song, one done using his flute, wordless in a way that Verity’s songs usually weren’t.

“Seems close,” said Alfric.

“We ran this way,” said Isra. “It was tracking us when we ran. It’s been moving toward us while we regrouped.”

“Powering up,” said Lola. There was really no need for her to announce this, not when she’d begun to glow with alien energies. Alfric was mildly surprised that she didn’t just keep them around all the time, but he supposed it would be like keeping a sword unsheathed when you were going about your day-to-day, only a hundred times as dangerous.

Alienism worked by binding spirits from another realm of existence for specific purposes. Knowing that there were spirits from another realm of existence gave Alfric some very uncomfortable feelings when he was younger, even after it had been explained that they interacted with his own world only in very specific ways, like ghosts, or the realm beyond the Spirit Gates. These aliens from beyond the world weren’t dangerous unless you meddled with them, and alienists were carefully trained to meddle with them only in safe ways.

Alfric had believed that introductory information much more before Lola had become an alienist.

To hear her tell it, a large amount of her training had been in not killing herself and the people around her. The bindings persisted for quite some time, as long as months before they needed to be undone and renewed, but there was danger in both the original binding, and in every use of it unless it was incredibly tightly done, then more danger in undoing it at the end. Nine tenths of the work of an alienist was in ensuring that the aliens wouldn’t burst free and cause damage. If not for the chrononauts, it was likely that the practice of alienism would be killed off as much as it could be, outlawed or worse, but alienist ‘incidents’ were prevented by chrononauts, and if the steady beat of undone death tolls was bothering anyone, no one was teaching much about the threat to children. Alienism was, at least, regular, the ‘accidents’ easy to avoid if it was known they were coming. And they were, usually, self-snuffing, so in the very rare event that an accident wasn’t undone, it was brief local damage and death, rather than a monstrous ongoing storm of energetic destruction.

Lola had died to her bindings. She’d died to her bindings a lot. She had focused her attention on making sure that they wouldn’t blow up when she activated them, but was a bit lazy about the other things, because she could be. If the bindings killed her, she’d try to figure out what had gone wrong and fix them, but this was something she did after they failed rather than before.

When she powered up her bindings, Alfric winced, worried that some new things she’d tried would explode or murder her or otherwise necessitate the reset of the day. But instead, she was wrapped in a glowing shell a foot out from her skin, an immaterial barrier from which tentacles extended. She was encased in the glow, which extended down as well, making her look alternately like she was floating and like she was wearing stilts, enough to make her the tallest there. With the tentacles she started pulling things from extradimensional space, provided by entads, and soon each of the glowing tendrils was equipped with a different weapon, each of them entads. Fighting with six arms didn’t seem, to Alfric, very sensible, especially because alienism didn’t allow for much better coordination, and he doubted that her weapons would be all that effective against the rocky shell, but he kept silent.

It wouldn’t do to keep watching her. Alfric needed to focus on his own team, who he could help out and whose abilities he had the best knowledge of.

“There,” called Isra, before anyone had any sense of where it actually was.

“Wow that’s big,” said Marsh once it came into view. “I’m good to unleash the flames?”

“Don’t burn down the forest,” said Alfric.

“Unleash,” said Lola, “Then I’m going in.”

Alfric hung back as the magic started to fly. They had four casters, but Mizuki was going to have to wait until there was something in the air to use. Still, between Josen, Marsh, and Kell, there was an enormous amount of power fired upon the creature. Marsh was using a tool he’d created from a sheet of fabric he’d moved in the air and locked into place, a cone of locked fabric, something that he’d always said he’d do back in Dondrian. It concentrated his flames, allowing him some distance without needing to burn the entire place. For Josen, it was a beam of energy, powerful enough that the air crackled, and for Kell beside him, a rather weaker projectile of some kind, wide and unconcentrated. Single encounters were where wizards were best.

When they had finished the first volley, the rocky shell was, at least on one side, broken, cracked, pitted, and slightly molten. The creature roared, turning to them with its head, and seemed to be screaming in either anger or pain, or both.

Mizuki stepped out and thrust both her hands forward. “Gonna be loud!” she shouted.

The magic she produced seemed to float through the air with understated speed, a proper construct of some kind, white and gleaming. The creature made a single step forward before the crystal hit. It blasted away as much as the wizards, combined, had blown apart and revealed raw, red flesh beneath. Alfric could feel the chill in the air, and it seemed like there was some component of freezing, one of the oppositional elements to Marsh’s flame.

The creature slumped to the side and took a moment to get to its feet again. Blood was dripping from its mouth and it was moving slowly, limping and mewling, but it didn’t take long for it to start moving again. Mizuki had said its particular magic was one of eating up and converting matter, and it seemed, at least from what he could see, that this meant healing as well as rapid growth. The eye that Isra had shot was still there, two arrows stuck in it, but the creature had a new eye beside it, this one whole and intact.

Lola descended on it. Whatever she lacked in terms of coordinating her six ghostly arms, she made up for with raw power and savagery. The blades flashed, each of them with their own magic, more deadly than just their edges, and Lola carved through the injured beast quickly, blades sometimes bouncing off stone. This lasted right until it moved a claw at lightning speed and hit her square in the chest. She pinwheeled through the air, slamming into a tree. She got to her feet in an instant, but had lost a few of her weapons.

“Second volley!” she shouted, hanging back for a moment.

Isra’s arrows seemed pitiful next to the wizards, and Alfric almost told her not to bother. This wasn’t where she excelled. It wasn’t where he excelled either, not against something so heavily armored.

Josen did the same as before, modified only slightly, the origin point being changed somehow in a way that allowed it to come from above, aiming at the place where they’d done the most damage. Marsh laid on the fire at the same time, a circle of flame around the beast that immediately set trees up in flame, and created so much smoke that it became hard to see.

“Locking it!” shouted Marsh as the creature moved out from the smoke.

The creature slowed but did not stop, and Alfric could see the trees around Marsh bending as he tried to use them to hold the creature. Warlocks needed to touch the things they locked together, but that kind of limitation tended to be easy to make up for with entads. As Alfric watched, he thought he could see brief moments when Marsh’s fingertips weren’t quite there.

Mizuki fired off her second big shot right at the moment Lola swept back in with her collection of blades. It was a matter of bad communication, Alfric could see that instantly, almost feel it, but the floating crystal that Mizuki threw out reached the creature at nearly the same time as Lola. It was a directed explosion of frost, more contained and directed than Mizuki normally did, but part of it hit Lola.

Lola spun on Mizuki immediately, rage in her eyes, and she drew back her weapons as though she meant to throw them. The moment passed quickly though, and Lola jabbed her many swords down into the exposed part of the creature, moving with abandon, giving in to bloodlust. The thing tried to swipe at her again, but it was moving slowly, and she didn’t get hit by the same attack twice.

Lola’s attack went on for what felt like an eternity, past when the creature had stopped moving, when the blades were just throwing up sprays of blood and the occasional chunk of something. Alfric noticed the uncomfortable looks between the members of his old party, Grig looking nervous, Josen frowning as he waited, Marsh turned away.

<She’s going to kill me,> said Mizuki.

Eventually, she stopped, and got in one last kick against the creature.

“Seems like we’re done,” said Lola. She folded her weapons back into extradimensional space and stepped down her bindings, gently falling to the burnt ground. The fire wasn’t spreading much, since it was too wet, and Marsh was using some kind of entad to produce water so he could soak the trees. Lola twisted a ring on her finger, and the blood on her started to coalesce, eventually becoming inch-tall little blood men who ran a few feet away from her and then collapsed in a splash on the forest floor.

“I’m not sure how much of that brutality was necessary,” said Josen.

“I’m the one with the Ring of Internal Anatomy, aren’t I?” asked Lola. “But we did it! Good work, team.” She looked all around with a smile on her face, until her eyes rested on Mizuki. “Nice try, but you missed me.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mizuki. “You said a second volley, I was just —”

“Trying to kill me,” said Lola. “But not this time, little one. You’ll have to do better than that.”

“We should head back to the rally point,” said Alfric, hoping to cut off this conversation before it could deteriorate any further. “There’s more cleanup to do.”

<Can I do a search for eggs here?> asked Isra.

<Of course, good thinking,> said Alfric. <Alone, or with backup?>

<Any this far east will be young,> said Isra. <Second to the beastmaster, I’ll be best at finding them. I have the bow, the channel, and the warp if there’s trouble. I’ll be fine.>

<Suit yourself,> said Alfric.

“What was that you were saying to your bard?” asked Lola, cocking her head to the side.

“Nothing,” said Alfric. “Isra will stay here and mop up, make sure there’s not a clutch of eggs we missed. We’ll talk to her once we’re back with the beastmaster, make sure that everything is taken care of.”

“Tell me,” said Lola. “Was it good to be with the team again?”

“Let’s get moving,” said Alfric. He led the way, and his own team, minus Isra, plus Kell, followed behind him, with Vertex taking a moment for discussion. It felt unceremonious, but the way Lola had attacked the creature, the way it had seemed to just keep going … well, saying a round of ‘hurrahs’ or doing an after action report seemed out of place.

“Was that on purpose?” Mizuki asked Kell.

“Yes,” said Kell.

“Was what?” asked Hannah.

“Mage stuff,” said Mizuki. “The magic he used was … well, like he was setting me up. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything like it. Normally I use cast-offs, but he was just — creating specific cast-offs?”

“It’s well-known that sloppy constructs make for good fodder for sorcs,” said Kell. “Doing it intentionally is just a matter of applying some thought, and I don’t think you’d be able to do it without quite a bit of background knowledge. It can’t just be sloppy. But you don’t know much about wizards, so … hopefully that was at your level.”

“It was a foolish thing to do,” said Josen, who must have taken an interest. He had moved up, away from the rest of his party. “There’s no way that a sorcerer could use your magic to make a better effect than you yourself were capable of. You were sacrificing efficiency. You gave up power to boost someone with less power than what you gave up.”

“Respectfully, no,” replied Kell. “You’re thinking of this as a naive case, with just me and her, in which case yes, Borchert’s Law says that it would be a disadvantaged transfer no matter how skilled the sorcerer was. I have some quibbles with that, but it’s sound theory. It’s not the naive case though, because obviously when there are multiple practitioners around the aether itself becomes awash with energy. In that case, providing the sorcerer with structural elements has a better return. You have to think about it holistically rather than reducing it down to a textbook problem.”

“Then you knew that we’d be with you?” asked Josen.

“Well, no,” admitted Kell. “It just happened to work out better than I had planned.”

“Mmm,” said Josen. He seemed unimpressed by the tactic, even if it had worked.

“I’ve never had someone supply magic for me,” said Mizuki. “It was … unexpected.”

“I’ll give you more warning next time,” said Kell. “If there ever is a next time. Hopefully we don’t have to deal with another dungeon escape again.”

“Depends on Lola, really,” said Mizuki.

Alfric tensed at that. It wasn’t all that plausible that Mizuki would get into actual legal trouble for besmirching Lola’s name, not when there had already been so much reputational damage, but it still seemed like an unwise thing to do, especially with Lola close enough to hear it.

“That’s very rude,” said Lola, who moved herself up to be by Mizuki. “And I must say I’m hurt. Haven’t I shown myself to be a friendly person? I helped to kill that beast. And you tried to kill me in the midst of it.”

“I said I was sorry.” Mizuki did not seem at all sorry, any contrition she’d felt in the moment now evaporated. “But I’m pretty sure I was the one with the deathblow,” said Mizuki. “You only got to it once it was already in the process of dying.”

“You’re so childish,” said Lola. “But I have a feeling we could be great friends, if only you’d give me a chance.”

“How many times have you tried?” asked Mizuki.

Lola laughed. “As if I would waste my time on trying to make friends with someone who unaccountably hates me.”

“Be nice,” said Grig. “Both of you.” He had often played peacemaker in their party, and it seemed that habit hadn’t left him.

“Sorry Grig,” said Mizuki. “I’ll try to be nicer.”

“Grig, I think she likes you,” said Lola. She gave a little laugh.

“I think the parties can unmerge now,” said Alfric. “And I think it would be for the best.”

“Aww, you’re no fun,” said Lola.

“If you want to talk to me again, use mail,” said Alfric. He turned off in the other direction, and his party thankfully followed. For a moment, he thought that Lola would come with, just because it was the kind of thing she found fun, but instead she allowed them to go, and their two parties diverged. As they did, it seemed as though Marsh and Hannah were having a whispered conversation with each other, with her smiling and him grinning. Alfric hadn’t been paying too much attention to them, and wondered how long they’d been talking, and about what.

“How’d it go with the hairy guy?” asked Mizuki. Alfric noted that Kell was walking beside her.

“Just fine,” replied Hannah. “He’s very forward.”

“So was the other guy though, right?” asked Mizuki. “That was what you complained about with Micah.”

Hannah spared a glance toward Kell. “Maybe we won’t talk personal business in front of the lad?”

“Sorry,” said Kell. “I am absolutely out of my element here, and I know I’m a sixth for you, but I didn’t really want to walk back with those people. I don’t think the other wizard liked me very much.”

“Josen is like that,” said Alfric. “A bit prickly, especially with people who he sees as unserious about magic, which is most people.” The momentary feeling of fondness and familiarity washed away when Alfric’s mind went to the betrayal.

“I think I take magic seriously,” said Kell. “And I thought he was flatly wrong there, though I was trying to be polite about it.”

“You’d have been a credit to the team, if we’d had you on,” said Hannah.

“Was that an option?” asked Kell, looking between the three of them.

“When I came to town, I talked to the censusmaster,” said Alfric. “You were on the short list, in part because you don’t — or didn’t — have a party.”

“I still don’t,” said Kell. “I’m not sure that I would have wanted to be a dedicated dungeoneer.” He glanced at Mizuki, which she didn’t seem to notice.

“We’re hardly dedicated,” said Hannah. “Once a week is about what we aim for, that would leave you plenty of time to ply your trade.”

“Can I ask why I didn’t warrant a visit?” asked Kell. “Not that I would have said yes.”

“Wizards are more likely to be gainfully employed and not want to risk anything, even if they are young,” said Alfric. “And wizards are also likely to be configured for more mundane things, requiring some time to make changes. I recruited a wizard to a party once and he told me that he’d need two weeks to get all of the combat constructs ready, and then it ended up taking longer, and eventually he didn’t even want to do it, or maybe he’d only agreed because I was pressuring him, or … something. That’s the kind of thing I was trying to avoid.”

“I’m not sure I’d have said yes,” said Kell. “Three dungeons in Kiromo was about enough for me. They have this saying there that each room is about as difficult as fighting three raccoons, but —”

Mizuki began to laugh. “That’s how they get you. And then it’s giant gelatin monsters and enormous cyclops.”

“Yeah,” said Kell, smiling. “How suspiciously specific. How was your third, by the way?”

“Our first was still our best,” said Alfric. “The third was a bit odd in terms of geography, but not all that exceptional otherwise.” He held up his bident. He hadn’t had a chance to use it, yet, but had tested it with a piece of meat earlier that morning, and it seemed to be able to do some extra damage when both prongs were inserted into an enemy, like a small explosion. “I did get this, and Hannah got that armor, both of which are fairly good, but it was the sort that, as my father says, ‘pays the bills’.”

“Well, if you’re ever in a pinch and need a substitute, I’m still unpartied,” said Kell. “Not that I’m in any rush to party, or to do dungeons, but it might be a fun change of pace. Like I said, I’m a bit of a tinkerer, so a change over to combat wouldn’t cripple me like it would some wizards who spend a month perfecting a construct that they’re never going to change.”

“We’ll keep you in mind,” said Alfric with a nod. “Running dungeons can be lucrative.”

They made it back to the rally point, but things were wrapping up there. Partridge was out in the field, directing people to find the stragglers, but it seemed like while they were away killing the big one, a team had been assembled to follow Partridge and go where she pointed.

“I think you’re fine to head back into town,” said Pann. “The other party you were with told me that the large one gave you little trouble?”

“No more than a somewhat difficult dungeon monster,” said Alfric. “Though our first encounter with it went a lot less well.”

“Your help was appreciated,” Pann nodded. “There’ll be a meal at the temple, I’m sure.”

“I have a request,” said Alfric.

“Oh?” asked Pann.

“If at all possible, I’d like to keep the day,” said Alfric. “To not have it reset.”

“Hmm,” said Pann. “We just report to the province, I think. But this was right at the edge of what we could handle, and we did handle it, which I think means that we’d default to putting in a report and not making a request for reset. I’ll speak with Bo, he’s the one who handles this sort of thing, they’ve probably got him in the temple by now.”

“Thank you,” said Alfric. He let out a sigh and turned to what remained of the party. Kell was still with them, it seemed. “Well, looks like the day is probably shot. Let’s go get something to eat.”

Chapter 51 - Mother

Lola was responsible for the escape, obviously she was responsible, but for some reason no one wanted to talk about it, and worse, no one wanted Mizuki to talk about it. The dungeon escape was a part of some wretched scheme, one whose purpose wasn’t entirely clear yet. The worst part, by far, was that it was entirely possible that Lola had done this before, maybe even a few times. Maybe on undone days, Lola had released some horrible beast into the woods and watched to see what would happen, and that this was happening now was because she knew what would happen fit in with her plans for Alfric, which seemed to be … well, unclear, but probably meant that he would be the father of her children and go back to be with his old adventuring party.

Mizuki was useless in the whole hunting expedition, which she’d known she would be from the start. There was less in the way of ambient magic outside a dungeon, since the dungeon itself leeched off quite a bit of ‘excess’, and even if she’d been able to spot one of the creatures before Isra, actually hitting small things from a distance wasn’t really what she was good at. Still, their little party stayed together, minus Hannah, with Isra tracking ‘the big one’ and the rest of them doing what they could. The biggest problem was that seeing the creatures wasn’t trivial: they seemed to absorb or bite at the plant life, which surrounded their more normal bodies, but when they weren’t moving, it provided them with a kind of camouflage. More than once, Mizuki had come across a clump of grass that she slowly realized was leaking from a hole that Isra had put in it.

Strictly speaking, the bodies didn’t need to be collected, they could just be left to rot in the woods, but they were still making an effort to at least leave obvious piles, which would help for clean up later, if that was deemed necessary.

<They’re starting to find some of them that have killed animals,> said Hannah over the party channel. <A dead deer, or what was left.>

<We’re not far behind the mother,> said Isra. They had been steadily making their way through the forest, following a path that was at times obvious even to Mizuki. It was a big creature, which they might have guessed by the eggs, each of which was at least as large as a pint glass.

<We’re away from the rest of the group now,> said Alfric. <But it’s going to be important to kill the creature that’s laying these eggs if we’re to keep this thing contained.>

<In the plant form they’re relatively docile,> said Isra. <That work should be easy.>

<It seems to be,> said Hannah. <The numbers are down, only about fifty of them left. We’re crediting fast action. Based on what Partridge says their location is, it looks like she might need to go into the field to direct efforts and get the more hidden ones.>

<How many eggs can this thing possibly have?> asked Mizuki. It seemed to have spat out hundreds, maybe more if the beastmaster’s numbers could be trusted.

“Wait,” said Isra. She’d stopped in place and was looking at a rock, one of the big ones that were common in the area, large enough to serve as a park bench, if not perhaps a dining table. Her hand went down to the rock. “This spot here, where there’s no moss or lichen.” There was a depression there, almost like a dent, if rocks got dents.

“Is that a problem?” asked Alfric. “Something to worry about?” He seemed a bit antsy to keep moving. They hadn’t seen many of the little plant ones, just the occasional clutch of eggs, which they’d destroyed, and they were going to be fighting the big one soon, not that it was necessarily going to be all that difficult.

Isra’s fingers lingered on the depression. “I think some of the rock might be stripped away.”

“Meaning?” asked Alfric. “That it’s got a third phase?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “Possibly.” She stooped down to look at the tracks. “Heavy, even for something this size.”

“What would a transition from plants to flesh to stone mean?” asked Verity.

“It would mean it’s more dangerous, if it has a shell of stone,” said Alfric. “Perhaps a lot more dangerous.” His frown deepened. <Hannah, report that the final form or end stage of the lifecycle is consumption of stone, which will make it extremely difficult to kill. I suggest retreat if people see one. Our group could probably kill one, specifically Mizuki, and Vertex could handle it too, but the townsfolk would mostly be outclassed.> Mizuki was pleased to hear something good said about her, but less pleased that she was the first line of defense against this creature.

<I’ll pass it on,> said Hannah. <We’re already getting the first of the injured, from the flesh ones. They’re the size of wolves, people say. Must be a lot of animals dying in the forest for there to be as many as there seem to be. Sometimes feathers, sometimes fur. Keep your eyes out, let me know when you’ve put the big one down.>

<Will do,> said Alfric. “Isra, we’re good to go?”

“Yes,” said Isra, getting to her feet. “I’m worried about what we’ll find.”

Mizuki hadn’t felt very nervous about it, not until that point. Alfric had said that she should start going for runs to build up her stamina, and she hadn’t done that, but now she was wishing that she had. Her job, as she saw it, was to lob as big of a fireball as possible at the thing as soon as they saw it, then run away so she’d be out of the fight.

They moved along with Isra at the lead, doing the tracking, but maybe because the creature was slowing down, or maybe because Mizuki had seen enough of its destruction, it felt like any idiot could track the thing. There were bites taken out of rocks, sometimes large ones, broken branches, trampled bushes, and small trees that had been pushed over. It was clearly big, and they weren’t coming along clutches of eggs anymore. The further they went, the more stone they found half-eaten.

“They grow fast,” said Isra. Her voice was soft. “The magic is strong. Hatchling to the size of a raccoon in a few hours. To the size of a wolf in a few hours after that.”

“More dangerous than you would naturally expect a dungeon escape,” said Alfric. “Not a nuisance, an actual threat to the region without either fast, competent response, outside intervention, or reversal.”

Mizuki wondered whether he was coming around to the Lola theory, and was about to ask when Isra said, <There.>

It wasn’t the largest monster that Mizuki had ever seen, but it was big, bigger than them, and bigger than even the lizzos that pulled the carts. It was in a part of the forest where the oaks had grown tall, leaving nothing but thin grass and moss beneath the canopy, and for just a moment, Mizuki thought that it was a rock, nothing more, but no, it was moving, swaying from side to side.

<Mizuki?> asked Alfric. <You’re up, do your best to get it in one shot. No telling how thick that stone shell around it is.>

The problem was the aether. It wasn’t like in town, where there was incidental magic used all the time, cartiers leaving a bit of a wake, clerics doing their house repairs or occasional healing, and the scant amounts that came from hundreds of ectads and built up over time. Out in the forest, in a part of the hex that had never been cleared and settled, the aether had very little, just the cast-offs of a few magical creatures and plants. The nameless monster that had somehow escaped from the dungeon had a miasma around it, which was the most prominent ‘flavor’ in the aether, but it was a creature who consumed and converted matter, or seemed to, based on the magical stink it was giving off. Those weren’t the kinds of things you could use to do offensive magic. Turning lead into gold was a neat trick, a useful trick, but not insofar as killing things went.

<It has the dungeon madness,> said Isra.

<Mizuki?> asked Alfric.

<Not sure what I can muster up here,> said Mizuki. She frowned at the creature.

<Better something weak than nothing at all,> said Alfric. <Isra, get ready to zip in.>

<From my perspective it’s more of a sedate walk,> said Isra. She glanced at Alfric. <Understood.>

<When do I start singing?> asked Verity.

<Now,> said Alfric.

Verity started up, using the party channel, but with her fingers on the strings of her lute, ready to start playing in full. Mizuki took in a deep breath, trying to steady herself, and began drawing on the aether, trying to cobble something together. It was better with Verity playing, and Verity was obviously lending power, not just from the song itself, but by multiplying Mizuki’s reach … but what she had to work with felt like so little.

Mizuki went with a fireball, the old reliable kind, but the texture and flavor of the aether wasn’t suited to it. It hit the creature, which was always a small victory given that there was some aiming involved, but when it exploded, it blew a chunk of rock off but didn’t seem to leave the kind of bloody wet mess that Mizuki had been hoping for. The creature turned on them at once, and ran directly for them, clipping trees with its bulk. It had rocky mandibles at the front, which served to protect small, sharp teeth, and its eyes were covered by brows made of more rock, beady black eyes that reminded Mizuki of how people looked in a full helm, barely visible behind the armor.

Isra let her arrow loose and zipped toward the creature even as it was building up steam. She was, all at once, standing in front of the creature but turned to face away from it, and there were two arrows stuck in one of its eyes. But just as Isra was about to fire her arrow again, the creature moved with surprising speed, and it seemed to have come within inches of hitting her. When she reappeared beside them, it was clear that something had happened, because she was moving funny, not quite limping but certainly not at her full speed.

The rock beast had two arrows in its left eye and none in its right. It was screeching at them and still moving fast, and the thought occurred to Mizuki just before Alfric said it.

<Full retreat,> he said. <Run. Warp if you need to.>

The phrase ‘poking a bear’ went through Mizuki’s mind. She ran, back the way they came, where there was at least a bit of a path, or at least the path they’d made while following the creature. The creature screeched again, louder this time, and it felt like the ground was shaking beneath Mizuki’s feet. She wished that she’d spent some time practicing the spell for the warp so she could do it in a flash, but she knew she was slow and clumsy with it, sometimes taking a try or two. It wasn’t the kind of thing you used more than once or twice a day, if that.

She had lost everyone else almost immediately, and she hoped that was because they’d scattered rather than because they’d been crushed. Running full-tilt through the forest wasn’t easy, and it especially wasn’t easy when wearing armor, going along something that wasn’t quite a path. Her heart was hammering in her chest, and she glanced back only once, which nearly sent her headfirst into the ground, after which she didn’t look back at all.

<Took Verity to the temple, Mizuki, Isra, are you okay?> Alfric was using his dungeon voice, firm and clear.

<Running,> said Mizuki.

<What was that?> asked Isra.

<Are you okay?> asked Alfric.

<I’m using the bow,> said Isra. <Walking away. Ankle isn’t quite right. Might use the warp, no sign of the beast.>

<Come find me and I’ll have healin’ for you,> said Hannah. <Last you said, you were east of the command?>

<Still running,> said Mizuki. She stopped for a moment and turned back. <I can’t see or hear it. I have no idea where I am though.> Using the warp was seeming like a better and better idea, if she wasn’t moments away from being crushed and could get it out with shaky hands.

<Go in the opposite direction to the sun,> said Alfric. <We’re heading back to command, we’ll meet you there, save your breath for moving quickly.>

Mizuki ran some more. The initial excitement of running seemed to fade quite quickly, and now that she wasn’t sure whether the creature was following her, it was a matter of putting one foot in front of the other as quickly as she could. She couldn’t really remember the last time she’d run for any real distance, and she found herself hating it.

<Mizuki?> asked Alfric.

<Still running!> she called back. <Still keeping the sun behind me, but I think I lost it.>

<Hannah, I think I might have broken my arm,> said Alfric. <Just a heads up.>

<Isra’s here,> said Hannah, <Already healed.>

<I’ll go find Mizuki,> said Isra.

<I have no idea where I am,> said Mizuki. The party channel was getting too confusing, and she was hoping that Alfric was keeping track of where everyone was.

It only took about two minutes for Isra to find Mizuki, as apparently Mizuki had wandered quite close to the rally point. Alfric was already there, standing next to Hannah, but Verity was nowhere to be seen.

“I ran ahead with the stride boots,” said Alfric, who was still breathing hard. He must have been booking it. “Verity is back at the temple, by mutual agreement. We’ll have to call out what we want to her, but going through the woods with a lute is really not something that a bard should be doing in the first place, not if we’re facing that thing down again.” He was sweating slightly. “Hannah, any deaths?”

“No,” said Hannah. “The injuries are rollin’ in though, and I’ve been earnin’ my keep.”

“Anything serious?” asked Alfric. “Anything that people will be stuck with?”

“Not so far,” said Hannah. “Almost more injuries from people bein’ careless than from the beasts, but the ones with fur and feathers are a bit aggressive when they’re hunted.”

“We’re going to need to go after the big one, and I don’t know how we’re going to manage it,” said Alfric. “Even if Isra fully blinded it, we have nothing that penetrates the stone enough to actually kill it, if Mizuki can’t do it.”

“I’d need a lot of magic around,” said Mizuki. “And we didn’t have Hannah, and Verity wasn’t really playing, and the creature itself is the wrong kind of magic, so I don’t know what you expected of me.” She had the feeling that she was talking too much.

“It wasn’t criticism,” said Alfric. “I didn’t mean for it to sound like it was. But we can’t go up against it again if it’s just going to be the same result.”

“I got too close,” said Isra. “Otherwise I would have been able to put another arrow in its eye.” She was no longer moving funny, her injury having been wiped away by the gathered clerics. “I was lucky that it only grazed me.” She didn’t have to say that getting clipped by something that big was still enough to seriously hurt a person.

“Well, I’m sorry to have to be the one to say it,” said Hannah. “But it seems as though we might need Vertex.”

Alfric nodded. “It does seem like that’s what needs to be done.” He hesitated for a moment, then walked over to their cleric, Mardin, who wasn’t too far away. Mizuki followed, feeling useless.

“Alfric,” said Mardin with a nod.

“We tracked down the mother,” said Alfric. “We tried to fight it, but didn’t have the firepower for it. Hannah’s probably kept you and the rest informed, but it’s got a shell of rock. Between Josen, Lola, and Marsh, I think you won’t have a problem punching through.”

“You’re proposing we team up?” asked Mardin.

“Yes,” nodded Alfric. “We’re weaker in terms of firepower, there’s no question about that, but Isra will be able to find it again, and we can offer support.”

“Things are getting rough out there,” said Mardin. “Those things are killing animals and tearing down trees. He hesitated. “But you’re right that the presumed mother will need to be taken care of.” He sighed. “You know it’s not my call, right? We need to talk about it as a team, maybe temporarily split up if there’s dissent.”

“I know,” said Alfric. It wasn’t crazy to think that this was the outcome that Lola was hoping for. “The sooner the better. We know where it was ten minutes ago, but every minute that passes is another minute for it to get farther away. It seemed like it was done laying eggs, but there’s no way to know for certain.”

“I’ll relay the request,” said Mardin with a nod. “And then we’ll go off together.”

“I’ll be comin’ with,” said Hannah. “Seems like things got hot out there, and bein’ able to heal someone on the spot would do us well. I’ll check in with Pann and Partridge, make sure they know where we’re goin’ and that it sits well with them.” She went off without waiting for confirmation from anyone and began an animated conversation with the cleric and beastmaster.

“Seems like what Lola wanted,” said Mizuki. “Seems like she planned all this.”

“There’s too much variance,” said Alfric. “There’s no way she could plan this, even if this was her third time through the day. I’ll grant it’s possible she grabbed a creature from inside a dungeon, but she would only know what it did by releasing it, and getting something like this would take a considerable amount of time and effort. Lola is … well, lazy might be the wrong word, but when I knew her, she wouldn’t have gone through the time and effort to take creatures out of the dungeon in secret and test them to see what would make the best distraction or whatever this is.”

“So you’re saying that it might just be coincidence,” said Mizuki.

“Yes,” nodded Alfric. He glanced at Mardin, who was keeping a respectful distance and talking to his party. “Or it might not, but we should treat it like it is.”

“She wants you back with your old party,” said Mizuki. “So she’s trying to get you to team up with them.”

“Maybe,” said Alfric. “I don’t know if that’s really what she wants. She might just be bored, which would be dangerous for us.”

“You’ll undo the day, if something happens?” asked Isra.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “That’s why I asked Hannah whether there had been any deaths. Temporary wounds wouldn’t necessitate a reset, but permanent maiming probably would. So long as we’re on track to keep the day … well, better that we treat it as a day we keep.”

“They’re coming,” said Mardin, who came over to stand with them at around the same time Hannah finished up with Pann and Partridge. “Do you really think Lola might have done this?”

“Absolutely,” said Mizuki.

“Maybe,” said Alfric. “It’s the kind of thing I think she might do on an undone day, but for her to keep something like this … I don’t think she would.”

“So this might be a day she’s intending to not keep,” said Mardin.

“Maybe,” said Alfric. “It’s somewhat unlikely to be kept as it is, given the costs involved, but it depends on what kind of report gets sent back to the province about what went on here. Self-containment is preferred, especially if they don’t know where or how the escape happened. They like to keep a timeline that’s ‘good enough’, especially since it helps keep people on their toes and gives them some practical experience. I don’t know where Plenarch decides the balance of things is.”

“They’re a minute out,” said Mardin. “And then we’ll be moving as a group.”

“Okay,” nodded Alfric. <Verity, you’re standing by for music on my cue?>

<Yes, I am,> said Verity. <You’ll have to call out instructions to me, but I’ll be giving generic benefits. Keep off the party channel as much as possible, playing over someone talking directly in your ear is more difficult. Since I’m somewhere I have peace and quiet, I might be trying something more difficult, a party boost.>

<Don’t strain yourself too much,> said Alfric. <And thank you.>

“Is she okay?” asked Isra.

“She tripped when we were scrambling away,” said Alfric. “I think if I hadn’t noticed, she might have died. I was able to lift her up and use the warp to get us away as it was bearing down on us.”

“Thank you,” said Isra, breathing out a sigh of relief.

“You made it through the woods fine?” asked Alfric. “Seemed like it managed to hit you.”

“It was a painful trip,” said Isra. “But with the bow there was never a chance that it could catch me, not once I was far enough. I got too close to it when I was aiming for the eyes.”

“It’s half-blind,” said Alfric. “That’s good. It would be better for it to be fully blind, but we can accomplish that in round two. When we’re on the return trip, be on the lookout for eggs.”

Isra nodded. Again, Mizuki felt a bit useless. She wished that she had some kind of special power, beyond just being a sorc, something that would make her indispensable. But with Vertex joining them, and a lot more magic on the table, well … she was hoping that she’d have a bit more to work with.

Chapter 53 - Siege Songs

Singing for the party while they were elsewhere was just about as miserable as Verity had always thought it would be, but worse, it was nerve-wracking. There was a very real possibility that one of them would die while she was merrily singing away in the temple.

By walls of white,
and fields of green,
the soldiers fight,
and armors gleam.
We wish them well,
Pray for the team,
And —

<She’s going to kill me,> Mizuki said.

Verity faltered for a moment and then recovered. The ‘she’ was ambiguous, and could have meant the mother monster or Lola, but following that, there was dead silence that felt like it was going on achingly long, a time in which her mind was starting to swirl that they were all dead. And then Isra was talking about eggs, and Verity let out an internal sigh of relief — internal because she’d kept singing.

The townsfolk seemed to enjoy the song, and Verity treated it like it was any other performance. She shoved down her feelings and focused on the song, both the words she was singing and the magic she was producing. It was a song of bravery, unheard by the rest of her party so they could keep using the channel, the kind of song that she’d always felt was a bit cheesy. This was her first time being in this sort of situation, hunkered down and worried about a situation that she had very little control over. There were siege songs, but she didn’t know any of them, and from what fragments she could remember, they were mostly about starvation and running low on resources, which wasn’t particularly applicable. She tried to make up her own.

The moment of battle had apparently passed, and Verity let the magic unwind, absent any input from someone else. She excused herself for a moment, promising that she’d be back for more.

She had been particularly nervous because of her close call with the creature. In their time in the dungeons, she had never come so close to dying as that, and if Alfric hadn’t been there with quick thinking and fast action, she was certain that she would have died. But no, he saw that she was in danger, swooped in, picked her up, and then executed the warp while holding her, with unflinching speed. It was as though he’d spent a few days in a relatively empty hex practicing the warp, which didn’t seem wholly unlikely.

Verity was grateful, obviously, but she was also a bit shaken. It was made worse by the fact that her best weapon was her song, and that was only an indirect weapon, not something that she could beat off an attacker with. It made her feel powerless, especially when she was using it at a remove.

Once she’d had some water and a moment to cool off, Verity started playing again, casting her magic wide rather than using the weirdly internal form that being bard to a party demanded. It was aimed at the townsfolk rather than party, spreading the magic wide and taking the edge off as much as she could. Her voice was high and clear, and many stopped to listen to her.

She was ten minutes in when Clemency came over with her own lute. The younger bard raised her eyebrows, asking a wordless question that Verity had no capacity to answer aside from a nod of the head.

They played together, with Verity leading and Clemency following, adding a richness to the sound and occasionally some harmony on the chorus. It was sometimes difficult to work with someone if you hadn’t practiced before, and should have been doubly so given that Verity was making up the song as she went, but Clemency had some talent, even if there was a roughness to her sound. Verity did her best to lean into the roughness, to make it feel like a raw, heartfelt song. There was a utility in that sort of thing, and while Verity herself had little experience with it, the theory she’d heard was that it could feel more spontaneous or real.

Their magic merged together, and Verity paid a bit more attention to that than to the lyrics she was spinning. She was blunting anger, anxiety, and general bad thoughts, and to complement that, Clemency was heightening a sense of camaraderie, community, and safety. It was, perhaps, a little bit much for them to be doing without having consulted with anyone, but no one was rushing up to stop them. In a tavern, there was an understanding that a bard would probably play at some point, but in a communal place like this, some might take the temporary altering of their emotions the wrong way.

Still, when they finished, there was a round of applause.

“You played beautifully,” said Clemency. “Sorry I didn’t know the song.”

“Oh,” said Verity. “I was making it up as I went along.”

Clemency’s eyes widened. “‘The timbre of sorrow on the walls as they fell’? That just … came from nowhere? It’s very poetic.”

“Um,” said Verity. “Well, what I try to do is think of words in terms of meter, and make note of particular lines that I like, or relations between things, or ways of phrasing. It wasn’t something that I’d planned to say, but there’s a bit of practice to get to where you can just come out with lyrics that are — well, not embarrassing, at least.” There were very often problems in her lyrics, she was painfully aware of that.

“And that’s what they teach at a conservatory?” asked Clemency. She seemed thrilled just to be sitting next to Verity.

“A bit,” said Verity. “But most of the music theory is in favor of playing better music, rather than writing or composition. At least as far as my own education went, there was almost no one teaching me about composition.”

“You’re very good at it,” said Clemency. “Do you write the songs down?”

Verity laughed. “No, they’re not worth doing that.”

“Well, I think they’re great,” said Clemency.

“I appreciate you saying so,” nodded Verity. There was something very nice about being fawned over by a younger bard. Verity was no stranger to praise, but when it came from people her parents were paying, or from the sorts of people who used concerts as an excuse for manipulative socialization, it hit much differently. “Things are going well at the Fig and Gristle?”

“Oh, very good for my first gig,” said Clemency. “But I’m already wondering where I’ll be in a year or two. The only way that I would stay in town is if I found a partner, and … well, they all seem to know each other.”

“There are a number of people who would be more than happy to give you a list of eligible singles,” said Verity.

Clemency laughed. “Well, I’ll think about that, but … I don’t know. The idea of finding a husband with a good trade who I could build a stable life with is appealing.”

At the mention of ‘husband’ Verity’s heart sank a bit, not that she’d been entertaining any notions of Clemency being … well, anything, but until that point there had been a hint of possibility, and it had just been firmly snuffed out. This was far from the first time it had happened, but it still hit Verity in a similar way to the first time, a possibility undone.

“I could introduce you to the smith’s apprentice, if you’d like,” said Verity. “I know he’s been looking. He’s not local either, though I do think he means to be here for some time.” She pointed out Micah, who was speaking with some older women.

“That is a very big man,” said Clemency.

“Well, maybe you’d want to wait anyhow,” said Verity. “Get settled, understand the town a bit more.”

“Probably,” said Clemency. She glanced over at Micah. “I didn’t say no to that introduction.”

“I should probably warn you that if he’s interested, he might do a Cairbre thing where he proposes to you?” said Verity, more of a question than a statement. She could definitely see the appeal of having things sorted away and being able to skip all of the dating and courting and all that other stuff.

“That,” said Clemency, nodding. “Would be odd. And I would need to think about it.” She smiled at Verity. “You know, you really are very nice.”

“Hmm,” said Verity. “You know, I wouldn’t say that. I was raised to be courteous and polite, but not kind. Thank you, though. Anything I can do for you, just let me know.”

Clemency grinned.

“But for now, I need to go find my party,” said Verity. “From the chatter I’ve heard, it seems like things are wrapping up, and the temple will be clearing out soon.”

They said their goodbyes, and then Verity was up and away, carrying her lute with her.

<Where is everyone right now?> asked Verity.

<About to head in,> said Alfric. <I’ve heard there’s going to be food?>

<Ay, there’s a big kitchen in the temple,> said Hannah. <Someone will be workin’ on it now, I should think.>

It wasn’t long before Verity could smell pork, as apparently someone had slaughtered a few hogs to make sure that people would have something to eat. Perhaps it had been done with the belief that the whole day would be undone anyway, but she supposed it was also possible that this was how things were in a place like Pucklechurch, where people took what they had and gave it to the community in times of need. Or perhaps there would just be payment afterward from a community fund, which seemed equally likely. Aside from the large quantity of pork, there were roasted root vegetables and quite a bit of fruit, all laid out so that people could come and get what they wanted. The local baker had brought in what felt like an enormous quantity of bread, and it was eaten fast.

Not long after people started to eat, the remainder of the volunteers came in.

“It’s done!” called Partridge. “Reduced to zero, and I don’t believe we’ve had any escapes to other hexes.”

There was a round of applause, and then a few words of thanks from various people, which involved a bit too much self-congratulation for Verity’s tastes. The hexmaster, Bo, had been absent for much of the crisis, but was in the temple saying empty nothings about how much he cared about the town and loved the people within it. Perhaps that was true, but it stunk of political grandstanding to Verity, a man taking a moment to speak when he had a captive audience. Verity’s opinion was, perhaps, city cynicism.

“This food is great,” said Mizuki. “The Pedder family will take any opportunity to roast a whole pig. They must have started right after they got the news, because it takes something like four hours.”

“That long?” asked Isra.

“Oh, sure,” said Mizuki. “And it can take even longer if you get a great big pig, or you stuff it with things, and if you want the best result, they’ll cook for eight hours, or more. Outside usually, sometimes in a trench. There’s a real art to it.”

“It’s so juicy,” said Alfric. “I don’t understand that.”

“Liquids are a big part of it,” said Mizuki. “Some actual juice goes into it, and the fats need to render, and … some other things. I helped them with a Dark Winter’s feast once, but didn’t quite learn enough to replicate it, not that I’ve ever had cause to prepare a whole hog.”

“So,” said Verity. “Are we doing the second dungeon? Because if we don’t do it today, we’d have to do it tomorrow, and we were going to the opera tomorrow, which … I think we could still do, but the timing seems suspect.”

“The second dungeon is off,” said Alfric. “We’ve put time and effort into helping with the dungeon escape, and even if we haven’t spent all that much in the way of material resources, I still think that it wouldn’t make sense to follow through with our original plan.”

“Och, never thought I’d see you arguin’ against a dungeon,” said Hannah.

“It’s a conservative decision,” said Alfric. “But I suppose if the four of you really want to, we could leave now and probably be back before dark, depending on what was in it and how slow we took it.”

“Better to be safe,” said Mizuki. “Besides, this means that next time can be the double dungeon, right? I mean, we’re in Dondrian for three days, that’s like extra relaxing.”

“No,” said Aflric. “With all the things you have planned, you’re going to need time for recovery.”

“We don’t have that much planned,” said Mizuki. “Just some shopping, the opera, the museum, dinner at a few places, meeting your family, and I guess when I say it like that, maybe it does sound like a lot.”

“Second question. What are we going to do about Lola?” asked Verity.

“Short of a confession from her, or some proof that she was the one that released the beast, there’s nothing to be done,” said Alfric. “There are some post-cognitive entads that could be employed to catch whoever was responsible, but my family doesn’t have any to loan, not with the right time frame, and the authorities wouldn’t be called in for something like this where the outcome was mostly inconvenience. It seems a little doubtful that the day will be reset, but there’s always a chance, I suppose.”

“Post-cognitive?” asked Mizuki.

“Knowledge after the fact,” said Hannah. “Bein’ able to look at a scene and see what happened there days, weeks, or even months ago.”

“Off the top of my head, my mom has a piece of glass that allows you to see whatever was going on exactly three hours before,” said Alfric. “Even that was pretty rare, and you’d need to know where the release happened.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “You know, Isra and I were talking about what it would take to kill a person, and I realized I had no idea how you’d go about catching a murderer.”

“Um,” said Verity. She looked at Isra. “Why were you thinking about killing a person?”

“Please don’t kill Lola,” said Alfric.

“You keep saying that,” said Mizuki, frowning. “But it seems like it should work, right? Screw up her plans and stuff? And it’s not like it’s forever, she just has to do the day again and stay out of my way.”

“But why were you talking about murder?” asked Verity.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. She looked at Isra. “Just … private stuff.”

“Mizuki used an expression I hadn’t heard before,” said Isra. “One about drowning a government official.”

“What?” asked Verity.

“Hard to murder someone and get away with it,” said Hannah. “First off, the chrononauts, but second, murder is the sort of thing that gets Inter involved, and when they come ‘round, they’re usin’ all kinds of entads, tryin’ to see into the past and pull thoughts from heads and … well, all that stuff.”

“Right, which is why you have to make it look like an accident,” said Mizuki. “Or like they’ve just gone missing, or ran off, or whatever.”

“I’d like to put a stop to this kind of talk,” said Alfric.

“Well, good luck with that,” smiled Mizuki, but on seeing his expression, her smile fell. “Fine, fine, I was only thinking that it’s not something that you hear all that much about.”

“Let’s keep it that way,” said Alfric. “I know death might seem like a distant thing to you, but … well, it’s not to me.”

“Because you’ve died so many times?” asked Mizuki.

Alfric nodded.

“It seems to me as though we need to do something about Lola,” said Verity. “Especially if she engineered today’s trouble.”

“I’ll handle her,” said Alfric. “I told her to contact me by mail, which takes our chrononaut abilities out of it, so … I don’t know, hopefully she’ll come to understand that I’m serious about that.”

“You talked to her today,” said Mizuki.

“I did,” said Alfric. “And yes, if she was behind the escape —”

“She was,” said Mizuki.

“Then yes, I was in some sense rewarding bad behavior,” he continued. “And if she undoes the day, then she can just do it again, if she wants to be near me and have me talk to her in clipped sentences and with a great deal of anger on my part. I don’t think that’s what she does want, but maybe.”

The rest of their lunch passed by easily enough, and they were visited by first Kell and then Micah, who Alfric had said were, at one point, alternates. Kell had a thing for Mizuki, that was obvious enough, but for all that Mizuki talked about boys and seemed to find potential in whichever ones were around, she didn’t seem very interested in Kell. In fact, she seemed more keen on Micah, who in turn wouldn’t take his eyes off Hannah, and Verity immediately began to second guess her offer to introduce Clemency.

When they were finished eating, they split off, and Verity was left with the question of how to fill the rest of the day. She needed to practice, though she’d played for quite a bit already, and there were a few preparations to make before the trip to Dondrian, even if they were going to be staying with Alfric’s family, a fact which had only recently been confirmed.

Verity was worried about her parents. Not that she was intending to see them, but if she did, they would want to talk, and … well, she wasn’t certain how that talk would go. She couldn’t handle the pressure that had been piled on her, and there was no justification for that, nor any explanation of what she was doing with her life. She had been a half-ring bard in a small tavern in the middle of nowhere, and now she was apparently a dungeon bard, and there was no path, no clear ending, no nothing.

Verity had always carried a bit of sadness with her, and there was no particular reason to be sad on this occasion, but she was anyhow.

“Are you okay?” asked Hannah as they walked.

“Fine,” said Verity. She paused. “Actually, not all that fine, if you’re available to talk later. In a professional capacity?”

“Of course,” nodded Hannah.

They got back to the house and went through with unpacking and getting back into their normal clothes, though Verity still had less in the way of armor than the rest, something that she was reconsidering following her close encounter with the monster. Once that was out of the way, Verity went to Hannah’s room — which had once been Mizuki’s room — and sat down on the bed. There was a small desk in there, and Verity glanced at it briefly, surprised to see that it was covered in papers.

“I’m writin’ a book,” said Hannah. “Though I don’t know if that’s what it will become, it seems wise to be a bit optimistic and do what plannin’ I can.”

“A book?” asked Verity.

“Ay,” said Hannah. “A book about symmetry as it applies to dungeons. There are a fair few of them in the large library at the seminary, but they’re theory only. I’m makin’ some notes on the dungeons we’ve done, the monsters in them, the layout, things like that. It’s a case study, of sorts, the kind of thing that would have maybe a dozen copies made and then sit on the shelves of shops, waitin’ for just the right customer.”

“And this is why you’ve been doing the dungeons?” asked Verity.

“No, no,” said Hannah, dismissing the thought with a wave of the hand. “I’ve been doin’ it for the experience, and only a bit of it is religious. Dungeons are somethin’ you do when you’re young, when you have a need to see the world and get in scraps and all that.”

She sat there quietly, giving Verity a pleasant smile, waiting.

“That was … a bit what I wanted to talk about,” said Verity. “I don’t know where my life is going. I don’t know what I want to do.”

“Ay?” asked Hannah. “Well, I can’t tell you that, as you’ve probably guessed. And it’s a hard thing to deal with, a lack of ambition like that. You can’t just pick a mountain to climb and be done with it … but if you don’t set out to climb a mountain, you’ll stay in the valleys.”

“I was meant for great things,” said Verity. It was, almost, an invitation for Hannah to ask, and Verity thought that she’d have answered. Xuphin had chosen her. People had spoken in tongues. “And I left.”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “It’s your return to Dondrian that’s puttin’ these thoughts in your head, is it?”

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “Maybe. Alfric is … challenging, in a lot of ways. Not in a bad way, but seeing him, his focus, his dedication, makes me feel inadequate.”

“He’s less focused than you’d think,” said Hannah. “From what I can tell, he’s less purposeful than he was a year ago.”

“I can hardly imagine that,” said Verity.

“Well, either way, Alfric isn’t a standard I would hold anyone up to,” said Hannah. “Nor would I advise anyone to try too hard to be like him.”

“I was talking to the replacement bard, Clemency, today,” said Verity. “And it seemed like she would be fine finding a husband and then just … being a bard at the Fig and Gristle.”

“And you reacted to that with horror?” asked Hannah, smiling. “Or at least, with a feelin’ that this wasn’t the life you wanted for yourself, even if you could find a good partner. And you also have no notions of goin’ back to Dondrian, where you’d be ensnared by the socialites and penned into obligations of their own design.”

“Right,” nodded Verity. She was very clear on that.

“And you’d go mad if you had to sit around with not a thing to do,” said Hannah. “I’ve seen that clearly enough.”

“What do you mean?” asked Verity, furrowing her brow.

“We’ve been together for quite a bit now,” said Hannah. “You like to be on the move, not content to sit and chat unless the circumstances are just right. Too much empty time and you’ll go find your lute to practice, just to have somethin’ worthwhile happenin’.”

“Hmm,” said Verity. “I guess so. Do other people … not?”

“Other people are better at takin’ a moment to relax, yes,” said Hannah. “Don’t you watch Mizuki sometimes?”

“She has a way of sinking into the couch,” said Verity. “Or just relaxing in general.” Verity frowned. “I had thought that over the course of my time at the Fig and Gristle I’d gotten fairly good at taking it slow.”

“Well, perhaps better than you were,” said Hannah. “I’m only sayin’ what I’ve observed, and I can’t see in your head.”

“Frankly, I feel like I’ve been doing nothing for nearly nine months now,” said Verity. “I was asked whether I write down my songs or work on composition or anything like that and …” she looked at the book on Hannah’s table. “I should be doing that. I might start.”

“And the garden too, where it seems you’ve been spending quite a bit of time,” said Hannah.

“Well, now is the season for it,” said Verity. “Or past the season for it, actually, which means that I’ve been playing catch-up. And I did hear that there was a gardening club in Pucklechurch, where I’d like to have something to show for my time, even if they sit there and talk about social matters.”

Hannah nodded. “But you feel that’s not enough? A nice garden, nice songs, a girl on your arm?”

“Xy is hardly on my arm,” said Verity. “We haven’t even had a first date, or a first … liaison, if we’re not to be partnered.”

“Well, either way, whomever you end up with,” said Hannah, waving a hand. It was curious phrasing, and for a moment, Verity wondered whether Hannah was making a pass at her, but that seemed rather out of character. “What I’m askin’, not that I think you could answer now, not that I think you should answer without a bit more thought on it, but … why would that not be enough? A quaint little house, a nice, proper garden, songs for the townsfolk, someone you love, why would that not be enough?”

Verity thought about that for a moment. “I guess I don’t have an answer, but it’s something that I should think about.”

Hannah nodded. “There are certain people who feel that they need to do something with their lives, and it might be that you’re one of them, or your parents tried to convince you that you were, but if it feels like there’s nothin’ to do …” She paused. “I don’t imagine you’d like hearin’ it, but I do think Alfric might have some insight for you.”

“He might?” asked Verity.

Hannah nodded. “It’s one of his central struggles, though I don’t imagine he’d put it like that. We’ve got a tamed world, in his view, with nothin’ of adventure or struggle, nothin’ that a single person can really accomplish on their own. That’s the attraction of dungeons for him, at least in part, a way for him to prove himself, to have a meaningful challenge.”

“And … you think that I’m like that?” asked Verity.

“Ay,” nodded Hannah. “But not the same, really, just … you’re in this world where you’re tryin’ to find out what you could do that would mean somethin’ to you, and it seems that Alfric went through that struggle himself, though I don’t imagine his answer will be the same as yours.”

“I suppose I could talk to him,” said Verity. “I don’t know that the others have struggled with that, with purpose.”

“I would imagine not,” said Hannah. “For Mizuki, it’s belonging, it’s people. For Isra … well, you’d know better than I would.”

“I suppose,” said Verity. “She’s become a fast friend, though what goes on in her head, I’m sure I only know half of.”

Hannah nodded. “I hope that’s helped. You let me know, if you’ve more thoughts. But I do think it best we head downstairs to make sure that the others aren’t getting into trouble.”

Chapter 55 - Carving a Path to Dondrian

Mizuki woke up early, or at least early for her. Hannah, Alfric, and Isra were already awake, and Hannah had made a quick breakfast, which Mizuki ate and made some never-to-be-given notes on. She had found, with Hannah doing the cooking, that there were certain things that Hannah just didn’t have the deftness for, and there were other things that Hannah did differently because of a difference in opinion about food, much of which stemmed from her being raised in Cairbre. Mizuki liked things thin and crispy, at least when that was an option, but Hannah tended to go thicker, and it was one of those things that didn’t seem like it was all that important, but was actually pretty critical. The textures came out all wrong, at least in Mizuki’s opinion. And to Hannah’s way of thinking, salt was a wonderful thing, but to be added by whomever was eating after the food was cooked, which Mizuki didn’t like at all.

The minor quibbles about food preparation weren’t doing anything to make her less anxious about going to Dondrian. She found herself checking in on the herb dragon far too much, which didn’t actually help much, because so far it was quite a lazy little baby.

“It’s two days, right?” asked Mizuki.

“With an option for three,” said Alfric. He was regarding her with a calm expression. “It’s going to depend on how much there is to get done, and whether our schedules spill over enough that we want to go another day. We’ll get our ‘disguises’ sorted away before we go anywhere. My mom thinks it’s a hilarious idea, she’s all on board. Dad will pick us up and drop us off.”

“And he’s not here yet?” asked Mizuki.

“What?” asked Hannah. “You think that he’d sneak in, full silent, without us knowin’?”

“Do I look okay?” asked Mizuki. She was wearing her temple best, which felt a little ridiculous, and apparently wasn’t fancy enough for the opera, meaning that they were all going to get new clothes of some kind.

“You look fine,” said Alfric. “My dad isn’t one to judge on looks, and he knows that you’re all just starting out.” The ‘just starting out’ bit was not reassuring.

There was a knock on the door, and Mizuki moved first. She was out of the kitchen in a flash, and had the door open before anyone could say a word.

“Hello, is Alfric home?” Alfric’s father was surprisingly short. Mizuki had been expecting someone that was taller and stronger than Alfric, Alfric but moreso, but his father was a few inches shorter instead. They looked more or less alike, though Alfric’s father had slightly lighter skin, and their noses were quite different from one another, Alfric’s being somewhat wider. Their eyes were the same though, brown and alert. He didn’t have anything like adventuring gear, just a simple, down-to-earth shirt and jacket in earth tones with some well-worn boots, which made Mizuki feel better about what she was wearing.

“He’s home,” said Mizuki. She held out her hand. “I’m Mizuki, you must be Harmon?”

“That’s me,” he said, smiling. “You’re all ready to go to the opera?”

“Of course,” said Mizuki.

“Well, it will take just a bit, the entad I’ve got for group travel is … unconventional and slow.” He gave a sheepish smile.

“Well, come in,” said Mizuki, opening the door wider for him. “We spend a lot of time in the kitchen together. Verity isn’t up yet, I don’t think.”

There was a round of introductions, with Harmon giving each of them a genial smile. Alfric had written about them, but not very much, which Mizuki thought was probably because he was worried about things leaking back to Lola, or maybe just because he took personal information pretty seriously.

“I’ll go wake Verity up,” said Isra.

“Looking forward to meeting the last of the party,” nodded Harmon. He turned to Alfric. “I have bad news, which is that we’re using the carver.”

Alfric groaned. “Dad, I know you think that it’s cool, but please can we not?”

“It was the only thing that was available for such a distance,” said Harmon. “Your mother is busy today and you do have five siblings. And my personal travel entad doesn’t allow for ‘live’ transfer through layered storage, so this is what it is.”

“What’s the carver?” asked Mizuki.

“You’ll see,” smiled Harmon. “I think it is, in fact, rather cool. We’ll need to go outside for it though.”

“I have a question,” said Mizuki. “You don’t seem to be wearing any entads.”

“Mmm,” said Harmon. “Your eyes deceive you.” He reached under the collar of his shirt and pulled out a chain necklace with a little twelve-sided copper pendant.

“Okay,” said Mizuki. She hadn’t caught it, but it was possible she could have, if she’d been looking very closely. “But … that’s just one?”

“I suppose I can let you in on a little secret,” he said with a smile. “This one is half of an entad pair. The person who wears it gets all the benefits of wearing whatever you put on a mannequin. That mannequin is loaded with, oh, around forty entads, but because of it, I can go around without carrying lots of mismatched metal or spending a small fortune on getting it all to look right. In a dungeon, I wear heavy armor and carry things with me, but day-to-day, I can just wear this.” He let the pendant fall back down beneath his shirt.

“Dad claims to be a minimalist,” said Alfric.

“Sometimes minimalism just means hiding all the maximalism,” said Harmon.

Not long after that, Verity came down the stairs, looking a little rumpled, and said hello.

“I must confess, I actually saw you perform once,” said Harmon. “When you played at the Ellusifé.”

“Oh, I played there twice,” said Verity. “Which time, if you recall?”

“It was Song of the Tiger Moon,” said Harmon. “Three years back, I think, I can’t remember the event.”

Verity nodded. “The first time I played there then. I remember being quite nervous to be playing for more than a thousand people.”

Harmon nodded. “Well, you’re in a different line of work now.” He smiled, and Verity gave a thin smile that faded quickly. “If everyone is ready, we should go outside so I can get the carver ready. It should take about ten minutes per person, and then we’ll go all at once.”

They went into the back, setting their bags down, not knowing what to expect, except for Alfric, who seemed a little bit annoyed that they weren’t using some other method.

Harmon held out his hand and summoned a thick, tall log from nowhere. Mizuki took a step back when it warped into existence. It was quite sizable, as tall as her, and quite a bit thicker around, probably taken from a very tall, very old tree. There were relatively few of those in the woods around Mizuki’s house, and she thought of them as the ‘old ladies’ of the forest.

“Mizuki, if you’d care to go first?” asked Harmon. “All I need from you is for you to stand facing me and hold still.”

“Okay?” asked Mizuki.

“Dad has a flair for the dramatic,” said Alfric.

“Certain things in life are interesting,” said Harmon. “I believe it is our solemn duty to make them more interesting. Otherwise, it’s a waste.”

“Or you could let the magic speak for itself,” said Alfric.

“Well now you’ve ruined it,” said Mizuki. “Because I know there’s going to be magic involved.”

Harmon smiled. He held out his hand, and a wooden case appeared in it, about as wide as his chest. He set it on the ground and cracked it open, then stood up and looked at Mizuki. “Do you want to make a pose?” he asked.

“A pose?” asked Mizuki.

“For the carving,” he said.

“Oh,” said Mizuki, looking at the block of wood. “Um … sure.” She spread her feet apart slightly and held her hand out in front of her, as though she was going to throw a fireball. It took her a few moments to get something she thought was worthy of being captured in wood.

Harmon pulled a sword from nowhere and with a flash, sliced straight through the upright log. One stroke followed the next, and soon he had something that was … well, not even close to resembling Mizuki, except maybe in the very basic shape. He’d removed huge chunks of wood, but it didn’t look like a person, let alone like Mizuki.

“Roughing is done,” said Harmon. “Now for the more impressive bit.”

The wooden box he’d taken out was filled with tools, hundreds of them, metal bits with wooden handles, and they rose up into the air all at once, swarming around the cut log like bees to sugar water. Wood began to be shaved away with great speed, and the carving began to take shape. Mizuki stepped forward to look at it, and Harmon held up a hand.

“Keep the pose, please,” said Harmon. “I could probably finish without it, but I do better work when I can look at my subject.”

Mizuki stayed where she was. “You’re actually doing the carving?”

Harmon waggled a hand. “There’s heavy entad assistance. I use three entads that boost my skill as a woodworker, and they mostly play well together. The case of tools offers its own boost, as well as multitasking. But on top of that, I spent a few months picking up woodworking, which helped enormously.”

“The logs are special,” said Isra.

“They are!” said Harmon. “Good eye.” It occurred to Mizuki that they hadn’t actually introduced her as a druid. “The logs are from our property, planted beneath some enormous growthstones, about three years old. The wood cuts easily until after it’s been treated, when it becomes as hard as stone, and doesn’t splinter unless you’re doing something very wrong. I wouldn’t be able to ignore the grain as much as I am if I were using normal wood.”

“It’s a very long way to go in order to get long-distance travel,” said Alfric.

“We have about half a dozen entads that could get you there faster, easier, and with less fuss,” said Harmon. “But they’re all in use at the moment, or bound to people who aren’t me, and the carver is, as I’ve said, interesting, and you’ll have something to remember the trip by.”

“There is no way that they’d want these carvings,” said Alfric.

“I want mine,” said Mizuki. It looked quite a bit like her, and wasn’t done, though the tools were making smaller and smaller changes. “Though I don’t know where I would keep it.”

“We have a warehouse full of the things,” said Alfric.

“Alfric exaggerates,” said Harmon.

“No he doesn’t,” said Mizuki.

“Well, fine, he doesn’t,” said Harmon. “I think this one is done, who’s next?”

Harmon must have taken a few liberties with the wooden statue, because Mizuki looked like a totally awesome stone-cold killer, a sorcerer with the aether at the tips of her fingertips and a will to use every scrap of it. “It’s amazing,” breathed Mizuki.

“Well, you can’t have a statue of yourself in your house,” said Verity. “I’m sorry, a painting might be acceptable, but a full-sized statue of yourself — you live with other people, it’s not something that I think we can accept.”

Mizuki pouted.

“Maybe out in the garden?” asked Verity.

“That would be a bit tricky,” said Harmon. “Mostly in that it wouldn’t last terribly long. Even with a good sealant, you’d have bugs, rot, and inclement weather. The wood will set up incredibly hard, but it’s not immune to damage.”

“I could deal with most of that,” said Isra.

“Oh?” asked Harmon.

Isra nodded.

Harmon looked at Alfric, and Alfric nodded too. “Fine, fine, keep your secrets. Who’s next?”

Hannah stepped forward. “As symmetrical as you can, please.”

“Oh, of course,” said Harmon. “It’s not my forte, but I’ve done a bit of studying the art styles of Garos. Now, before we start, can you tell me whether you’re of the Arcross or Perinth school?”

“Arcross,” said Hannah. “I’m surprised you’d know the difference.”

“Oh, I’ve made an effort to have a bit of learning,” he said. “When you get to be my age, you have to occupy your mind with something, and my best dungeoneering days are behind me.”

“Um, what’s this about schools?” asked Mizuki.

“Dominant art styles of Garos,” said Harmon. “The Arcross school argues, in short, for complexity across the plane of symmetry, while the Perinth school goes for a more reserved approach. That’s over-simplifying it, but you can think of Arcross as being baroque and Perinth as being minimalist.”

“And you’d favor Perinth then?” Mizuki asked him, frowning. She was very worried that this little trip was going to result in her having to ask an enormous number of questions that would both make her look dumb and annoy the others.

“Well,” said Harmon. “What I want, in my life, is a few simple, practical tools, well-made and functional. I don’t want individual things, my sword, my armor, my home, to be works of art by themselves. But from my art, I want whatever does the best at evoking something in me, some emotion, some revelation, and I don’t particularly care whether it does that in a simple way or a complicated one.”

“This pose then, I think,” said Hannah. She had been moving around, trying to figure something out, and had settled for having her hands on her hips with her chin slightly raised. She had also done something to her hair using her clerical powers, removing some of the messiness and making it perfectly symmetrical.

It was very Hannah, in Mizuki’s opinion, with a bit of appealing superiority and sureness to it.

“Your dad seems nice,” Mizuki said to Alfric. They were standing over to one side, and Mizuki was speaking low and also making sure it was something she didn’t mind being overhead. The others had their own side conversations while she was mostly just standing there.

“He’s gotten more artsy as time goes on,” said Alfric. “He’s always been on the verge of dipping his toes into the Society, but I’m a little worried he’s going to go all the way.”

“The Society?” asked Mizuki.

“Rich people,” said Alfric. “Verity’s people, essentially, people who have been rich for ages, to within the extent of the law, and have their own little incestuous society built up that excludes other people.”

“But hasn’t your family been rich for ages?” asked Mizuki. “And don’t they have their own, er, well, not incest, but bloodline thing?”

“We’ve got different cultures,” said Alfric. “Different media, different mores, different hobbies. The Overguards don’t attend the society balls, we obviously don’t marry into them, we might know them, but we keep ourselves separate from them. Somewhat deliberately, actually. These are people who spend most of their time holding onto generational wealth as best they’re able, and when they’re not doing that, they’re engaged in politics to attempt to stop the government from taking even more from them.”

“Which … your family doesn’t like?” asked Mizuki.

“Not in the least, but as with anything, it’s complicated,” said Alfric. He bit his lip. “It’s one of those political things that I don’t think you need to care about, since it probably won’t affect you.”

“Because you think that I won’t be rich?” asked Mizuki.

“Not to the level that you’ll have to care,” said Alfric. “If we’re reliably doing a dungeon a week, we could live pretty comfortably, especially if we can keep using your house and mostly eating meals that we — you — cook. By the time we’re too old for dungeons, and arguably before that, we’d have enough to live off of. That’s … not really what I wanted, but it would be doable, maybe, to go that slow and still be quite comfortable.” He hesitated. “If you want a very quick overview of the law and the politics around it, I can give it to you.”

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “Your family has a lot of money and they don’t really mix with some other people who have a lot of money. Got it.”

“More or less,” said Alfric.

“It’s actually very complicated,” said Verity. “But I think my turn is coming up.”

“Please don’t talk politics with my dad,” said Alfric. “He can get heated about it. More now than when he was younger.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Verity. “Let’s hope our fathers never meet.”

When it was finished, Hannah’s statue, like Mizuki’s, was whisked away into extradimensional space, and Harmon twisted his wrist, which did something to cause all the wood chips to fly up in the air and coalesce before winking out of existence.

“Do you have a preference?” Harmon asked Verity.

“No,” said Verity. “Though, could I be sitting? Or does it need to be standing?”

“You can sit,” said Harmon. “Would you like your lute to be part of it?”

“If that’s possible, yes,” said Verity. She sat next to the plants and struck a pose with her lute, a serene look on her face. The look she was going for, Mizuki suspected, was poise.

“Well, Isra, I’ve a request,” said Hannah. “Could you be sittin’ as well?”

“Yes,” nodded Isra. “Though I don’t sit often.”

“Eh,” said Mizuki. “I get that you want her to sit so that there will be some symmetry, but she’s right, she doesn’t sit often. We want her to be in the most ‘Isra’ possible pose, right? If these are going to end up being garden sculptures, anyway.”

“And what would that be?” asked Isra. “What is the most ‘me’?”

“Bow drawn?” asked Hannah. “But that would ruin the symmetry. Och, I s’pose that’s fine, I can’t hope to dictate how people pose for their statues, can I?”

“Mmm,” said Isra. “But I don’t think I can keep a bow at full draw for so many minutes.”

“It’s fine, do it once and I’ll work with it,” said Harmon.

They milled about. It was quite a bit of waiting, and Mizuki was eager to see Dondrian. Eventually, Harmon stepped back from the statue, looking it over. “Verity’s almost done, which means that we’re just a few minutes away from all four being done.”

“You still haven’t said what you’re going to do with them,” said Mizuki.

“Oh, well,” said Harmon, smiling as his dozens of tools attacked the log. “I have an entad that interacts with statues of people. When I press the wand to them, they’ll swap places with you. I can’t take people at range, but I can take statues.”

“Like I said,” replied Alfric. “It’s a very long way to go for the intended result of getting everyone to Dondrian.”

“The statues only need to be made once,” said Harmon. “And it gives me some time to speak to your party before you go off through the city like wild animals.” He gave one last look at Verity’s statue, then declared it done. Mizuki was impressed by how much he’d heightened the poise and grace Verity had presented, because to her, it had already felt heightened when Verity was doing it.

Isra went last, and Mizuki was curious how the bow and string would be carved, but as it turned out, after a few minutes and some conversation, Harmon simply used different pieces of wood, some of them taken from what had been carved from the other logs. The bow string was thicker in the sculpture than in real life, presumably for the sake of having it stay in place.

“Alright!” said Harmon, clapping his hands together. “On the way back, we won’t have to do this. Now then, I’ll get the statues over to our house and you’ll find yourself replaced, one by one, with statues, so get into the position where you’d like your statues to be. Maybe inside, for now, until we can seal them.”

He went walking off to find some grass, maybe to meet some unknown requirement, then disappeared in a blink, and they all moved inside.

“Like I said,” sighed Alfric. “It’s a very long process, but it’s the kind that dad likes. Five or six entads just to do what a better entad would do by itself. You noticed how he just left without needing to make a big deal out of it?”

“The whole time he was making the carvings, I was thinking that it was exactly the sort of thing you’d enjoy doing,” said Mizuki.

“Well,” said Alfric. “It’s just a bit embarrassing, that’s all.”

“I enjoyed it,” said Isra.

“I did too,” nodded Verity. “I’ve never had a carving done of me.”

“Well, so long as no one thought it was too much of a bother,” said Alfric. “If my mom had been picking me up, we’d have —”

Alfric was gone, replaced by a wooden statue of himself, one which was a little bit shorter and maybe younger, though clad in heavy armor and holding his helmet at his side.

“Well that’s disconcerting,” said Mizuki. She turned to Verity, only to see that their bard was a statue too, one that was sitting on a block of wood. “Yup, not liking this.”

“It was explained what was going to happen, ay?” asked Hannah. “If you ask me, it would be terrifyin’ if you didn’t know what was goin’ on, but since we do —” and then she was gone as well, her perfectly symmetrical statue in her place.

“Just you and me now,” said Mizuki. “I really shouldn’t be so nervous.”

Isra turned into a statue before she had a chance to say anything, not that it would have been necessary.

For just a moment, Mizuki felt empty and alone, with nothing but four wooden statues around her. She wished that she’d been first to go.

And then she was in a large building that had nearly two dozen wooden statues, along with her friends. It was a big room, with timber beams held in place by iron braces, and there appeared to be a fair amount of junk piled up, some of it in boxes, other things covered by tarps, and in general, a nice pleasant mess all around.

“It is a warehouse,” she said.

“When I think of a warehouse, I think of something bigger,” said Harmon. “But yes, unfortunately, we’re starting a tour of the house with the least interesting room in it.”

“Oooh, a tour,” said Mizuki.

“A short tour, unfortunately,” said Harmon. “I have business to attend to elsewhere.” He clapped his hands together. “But I can show you around, certainly, especially to your rooms.”

He began to move, and they followed behind, with Alfric bringing up the rear. He seemed at ease, happy even, and Mizuki smiled at him, gratified that he smiled back.

The warehouse opened up into a long hallway with many doors and a large staircase that spiraled down to a lower floor. The walls were wooden up to Mizuki’s waist, then a rich red with a pattern of tiny golden diamonds every now and then. The most interesting thing to Mizuki was the ceiling, which was slanted and had a number of windows at regular intervals. The corkscrew staircase had a glass dome over it with a number of metal struts connecting the panes. It let in a huge amount of light. The other thing that Mizuki zeroed in on was the doors, which were all different from each other.

“The upper floor is for sleeping and privacy,” said Harmon. “We won’t be showing off any of the kids’ rooms, unless Alfric wants to show you his?”

“I suppose,” said Alfric. “It’s this one.”

The door was a light wood stained blue, nearly teal, which made Mizuki smile, because it seemed entirely unlike Alfric. He opened it and stepped inside, ushering them in. On the wall next to the door was a chart, which Alfric had glanced at: it seemed to be a chart of the tides.

Mizuki was surprised by the size of the room, given that the doors were somewhat close together in the hallway. Looking at the wall, it seemed like the room was bigger on the inside than it was in the hallway, and Mizuki frowned at that. It seemed to imply some kind of entad magic, which also made sense of why the doors were all so different from each other.

“We’re somewhere different,” said Isra. “The air is different.”

“It’s a fishing town about thirteen miles or so from downtown Dondrian,” said Alfric. “I had really wanted to be a sailor when I was little.” He pointed to a door set into the opposite wall, which was flanked by windows that looked out onto docks filled with sailing ships and hundreds of white birds. With a start, Mizuki realized that she was looking at the ocean for the first time. It wasn’t all that different from the Proten Lakes, but she still found it surprising that they really had traveled so far.

“All the rooms … are in different places?” asked Isra.

“They’re spread out around a twelve hex area,” said Harmon. “Doors as portals are common enough that we have a bit of a collection. They’re all a bit different from each other though, and some have more restrictions than others.”

“My sister Kyrie’s room can only be passed through if you sacrifice a bone of a native species of the place you’re going to,” said Alfric. “She’s got a jar of them.” He nodded to the door they’d come in through. “That one will lock you out depending on the tides, and doesn’t have terribly many more uses now that you’ve all come in.”

Mizuki looked around the room. It was fairly large, which wasn’t a surprise given the family’s wealth, but there were many more books than she’d expected there to be, and rather than a bed, Alfric had a hammock. He also had a desk sitting by the window, with a number of papers strewn about it. She had thought he’d keep a tidier room than that, but then again, she hadn’t ventured into his third floor room in her house, so it was just an informed guess. There were a few bits of training kit, a blunt sword and a spear with no tip, and a dresser of clothes. There wasn’t anything terribly sentimental, no old toys or stuffed animals or mementos or anything like that. That was about what Mizuki expected of Alfric, but it still made her a bit sad. There was a tiny little bathroom off to one side, nothing more than a shower, toilet, and a sink, all right next to each other, separated from the bedroom by a curtain.

“So you could just go out into the ocean?” asked Isra.

“When I was old enough, yes,” said Alfric. “Before that, the door wasn’t there.”

“All the kids are at an age where they’re free to come and go,” said Harmon. “The house is becoming less like a house, and more like a set of houses, which was what we’d always hoped for.”

“These doors seem like they’d be expensive,” said Mizuki.

“Oh,” said Harmon, waving a hand. “Most of them we found. Eight out of a dozen, maybe?”

Alfric seemed uncomfortable that Mizuki had mentioned money, so Mizuki kept her mouth shut. The idea of having a door that went straight from Pucklechurch to Liberfell … well, her grandfather had an entad that allowed him to make the trip, but it was a prized possession that he’d said many times was priceless, and it came with some severe restrictions.

“Moving on, and sorry for the rush,” said Harmon. He went out of Alfric’s room and down the hallway, and they followed him. “Now this door is a special one, and leads into the guest rooms.” He turned a dial, which had a number of colors on it, and opened up the door when it was on red. “You’ll have to remember your colors.”

The room was small but well-furnished, and the bed was big. Everything was red, from the pillows, to the walls, to the sheets, with only a few spots of whites and pinks to break it up.

“Sorry about the color scheme,” said Alfric. “The door does it. This was all one room, and sometimes is all one room, but the door makes color copies. Perfectly safe to sleep in, or keep your things in, so long as no one collapses it, and even then, it’s just a mess, not actually dangerous. There are seventeen colors. They each have a small bathroom too, but you’ll have to content yourself with a shower.”

“The horror,” said Hannah. “I thought we were going to have real accommodations.”

“I want something a little less vibrant,” said Verity. “Seems like it would be hard to sleep with all the red.”

“One caution,” said Harmon. “And that’s that the door won’t open if someone else has it opened on the outside, so if you turn the handle and it won’t budge, just wait a bit. We’ve only had seventeen in the guest rooms once, and traffic was a bit of a nightmare. Oh, and close the door as soon as you’re done so others can get out. And don’t try to take any of the colored things out, they’re stuck in there until we collapse again.”

“So this house is very magical, is what you’re saying?” asked Mizuki.

Harmon nodded. “Now for the downstairs, and I’m sorry, but it’ll have to be quick.”

They went down the corkscrew staircase together. It was wide enough around that it barely made a full rotation before bringing them to the ground floor, where they came out into a foyer whose doors split the house off in five different directions, one of which was a set of double doors that Mizuki assumed led outside. As for the other four, each of them seemed to have different lighting, and she frowned, trying to make sense of what was clearly magic. Most of the doors were open.

“Alright,” said Harmon. “Alfric can give you the rest of the tour, if need be, but the green door leads out into nature, the blue door leads to the cozy rooms, the red door is toward the workshop and study, and the yellow door is the dining room, kitchen, laundry, and other drudgery.” He turned to Alfric. “Good to go?”

“Mom’s helping with dresses later?” asked Alfric.

“She has all kinds of plans, yes,” nodded Harmon. He stepped forward and wrapped Alfric in a hug. “Good to see you, and I’m glad you’ve found some people who suit you.” He pulled back once Alfric had hugged him back. Alfric seemed quite embarrassed about the whole thing. “Everyone else, it was a pleasure to meet you, our goal is to stay out of your way. If you’d like dinner or any other meal, it’s all provided by entads, so no need to say you’ll be joining us ahead of time. We are planning to eat together though, and have a bit of a — game, I guess you’d call it. Now I’m afraid I have to run, because I think I might be late.”

He disappeared before Mizuki could even say goodbye.

“I think this house might give me a headache,” said Isra. “I can feel each of these places.”

“Oh,” said Alfric. “I didn’t even think about that.”

“I feel fine now,” said Isra. “I’m not sure I will later. It’s more than I’m used to, I may need to readjust or close myself off.”

“The whole house is spread out over Dondrian,” said Alfric. “Or places that are close to Dondrian. The doorways on this level can all be used as much as we want, so we leave them open.”

“But they’re all different?” asked Mizuki.

“Two of them are the same, actually,” said Alfric. “A pretty rare entad set, and with the bonus of being straightforward, limited by weight but not so much that it ever shuts down. The workshop area — well, you won’t have to worry about it. The other one,” he pointed at the one termed the ‘nature’ area, “requires a blood sacrifice, but dad does that every month, and we eat the goat afterward.”

Hannah moved over, peeking through into the workshop and study area. It was a hallway of some length, with more doors. “Bit of a draft?”

“Oh,” said Alfric. “Uh, yeah, that section of the house is actually in far southern Cairbre.”

Hannah raised an eyebrow. “You can just go to Cairbre whenever you’d like?”

“Um, no,” said Alfric. “You’ll end up insubstantial. But everything in the study and workshops is also equally insubstantial, so … like I said, you won’t have to worry about it, it’s well-insulated. And mostly you wouldn’t be able to tell that you were ghostly. I don’t actually think we’re planning to spend all that much time in the house.”

“And why would you have your workshop in such a cold place?” asked Hannah. “You’re talking far south?”

“Beyond the tip of Lathaigh,” said Alfric. “And it’s mostly so that you can crack a window in case you work up a sweat. You have to remember that Dondrian is actually pretty far north, quite a bit hotter, so it’s good for us to have a refuge from the heat. Again, I don’t really think that it matters much.”

They were standing by the workshop hallway when a dog poked its head out from one of the doors, then trotted over to them. It was bigger than any dog Mizuki had ever seen, by quite a large margin. The top of its head came up to just below her collar bone. Aside from being absolutely massive, it was quite furry, like people said arctic animals were, with floppy ears and large eyes.

“You have a dog?” asked Isra.

“Family dog, yeah,” said Alfric. “He’s a dungeon dog, actually.” He frowned. The dog was sniffing each of them in turn. Mizuki held out a hand, and the dog gave it a casual lick. “This is Emperor.”

Isra was staring at the dog with wide eyes. “He’s smart.”

The dog sat down in the hallway, his sniffing complete, and looked at each of them in turn.

“Yeah,” said Alfric.

“And old,” said Isra.

“Yup,” said Alfric.

“How old?” asked Mizuki.

“Four hundred and thirty-eight years old,” said Alfric. “Like I said, he’s a family dog.”

“And is he a good boy?” asked Mizuki. She smiled at Alfric.

“He thinks he’s smaller than he is,” said Alfric. He was frowning at the dog. “We never really got along that well.”

“You didn’t get along well with a dog?” asked Mizuki. She reached a tentative hand forward, and the dog, Emperor, bowed down and moved his head beneath where her fingers were. He shook his head from side to side, getting his pets one way or another.

“He bowled me over a few times,” said Alfric. “Gave me attention when I didn’t really want it. And I fell off him and broke my arm, which I realize now wasn’t his fault, but … still left an impact when I was little. I would describe our relationship now as cordial.” This struck Mizuki as frankly ridiculous.

“What were you doing on top of him?” asked Mizuki. She was petting Emperor in earnest, and his head was lolling, clearly loving it.

“When we’re little, we take him for rides,” said Alfric. “Family tradition.”

“Does no one pet you boy? Huh?” asked Mizuki. She kneeled down and began using both hands to scratch behind the dog’s ears.

“Don’t believe his lies,” said Alfric. “He gets petted all the time. But we’re really not here for the dog.”

“Aren’t we?” asked Hannah, who had joined Mizuki in petting the dog.

“Well, personally, I’m ready for some time in the city,” said Alfric. “There are a few things that I have the rings for now that I wasn’t able to get when I left. Verity, if you want a disguise, we can do that now.”

“Where are your brothers and sisters?” asked Mizuki.

“My brothers are older,” said Alfric. “They still have rooms in the house, like me, but they’re building up their own lives. Same for my oldest sister. The two younger ones are around, probably in their rooms or the study or something. If I knew, I would find them and make introductions, but we’re not here to meet my whole family.”

“Aren’t we?” asked Mizuki, grinning at him.

Alfric sighed. “Okay, well while you pet the dog and seek out my sisters, I think I’ll take Verity down to the family vault.”

Mizuki stood up, quick as a flash. “I’m coming with.” She clicked her tongue. “Come on Emperor.”

Chapter 54 - Hatching

Isra’s time as keeper of the egg was coming to an end.

The egg lived in its little glass jar, kept at exactly the right warmth by the ectads, breathing by virtue of the ectads, in conditions far more perfect than it would get in the wild. There were certain things that needed to be done as well, things that only Isra knew. In the hands of the Liberfell bastlekeeper, it would likely have died, but she’d given him instructions, and hoped that he would follow them correctly. The egg needed to be turned every now and then, not to ensure proper heating, but because it would grow wrong if it were pointed in the same direction for too long. The day before it was to hatch, she picked some fresh herbs from the garden, mostly mint, and placed them around the egg so that it could smell them.

It was the evening, following their communal lunch, which itself followed the dungeon escape. That was when the creature in the egg chose its time.

“It’s going to hatch soon,” said Isra.

“Neat!” said Mizuki. “So I’ll just have to chew up some herbs and spit them out? Like a momma bird?”

Isra nodded. “With lots of spit.”

“Oh I can do slobber,” said Mizuki. “You wouldn’t believe how slobbery I can be.” She snuck a glance at Alfric.

“First off, don’t be crude,” he said. “Second, I’m not sure that Isra would get that joke, if you want to call it that.”

“I wasn’t being crude,” said Mizuki. “You’re the one making it crude.”

“I understood the joke,” said Isra. She liked jokes, especially the dirty ones, at least when she understood them, because they seemed to be one of the only places where people would talk about certain things. Sex, especially, seemed a very funny thing to Isra, which made the jokes all the more funny. However, she was, she had found, terrible at telling jokes. “I like jokes.”

“Including crude ones?” asked Alfric.

Isra nodded. “Especially crude ones,” she said.

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “I wouldn’t have figured you for it.”

“Why?” asked Isra. The nice thing about being with these people was that she could simply ask why, and they would respond, rather than acting weird about things.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “You’re usually reserved, and you dress with what around here is a kind of extreme modesty.”

“The headscarf?” asked Isra.

Mizuki nodded.

“And it makes you think that I have no sense of humor about the body?” she asked.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “That would be traditional, for Tarbin.”

“And you think I’m traditional, for Tarbin?” asked Isra.

“I guess not,” said Mizuki.

Alfric cleared his throat. “Even if someone thinks that modesty is a virtue, it doesn’t mean that they can’t find humor in transgression,” he said. “In fact … I mean, I’m just guessing, but maybe they’d find more humor in it, if it’s more transgressive?”

“See, this is why you’re not funny,” said Mizuki. “Too much thinking.”

“I’ve seen you laugh at my jokes,” said Alfric.

“I take pity on the less fortunate,” said Mizuki.

“Well, that explains your love life,” said Alfric.

Mizuki frowned for a moment, then laughed. “Alright, fair play.” She moved over to the jar the egg was in. “When you say that it’s going to hatch soon, how soon do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “It depends on the dragon.”

“It’s not a dragon,” said Alfric. “And we probably shouldn’t call it that.”

“What is a proper dragon?” asked Isra. People spoke of them in hushed tones, but she’d never actually asked what they were. She’d seen a few pictures of them, giant reptiles with enormous wingspans, but that didn’t explain how people spoke of them.

“Dragons have been around as long as the hills,” said Alfric. “The oldest of them are thousands of years old, maybe tens of thousands of years old. When they’re young, they ravage the lands, and when they’re old, which most of them are, they hide away.”

“In demiplanes,” said Mizuki.

“Well,” said Alfric. “There’s been a lot written about dragons, but precious few actual conversations with them, so there’s more speculation than there is evidence, and people talk a lot when there’s no way to disprove what they’re saying.”

“You never believe me,” said Mizuki with a frown. “Why is that?”

“With respect,” said Alfric, which seemed to Isra the start of something dangerous. “Dondrian is a place of learning, and I had access to some of the most knowledgeable tutors and teachers that money could buy. If I don’t believe your account of things, it’s because I was taught by people who are in a position to know. If dragons did go to live in demiplanes, how would they acquire them? And more to the point, how would you know?”

“You think I’m wrong,” said Mizuki, folding her arms across her chest.

“I don’t know if you’re wrong,” said Alfric. “But … how the world is, and what we know about the world, is important. People make things up, they’ve made things up for most of human history, and we’re sitting on top of a pile of knowledge where some things are made up and other things aren’t. So yeah, it’s important to know how we know things, to not just have it all be hearsay or worse.”

“Well for your information, I heard it from my grandfather,” said Mizuki. “And whatever else, he was a man who knew things.”

“Okay,” said Alfric. “So, maybe it’s something that’s common knowledge in Kiromo, or even specialized knowledge, or speculated on. I can accept that. It’s just not something that I had heard, and it seemed like if dragons really did retreat into extremely rare and valuable demiplanes, it was something I would have heard about.”

“What’s a demiplane?” asked Isra. She wasn’t entirely sure what they were fighting about, if they were fighting. Their posture and tone seemed to indicate a fight, and she was curious about it. It seemed to have come from nowhere.

“A demiplane is a created reality, like a dungeon,” said Alfric. “But stable, larger, and you can go in and out of it at will. The kind that people usually imagine is as wide as a hex, with its own artificial sun that’s a part of the demiplane, but they come in smaller sizes.”

“And larger,” said Mizuki. “There are some the size of a whole province.”

Alfric frowned at her. “Dozens of hexes across?” he asked.

Mizuki nodded. “According to my grandfather, yes. You could fit a whole country inside of a demiplane, if you really wanted to.”

“I’m having trouble with the concept,” said Isra, frowning. “Nature has a balance to it, cycles that don’t seem like they would be present. With a world only a hex across, how would you have rain?”

“I’ve been in a few,” said Alfric. “There are different solutions. Some places will hire a wizard or two to set up something long-term, or there are entad solutions, though an entad that can produce weather, at scale, from nothing, would be pretty costly. Of course, if you can afford a demiplane, you can probably afford the other stuff as well.”

“It sounds lonely,” said Isra. “And small.”

“Does it?” asked Mizuki. “It sounds great to me, cozy.”

“There’s no world beyond,” said Isra. “Don’t you feel the same way about dungeons? That they’re horribly small? And … not cozy?”

“Dungeons are scary though,” said Mizuki. “I mean, if I could stuff this house and the woods around it into a demiplane, I’d do it.”

“We’d need to be extremely wealthy to do that,” said Alfric. “Extremely wealthy. I think what I heard was that the number of known demiplanes is in the hundreds.”

“And your family doesn’t own one?” asked Mizuki. “And here I thought you were rich.”

“Depends on what you mean by family,” said Alfric. “There are a number of them in the chrononaut clan, yes, but none of my immediate family. My dad considers them a waste of time and money, given how much available land there is in Inter. You’re paying a huge markup per acre.”

“Alright,” said Mizuki. “I will say that on this one particular thing, it’s possible you know more than me. But I still do think that there are giant demiplanes.”

“Legendary ones, maybe,” said Alfric. “Province-sized, with a hundred hexes or more … I don’t know, I guess.”

Isra didn’t like the idea of demiplanes. It seemed like they’d be too sterile, too small, too much like a toy world. She kept her thoughts to herself though, in part because she thought she might still be misunderstanding a demiplane. She also had more questions about what these things were, how they looked when you were inside them, how you entered them, and all kinds of other things, but if there were only two hundred in the world, it seemed unlikely that any of it would actually matter. Like ley lines, it seemed like her questions could wait until it was actually relevant, if ever.

“There,” said Isra. “The first crack.”

They both came over to see.

“Where?” asked Mizuki.

“There,” said Isra, pointing. The claw of the dragon tapped against the internal wall of the egg again, harder this time, and the crack became more noticeable.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “So it’s hatching today then, that’s great. Do we need to do something?”

“No,” said Isra. “It will get stronger as the day goes on, make more cracks, then pull itself out, looking ugly.”

“Ugly?” asked Mizuki. “Nah, she’ll be cute.”

“Not when she’s freshly hatched,” said Isra. “You’ll see. Newborn animals are gross. Once they’re cleaned up, they look much better.”

They had already placed herbs all around the egg, which Isra thought was the only thing that needed to be done. It was hard to say what the egg’s mother would have done, if anything. Isra somewhat suspected that in the wild, the creature would simply lay eggs where the herbs were, and the young would be born in a patch of mint or similar, but it was difficult to say.

She was more aware of the gaps in her knowing, of late. She knew things that others didn’t, but there were things she didn’t know that she somehow felt she should. Cooking with Mizuki had been eye-opening in that regard. Isra had never understood the importance of getting everything to be of the same thickness, but Mizuki had explained that different thicknesses would take different amounts of time to cook through, and it was so obvious after the fact, but apparently not something that was simply Known to a druid. It was also difficult to know how long to cook something until it had what Mizuki described as a ‘perfect toothsome quality’, and Isra had been a bit confused about the concept until they took a half hour to cook pieces of broccoli to varying levels of doneness, ranging from raw to mush.

There were all kinds of things that Isra simply Knew without knowing how she knew. The conversation between Mizuki and Alfric, the fight, if she wanted to call it that, had been a bit befuddling, because most of the things that Isra knew were simply apparent to her without having an original source. They were both claiming to have knowledge about demiplanes and dragons, and both of them had been told something by other people, who in turn had probably heard it from somewhere, or as Alfric had said, had made things up.

It didn’t feel like the way knowledge should be, teetering piles of inference and trust, but she could understand that not everything could be experienced firsthand. There were enormous questions remaining though, questions of who to trust and how they knew things, and she didn’t imagine that anyone could give her guidance, because they themselves might not be trustworthy. At least on the topic of dragons and demiplanes, it seemed that one of the two was wrong. At least one of the two.

Isra had only vague ideas about what the egg would become. She knew what its needs were, what would help it to hatch, things like that, and she knew some details of its body, but she didn’t know what it would become, and she had no idea what it would be useful for, if anything. As she was discovering with cooking, she wasn’t terribly good at guessing whether or not things would taste good, and while she knew whether things would be good or bad for her, she couldn’t tell whether oil had gone rancid except by smell.

They were all looking at the jar together when Mizuki’s fat cat, Tabbins, put his paws up on the end table and looked in too.

“The egg isn’t food,” said Isra.

Tabbins lowered himself back to the floor and sauntered off through the house, likely going to one of his several sleeping spots. He hadn’t been terribly happy with people moving in, and had spent a few nights in the woods until Isra explained things to him.

“It boggles the mind,” said Mizuki.

“So you’ve said,” replied Isra. There was something nice about how impressive Mizuki seemed to find someone giving instructions to her cat.

“How long are we talking?” asked Mizuki, returning her attention to the egg. “An hour?”

“Roughly,” said Isra.

“I am so excited,” said Mizuki. She turned to Alfric. “But I’m going to continue to call it a dragon, just to warn you.”

“Can you call it an herb dragon?” asked Alfric. “Just so there’s no confusion.”

“Sure,” smiled Mizuki. “So what do you think it could be used for?” She directed this question at both of them.

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “What do people use animals for?”

“It’s unlikely it’ll be used for anything,” said Alfric. “Animals and plants are — well, high variance. But in terms of what we’ll be looking for, the biggest things are some kind of material, whether that’s skin, scales, claws, or horns, maybe milk if we’re really lucky, and productive labor of some kind is a distant possibility. Beyond that, I guess we’ll monitor growth rates and domesticability and see whether or not it will make for a good pet. The fact that it looks a bit like a dragon is actually pretty good for us, since it means that if it does make a good pet, it would sell for more.”

“And we’d breed them up?” asked Mizuki.

“Ideally,” said Alfric. “Isra, you think that would be possible?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “They’re not sexually mature.”

“Well, when you know, let me know,” said Alfric. “Ideally they lay eggs in clutches rather than just one or two at a time, but we found these three all together, so … I don’t know. There’s potentially a fair bit of money here, if they’re good for something.”

“And if not, then we have a team mascot, right?” asked Mizuki.

They stood, chattering with a few interjections or bits of ‘expert’ input from Isra, until the herb dragon had finally made its way out of the egg, pushing the bits and pieces aside to lay down on the bed of herbs they’d prepared for her. By that time, Verity and Hannah had come downstairs.

“You were right,” said Mizuki. “This is pretty gross.” It was covered in what was left of the glair, which it was already weakly licking up.

“Give her an hour,” said Isra. “She will clean herself. From there, she will start to move around, and not long after, be ready for her first meal.”

The herb dragon became the center of attention, and by proxy, so did Isra, who was able to tell them all when it was ready to be touched, how it should be held, and what it needed. It was a bit of a useless creature, incapable of taking care of itself, but that was nice for them, since it meant that it wasn’t immediately attempting escape, destruction, or anything else.

The herb dragon was thin and bony, but it would fill out in time. Its neck was long and thin, barely supporting its head, but it already had horns, which had a look similar to driftwood. The scales were nearly white, but would have more color with time. The claws were long, largely defensive, she thought, retracted like a cat’s in normal circumstances with the same little toes like beans. It was a creature that was to be stroked rather than petted, and it would grow thicker and fuller from the chewed-up herbs it would eat in the coming days. For all that Isra knew about it, she was excited to know more. The egg had revealed itself to her slowly, and there was more knowledge of this creature yet to come.

“Like I said, a few days in the jar will suit it well,” said Isra. “And we have a week to build an enclosure for it, if we still want to do that.”

“I really don’t think we can justify letting it go free, even if you give it instructions,” said Alfric. “It’s a violation of law.”

“They don’t make exceptions for druids?” asked Verity.

“Not that I’m aware of,” said Alfric. “Though I guess they might.”

“I could keep this creature from escaping,” said Isra. “It seems cruel to limit it if there’s no need to. It will mostly eat herbs.”

“In the winter too?” asked Verity. “Because we should get a little greenhouse going, if that’s the case, or … I don’t know, use the growthstones, if we’re going to be taking a few from Besc.” Verity touched Isra’s elbow. “You can let me know what I should be planting in order to feed it?”

“Of course,” nodded Isra.

“And tomorrow we go to Dondrian,” said Alfric. “We’ll bring the jar with us, and hope that the herb dragon is fine in there, which I’m sure she will be, given that Isra would be able to tell us long before something went wrong.”

“Whoa,” said Mizuki. “You’re saying that like we’re done here, but we haven’t even done the most important thing.”

“Which is?” asked Alfric.

“Giving her a name,” Mizuki smiled.

“I would like to propose either Lerial or Marsc,” said Verity. “That’s the opera we’re going to, and we’ll be bringing the herb dragon to it.”

“We will?” asked Alfric.

“It’s a private box, isn’t it?” asked Verity. “And the opera lasts long enough that I wouldn’t want to leave our baby herb dragon alone somewhere.” She looked at Isra, and Isra nodded. It was unlikely that something would happen in the four hours they would be there, but Isra would feel better if they were able to respond quickly.

“I think that would probably be fine, so long as we’re not carrying the jar with us through the opera hall,” said Alfric. “And so long as it’s not making any noise.”

“What is Lerial and Marsc?” asked Mizuki. “Like, what’s the plot? I don’t want to name our herb dragon after some horrible tragic character.”

“It is a bit of a tragedy,” said Verity with a frown. “Lerial and Marsc are childhood friends who are separated by circumstances, then reconnect later in life, whereupon they go through some tribulations. They do get together in the end, but it’s with pain in their past and a sense that things could have gone differently.”

“And which of those is a girl’s name?” asked Mizuki.

“Both of them,” said Verity.

“Ah,” said Mizuki. “And that’s why you like it?”

Verity shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know. Seeing it was … formative for me.”

“So you’re saying there are pretty girls,” said Hannah.

“Pretty girls aren’t really the point of the opera,” said Alfric.

“And the story isn’t really about that either,” said Verity. “It’s about love, named and unnamed.”

“So there aren’t pretty girls,” said Hannah.

“Well,” said Alfric. “It really is more about the music and the emotion. We can probably go backstage after the show, if you’d like, but they also come out to mingle and accept their plaudits. Their attractiveness is kind of beside the point.”

“Well I didn’t mean anything by it,” said Hannah. “That was just my understandin’ of why people came to these things, and, you know,” she waved a hand. “Actors.”

“Actors?” asked Isra.

“They’ve a reputation for promiscuity,” said Hannah.

“Well, that’s true,” said Alfric. “But I don’t think that you should go into the opera thinking about things like that. You come for the music and the emotional story it tells you.”

“Okay, so Lerial?” asked Mizuki. “I think that’s a fine name for a dragon.”

“Herb dragon,” said Alfric.

“It might be a bit classical,” said Verity. “And I worry about what kinds of nicknames Mizuki will come up with.”

“My days of nicknaming pets are over,” said Mizuki. “It is true, in the past, I used to call Tabbins ‘Tabby’ or ‘Bins’ or other childish things, but no more.”

“You were doing it earlier this morning,” said Verity.

“And this morning was the past, wasn’t it?” asked Mizuki. She wagged a finger. “Woe to you, if you seek to engage in a battle of wits with the likes of me.”

“Well, I’m fine with Lerial if you are,” said Verity, rolling her eyes. She looked around. “Any other suggestions or vetos?”

“This is going to be a party pet?” asked Alfric. “I think ‘pet’ is a bit, well … there’s a chance that our best course of action will be to sell it, or kill it.”

“How dare you say that about Larry,” said Mizuki, moving to put herself between Alfric and the herb dragon. She was only half joking, by Isra’s reckoning.

“If it grows too fast, shows signs of breeding by itself, becomes violent,” said Alfric. “There are lots of cases where we might be forced to put it down. That’s all I’m saying.”

“But you also think there’s a chance we might eat it for its meat,” said Isra.

“Well,” said Alfric. “No, because we want to breed them if they’re useful. But there’s a big difference between a pet and a commercial animal.”

“Fine,” said Mizuki. “But given it’s going to take some time to grow up, no harm treating it like a pet, right?”

“Two years to reach maturity, I think,” said Isra.

Alfric whistled. “Is that new information?”

“Yes,” said Isra. “And it’s also a guess. I’m not sure what shape it will have then, but it will be bigger.” She looked at Mizuki. “Time to spit out some herbs.”

“For little Lerial,” said Mizuki. She took some of the herbs they had picked, mostly mint, and stuffed them in her mouth, chewing on them.

“This is gross, I’m going to go practice,” said Verity, making a face.

“You’ll need to chew thoroughly,” said Isra. “And use lots of spit. It’s not what Lerial’s mother would have produced, but I think it will be close.”

Mizuki, whose mouth was full, nodded, and spent quite a bit of time chewing until she spat out, in one gob, something that was a slobbery paste. It was gross, Verity had been right about that.

Their little herb dragon saw this addition to its jar though, and lifted its head on a thin neck to sniff the air, then slowly made its way over and began to eat the spit-up herbs.

“She likes it!” said Mizuki. She peered in close at the dragon. “We’re going to bond, right?”

“No,” said Isra. “But an animal knows where its food comes from, and will seek out more, which is its own kind of affection.”

“Ah, so like what I’m doing with the four of you,” said Mizuki, nodding.

“You’re going to have to spit up herbs for her five times a day,” said Isra. “And it can’t all be mint, it will need to be chives, sage, and whatever else we can get. Not dried, as fresh as possible.”

“Joy,” said Mizuki with a frown. “Why did I volunteer for this?”

“Because you have a big heart,” said Alfric. “Now, herb dragon aside, we need to get packed and ready. My father will be coming early in the morning to fetch us, and I’d like for him to not be wandering around Pucklechurch for too long.”

Isra was still waiting to see whether the day would be undone, and they had some extended and fruitless conversations on the subject during dinner, but while that hung over them like a cloud, there was still work to be done. She packed, using a spare bag of Mizuki’s, a pitiful amount of clothing and what felt like not enough for a trip across Inter.

And in the morning, it was, in fact, a new day, one that promised Dondrian, whenever Alfric’s father showed up.

Chapter 56 - The Family Vault

There was no door to the family vault. Instead, you were just whisked there by someone who was keyed in, in this case, Alfric. Mizuki wanted to go first, so Verity waited.

She had overheard bits and pieces of Alfric’s conversation with Mizuki regarding what ‘rich’ meant. While Verity’s family was rich, they were at a lower tier than the Overguards, and it was entirely true that their culture was quite a bit different. Verity’s parents were a part of the Society, a relatively close-knit group if you discounted the backstabbing and gossip. While there were occasional new members, either through marriage or more rarely, the merits of personal enterprise, it was largely a matter of bloodlines, those families that could hold on to their wealth from generation to generation, as difficult as that was with the laws as they were.

A house like Alfric’s would be beyond the dreams of most people, especially given how much magic was built into it. Having bits of the house in different areas of the region allowed for fast travel by all the members of the household, beyond just the aesthetic functions. Dining being provided entirely by entad … well, it depended upon the quality of the food, but from the things that Alfric had said about his family, Verity had very little doubt that it was in excess of anything she’d had before, putting trained chefs to shame. Yet they didn’t act particularly rich.

Verity knew the politics of the situation mostly because of her parents, especially her father, who was always fretting over the position of the family. Taxation and seizure were the twin specters that seemed to haunt him, and he spoke of them frequently. They were, to put it in her father’s language, being bled at multiple different levels, thrashing around like a wounded animal trying to stave off the tax collectors, and at the same time, their business interests were at threat from the workers, who could legally seize a company in a forced buy-out at what her father considered to be rates akin to robbery. Her father hadn’t actually suffered from a company going into seizure, but he spoke about it often, and when it was a part of the Society news, it felt to Verity like it was all anyone spoke about.

There were certain things that were not taxed and which could be passed down to children without penalty. Homes were one of them, as were clothes and food. There were, if Verity understood her father right, all kinds of arguments about what counted as being within those realms, and he expressed some annoyance that their second home in Merilay was taxed at a much higher rate than their primary home. Taxes were largely on the businesses, but also on the accounts, much to his displeasure.

The Overguards, by contrast, had an embarrassment of riches, and seemed not to think too much about it, at least if Alfric and his father were anything to go by. There had been some element of showing off in the wood carvings, but that hadn’t been about wealth, at least not so far as Verity could see. Instead, it was simply enthusiasm for something a bit dorky.

If her parents ever met Alfric’s parents, she was certain that they would hate each other. In fact, it was entirely possible that her parents had met his parents, though if they had, she hadn’t heard anything about it. She did let their conversations roll over her though, especially with regard to other families. And they had hired Alfric to come find and report on her, which she suspected had quite a bit to do with his family’s name or position.

Alfric saved her for last, bringing in the family dog before her at Mizuki’s insistence. It gave time for the anticipation to build.

The vault was huge and well-organized, large enough to put the biggest entad emporium to shame. There were five levels, with a hollow in the center and a little lift going between them, and lots of bright light. Despite how large the vault was, it still seemed that space was at a premium, and things were packed tight, with racks of weapons nearly overlapping each other. There was enough in the vault to have outfitted an entire army, and surely enough destructive power to have leveled a small city, if not one as large as Dondrian.

“This is for the whole extended family,” said Alfric, as though that explained the absurd amount of entads. “Uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, everyone under a pretty wide umbrella. Most of it is bound, either to a person or a party, and the things that are bound are sectioned off by who they’re bound to, but we’re not really here to sightsee, we’re here for disguises.”

They were all looking at the riches with wide eyes. It was hard not to.

They passed a set of long-handled weapons, all of which had labels attached to them, and they were organized by their types, so many of them that there were separate sections for spears, bidents, tridents, polearms, poleaxes, on and on, types that Verity didn’t know and had perhaps been invented by the dungeons.

“A lot of these are worthless,” said Alfric as they walked. His dog, Emperor, walked beside him, and Alfric absent-mindedly patted his head as they walked. “It’s less impressive than it looks.”

“It looks extremely impressive,” said Mizuki.

“Well, the bound stuff eventually builds up, a ton of it, and unless you’re going dynamic, most of it has to just stay in storage. A lot of it is terrible, and the stuff that’s not terrible is out-classed.” He shook his head.

“Dynamic?” asked Mizuki.

“Changing your equipment as the circumstances demand,” said Alfric. “Usually through the use of fast storage. If you need a polearm, you use a polearm, if you need a sword, you use a sword. You take into account the monster’s magic when you do it. It’s a lot of mental overhead and cross-training, usually. My mom selects her armor and weapons from a set of more than a hundred, but she has entad assistance for picking what’s appropriate.”

“I’m starting to feel overwhelmed,” said Mizuki. Her eyes hadn’t stopped moving.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Alfric. “I’m just trying to give some context. The best stuff we have usually gets rented out or used on our person, so most of this is second-rate.”

“It still seems impressive,” said Isra. “It’s larger than the entad shops I’ve been in.”

“It’s larger than the entad shops I’ve been in,” said Verity.

“Well, it’s not a shop,” said Alfric. “There’s no worry about inventory or whether or not something will sell, it’s just … our stuff.” He came up short. “Here, something in this row.”

They had come to a row that consisted mostly of clothing, with shawls, shirts, hats, skirts, pants, all hung up on various hooks or hangers, each with a little card attached that said what it did. There were quite a lot of colors, but the categorization seemed a little haphazard until Verity realized that unlike the weapons they were organized by what they did rather than what they were. A label marked thirty or so items as being ‘disguise’, with a much larger selection next to it, not all cloth, which was ‘cosmetics’.

“And you can just come in here at any time and take what you want?” asked Mizuki.

“Well,” said Alfric. “We’re encouraged not to, and there’s a book that tracks who takes what. If you’ve won it yourself in a dungeon run, that’s a bit of a different story, but … well, most of us do go a little crazy with the entads at some point, wanting to try things out, and sometimes one of them will go around the house as a toy. Overall though, yes, I can take what I want.”

Verity was reading through the cards one by one. Each entad was unique, but if you had enough of them, organized properly, there was a bit of overlap and places where that uniqueness was harder to see.

“We have time enough for you to try things out, if you’re interested,” said Alfric. “How much of a disguise you’re going for is up to you, though I’d think it would be enough to just change the face.” He pulled a scarf from a peg. “This one lets you rearrange your face like clay, but you have to be a little careful with it, because if you bump something by accident, you can end up looking a little wonky. My mom sneezed with this one on and ended up having a very awkward conversation with the banker she’d been talking to.”

“Doesn’t this create some problems for disclosure?” asked Mizuki. Alfric raised an eyebrow. “Just asking.”

“Yes, it does,” said Alfric. “There are rules for ethical disguises. Don’t talk to people you know, don’t talk about yourself, don’t listen in on conversations people wouldn’t want you to be privy to, and so on.”

Mizuki rolled her eyes, then looked around. “Ooo, a hat!”

“It’s face-obscuring,” said Alfric as Mizuki slipped the wide-brimmed hat on. Her face blurred, which produced a faint humming noise. “When you want people to know that you’re going incognito.”

“Lame,” said Mizuki, pulling it off and putting it back on a peg.

“Do you know what each of these do?” asked Hannah.

“No,” said Alfric. “But I went through a period when I wanted to be a spy.”

“A spy?” asked Mizuki.

“Chrononauts are suited for it,” said Alfric. “And it seemed interesting. Ethically fraught, but interesting.”

“Is there much call for spies?” asked Hannah. “I’d have thought those days were pretty much over.”

“So long as one group of people is trying to get one over on another group of people, there will be spies,” said Alfric. “I’d have been working for Interim, probably in Tarbin or North Tarbin. But I was quite young, and feeling a little rebellious, not wanting to do what my mom and dad did. It passed pretty quickly, especially once I learned how boring spying really is.”

Verity looked over at Isra, who had slipped on a ring and gone green, literally: her skin was the deep green of plants just after rainfall.

“Is this a disguise?” asked Isra.

“Um,” said Alfric, quickly reading the card. “Change eye color, skin color, hair color, hair length, hair texture,” he said. “Not a great disguise, but it will do in a pinch.” He looked up. “Oh, that’s actually cosmetics, that makes more sense.”

“Mmm,” said Isra, putting it back. Her skin returned to its normal dark color.

“Hey, I’m a boy,” said Mizuki, who’d put on a cloak and grown a beard. Her hand briefly went between her legs. “Aw, what a rip.”

“I’m guessing Verity won’t want that one,” said Alfric.

Mizuki was reading the card. “This is one way only? Gives a beard and flattens breasts? Lame.”

“Most of these are pretty lame,” said Alfric. “I did try to warn you.”

Verity slipped on a hair clip and turned to look at Isra. “How’s this one?”

“You look like Verity’s sister,” said Isra.

“I wouldn’t recognize you, but there’s a resemblance, ay,” said Hannah.

“It’s weird,” said Mizuki, peering at Verity’s changed face. “I like it.”

“It’s probably the least weird of them,” said Alfric. “Though I think there are a few more since the last time I was through here. If you want a better disguise you could also be a little bit shorter. Off the top of my head, would you rather be proportionally smaller or have a chunk taken out of your legs?”

Mizuki laughed, though Verity didn’t think that it had been a joke. Alfric was giving her an earnest look.

“Proportionally smaller, please,” said Verity.

“Of Kesbin, I’d expect?” asked Hannah. “Seems a thing they’d like to have.”

“Oh, we’ve given lots of things away,” said Alfric as he moved down the hall of entads. “I have to imagine that the more pronounced effects are the ones that have found their way into the hands of commerce or the clergy.” He took a bangle down from a peg and handed it to Verity. “This should let you be as short as Mizuki.”

“You can be small pals with me!” said Mizuki.

“And here,” said Alfric, taking a wand from the wall. “Can we change your hair color too? I’m a bit worried that you’ll be found out, and I know you’re not ready for a return to the Society.”

“Sure,” said Verity.

“Lasts twenty-four hours, will need to be reapplied,” said Alfrc before tapping her on the head with the wand. He placed the wand back in its holder, where it sat next to hair of various colors and styles, which were apparently samples that the wand used. “Um, there should be a mirror around here somewhere.”

“Kyrie broke it,” said a voice. The man was obviously built from the same mold as Alfric, and sauntered toward them with a smile. His nose was slightly wider and his eyebrows a bit thicker, but the biggest difference between them was his silky demeanor. He was wearing flashier clothes too, with gold embroidery and red trim. “Good to have you back, little brother.”

“She broke it and didn’t replace it?” asked Alfric.

“She keeps saying she’s going to,” said the brother. “This is the new party we’ve been hearing so much about?”

“I really haven’t been putting much in the reports,” said Alfric. “Everyone, this is Mo, the eldest.”

“The eldest Mo, or eldest brother?” asked Mizuki, who was looking him up and down.

“Both,” said Mo. “There are two more Mos I know, both younger, and no mo’.” He gave her a very cheesy smile and she rolled her eyes.

“Ugh, he’s terrible,” said Mizuki. “I love him.”

“What are you here for, Mo?” asked Alfric.

“Can’t I stop by to see my little brother?” he asked. “But seriously, I’m here for some cosmetics, the girl I’m seeing likes blue eyes and I thought I’d surprise her.” He grabbed the ring that Isra had tried on and held it up. “You’re not using this one, right?”

“Go right ahead,” said Alfric.

“Good to meet you all,” said Mo. He turned and left just as suddenly as he’d come.

“So the way you are isn’t how the rest of the family is?” asked Mizuki. “I can’t help but be a bit disappointed.”

“We probably won’t be seeing much of them, aside from my mom, who is intent on dressing the four of you up like dolls,” said Alfric.

“Not you?” asked Hannah.

“I have opera-ready clothes,” said Alfric. “I think my mom will do right by you, but … well, she’s happy that I have a party that’s doing regular dungeons, and she wants to show her appreciation in a way that isn’t awkward or overstepping. I think we have everything we need here, unless anyone else was serious about their own disguise?”

“Before we go, can I change the dog’s fur color?” asked Mizuki.

“Only if you want my mom to yell at you,” said Alfric. “Purple is his favorite, by the way.”

“Fine,” Mizuki grumped.

“So what’s happenin’ for the rest of the day?” asked Hannah.

“You’re free to do whatever you’d like,” said Alfric with a shrug. “We’ve got no formal plans that I know of. Tomorrow is the museum and the cathedral, tonight is the opera, that’s it as far as I’m concerned.”

“I’m going to find some street food,” said Mizuki. “I’ve got two hundred rings budgeted for food.”

“That’s absurd,” said Hannah.

“I think I’ll practice my lute,” said Verity.

“Seriously?” asked Mizuki.

“There’s an old joke,” said Verity. “If I take a day off, I can tell. If I take two days off, the people I play with can tell. After a week, the audience can tell. And after a month, even the critics start to notice.” This didn’t get much in the way of laughs, maybe because they weren’t musicians and had never worried about critical reception. Possibly it was her delivery. “Anyway, I do need to practice, and the nature center seems like it would be the place to do that.” She glanced at Isra.

“I think I’ll see the ocean,” said Isra. “And speak with a few of the city creatures.”

The phrase ‘city creatures’ raised a few eyebrows, and Verity imagined her having in-depth conversations with the day owls that plagued Dondrian.

Alfric took them out of the vault and for a time, they went their separate ways, though not before they’d each picked a color for their guest room and gotten what luggage they had squared away.

When Harmon had said that the green door led out to nature, Verity hadn’t known quite what to expect, but it turned out to be a number of rooms set in any idyllic hillside section of Dondrian with walls tastefully concealed by artful landscaping. This amount of land inside the city proper seemed like it would be quite expensive, and it seemed a bit out of character for the family, given how conspicuous it was. The view was excellent though, one of the best that Verity had seen, and she was well-acquainted with the tall hill she was on, which jutted up from the central hex and had all the best houses on it. It was in the area that her mother had always lusted after.

There was a small greenhouse, one with plenty of signs and, it seemed, was filled almost exclusively with unique dungeon plants. She assumed, given Alfric’s own caution and what she knew of the laws, that they were all sterile. Despite having said that she was going to practice, and having her lute case in hand, she spent quite a bit of time there, marveling at a few of the plants they had on display, especially those with large flowers or that were fruiting. The smell was earthy and damp. Either someone was taking care of the plants, or more likely, there was entad and ectad support in place to handle things without creating a long list of daily chores.

Aside from the greenhouse, there was an enclosed pool, though somewhat unusually, it had lily pads, mosses, fish, frogs, and other bits of life in it, all arranged with such beauty that it was definitely deliberate (though the frogs moved of their own accord, and were unartfully piled up on each other in one corner).

Verity decided to practice outside, and had to pick between a bench overlooking the city and the ocean beyond it, or a lone chair by the fire pit. She picked the chair, as it looked comfortable, and when she sat in it, another identical chair appeared beside it. She was guessing that it would provide seating for as many as wanted it, which explained why the chair was all by itself.

Being back in Dondrian was making her anxious, but being with friends and in a disguise did quite a bit to assuage her concerns.

Verity settled on songs from Lerial and Marsc, though she was only a single player, and to do them justice required a somewhat sizable string orchestra. It was an opera in the classic style, with sharp distinctions between voiced parts and instrumental sections, never overlapping the two, and typically had a smaller orchestra of string instruments only, though Verity had attended a production that had used the full force of an orchestra using a new composition, which she hadn’t particularly thought was an improvement.

Having been reduced down to Mizuki’s size made the playing more difficult, not because it changed her understanding of the instrument — that had been magically preserved — but because her fingers had to extend further to play the chords. A number of instructors had complimented her on her long, elegant fingers, and she wondered if they’d have said the same if she was smaller.

There was some occasional discussion over the party channel, in part because it was simply necessary for coordination, but also because they wanted to keep each other informed. Mizuki was giving reports on street food, and Verity was somewhat worried that by the time the opera started, Mizuki would be sick. Isra was largely silent, but was apparently seeing the ocean for the first time and speaking with whatever animals she could find, which sounded innocent and lovely to Verity, enough so that she considered that she should have invited herself along, especially after all the work to get her disguise in order. Hannah and Alfric were, it seemed, taking a more in-depth look at another part of the house, particularly some of the training equipment, which Hannah had some interest in.

Verity had made it through three songs when someone new came to join her. She was dark-skinned, and there was a bit of a family resemblance, but it wasn’t immediately clear to Verity whether this was a younger sister who looked older than she was, or the fabled mother, who was showing no age. Her hair was poofy but pulled back, her eyes brown and somewhat hard, which was the only thing that suggested age. The seriousness was what reminded Verity most of Alfric.

“You must be Verity,” said the woman when Verity was finished, and there was something gentle in the way she said it that made Verity certain this was the mother. She was wearing a simple blue dress and walking around barefoot, with not an entad in sight.

“I am,” said Verity. “You’re Ria?”

She nodded. “Do you mind if I have a seat?”

“Not at all,” said Verity.

Ria sat down in the spare chair, and a new spare chair popped into existence. “I’m glad I caught you alone.” She smoothed out her dress. “I’m afraid I’ve spoken with your parents.”

Verity stiffened. “I was really hoping that I could keep them out of my business.”

“I haven’t said anything to them, and I don’t intend to,” said Ria. “You’re a guest and have a right to your privacy, and beyond that, from what I know of your situation, I think they’re in the wrong. Children should have a right to self-determination, to find themselves and pursue their own lives, whether those are lucrative or not, whether they’re prestigious or base. Not that I would consider dungeoneering ‘base’, but there are people who hold that opinion.”

“What do my parents know?” asked Verity.

“Only what you told them when you left,” said Ria. “But they know that it was my son they sent after you, and — reading between the lines a bit — they were hoping that there might be a connection between our families, through business if no other way. They don’t know you’re in a party together, and they certainly don’t know you’re doing dungeons.”

“That was what they talked to you about?” asked Verity. She returned her lute to its case. She didn’t feel like playing anymore, and had done enough that her fingers would still play well.

“We had a polite discussion,” said Ria with a nod. “The family likes to pretend that we’re disconnected from people like them, but it’s not entirely true. In part they were here to speak of possibilities, but I wanted to know about you, to the extent they could tell me anything.”

“They never listened to me, so they wouldn’t know,” said Verity. “I wouldn’t have left if they had just,” she clenched her fist. “I don’t know. Listened, or took me seriously.” It was indecorous to say, the kind of thing that would be a major faux pas if said in front of another member of Society, no matter how sympathetic they seemed.

“Your mother refers to what you’ve been doing as a sabbatical,” said Ria. “A temporary blip in your presence within the Dondrian music scene.”

“That does sound like her,” said Verity. She regarded the older woman. “Are you suggesting something by that?”

“No,” said Ria with a shrug. “I do want Alfric to have a good, loyal party, and I worry that your parents threaten that, but I’m not in much of a position to help, nor do I think it would be wanted.” She rose from her seat, and the chairs collapsed back into one. “I thought you should know I talked to them, and I’ve passed on to you what I thought was good to pass on.”

“Thank you,” said Verity. “Sorry if I was impolite.”

Ria nodded. “I know how it can be, with parents.”

“You do?” asked Verity. “You’re part of a dungeoneering family. And … not to seem fawning, but Alfric says that you’re the best dungeoneer.”

“My father was a difficult man,” replied Ria. “He wanted a gentler life for his children, and didn’t approve of my enthusiasm for the dungeons, nor the way I went about it. His outlook on the dungeons wasn’t particularly healthy. To him, they were a burden, a curse to be borne, the price for success and a truly secure future for his children. I never felt that way about them, but he couldn’t help but imagine his own vision of the dungeons must apply to everyone else.”

“Then why dungeons?” asked Verity. “Surely as a chrononaut he could have done something else?”

“Ah, well,” said Ria with a sigh. “It’s a long story, and you didn’t come here to hear about old family drama.”

“I’d still like to hear, if you don’t mind,” said Verity. “I’ve been getting a bit envious of your house and your family. It might make me feel better to know that I’m not alone in having familial disagreements. If you’re willing to share, that is.”

“The dungeons are the best way to make money,” said Ria. “The right entads can set you up for life, and entads are largely sheltered from taxation and seizure, though there are some exceptions. My father felt insecure about his future, largely because of the way my grandparents reinforced the lessons of self-reliance.” She paused. “When he reached the age of majority, he was thrust out into the world to sink or swim by himself. He hadn’t been given as much education as perhaps he needed, not taught how to care for himself as much as he should have been, and he had a few rough years before getting into the family business.”

“Alfric never mentioned it,” said Verity.

“He wouldn’t have,” said Ria. “Alfric loves the dungeons in the same way that my husband and I love them. We chose them, rather than being forced into them. If I can speak freely about your parents, I believe where they might have gone wrong was in not allowing you a choice. But you do like music?”

“I do,” said Verity. “Though I think I liked it rather less when I thought that my life would be soaked in music, defined by it.”

Ria nodded. “Alfric may have told you that I stepped back from the dungeons a bit?”

“Yes,” said Verity. “He mentioned that you had focused more attention on your children, at a certain point.”

“With mixed results,” said Ria. She hesitated. “Did he add that? ‘With mixed results’?”

“Something like that, yes,” Verity admitted.

Ria laughed, and Verity felt a bit of relief. “I went through a particularly long dungeon,” said Ria. “The rewards were good, but I looked at it all and realized that it had lost its luster, that my legacy as a dungeoneer was secure. I had children that I wanted to do right by, and the dungeons were, in some sense, selfish. Worse, they were selfish and not even something I was taking as much joy in.”

“And the ‘mixed results’?” asked Verity.

“It was a change, for the children, seeing so much more of me,” said Ria. “Especially at the beginning, I didn’t properly understand how much they’d been enjoying their space and their chances for adventure. They’d been taught self-reliance and all of a sudden, here was their mother attempting to do things for them, getting involved in their business, offering advice … well. It was a bit much. I’d like to think that I’m doing better now, but it’s hard to say.” It was shockingly candid, for an adult to be saying such things to Verity. It felt nice though.

“Thank you for speaking with me,” Verity nodded.

“From what I understand, you’ve been alone for quite some time now,” she said. “If you need some support, you can depend on the family.”

“Even with everything you say about self-reliance?” asked Verity. “Or that I’ve heard Alfric say, rather?”

“We also believe in helping people who can’t help themselves,” said Ria. “Catch a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, and you’ll feed him for a lifetime … but you need to make sure that the man is fed while he’s being taught, because otherwise he might just die, and not everyone can learn to fish. It really does depend on the man.”

“Mmm,” said Verity. She wondered about this woman’s politics, and where she would stand on various issues. She wondered whether the Overguards were political in any way that her parents would recognize the use of the term.

“Well, I’ve taken up enough of your time, thank you for indulging my unasked-for conversation.” She smiled. “And Alfric has said that you’re fine with me finding clothes for you? I see you’re already disguised.”

“Yes,” said Verity. “We went to visit the vault. It was quite something.”

“Much of it is useless wealth,” shrugged Ria. “Too much of it is mine and mine alone, I’m afraid. Well, I’ll see you later in the day, before you’re off to the opera.”

She set off, back into the house, and left Verity alone in the garden. It was an unusual conversation to be having with an adult, and felt deeper than any she’d have with her own mother. The candor was impressive, as was the self-reflection, things that she felt her own mother was genuinely incapable of. Even though their conversation had been brief, Verity felt like they had connected, and it was a bit startling to know that such things could happen.

She took a last look out on the city and decided to go find out what her friends were up to.

Chapter 57 - Street Food

Being in Dondrian made Mizuki wonder why she’d been wasting her life in Pucklechurch.

She had a good enough handle on her own ways of thinking to realize that this was probably a temporary opinion, the kind that she sometimes had when exposed to something new and interesting, but a bit of her mind was still frantically buzzing away, trying to think about what it would take for her to be in this enormous city with all of its riches.

The front door of the Overguard house led right into the city, with only a set of marble steps separating it from the street. There were no cobblestones making up the road, and certainly no dirt paths, and instead, there was something like flat tile, expertly — perhaps magically — placed. Everything was clean, in a way that Mizuki hadn’t expected, but they were in a good part of the city, and maybe there were cleaners, or more magic. Looking back, the house was quite thin, no wider than the foyer area, and Mizuki spent a moment trying to puzzle it together in her mind. The upper hallway was in the city proper, attached to the front door, she was fairly sure, and looking at it, she imagined that the master bedroom was a part of the narrow building, but it was hard to be sure.

The house had been beyond her wildest dreams. The vault had been too. There was a part of her that just wanted to declare to Alfric that sorry, she was going to simply live there from that point on, and she would come do dungeons via the statue swapper when it was necessary, or they would find an entad door that would let her step from her own house in Pucklechurch to Alfric’s house in Dondrian.

She could imagine what he’d say. He’d tell her that the house was built by his parents from their own dungeon runs, and that he would build his own house like it, or something more suited to him, from the next thousand dungeons they did together. Or he’d say something like that. And he would, in some sense, be right. She could imagine the good feelings his parents had when they went through a dungeon and found a new door that would be perfect for their sixth child, or when they found a clock that tracked the tides, or any of the other bits and pieces of magic that were all around. It would feel better to build a house piece by piece, rather than just inheriting it. There would be thrills in the new finds.

There was something so cozy about the house. It wasn’t at all like she imagined rich people lived. Some of the entads had been purchased, but it seemed like most of them had been pulled from the family vault, or taken right from a dungeon and put into use. The way that Alfric’s father had been showing off the carving, Mizuki could see some of the same joy that Alfric had in moving the stupid wardrobe. It seemed like his whole life up to this point might have been filled with moments like that, his mother or father coming home with some new addition to their house. It was a life that Mizuki found herself wishing she was living.

It didn’t take long for Mizuki to find somewhere a little more commercial, and she walked without aim, confident that either she wouldn’t get lost, or if she did, that Alfric would be able to guide her back over the party channel.

If you were in Pucklechurch, then Liberfell or Tarchwood were the places to go for shopping, if you needed something more than the essentials or whatever Basil had in stock. Moving through Dondrian made Mizuki realize, with startling clarity, how much of a backwater she’d been living in. The stores were bigger and more specialized, with more stock and finer goods. The glass in the windows was free of imperfection, which wasn’t always the case in Pucklechurch, and there was care and attention that had been lavished on the signs and displays.

Fine dinnerware, bolts of exotic cloth, racks of weapons, rows of clothing, mannequins in dainty dresses and formal suits, rooms full of furniture in all different styles, henling shops putting forward their best dungeon-made artwork, a storefront filled with flowers of every color, rows of fine soaps with herbs and colors mixed into them, candles and dyes, custom ectads, gleaming shelves full of cookware and earthen crocks … Dondrian had everything.

But what Mizuki had gone out for, and been looking forward to, was the food, which was also present in abundance.

The food was divided into three broad categories — and that Mizuki was thinking that was a sign that Alfric really had infected her thinking.

The first were the stores that specialized in things to take home, most noticeably the bakeries, with their row upon row of differently styled breads made with different varieties of grains, but there were other specialty shops too, and a few more typical grocers. Mizuki went by one of these that had a lizzo licking its lips outside of it. The cart that was hitched to him was being unloaded, with crates of leafy greens and oblong melons being taken down and brought in. There were quite a few of the lizzos around, scaly animals of various green hues, used for slowly pulling carts. The city streets seemed to have been built around them. There were also people pulling carts, and in one case, a man on something that had two wheels, one in front and one in back rather than side-by-side, which he moved by kicking his feet against the ground, somehow not toppling down. The things that moved cargo seemed to stay in the center of the road, and Mizuki stuck to the side, with the other pedestrians. She took a moment to pat the lizzo on the head, after having asked the man unloading if that was okay, and then moved along. She’d resolved to do no cooking while in Dondrian, and if she was going to buy any ingredients to take home, she was going to do it later on, right before they left.

There were cafes and salons and all kinds of other places that you could sit down to eat, most of them quite busy even though it wasn’t quite lunchtime, most with chalkboards up that listed off what they were selling. These places had good smells, and Mizuki stood in the doorway of more than one, looking over what was on offer and taking in the aromas. She was a bit surprised how normal many of the things she saw were: apparently in Dondrian they still ate chicken sandwiches, just like at home, and she was mildly disappointed by that.

But the last kind of food was what she’d been most excited for: street food. There were little temporary stalls and carts that unfolded into shops, all of them parked at regular intervals, and sometimes congregating at intersections. Mizuki loved the idea of it, a person who made one dish and only one dish, perhaps with some differences in toppings or other customizations. When Pucklechurch had a faire, there were often stalls set up, and she stuffed herself on those days, taking delight in foods that were made in bulk by someone who dearly loved a recipe and had spent years perfecting it until they knew both the ingredients and the end product inside and out.

She ate long strips of eel that had been threaded onto a stick and cooked over actual wooden embers rather than ectad heaters, basted with a sweet and pungent sauce. She ate tiny balls on skewers, dough with meat in the middle, coated in three different kinds of sauces with flakes of dried fish and seaweed sticking to them. By the time she had her third dish, she was slowing down considerably, but it was a spicy Chelxic dish with a mix of flavors she’d never had before, thin sheets of boiled mutton with vegetables diced so fine they were nearly a sauce, all wrapped in a flatbread that made it nearly like a sandwich. Still feeling the spice, she followed that by sitting at a cafe for long enough to drink a ‘hot chocolate’, which was surprisingly filling, and far better than the one she’d made at home from the care package chocolate.

It was while she was drinking what she was realizing was confection that a man sat down across from her.

“Um, hello?” she asked.

“Hi,” he said, smiling at her. He had nice clothes that made Mizuki feel a bit dowdy, finely cut and with bright colors that must have been difficult to keep that way. His hair was long and swept back, his eyes dark, and his skin almost sickly pale. “You’re new in town, aren’t you?”

Mizuki nodded. “Just visiting for a day or two,” she said.

“It’s the way you look around,” he said. “You can always spot someone who hasn’t gotten used to Dondrian. There’s more of everything to see.” He had a too-wide smile. “You’re all alone?”

“Um,” said Mizuki. “For the time being. Just exploring while my friends are elsewhere.”

“I could show you around,” he said. “I’m always looking to share some of the delights of our city.” He pointed at her cup. “We’re becoming known for our chocolate drinks.”

“It’s good,” said Mizuki, cupping the mug. “Though I do wish that I could bring it with me while I walked.”

“Many of us bring our own cups to the cafe,” he smiled. He held out a hand with delicate fingers. “Bertran.”

“Mizuki,” said Mizuki, taking her hand off the mug to shake his hand. His grip was firm, in a way that she didn’t quite like.

She looked at him more closely, and tried using her other vision. The aether was practically thick in Dondrian, the accumulated magic all around them layered over the city like a fog. The dungeons bled off much of it — the city would be unlivable without that, if her understanding was correct — but there was still so much of it that it felt like it should be hard to breathe. As for the man himself, ‘Bertran’, he was devoid of magic, at least so far as she could see, which made her feel a little bit better about him sitting down at her table, unannounced.

“So how about it?” he asked. “Can I show you around?”

“Er,” said Mizuki. The polite thing to do was to say yes, but she had been enjoying being on her own in the big city. “No thank you, I think I’ll just drift down the streets on my own.”

“Oh, come now,” he said, still smiling. “It’s not the kind of offer you’ll get every day. If you come with me, I can show you the Bridge to Nowhere, the museum, all kinds of things.”

“No, that’s, um,” said Mizuki. “I just … really was enjoying being alone.” It felt horribly rude. She was terrible about saying no to people.

“We could be alone together,” he smiled. “First time in the big city, it’s the time for adventure, isn’t it?”

An owl landed on the table and twisted its head around to stare at the man.

“Shoo!” he said, moving as though to hit it. The owl stayed where it was, and it became clear that he didn’t particularly want to touch it. “Go on, get away.” He looked at Mizuki. “Day owls,” he said, shaking his head. “If you finish up, we can get out of here.”

A second owl came to join the first, and this one also looked at Bertran. They were small birds, about twice the height of the mug Mizuki was drinking from, and quite like normal owls, except in their behavior. From what Mizuki knew, they were specially bred for the city, but considered pests in some respects.

More owls began to land on the table, all of them carefully avoiding Mizuki’s drink, and Bertran got up from his seat. The owls were all staring at him, half a dozen of them in total, and he gave Mizuki one last look before leaving without another word.

“Thank you, owls,” said Mizuki. She slid what was left of her hot chocolate forward. “Here, you can have some of this, if you’d like.”

“It would make them sick,” said Isra, who came to sit down at the table. “I hope I wasn’t overstepping.”

“No, not at all,” said Mizuki. “I didn’t like his vibe. Too old for me, too … forward.”

“You don’t like forward?” asked Isra. She looked out of place in the city, and they were getting some looks, though that might have been because of the half-dozen owls milling about on their table.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “Besides, things are going well with Rolaj, or well enough, and I don’t need a second relationship carried out over letters. How has your time been? How’d you find me?”

“I used the owls for scouting,” said Isra.

“Of course you did,” said Mizuki. “Sent them out and told them to find a Kiromo girl?”

“Looked through their eyes,” said Isra. “They’re surprisingly intelligent though.”

“They’re trash birds,” said Mizuki. She hadn’t realized that seeing through the eyes of animals was within the realm of druidic powers. “They pick up trash, I guess. Someone found them in a dungeon and thought they were really well-suited to being basically a service animal?”

“They poop in bins on rooftops,” said Isra.

“Hmm,” said Mizuki. She looked down at her hot chocolate. “Did you want the rest of this?”

Isra nodded and drank it down in a single swallow.

“So what were you up to?” asked Mizuki.

“I went to see the ocean,” said Isra. “The waves were larger than I expected. The water tasted quite salty.”

“You’re, um, not supposed to drink it,” said Mizuki.

“I didn’t,” said Isra. She shifted in her seat. “Just a taste.”

“And how’s the nature in the city?” asked Mizuki. “Not all that much of it around.” There were trees, some of them nicely grown, and flower boxes, but most of the ‘nature’ seemed confined to parks.

“I find the owls interesting,” said Isra, gesturing at the collection of owls, who were still on the table. “They’ve been tricked into being the perfect bird for the city. They only poop in a specific place where their waste can be taken away, they eat garbage they find if it’s edible, or collect it if it’s not, and if they were to go beyond the city, they would perish. I sometimes look at farm animals, like sheep, which could not survive in the wild, and wonder at them. The … I don’t know the word.”

“Crippling?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Isra. “The beautiful way in which they fit together with people.”

“Symbiosis?” asked Mizuki.

“Maybe,” said Isra, biting her lip.

“But you didn’t like the plants when we had that breakfast,” said Mizuki. She cocked her head. “But I guess you thought that those plants were being crippled, or mistreated, or something?”

“Mmm,” said Isra. “I don’t know. It was just a feeling.” She was silent for a moment. “I think there is beauty in these trash birds because they are in their element, encouraged to do what they are already inclined to do. When plants or animals are being twisted toward some purpose that doesn’t suit them, when someone has no knowledge of what they’re doing with a plant or animal, that’s when I frown.”

“You frown kind of a lot,” said Mizuki. “It’s a nice frown, but I’ve definitely noticed it.”

Isra frowned. “I should frown less?”

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “No. I’m just not sure that I’ve really seen you happy.”

Isra forced a smile, and Mizuki looked at it.

“Okay, yeah,” said Mizuki.

“I think I frown so much because I frown when I’m thinking,” said Isra. “When I was picking up my shells from the beach, I was smiling.”

“Shells?” asked Mizuki.

Isra nodded and then smiled for real. She brought her bag up onto the table, causing the owls to finally scatter from where they’d been milling about. The bag clacked and rattled, and it turned out that this was because Isra had nearly filled it with a wide variety of shells.

“Wow,” said Mizuki.

“I don’t know the names of any of these,” said Isra, holding up a white shell with spikes on the outside and a pink interior. “Isn’t this pretty?”

“It is,” said Mizuki. “I didn’t realize that the beaches here had so many shells. Or that there were beaches.”

“There are,” nodded Isra. “One stretch near the docks, open to the public, I checked. There weren’t signs saying not to take shells, so I waded in and took as many as I could carry.”

Mizuki looked under the table and found that Isra’s pant legs were, in fact, wet, though her boots were dry, and must have been removed before the wading expedition.

“You know, maybe I’ll hang out with you tomorrow,” said Mizuki. “I was going to go with Hannah to see that cathedral, but I think I’d enjoy seeing the museum through your eyes. What are you going to do with all these shells?”

“Sort them, study them, and put them in a special place,” said Isra. “I took some sand and driftwood as well.”

“You know, we’ve never been to your house,” said Mizuki. “I kind of want to see it.”

“Oh,” said Isra. The enthusiasm for driftwood faded from her face. “Maybe someday.”

“Or not,” said Mizuki, as quick as could be. “No big deal. I was just thinking that being a druid and having a full knowledge of the hex, you probably have a good collection, that’s all.”

“After being in your house, and now Alfric’s,” said Isra. She searched for words. “I don’t think I have a good home.”

“Ah,” said Mizuki. “Well … maybe, maybe not, it’s really more about whether you like it, and — if you wanted, we would be happy to help you, either to make it better, or to move out everything that means something to you, or … something.”

“Thank you,” said Isra. “I’m sorry that you keep doing so much for me.”

“Do I?” asked Mizuki.

“The matter with Angun,” said Isra.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Right. Well, we’ll nail him to a tree soon enough, I think. The wheels of justice are turning, if slowly.”

“Nailing him to a tree is … another colorful expression?” asked Isra.

“Yes,” nodded Mizuki. “Not a cultural practice, just … how I hope it feels, when we get him.” Mizuki was faintly surprised to realize that there were two people she wanted to feel like she’d nailed to a tree, the other being Lola. Two was perilously close to needing a list, and she really didn’t think of herself as that sort of person.

They left together, and Mizuki was happy to have a guide through the city. Isra seemed to know where she was going, her sense of direction unerring, and despite Mizuki having eaten quite a lot of street food, they shared a lunch together at one of the restaurants, with Mizuki taking a smaller portion of buttery crab and Isra ordering crispy duck. They had some discussion about how things were done in restaurants, which Isra seemed receptive to: she liked to know the rules, which she often found opaque.

Afterward, they walked through the city. Isra wasn’t normally one for small talk, but it seemed as though she had the same love of the novelty of the city as Mizuki did. They went into a few stores, and though they hadn’t planned to, they ended up buying a few things, which Mizuki put into her bag, since Isra’s was full of shells.

They were going down another of the endless streets, looking in on what seemed to mostly be garments and accessories — a whole store devoted just to buttons — when they saw something flying overhead.

“Airship!” called Mizuki, pointing up. There were some looks from around her, but it was Isra that Mizuki cared about, and she was looking up with wide eyes.

“What is that?” Isra asked.

“Airship,” said Mizuki. They had both stopped to watch it. It was as high in the sky as a cloud, a wooden ship drifting along with large propellers that were sedately spinning. Some of them had sails, Mizuki knew, but this one was different, having nothing they could see in the way of a mast or rigging or anything like that. The bottom of it was painted with bright colors and pretty patterns, seemingly for the sole purpose of entertaining those who cared to look up.

“Wow,” said Isra. “It’s even better up close.”

“Up close?” asked Mizuki.

“Through the eyes of the owls,” said Isra. Mizuki looked, and she could see a flock of owls circling the airship.

“How hard do you think it would be to get an airship ride?” asked Mizuki.

“What are they used for?” asked Isra. “Cargo?”

“Um,” said Mizuki. “There are some floating islands way out east — west, maybe, from where we are?” Geography was not her strong suit. “But aside from that, I think they’re mostly just for cruising around. With entad transport, cartiers, lizzos, whatever else, there wouldn’t be any need for a flying ship. And they’re prone to crashing if they run into bad weather.”

“Why don’t they just have a druid with them?” asked Isra.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “Druids are rare, I guess, or expensive in the cities, or … something.”

“Hmm,” said Isra. “They don’t control the weather here?”

“I guess I don’t know that either,” said Mizuki. “With a few druids working together, you’d be able to just schedule the weather, right?”

“You would only need one,” said Isra.

“I mean, it does seem like a nice day,” said Mizuki. “Can you … tell?”

Isra frowned. “I suppose it is being managed by someone. A city druid. I’ll try not to interfere.”

“Hey, if you ever wanted, you could move here and probably make some money,” said Mizuki.

“I’m enjoying the trip,” said Isra. “But I wouldn’t want to be around so many people. There are parks, but they’re thin strips of nature between mountains of stone and brick. I feel a bit out of tune.”

“Speaking of, I think we should go meet up with the others,” said Mizuki. “We’re going to have dinner with the Overguards before the big opera, and before the opera we’re going to get properly dressed. Are you looking forward to that?”

“I might go without the headscarf,” said Isra.

“Yeah?” asked Mizuki. “You wouldn’t feel … naked?” Isra had said something to that effect earlier.

“We’d have a private box,” said Isra. “And … I don’t want to stand out. I want to look pretty.”

“I’m pretty sure you’d look pretty with your headscarf on,” said Mizuki. “You look pretty right now, even without makeup and a fancy dress, or whatever.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. “Thank you.” She pursed her lips. “I want to seem like I belong at the opera.”

“Oh, for sure,” nodded Mizuki. “Me too. But we’ll be in the private box, so … you know, it should be fine.”

They had gone another few blocks when Isra brought up a question that must have been on her mind.

“That man,” said Isra. “You were uncomfortable. Why were you so polite to him? You didn’t know him. You likely won’t see him again.”

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “I guess I just didn’t know how to handle it, didn’t want to seem rude, thought that if I was just polite about things, then … eventually a bunch of owls would come down and stare at him until he left.”

Isra laughed, and Mizuki smiled, but the question didn’t sit easily with her. She thought about it more as they walked in silence, but came to no firm conclusion, except that perhaps she was less suited to the city than she’d thought.

They made their way through the city, back to the Overguard house, and it was easy to shake off the bad thoughts. She was looking forward to the dinner, and having a fancy dress, and beyond that, maybe, the opera.

Chapter 58 - Mixed Up Meals

“So,” said Alfric’s mother. “Which of these girls are you romantically interested in?”

“Mom,” said Alfric, rolling his eyes.

“Well it’s been a month, you’re a teenager, it would be natural,” she said. They were in the Royal Room, a place with lots of henlings on the walls, with pictures of kings, and crowns hanging from pegs, the trappings of royalty, from a time when there still was royalty. The others were in their guest rooms, getting ready for dinner. The Royal Room was mostly a place for sitting and talking, one of those rooms that Alfric thought of as being mostly superfluous. If he had to cut the house down in size, this would be one of the first rooms to go.

“It would be unprofessional,” said Alfric.

“Well how dare I think an eighteen-year-old would be unprofessional,” she replied, rolling her eyes right back. “I know you and Lola are on the outs, and you’ve been with four girls who I cannot imagine would share your opinions on professionalism, so all I’m asking is who the most likely candidate is, if you’re not already firmly partnered with one of them.”

“Which I’m not,” Alfric replied.

“You seemed to be getting along swimmingly with Hannah,” said Ria. “You were wrestling when I found you.”

“We were sparring, mom,” said Alfric.

She smiled at him. “Well, if you had to answer that you were interested in one of them —”

“Which I don’t,” said Alfric.

“Fine, fine,” she sighed. “And you and Lola are still having some trouble? You’re still upset with her?”

“Firmly,” said Alfric.

“It would make things a bit complicated if you didn’t make up,” she frowned.

“You go between asking me if I have a crush on a party member and asking me whether I’ve made up with the girl I’m supposed to have children with?” asked Alfric.

“I’m trying to be understanding of the complexity of life,” she replied. “You’re pacted, you don’t necessarily need to be married. So long as you have children, which you won’t even have to have sex to do,” Alfric cringed, “the conditions are fulfilled and you’ve done your obligation, so long as the children are raised properly. If there’s some other girl who’s to be your wife, that’s not ideal, but it’s workable.”

“I really didn’t come here to talk about my love life,” said Alfric.

“Am I mothering too much?” she asked.

“A bit,” he nodded.

She sighed. “Well, I’ll back off then, but if you need help brokering a peace with Lola —”

“I’ll be fine,” said Alfric. He wasn’t entirely sure that was true, but having his mother come in to ‘deal with’ the problem of Lola seemed like it wasn’t likely to solve anything, especially given the sort of help that his mother seemed likely to offer.

“We’ll have an early dinner, then get ready for the opera,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about how to dress them, and I have some wonderful ideas.”

“Were the opera tickets your idea or dad’s?” asked Alfric.

“Sometimes there’s such a thing as serendipity,” she replied with a smile. “It was all your father’s idea, but now I have four girls to dress.”

They all met in the dining room, which was one of the most magical places in the entirety of the house, and that was saying something. The room was at the top of a large tower, with windows on every side, giving a view in all directions of the city of Dondrian. It was a very large room, made larger by the table in the center, which warped space around it in accordance with the twisting of a recessed dial on the side. It was tuned for nine: his parents, his party, his brother Beryl, and his sister Faith.

Isra was seated to Alfric’s left, and Mizuki to his right. Isra was subdued and perhaps feeling a bit out of place, though it was hard to tell why. Mizuki was absolutely ecstatic.

“Alright!” called Alfric’s mother, standing near her spot. “Welcome, Alfric’s party, I’m sorry if I haven’t gotten a chance to meet you yet. Since we have the honor of having a cleric with us, I thought that I would give her a chance to say a few words, if that’s alright with you, Hannah.”

“Oh,” said Hannah, seeming surprised. They had never done prayers during meals at Mizuki’s house. “Ay. Garos bless this food, though its provenance is the chaos of the dungeons. May our bodies take this sustenance and add to the symmetry of this world, and may we, in our work, bring order to the disordered.”

“Thank you,” said Alfric’s mother. “Now, sitting before you are seventy-eight entads.” She slapped a hand on the table and the entads all appeared there, a motley collection of plates, cups, glasses, mugs, bowls, platters, forks, knives, spoons, and a few things that only a dungeon would ever have made for eating with. “As is tradition, it is your job as guests to figure out how to get a meal out of them. Let’s eat!”

There was some understandable hesitation from Alfric’s party, but his family grabbed for the good things right away. There was plenty to go around, that was by design: fully fifty of the things on offer could get you food of some kind, and twenty or so could give you one of the best meals of your life.

“There’s a mercy rule,” Alfric said to Isra, lowering his voice so his parents wouldn’t hear. “It’s meant to be fun, but if you don’t get any food, or have some frustration, they’ll push something your way.”

“Thank you,” she said. She reached for a few things from among the gathered entads and began experimenting.

“This is awesome,” said Mizuki, who had a bowl and a spoon in front of her. Alfric didn’t recognize the spoon until he realized that it was, in fact, her spoon, what she’d taken to calling the Anyspoon. She apparently carried it with her everywhere.

Alfric took from the pile last. There were a few duds in there, like a plate that would keep your food the perfect temperature, or a fork whose tines you could wiggle by thinking hard enough, and he wanted the others to get their pick, just to limit the chance that they would get something comparatively useless.

His parents were watching with some amusement and interest. This was something they loved to spring on guests, and if not for the mercy rule, Alfric might have found it a bit mean-spirited. He had never seen anyone upset by the tradition, nor heard about it, but he always worried, just a bit. Still, it was a novel experience for most people, and his parents argued that springing it on people made it all the better. He could have warned the party, but had chosen not to. Looking at them, he thought that was probably the right decision.

Hannah had gotten her plate to work right away, one that could make you a meal when you spoke aloud to it, and she was in the midst of eating something that looked distinctly like a Cairbre dish with mashed potatoes, ground meat, gravy, and roasted root vegetables. She was, unfortunately, using a spoon with a similar power to eat it all, and a fork whose self-levitation she probably wasn’t going to figure out. There was a separate cup of non-entad utensils, but they hadn’t been quite clear about that, so Hannah had taken from the entad stock.

“Does this only do water?” asked Mizuki, looking down at the bowl, which she’d filled with water. She looked over at Alfric. “Works by thinking, but I haven’t been able to get it to do soup.”

“No cheating!” called Beryl.

“Ah,” said Mizuki, who’d gotten the contents of the bowl to change. “Just certain kinds of soup?”

“Can I give it to you?” asked Alfric’s father.

“Sure!” said Mizuki.

“It’s homogeneous liquids,” said Alfric’s father. “So if you’d like a soup with no chunks or irregularities in it, it’s wonderful, but if you want something more substantial, you might want to pick something else.”

“Oh, that’s neat,” said Mizuki. She looked down at the bowl, whose contents were a deep red color. “It can do wine!”

Alfric’s mother laughed. “I like this one.”

Mizuki slid the bowl forward and picked out a white plate with some blue glaze. She poked at it a bit, spoke to it, narrowed her eyebrows in concentration, then looked at Alfric. “You don’t need to wait for me.”

“I want to make sure you get fed,” said Alfric.

“Aw, caring about my stomach for a change, how thoughtful,” said Mizuki. She stared at the plate in front of her for a moment, then used her spoon to reach down and pick up some imagined food. Once she’d lifted the spoon high enough, the food materialized. “That worked?”

“People don’t usually get that one,” said Alfric’s mother, who was half-done with her meal. “I believe we didn’t figure it out on our own.”

“Amazing,” said Mizuki, taking another spoonful. She was testing the plate’s limits, Alfric could tell, and he watched her out of the corner of his eye as he dug in to his own food, which was provided by a plate that could only make bland, nutritious food, one of the relative duds in the collection. His fork changed the taste though, heightening anything in proportion to how bland it was. This was a combination that he always took if he could get it before one of his siblings.

Alfric looked over at Isra, who had been eating from a plate that seemed to be giving her just a bit of trouble. She had food, but it didn’t seem that she’d grasped the trick to it.

“Do you want help?” asked Alfric.

“Wonderful meal,” said Hannah. “Do you do this every time?”

“Every time there are guests who we think would be receptive,” said Alfric’s father. “Usually people enjoy it. Of course, you’ll be with us for a few meals, and if you’ve been watching carefully, you’ll know what everything is, so we can dispense with the games.”

“There are so many we haven’t seen though,” said Mizuki, looking at the pile of things. “I’m not one of those lame people who wouldn’t go for an adventure. Though I will have a bowl of wine.”

“I need help with mine,” said Isra, who was poking at her food with a pronounced frown. “I summoned the food, but I was only able to eat a bite.”

Alfric looked down at her plate. There was a small pile of thin white noodles, small slices of thin red meat, and some cooked greens that had been topped with some kind of seed. She was poking at the meat using a fork that could duplicate food, but the tines were treating the meat as though it was made of solid stone.

“Mom?” asked Alfric. “I don’t think I know that one.”

“It’s a trick plate,” said Alfric’s mother. “A recent acquisition. It’ll create a complete meal, but you have to eat in proportion, one bite of meat, then one of noodles, then one of vegetables. It’s a shame we didn’t get it earlier, it would have been perfect for picky eaters.”

Isra moved her fork over to the noodles, which she lifted with ease.

“Sorry,” said Alfric, voice low.

“It’s fine,” she said. “I should have tried that. It’s good food.”

They ate in relative silence, and Alfric enjoyed his meal. It tasted different after so much time away, better and richer for his mouth having gotten used to other foods. He’d been using the same plate and fork combination for nearly two years, and there was something unexpectedly nostalgic about it. When he was older, when he’d proved himself, perhaps he would ask for the combination, if that wasn’t too ostentatious of a gift. Most of the entads at the table had limits that reduced how valuable they were, with all the best food making entads having been sold off, rented out, or donated.

“What’s the best entad you’ve ever pulled from a dungeon?” asked Mizuki. She had apparently finished, though with her plate, it was hard to tell.

“Let me think on that one,” said Alfric’s father.

“It’s a very complicated question,” said Alfric’s mother. “The one that’s worth the most, the one that brought me the most personal joy, the one that I thought was most interesting?”

“Personal joy, I guess,” said Mizuki.

“Ring of Flight,” said Alfric’s father. “Not the fastest way to travel when you have portals and teleportation and all those things, but I got it early on, and even when it was past its prime I kept it. I still use it sometimes.”

“Mo broke his leg using it,” said Beryl. “We were banned from using it after that.”

“Only for a year,” said Alfric.

“I think I have my answer,” said Alfric’s mom. “I pulled a fork that could change into anything.” She gave Mizuki a grin.

“Har har,” said Mizuki.

“Only joking,” she said. “Though, here.” She pointed at the center of the table with two fingers and flicked them up, lifting a fork with telekinetic force then sending it drifting over to Mizuki, who grabbed it and looked at it.

“What is this?” asked Mizuki, turning it over. She changed the fork’s shape, then its appearance, warping it, changing the number of tines, and then adding embellishments. “You do have the Anyfork?”

“No,” said Alfric’s mom. “It copies the entadic abilities of whatever other silverware you’re holding.”

Mizuki’s eyes went to the Anyspoon, which was still in her other hand. “Huh,” she said. She looked back at the fork. “Isn’t that kind of … useless?”

“Wrong word to say around dad,” said Alfric.

“We don’t call entads useless,” said Alfric’s father. “Every entad, no matter how bad, has some kind of use.”

“Dad’s always said that in another life, he’d have worked at an entad shop,” said Faith.

“Oh I’d probably hate it,” he said with a shrug. “I enjoy the entads, but I wouldn’t want to deal with the paperwork or the customers.”

“So what’s the answer?” asked Mizuki. Her eyes were on Alfric’s mother. “What’s the best you’ve ever gotten?”

His mother seemed like she was debating whether to show or not, but eventually she raised her hand high above her and summoned the sword.

It was like a hole in the world, the long curved blade visible only by what was missing. It did something to the eyes, the blackness reaching into the mind, erasing any sensation of light, even for things that were in front of it. You could ‘see’ the sword through the walls of a building by the way it sucked at your perception of it. She didn’t summon it indoors often, not after the neighbors had complained. Where her fingers were holding it, it was like they’d disappeared, or like the pitch black sword was somehow in front of them.

“Whoa,” said Mizuki.

“The cosmetics are impressive,” said his mother. “But this has been my primary weapon for a decade for other reasons.” She let go of it, and it disappeared. “Has Alfric talked your ear off about entad effect independence?”

“No,” said Mizuki. “At least, I don’t remember him doing that.”

“Alfric, if you would?” asked his mother.

“Entads have effects,” said Alfric. “There are some common ones, like resizing, or durability, and then there are more unique ones, usually a ‘main’ function, though you definitely do get things that are just very durable or just resize. Anyway, sometimes you can divide the ‘main’ function into parts, like Isra’s plate, which both summons food and locks down food unless you’re eating equally from your different dishes. Those effects are technically not dependent on each other, or I’m guessing they’re not: you could have an entad with one effect or the other and they’d still be functional. Sometimes you get divergent effects, where a wand, say, creates a rock out of thin air but also cuts off all fingers in a fifty yard radius.”

“Wow, that is way too specific to not be a real effect,” said Mizuki.

“Happened to me,” said Beryl. “And it was after my very first dungeon, too. We were playing around with what we’d taken out and then all our fingers were on the ground. Thankfully we weren’t in the middle of town, and our cleric was able to reattach them without too much trouble.”

“Oeyr?” asked Hannah.

Beryl nodded.

“Anyway,” said Alfric. “There are dependent extras, which require the first one, and independent extras, which don’t require anything extra. It’s mostly important because one of the ways of marking an entad’s approximate power is how many independent effects it has. More is better, though if they’re all awful, the whole entad is still awful.”

“And how many independent effects does the sword have?” asked Mizuki.

“Seven,” said Alfric’s mother. She smiled. “It’s not a world record, but it is a family record.”

“And what are they?” asked Mizuki. “If you don’t mind?”

“Perhaps later,” said Alfric’s mother. “I fear we’ll need all the time we can get to prepare for the opera.”

“I think I can remember all of them,” Alfric said to Mizuki.

She nodded. “Time to go get pretty, I guess.”

The sword had the obvious visual effect, which was largely cosmetic. It could disappear into nowhere and be recalled by the person who sent it away. It slowly drained a negligible amount of blood from its designated user, and paid that blood back, with interest, if they were injured. It voided matter that the blade touched. When pointed at a creature, it would point at their most vulnerable spots in turn. So long as the blade was moving toward a designated enemy, the person holding it was sped up by a factor of ten, multiplying perception and force. So long as two or more designated enemies had close to similar physiology, any damage to one would also apply to the others.

It was very possible that it was one of the ten best swords in the entire world. Certainly the final ability, which applied to humans and had an enormous range, meant that if it were ever used in a war scenario, his mother could kill hundreds with a single stroke, perhaps more. Alfric had seen historical pictures of battlefields with thousands of men lined up with magical support and specialist units, and from what he knew of the sword, they could have all been wiped out at once if she could see enough of them. That was all before considering that when she went into the dungeons, his mother had much, much more than just the sword.

Alfric thought about war sometimes. When he was younger, he had longed for it, imagined it in vivid detail, thought about the entads in the family vault and how they could be used against armies. The armies, in his mind, were faceless baddies, some random, unknown army of vile people. The more he grew up, the more he realized how stupid that was. There were relatively few countries in the world, and who would Interim be going against? The people of Kiromo? Tarbin? His father had opined that it was far more likely, if there were ever to be a war, that it would be of Interim against one of the component provinces, and that was quite unlikely unless something radical changed. The biggest threat to peace was the Editors making some change with unforeseen consequences.

He’d turned to the dungeons, naturally, where there was very little question of the moral worth of what he was fighting against. It wasn’t like it had been in his dreams, and the moments of awesome power still seemed somewhat far off, but he was confident that he was on the right trajectory now, and they had gone three dungeons — and one dungeon escape — without needing a reset.

Alfric got dressed in his room, where he still had most of his clothes, having taken little with him to Pucklechurch. He had three outfits to choose from, and picked the one of black silk, buttoned down the front with a jacket that had maroon trim. It had been a present from his father on the occasion of his sixteenth birthday, and had been worn primarily for temple days, weddings, funerary rites, and the occasional opera. He felt uncomfortable in the clothes, but he could at least move in them, though if he tried to fight, he would surely end up ripping something.

He looked at himself in the mirror, evaluating. The suit needed to be tailored again: he’d put on too much muscle since the last time he’d worn it, and it wasn’t flattering in the way that clothes were supposed to be. If he’d worn this kind of thing into Pucklechurch, they probably would have gotten the wrong impression of him, thinking that he was a wealthy socialite.

He sighed and checked himself over before leaving to go see what his mother had decided upon.

Chapter 60 - Opera

Verity had seen Lerial and Marsc five times before, across two productions, but both had been in different locations by a different opera company. She knew it well enough that she was on the lookout for deviations, though she’d been somewhat young for the first run, and the second run had been a few years ago now.

The variations among productions were interesting to Verity, in part because they were inevitable, and in part because they said something about the time and place of the production. Music of the sort that Verity had most often played was written in sheet music, without lyrics. There was never any confusion about what a note meant, and it was relatively rare that there was any room for interpretation on the part of the musician. Any little swell or fade was considered a deviation from the score, and it was a tenet, as if in stone, that there should be no difference between performances.

In reality, even for the rigid style of music that Verity had been most heavily trained in, there were always choices to be made. There were norms, of course, stylistic norms and those specific to certain instruments, but there were little things, matters of tempo, articulation, tone, dynamics, and timbral effects where no one could rightly claim that the variation was ‘wrong’.

But for opera, the matter was far more complicated, because there was no agreement on costuming, set design, or the choices of the individual performers, and all of it taken together might dramatically change the meaning.

Lerial and Marsc was nearly two hundred years old, but the costuming wasn’t authentic to the period, at least to Verity’s understanding of historical fashion. Instead, it had been updated, but only so far. The clothes of the first act, when the leads were young, looked like the kind of thing that Verity’s grandmother might have worn, or even her great grandmother, with more wool than cotton, and silhouettes that were decades out of fashion, with puffy fabric around the upper arms and too many darts at the bottom. It was also all oversized and exaggerated, which was usual for the opera, so that people could get a striking image even from a distance.

The characters of Lerial and Marsc were, somewhat unusually, done in similar style to each other. Though there was nothing in particular to suggest it within the text of the opera itself, it was common to have Lerial be highly feminine and Marsc to be highly masculine, almost a boy. This production instead had them be, if not the same, then not differentiated along those lines. Lerial was a bit slow to act, spending her time thinking and dreaming, while Marsc was bold and brash, quick to anger and equally quick to apologize, and Verity could see why they were so often given their feminine and masculine characterizations — but it was nice to see the costuming, at least in the first act, had them both wearing feminine clothing. The previous productions had Marsc in shorts or pants, essentially throughout, still obviously a woman, but … well, there was something that Verity didn’t like about the idea that between two women, there needed to be one that was ‘the man’ in the relationship.

She glanced at Isra. Verity had known that clothes, makeup, and everything else could change a person’s appearance, but she hadn’t realized how dramatic the effect could be. Isra had always been pretty, but in a somewhat distant way, a wild way. Now, Isra could easily have fit in with the society set, at least until she opened her mouth. Part of it was her posture, which was excellent — they had worked on it together, not that she’d needed all that much instruction or change. It made Verity feel something like pride.

And Isra was, of course, beautiful, but Verity had thought that for quite some time. There was something a bit angry about Isra, but it was a pretty kind of anger. Isra frowned in concentration and scowled at her target before firing an arrow, and there was a vibrancy there which Verity couldn’t help but appreciate. Perhaps it was the intensity that drew Verity in, or perhaps it was the coarseness, or maybe it was just the ways they’d become increasingly familiar with each other in the time they’d known each other.

Verity didn’t know whether Isra was even attracted to girls though. She was cagey about it, and Verity didn’t know how to ask her. Certainly Isra had no experience, not that Verity really did either. What Verity was most worried about was that she was projecting her own attraction onto Isra, and that if they did partner, it would only be because of Verity. Then, down the road, Isra would realize that it wasn’t what she was interested in after all.

Verity had gone through most of an aria without paying too much attention, which wasn’t what the opera deserved.

The singing had accompaniment from a relatively small thirty-piece orchestra. When the singing was going on, the bards played low, making as little noise as they could while contributing to the magical effects that were part and parcel of any performance. She listened closely and felt for the magic, which was largely emotional in nature, moving with the shifting of the music. They were strong players, as expected for professional musicians at one of the highest levels of craft in the largest city in the world. Bardic magic wasn’t meant to be the point of the opera, but it was important, because it helped to make the music more captivating.

The others seemed enraptured, as did the audience. Some of that was a component of the bardic music, and some of it was just the art on display. Verity was a bit numb to what bards could do, thanks to both training and near-constant exposure. A group of bards working together in a guild, as this orchestra certainly was, could reduce a person to tears, but that could only happen for Verity if she allowed it.

The first act ended with Lerial and Marsc separated at the end of their childhood, and there was a brief break as the set was transformed for the second act.

“I don’t think I understand,” said Isra. “They’re supposed to be young girls? But they’re clearly adult women.”

“Young girls can’t be trained to sing like that,” said Verity. “And they want the same singers for all four acts. They’ll be adults in the next three acts.”

“Okay,” said Isra. “I’ve been enjoying it.”

“Good,” said Verity. “We can talk later.”

Alfric and Mizuki were carrying on their own parallel conversation, this one about the grapes that had been on the platter, which Mizuki had eaten all of. So far as Verity had been half-listening in, Mizuki was inquiring when and how they would get more grapes, and Alfric was explaining that it would take until intermission, which was in another hour.

The second act featured a split set, with Lerial on the left and Marsc on the right. They were in different parts of the world, and the lighting would focus on one, then the other, or on both when they had duets or there were otherwise events that would transpire across the distance. This was one of the things that the opera was known for, the unconventional staging having left its mark on history, but Verity now saw it as a bit of a gimmick, even if that sense of distance was still affecting. She was happy to see that the costuming was still emphasizing the femininity of both characters, which seemed to be a deliberate choice on the part of the director.

It was during the final aria of the act that Verity saw her mother in the audience.

She had been paying attention to the opera itself, but given their seats, it was hard not to cast a glance at the audience below them, their faces illuminated only by the heavy lights pointed at the stage. She hadn’t been looking for her mother, only watching the people, perhaps out of instinct as a performer, though they always said you shouldn’t focus your attention on the audience.

Her father was nowhere to be seen, but her mother definitely was there, sitting next to a friend Verity recognized.

Verity sat back in her chair, and made sure that she couldn’t see her mother, if her mother was looking up at the boxes for whatever reason. She was going to have to reapply the disguise for the intermission, and she would stay in the private box, just to stay safe.

She could feel the anxiety in the pit of her stomach. It wasn’t a fresh anxiety, it was an old one, the weight of a shirked obligation coming back in full force. All of the old guilt had returned. She shivered slightly, then practiced the same control she’d been exercising since she was little, not allowing the fear and apprehension to show on her face.

“Are you okay?” Isra whispered.

“It’s almost over,” whispered Verity. “We can talk after.”

The aria came to its stunning conclusion, and Verity tried to feel the emotion that the bards were attempting to evoke, that of a longing for home and seeing that your life was on a path you didn’t wish to travel down. It should have been more affecting to Verity given how her circumstances had changed in the years since she’d first heard it, but all she could think about was her mother down there in the audience.

“Thirty minute intermission,” said Alfric, once the applause had died down. “We can either go back to the house for a bit, or we can lounge around here. It’s a great time to use the bathroom.”

“And now there will be more grapes?” asked Mizuki.

“They’ll bring in more food for the platter, yes,” said Alfric. “And if you want to eat something more substantial, we definitely have time for that. It’s not any trouble at all for me to grab a plate from the house.”

“My mother is down there,” said Verity.

“Really?” asked Hannah, peering over the edge.

“Yes,” said Verity. She felt, in her gut, that Hannah shouldn’t be looking, that it was a method of drawing attention to them, but of course her mother couldn’t possibly see into the box where Verity was, and would have no idea who Hannah was.

“We knew this was a possibility,” said Alfric. “I can take you back to my house, or back to Pucklechurch if you prefer. You can put on your disguise too, if you’re worried she’ll see us.”

“She won’t,” said Verity. “I’m too far back, unless I stand up or lean over. I’d prefer she doesn’t see you either, because you’re supposed to be keeping an eye on me, and if she comes up here —”

“I’ll put on my own disguise,” said Alfric. He sat up and reached into his pocket, pulling out a messy blonde wig, which he put on his head. He had a very stern look on his face, and for a moment she was waiting for some kind of magic to happen, but he kept giving her a very serious look, and eventually she broke into laughter.

“Did you seriously bring that ugly wig as a gag?” asked Mizuki, while Verity was still laughing. It had gotten a laugh from everyone, but she apparently found it funniest.

“Yes,” said Alfric. He stuck the wig back into his pocket. “It pays to be prepared.”

Mizuki laughed. “I think the idea of you pocketing a wig so you could make a joke later is funnier than the joke itself.”

“Well, either way,” said Alfric. “I’ll have an actual disguise. We’ll stay up in our box. Verity won’t have to talk to her mother unless she wants to?”

“Why would I want to?” asked Verity.

“Reconciliation?” asked Hannah. “Sorry, were you thinkin’ that you’d just never talk to her again?”

“I — I don’t know,” said Verity. “If she were — if she didn’t matter, if I could live my life without caring about her, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe we could talk, and I could just tell her that I wasn’t having any of it, that I was going to live my life my own way.”

“Like Lerial,” said Isra.

“Like — yes, but not — it’s a fantastical opera, it doesn’t have any grounding,” said Verity. “It’s not the same in real life.”

“I could go down and tell your mom to suck eggs,” said Mizuki. She smiled, and Verity could see that it was a joke meant to lighten the mood, but Alfric had done a much better job.

“We’ll just stay here,” said Verity. “Or I will, the rest of you don’t have to.”

“I’ll stay,” said Isra.

“I’m goin’ to get some food,” said Hannah. “There’s some concessions and wine and things, aren’t there?”

“We can have things brought in, if you prefer,” said Alfric. “I can flag an attendant.”

“Nah, I want to see how the rich and powerful do things, peep some dresses, that sort of thing,” said Hannah. She looked down at the audience. People dressed up for the opera, but this was a normal performance, not a gala or special occasion.

“Er,” said Mizuki. “You’re not worried about, well … you know, not fitting in?” She glanced at Alfric.

“Not caring about those people is, in my opinion, the right mindset,” said Alfric. “So long as we’re not unduly rude. We’re leaving Dondrian in not too long, and momentarily being looked down upon by opera-goers seems, to me, not something to worry about.”

“Well,” said Hannah. “I’m not going to make a scene.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Mizuki.

“To keep an eye on me?” asked Hannah, raising an eyebrow.

“Because if I’m with you, maybe I’ll care less about people watching me,” said Mizuki.

“Well, let’s get to it, time is wasting,” said Hannah. “Most people don’t care about others, only themselves, we’ll be fine.”

“Tell them you’re in the Overguard box,” said Alfric. “They’ll comp the food and drink for you.”

Verity waited until they were gone to voice her thoughts. “In my experience, people do look at you, and talk about you. For some of these people, that’s half the point of coming to the opera, especially because there’s an expectation that you’ll be wearing nice clothes.”

“My father hates that,” said Alfric. “Not just because he thinks it has an impact on ticket sales, but also because he wishes that the opera were more for everyone.”

“He’s egalitarian?” asked Verity. She resisted the urge to look over the railing to try to see her mother again.

“The whole family is,” he replied. “Lots of charitable donations, stuff from the dungeons especially. Dad considers it a failure of governance for any person to go hungry, a cause for rebellion if anyone doesn’t have shelter.”

“That’s from something,” said Verity. “The Governance Palimpsest?”

“Maybe,” Alfric shrugged. “But he’s not a radical or anything, just … has some views. I think now more than he used to. We were talking some last night. Inter does well enough, I think.”

“Do people go hungry?” asked Isra.

“Well,” said Alfric. “No, not typically, there are national programs in place and we’ve been making more food than we need for nearly a century. But — do you care about the politics?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. She looked at Verity. “A bit.”

“There are two major factions,” said Alfric. “The leverists believe that we can achieve the perfect society by introducing proper legislation and creating incentives that people will follow. The culturalists believe that we can achieve the perfect society by having a good culture, and there’s some disagreement about what that actually means, but they’re somewhat united in the idea that more laws will inevitably backfire, or have huge overheads.”

It was, in Verity’s opinion, a very even-handed approach to the topic, perhaps a bit too much so. In practice, the leverists and culturalists clashed on certain specific points which were at least somewhat at odds with that description. The culturalists were often talking about specific laws they wanted abolished, especially those which they thought got in the way of personal liberty, or sometimes, accumulation of wealth. Contrarily, the leverists were often focused on things which weren’t about putting levers in place, but rather, were more about attempting to control the shape of society through other means. There was, at least, broad agreement on the basics of what a good nation would look like, which wasn’t true in previous centuries, at least so far as Verity understood her history.

“Okay,” said Isra. She was frowning in thought.

“The intermission isn’t really the place for a primer on politics,” said Verity. “Traditionally, it’s a time for us to come back from the world of the opera, think about it critically, talk about what we saw, and — well, usually it’s for gossip, if my trips with my mother were anything to go by.”

“I thought it was very nice,” said Isra. “Much more straightforward than I had thought it would be.”

“Did you enjoy the bards?” asked Verity. “Some people have a bad reaction.”

“Mostly because bards work with what’s there,” said Alfric. “Sorry, not to step on your toes.”

“No, it’s a good clarification,” nodded Verity. She was still waiting for Isra’s response.

“I couldn’t tell what I was feeling and what was from them,” she said. “But after a few minutes, I stopped worrying about it. It was nice, I think. There was a depth of feeling, a — a guiding to it?”

Verity nodded.

“And you can do that?” asked Isra.

“Yes,” said Verity. “You’ve felt it a few times, haven’t you? Just taking the edge off of anxiety or fear?”

“Yes,” nodded Isra. “But … it’s not like that, not so … full?”

“For a bard to blast someone with emotional multiplication is considered quite rude,” said Verity. “Even in a tavern setting, where it’s expected there will be a bit of influence from the music, you still wouldn’t go full force. And this wasn’t full force either, the point is to complement the music rather than overwhelm the mind.”

“Can you overwhelm the mind?” asked Isra.

“A bit,” said Verity. “If you weren’t prepared for it — it’s possible, at least for someone who has as much training and experience as I do, to make you stop in your tracks with emotion, so long as I was amplifying something that was already there.”

“I would like to try it some time,” said Isra.

“Really?” asked Verity.

“It’s less fun than it sounds,” said Alfric. “And I don’t think it sounds very fun.”

“You’ve tried it?” asked Verity, raising an eyebrow.

“Grig did it,” said Alfric. “On a dare. I was trying to be a part of the fun.” He shrugged. “Not a great experience, overall, but not one that I wish I didn’t have.”

“Ah,” said Verity. “I should get into my disguise,” said Verity. “Though I suppose I won’t be able to make myself shorter or the dress won’t fit.”

“I like you tall,” said Isra.

Verity smiled at her. A part of her mind was still devoted to looking at their druid and marveling at how pretty she was.

It wasn’t too long before Mizuki and Hannah returned, and Verity thought she detected something uncomfortable from them, but was too polite to ask if they weren’t going to share it on their own.

Chapter 59 - Dressing

Isra was finding the city to be both wonderful and bizarre. The strangeness of the place might have been a bit more unsettling if not for Mizuki, who seemed equally confused by the place, but delighted all the same. She seemed besotted by the house in particular and the bevy of entads it contained. For her part, Verity also seemed to be a bit overwhelmed, though she’d said very little about it, leaving Isra to pick up on what Verity was feeling from the subtle changes to how she spoke and behaved.

“I will take care of you,” said Ria, Alfric’s mother. “If you’d like to dress on your own, the vault is open to you, and I can let you look, but I know what I have and what looks good, and I think I have everything ready for all of you.”

Isra nodded. She had very few ideas about fashion. They were standing in what seemed to be a closet of enormous size, one that was connected to the master bedroom, which they’d passed through only briefly. The bedroom had been immense, with various nooks for reading and writing, a small couch with a fireplace, and enough things that it seemed like it was a small house in its own right. The closet was something else though, an eleven-sided room with shelves that pulled out and enough space in the center that Ria and Isra could stand there together without being in each other’s personal space. The others were in a nook of the master bedroom, waiting for them to be done.

Isra took her headscarf off. “I just want to look pretty,” she said.

“Well, you are pretty,” said Ria. “Dressing for this kind of thing, it’s about calling forward your natural beauty. I’m guessing your mother didn’t help you with this sort of thing all that much?”

“She died in childbirth,” said Isra.

“Oh,” said Ria, pausing for a moment. “Well. I’m so sorry.”

“I never knew her,” Isra shrugged.

“She didn’t have the strength to warp?” asked Ria.

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “My father died five years ago. He never explained the details to me.”

“You poor dear,” said Ria. She had a pronounced frown. “Alfric never mentioned any of this, and here I’ve put my foot in my mouth.”

“It’s fine,” said Isra. She looked at Alfric’s mother. “He’s been good to me.”

She shook her head. “We can talk about it all later, if you’d like, but I’m sure he didn’t feel it was his place to say.” She took a breath to recenter, and a moment to gauge Isra, seeing whether or not she should press the matter. “Now, what sort of pretty would you like to be? From what Alfric said, I think I have the others figured out, but you’re going first because you’re a mystery, and I wanted plenty of time to figure you out, if my first guesses weren’t right.”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “I don’t know what my prettiness would be.”

“Can you understand the others?” asked Ria, raising an eyebrow. “Tell me the ways in which they’re pretty?’

“Mizuki is energetic,” said Isra. “Hannah is solid. Not — solid isn’t a pretty word, but she’s like granite. Strong. Not just physically.” She frowned. “Verity is serene. Not like a stone, but like the wind in your hair. Or like water flowing around your toes.”

“Mmm,” said Ria. “Yes, good, so my plans for them aren’t for nothing, and my son does have some understanding of them.”

“But he doesn’t understand me?” asked Isra.

“I don’t know,” said Ria. “I wouldn’t want to speak for him. His dungeon reports are very dry reading, with hardly any personal details, but I can see what he likes about all of you.” She pursed her lips. “As it stands, I think I have two options for you. The first is traditional Tarbin, the second is something more like what I would wear.” Isra looked at the blue dress. “Not this, this is just normal wear. My skin is a bit darker than your own, but I think I know what works best with it, to avoid clashing with your skin tone.”

What Isra wanted was something that would make Verity completely forget about Xy, but she didn’t know how to say that, or how to explain who Xy was, or what her own feelings on the matter were.

“Will the traditional Tarbin outfit make people want to touch me?” asked Isra. Ria’s eyebrows went up, and Isra could see that was the wrong question.

“It depends upon the person,” said Ria. She was suddenly choosing her words carefully, and Isra didn’t particularly like that. “The outfit would be concealing, and … there are some people who find that alluring, and some people who don’t, but in general, I think more that don’t. If you don’t want to be touched, if that’s your cause for wearing the concealing Tarbin fashion —”

“Oh,” said Isra. “I meant … the opposite.”

“The opposite?” asked Ria.

“When I was asking whether people would want to touch me, I meant that I wanted them to,” said Isra. “Or, not to touch me, necessarily, but … I thought it might be nice to be wanted, in that way.”

“I … see,” said Ria, blinking. “And is this for a particular person?”

Isra stayed silent and thought about that. She had been struggling to put into words the way she felt about Verity for quite some time now. It was a nameless yearning for their skin to touch, and when it did touch it was warm and close, a moment that Isra wanted not to end. She liked when their heads were close to each other, when they were in each other’s spaces. They sought each other out in the house, just to see what the other was doing. They talked together, alone, sometimes while they were in the garden together, other times in the room that they shared in Mizuki’s house.

“I sometimes look over, late at night, when I can’t sleep,” Verity had said. “I like seeing you asleep. You look so peaceful. It’s nice.”

“I do the same in the morning,” said Isra. “You sleep in so late.”

The conversations sometimes happened when Isra was drifting off to sleep, and it was nice to have Verity’s sweet voice in her ear, sometimes with a song, only half-remembered in the morning.

Isra wanted them to be closer, to have them share more, to share a bed. There were moments she thought that they were about to kiss, times when it seemed that their faces were near enough that it would be simple and natural for that to happen. She wanted to wear a dress that would, somehow, communicate all of this to Verity, and to do it in a way that wouldn’t change things between them. Their friendship was precious to Isra, but she had the sense that it was fragile too, capable of being torn apart in an instant by unknown words or actions.

“Not my place, obviously,” said Ria, because Isra had gone too long without speaking. “We’ll go with the other outfit then, the more regal one.”

She went to the closet and pulled out a plum-colored dress, then from a cabinet, took a measuring tape.

“This is an entad, it will take your measurements,” said Ria.

“You’re … tailoring it to me?” asked Isra.

“Magically, yes,” said Ria. “Stand with your arms out, please, legs shoulder-width apart.”

Isra did as she was told, and the measuring tape slithered through the air like a snake, wrapping itself around various parts of her body, squeezing just a bit.

“If it weren’t bound to me, it would have been worth quite a bit,” said Alfric’s mother. “It can resize any dress to fit whomever was just measured, so if that dress doesn’t work out, there are others. When it bound to me I was torn between wishing that it could have gone somewhere it would be in near-constant use, and being quite happy that I would have an excuse to have it sitting in a drawer somewhere when I needed it.”

When the tape measure had finished, it went back to Ria’s hand, and she pressed one end of it against the dress. “There, you should be good to go, I’ll leave you with this.” One of the walls had a few drawers, and she frowned, pulling one open. “Accessories are also quite important, but if you don’t like the dress, we’d have to change them. If you do like the dress,” she paused, looking at what she had, “This, this, these, this, this, and this.” She set a handful of jewelry on an empty shelf. “You’ve already got gold, so this will go with those. The dress will draw attention, the accessories will keep it.”

“This is a lot of gold,” said Isra, looking at the assorted bracelets, rings, necklaces, and earrings.

“Yes,” said Ria. “Half of them are entads, though nothing you’d need to worry about. They’ll be a bit heavy, hand them off to Alfric if they get to be too much. You’ll need a storage entad too, to hold whatever you need, but I’ll have to get something from the vault, something that won’t interfere with the general look. I’ll leave you to it.”

She left without another word, and Isra was left staring at the dress and — she had never understood the term ‘embarrassment of riches’ before, but looking at the pile of gold, pulled casually from one of many drawers, Isra did feel embarrassed. Her own gold, the meager bits she wore in her face, were there because she’d learned that was a good way to make sure they would never be stolen without her knowing about it, a way to carry wealth.

Isra put on the dress and frowned at herself in the mirror. It fit her perfectly, but it didn’t match the rest of her very well. When she looked at her face, it was still her face, and the dress suited her, but it also pulled her in a different direction. It was difficult to put into words, as many things were. Isra was a huntress, a druid, and the dress was for some alternate version of herself, someone who had a sense of the city rather than a sense of the woods.

There was a brief rap at the door, and when Isra opened it, Alfric’s mother slipped in. She made some brief adjustments to the dress and frowned a bit.

“Alright, I’m sorry to say, we’re going to need different underthings for you,” said Ria. “Is that okay?”

“Yes,” said Isra. “Why?”

“The silhouette is important,” said Ria. “The dress is fitted close, it’s just a matter of keeping the lines. I’ll get you a bodice that will work well with the dress. You’re using wraps now?”

Isra nodded.

“Well, all a matter of getting things handled, I should have thought of it before I left you here.” Ria went rummaging in the drawers and pulled out more things for Isra, touching each of them to feel their texture. “I’m glad that makeup will take hardly any time at all, because otherwise we’d be horribly behind schedule rather than just mostly behind schedule.”

“Sorry I’m taking so much time,” said Isra.

Ria waved a hand. “I had an entad that slowed down time, and my husband used to joke that I should have kept it for this room. Doing things properly takes time.”

Isra asked for help with the undergarments, and Ria stayed this time, making sure that everything fit and was put on properly, laced up and in place. Isra had never been fussed over, and quite liked it. Verity had said that when she was younger, her mother had treated her like a doll, dressing her up, and now Isra, having it done to her, found that she still didn’t understand the objection.

The jewelry was hung on her, heavy but beautiful, makeup was applied in a handful of seconds by an entad, shoes were picked out, and Isra suddenly found herself done. She looked at herself in the mirror. Any reservations she’d had about the dress not suiting her had evaporated. She looked quite good, she thought. Her hair was tied back, held in place by a large golden clip, and there was light purple shadow around her eyes, to complement the dress. There were a thousand details that she was sure she would only notice if she had been willing to spend an hour staring in the mirror.

“Now is the fun part,” said Ria. She grinned at Isra through the mirror. “We get to present you.”

Isra stepped out into the bedroom, where the others were waiting.

The only shame was that Verity was in her disguise, but everything else was exactly as good as Isra had hoped. Verity’s eyes went wide and her mouth slightly opened, and she let out a sound that seemed like it might have been an attempt to start a sentence. She regained her composure quickly, but that was to be expected from her.

“Wow,” said Mizuki. “It’s a good thing we have a private box, because you would get a lot of unwanted attention. Also, you’re positively draped in magic. Are we all going to get that much?”

“Likely, yes,” said Ria. “Now I’m hoping that I can do the others a bit faster, because my husband would kill me if you missed the start of the opera for some clothes that no one was actually all that interested in.”

“Well I didn’t know they’d be magical,” said Mizuki.

“You next, let’s go,” said Ria. “And please don’t be picky.”

“You look stunning,” said Verity as Mizuki went in for her turn.

“Ay,” said Hannah. “It gives me some confidence that somethin’ will be done with me.” She gestured at herself. “With this.” She was wearing her usual outfit of a buttoned-down shirt and trousers, both in somewhat dull colors.

“I like how you look,” said Verity. “It’s very practical. It suits you.” Her eyes kept going back to Isra, and Isra smiled. “Your smile,” said Verity. “I wish we had some way to preserve this.”

“Surely they’ve some entad or another,” said Hannah. “I can’t imagine that they don’t have a brush that can make a paintin’, or some such.”

“We can ask Alfric, I suppose,” said Verity, whose eyes continued to roam Isra’s outfit.

Isra took a seat next to Verity on the small couch in the sitting area. The place was clearly meant for two, a retreat for the parents, but Hannah had brought over a chair from a small desk that was tucked away in a different part of the master bedroom.

“Are you dreading this?” Isra asked Verity. “You said you didn’t like it.”

“Not dreading, no,” said Verity. “But not particularly looking forward to either. Mostly I remember my hair being pulled back too tightly, or being scolded for moving, or for not applying my makeup correctly, or for a dozen other things. I somewhat doubt that will be a problem here, if only because they have so much magic on hand. We’ll see. Maybe it will be different.”

Isra slipped her hand into Verity’s and gave it a squeeze, and Verity smiled. But when she turned from Hannah to look over at Isra, her eyes went wide again, as though she’d forgotten that the transformation had taken place.

“Done!” declared Ria, opening the door.

Mizuki was in a red dress, one that almost seemed to be made of a single large sheet of fabric, gathered together at her front so that it formed a V at her chest and a second, upside down one by her legs. It ended up with something like a cape in the back, the fabric draping low, almost touching the floor. At the shoulders there was a fluffy fabric, like non-functional pauldrons. Her hair was down, and when Isra looked at it, she thought that it was quite a bit longer than usual, wavy and black, trailing down to the small of her back. Her makeup was somewhat understated compared to Isra’s. She gave a little spin to show them, then with a snap of her fingers, the dress caught on fire, the red fabric momentarily turning to flames that hugged her body.

“None of that while you’re sitting down,” said Ria with a frown. “I’m not going to regret giving you the flame dress, am I? You can’t touch anything when it’s on fire.”

“I’ll be careful,” said Mizuki, snapping her fingers again and extinguishing the dress.

“Hannah?” asked Ria. “Ready?”

“Oh, ay,” said Hannah.

Mizuki sat down in the chair that Hannah had vacated and touched her earrings, which were copper and ruby, then her necklace, which was so close to her neck that it was nearly a choker.

“Do you like it?” asked Verity.

“I love it,” said Mizuki. “The long hair was a last minute choice, we had to double-check that it wouldn’t burn when the dress was on fire.”

“A flaming dress doesn’t seem very practical,” Verity frowned. “Though it is very striking, when it’s on.”

“I wanted heavy magic,” said Mizuki. She shrugged. “I am a sorceress.”

“Not a pyro though, right?” asked Verity. “A fire dress would seem more appropriate to them.”

“Well, yes,” frowned Mizuki. “And if there’s a pyro around, I’m better with water, cold, and ice.”

“All of them?” asked Isra, who knew virtually nothing about what Mizuki could actually do. She just accepted that Mizuki could do magic some times and couldn’t do magic other times, and that this had something to do with the aether.

“Okay,” said Mizuki. “There are like a hundred ‘moods’ of magic in the aether, and they’re in opposition to each other, but one particular mood can be in opposition to more than one other mood, so there are different possibilities for evening out the aether. Usually one is easiest. For pyros, at least what I noticed when Marsh was around, it’s not just ‘fire’, it’s fire, heat, and consumption, and those have six oppositional moods between them. It’s actually super interesting, I’ve been reading a book that Alfric got for me before the third dungeon.”

“A book … about how to be a sorcerer?” asked Verity.

“Well,” said Mizuki. “Some guy’s understanding of the fundamentals, I guess. Putting into words some things that I always knew, just … I don’t know. I usually called them ‘flavors’, not ‘moods’? But the book is a good one, I’ve talked to other sorcs before and they don’t do as good of a job explaining what it’s like for them. And there’s some interesting stuff in there about rare moods, the kind that you see once or twice and then have to figure out what to do with them really quickly before they’re gone.”

Verity and Mizuki spoke some more about magic, and Isra wasn’t really able to contribute all that much, because it hadn’t been all that long since she’d learned she could do any sort of magic. Bardic magic had some rigor to the approach, but it was (according to Mizuki) quite different for sorcs, in part because they were rare, and in part because there was enough individual variation that talking to other sorcs wasn’t all that helpful.

Ria came out of the closet. “Alright, this is three down, Verity, we’ll have to move quickly, sorry.”

“That’s fine,” said Verity.

Hannah stepped out, looking a bit skeptical. Her dress was green, matching her eyes, and her curly hair had somehow been managed, curling like waves on the ocean, all the curls moving in the same direction and tied off with a bit of emerald and gold. The dress was symmetrical, perfectly so, sleeveless to show off Hannah’s muscular arms. There was a belt around her waist, fashioned for symmetry, and a shaping to the built-in corset that gave it more structure and support than either Isra or Mizuki had. The hemline was quite low, almost down below her ankles, and beneath it, Isra saw that she was wearing some kind of shoe with an extremely high heel, which made her look taller.

“Some women aren’t suited to this sort of thing, I s’pose,” said Hannah, grinning sheepishly.

“Are you kidding?” asked Mizuki. “You look great.”

“Come on, in you go,” said Ria, beckoning Verity. “I’m very seriously worried about running late.”

“Wish me luck,” said Verity, smiling at Isra. It seemed that their eyes took some time to leave each other.

“I’m serious, you look great,” said Mizuki. “I feel a little embarrassed, sure, but I also think that we all look good. I wonder how long it took his mom to get good at this kind of thing?”

“If you have all these things, I would think that it wouldn’t be too difficult,” said Hannah. “The tape measure, in particular, means that it all fits, which as I understand is the hardest part.”

“I think if you set me loose in that closet, I would come up with something far less good than this,” said Mizuki, gesturing at her red dress and ruby accessories. “Also, it would take me several hours.”

“Longer, for me,” said Isra. “I didn’t really understand what was being done to me.”

The door to the bedroom opened and Alfric stepped in. “We’re still waiting on Verity?” he asked.

“Aren’t you going to tell us how great we look?” asked Mizuki.

“Sorry,” said Alfric. He took a moment to look at her, and that was one of the good things about Alfric, that if he was asked about his opinion, he would take his time to think through an answer. “You look lovely.”

“Not so bad yourself,” said Mizuki, eyeing his black suit. “A bit simple though?”

“It’s the style of the time,” said Alfric. “There’s quite a bit of disparity between what men and women wear. But right now, I’m worried about getting there on time.”

“Shouldn’t be long now,” said Mizuki. “It’s just Verity left to go.”

“This would have been a lot faster if my mom had just set out clothes for you,” said Alfric. He frowned.

“Relax,” said Mizuki. “We’re in a private box, right? And you said we can just go right there, teleport or whatever, so if we’re a little late, it’s not a huge deal. Right?”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” said Alfric. “There’s very rarely an excuse to be late.”

They waited, and it was the first time that Isra could recall seeing Alfric visibly impatient.

Even if Verity had taken longer than the others — she had been the fastest — it would have been worth the wait.

The dress had no back, and very little front. A strap hung around her neck, supporting it, but there was clearly no corset, stay, or any other form of support. The dress was also slit along the legs, and when Verity walked, it showed their full length. Around her neck was a pearl necklace, with pearl earrings to match it, and a tie for her hair that seemed to also be made of pearls. She was stunning, radiant, and that feeling of wanting to be close surged through Isra. Verity’s legs were very nice, long with smooth skin, and her back being so exposed made it seem as though she was naked.

“You’re out of your disguise?” asked Alfric.

Isra hadn’t even noticed, but he was right, Verity was back to being Verity.

“Just for the time being,” said Verity. “I wanted to be more myself, not my own sister. I’ll put it back on when we’re out on the town. I spoke with your mother about it.”

“Alright,” said Alfric. “But we need to go, very soon.”

“That dress is a bit scandalous,” said Hannah, frowning — frowning! — at what Verity was wearing. “I can see a bit of your tit from the side.”

Verity turned, presenting her profile, and Isra could see that this was true. The cloth of the dress went down her front, but it didn’t hug her skin, and from the side, her breast was exposed.

“She asked for something provocative,” said Ria. “Something that was on the edge of being indecorous. Well, we’re not changing it, so if she wants to change into something that shows a bit less skin, it’ll have to be at intermission.”

“Hmm,” Verity frowned. She looked up at Isra, who was still staring at her, and hadn’t really stopped. “I’ll stick with this.”

“We might already be late,” said Alfric. “Mom, if you could do the honors?”

Ria nodded. “Any last business before you go?” she asked. “Anything you need to grab?”

They all shook their heads, and Ria pulled a dagger from nowhere. She pointed it at each of them in turn, flicking it around as fast as possible, and they popped away as quickly as could be. When the dagger was pointed at Isra, the world around her warped and changed, and she was somewhere with dim light and quite a bit of noise. The room they were in, if it could be called a room, hung over a large place filled with people, with a very nice view of the stage. There were two rows of seats, more than necessary for all of them, and a small table between the rows where a platter of food and glasses of wine were already set out.

“Seems we’re early,” said Hannah, stepping forward to peer down at the audience. “Not everyone is seated.”

“Five minutes early is about twenty times better than five minutes late,” said Alfric. “It looks like the service has been through. Before we start, a bit of etiquette: no talking except through the party channel since even a whisper can carry, food and drink should be taken as quietly as possible, though preferably not at all, bathroom should wait for either the act break or the intermission, applause lightly and briefly at the end of a song — they’ll pause for it — and louder at the end of an act, standing ovation once the opera is finished. Intermission is at roughly an hour and a half, but there’s a brief musical interlude for a set change between the first and second acts. Once it’s done, we’ll go backstage to speak to the performers and musicians, if you’d like.”

He found a seat, and Mizuki sat next to him. Isra picked a spot in the second row, slightly back, next to Verity and Hannah. Alfric handed them all little sheets of paper, which he called programs, which listed the performers and musicians, the division of acts, some background on the opera, and on the opera company that was performing it. Isra was the only person to pay it any mind; the others glanced at it, but didn’t actually read it, their eyes too busy looking around the opera hall.

“Dwodo,” said Mizuki, pointing across the way, to another of the rooms that hung off the walls of the hall.

“Sorry,” said Alfric, who took Mizuki’s hand and gently lowered it. “I should have explained that part of etiquette is not pointing at other members of the audience and gawking at them.”

“Okay, yes,” said Mizuki. “But still, dwodo, you see them, right?”

“Yes,” said Alfric. “But they’re here to enjoy the opera, same as we are.”

Isra looked where Mizuki had pointed, and in the box across from them, on the other side, there were, apparently, dwodo, hunched figures with grey skin and wide mouths, bald heads and clothes with many layers. Isra had never seen anything like them before, and the term ‘dwodo’ was unfamiliar.

She was about to ask about them, hoping that her ignorance wouldn’t be annoying, when the lights all around them got dimmer — accomplished by mechanical slats lowering into place, at least for those lights in their box.

Then, the show started, and Isra gave it her full attention.

Chapter 61 - Concessions

It seemed faintly ridiculous to Hannah that Mizuki should be keeping an eye on her. Perhaps the others hadn’t seen Mizuki’s moments of ‘spontaneity’, but Hannah could still very distinctly recall Mizuki calling over to the boys from Vertex at the noodle shop, and if anyone needed looking after, it was Mizuki. Of course, Mizuki hadn’t framed it as looking out for Hannah, but it very much felt like that was what they were doing, looking out for each other.

Everything she’d seen so far in Dondrian had been eye-wateringly expensive, even taking into account that she was staying with a family that was wealthy beyond measure. The hallway that they walked down was carpeted with a vibrant and pretty design, and she imagined that either they had incredibly good cleaners for it, or entads to deal with the wear and tear, or both. The walls had a long, continuous mural that was a work of art in its own right, and which people were passing by as though it was nothing.

“I liked the opera itself well enough,” said Hannah. “With two women, I’d thought that it might not be my style.”

“No?” asked Mizuki as they walked together. “Why not?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Hannah. “There’s something I like better about the camaraderie of men, compared to women. Maybe a part of me thinks of girls as bein’ catty with one another.”

“Men can be plenty catty,” said Mizuki.

“Well, ay,” said Hannah. “But I’m speakin’ of what’s in books and operas, not real life. The way men are written just appeals more to me, most of the time, especially when they’re lovers.”

“But … they’re still vulnerable in those books, aren’t they?” asked Mizuki. “Like, I’m pretty sure that I read correctly, and they had those tender moments.”

“Aye, but they’re tender against type,” said Hannah. “With women the weakness, the tenderness, seems to be out in front, most of the time.”

“I guess,” said Mizuki.

They had made their way to the lobby, which had a concessions area and a number of people handing out plates and glasses to those with some rings. From the tastefully painted sign, Hannah was extraordinarily grateful that they wouldn’t have to pay for their own food and drink, though the gratefulness didn’t actually extend that far, because she’d have rather gone hungry than pay those prices. That someone else was paying those prices on her behalf was almost an affront.

“Do rich people like lines?” asked Mizuki as they stood in line. “I mean, it seems like if you’re rich, you wouldn’t want to stand in line. You’d pay more for extra staff.”

“My guess is that if you’re really rich, you pop back home for intermission and eat from your chiller, or you bring a spoon that you can have a full meal from, or some such,” said Hannah.

“Ah, so these are lesser creatures,” said Mizuki, looking around. “The poors.”

Hannah laughed. “Well I’m glad you’re enjoyin’ yourself,” she smiled.

“Dondrian has been wonderful so far,” said Mizuki. “Beyond my wildest dreams. It kind of makes me wish I were an Overguard.”

“Eh, ay, hard to become more than an honorary member, isn’t it?” asked Hannah. “Even if you were to marry Alfric.”

Mizuki started coughing. “Um, what?”

“Oh, are you going to pretend that you don’t feel some attraction?” asked Hannah. “Is that what we’re doin’?”

“Yes, it is,” said Mizuki, folding her arms. “I was thinking they could adopt me, not that — I mean, he’s not attracted to me anyway, so it doesn’t bear thinking about.”

The fact that Mizuki was denying it seemed, to Hannah, a clear sign that this was more than just the kind of attraction Mizuki felt to nearly any man around her own age. They took a few steps forward in line, and Hannah considered her approach.

“To my mind, the thing that would complicate things more would be their system of pacts,” said Hannah. “Which is why I said the thing about honorary members. You could marry in, but at best, you’d be raisin’ kids that aren’t your own, or he’d have a second family somewhere, and I know that’s how Xuphin does it, but most people don’t have the stomach for it.”

“Well,” said Mizuki. “I’m not into him, and he’s not into me, so it’s not worth talking about.”

“Alright,” said Hannah. She could tell when to back off. “Just know that I’m here to talk with you, if you want.”

“And you’re not into him?” asked Mizuki.

Hannah laughed. “Why would you ask that?”

“See,” said Mizuki, pointing at her. “You didn’t answer the question. And while I was out exploring the city, you were apparently wrestling with Alfric.”

“So?” asked Hannah.

“So if I were wrestling with Alfric, us getting sweaty and holding each other down, it would definitely mean something,” said Mizuki. “That’s all I’m saying.”

Hannah laughed. “And you don’t think that says more about you than me?”

They got to the counter, and Mizuki was a bit too quick to order, like someone who had been caught in a trap. So far as Hannah was concerned, this was all in good fun, but she was watching closely, because romance was something that made people go a bit crazy, and if Mizuki thought that this was serious, it was better to nip that in the bud.

Mizuki ordered quite a bit, to be sent to the Overguard box, in part because she wouldn’t have had enough hands to carry it all. What was on offer was not, it seemed, a full meal, but rather, relatively small things, snacks or appetizers, typically those that could be eaten without making a mess. It was somewhat amusing to watch done-up people eating carefully so as not to smudge their makeup or get a drop of something on their fancy clothes.

“Honestly, I’m not sure this is going to be able to beat the street food,” said Mizuki. “The way they do things here, if I understand it right, they don’t want to repeat things too often, but all the focus on novelty means that they don’t have the time and experience to get things right.”

“Oh?” asked Hannah. “You figured that out without even tasting the food?”

“Nah, I was talking to Alfric’s dad a bit, before we had our early dinner,” said Mizuki. “Mostly wondering what kind of food there would be. But it makes sense, it’s the same way when I’m trying new things. You learn a lot, the first time you do it, and a little less every time after that, until eventually it’s perfect.”

“One moment,” said Hannah. She’d caught a bit of conversation. “Eavesdrop with me?”

“What’s with you and listening in on people?” asked Mizuki.

“Didn’t you do the same with Alfric and Lola?” asked Hannah, who was making her way over.

“Different,” Mizuki replied.

They made their way over, and the bit of conversation, whose most important word was ‘Verity’, was still ongoing between two women of middle age, one in a dress of blue which had sleeves down to her wrists, the other in an ostentatious dress of gold that clung to her figure.

“Oh, well she was always such a well-behaved girl,” said the woman in gold. “And to be Chosen at a young age must have seemed like such a gift. But she’s almost a year gone, and it’s not clear what the family will do without her. Parson is facing seizure, it’s said, and well-deserved from what I’ve heard, and Edil, she’s never contributed much except to spend.”

“Inherited lifestyle can be such a dangerous thing,” the woman in blue replied. “I’d always counted Edil as one of our own.”

“Well, yes, and she was, she had all the proper learning, but that’s simply not enough in this day and age.” The woman in gold clucked her tongue. “I can’t say that we’re the better for it, but in some cases, it seems as though there’s some justice, not that I should speak my piece until after there’s a verdict on the seizure.”

“No, wouldn’t do to rush to a hasty conclusion,” nodded the woman in blue. She took a drink of amber wine from a fluted glass. “Do you suppose the girl will come back from wherever she’s gone?”

“It’s possible the poor thing has crumbled under the stress,” said the woman in gold. “Sometimes having a gift at a young age can be a burden, the talent outstripping the development of the rest of the self. But it’s also possible that she’ll come roaring back into Dondrian with a skill and charm that we’ve never seen before. You can never count out a Chosen. A god’s will isn’t easily denied.”

“And you believe the rumors?” asked the woman in blue. “That they’ve simply lost track of her?”

The woman in gold smirked. “Oh, well, — can I help you?”

Mizuki and Hannah had been looking at a painting hung on the wall, one of a singer who had been immortalized by the brush, and while Hannah had been keeping her ears open and her eyes forward, Mizuki had been sneaking glances. Now, they’d been caught.

“Sorry,” said Mizuki. “I couldn’t help but overhear.” Mizuki was, for some reason known only to her, putting on a bit of an accent, sounding more like Verity. “You were speaking of Verity Parson? We went to the conservatory with her, did you say she’s missing?”

“If she were missing they would have made more of a to-do about it,” said the woman in gold. “But she’s left Dondrian, yes.” There was a bit of suspicion in her tone and the way she was looking at them, which was only natural, given that they’d been caught listening in.

And here there was a problem, because if they really were students who’d been in Verity’s class, as Mizuki had put it in her off-the-cuff lie, then they should surely know more than these two women about Verity being one of the Chosen, which would certainly be a surprise, and only raise further questions. But they couldn’t ask whether Verity was really a Chosen, or a Chosen of which god, without revealing that they were not, in fact, who they’d said they were.

Mizuki’s clever solution to this was to simply ask anyway and damn the consequences — which, to be fair, were expected to be quite mild.

“So Verity is a Chosen?” asked Mizuki. “Of which god?”

Both the women seemed taken aback.

“Of Xuphin,” said the woman in blue. “How could you not — it was well-known!”

“Alright, see ya later,” said Mizuki. She walked away as though this was the most natural interaction in the world, and Hannah followed after her.

They walked together in silence for a bit, down one of the corridors.

“Pretty crazy that we ended up in a love triangle, huh?” asked Mizuki.

“What?” asked Hannah.

“You, me, and Alfric, I mean,” said Mizuki. “It’s just not how I thought things would turn out.”

“I know you’re makin’ a joke,” said Hannah. “But I don’t think we can ignore what we heard.”

“Seems like if Verity wanted to tell us, she’d have told us,” said Mizuki. “And this is why you don’t eavesdrop on people, because sometimes you hear things you weren’t meant to hear.”

“So we should pretend that we heard nothin’?” asked Hannah. “Seems to me that neither of us are all that good at puttin’ on a show. And what would Alfric say?”

“He’d say that we should disclose it,” said Mizuki with a sigh. “But … Do you think he knew?”

Hannah couldn’t help but laugh. “He’s Alfric, do you think that he went across the continent to chase her down without knowin’ every detail there was to know about her? He knew she was Chosen, probably consulted with some clerics on the specifics, talked to her parents certainly, all kinds of things.”

“I guess,” said Mizuki. They’d arrived at the door of the private box, after going up what felt like quite a few too many stairs. “But can we wait to talk to her about it until after the opera?”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “Wouldn’t want to ruin a perfectly fine evening.”

When they came in, the food and drink were already waiting for them, having beaten them to the box.

“I think this might be a bit too much food,” frowned Alfric.

“It’s to share,” said Mizuki. “How have things been in here?”

“Good,” said Isra, which Hannah noted as an unusual volunteering of information from her. “They’re moving the sets around.” The stage was mostly dark, but not so dark that movement couldn’t be discerned.

“So this is to share?” asked Verity, pointing down at the plate of food.

“Of course,” nodded Mizuki. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m super hungry. Might just be the music that’s doing it. Is that a thing bards can do?”

“Thirst and hunger?” asked Verity with a raised eyebrow. “Yes, we can. It’s frowned upon though, and can be difficult to do without people noticing. And beyond that, it’s just amplification, so once someone eats or drinks, it falls off. I wouldn’t be able to make someone hungry if they weren’t already hungry.”

“They wouldn’t do that here,” said Alfric.

“I was just curious,” said Mizuki. She picked up a tiny little pie with slices of thin ham curled inside to look like petals of a flower, and herbs in the center that looked like a stamen. She ate it in two bites, and Hannah thought that it would have been entirely possible to do it in one. For the same price, it would have been possible to buy half a sandwich in Pucklechurch. “Mmmm.”

There was a collection of different sheep cheeses, cubes of cured meat on small skewers, different skewers with what looked like a collection of oblong vegetables and slices of pickle. A small pile of sandwiches were available, all of them with their crust removed, filled with nothing more than creamy sauces and leafy greens. Isra seemed particularly interested in a different tiny pie that seemed to be filled with little black beads.

“Fish eggs?” she asked. She seemed pleasantly surprised.

“Yes,” nodded Alfric.

Isra happily ate the tiny pie, and Hannah kept well clear.

“Does anyone want to discuss the opera?” asked Verity.

“Is there that much to talk about?” asked Mizuki.

“Zuki and I were talkin’ about how femininity is portrayed,” said Hannah.

“I guess,” said Mizuki. “Tell me, does the opera change at all if you make Lerial into a man?”

“Traditionally it would be Marsc as a man, or at least more masculine,” said Verity.

“Really?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, we haven’t finished it, but Lerial is the one pursuing Marsc, right?”

“At the end of the second act she’s returning home, yes,” said Verity. “And you think that’s a manly thing to do?”

“It’s, I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “In my experience, I’ve almost always been the one that’s pursued. That’s normal, right?”

“You flirt, don’t you?” asked Hannah. “Flirtation is a form of pursuit.”

“Is it?” asked Mizuki. “Seems to me like it’s an invitation, if that? Which is different.”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever flirted with someone,” said Alfric. He looked at Hannah. “Is it different, between two women?”

“Oh, ay,” said Hannah. “As Mizuki says, there’s a bit of a dynamic, and it can happen, at times, that two women will flirt back and forth endlessly, neither of them makin’ the first move. It’s a bit of relationship paralysis. Happens between men and women too, but there, at least, there’s some convention to fall back on.”

“Are we going to see that in this opera?” asked Isra. “They haven’t confessed their love for each other yet.”

“That would be telling,” said Verity. “We still have half an opera left to go.”

“Set change looks interesting,” said Mizuki, peering out into the theater. She’d eaten quite a bit from the plates that had been set out, and was on another glass of wine.

“It’s another transforming one,” said Verity. “That’s one of the things that the opera is known for. The act one to act two transition, where they’re split into two different areas, and the transition from act three to act four, where it goes from a house where they’re coming together to — well.”

“Right, you don’t want to spoil it,” said Mizuki. “Which I do appreciate. Though with all the songs and lyrics and emotional manipulation, I’m not finding it to be the easiest thing to follow. I also don’t feel like I need to be surprised?”

“We can dissect it after it’s done,” said Alfric. “We’re still planning on a night around the town? There are places we can go to get some dancing in, or some drinks.”

“I have to be honest, I’m a bit tipsy already,” said Mizuki. She held up her glass and closed one eye. “I’ll finish this one, then sober up a bit in time to get smashingly drunk. What kind of dancing do they do? Line dancing?”

Alfric laughed, until he realized that she was serious. “Um, can you waltz?”

“It’s four steps,” said Mizuki. “Who doesn’t know how to waltz?” She glanced at Isra. “You can learn it in like … five minutes, it’s easy, especially if you have a good lead.”

“I can teach you,” said Alfric. “It’s really not hard. The basic five dances will get you through a good number of songs, you just need your partner to know that you’re a beginner so they don’t try to spin you.”

They talked for a bit after that, chatter, mostly, about what would come the next day and what they’d do that night. Verity didn’t bring up her mother again, but did glance down toward the seats as they began to fill.

Once the opera started, Hannah did her best to concentrate, but as the opening song of the third act started, she knew that it was useless. There were too many other things to think about, and the opera had no hope of gripping her.

Verity being one of the Chosen of Xuphin was hard to believe. If it was true, and it seemed as though it had to be true, then Verity had been keeping it from all of them for quite some time. That stung, and more than Hannah might have expected. The Chosen were special, picked by the gods for some ineffable purpose. If you were Chosen, that instantly became the most important thing about you. To not have said anything about it, especially after she’d chastised Alfric for his own brief deception, just didn’t sit right with Hannah.

Hannah had met two of the Chosen of Garos, though hadn’t spent any significant time with either. One was an architect, advanced in age and kept at the seminary mostly for the purpose of being trotted out to give a talk every now and again. She had designed a number of notable buildings, all in a beautifully symmetrical style, not just following in the footsteps of prior builders but forging her own path with reflections upon reflections, designs that mirrored at many levels, which helped the people who lived and worked in those buildings to have lives of symmetry.

The other had been a cartier, who had developed a stride technique that allowed him to flow through the leylines at twice the speed of nearly anyone else. That one, sadly, had not been terribly transferable, too difficult to teach to others, too specific to him, but he had nonetheless come before the fledgling clerics to talk about it, in part so they could meet someone that had been touched by their god. He was an important man in his field, among the fastest of the cartiers, which meant that he got the biggest and most important shipments.

What might Verity become? Hannah’s mind turned over the possibilities. The Chosen came in different magnitudes, some of them titans of art or industry, others working in a particular niche or on some particular project. Verity was apparently a prodigy with the lute though, and a highly skilled bard for being so young. Would she advance the state of the art there, or create some great work? It seemed quite likely.

Hannah had a bit of schooling in the ways of Xuphin, as she did in all the gods. When people thought of Xuphin, they thought of all things large and tall, of excess and gluttony, but the actual doctrine and the holy words in the Xu Phinnas went far beyond that. Humans could be made larger, and this was good, but they couldn’t be made infinitely large, so large that they blotted out the sun, so their head went past the moons. In the seminary, when they spoke of what each god might have wanted as the end state of the world, it was thought that Xuphin would want a world without end, one teeming with life and variety, a world that would dwarf humans, one where they would be rendered insignificant. It was a bit frightening, more so than the perfect world for Kesbin, mere nonexistence.

And what might a Chosen of Xuphin do? Was she dangerous to be around? Were they to be her springboard into greatness? The more Hannah thought about it, the more upset she was at not being told, as much as she tried to make herself understand that there wasn’t anything compelling Verity to disclose that information. Nothing except the fact that it might affect them in some way, and that they were all supposed to be friends.

Hannah tried to reflect herself into Verity’s place, to get some perspective on the matter. It really didn’t help that the opera seemed to be moving in an unpleasant direction. Lerial had returned home and Marsc, despite clearly being in love, felt some duty to her husband and some reluctance to reunite. It felt like there was some real anxiety being produced by the bards, a thick tension that wasn’t coming from Hannah alone.

If Hannah had been Chosen, even if it was by a god that wasn’t Garos, she’d have been thrilled beyond words. It wasn’t the promise of doing something grand and important, it was the idea that there was some true purpose to her life, that she fit in with the world in some way above and beyond normal people. Being Chosen was like one of the gods coming down and saying “this is what you were meant to do, and you will be great at it”. Of course, you still had to pick your specialty, and there were a few rare Chosen who didn’t go on to do anything obvious of note, but — Hannah found herself getting sidetracked with her own feelings. She was doing a poor job of trying to think about what Verity felt.

Verity had said she’d left Dondrian because of the expectation placed on her by her parents, and it was clear now that what she hadn’t said was that she’d also left Dondrian because of the expectation placed on her by Xuphin, not to mention his clerics and followers. So when Hannah thought of what Verity had been feeling, it was pressure to perform, and not just to perform, but to perform better than anyone had before, bigger, louder, better, to innovate and iterate and … Hannah thought she’d have done well with it, but she could see how it might be difficult for someone who was constantly questioning whether they were good enough.

It was difficult for Hannah to relate. When she’d come to the seminary, she’d seen so many people who were unserious about their faith, their god, and while there were plenty of arguments with the more intellectually inclined set, Hannah had never felt much in the way of pressure or strain.

It was clear that Verity felt quite a bit of strain and pressure, and that a lot had been asked of her from a very young age. She had been famous, at least a little bit, enough that they were still gossiping about quite a bit after the fact.

Hannah couldn’t quite square it, couldn’t quite grasp what Verity was feeling, not on a gut level. They would have to have it out, Hannah was sure of that, but she suspected that if challenged, Verity might simply fold.

There were still things to do though, if you didn’t quite grasp what someone else was going through and couldn’t quite feel any empathy for their position. You could trust their accounting of things and give them the space to do as they would. It was what Hannah resolved to do, though she’d ask her questions all the same. Verity needed support, not to be questioned.

Though Hannah did think that Verity needed to have a talk with her mother, even if it was to tell the woman to bugger off.

Chapter 62 - A Night on the Town

Mizuki found the fourth act of the opera absolutely stunning. If there had been a direction she’d been thinking it would go, following the third act, it wasn’t the outbreak of war. The whole set was on fire, and it looked like real fire, but she didn’t imagine that they would actually burn down the set, so it was either a clever illusion or an entad or something, and she was momentarily distracted from the opera itself until the fighting started. The whole thing had been so gentle, maybe a bit melodramatic, though it was probably hard not to be when you were singing everything, and then it had taken a fourth act turn into a war story, or if not a war story, then a story told in a time of war. Before Lerial and Marsc came onto the stage again, there was a battle between two sides, with red scarves to represent blood or maybe guts, desperate fighting with swords and magic until eventually one side — unclear which, or why they were even fighting each other — had won, then looted the corpses and carried them off.

Then the singing started up again, with the burning city as the backdrop.

The lesson of the opera, it seemed to her, was that times of peace could be suddenly blown into pieces, and that the fragility of life and our conditions within it meant that it was better to act, to seize the day, to take chances where and when you could.

“Okay,” she said once it was over and they’d given the obligatory standing ovation. “I liked that they got together in the end, but sheesh I didn’t think they were going to go there.”

“The war?” asked Verity. “It was foreshadowed.”

“Was it though?” asked Mizuki.

“Yes,” said Verity. “In the first act? It’s why Lerial goes away in the first place, because of a fear that problems are brewing?”

“I don’t remember that at all,” said Mizuki. “Anyway, I liked it, but the war stuff hit hard.”

“It’s toned down,” said Alfric. “Compared to what war really was, anyway. They simulated the deaths and dragged the corpses off the street right away. In actual wartime — not to churn anyone’s stomach, but it was a lot worse. Soldiers get hungry and steal from civilians. Armies steal from workers. Buildings and fields are burnt as part of denial tactics. Bodies are left on the ground and disease spreads. And when magic comes into the picture, sometimes thousands die at once.”

“One of the roles of Lerial and Marsc, within the canon, is a call to not forget our bloody history,” said Verity. “The stagings of it vary though. I thought a full acted-out battle to music was … well, a bit much. The last time I saw a production, the opening of the act was the grim aftermath of war, which is the actual setting that the leads will be singing in.”

“I don’t know enough history,” said Isra. “It seems unimaginable.”

“The opera post-dates Interim’s last war by nearly fifty years,” said Verity. “From what I understand, the shock of the fourth act was even more pronounced, with blood on the stage and, as Alfric said, simulated corpses. I actually read that there was one production where they wafted the scent of char and death out into the audience.”

“Seems it must have been political, for the time,” said Hannah.

“Yes,” nodded Verity. “Provocative, as quite a bit of good art is.”

“I enjoyed it well enough,” said Alfric. “It’s my second time seeing it, the other was when I was younger. I’m not much of a fan of love stories though.”

“Aw, Alfric has a hard heart,” said Mizuki.

“This particular sort of thing, where the two leads are going back and forth,” he said. “Especially with fully half the opera being yearning for one another, it’s … I don’t know. It’s not my thing.”

“I liked it, except for the parts I didn’t like,” said Mizuki.

“Opera isn’t really about the plot,” said Verity. “Or it’s not supposed to be. It’s about feeling, the emotion.”

“The emotions were good,” said Isra. “Strong.”

“Well if you’d like, we can go backstage,” said Alfric. “Usually the singers will come out into the lobby and shake hands, get their accolades, things like that. But backstage, we could see some of the sets, talk privately when they came back, things like that. It does break the spell a bit.” He shrugged. “Or we could just go out dancing.”

“Dancing,” said Mizuki.

“Ay, dancin’,” said Hannah.

Isra looked at Verity, from whom she seemed to take many cues. “I don’t particularly feel the need to congratulate them on the performance,” said Verity. “And I’ve been backstage, it’s nothing too special.”

“Alright,” said Alfric, nodding. It didn’t seem to matter to him one way or another. “Is everyone going to wear these clothes, or slip into something more comfortable?”

“I’m ready to shock people with this dress,” said Verity, gesturing down to it. It was, in fact, possible to see a bit of tit from the side, as Hannah had pointed out.

~~~~

The place they went to was called The Contrary Dragon, which to Mizuki sounded like a good pub name. It was anything but: it was absolutely enormous, with a long bar against one wall and a number of bartenders in sharp suits there. The wide dance floor had hundreds of twirling partners. Along one side, there were tables for people to sit and drink, and the entire place seemed quite full.

<So many people,> said Isra. She was using the party channel because the place was loud, not just with the band that was playing, but with the movement and conversation of so many people.

<Fewer than went to the opera,> said Verity.

<But they’re not all in rows,> said Isra. <It’s a swarm.>

<Looks fantastic,> Mizuki said. <Alfric, teach Isra some steps, then let’s get going.> She rubbed her hands together and grinned. It had been some time since she’d learned this kind of dancing, and she was going to be rusty, but dancing was fun, and she was looking good.

It didn’t take long for Mizuki to be invited onto the dance floor by a hopeful young man, and she took his hand, hoping that she was doing things right. Thankfully, he kept to the basic steps, and they got swept up in the cloud of dancers, which seemed to follow a counter-clockwise swirl.

They talked, a bit, though it wasn’t the sort of conversation that left an impression in her mind. He was Chelxic, at least going by his complexion, and spoke with a bit of an accent, which was pleasant enough to listen to, but when the song ended and he asked for another dance, she thanked him and then said no, wandering off to go find someone else.

She was overdressed for the venue, but given the outfit, that was almost a given. Almost all of the women wore dresses, but most of them were a bit simpler and more practical. Most of the men were in buttoned-down shirts and slacks, the same thing that Alfric usually wore, though many of them had quite a bit more color than he normally wore. Tonight, he was in black, with very little color to liven it up.

To her satisfaction, she seemed to be attracting a fair number of men, and didn’t need to wait long to find a new one. Her second partner was a tall man with red hair and flushed cheeks, slightly drunk but with good cheer. Her third partner was a muscular man with sleeves that went only just to below his elbows, and he sweated a bit too much, making the point where their hands connected too damp.

The fourth was Alfric.

His grip was firm but yielding and his form was impeccable. He moved through the swarm of dancers with an absolute awareness of what the other couples were doing, sometimes slowing her down and other times pulling her in close to let someone by.

“You’re actually good at this,” she said.

“Practice,” said Alfric.

Mizuki smiled at him as they swept across the floor, and nearly missed a step. “Always practice, isn’t it?”

“Lola liked to dance,” said Alfric.

They were silent for a bit after that, as Mizuki felt like she’d put her foot in her mouth. Lola wasn’t just an arranged marriage that Alfric had never wanted, they’d been friends and partners. Lola hadn’t just taken his party, she’d trashed their relationship as well, and there were times when Mizuki could see that in Alfric.

“Sorry,” said Mizuki.

“It’s fine,” said Alfric. “I got decent at dancing, and it’s nice to use an old skill. Are you ready for a dip?”

“What do I need to do?” she asked, focusing on her steps.

“Engage your core, have some rigidity, I’ll guide you, just hold onto me,” said Alfric.

The dip happened suddenly, and Mizuki went nearly horizontal, supported mostly by Alfric’s hand. She was afraid that he was going to drop her, or that she would slip, but he had her, and pulled her back to her feet as though she weighed nothing at all. He gave her a grin that made her feel like butterflies, and they stood there for a moment, just looking at each other. The music had come to a stop, and it seemed as though he’d timed the dip to perfectly coincide with it.

And then he walked away, with her following after him, as though they hadn’t just had a moment.

Mizuki wasn’t attracted to Alfric any more than she was attracted to any other boy, but … well, that meant that she was attracted to him a little. He was handsome enough, and muscular, and extraordinarily driven, focused, and competent. He was a bit of a brick, that was true, and she couldn’t imagine what kissing him would be like — or rather, of all the times she’d imagined him kissing her, it hadn’t felt quite true, it had felt like she’d drawn a picture in her mind that didn’t match reality.

Hannah had staked out a table and waved them over, and they came to sit down with her.

“Took ages to get a drink,” said Hannah. “And quite overpriced.” She was speaking loudly to be heard over the music, which had started up again.

“Where are the other two?” asked Mizuki. She was still feeling a bit awkward about Alfric, and deliberately sat on the other side of the table from him, which he took no notice of.

“There,” said Hannah, pointing.

Mizuki looked, and saw Verity and Isra dancing together, mostly in glimpses, because they were in the center of the swirl, where slower dancers tended to go. It was obviously not the most graceful dancing that Mizuki had ever seen, and from the way they were looking at their feet, she suspected that Verity was continuing the job of teaching Isra what she needed to know. It was also clear why Hannah hadn’t used the channel; she didn’t want to interrupt them.

“Four dances for me,” said Mizuki. “I’m not sure how many I have in me, actually.” The shoes she’d been supplied with were very nice, magically custom-fitted to her feet, but her feet were already starting to get sore.

“I don’t think we’ll stay here long,” said Alfric. He took a flask from inside his suit pocket and took a long swig from it, then held it out to Mizuki. She drank, and was mildly disappointed that it was just water.

“Did you do this often?” asked Mizuki. “Before you came to the greatest little town in the world?”

“Every now and then,” said Alfric. “Less, after I was by myself.” He looked out on the spinning crowd. “It brings back some memories.”

“Good ones though, right?” asked Mizuki.

“Bittersweet,” said Alfric with a shrug. “And a few times I came here with my brothers, or stag, but — well, I’m glad that I have friends with me.”

“Save the next dance for me?” asked Hannah. “I haven’t been out there at all, and would like to give it a try.” Alfric nodded.

“Do you know how?” asked Mizuki.

“Oh, ay,” said Hannah. “I learned at seminary, and went out a few times, though I’m none too good. There are traditional dances of Garos, but they’re not terribly popular, and mostly for holy days. Those I’m quite good at.”

“Naturally,” said Mizuki. She wasn’t sure that she’d ever seen a Garos dance, not even during a holy day. Garos wasn’t really a dancing god.

“To tell the truth, I’m already ready to go back,” said Alfric. “Not back to the house, to Pucklechurch.”

“For more dungeons?” asked Mizuki.

“Well, that too,” said Alfric. “But less people around, a smaller setting — I think it suits me better.”

“That’s us,” said Hannah, rising from her seat. The band had brought their song to a close, and Alfric took her offered hand, guiding her out onto the dance floor.

Mizuki watched them go. Hannah looked much different in the dress, in part because it showed off her muscular arms. It was a good look on her, and of them all, it was arguable that she’d had the biggest transformation. But Mizuki saw Isra, who was showing her hair and neck, draped in gold, and decided that no, she was wrong, it was Isra who had changed the most. Verity was dancing with Isra still, in the center, much more of a lesson than a proper dance.

Mizuki sat by herself, not wanting to brave the busy bar to try to get a drink, mostly just watching the dancers twirling by. The fashions of Dondrian were eclectic, but there was a Chelxic style that seemed to be common, dresses that came nearly to the floor while leaving arms bare and necklines low. Verity’s was provocative, and she got some looks, but they were appreciative looks, at least so far as Mizuki could tell.

“Here, I saw you all alone and bought you a drink,” a man said as he sat down next to Miuzki.

He had changed clothes, but after a moment, Mizuki recognized him as the man from before, the one that had bothered her while she was drinking her hot chocolate. His hair was a bit more slicked back than before, some of that from sweat rather than oils, and he had a happy grin on his face.

“Thank you,” said Mizuki, taking the drink from him but not drinking it.

“That was odd, with the owls, wasn’t it?” he asked.

“I guess,” said Mizuki. “You know, it’s a bit presumptuous for you to come sit at my table.” She was mildly annoyed that he was there, but not so much that she wanted to make a scene, not when he was being friendly.

“Oh, I know. But I did bring you a drink.” He used one long finger to push the glass closer to her. “And earlier, with the owls, if I came on strong — well, you have my apology.”

“Accepted, I suppose,” said Mizuki. She glanced at the drink, but still didn’t pick it up. It was a bad feeling, that was all, and it was rude of her not to accept it, but it took some trust to drink something that someone had brought to you unasked for.

“Well, do you have another dance in you?” he asked. Mizuki had forgotten his name. Bertrand? Bertan? Bertran? Whatever his name, he seemed hopeful.

Mizuki looked out at the dance floor. The song was, by her reckoning, half over, and she had cooled back down from her round of dances. Alfric and Hannah had taken two songs together, and Verity was swaying in the center with Isra. That left Mizuki all alone, and it seemed that she would be so for the foreseeable future.

“Alright, sure,” said Mizuki. She took his hand and they went out onto the floor.

Two things were immediately obvious. The first was that Bertran was very good at dancing, better than Alfric or any of the other men Mizuki had danced with. He moved gracefully and fluidly across the floor, his frame solid and Mizuki naturally following, though they had a few missteps early on when Mizuki was able to reveal her lack of expertise. He slowed somewhat, if only to avoid getting his toes stepped on.

The second thing that was immediately clear was that he liked to talk, and expected their dance to be one of constant conversation. If Mizuki had known that, she would have declined.

“So, I’m an assessor for the city, mostly relating to taxes, it’s more interesting than you’d think.” It was impressive, at least, the way that he was able to put out so many words while doing something that was strenuous — strenuous because he was moving them so quickly around the dance floor, breezing past the other dancers. “I get to go learn about new companies and what they do, their process, their skills, the important people. I find it great fun. What do you do?”

“I’m a dungeoneer,” said Mizuki, which felt like a bit of a lie given that they’d only done three dungeons, but was, in some sense, true.

He laughed. “You?”

Mizuki withdrew from him and made to leave, but he rushed around, grabbing her hand, and tried to force her back into frame.

Mizuki lit the dress up. The way he shrieked and pulled back was incredibly satisfying, as was the actual fear in his eyes. She turned away and walked off, back towards the table, extinguishing the dress as she went. She wasn’t sure whether she’d burned him, or how badly, and regret set in almost at once, but he had grabbed her, and she had only gone for a dance because she hadn’t wanted to be rude, and because there was nothing else going on.

<I’m ready to go,> said Mizuki.

<Saw you light up,> said Hannah. <I’m going to offer first aid, if it’s needed.>

<He had it coming,> said Mizuki.

<I saw,> said Alfric. <I’ll back you up, if it comes to that.>

<Ay, but if I heal him, the evidence, if any, is gone, and we have less worry about consequences,> said Hannah. <They don’t look kindly on givin’ someone a burn, even if there was some inappropriateness goin’ on.>

Mizuki came back to the table, where Alfric was standing with perfect posture, hands folded behind his back.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Night’s almost over anyhow,” said Alfric. “We were going to leave.”

“He grabbed me,” said Mizuki. “I just — didn’t want to be touched.”

“He’s lucky to be getting away with the temporary pain of a burn,” said Alfric. He was watching where the guy was, Bertran or whoever he was. He’d gone off to the side, and was clutching his hand, seething in pain but taking very little notice of where Mizuki was.

Hannah came over and healed him, which … yes, was sensible, Mizuki hadn’t meant to leave a scar or anything, she’d just been angry and fought back against being grabbed. He must have supposed that if he got her back in frame they would have been dancing again, that bullying her around would work, whether that was because she was a woman, or small, or both.

<What a baby,> said Hannah. <Fine though, and I fixed his cuff, which was singed.>

Verity and Isra had come over, and were, like Alfric and Mizuki, watching.

“Isra, is that drink — good?” asked Mizuki, pointing at the drink that Bertran had brought over.

Isra picked it up, gave it a sniff, then sipped it a bit. “Yes?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“It doesn’t have, I don’t know, poison in it?” asked Mizuki.

“Alcohol is a poison,” said Isra.

“Or like … spit?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Isra.

“He brought that over for you?” asked Alfric.

Mizuki nodded. “I didn’t drink any.”

“Probably just wanted to get you drunk,” said Hannah, who had made her way across the dance floor. “Not a serious burn, nothin’ that he couldn’t have winced his way through for a day or two with some bandages.”

“We should go,” said Alfric.

“Am I going to be in trouble?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Alfric. “Absolutely not. But I can reset the day if you’d like.”

“I don’t want the day to reset,” said Isra. “It was a good day. A repeat might be worse.”

“Well I don’t want a reset either,” said Mizuki. “Just that one part of it.”

“Alright, let’s get moving,” said Alfric. “We’ll walk back, it’s not far, and if anyone wants a midnight snack, they can have it.”

They’d gone half a block when Bertran came rushing out of the dance hall. Alfric put himself in the way, the same as he did in the dungeons when there was a threat.

“You can’t just do that, burn a person,” said Bertran, speaking past Alfric toward Mizuki.

“Don’t make this a thing,” said Alfric. “You were being a jerk, she left, you tried to grab her, you got burned, and you were healed five seconds later.”

“Don’t impugn my honor,” said Bertran. He was giving Alfric a death glare.

“Or what?” asked Alfric. “Are you one of those small men who thinks you can get your way through violence, or the threat of it?”

“He ran away because of a handful of owls,” said Isra.

“I was only showing my interest,” said Bertran. He had a sour look. “Any more aspersions, and I’ll be forced to seek satisfaction.”

“Again, of what sort?” asked Alfric. He hesitated. “A duel?”

Mizuki had heard of such things, mostly as the sport of young men, but she hadn’t expected that was what he might have meant. By Bertran’s cruel grin, it was clear this was what he had in mind.

“You have a cleric,” said Bertran, nodding to Hannah. “To the blood, so that I might have my satisfaction for your rudeness and assault.”

Alfric sighed. “It doesn’t appear that you’re armed, so we’d be using fists?”

“Swords,” nodded Bertran. “Or a weapon of your choice.”

“Entads?” asked Alfric.

Bertran nodded again.

“I would fight in her stead, if she would have me,” said Alfric. “And if that would be acceptable to you.”

<Demolish him,> said Mizuki.

Bertran smiled. “Naturally.” He held a hand out to his side, and a long, thin rapier appeared there. It was an entad, obviously, which meant that it might do anything. That alone was scary. “I should warn you that I’m a duelist of the top rank. I’ll give you a moment to find your own sword.”

<Question,> said Alfric, looking to Mizuki. <Would you rather I beat him barehanded or with full entad support?>

<Full entad support,> said Mizuki. She wondered whether Alfric could win barehanded against a skilled duelist, but he seemed confident in his own abilities. Then again, she didn’t know what he meant by ‘full entad support’, given that he wasn’t wearing anything obvious, and couldn’t really have been hiding the bident.

“Hold my jacket, please,” said Alfric, taking it off for a second. His hands went into his pocket, and when he pulled them out, there were several rings on his fingers. “Alright, I’m ready to begin, ten paces?”

“Very well,” said Bertran. He seemed quite confident, and went into a fencing stance with one hand out to his side.

A small crowd had gathered to see, and Mizuki had the impression that this sort of thing wasn’t entirely uncommon. She wondered whether it was legal, or illegal, or the kind of illegal thing that no one cared too much about. It certainly happened in Pucklechurch that sometimes two men — or more rarely, a man and woman — would settle their differences through fisticuffs, often paying a visit to one of the clerics afterward. It was frowned upon, but also generally accepted, so long as both parties wanted to have a go, and so long as they didn’t destroy anything in the process of having their scrap. This … seemed a bit more serious, if only because of the weapons involved.

“Are you going to arm yourself?” asked Bertran, cocking his head to the side.

Alfric gave a brief nod, and exploded into magic. When the wisps of blue smoke cleared, he was coated in a black armor with thin lines of gold, holding a sword that was six feet long with a gentle curve, gleaming in the streetlights. He’d grown by an extra two feet, towering over everyone around them.

Bertran’s eyes were wide, his stance instantly weakened. “We didn’t agree to —”

Alfric let out a beastial roar and ran forward, bringing the sword down in a two-handed overhead swing. Bertran brought his sword up to block, probably on instinct rather than because he thought it was a good idea. Alfric’s six-foot blade knocked it to the side and continued downward, and if it had continued, it seemed as though it would have sliced straight through him. Instead, Alfric came to a dead stop, and Bertran stumbled back, dropping his sword and clutching his face. Alfric swung again, this time with a slice from the side, one that came perilously close to cutting through people in the crowd, but again he stopped at just the moment before it made contact. His third attack was straight forward, a lunging thrust, and this time the tip made contact. Bertran stumbled back, falling to the ground.

Alfric held the pose for a moment, sword extended into the air where Bertran’s face had been, but Alfric gradually relaxed, standing up at his new, exaggerated height.

“I think we’re done here,” he said. <Hannah, healing would be appropriate now.>

<Go, I’ll catch up,> sighed Hannah.

Alfric turned away and the four of them started walking. Hannah, true to her word, caught up with them not too long after.

<Loaner entads,> said Alfric, by way of explanation. He was still in his enlarged and armored form, with his sword resting on his shoulder. <I had told my mom that I was a bit worried about protection.>

<So you saw that coming?> asked Mizuki.

<Not at all,> said Alfric. <I was worried about Lola, not that I told mom.>

<It was appreciated,> said Mizuki. <The fear in his eyes was something to behold.>

<Not quite legal though,> said Verity.

<No, not quite,> said Alfric. <But it wasn’t much of a duel, and the city guards turn a blind eye to it, so long as no one was permanently hurt.>

<Just a single drop of blood from a cut on the cheek,> said Hannah. <Though the psychological damage will be, I imagine, quite permanent.>

<I doubt he’ll learn anything from it,> said Alfric. <That’s really not the way to get someone to change.>

<Satisfying though,> said Isra.

<Very satisfying,> said Mizuki.

<It’s the sort of thing that my parents complain about,> said Verity. <Casual violence among the youth, too much magic making people not take things seriously.>

<I wouldn’t have done the ‘duel’ if I had thought there was danger,> said Alfric.

<You hear stories though,> said Verity. <People doing duels without a cleric on hand —>

<Which they had,> said Hannah.

<I don’t think you appreciate how good these loaners are,> said Alfric. He was still eight feet tall and coated in armor. It hugged him like a second skin, with no trace of the suit beneath it. Mizuki could see muscle definition, if she looked closely, and it seemed to move with him. A very quick glance — it was nearly at her eyeline — and she could see that the armor thankfully had a tasteful codpiece.

<There was a boy who died three years ago,> said Verity. <You remember that, don’t you Alfric?>

<I remember the chronos getting flack for it,> said Alfric. <The circumstances were unique though.>

<And don’t need to be relitigated,> said Verity. <I’m not against watching men going through a no holds barred fight, I just also acknowledge that it’s a rather stupid thing to do outside a dancing club over a very minor dispute.>

<Alfric wasn’t the one to suggest it,> said Mizuki.

<I knew it might be a possibility though,> said Alfric. He shrugged. <I did my best not to bait him.>

As they walked and talked, Alfric began to slowly shrink back down, losing an inch every few steps until he was back down to size. Once he was, he dismissed the armor and sword, taking his jacket back from Mizuki, who had been wearing it around her shoulders.

By the time they reached the main entrance to his house, Mizuki was feeling the chill of the night air. She was also quite tired after a long day that had begun with the wood carving, which seemed like it was ages ago. If anyone else had proposed that they stay up a bit and drink some rum beside a fire, she probably would have gone along with it, but they had another long day ahead of them the next day too, and all went their separate ways — or not separate, as the case might be, because they were all in the ‘same’ guest room.

Mizuki had picked a shade of green, and got it wrong on the first try, because there were two different greens and she’d gotten confused. But then she was in the green room, where she had a bag with all her things, and was alone.

It was deathly quiet. The room had a single window, but it was pretty obviously an entad window, one that was duplicated across all the guest rooms. Inspecting it closely, Mizuki found two small dials on the side, and when she turned them, the view beyond changed. One seemed to control the conditions, while the other was location, but both of them were quite random, and turning the dial one way and then the other didn’t bring it back to what it had been. The views differed from each other, but none of them were quite normal, sometimes showing plants and animals that Mizuki didn’t think were a part of the real world, other times with weather that certainly wasn’t real, like black shards falling from the sky and shattering against the ground, or giant globs of a viscous yellow liquid splattering on a beach.

Eventually, after spending what was probably too much time on it, Mizuki settled on a view from the top of a mountain looking out over a pleasant valley filled with slow-moving furry lumps. The ‘weather’ was gently drifting motes of blue light which twisted in the wind and made a tiny flash when they landed.

Mizuki got undressed and washed her face in the small bathroom. There was a tank of water attached near the ceiling, which made sense given that the room was dimensionally contained. The dress, shoes, and jewels were set to one side, very carefully, to be returned to Alfric’s mother the next day. She wanted to make sure that everything was in order.

Mizuki lay in the green bed with its green sheets, her head on a green pillow, staring up at the green ceiling.

She pulled out Herby and fed her some chewed up herbs, but she was still a young herb dragon yet, and frightfully boring. The herb dragon fell back asleep while in the middle of eating, and Mizuki sighed. It was clear this wasn’t the companion she’d been so keenly wanting.

She liked it in the Overguard house, but it gave her a sense of yearning. She wanted this to be her life, maybe not in the city, but somewhere, a life with all kinds of magic in it, comfortable and cozy, filled with rituals and secrets that were known only to her and her loved ones.

The problem was, there was no way to obtain that kind of life.

Hannah had joked about Mizuki ensnaring Alfric and marrying into the family, but obviously even if Mizuki had been that kind of person — she wasn’t — it wouldn’t work, because she’d always be a half-member, and if she wasn’t pulling her own weight, she wasn’t sure that she could live with herself.

But of course, there was a way to get the life that the Overguards had, and Alfric had been pushing for it since basically day one: they needed to do dungeons. They needed to do a lot of dungeons. The entads would trickle in, most of them useless but a few that were great, and others that had their own intriguing natures to them, quirks and flaws that only the party would know. In a few years, they could have a little stockpile of such things, along with rooms filled with henlings, a table that would set itself, a knife that grudgingly helped out with cutting potatoes, and Mizuki would have everything she found herself keening for.

All it would take was going into the dungeons, again and again, not exactly risking life and limb, given that there was Alfric, but dealing with some stomach churning things and being frightened out of her mind.

She found herself resolving to do it, to actually put in the work in a way that she hadn’t quite been doing. She needed to stop treating dungeoneering as a temporary lark, and start dealing with it like Alfric did. She needed to be competent. And with Alfric’s help and guidance, she thought that was probably achievable.

Still, she was lonely.

After what felt like too long staring at the ceiling, she cracked the door open.

“Emperor?” she whispered. There was dead silence. “Emperor, did you want to sleep in my bed tonight?”

The sound of nails on hardwood was immediate and quite loud, and it was only a handful of seconds before the Overguards’ enormous dog was using his nose to push open the door and saunter into Mizuki’s room. She shut the door behind him and by the time she turned back to the bed, he was curled up at the foot of it. Mizuki smiled at him and climbed back into bed.

“You’ll tell me if you need to be let out boy, won’t you?” she asked as she petted him. He took up quite a bit of room, but this was exactly what she’d been hoping for.

Emperor barked once, fairly softly, and Mizuki dug her fingers into his fur.

“You’re such a good boy,” said Mizuki. “Thank you for keeping me company.”

The dog barked again and laid his head on the blanket with his eyes closed. She spent some more time petting him, until he seemed to be asleep, or close enough to it, and when she went to join him, she found she fell into a dream with hardly any trouble.

Chapter 64 - Outside Help

Alfric had been to the Garos Duomo only once before, for his aunt’s wedding. It was a huge, grand building, a cathedral that served as a monument to one specific god, not quite incomparable, but the largest of its kind outside of the holy city of Garag. For regular church service, his parents had found it too crowded and too impersonal, and preferred to go to one of the smaller outlying churches of Garos. Dondrian was not short on alternatives, not when it came to churches, or anything else.

The building was symmetrical, obviously. The aesthetic style was Arcross, emphasizing complexity across the planes of symmetry, and the Garos Duomo had plenty of those to go around. The most prominent of these was the horizontal reflection, accomplished via a floor with a perfect mirror surface. If you looked down, you found yourself looking at your own face, and beyond that, the ceiling of the space, which was high above you. The Garos Duomo could have swallowed the temple at Pucklechurch whole, any of the six domes being able to house the smaller building. The domes were supported by struts that ran between them, but these led to the outer walls, with no pillars coming down, and nothing to get in the way of the expansive emptiness.

“Wow,” said Mizuki once they were inside.

“Ay,” said Hannah. She seemed quite pleased with it, and was looking around with her hands on her hips. There wasn’t a sermon until later, and people were free to come and go. Many of them were, like Alfric, Hannah, and Mizuki, sight-seeing.

“How do they keep this clean?” asked Mizuki, looking at the floor. “Entad?” She was squinting, which she often did when looking for magic.

“I have no idea,” said Alfric.

“It’s the material itself, I think,” said Hannah, crouching down to look at it. She touched it, then licked her fingers and pressed them against the mirrored surface, pulling them away to watch the saliva. “Disappears in about five seconds.”

“And is it safe to walk on?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, it must be, but a perfectly mirrored surface is almost more impressive than whatever they did with the walls.”

Alfric didn’t really think that was true. The walls were absolutely coated in sculpture, much of it the natural white of marble, but with veins of black or pink in places. There were also a few pieces that had more color to them, sculptures that broke with the theme of natural stone. Alfric found it all a bit tacky, just as a matter of personal taste, but he had to admit that during a boring sermon, it gave the congregation something to look at.

They walked around for a bit, making appreciative noises at everything there was to see. The sculptures on the wall weren’t just there to be pretty, they told stories that were either important to the Church of Garos or the god himself. Alfric was particularly drawn to the scenes of battle, with shields set to hold back a charge or spears thrust out to stab at the heart of an enemy. They were the stuff of epics.

Mizuki was less sanguine about them. “Isn’t this all stuff that the modern Church regrets? Crusades and holy wars and things like that?”

“Oh, ay,” said Hannah. “But it’s still a part of our history, isn’t it?”

“Well,” said Mizuki, pointing at a scene of a muscular man, shirtless with a sword, lunging at an enemy who had asymmetrical horns and a twisted, off-center face. “Correct me if I’m wrong, and I might be wrong, but the Church of Garos never really fought monsters, right? I mean, most of what they fought, in the bad old days, was just other people, including other churches. So …”

“So you think it’s all a fable?” asked Hannah. She looked at the sculpture. “I do have to admit that history isn’t a strong suit for me, when it comes to the church. I avoided it, in the seminary. My guess is that this is a sculpture of some specific happenin’, but I’m hard-pressed to place it.”

“I don’t think it’s a fable, necessarily,” said Mizuki. “I just see a lot of war up there, and I know that especially in what’s now Inter, there was a lot of fighting, and the churches weren’t always unified, or working for the people. Or kind.”

“The Realignment was almost a thousand years ago,” said Alfric.

“And took place over a hundred year period,” said Hannah. “This cathedral isn’t more than seven hundred years old, well past when everyone was gettin’ along. Or mostly so.”

“I just see a lot of war up there,” Mizuki repeated with a shrug. “And most of the history of war is us fighting other humans, unless it’s a battle against the dwodo or the feil.”

“Which is also ancient history,” said Hannah.

“Or battles against dungeon escapes, or native threats,” said Alfric. He looked at the asymmetrical face, twisted in anguish at the sword swinging his way. “Is there someone we could ask?”

“You want to know about that one in particular?” asked Hannah. “Or in general, the meanin’ of it all?”

Alfric looked at the walls, which rose quite high and were covered with various scenes that all ran together. “If there’s meaning in all of this, then we might be here all day.”

“Well,” said Hannah, “Like I said, I’m better on praxis than I am on history, but I do know a few of these, so I can tell you of them, if not about any given one you point to.” She scanned the section of the wall they were standing in front of, then pointed. “There, those five, they’re from the Golden Generation of Garos, back when worship was more regional than it is today. Some fine mathematics came from them. Zerthusa in particular you’ve probably heard of?”

“Nope,” said Mizuki.

“She had a theorem,” said Alfric. “Um … something having to do with … calculus?”

“She invented calculus,” said Hannah.

“Er,” said Alfric. He didn’t really know how to deal with this sort of disagreement. “I thought that was a different cleric? Someone from the church of Xuphin?”

“Independently discovered in more than one place at around the same time,” said Hannah with a wave of her hand. “Mathematics underpins quite a bit of godly pursuits, and I imagine there are a fair number of mathematician-clerics up there.” She squinted at the wall. “There, that one I recognize, Lestria, wrote perhaps a fourth of the mathematical prayers we still use today.”

“You do math as a form of prayer?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t, personally, but for some, there’s a purity to the symmetries of mathematics that helps to bring them closer to god.” She shrugged. “For myself, I’m more about the physical and social worlds. It brings a greater connection when I have something tangible.” She was still looking at the wall. “And there, I … think.” She was pointing at a statue of a woman with long, flowing hair, the fabric of her wrap caught in motion, breasts bare. “Pollinia, one of the saints.”

“And what did she do that was saintly?” asked Mizuki.

“She was a noted midwife,” said Hannah. “Used to be that a fair few babies died in childbirth, or the mothers, in part because there are limits to what a cleric can do. Pollinia introduced some diagnostic methods and helped reduce the death rate by a good margin. The real saintly aspect was savin’ an infant king from death, but — well, there are all kinds of stories, and it’s hard to say if it’s really Garos reachin’ down through a person or not. I can’t help but notice that it’s often someone bein’ honored for their other work, then the extraordinary aspects come later as a way of justifyin’ it. It’s nice to dedicate a healthy birth to her, but hard to say one way or another, meanin’ no disrespect. Supposedly the saintly miracle was a near complete reconstruction of the child’s left side.”

“Why the skepticism?” asked Alfric.

“I know how tough that is,” said Hannah. “And it was never repeated, supposedly couldn’t be repeated, not by anyone, not without the intervention of Garos. It’s suspect, that’s all, and I’m not the sort of cleric to take every word of the Church as bein’ the full and complete truth of the matter. As Mizuki said, there’s some dark and bloody history.”

“I hope you didn’t take that as criticism,” said Mizuki. “I don’t have any complaints about the church.”

“Ay,” said Hannah. She turned to look at Alfric. “Speakin’ of godly interference in the world, I s’pose now that the three of us are all in one place, we might speak about Verity’s status as Chosen of Xuphin?”

Alfric kept his face blank.

“We overheard a conversation last night,” said Mizuki. “Or Hannah did, then we talked to some people, and, well, we assumed you knew, and kept it from us because you thought that it was her place to say, and she kept it from us because — I don’t know why.”

“Didn’t want to be treated different, I imagine,” said Hannah. “Or doesn’t want to engage with the idea of being chosen by god, which I can’t quite wrap my head around.”

Alfric sighed. “It would have been better if she’d told you herself. I had imagined she would before our trip to Dondrian, but maybe she was hoping to get away with it. So, yes, Verity is Chosen of Xuphin. I knew before I tracked her down to Pucklechurch.”

“And that’s why you wanted her so badly for the party?” asked Mizuki.

“It’s one reason,” said Alfric. “That she’s a bardic prodigy was the other big reason. Things haven’t turned out quite how I’d thought they would, but I have few complaints.”

“Yeah, but what’s she going to do?” asked Mizuki. “If you ask me, she doesn’t really seem like the Xuphin type, you know?”

“And what’s the Xuphin type?” asked Hannah.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “Big? Like, not physically big, though that too, but someone who takes up a lot of, um, emotional space? Or mental space, I guess.”

“Well, I’d agree with you there,” said Hannah. “She’s more of Kesbin, if anything.”

“Really?” asked Mizuki.

“With the focus on austerity and restraint … I can see it,” said Alfric. “But she doesn’t enjoy that, it’s just how she was raised.”

“Ah,” nodded Hannah. “True, true, she behaves in a way that comports with Kesbin, but does not possess Kesbin-nature.”

Mizuki pursed her lips. “Maybe, and this is just a thought, but maybe the gods aren’t human enough that we can slot people into easy categories using their philosophies.”

“Nonsense!” Hannah laughed. “What would Qymmos say, if he heard you talkin’ that way?”

They didn’t spend too much longer at the sculptures, except to go to the end of the wall and confirm that yes, the same sculpture was mirrored along one of the planes of symmetry. According to Hannah, the whole place thrummed with symmetry, much of it not immediately obvious, and there were symmetries within symmetries.

Overall, Alfric somewhat wished that he’d gone with Verity and Isra instead, as the Museum of Qymmos had quite a bit more to see — it was, after all, a museum, built for that purpose. He enjoyed spending time with both Hannah and Mizuki, but the religious significance was of interest to Hannah more than to him, and even then, she was missing a bit of the history, given that she wasn’t a historical scholar. He almost suggested that they try to find or hire a guide, but felt better about wandering on his own, even if he was missing quite a bit of the context and purpose behind the art.

For lunch, they went their separate ways, with Alfric returning home, Mizuki seeking out more street foods, and Hannah going to one of the places near the cathedral that served holy meals, similar to those she’d had at the seminary.

Alfric had thought that he’d be eating alone, but his father was in the dining room, having soup.

“Taking a break from the girls?” his father asked.

“Not really,” said Alfric. “We just all have different priorities for how to spend our time.”

“And you wanted to spend time with your old man,” he father said with a grin.

“Har,” said Alfric. The entad dishes were stacked up in the center, and Alfric picked out a two-tined fork that created raw seafood on its tips. It had been a favorite of his when he was younger. To accompany it, he took a small bowl. The bowl could make very small amounts of food, no more than a single bite, but couldn’t do the same food twice within a month. It was excellent for getting a variety of dipping sauces for the seafood, and the combination was one that he particularly enjoyed.

“So,” his father said, once Alfric had taken the first few bites. “While we have you here, I wanted to talk to you about Lola.”

Alfric set his fork down, the shrimp only half-eaten.

“Go ahead,” said Alfric. He tried to be respectful and avoided rolling his eyes or sighing.

“You’re in a rough patch,” said his father. “You tried to solve it on your own, and I think that’s admirable, but from what we can tell from afar, the rough patch is still ongoing, with no signs of ending.”

“She stole my team,” said Alfric.

“You can’t steal a team,” his father replied. “You don’t own a team. At most, you can have a contractual arrangement with them, but if they broke a contract, then — it can be her fault, but it’s really about the team. And you didn’t have any kind of contract, or any buy-in like partybound entads.”

“We had an implied contract though,” said Alfric. “And there was buy-in, labor done in service of future earnings that they took.”

“I understand why it upset you,” his father said. “And I’m not saying that she didn’t do anything ‘wrong’. But when you say that she stole your team from you, you imply that you owned the team, and it’s important — regardless of what we’re talking about with Lola — that you know that’s not true. Lola gave them a better offer. That’s what happened. She shouldn’t have done it, and it’s obviously upsetting, but you have to look at it in the context of — please don’t roll your eyes at me.”

“Sorry,” said Alfric.

“You’re an adult now, a full adult, and we need to give each other the respect that we’d give other adults,” his father said.

“Sorry,” Alfric said again. He looked down at his fork. “I had a good team that I’d spent time preparing, and she essentially paid them not to go into dungeons with me.” There was some level of emotional and social work that she’d put into it as well, but it was more difficult to quantify. “That alone would have been enough for me to want to break the pact, but it was the reason she did it, which was essentially to blackmail me in order for me to do things that you and mom taught me were bad things to do.”

His father frowned. “And we still believe those things. Disclosure is a fundamental principle, and you can’t properly practice disclosure if you’re doing things that you wouldn’t want to disclose. That Lola apparently hasn’t been practicing disclosure is alarming, and we’ve spoken to her parents about it.”

Alfric sighed. “But you want me to patch things up and have children with her.”

Sometimes, and on this occasion, his father had cold, calculating eyes, as he measured what to say. He was a good father, but he was also a strategist by nature, and Alfric could imagine those same eyes turned on the dungeon monsters.

“Our family has practiced the pact for hundreds of years,” his father said. “It’s less of a matter of survival now, but it’s still important, and anything that erodes the institution is ultimately a threat to our power, which is a power used in service of the entire world.”

“I know that,” said Alfric.

“Your mother and I aren’t perfect,” his father continued. “We were considerably less perfect when we were younger, and together, we grew and overcame many of our deficiencies. I don’t doubt that Lola has her own deficiencies to overcome, and from what I know of her, what I’ve been able to find out, she has quite a bit more to overcome than you do — you know that I think you’ve grown into a fine young man and a credit to both this family and our kind.”

“I — thank you,” said Alfric.

“You’ve been apart for a year now,” his father said. “I think it’s time that you at least sit down and have a conversation with each other.”

“I told her that I would talk to her by letter,” said Alfric. “And then she staged a dungeon escape.”

“Staged?” his father asked. He was momentarily nonplussed. “What do you mean? Who did you hear this from?”

“Firsthand,” said Alfric. “There was a dungeon escape in Pucklechurch, not so bad that the Knives or the Pyros had to be called in, just bad enough that working together, our two parties could take it out. If it wasn’t her, then it was a massive coincidence.”

“She was in the region, with you?” his father asked, seeming more alarmed by that than the dungeon escape.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “She moved her party to be stationed out of Liberfell for the time being, two hexes away, and she did this not long after I arrived there.” There were plenty of options for how she’d found out, but the most likely one was that his parents had let it slip to Lola.

His father swore. “We told her to give you your space, that you might come around once you were through your rough patch and established as a dungeoneer.”

“Not listening to people is kind of her thing,” said Alfric.

“But a dungeon escape, you think that it was her?” his father asked. “I don’t think that one made it into my daily briefing.” He frowned. “I’ll need to read up on it.”

“If you read a report, you’d be reading my report,” said Alfric. “It was released in the early morning, dungeon mad as confirmed by a druid, meaning that it definitely did come directly from a dungeon, rather than being a secondary escape. If it hadn’t been contained, it would have been a nightmare scenario, a single large mother that laid hundreds of eggs, fast metabolism of readily available material — there are questions I have about how she would have found something like that, how she’d have captured it and saved it for later — but there’s very little doubt in my mind that it was her.”

“I see,” said his father. He steepled his fingers and was no longer focused on Alfric, lost in thought.

“It was in the Pucklechurch hex, single digit miles from the house we’re using,” said Alfric. “In the woods, away from where anyone lives.”

“It’s a very serious accusation,” his father eventually replied, returning his attention to Alfric. “This came after you had tried to have her do contact through asynchronous channels?”

Alfric nodded.

“When was this?” his father asked.

“Two days ago,” said Alfric.

“I don’t think we have anything that can look backward in time that far, not that we haven’t farmed out,” his father said.

“I checked the vault yesterday,” said Alfric. “I didn’t think we had anything, but I wanted to double check.”

“I’ll confer with your mother,” said his father.

“You’d run into a problem, which is that the exact time and location isn’t known,” said Alfric. “Trying to find out if she actually did it would amount to a major magical investigation.”

“Yes,” his father nodded. “Not outside of the family’s power to do, but it would cause problems.”

“You believe me?” asked Alfric.

“You don’t lie,” said his father. “So if you’re wrong, it’s because you’re mistaken, and I haven’t known you to make many mistakes either, with only a few exceptions we don’t need to delve into.” He cleared his throat. “There are … differences of opinion on undone days, and especially when we’re young, there’s some leniency to what happens there. Disclosure is a fundamental rule, a rule that has to apply to all chrononauts, but it not being followed perfectly is … expected. However, if Lola is letting her bad behavior bleed out into the real world, that’s cause for real concern.”

“All I want is for her to leave me alone,” said Alfric. “All I want — what I’ve wanted since she bribed my party away from me is for the pact to be dead and gone.”

His father leaned forward and rubbed his forehead. “Yes, alright.”

“Alright?” asked Alfric.

“Not ‘alright, that’s fine’,” said his father. “But alright, I’ll start looking into it. It would be better to have something watertight and unambiguous, rather than supposition and rumor.”

“I do think something needs to be done about her,” said Alfric. “We depend on our reputation. We depend on the goodwill of others.”

“I am well aware,” his father replied.

“You can understand how I find it frustrating to be told that disclosure is a fundamental principle, then see nothing happen to others when they violate it?” asked Alfric.

“I can,” his father nodded. “I’ve spoken with her parents, I can do it again.”

“Seems like it didn’t help the first time,” said Alfric.

“No, it didn’t,” sighed his father. “It’s been a long time since we’ve had to take any disciplinary action against one of our own, and even if she was responsible for a dungeon escape, that wouldn’t rise to the level of needing familial intervention, only governmental intervention. But I’ll look into it, and I’ll look into you getting a formal release from your pact.”

“You could have done that the first time I asked,” said Alfric. “Back when she dashed my dreams into the ground.”

His father was tight-lipped. “We try to do right by you. The problem is that it’s not always clear what doing right by you entails. And we do have the family to consider.”

“If the pact was lifted, would I have another one?” asked Alfric.

“I don’t know,” his father replied. “Ideally we’d find someone else for you, but most of your cohort are already married. I’ll speak with your mother about it, and with some of the other families. It has the potential to cause a rift, which is something that we desperately want to avoid. Our power and security as chrononauts comes in large part from the fact that we don’t undercut each other, that we work in concert rather than at odds.”

Alfric had the feeling that they were both telling each other things that they already knew as a way of making their points, and he didn’t particularly like it. All he needed was his father’s support, really. It would have been so nice to hear ‘I’ll take care of it, Alfric’.

<I’m done with lunch,> said Mizuki. <Anyone up for the zoo? Cathedral had less to see than I’d thought it would.>

<I’m going back to the cathedral, actually,> said Hannah.

<We’ll still be at the museum,> said Verity. <I think we’ll be here all day, unless Isra gets bored. So far I’m having a wonderful time.>

<I’ll join you at the zoo,> said Alfric. <I think I’m ready to leave Dondrian, incidentally, but I can go back a day early if the rest of you want to stay.>

<Things not going well?> asked Mizuki.

<Just some old frustrations,> said Alfric. <Don’t worry about it, I don’t want to put a damper on anyone’s mood.>

“I take it you’re off?” asked Alfric’s father. Alfric had held up a hand, giving the signal for party chatter, when Mizuki had cut in. His father had waited patiently. “You’ve hardly eaten anything.”

“I’ve lost my appetite,” said Alfric.

“It will be easier to get a separation if you get her dead to rights,” said Alfric’s father. “If she’s harassing you, build up evidence, get something incontrovertible.”

“Because we can only act after the fact?” asked Alfric. “Seems counterintuitive, for chrononauts.”

His father gave him a thin smile. “I want to help you. I just need something more than things that might be a bit too coincidental.”

Alfric nodded. He’d known that was true, but it was still a bit of a disappointment.

Chapter 63 - Curation

The Metropolitan Museum of Qymmos was an immense building, taking up almost four city blocks, though it was divided into quadrants with walking streets going between them and arched bridges between the upper floors, so in some sense, it felt like it was four connected buildings rather than one. Qymmos was the god of Sets, of Categorization and Identification, and Isra wondered whether they’d had some argument in the construction of the building. The clerics of Qymmos typically preferred for things to be what they called the central example of its category, the chair that was the most like a chair, the apple that was most like an apple. The museum, by contrast, seemed to be the only thing of its type in the entire world. Perhaps that was how they justified it.

They had a brief ‘drinking breakfast’ at a cafe outside the museum, with a thick drink of various beans for Isra — chocolate and coffee with cream — while Verity had a drink that was mostly fruit.

“Excited?” asked Verity.

“I don’t really know what to expect,” said Isra. “You’ve said that the collections are … extensive.”

“The goal of this particular museum is to have one of everything,” said Verity.

“Seems an impossible goal,” said Isra. She sipped her drink. She was going to have to spend some money on chocolate before they left Dondrian, given that it wasn’t available in Pucklechurch. The same went for coffee, though she was less certain about that. Apparently it took a decent amount of training and work to brew it, a process she wasn’t sure she could replicate herself. She also wasn’t sure that it would taste as good without the chocolate and cream.

“The dungeons make it extremely difficult,” said Verity. “Every time you go in, you can pull out a new plant or animal, or a new piece of equipment that the world has never seen before, even if it’s useless. Their ambition is to catalog the ‘living world’.”

“An impossible distinction,” said Isra, shaking her head. “So much comes from the dungeons. This is why I don’t like Qymmos.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” said Verity.

They were both returned to their normal selves, having given back the shoes, dresses, and jewelry from the night before. It had felt like they were under a spell, one which was now at least partially broken, the pieces of that spell feeling like they were still floating around them. They had danced together for quite some time, clumsily on Isra’s part and slower than the music suggested. Once Isra had some basic understanding of the dances, they had moved together, drawing closer with each successive song. Isra had gotten the touch that she had craved, and it had seemed as though it was just the two of them amongst the mass of people.

And then they had left the dance floor and walked home. The energy had begun to dissipate by the time they reached the house, especially given the unexpected duel, and Isra was feeling drained from the opera. She was up so late past her bedtime, and unused to strong drink.

“Do you disfavor a god?” asked Isra.

“I don’t disfavor a god,” said Verity. “But if you’re talking about an ideology of a god … perhaps Bixzotl.”

Isra frowned, then remembered what Alfric’s mother had said about frowning and deliberately lightened her expression. “Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Verity. “God of Copies, God of Repetition, maybe? Especially in music, repetition is reckoned to be the mother of learning. Bixzotl is God of Sameness, God of Conformity, those are the things that I don’t like. It’s not every sermon, but I’ve sat through a few that are about patterns of our lives, the repetition of the seasons, cycles, things like that. Whenever they get to the part where it’s applicable to our lives, they’re talking about how it’s okay if the days blend together, that it’s fine if you’re not unique, all these things that are probably okay for other people, but are definitely not okay for me.”

“You … don’t want to be ordinary?” asked Isra.

“I don’t want to conform, no,” said Verity. “And frankly, I’m not ordinary.”

Isra nodded. “I’m not ordinary either.”

Verity gave her a warm smile.

When they were finished with their drinks, they went into the wing that contained fauna: the divisions they’d decided upon were flora, fauna, materials, and history. This categorization created some obvious problems for them, so from Isra’s understanding of what Verity said, they’d given each of the wings a name, the better to obfuscate the reality that their categorization scheme was running into all the problems that any categorization scheme ran into. This wing was the Bellius wing.

Isra’s preemptive quibbles died in her throat as soon as they were through the doors. The main lobby contained a dragon with its wings spread wide.

It was an immense creature, made more so by the wings which stretched out wide beneath the windowed dome of the lobby. The room seemed to be built specifically to accommodate the dragon, or perhaps it had been posed within the limits the room created. The wingspan had to be nearly two hundred feet from tip to tip, and the wings themselves were folded in just slightly, constraining it. Those tips stopped five feet from the wall, just below the third floor of the room, where there was a place to walk around, presumably to see the dragon from a higher level.

The dragon itself was stooped low, and almost gave an impression of looking down at anyone who came in. Its scales varied in color, but most were a shade of red. The smallest of those scales was the size of Alfric’s shield, and they showed striations and defects up close, each telling their own story of growth.

Around the base of each of the dragon’s feet there were plaques, diagrams, and other exhibits, all of them related to dragons in one way or another.

Isra looked closely at the eyes. There were six of them in total, two large ones and four small ones, all of them so large that she felt she might have been able to swim in them. This was all some kind of taxidermy, or less likely, illusion, but if not for the fact that it was perfectly still, and the way she had no feeling for it, she might have believed it was alive. She had seen stuffed animals before — there was a deer head hung at the Fig and Gristle — but these dragon eyes had a shine to them, a gleaming wetness which, when she pushed out with her senses, was some kind of expertly applied lacquer or resin.

“I didn’t realize they got this big,” said Isra. She had moved, mostly to get a better look at it, and Verity had been following behind, looking quite pleased.

“It’s impressive,” said Verity, with her normal reserve.

Isra turned to her. “It’s wondrous.” She gestured up to the dragon. “Do you not see it?”

“It doesn’t take my breath away anymore,” said Verity. “I’ve been here three or four times though.”

Isra looked up at the dragon. They were standing under one of the wings, with the light coming in from the windows of the dome being blotted out. “If I could, I would come here every day to see this.”

“It is shocking,” said Verity, looking up. “I wouldn’t deny that.”

“What would we do, if such a thing attacked?” asked Isra.

“Here,” said Verity, pointing to the exhibits around the dragon’s feet. “I think there’s some information.”

They must have spent a half hour with Isra simply reading about dragons. There were other people milling about, but Isra paid them little attention, and Verity was quite polite about how much time Isra felt compelled to spend with her eyes glued to the words. Verity read alongside Isra, humming under her breath and seemingly unaware that she was doing it. There was no magic in it, but it nevertheless gave Isra a warm feeling.

The dragon had come to the museum one hundred and fifty years ago, having been found dead, draped across the countryside. It had been moved at great expense, then reconstructed at great expense, with this wing of the building having been extensively modified to house the dragon. It was the only example of its kind in the world, because wherever dragons went to hide away, that seemed to be where they died. Among the exhibits at the dragon’s feet, there were a large number of drawings of dragons, which came in different shapes and sizes, and Isra looked at them, but they didn’t stir anything in her in the same way that the dragon did. There were fragments of a dragon shell, and a recreation of one. There was a ‘baby’ dragon, with a visible hole through its still-soft scales, killed by a human early on in its life.

Mostly, there was a lot of writing and speculation, and Isra read it all, circling all four of the dragon’s feet.

There was some mention of demiplanes, as part of the exhibit which went over the question of what happened to dragons as they aged. Clearly the dragons were going somewhere, given that a corpse would be immediately visible, the bones incredibly slow to decay. There was speculation that they dove down into the oceans where they might hold their breath, that they flew beyond the Barrier Storms, that they somehow escaped the pull of the world and settled on one of the moons. The demiplanes were given as a Kiromon belief, but only briefly gone over, with less in the way of discussion than Isra might have expected. The earlier argument between Alfric and Mizuki wasn’t resolved.

“Sorry I’m taking so long,” said Isra. “I know there’s more of the museum to explore.”

“It’s fine,” smiled Verity. “Take your time. I wouldn’t have thought of you as someone interested in dragons.”

“Why?” asked Isra.

“I suppose I don’t know,” said Verity. “They’re very popular with young boys, which might be a part of it. I imagine that Alfric went through a phase when he was terribly interested in dragons, these grand, wild creatures that are barely ever seen.”

“They’re not wild,” said isra. She pointed at the plaque. “They’re supposed to be quite intelligent.” She wondered what they actually meant. The Overguard family dog, Emperor, was so far the smartest animal she’d ever encountered, and she wondered whether a dragon would give her the same feeling.

“Intelligence can go with wildness,” said Verity. “Dragons are untameable, completely free. I really do see the appeal in it.”

“You said boys, not girls?” asked Isra.

“I did,” said Verity, shrugging. “I’m sure there were plenty of girls who were interested in dragons, but it was very much a boy thing.”

“And what did girls have?” asked Isra. This was the sort of thing that she often found quite irritating, hidden rules that didn’t seem to make much sense, and which couldn’t be guessed at from knowing other things.

“Dolls, mostly,” said Verity. “But I’m given to believe that those roles applied more to the upper class, rather than the lower.”

Isra nodded. “And when you say … class?”

“Um,” said Verity. “Whether or not you come from wealth. Though it’s actually more complicated than that, because there are all kinds of things that get wrapped up in it, and — it’s very complicated, and I’m not really sure that I understand it fully.”

“Your family has a great deal of money,” said Isra. “Like Alfric’s.”

“Yes,” said Verity. “Though … not like Alfric, which is one of the reasons that I think it’s complicated. They have quite a bit of wealth, but they have far less of the trappings, and quite a bit less of the etiquette, at least from what I’ve seen. They’re not cultured in the way that I would expect. Which is to say nothing against them, obviously.”

“Is it bad to not know etiquette?” asked Isra. She didn’t know etiquette, and wasn’t entirely sure what etiquette was.

“Well,” said Verity. “It is, in certain circles.”

Isra looked up at the dragon. It all seemed so pointless, in the face of a creature like this. “And Mizuki?”

“Well, her family is from Kiromo, and I expect they do things differently there,” said Verity. “But her grandfather seemed to have quite a bit of wealth, and she inherited a house. That’s what I was saying about how wealth is only a part of it.”

“I see,” said Isra. “It’s Qymmos nonsense.”

Verity laughed. “I suppose it is. But it’s a useful sort of nonsense, at least some of the time, being able to make groupings of things and people. The same sort of discussion happens ad nauseum in music as people try to come to agreements about what the sets actually are. And of course, the clerics of Qymmos tend to just complicate things, and often disagree with each other, or have their debates about the debates, rather than the original subject matter. It’s sometimes a wonder that they can accomplish anything.”

They eventually left the room with the preserved dragon, moving to a long hallway, one of several on the ground floor. There were more hallways, stacked on top of each other, and there was a suggested ‘flow’ to it all, a path that would take you all the way through the whole building — or quarter building, depending upon what it was considered.

The long hall began with the domesticated animals, which seemed a bit odd to Isra. She looked for a plaque or some kind of explanation for it, but there was none. It was only domesticated animals down the length of the hall, a few of them alive, living in what seemed to be tanks, but most of them preserved. As with the dragon, the preservation was imperfect, but likely much more noticeable to Isra than to anyone else.

They stopped at an exhibit, ‘Variations on the Pig’, which had more than fifty pigs in varying shapes and sizes, each with their own plaque — but above them, on the wall, there was some explanation of the central thrust of it.

Pigs were unambiguously not dungeon creatures, but once they had been domesticated, and spread among the human populations, things that were close to pigs began to be pulled from the dungeons in much greater numbers than when there were only wild boars. Some of these were extracted for breeding as a form of speculation, and others developed naturally through variation in breeding stock over time, or possibly domestication of different initial breeds. Once there was something called “the pig” that had great prominence in human society, it was natural that there would be hundreds, thousands, of variations on the pig. Beyond that, “pig” was known to the entads, and entads would key off that word, with a specific definition that might or might not be a ‘true’ definition by someone else’s accounting.

There was a quite long section on which definitions the Metropolitan Museum of Qymmos had used for things that might have come from dungeons. For them to include a pig, or any other animal, it needed to have not just a breeding pair, and not just a stable population, but some actual significant import in the world. That, in turn, needed careful definition, which was the manner of Qymmos.

“For someone who doesn’t seem to like Qymmos, you’re reading an awful lot of plaques and descriptive material,” said Verity.

“That’s the point of the museum, isn’t it?” asked Isra.

“Yes,” said Verity. “But most people don’t read everything. If you did that, you’d be here all day.”

“We’re intending to be here all day,” said Isra. “Aren’t we?”

“Well, yes, if that’s what you’d like, with a break for lunch, perhaps,” said Verity. She fidgeted with her dress, smoothing it out. “I was just thinking that perhaps you were drawn to the question, if not to the answer.”

“The question?” asked Isra.

Verity pointed to the opposite wall, where it said, “What is a Pig?”

Isra pondered that — not the question of what a pig was, which seemed like a silly question, but the question of whether such questions tugged at her in some weird way, above and beyond what other people thought of them.

The obvious answer was that the village of Pucklechurch had been full of mysterious rules — and still was, even if discovering she was a druid had made sense of quite a bit of it, along with a few lessons from her new ‘family’. That struggle against the unknown hadn’t been everpresent, given that she’d spent most of her time in the woods, but it had left deep marks.

She wasn’t sure whether the obvious answer was true though, it was just easy and present, ready to give out, if she wanted to.

Verity was still being quite patient, standing next to Isra with hands folded. “I think that most people, if you asked them what a pig was, wouldn’t care. The distinction between things that are pigs and things that aren’t pigs is meaningless. And if it’s a conversation that gets very technical, that’s even worse, isn’t it? For most people, anyway.”

“What would a technical conversation even be?” asked Isra. “Are there pig experts somewhere?”

“There are an enormous number of clerics of Qymmos around,” said Verity. “We could find one pretty easily, if you wanted to talk to them?”

“I don’t really like their categories,” said Isra. “Their need for it.”

“Well, we wouldn’t be talking about the sets themselves, we’d be talking about the construction of sets in the abstract,” said Verity. “That seems like it would be a good use of our time, doesn’t it?”

“To get in a fight with a cleric of Qymmos?” asked Isra. Verity laughed.

“Forgive me if I’m wrong,” said Verity. “But your understanding of Qymmos and his clerics comes mostly from reading, doesn’t it? Holy books and a bit of fiction? That is, you haven’t listened to the sermons, or spoken to a cleric, right?”

“I haven’t,” said Isra. “You’re saying that they’re not the same? The holy book, gifted by the god, and the belief in the god as practiced?”

“It’s the same for all the gods,” said Verity. “You’ve heard Hannah talk about it, how the clergy ends up with their own canon that’s outside of what the books dictate, or even what their powers imply or allow for.”

“If you’d like for us to talk to a cleric, we can,” said Isra. “It might be illuminating.”

They walked through the exhibits, keeping their eyes out for a cleric. They had seen a few of them already, but there were apparently none in the Hall of Domesticated Animals. The lizzos took up quite a bit of space, and they passed multicolored sheep, the so-called ‘dyed’ sheep that gave different colors of wool, and various magical creatures which created products used in various ways. Many of them were, apparently, finicky creatures, like a sheep that ate only a very specific kind of grass and would drop dead if the temperature was above a mild mid-summer’s day. In exchange, these creatures gave cloth that was mildly self-cleaning, or kept a person warm in winter, or meat that when eaten could heal most gut wounds, which were notoriously difficult to treat. There was more magic to the world than Isra had ever imagined, but most of it was quite specialized or expensive, which came, in part, from the delicacy of some of the animals.

They passed through more of the hall, looking at the various animals in all of their splendor. Isra was most interested in the living animals, of which there were precious few, because those she had a sense for. The ones that were stuffed and taxidermied she was much more fuzzy on, their death having robbed her of the ability to get instinctual knowledge. In some sense, she’d been reduced to Verity’s level.

At the end of the hall they turned, heading back toward the dragon along a different path.

This brought them to the fowls, including all the ducks, geese, chickens, and things of that nature, along with all of their eggs and a variety of feathers. Eventually they did see a cleric of Qymmos, who was looking through the exhibit on eggs with a frown on her face.

“Excuse me,” said Verity. “Are you available to field a question?”

“Of course,” nodded the woman. “That’s why we’re here.” She was short, with grey hair but an unwrinkled face aside from some crow’s feet. Isra hoped that she would age as gracefully as that. She had seen too many animals grow old, and while humans lived long, they were consigned to the same fate. The curator had the same darker skin that Isra had, which seemed to be more common in Dondrian.

“Why do things get put into these categories?” asked Isra.

“Oh,” said the woman, blinking. “Well. That is a very big question, and one without any satisfying answers, I’m afraid.” She looked out at the displays, frowning in thought. “I’m not in charge of policy, but while the official policy of the museum is that we’d like to have one of everything, there are a number of complicating factors involved, one being that we have limited space, and another being that one of the purposes of the museum is entertainment and education. The exhibits are created with an eye towards enlightening people about the nature of the world, and to adhere to a strict categorization scheme would interfere with that.”

Isra frowned. “So it’s not in accordance with type?” she asked.

“Well,” said the cleric. “It is, to the extent we’re able. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a cleric of Qymmos that wouldn’t allow that it sometimes make more sense, from a human perspective, to use different schemes in different places.” She pointed at the eggs. “Here we have eggs of all domesticated species, grouped together this way because we want to say something in particular about eggs and their role in human culture and domestication.” She looked down the hall and frowned. “With other creatures, we put the eggs with them, if we have them, or models if we don’t, in service of showing the lifecycle. That naturally puts the eggs away from other eggs though, and so there are competing categories at play, either showing the animal with the entirety of its lifecycle, or showing a piece of that lifecycle that generalizes between animals.” She shrugged. “A lot of it comes down to the whims of the department directors.”

“You say that as a cleric of Qymmos?” asked Isra.

The cleric blinked again. “Yes?” she asked. “If the question is one of theology, it’s well-accepted that any strict system of categorization will function poorly in the real world. It would be simple for us to split the entirety of the museum into strict categories, but that would leave things that are similar to each other on opposite sides of the place.” She gestured again at the eggs. “Here, we show a category of things, domesticated eggs, where in a strict category of creatures, they would be separated from each other.”

“So you use different categories depending on the circumstance,” said Isra.

“Yes,” nodded the cleric. “Goodness, it’s been some time since I’ve done theology, I apologize if I’m a bit rusty.”

“But you do maintain that these categories are real?” asked Isra.

“Oh, not at all,” said the cleric, blinking again. Isra didn’t take all the blinking as a good sign. “That is, the criteria for inclusion within a category can be well-defined if you understand what all the candidate members are, but that doesn’t make the category more valid or true than any other category.” She seemed to be slipping more toward jargon, but that might have been because the question demanded it.

Isra felt herself frowning and tried to ease her face a bit to be less severe. “That’s not what the Qymr Mos says.”

The cleric frowned. “Well,” she said. “You mean in the second section?”

Isra nodded.

“It’s … controversial.” She looked around, as though trying to find someone to help her out. “I’m sorry, my strict theology is a bit rusty.” Isra waited. Verity seemed somewhat amused. “There are, yes, ‘natural’ categories, clusters that arise naturally from given definitional boundaries. It’s a thorny theological issue though.”

“Qymmos says one thing, and the clergy say another,” said Isra.

“N-no,” said the cleric. “That is, Qymmos had a particular perspective, and clerics cultivate it in order to access the power of Qymmos, but the view of the world as presented in the holy text is — it’s not something that all clerics agree with. Sorry, I have business elsewhere.”

She hurried off, and Isra watched her go.

Verity smiled. “I feel like the clerics here are trained mostly to answer questions about the exhibits.”

“It seemed like a basic question,” said Isra.

“It was, perhaps, the way you were talking,” said Verity. “No soft tones, brooking no argument.”

“Sorry,” said Isra.

“Well I don’t mind,” said Verity. “I like that about you, that hard edge, the way that you look like you’re willing to throw down with someone, whether that’s dealing with a merchant or a casual conversation with a curator.”

“I’m not sure I like it about myself,” said Isra.

“No?” asked Verity. She seemed a bit saddened by that.

“No,” said Isra. The spell of the night before felt even more broken.

She had been wrong about people, wrong about why they lied or whether they lied, and with the true context, most of what had made her angry or sad was simply a misunderstanding. Her approach to negotiating with merchants in particular had been founded on the belief that they were universally liars and cheats who would say blatantly untrue things in order to get a better price. If this wasn’t true, then she thought too harshly of them, and dealt with them using too sour of a disposition, even if it did seem to get her good prices.

“Well,” said Verity, clearing her throat. “Shall we continue? At the rate we’re going, we’ll see no more than half the wing today.”

They went through the museum, sometimes talking, other times not, slowly and steadily, since Isra didn’t really see the point in going to a museum if you were just going to nod at things you found interesting rather than examining and learning about them. Quite a few people did seem to have this approach to museum-going though, especially those with small children, and others who seemed to treat the museum like an indoor walking course.

Verity showed quite a bit of patience, and read along with Isra, not seeming to mind that it was taking so long, or that Isra was reading almost every bit of writing there was to see along the corridor.

It was all giving her ideas of what she might do with her own collection at home. But beneath that, she was entertaining questions of Qymmos, and why he, in particular, tugged at her so much.

Chapter 65 - Lonesome

The Garos Duomo had been a bit of a disappointment to Hannah. It was a pretty building, and yes, very symmetrical, but aside from the stunning feeling of vertigo that the floor induced, and the extremely large and rather long artwork, whoever had made the building concerned themselves more with history than actual practice. They seem to care about veneration of the Church rather than their god.

Hannah had often felt a sense of alienation from the Church of Garos, and it was exactly for that reason. There was so much in the seminary — and beyond — that was about the built up cruft of religion and society. Hannah had hoped that the artwork would be intensely symmetrical, like the Painting of Twenty Symmetries in the seminary that had hung in her dormitory.

She’d come back to the cathedral not because she was hoping that it would have some hidden insights, but because Dondrian was large enough to support all kinds of businesses that related to Garos in some way. There were thousands of clerics of Garos, which meant there were seamstresses that specialized in outfits of the highest symmetry. Hannah wasn’t much interested in a souvenir, but while they were in Dondrian, it seemed like a good time to buy things that couldn’t be had in Pucklechurch.

She was in a bakery near the cathedral when the marble in her pocket began to grow warm. For a moment, she thought about not answering it, but there was no point taking the thing if she wasn’t going to answer the call. She pulled it out, squeezed it as she’d been shown, then held it in her palm.

The image of Marsh appeared, quite small on the surface of her forearm, like a tattoo of incredible fidelity, but moving of its own accord.

“Hannah!” grinned Marsh. “This thing is working, good.”

“Ay, it’s working, but you seem a bit ugly on my end.” She grinned at him.

“You wound me,” said Marsh, clutching his chest. “Where are you? I rolled into Pucklechurch looking for you, but you were out yesterday, and today too.”

“So much attention for me?” asked Hannah. “I’m honored.”

“After the dungeon escape we decided to take a breather,” said Marsh. “I’m bored out of my skull. I thought maybe we could pick up where we left off?”

“Well, ay, there’s a good chance we will, next time we meet, but I’m out of town,” said Hannah. “I’ll be back tonight, but will want some rest, so it will have to be tomorrow.”

“Did you end up telling your party about us?” asked Marsh.

“I haven’t yet, but I don’t see it as much of their business,” Hannah replied. “Have you told your party?”

“Nah,” said Marsh. “I was going to, but Grig got unusually drunk and there was some fighting about whether or not Lola was the one that let the monster loose. The party is being a drag, and you’re the only highlight of my life right now, and I just know they’d do their best to wreck it.”

“Fair enough,” said Hannah. “And better to keep it from Lola, I’d think.”

“Maybe,” he shrugged, shoulders momentarily obscuring a freckle. “So, tomorrow?” He had a winsome grin that was nearly hidden by his voluminous beard.

“Ay, tomorrow,” said Hannah. “Use the marble, we’ll find a place to meet up.”

“See you then,” he smiled.

The tattoo faded away, and the marble, which had been sitting in her hand, quite warm, began to cool down.

Marsh was, in Hannah’s opinion, not the sort of man that you ended up with, but he was fun enough, with a swagger and charm, very straightforward. Hannah would settle down, eventually, and it wouldn’t be with anyone remotely like Marsh, but she’d met up with him after the dungeon escape, and they’d ended up kissing behind the temple for quite a bit. He’d given her the marble, which was bound to him, and it seemed like for a time, they’d be something like partners.

Kissing him had been a touch impulsive, but she’d been riding high off a good day’s work and the thought that perhaps all this would be undone. She didn’t regret it, but a part of her thought that it might have been better to go in with a level head rather than letting the passion take her. Of course, with a man like Marsh, the point was to have fun and not worry about it too much, and the kissing had been fun — she was a fan of long moments of kissing.

He’d tried to go further, but she’d moved his hand with a firm grip, and when he’d tried to convince her that the day might be undone, she’d laughed him off as though it wasn’t a bit enticing. He’d been gracious about it, and given her the marble, which she thought was to his credit. She’d had a partner in seminary that had whined and begged for physical intimacy, and it had left a very negative impression on her. Once she was done with Marsh, she’d gone back to the house, and had enjoyed having a bit of a secret from the others. There was a nice warm feeling to kissing someone for the first time, and she imagined that it might go away if Alfric knew, given that he’d probably have Opinions.

She hadn’t told Marsh where she was, or been exact about when she’d be back, for fear that Lola was listening in on the conversation, or had otherwise induced it to happen. Alfric had been fairly certain that Lola didn’t have the ability to quickly dart from one end of Inter to the other, and Hannah trusted his judgment, but there was still the worry that she might be snooping around in the house, even with it locked up tight, or that she might otherwise be working on some surprise for them when she got back.

Something would have to be done, and ideally, that would mean some kind of truce, but given the animosity Alfric felt and the fact that almost all the aggression, if you could call it that, was coming from Lola, a truce seemed like it would take a lot of work. On the one hand, Hannah thought that she could help them, but on the other hand, it seemed that Alfric didn’t particularly want her help.

She bought some bread from the bakery and talked to the baker there about the plaits they used, particularly the rotational symmetry in one of their loaves, a triple helix that had, somehow, been created so that it had different levels of symmetry and no apparent contact with the stove. There was a trick to it, which was that a cleric helped to even out all of the problems that gravity created during the baking process, but they were happy to share their secrets with Hannah, including the recipe, which was quickly written down on a notecard and passed over. People often said that big city folk were rude or curt, but the baker, at least, had shown that this was a matter of who you met and how you approached them.

Once she was done at the bakery, a bag with two loaves in hand, Hannah went over to a relatively small entad shop. She had no real notion of buying anything there, but it seemed specialized in things that were of importance to Garos, which meant that it was worth a look. With her armor now sorted away, the only thing that Hannah really had any need for was a proper weapon, and even then, the armor could help with that as well, in a pinch. Other things, like a personal travel and storage entad, would likely have to wait until they found a suitable one in the dungeon. Specialized entads, like those that would allow her to touch things from far away, would take even more time, and according to Alfric, were horrendously expensive.

“Looking for anything in particular?” asked a man in a crisp uniform. Uniforms seemed to be a big thing in Dondrian, as Hannah had seen quite a few of them, or at least clothes that seemed tailored and washed for the purposes of a professional appearance. It was the sort of thing that they mostly didn’t bother with in Pucklechurch, with only a few exceptions — clerics putting on their formal outfits on temple days being one of them. His hair was closely cropped, with straight lines that made it seem like he’d been to the barber in the past few days. He was older, maybe forty, with a refined sense to him.

“Nothin’ particular, no,” said Hannah. “I’m a dungeoneer, so — if you have it, I s’pose, I’d like somethin’ that I’d not be likely to eventually pick up myself.”

“Hmm,” said the man, tapping his lips. “What do you get for the woman who might find anything?”

“I’m a cleric of Garos, if that helps,” said Hannah.

“Oh, I had imagined,” he replied. “You seem the sort. You can’t always tell by the symmetricalization of the face, but the hair is usually a dead giveaway, especially yours, with as much volume as it has.”

Hannah felt herself blushing, not that it was so great a compliment. Normally she wouldn’t have bothered to make sure that each strand was laying symmetrical, but she was in the Garos quarter, such as it was, and she had made the effort, the same as she’d done in the seminary.

“Well,” he said. “If you’re looking for something that will be a minor help, we have plenty of that, and if you’re looking for a major help, we can have a discussion.”

“A minor help,” said Hannah. “I’m not lookin’ to spend too much, and I don’t have too much to spend, mostly hopin’ for somethin’ that will help me and mine out when we’re in the thick of it. We’re sorted for storage and travel, but it seems there are all sorts of edge cases in the dungeons.”

He snapped his fingers. “I think I have just the thing, unless you’re also sorted for mapping?”

“We are not,” Hannah replied.

“I’ll need to grab it from the back,” he said. “In the meantime, there’s a catalog you can look through, if you’d like, it’s a new wortier design, listing every entad from every shop that’s part of our cooperative.” He gestured at a relatively thin tome sitting on top of the counter.

“Seems a nightmare to keep track of it all,” said Hannah.

“It still is, even with a very clever group of wortiers having worked on it,” he nodded. “But the sorting is quite ingenious, and it’s linked with dozens of other books of its kind. It’s quite new, we’ve had it only a month.” He left, going back into the bowels of the shop, and Hannah, for lack of anything better to do, decided to idly leaf through the catalog, though a catalog seemed a poor replacement for actually getting her hands on something.

Though the book was thin, it was immediately obvious why: the thing was infused with a very heavy wortier magic, such that the relatively few pages would reconfigure themselves to the touch of the reader, or in this case, shopper. There were manifold divisions of the entads, and they could be sorted by their form, their general magic, their specific magic, the store they belonged to, or their price. The prices seemed quite steep to Hannah, but she’d been warned that things were more expensive in the city, at least in some respects.

The possibilities were overwhelming, naturally, and the prices, at least at the upper end, were astonishing. Out of curiosity, Hannah sought the most expensive of them, and it seemed to be a jug that could make milk in great quantities, which was a bit of a boring answer, if you asked her. There was a note saying that it was currently in ownership but ‘underutilized’, and an explanation of the pricing, which factored in potential profits for whomever could make it work at scale, all of which made Hannah’s eyes glaze over.

And then there were the entads whose prices were not listed, which obviously might have a much higher value. In fact, looking through the book, it seemed that most things didn’t have a listed price. Hannah didn’t know what the city’s stance on haggling was — she hadn’t haggled for the bread — but it was a mainstay of entad sales, she knew, given how unique they each were.

After not too long, the man came back, holding a copper amulet in his hand, encrusted with verdigris. He handed this to Hannah, smiling.

“It creates a dynamic map,” he said. “Anything it’s been within ten feet of will show up, though only for two days, and from what Qymmos says, if you’re in a dungeon, it will show only the dungeon. A mental push will call the map up. Visible to you and you alone.”

Hannah handled it, turning it over and looking at it, then gave the mental push and looked at the map.

She could see the flaws right away, but felt like she was uncovering more with every passing moment. Ten feet was too short a range, and left the ‘map’ with gaping holes all over the place. The map didn’t distinguish between walls, people, or things, meaning that it was all one singular color, seemingly melded together given the low fidelity. And it didn’t show where it was, nor did it update quickly enough that you could tell just by moving your hands, you had to try to find where in the map you were by finding the shape of a person who was standing still and looking at an amulet.

Still though, it was useful, and the flaws seemed like they might be helpful insofar as they might lower the price.

“How much?” asked Hannah.

“One hundred rings,” he replied.

“How flexible are you on price?” asked Hannah.

“Not terribly,” he replied. “Though for a cleric of Garos, I do occasionally offer a better deal.”

“Ninety-five?” asked Hannah.

“I could do that,” he nodded.

They shook on it, and Hannah took out her rings. It was, she thought, a fairly good deal, though she was sure that Isra would have haggled for longer, and that Alfric would have told her it was better to wait until they found something of their own that could fulfill the same function. Still, she had been saving her money from that first big and as-yet-unmatched haul, and it didn’t hurt to buy something just because she wanted it, especially not when it could be justified as dungeoneering equipment.

She did spend a bit more time looking around after that, and apologized to the man at the counter for being a lookie-loo, but he didn’t mind, and she imagined that if you had a shop selling entads, it came with the territory.

Once she was finished there, she was feeling a bit lost. She could go back to the cathedral, of course, but what she had a real hankering for was a deep theological discussion, and that seemed the sort of thing that would be hard to get unless you knew the right people, especially as someone being a cleric of Garos wasn’t sufficient for them to actually care about Garos.

By coincidence, it was precisely as she was having this thought that she heard someone shout “Hannah!” from down the street. She turned, and saw that it was Prudence.

“Hannah, I thought that was you,” smiled Prudence as she came over. “I’d have recognized that hair anywhere.”

“Prudy?” asked Hannah. “What are you doin’ in Dondrian?”

“Well I should ask you the same thing!” exclaimed Prudence. “I came here after seminary, selected for the Garos Duomo. I’ve been in Dondrian this whole time. And you were sent to … somewhere? I’m sorry, I can’t recall.”

From someone else, Hannah might have thought that was a slight, but Prudence was sweet and earnest, without a mean bone in her body, even when that would have suited her well. They had been part of the same class in the seminary, though never terribly close friends. Still, there was some closeness that came with going through the same program at the same time, living in the same place, eating meals in the same rooms, and all that, even if they didn’t have terribly much in common beyond being clerics of the same god.

“I was sent to Pucklechurch, a small town in Greater Plenarch, east of the provincial capital,” said Hannah. “Though I’m independent now, a dungeoneer.”

“Oh,” said Prudence. “That’s — you were always so talented, so knowledgeable.”

“Still am,” nodded Hannah.

“Sorry, I didn’t — I just thought that you would end up … well, high up within the Church, that’s all, possibly working at the seminary in Plenarch yourself.” She frowned. “Sorry, I meant no offense, I just didn’t imagine that you’d end up, um, in the dungeons. So to speak.”

“No offense taken,” said Hannah, though she might have taken offense if it had been someone else. Prudence was a kindly girl. “I’m not sure that the administration would have suited me, nor the academic side, small though it is. Poring over tomes at the age of twenty, immersin’ myself in mathematics — there’s an appeal there, I’ll admit, but it seems a waste of youth.”

“I can see that,” nodded Prudence. “For myself, I’ve been having a bit of struggle with all the newness of the city, even if it’s been, what, almost a year now? I suppose I came here in spring, so a bit more than a year now. I keep feeling like I don’t belong, or like I’m never going to get to the level that everyone else already seems to be at.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll get there, you were always diligent,” said Hannah.

“Would you have time for a bit of tea, if you’re just visiting?” asked Prudence.

“I’m afraid I have business with the party,” said Hannah, which wasn’t strictly true. “And we’ll be off today, otherwise I’d schedule something.”

“Oh, no worries,” said Prudence. “It was just a flight of fancy. Say, would you mind a letter sometime? I keep in touch with a few people from our class.”

“I’d take a letter, ay,” said Hannah. “And send one back in turn, as befits a cleric of Garos.”

Prudence gave a laugh, and Hannah smiled, but once Prudence had said her goodbyes, the smile was quick to fade.

Prudence hadn’t been the only one who’d thought that Hannah was destined for great things after the seminary. She didn’t think so highly of herself, not when it came to matters as high as the level of the province, but she had thought that perhaps she might rise to a position of prominence within whatever church she was placed in.

That was an impossibility in Pucklechurch, naturally. There, she was meant to be a replacement for Lemmel, and once he was retired, she would have a good forty years or so before she started training in her own replacement, who would in turn be stuck there.

Why they had decided on Pucklechurch for her was, to Hannah, a mystery. Placement was a complicated process, one with many people involved, and there was no doubt in her mind that she’d butted heads with a few of them during her time at seminary, for one reason or another. She had complained when her assignment to Pucklechurch had come in, but nothing she’d said had done anything to sway anyone, and in fact, it felt like it was quite the opposite. Someone needed to go to Pucklechurch, that much was true, but she saw no good reason that it should be her.

She’d put in the effort, and tried her best, despite her disappointment. It became clear relatively quickly that Pucklechurch was not the place for her though, not in the long term, and her application to be moved elsewhere was quietly ignored until a follow-up letter made it clear that Pucklechurch was, in the view of the church, where she was most needed. She didn’t agree, and perhaps that disagreement had left her disagreeable with the other clerics in general, which had led to her leaving the local guild.

She had known for some time that she was going to go independent, but it was a step that wasn’t to be taken too lightly. The Church had quite a bit of control, and leaving — leaving for good — meant that she wouldn’t be able to put into practice quite a few of the skills that she’d been taught. There was a bit of stigma that came from leaving the Church, and even if there hadn’t been, who would want to take advice from someone who didn’t have the support of their Church? The obvious question people would ask, even if only in their own heads, was ‘what’s wrong with her?’

It was a question that Hannah didn’t normally give all that much serious consideration. The obvious conclusion was that it was the world that was wrong, that the Church was a place of politics and performative symmetry, where doing your best to not cause offense was more important than whether your opinions could be backed up by theory and fact. The laity cared about healing and repairs, rather than Garos, and most of the clerics had come up from the laity, never having true devotion. They treated what should have been a calling like it was a profession, and prayer like it was a cost that profession incurred.

There was a bundle of sour feelings that Hannah tried not to poke at too much, for fear her thoughts would be sour for the rest of the day.

<Who is closest to me?> asked Hannah. <I’m at the Garos Duomo, but finishing up here, lookin’ for somethin’ else to do to fill out the day.>

<The museum isn’t far,> said Verity. <Half a mile’s walk due west. We’d welcome your company, though I have to warn you that we’re going slow.>

<Sorry,> said Isra.

<No, it’s fine,> said Verity. <I’m enjoying it.>

<Well, I’ll be there in a bit,> said Hannah.

She hurried off, wanting to be with other people, rather than alone with her thoughts.

Chapter 67 - Resolve

After the zoo there was shopping to do, and Mizuki was on her own for a bit, picking up a few things that she didn’t really need, along with a few that she did. Her funds were dwindling by the time she was called back to the Overguard house by party chat. There was some discussion about whether they would stay another day, and she seemed to be the only one who wanted to, so she didn’t voice much objection.

Mizuki didn’t want to leave though. She had been on the verge of asking Alfric whether or not they could stay another day, but when Verity came back home, she was clearly upset, and all dreams of one extra day in the city went up in smoke. The upshot seemed to be that Verity’s family was poor, and that Verity needed to bring in more money, which she was going to do by commuting.

Mizuki had expected Alfric to be bothered by Verity having an unexpected side job, but he was understanding and thoughtful.

“We can work around it,” said Alfric. “I had always planned to. The more dungeons we do, the better, in my opinion, but if we’re on pace to do one a week, then you being gone for a few days won’t matter too much. What I’m more concerned with is you not feeling that you’re stretched too thin or overworked.”

It was sweet of him. Whatever trepidation he was feeling, he was keeping it to himself and focusing more on her and her needs. From what Verity was saying, it was the exact opposite approach that her mother had taken.

Mizuki didn’t have all that much to add to the conversation. Her own relationship with her parents was pretty good: they had left her to her own devices, which was exactly what she had asked for. Perhaps she and Verity had ended up on opposite sides of things. Mizuki wouldn’t have traded places, certainly, but she did sometimes crave someone to look out for her. Not that this was what Verity’s mother was doing. It seemed more like exploitation, in point of fact.

“Well, we enjoyed your company,” said Harmon once they had announced their intention to go. “I miss those early days, when I was just starting out and everything was all fresh and new. In a way, I envy you.”

Envy was, in this case, a two-way street, but Mizuki resisted the urge to say that, mostly because she thought that he — or Alfric — might take it the wrong way. The trip had made her much more aware of money and the benefits that it could bring, and she had a better understanding of why Alfric’s old teammates had felt the way they had.

It felt, to Mizuki, like they were leaving too suddenly, even though this was what they had planned. She had pulled all of her things out of her version of the guest room, double-checking to make sure that she had Herby, and that their pet dragon was safe and sound.

“What we talked about,” said Alfric’s father. “I’ve been thinking about it, and if there’s anything that you can get me, it would help out enormously. Something … incriminating.”

Mizuki hadn’t meant to overhear it, and it had been said quietly, but she’d been gravitating toward Alfric. Alfric only nodded.

They gathered in the foyer. Harmon left, and they sat there, waiting to be whisked away using the statues.

“I’m going to miss this place,” said Mizuki.

“I’m glad you liked it,” said Alfric. “It’s not for everyone. I do wish that my siblings had been around a little bit more, but they’re in and out, and starting their own lives.”

“I liked the museum,” said Isra. “But home is simpler.”

Emperor was standing with them, as though he was expecting to be replaced by a statue at any moment, and Mizuki patted him on the head. “Hey, can your dog come visit?”

“I guess there’s no reason that he couldn’t, except that he doesn’t have his own travel entads,” said Alfric. “Though I’d really rather not have too much interaction with my family, given that I’m trying to do things on my own with some independence. If my mother is stopping by to drop off the family dog once a week, that somewhat undercuts what we’re doing.”

“Aw,” said Mizuki. She bent down to give the dog a hug. “I’ll miss you buddy.”

Emperor panted happily.

“Don’t you have a cat?” asked Alfric.

“Tabbins isn’t cuddly or friendly,” said Mizuki. “Sometimes he’ll sleep on the window seat in my room, but he doesn’t have the same kind of vibe. He doesn’t like me.”

“He does,” said Isra. “Cats just show it differently.”

“He does?” asked Mizuki, blinking.

Verity was the first to be replaced by her wooden statue, and the others followed faster than before, with Mizuki in the middle this time, thankfully. The familiarity of the yard outside the house nearly smacked her, and the sense of alienation and weirdness that had been building up in the city was washed away before she could really even realize that was what was happening.

“Welp, that’s the end of the trip,” said Mizuki. “And we’re not far out from going to bed.”

“Not happy to be back?” asked Alfric.

“No, I am,” said Mizuki. “But I think I’m going to need a day to get back into the swing of things. Oh shoot, I’m going to have to cook.”

“Not until tomorrow,” said Alfric.

“Still, that means that I’ll have to go out and do some shopping,” frowned Mizuki. She had bought quite a few ingredients in Dondrian, but not the right ones for a complete meal. “Well, it’ll wait until tomorrow.”

“I can help,” said Isra. “Maybe make a meal on my own?”

“We’ll do it together,” said Mizuki. “You’ve been a big help.”

Isra nodded, but it was hesitant. “I’d like to do more than chopping things.”

“Okay,” nodded Mizuki. “I’ll think about what would be good for your first real meal.”

They put their things in their rooms, and Mizuki spent a moment on her bed, staring at the ceiling. Eventually, she got up and went downstairs, where everyone was talking.

“Hannah has a date,” Verity explained.

“A date?” asked Mizuki. “With who?”

“Marsh,” said Alfric, who had a pronounced frown.

“The fire guy?” asked Mizuki.

“Ay,” sighed Hannah. “It’s not a big deal.”

“I really don’t think he’s right for you,” said Alfric. “And I hope you remember that I do know him.”

“We’re not gettin’ married or somethin’ stupid like that,” said Hannah. “It’s a lark. I meant no offense to you, I know there’s bad blood, and I’m well aware that he might run off with another girl if she offers him riches.”

Alfric held up a hand. “Just registering that I think it’s a bad idea, for the record,” he said.

“Well I’ll give you leave to feel smug when it ends badly,” said Hannah. She grinned, clearly trying to make sure there were no hard feelings.

“I care about you,” said Alfric, remaining serious. “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“I’m more liable to hurt him than he is to hurt me,” said Hannah. “He’s one of those tough boys with a soft center. Once you crack them, it’s just a gooey mess.”

“I’ll leave it to your judgment,” said Alfric.

“As you’ve no other choice, yes,” said Hannah. “I’ll be fine, and I know better than to tell him anythin’ that we don’t want gettin’ back to Lola, which is near everythin’.”

“What does that leave to talk about?” asked Isra.

“Well, I’m not sure that talkin’ is his strong suit,” replied Hannah with a laugh. “But the sun will be fadin’ soon, and I’d best be off to not keep him waitin’.” She hesitated. “If I were to bring him home, would that be an issue?” She was looking at Alfric when she said it.

“Not for me,” said Mizuki. “Though moving fast, in my experience, usually isn’t good for keeping things going in the future.”

Alfric shrugged.

“Well, I’ve no investment in Marsh as yet, just a bit of fun,” said Hannah. “But I should be goin’. Tomorrow we make plans for the next dungeon?” she asked. “Moil Meadows?”

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” Alfric nodded. “Take some time to decompress. Have a good time with Marsh. Sorry if I was overbearing.”

“I know you mean well,” said Hannah. “And I do think it comes from a place of carin’ about me, which I appreciate.” It felt as though she was going to say more, a ‘but’, but she left it at that, and everyone said their goodbyes.

Mizuki got out the dragon and fed it again, this time with some herbs from the garden, which was really starting to come along. If she was going to be chewing up herbs, she’d have preferred something a bit sweet, but Isra had taken a look and said that some kind of onion would be better, which left Mizuki chewing up a mouthful of chives, an eye-watering experience.

Herby was showing a bit more life and a personality, playing with his wad of chewed up herbs a bit before eating it, and, for the first time, looking up at Mizuki with wide eyes. He licked his lips, then extended his tongue up and licked his eyes. It would have been creepy, if he wasn’t so cute. His wings, which Isra said were vestigial, had begun to spread out, and he gave them a flap every now and then. Once he was done eating, his brief moment of activity was over, and he curled up into a ball. At first Mizuki was quite happy to see him sleeping, but then she began to grow bored, and she looked for something else to do.

Verity and Isra were out in the garden, looking it over and doing some maintenance on it, not that they’d had a long enough absence that there was much to do. Mizuki didn’t want to interrupt them, so she went to go find Alfric, hoping that he was up to something interesting. He wasn’t in the kitchen or dining room, and she checked down in the cellar first, then went up to his room on the third floor. She paused at it for a moment, trying to hear whether he was in, then tentatively knocked on the door.

“Come in,” said Alfric, and Mizuki went into the room, for the first time since he’d taken it.

Each floor of the house was smaller than the one below it, but the single room on the upper floor was still one of the largest rooms in the house. It had been designed as a self-contained living space, with its own small bathroom, a place for aging parents or perhaps an independent child, though it had never ended up being used for either. Mizuki’s father had always argued that it would have been better to have such a place on the first floor, the better to not have stairs to navigate, but her grandfather must have had something in mind when he was making the house. At the time, her grandfather must have planned to reach the end of his life there. It had ended up being a good place to retreat to and play, along with being a sometimes guest room.

Alfric had made the place his own, putting the boxes stored there to one side, festooning the desk with neatly arranged papers, and laying out a mat in the center of the room. His armor, sword, bident, shield, and boots were all neatly arranged to one side, and his clothes were stacked in a small pile, since the room had no dresser in it. Alfric was sitting at the desk, looking at a map of the region, but he stopped once she came in.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“You organized,” said Mizuki, looking around the room.

Alfric nodded. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” said Mizuki. “This is your room. If you needed to, you could move those boxes down into the cellar. I’d help.”

“Not necessary,” said Alfric after a glance at them. “I’m actually thinking of moving into the garden stone as much as possible. There’s enough space there for a small house without making it unsuitable for everything else we might want to do with it. It would take some work though.” He hesitated. “Did you need something?”

“Just checking in,” said Mizuki.

“Bored already?” asked Alfric.

“Restless, more like,” said Mizuki. “Sorry if I’m interrupting.”

“It’s fine,” said Alfric. “I wasn’t doing anything important, just preparing for the conversation tomorrow, which I actually think will be two days from now for me.”

“You’re throwing a day away?” asked Mizuki.

“Probably going off to get a few things done,” said Alfric. “I’ll leave a note. Don’t do anything rash, just in case I end up keeping the day.”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Would it be possible for me to come with you?”

“You wouldn’t remember any of it,” said Alfric. He stated this matter-of-factly, not like it was an argument, so Mizuki pressed.

“That’s fine by me,” said Mizuki. “There will, temporarily, exist a Mizuki who would be with you, and I would rather have that than have there be a Mizuki who is sitting at home by herself, worried about where you are and what you’re doing.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Alfric. “But then you’d want me to report on everything done in the undone day, right? And I wouldn’t want you to feel like I had gotten something out of you, or like our friendship was too one-sided somehow.”

“Hmm,” said Mizuki. “Well, I guess I should think about it too.”

The room had four windows, one on each wall, and she went to one of them to look out on the garden. Isra and Verity were there together, pulling weeds and trimming parts of the plants that were, presumably, undesirable. The garden was really coming along, looking more managed and more green.

“I want to do more dungeons,” said Mizuki.

“Oh?” asked Alfric with deliberate nonchalance.

“Yes,” said Mizuki, turning to him. “With one a week, we’re doing just enough to tread water, right? We can pay for food and supplies, and go on to the next one, or sell some ectad things or whatever, but … we’re not going anywhere with it. Right?”

“There’s quite a bit of variance,” said Alfric. “So far we’ve gotten a bow for Isra, a bident for me, and armor for Hannah, if I’m only counting the real winners. The wardrobe, the book, and the stone too, for secondaries. If it keeps being this good, which it might, then in a year we’d all have proper adventuring gear.”

“Okay, can I lay it out?” asked Mizuki. He nodded. “What I want is a house like your house.”

“I don’t have a house,” said Alfric. “My parents have a house. But I take your meaning. And you think that by doing a dungeon every week, you’ll never end up with a house like that?”

“Would I?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Alfric. “In another twenty-five or thirty years, when we’re their age, we’d have done a thousand dungeons or so, and that wouldn’t get you that kind of wealth unless you were quite lucky. We’re a string of bad dungeons away from having to supplement our income, at least until the money from the growthstones starts coming in. I’m doubtful that the herb dragon will pay off either, but I suppose I don’t know. And the more dungeons we do, the worse the travel will be, and that will start to cut into profitability too.”

“So, I want to, you know,” said Mizuki. “Actually do it, I guess. I want to actually be a dungeoneer instead of just doing it as a weekend thing.”

Alfric regarded her for a moment. “That’s unexpected,” he said. “I thought you were happy with your life here.”

“I am,” said Mizuki. “Or … was.”

“Not anymore?” asked Alfric.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “The dungeons are one of my only paths to — I don’t even know. A house with a dozen doors to different parts of the world, a kitchen where every tool is an entad. That’s what I want.”

“You could move to a big city,” said Alfric. “There’s usually demand for sorcerers, and opportunities for them to ply their trade, either getting rid of dangerous buildups that the dungeons can’t quite bleed off, or converting aether into something useful.”

“I guess,” said Mizuki. “But … dungeons are worth more, right?”

“Much more,” said Alfric. “Especially with me.”

“I don’t understand why you’re trying to talk me out of it,” said Mizuki. “You want to do more dungeons, right?”

“I do,” said Alfric. “But I don’t want you to come back from the city and push hard for more dungeons and then burn out, or feel like there’s too much pressure, or to just hate it, I guess. What Verity’s going through, basically.”

“That’s nice of you,” said Mizuki, giving him a weak smile. “But I really do want to feel like there’s some forward momentum for once.”

“I think it will hinge on Verity,” said Alfric. “Maybe if we can be more profitable than her playing in Dondrian, or more respectable … I don’t know. But I also don’t want to push her, not right now.”

“Because she might break?” asked Mizuki.

Alfric frowned. “Not how I would put it. It’s much more about making sure that she’s taken care of than using her as a tool. She’s a person. I care about her. We’re friends, though maybe not as much as we might be.”

“I didn’t mean that she was a tool,” said Mizuki. She slumped slightly. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine, just the wording that threw me off,” said Alfric. He stepped forward and looked out the window to the back, where they could look out at Verity and Isra. He lingered only a moment though, and moved back to where he’d been. “I can talk to her and try to work something out. I wish that she hadn’t committed to doing performances in Dondrian, and I don’t know how she’s going to get there on a regular basis, but I can understand a duty to family. I just hope that it’s not too taxing on her.”

“Me too,” said Mizuki. She looked around the room. It felt like their conversation was over, but she didn’t want to leave.

“Have you been reading that book I loaned you?” asked Alfric.

“Almost done,” Mizuki replied. “It’s been interesting. Not necessarily eye-opening, but there’s a lot of language that I think helps me. Ways of looking at the craft.”

“Such as?” asked Alfric.

“Hmm,” said Mizuki. She felt like she was being put on the spot, and momentarily froze up as her mind failed to gain traction.

“Just curious,” said Alfric.

“There’s a chapter on combinations that I found interesting,” said Mizuki. “A way of dividing the function of aetheric moods into different buckets. I’m having a little bit of trouble putting it into practice, not that I’ve had much of a chance, but one of the things that he suggests is to use one mood for energy output, which I think usually means damage, and the other for utility, which is aiming and focusing and stuff.”

“And … you weren’t doing that already?” asked Alfric. “Again, just curious, not trying to —”

“No, no, I know,” said Mizuki. “And no, I didn’t do that before, I mostly just winged it. I’m still having trouble understanding the theory, but he describes it like a house that’s made of stone and wood, where each should be used for a separate thing, and if they’re both put together, then each is doing work it shouldn’t be doing. I’m not sure it really holds, and he’s light on examples.”

“Hmm,” said Alfric. “Well, I guess practice makes perfect.”

“There isn’t much ability to practice though,” said Mizuki. “I can’t just sit in one place making a hundred fireballs in a row. Which is frustrating, because I would like to get better.”

“Is this something that you want help with, or that you’d like to figure out on your own?” asked Alfric.

“Help,” said Mizuki, nodding. “Please. Why would I want to struggle alone?”

Alfric shrugged. “Some people like to figure things out on their own,” he replied.

“Ah, like carrying a wardrobe around, or getting the team a fast trip back to Pucklechurch,” said Mizuki.

“Not that I wouldn’t want to figure it out with friends,” said Alfric. “But I would want to have a hand in figuring it out, rather than just being handed a solution right off the bat.”

“And do you have a solution?” asked Mizuki.

“A short-term one,” said Alfric. “You work with built up aetheric imbalance. It wouldn’t take all that much work for you to level everything down to unusability. But we’ll be going to a lot of other hexes, and if you went, say, an hour early, you could flatten down the area around the dungeons we’ll be going to as a way of warming up and getting more experience in. Plus there’s a decent chance that whatever is around the dungeon will match what’s in the dungeon. The earlier you went, the more practice you could get in, hopefully without tiring yourself out for the dungeon.”

“Wandering through the woods alone doesn’t really have much appeal,” said Mizuki. “Which, I know, I said I want to get better, but —”

“I could come with you,” said Alfric. “If you needed company?”

“But what would you be doing?” asked Mizuki.

“Talking to you?” asked Alfric. “Trying to help you with your craft, if I could? I could read some books and try to figure it out, though without being able to see and feel the things that you can, I’m not sure that it would be too beneficial. I don’t think I could ever become qualified enough to teach you anything, not even if I spent some time in undone days trying to read up on sorcery. But I could be there with you, if that’s what you need.”

“You’re very nice,” said Mizuki, biting her lip. “I don’t want to be a burden.”

Alfric furrowed his brow. “Meaning … you don’t want to be a burden to the team and therefore want your sorcery to get better, or you don’t want to be a burden because you feel like I wouldn’t get anything out of going in the woods with you?”

“I don’t know,” Mizuki shrugged. She was feeling flustered and uncomfortable, her stomach tight. “I’m going to go do some reading, and I think I have a letter from Rolaj to read. Thank you for listening to — I don’t know. To me.”

“Of course,” Alfric nodded. “I’ll think about taking you with me on the undone version of tomorrow, but the next time you see me will, from your perspective, be after that, on the version of the day I want to keep. Probably.”

Mizuki nodded, then left his room, going back down to her own room. She grabbed the book, which she’d brought along to Dondrian and not read at all, and cracked it open to where her bookmark was.

She tried to read, she really did, but it was boring, and her mind wandered. She could see the aether, something that she’d been able to do since she was little, and she wondered what it might have been like if she’d been like Isra, ignorant of the limitations of other people. She wondered whether there ever was a time when she’d thought that other people could see what she saw, but if that had ever happened, she had no memory of it. In this imagination of a life gone differently, maybe someone would have chided her for talking about the aether, and she would fall under the mistaken impression that it was impolite to do that, and getting slapped on the hand once might have made her think that spells were uncouth, or taboo, or something like that.

But Mizuki didn’t think she would have responded that way. Her hand had been slapped away from various things more than once, and she’d just gone ahead and done those things anyway, more often than not.

She turned back to the book, and had read less than a paragraph. Her eyes had skimmed over it, as though tracking from left to right was all they were supposed to do.

She tried again, mustering up some of that sense of seriousness.

In our final estimation of the machinations of sorcerers, we must contemplate their limits as a conduit for the conduction of the aether. When pressed, most will say that their ability is limitless and the aether alone is the controlling limit of their power, though as I have said before, I believe that finesse is in most cases a larger contribution. Still, it is often the case that sorcerers know little about their own power, in part because of a current lack of opportunities for education. There is some evidence that a sorcerer, when faced with enormous disruptions in the aether, might become catastrophically incapable of controlling the sheer volume of aetheric difference they’re able to take in. Given modern circumstances, the necessary conditions might no longer manifest naturally, but I have some suspicion that long, long ago, before the dungeons, such build ups happened with some regularity. Sources are, as ever when dealing with that time period, both scarce and unreliable.

This hypothesized ‘explosion’ of magic gives some clue as to the inner workings of a sorcerer, or at least suggests a direction of inquiry. By having two sorcerers standing side by side, one watching the other, they were able to observe the disturbance in the aether, and it seemed to them, after as much testing as they were able to do, that the disturbance truly is pulled ‘into’ the sorcerer before being expelled. This is contrary to the reported feeling of sorcerers, which is typically that of manipulation ‘outside’ their own bodies.

These thoughts have been left for last in part because they are unimportant to understanding the everyday working of the sorcerer, but also because there is so little to be said on the matter, not without better tools than have currently been developed.

Mizuki didn’t particularly like the author. He was a sorcerer, but spoke of sorcerers in the third person, which was explained in an opening note but still somewhat rankled.

The chapter as a whole was about higher level thoughts on sorcerers, which was one of the reasons that it was a slog to get through. She could see how someone might find it interesting if sorcerer’s ‘drew in’ magic rather than using it outside themselves, but she didn’t care. It wasn’t the kind of thing that was going to make her better as a sorcerer.

Really, what she needed to do was to practice.

A part of her wanted to get up and go out into the woods so she could find some magic to play with, but she was tired, and if Alfric was going to bring her with on an undone day, she wanted to get her sleep, especially since he seemed to rise so frightfully early in the morning.

Chapter 66 - Private Affairs

Verity had been to the museum a number of times, but the time with Isra was by far her favorite.

It was a combination of a few things. The biggest was that they were together, just the two of them. Isra was wild and untamed, which naturally held a strong appeal for Verity, but she’d found that when Isra was part of a group, their druid often faded into the background, waiting and watching, contributing only when it was important to do so. One on one, she spoke much more, especially when given some silence to work with, and some time to develop her thoughts into something she thought was worth sharing.

Still, the addition of Hannah, later in the day, was welcome, in part so that the dynamic had a chance to change. Isra seemed to enjoy having Hannah there, if only because that meant there was someone who shared her befuddlement with Qymmos.

“I’m surprised that they’d include dungeon animals at all,” said Hannah.

They were sitting in a single hallway devoted to dungeon creatures, all taxidermied, like most of the other animals. A slimy creature, rendered permanently wet-looking with polished lacquer, was posed with one tentacle lifted high into the air. It sat there next to its brethren, other similarly slimy creatures with tentacles, and though Verity had read more than enough exhibits for this current trip, she could see from a glance that the exhibit was drawing connections between features of quite different creatures. One of them, it was claimed, had no skeleton at all, only a skull, while a different one was a terrestrial creature with an awkward number of legs and patches of fur. The point was the tentacles, naturally, and the way they were a single coherent idea that would show up many different times in different situations.

“I think the museum has helped me understand Qymmos better,” said Isra. “Or … his clergy. But I do not know where the ideas of the clergy come from, if not their god.”

“There is, in fact, a term for it,” said Hannah. “Theological drift.” There was, Verity had noticed, a slight change in Hannah’s speech whenever she used such terms, or quoted scripture, which she had been doing less these days. She lost a bit of her accent and became more poised. “But it’s not confined to just the churches. There’s an old story, if you don’t mind?”

“Not at all,” replied Isra.

“There’s a man who owns a peach orchard,” said Hannah. “He sells these peaches, but to do it, he needs somethin’ to put them in, and decides one day to make his own crates. A few years of doin’ this, and he realizes that the crates he makes are much beloved, and he’s got some problems with gettin’ them back from people. Eventually a lady asks if she can pay him extra to keep the crate, and he says yes, and two years down the line, he realizes that he’s been makin’ and sellin’ so many of these things that what he runs is, in fact, a crate company.”

“Mmm,” said Isra.

“Of course, it’s not usually so apparent, this ‘drift’. The Adventurers’ League is usually given as a prime example, having slid sideways into a quasi-governmental role, but it was a process that took ages, and Alfric would probably know the history better than I do.” Hannah frowned. For a moment it seemed like she might use the party channel. “What it’s really about is institutions steppin’ up to do what needs to be done, hammers being wielded for things that aren’t nails because the other tools are missin’, and the way that these institutions can continue on forever, if you let ‘em.”

Isra nodded. “You think this is how the … disconnect between a god and their clergy happens.”

“Oh, I think it’s part of it,” said Hannah. “There are other pieces, surely. One highly placed cleric with a pet interest can shift the church’s focus, and then the next one can do the same, until the church ends up doin’ somethin’ entirely different. Any institution is made up of people, and they have their own ways of thinkin’ about things.”

“Including the Church of Garos,” said Isra.

“Ay,” said Hannah. “But I’d prefer not to speak of that, today.”

“Oh?” asked Verity. “Usually it’s something you’re keen to talk about.”

Hannah waved a hand. “Not today. I ran into an old friend from seminary, and had my fill of religious talk. Church talk, rather. I’m more interested in seein’ this museum.”

With Hannah along, they went considerably faster, though that wasn’t saying much. Verity did like the sedate pace though, and composed little songs in her head, making it a challenge to get at least a few couplets about every exhibit they stopped at. She didn’t share these bits and pieces out loud, they were too poorly formed for that, but she did think about what Clemency had said about writing some of her work down rather than simply allowing it to be transient, and she considered Hannah’s nascent book on the symmetry of dungeons. It would be nice, once this period of her life was over, if she had something to show for it — something other than a flute that gave her too many fingers and a few other entads, something more than just friendships which couldn’t yet be counted upon to hold steadfast.

A part of her was unspeakably sad at the prospect that some day their party would break up and they would all go their separate ways. That was what happened to dungeoneering parties you made in your youth, unless you all stuck together for a longer duration, or you found something that you could build up a business around. A nice, useful partybound entad wasn’t something to pin her hopes on, and she was well aware that even if they got one, it might amount to no more than a bit of money sent her way every two months. They’d have the party channel, but it might sit dormant most of the time.

And with that, Verity realized that she had made herself sad just by thinking of some far-off possibility. She resolved to turn her thoughts in other directions, and when they’d gone another two halls and that hadn’t particularly helped, she resolved to instead do something about these thoughts.

“I think we should do more dungeons,” said Verity.

“Oh?” asked Hannah. “And what in this hall of birds inspired that idea?”

“Unrelated thoughts,” said Verity. “I think that I’m going a bit cross-eyed from all these exhibits. I might go back to the house, I don’t want to ruin a good time for the two of you. I do still need to practice today.”

“Why more dungeons?” asked Isra.

“Oh, I was just … if we’re going to do it, we might as well do it properly, and if I’m the one that’s asking for rest, then I don’t think I should be. I’ve never needed so much as a day of rest after a performance.” She left many of her other thoughts unsaid.

“Alfric will be absolutely ecstatic to hear that,” said Hannah. “Positively chuffed to bits.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s just me alone,” said Verity. “And I will still need to take into consideration whether or not I’m pushing myself too hard.”

“Yes, maybe tone it down when you tell him,” said Hannah. “Express it in softer terms that will make him less hopeful.” She grinned.

“Will do,” smiled Verity.

“If you’re going back, I think I will come with you,” said Isra. “We’ve been here for a long time already.”

Verity nodded. She was grateful that she wouldn’t be leaving Isra behind.

“Well I won’t be here on my own, that’s for certain,” said Hannah. “Though would you mind if I got a look at the dragon on our way out? I think it’s in the right direction from where we are.”

“It’s majestic,” said Isra. “I hope to see a live one someday.”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “But not too up close, if you hear what I’m sayin’.”

“Either way,” said Isra with a shrug.

“You did read about how much destruction dragons have historically caused, right?” asked Verity.

“I did,” said Isra. “I can’t explain how I feel about it.”

Verity passed by an exhibit that was behind glass and saw her reflection. She was momentarily startled by the disguise, the blonde hair especially. It was an unpleasant reminder of the close call she’d had the night before, and the way her parents were still in the city, still looking for her and trying to dig their fingers into her life. It was, after all, why they’d sent Alfric, and she had no illusions that his reports back to them would stave them off for long.

There was some sense in going to them and having it out, once and for all, but from experience, it wouldn’t be once and for all. Verity would attempt to get the last word, and the result would be that her mother would get the last word, because there was no way to simply end a conversation with someone on whichever note you chose, except perhaps using the warp and leaving.

“Is it alright with the two of you if we take a detour?” asked Verity.

“Of course,” said Hannah. “Though is there a reason we’d be taking a detour?”

“I’d like to go by my house, just to point it out,” said Verity.

“I think I would like to see it,” said Isra.

“Just from the outside,” said Verity. “It’s going to be quite the long detour, unfortunately.” She came to a stop. “We’ll be taking the warp.”

“You said that was somethin’ of a big deal in the city,” said Hannah. “And that we shouldn’t unless we really needed to.”

“It’s not that it’s a big deal,” said Verity. “There are rules and norms, and I can hopefully go over them quickly. Outsiders describe it as a harrowing experience, but — it’s really not that bad, and if you like new experiences, it’s certainly something.”

“Alfric advised against it,” said Hannah. “He said it was better to just walk, unless you were right at the edge, which we weren’t goin’ to be.”

“All you need to do is to keep moving,” said Verity. “Keep away from others as much as you can, make sure that everything is strapped down, um … probably some others. I can just go by myself, but I’d appreciate the back up.”

“We’re not just goin’ there to look?” asked Hannah, raising an eyebrow.

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “It’s been a long time. Maybe I just want to see the house.”

Hannah nodded. “Well, if you need support, then no public transit solution is goin’ to scare me off.”

“Me either,” said Isra.

Verity nodded, feeling warmed by that. She didn’t want to go confront her mother or say anything about having been away, but it was something that would need to be done eventually, if only to stave off further interference in her life in Pucklechurch. They wouldn’t be in Dondrian too much longer.

She gave a brief explanation of protocol, which turned into a more lengthy explanation of what the warp station was like. She decided that she would be the first to go, just so she could demonstrate better. She faced west, got into the proper stance, then cast the warp.

She found herself on the Great Slide at the Central Station, her stance allowing her to fall gracefully so that she was sliding down on her butt. It wasn’t a terribly busy time of day, but there were people ahead of her, and as soon as she had gone some distance, behind her as well. The Great Slide widened as it went, and people naturally drifted off to other parts of it, sometimes by chance and other times by steering themselves. The slope grew more gentle lower down, which helped to slow Verity before the end, and once she was able to, she took a glance behind her and then quickly stood up, moving out of the way so that there was no risk she’d get bowled over. There were clerics on hand along with healing entads, just in case there were injuries, and though Verity had never seen a pile-up, she knew that attendants had been entrusted with a variety of magics to stop the worst and clear the space, largely through short-distance teleportation to a padded area or telekinesis to literally pick someone up and get them out of the way.

The warp point at Central Station was still a madhouse, one which only worked, to the extent it did, because everyone knew the rules and followed them as best they were able. Dondrian was, by most measures, the largest city in the world, and the traffic through the warp point of its most prominent hex was immense. The Great Slide got people out of the way in a hurry, but during rush hour even that wasn’t enough, and you’d sometimes have to try the warp three or four times before it would go through, only to find yourself in a throng of people, trying your best to avoid bumping too much as you slid down.

There had been some proposals to replace the Slide with a sheer vertical drop, though apparently there were some considerations with the warp that would have made it difficult, given that the warp attempted to place people somewhere relatively safe. It sounded terrifying to Verity, and even more prone to injury than the Slide was, but Dondrian continued to grow with every passing year, and the Slide had limits on how many people could use it at once, limits which the city butted up against more and more as time went on.

She waited off to the side of the Great Slide, feeling a bit anxious. Isra appeared and came down easily, as naturally as if she’d been doing it her entire life, though she had an open-mouthed smile and a face lit up with glee, which wasn’t the usual commuter expression. Hannah didn’t get the stance quite right though, and ended up slipping around, going backward down the Slide, which was embarrassing but not cause for that much alarm. When she got off, she was blushing furiously.

“Bit of a ride, that,” said Hannah once she’d gathered herself. “Not what I was expectin’ at all.”

“I enjoyed it,” said Isra. She was still smiling. “Are there rules against doing it again?”

“It’s frowned upon,” said Verity. “But no, no rules.”

“Just one more time,” said Isra. She assumed the stance and cast the warp again, and Verity watched as Isra happily slid down again.

“She’s somethin’,” said Hannah. She clucked her tongue at the slide. “I think I might call for a pick up, rather than doin’ that again.”

“Understandable,” nodded Verity. “We’re here in order to access a door that will get us to Lakeside, where my parents live.” She was able to stop herself from saying ‘my home’ in time.

“Too much magic in the city,” Hannah grumped. “And I like magic, but it’s thick here, as Mizuki says, so much it almost feels like it might be choking us. To live here it feels like you’ve got to memorize a hundred custom solutions and rituals just to get through the day.”

“I like it,” said Isra once she’d rejoined them. “Though I wouldn’t want to live here.”

“This way,” said Verity.

Central Station was relatively empty, which allowed a better view of it than was normally possible. The Great Slide was obviously the primary feature of the place, but around it was a large hall, one with plentiful windows toward the top of it, letting in light. Arranged around the Slide were doors leading out to the city, but set between them were other doors and stations, these ones magical in nature. As Alfric’s mother had said, magical doors that led elsewhere were relatively common, but often quite limited in nature, either requiring something onerous, working only a certain number of times per day, or in certain conditions, or all of the above.

Central Station integrated everything that was deemed good enough, those things that could be used without anyone interacting with the entads too much, without high costs, and without suddenly running out. They had attempted to make everything look unified, but there was really no possible way, even with entad alteration and masking. One of the passageways was, clearly, an oversized cauldron tipped on its side, and that was the one that Verity was headed for. It was a short queue, and she was thankful that the connection was one-way, since waiting for a two-way connection often felt like it took more than twice as long. The neighborhood of Lakeside was at the edge of the main hex of Dondrian, which meant that most people would warp to Central Station rather than trying to go through the cauldron.

After a short while, they were through, into the area of the city known as Lakeside, called that because it was built around a lake along the southeastern border of the hex. It had once been a worse part of the city, but with conservation efforts, the lake had been transformed into a place of greenery, with a park district along one part of it, and houses along the northern shore. Verity’s family didn’t have actual lakeside property, much to her mother’s chagrin, but the family house, passed down through her side of the family, was across the way from those that did.

“No streets?” Hannah asked as they walked. “Seems odd.”

They were talking as they walked in the neighborhood, still another two blocks from Verity’s home, and Hannah was right, there were no proper streets, just greenery and walking paths. Many of the houses were walled off, either with hedges or proper walls, but there were a few that boldly showed their walls to their surroundings. It seemed too lacking in privacy to Verity.

“It’s a residential area,” said Verity. “There’s no need to have proper roads. No carts go down this path, no lizzos, and the rare bird doesn’t need a proper street. Anything big and heavy would get moved in via entad services.”

“Such large houses,” said Isra, who was looking at nearly everything that passed.

“Yes,” nodded Verity. “Usually enough for the family, some extended family, and live-in help. But it’s not like anyone here is as rich as the Overguards are. Before going to their house, I hadn’t really had any context. My father runs a large business, but he still has to think about money, at least for the larger things. The Overguards don’t, and why should they, when they can go into a dungeon and pull out things that sell for millions of rings?”

“Do I detect jealousy?” asked Hannah.

“Aren’t you a bit jealous?” asked Verity.

“I’m not sure,” said Hannah. “I s’pose the idea of bein’ so rich that everythin’ is always exactly how you want it must be nice. Bein’ able to help people too. But money hasn’t really been that much of a limit in my life, and I’m with Kesbin on the idea of not havin’ everythin’ hinge on what you do or don’t have.”

“Is that what the clerics of Kesbin say?” asked Isra.

“We’re goin’ to have to have you sit through a few sermons to separate the practice from what’s in the holy books,” said Hannah with a laugh. “Otherwise I think we’ll have to go through them all, and aside from Garos, I don’t know that I can properly untangle the gaps between what’s written and what we take for granted in the culture. I never paid much attention to Kesbin.”

“Which is just as he’d like it,” said Verity. It was an old, well-worn joke, the kind that people always chuckled at. “This is it.”

It was five stories in all, built in the same style as the other houses beside it, with not terribly much room to spare. The place was practically covered in windows, many of them protruding, as the style preferred quite a few angles, with bay windows sticking out, dormers on the roofs, and a few areas were rooms jutted out above the floor below. Where there weren’t windows, it was dark blue slats with dark grey trim, imposing in its own way. There were two turrets, tall and round, which technically made up the sixth floor, and there were three balconies, though only the middle one got much use. They were just far enough away that their house only fell in the shadow of another house at sunup or sundown, but the yard was small. It was covered in ‘natural’ flowers, which was the style that most of the houses in the neighborhood went with.

“Smaller than I’d thought,” said Hannah, looking at the building.

“Is it?” asked Verity.

“Well, you’re rich, aren’t you?” asked Hannah. “And it’s a big house, don’t get me wrong, but I thought it would be, er,” she held out her hands, “wider.”

“It’s on three city lots,” said Verity. “Is it the fact that the house is next to so many others?”

“It does make it seem a bit less rich, I s’pose,” said Hannah.

“Well I’ve always said that we weren’t that rich,” said Verity. “We’re Society, but we’re not the cream of the crop. You can imagine us as being at a middle level where we still need to keep up appearances and jockey for position. My father does work, because if he didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to afford this house.”

They stood awkwardly outside the house, with Verity looking up at it.

“Well, we’ll give you all the time you need,” said Hannah. “But if you wanted to see your parents, it might be best to check whether they’re home.”

“I don’t want to see them,” said Verity. “But I don’t know how long they’re going to put up with Alfric sending word back to them, and I know the next step is probably sending someone else, or coming to Pucklechurch on their own. If we didn’t have the party, I might think about picking up and moving somewhere else, but if they found me once, they can find me again.”

“Might be good to clear the air,” said Hannah. “It’s been nine months or so since you left, right?”

“A bit longer,” said Verity. “But yes. I don’t feel that I owe them anything, not when they were so insistent on not listening to me.” She stared at the house. “I think I’m starting to work myself around to the idea that I could talk them into — letters, maybe? Some unobtrusive way of communicating. But then if they learned that I was a dungeoneer, I’m sure they’d go into shock.”

“Dungeoneering is respectable work,” said Isra.

“Yes,” said Verity. “But it’s not Society. Too high a risk of serious injury or death, I think, though I don’t know that I’ve ever spoken with someone about why it’s not done. Going into the dungeons is just something for poor people, I guess.”

“Ouch,” said Hannah.

“I meant that in a self-deprecating way,” said Verity. “It’s the idiocy of Society, rather than some actual judgement of people who can’t get their income any other way.”

“Well, it doesn’t apply to me,” said Hannah. “Since I could live my life just fine without the dungeons. But there are people who feel like the dungeons are their only shot for the finer things, and they’re often the ones that suffer the worst from the dungeons, since they’ve got no money to pay for good equipment, good trainin’, things of that sort. It’s reality for quite a few people. You remember those people we briefly met before we did Hie Point? That’s what it’s like for a lot of them, a decent enough reward for a day’s work, but you get banged up and leave grumpy. They do that because if they don’t, they’ll never have,” she gestured to the house. “All this. Most likely, they never get that anyway.”

“True, I suppose,” said Verity. She frowned. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Well, of course you didn’t,” said Hannah. “And I take no offense, except in the general sense, the sort of offense you take on another person’s behalf, which I think you’ll agree is a lesser sort of offense.”

“How long are we going to stand out here?” asked Isra.

“I do agree we’ve been awkwardly standin’ outside this gate for quite a bit,” said Hannah.

“I’m thinking,” said Verity.

“Think away,” nodded Hannah.

Given nine months away from home, Verity should have had a monologue prepared. She should have been practicing the speech to her parents and running through their expected objections. It was something she’d done with her mother a few times, usually for important occasions. For Verity’s admittance into the conservatory, they had spent what felt like two weeks going through everything that the board there might say, and what Verity’s responses should be. It had been exhausting. When the time came, the practice paid off, and Verity had ready answers to all of their questions. Practice worked, and practicing what you were going to say, and what others were going to say, and the flow of the conversation, was typically worth the effort, at least for the important things.

Verity had not put in the practice for talking with her mother and father. She had done her best to forget them, because that was easier than thinking about them. Even when she’d known that she was going to Dondrian, she hadn’t seriously put in the work of preparing. She’d been ignoring the idea of her parents.

<There, at the window,> said Isra.

<This isn’t related to us, right?> asked Mizuki.

<We’re at Verity’s place,> said Hannah. <There’s a woman at the window lookin’ at us.>

It was Verity’s mother. She was staring down at the three of them, but Verity in particular.

<What do we do?> asked Isra.

<Good luck!> said Mizuki.

Verity’s mother disappeared from view.

“She’s going to come down,” said Verity. “And ask us to leave. It’s what she would do if three strangers were standing outside looking at the house.”

“Well, do you want us to scram?” asked Hannah. “You’re still in your disguise, we could leave without much fuss, I’d think.”

“No, it’s fine,” said Verity. “We can stay. I’ll … talk to her.”

Verity’s mother came out the front door. She was in a maroon dress, one of her favorites, and holding her face high. She walked with perfect posture, her steps even and measured. The family resemblance was undeniable, not that Verity had even thought to deny it, and her mother had the same slender tallness as Verity, with the same delicate features. Her hair was pulled back and had been done up in thick braids by one of the maids, as usual.

She stood on the opposite side of the gate for a moment, and they looked at each other. It was the moment for Verity to leave, to say that they were just looking, but she was frozen there by her mother’s gaze.

“I suppose you shouldn’t just stand out there,” Verity’s mother said, ending the breathless moment. “Come on in, and bring your friends.”

“It’s — it’s me,” said Verity.

“I know that dear,” said Verity’s mother. “If you’re going to go through all the trouble of looking different, I don’t know why you’d wear a dress that I bought for you.”

Verity looked down at what she’d been wearing and saw that it was true. She was wearing a blue dress with small white flowers on it. Her mother had always said that blue was a good color, and it was what Verity wore most often. She hadn’t even considered it when she’d dressed that morning. She’d taken only some of her clothes with her when she’d left Dondrian, paring her wardrobe down to what would fit in a trunk, and hadn’t bought anything new to wear in Pucklechurch. It was a small feeling, to be wearing clothes that her mother had bought for her, made worse by the fact that Verity hadn’t given it all that much consideration beforehand.

Verity followed her mother after a moment of hesitation. Running away now, after she’d been found out, would be humiliating and solve nothing, not unless she was willing to abandon the party and form a new life somewhere else. The possibility of that went through her head for a moment, but was dismissed as a flight of fancy brought on by nerves.

The house was exactly as Verity had remembered it, all polished dark oak and serious paintings of romantic scenes and long-past ancestors. Everything in the house reeked of age, from the carpets that had been woven a hundred years ago to the vases that the flowers and plants sat within. Even the plants themselves had the weight of tradition to them, each of them being a specific breed of some importance, cycled in and out of the green room of the house as the seasons and health of the plants demanded. The contrast to Alfric’s house was stark, and even Mizuki’s home had a lived-in feeling to it. Verity, in her family home, felt more like a visitor, or perhaps a steward whose role was to take care of all these things that had been handed down, and to hand them down in turn.

“Your friends can sit in the Henling Room,” said Verity’s mother once they were in the foyer. “We’ll take the Blue Room.”

Verity felt a twisting in her guts. She wanted Hannah and Isra to be with her, to help her through this, but it was a private affair, something that would be uncouth for her to have friends sitting there for.

“We’ll be with her, if that’s all the same to you,” said Hannah.

“It’s not,” said Verity’s mother. “This is a private family affair. As I’m sure you know, if you’ve accompanied her here, Verity has been gone for quite some time, and there are matters that need to be discussed now that she’s returned to Dondrian.”

“I haven’t,” said Verity. “I’m just … visiting.”

“Private affairs should not be attended to with onlookers,” said Verity’s mother.

“They’re members of my party,” said Verity. “Mother, this is Hannah Carthaigh, cleric of Garos, and Isra Jamin.” It was proper to introduce clerics as such, if their god was known. “This is my mother, Edil Parson.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, I’m sure,” said Verity’s mother with a perfunctory curtsey.

“Members of a party shouldn’t be excluded, so long as it’s not a recent party,” said Verity. This was basic etiquette, though a bit outdated. The party bond was historically stronger than it tended to be in modern times, but etiquette was slow to change. “They’ve been my party members for the last month.” This was stretching the truth somewhat by rounding up.

“It is an expectation that even long-standing party members will remove themselves,” said Verity’s mother. Her eyes were cold.

“Verity?” asked Hannah. “It’s your call, but I would rather be here for the conversation, if you’ve no problem with it.”

Verity paused. “I think if I’m going to handle this, I’ll handle it on my own. But thank you for looking out for me.”

“I don’t know what you expect from me,” said Verity’s mother. “But I only have Verity’s best interests at heart.”

“Ay,” nodded Hannah. “But speakin’ as a cleric, I know that it can be difficult when there are disagreements on what those interests are.” She looked to where Verity’s mother had gestured. “We’ll wait there. You two take your time.”

Isra seemed more hesitant to go, and before she left, squeezed Verity’s hand. “You’ll do well.”

“Thank you,” said Verity. “I’ll … try not to be too long.”

The Blue Room was exactly the same as it had been when Verity had left, with the exception of the plants, which had been changed out. A blue lily sat in a large pot where there had once been a blueberry bush, and the zinnias that had been hanging by the south window were gone, replaced with a spider plant of some kind, unfamiliar to Verity. The rest of the room was the same though, a relatively small sitting area with two couches and a low table between them, along with a fireplace which was almost never lit. Many of the decorations on the walls had a nautical theme, with pictures of sailing ships and the odd bit of ephemera from boats like a coil of rope and a weathered masthead from a ship that had once been in the family.

Verity couldn’t help but be nervous. It would have been better for them to meet at a restaurant, or somewhere public, a place that her mother didn’t control. The Blue Room in particular was the one that her mother liked to use for intimate conversation. They sat on opposite sides of the room, and for a moment, neither said anything.

“I can have Hazel get you some tea,” said Verity’s mother. “I take it from your lack of luggage that you don’t intend to stay, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer some hospitality while you’re here.”

“Nothing for me, thank you,” said Verity.

“You didn’t plan this reunion,” said Verity’s mother. She had her legs crossed and her hands folded on top of her knee. “How long will you be in Dondrian?”

“Another day, at the most,” replied Verity. “We might leave tonight.”

“And then you’re back to Pucklechurch, I suppose?” her mother asked.

“Yes,” nodded Verity. It was a bit of a power play on her mother’s part, mentioning the town that Verity was staying in. “I’ve been doing well there.”

“Your place is here, in this house,” said her mother. “If you truly don’t think that suits you, we could find an apartment for you, something not too far from the conservatory, if you’d like to extend your studies there, or near Publican Row. You’ve been gone for a good long while now, and that’s only increased the demand for your music. There’s nothing that people love more than a minor scandal.”

“I’m not coming back,” said Verity.

“Since you’ve left, I’ve given quite a bit of thought to what happened,” her mother said. “I was torn on whether we should have given you a longer leash or a shorter one, indulged you more or less. In the end, I suppose I don’t know, but if we raised you right, then you should understand your obligation. Do you?”

“I want to live my life on my own terms,” said Verity.

“Then you don’t understand,” her mother replied with a grim sigh. “You have an obligation to this family, to this house, to your father’s name. A sabbatical can be explained away easily enough, and your return to society will be welcomed, I feel. But if you are intent on living a low life in the middle of nowhere, then you should know that it comes at great cost to your father and me.”

“I know,” Verity nodded. “The scandal of having someone who doesn’t want to use their talent must be unbearable.”

Her mother pursed her lips. “Unfortunate as it is, and as gauche as we both might find it, I’m speaking in monetary terms. We paid for your education at the conservatory —”

“An investment that’s made you your money back a few times over,” said Verity. She flushed. “I did pay attention to the accounting.”

Her mother pursed her lips. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at them for a moment before returning her gaze to Verity. “Your father’s company is facing seizure.”

Verity froze as she turned over the words. “Is it certain?”

“Only the outcome is in doubt,” said Verity’s mother. “A hold has been placed on the company, and while work is continuing, an assessment is incoming. It’s possible that we’ll dodge a full seizure, but your father hasn’t been putting in the floor time that his father did, and his contributions to the company seem unlikely to be recognized. The best we can hope for, at this juncture, is a partial seizure, where your father would be kept on as an employee.”

“How did he let that happen?” asked Verity. She was aghast. It was going to be the talk of the town, if it wasn’t already.

“He focused his efforts elsewhere,” replied Verity’s mother. “He was attempting to create a new company, one focused on an ectad design for which he had secured a national patent. In the process of gathering funds for this new venture, he drew a larger salary for himself than was perhaps wise. I’m telling you this now, in confidence, because you’re sure to hear it elsewhere if you care to.”

“You need money,” said Verity, eyes widening.

Her mother nodded. “For the time being, money can’t be drawn from the company, not that we would, but barristers need to be paid for the seizure defense, and we need to be in a position to deal with the inevitability of a full seizure. There will be an influx of money no matter the outcome, but we’ll no longer be able to cover our expenses.”

“So you need me,” said Verity. “It’s not about saving face, it’s about being able to keep yourself in comfort.”

“It’s about the legacy of this family,” said Verity’s mother. Her lips were thin. “Your place is here, in Dondrian. Your career, which you were trained for from a very young age, is to perform music on the stage for an audience. Your father and I need you to do this for us, lest we be relegated to an apartment somewhere in the city while he works on his ectad business.”

Verity felt sick to her stomach. “I can’t,” she said. “I reached my limit here in Dondrian, and if I came back, it would only be a matter of time before I reached my limit again. Some people can handle the stress and the pressure, and — I’m not one of them.” She was avoiding her mother’s eyes. “I’m in a good place now. I feel happy about where my life has gone. I’m living a comfortable life. I can’t just throw it away to — to rescue you.”

“Why?” her mother asked. “Do you believe we didn’t sacrifice for you? That we didn’t spend time and effort on your upbringing? Why does the very concept of family not inspire something in you? Where is your loyalty?”

“Where was your loyalty to me?” asked Verity. “When I said to you that I couldn’t handle the demands that were being placed on me, when I said I would break if I had to do another year —”

“Don’t act like I never attended to your demands,” said Verity’s mother. “I canceled performances, I changed out tutors, I did my best to keep you in comfort while making sure that you were actually doing what you were meant to do.” She threw up her hands. “And now we’ve come to this, you saying that you have no intention of doing professional performance ever again, that you’d rather be a half-ring tavern bard.”

“I want my own life!” shouted Verity. “I want to not be constantly performing for someone, whether that’s with my lute or with endless parades of people I don’t care about who have to be thanked and told how much I appreciate them listening. I don’t want that kind of thing. Do you know, I’m actually pretty good with stressful situations? But if it’s going to be every single day, with a new gig hanging over my head, or some grand performance that will determine the course of my career … I can’t!”

“Lower your voice when there are guests in the house,” said her mother after a moment. “And your new life, working at a tavern, you like it because no one cares too much? They expect less than you can offer? You want to keep doing it because it’s easy?”

“If I thought you were asking that question seriously, I would answer it,” said Verity.

“I am asking,” her mother replied. “This isn’t a rhetorical trick.”

“To tell you the truth … I’m not working at a tavern anymore.” Verity tried to control her breathing, because if she didn’t, she was sure she would unintentionally start holding her breath. “I’ve been doing dungeons.”

Her mother had a pronounced frown. “That’s what you’ve been doing with a conservatory education? Verity, I understand the rebelliousness of youth, but there ought to be limits. You don’t need to do dungeons. Even if you came to Dondrian for private engagements once a month, you’d be making more than you could ever make running dungeons.”

“That’s not true,” said Verity. “If I did many dungeons, and at a high level, my wealth could easily eclipse the family fortune.”

“It wouldn’t be a hard thing to do, in the state we’re in,” her mother replied. “How much have you made to date?”

“It’s a rude thing to ask,” said Verity.

“It’s a necessary piece of information when speaking of your future,” said her mother.

Verity didn’t want to answer. Even including all of the future money they were expecting from the ectad materials and a few unsold entads, it was unlikely to be more than ten thousand rings, and she suspected that was being generous. Her mother would rightly point out that ten thousand rings was what Verity had been paid for a day-long performance at a wedding the summer before. Unlike the money coming to the party, performance money didn’t need to be split five ways.

“I am hoping that I raised you well enough that you can understand my exasperation with you,” said Verity’s mother. “Even if you seem intent on abandoning this family.”

“I never wanted to abandon you,” said Verity. “I didn’t even really want to leave. I only wanted to have some room to breathe.”

“But you don’t intend to come back,” said Verity’s mother. “You intend to leave this family to ruin.”

Verity kept her mouth shut. She wanted to say that she would figure something out. She did, in fact, want to be a good daughter and take care of her parents. But the things her mother cared about weren’t the things that Verity cared about, and ‘ruin’ was relative. The second home would be sold, and this house, too, could be sold, the vast closets of her mother’s auctioned off, the pieces of ‘priceless’ family furniture sold. It would be a humiliation, the talk of Society for months, one of their own brought low. Her family would be a cautionary tale.

“I’m sorry,” said Verity. “Maybe I can … I don’t know. Make a commute. Play a performance … once a week,” she should have said once a month, “if I don’t have to pretend to be nice to people who are only interested in rubbing shoulders.” It felt like an enormous concession, and of course there was the problem that commuting to Dondrian would be its own problem that couldn’t be solved without quite a bit of travel time or enormous expense. She hadn’t been able to help herself though, not in the moment. She had to say something.

“You’re saying that if I arranged something for you, you would do it?” her mother asked. “That I should begin speaking with concert managers and arranging for performances?”

Verity nodded, but she felt slightly sick. “I am going back to Pucklechurch though.” She stood up suddenly, though her legs felt weak. “You can mail me there, and … there’s no need for us to be estranged, so long as you accept that I’m living my life as I wish to live it.”

“If you’re intent on going, then I won’t stop you,” her mother replied. She stood as well. Maybe she was content with this small victory. “It was good to see you. I’m sorry that it couldn’t be a warmer reception, but I had no idea you were coming. I’ll have a letter in the mail soon, priority.”

Verity felt relief that it was over, and anxiety that she’d agreed to something she didn’t particularly feel like doing. The dungeons were a different kind of stress from the performances, and one she was much more keen on, perhaps because of the company. Coming back to Dondrian once a week, if that was even possible, meant being slowly and surely smothered by her mother again and pressured to do more. She was going to have to take practice more seriously, not just working on the skill of playing, but playing particular pieces she would be expected to know by heart. She would need to think about what she was going to wear, what she was going to do for makeup, she’d need to collect sheet music from her room — she would need to tell the others.

The goodbye lasted a bit too long, especially because there were things for Verity to grab from her room, and she spoke with one of the maids who was very surprised to see her, especially given the disguise. When she came back down, her mother was in conversation with Hannah and Isra, a conversation which stopped almost immediately when Verity came down the stairs. Then another round of goodbyes was required, and a promise that Verity would respond promptly when a letter arrived at her house.

“How did that go?” asked Hannah once they were out of the house and walking, somewhat aimlessly, down the path. They’d have been better off doing the warp, but Verity was still feeling out of sorts, visibly so.

“Awful,” said Verity. “I thought that I was holding my own, and then I felt guilty, like I was a bad person for wanting my own life, for not helping them.”

“Helping them?” asked Isra. “Why do they need help?”

“It’s complicated,” said Verity. “The family position isn’t secure. My father will be fighting a battle against the workers at his company, and most of his funds are tied up in some other venture.”

“They need you to provide for them?” asked Hannah.

“To help them, yes,” said Verity.

There was a bit of silence at that, and Verity was left with her own sullen thoughts.

“Do you want to help them then?” asked Hannah. “Or is it more of an obligation?”

“You’re still a part of the party, right?” asked Isra.

“I am,” nodded Verity. “And it shouldn’t interfere with the dungeons. I’ll just … come here every now and again, play a performance, then come back. I guess.” Even saying that, she felt ill.

“Mmm,” said Hannah. “I’ve a confession to make, one that I was hopin’ could wait a bit, but disclosure and all that. Mizuki and I overheard some people talkin’ at the opera last night. We had heard your family was in some trouble, though I’d chalked it up to gossip, and there was another bit which — we wanted to let you tell us on your own terms, but they had said you were a Chosen of Xuphin.”

“Oh,” said Verity. Her already low mood became lower. It was too much to process. At least they hadn’t said anything about it until now, which meant that they weren’t going to abandon her, but they knew now, and that was bad.

“I think both topics are ones that can wait, if you’d prefer, which it seems you do,” said Hannah. “Just know that we’re here for you, to talk or to offer support. If bein’ a Chosen is a difficult thing for you, we’ll do our best not to speak of it.”

“Thank you,” said Verity, but it didn’t stop her from feeling wretched.

Chapter 68 - Undone I

Alfric woke in the middle of the night, as was his habit. He checked for guild messages, and saw none, which was the best possible indication that he hadn’t missed the witching hour. Guild messages from the day before went through, all at once, just five minutes after the witching hour. The difference between those two times had been a topic of occasional discussion within the guild, and Alfric had read through enough of the back-and-forth to know that most would have preferred that it be more like an hour’s difference, not that there was any way of making a change. If there was something from an undone day you needed to report to the guild, you had five minutes to say what needed to be said. It wasn’t terribly much time, but it allowed for people to set up some coordination, at least a little. If the guild messages went through fourteen hours after the witching hour, there would be almost no coordination, and if the guild messages were immediately after the witching hour, no one would be able to get a message out in time.

He sat up so he wouldn’t fall back asleep, and waited, not moving from his bed. He didn’t have all that long to wait. He was always slightly nervous, if he’d had a day that had gone well, because he knew that days were undone all the time, and it was much more likely that you were living in an undone day than that you were in one that would finish. Of course, you only ever saw the inside of the ‘done days’ or the days that you ended up personally undoing, so you never had any actual experience with a day that didn’t end up happening. The whole thing was an existential quandary that Alfric did his best not to think about, but the nightly ritual of waking up for the witching hour unfortunately offered quite a bit of time for such rumination.

There was no particular sensation during the witching hour as they moved from one day to the next, so the first indication Alfric got was from the guild as the messages came in all at once. He had the interface open, naturally. He scanned it quickly, looking for a priority alert from someone, just in case they needed something immediate and important, especially if it was for him. There were special codes that could be used, the better to get as much information as possible and mark something as an absolute priority, and other codes that could relegate a message to the level of mere useful information. No one had any great emergency going on, and no one had any specific message for Alfric. There were dungeon reports to read, and some ongoing discussion between other members of the family that he was interested in following … but all that could wait until the next day, as tempting as it always was to read something the moment it came in.

Alfric lay back in bed, and was out in another few minutes.

The only issue that Alfric had with the top floor at Mizuki’s, other than a lack of drawers to place clothes into, was the light that came streaming in when the sun rose. He was an early riser, but it was just about early summer, and the sun was now at the point when it was getting up earlier than he did. The light came in all the same though, and woke him up. He was going to have to get curtains for the windows if he was going to stay there, but he hadn’t had luck finding anything in Pucklechurch, and had run out of time when he was in Dondrian. It wasn’t just a matter of finding curtains, because rods needed to be cut and installed as well, and it was no small amount of work. It was also not particularly in his area of expertise.

He got dressed, used the tiny upstairs bathroom, gathered up what gear he would need for the day ahead (sword, boots, his empty pack, rations, water), and headed downstairs to see whether or not Mizuki was awake.

He was of two minds about taking her with him. On the one hand, she would probably slow him down a little bit, but on the other, it would be good to speak with her, especially since she’d given it some thought ahead of time. Besides, Mizuki was a good friend, and it was quite unlikely that she would feel like he’d taken advantage of her by having conversations that she didn’t remember. He would, of course, tell her about everything that happened, but he had a somewhat boring day planned.

Alfric gave a tentative knock on Mizuki’s door, trying not to be too loud in case she was still sleeping. He wasn’t terribly surprised when she didn’t answer, so he went downstairs to get a bit of breakfast for himself. He would eat, then check in on her again to see if she was awake, and if she wasn’t, then he would leave without her and hope that she’d forgive him when he told her what had happened.

When he got down to the kitchen, he was surprised to see that she was already there, making tea and frying up some eggs and bacon. She was dressed in her usual outfit, culottes and a simple shirt, rather than the robe she normally wore when she’d just woken up.

“Mornin’,” she said with a yawn. “I had trouble sleeping and then woke up way too early, feeling completely alert. It’s started leaving me now though. Hence tea.”

“Are you making enough for me?” asked Alfric.

“I am,” said Mizuki as she shifted things around in the pan. “You’re getting used to breakfast?”

Alfric nodded. “I had to stop eating so much at lunch and dinner, but when Hannah does morning baking and I smell you frying things up, it makes sense not to miss out.”

“She didn’t come home last night,” said Mizuki.

Alfric tensed. “No?” he asked. “We should use the party channel, make sure she’s okay.”

“She’s fine,” said Mizuki, sighing. She grabbed a loaf of bread and started aggressively slicing it. “She got drunk with Marsh and ended up spending the night at the temple instead, rather than walking back. She came in this morning, when I was sitting in the living room reading, and seemed a bit sheepish.”

“Ah,” said Alfric, relaxing. “Good.”

“But not good that she’s with Marsh?” asked Mizuki. She was focused on the pan, shaking it a bit more aggressively than was necessary.

“I just worried that something had happened to her,” said Alfric. “When you say that someone didn’t come home the night before, my mind goes to the need for a search party, rather than a bit of embarrassment.”

“I don’t think that they slept together, for what it’s worth, but she looked a bit hungover, and is sleeping up in her room right now,” said Mizuki. “We can grill her about it later.”

“I’m not sure that’s necessary,” said Alfric.

Mizuki shrugged. “So … is this the day that gets undone or has that already happened?”

Suddenly, her nervous energy made sense.

“It’s the day I’m planning to undo,” said Alfric.

“Ah,” said Mizuki. She was still looking at her cooking.

“Were you still thinking that you were going to come with me?” asked Alfric.

“I was,” said Mizuki, biting her lip. “But you never really said what you were doing.”

“Item identification is one of the big things,” said Alfric. “I already cleared it with Filera. I had meant to do it earlier, after the second dungeon, but there didn’t seem to be anything pressing, and then with Lola showing up, I wanted to keep my days in reserve, just in case I needed to do some kind of counterplay. I still do feel like that, but if I don’t get the items properly identified in an undone day, then I need to lean into her a bit too much. The agreement was for six hours of her time, so long as it was guaranteed to be undone.”

“And what are you going to be doing during that time?” asked Mizuki.

“I’ll be going to Liberfell,” said Alfric. “We’ll use the wardrobe to get halfway, then walk the rest of the way, and use the dagger to get back. I want to give a more thorough look at the League logs and check in on Besc to see how much has been done with the growthstones, visit the bastlekeeper, and possibly scout out Vertex.”

“Oh, this is that kind of mission?” asked Mizuki. She rolled her shoulders. “If you need someone to kill Lola, let me know.”

“I don’t,” said Alfric. He sighed. “It’s nice of you to offer though.”

“Is it?” asked Mizuki, brightening.

“Not really,” said Alfric. “I mean, it’s nice that you have my back, but killing Lola … it’s not for the best.”

“Sure, sure,” nodded Mizuki. She plated up what she’d made, setting toast, mushrooms, bacon, eggs, some of her sobyu onto a plate, along with a few slices of cucumber. “Eat up, I guess. And I suppose I’ll be making this exact same meal when we do this again, so I hope it’s nice enough you don’t mind eating it twice.” She poured him a cup of tea and set a pot of blueberry jam out along with a dish of butter.

“I missed this,” said Alfric.

“Really?” asked Mizuki. She smiled. “I don’t think it compares at all to Dondrian.”

“It’s comforting,” said Alfric. “Homey.”

Mizuki narrowed her eyes at him as she ate a piece of bacon. She had a way of getting it to just the perfect level of crispiness. Alfric buttered his toast, then scraped the butter off the knife and put some jam on it. “You know,” she said, “Hominess is a very low compliment to give.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” said Alfric. “I think a feeling of home is one of the highest compliments you can give a meal, actually.”

“Mmm,” said Mizuki. She ate the rest of her food so quickly that Alfric almost had trouble keeping up. Clearly, she was in some kind of mood, but it was difficult for Alfric to figure it out, let alone talk to her about it.

It took some time to gather things up. The entads for identification were the large coin, the bident, the barnacle-encrusted sword, the dagger, the blanket, the wand, and the goggles.

“Most of those we know what they do though, right?” asked Mizuki.

“We sort of know,” said Alfric. “Proper identification might still reveal something we don’t know about them. There’s been no rush to sell them, and talking with the entad sellers has made me think that I won’t get a good price from them. This is mostly to confirm findings and iron out wrinkles. There is the problem that we won’t have any kind of certification on the identification, but if they’re worth it, I’ll get them recertified.”

“Sure,” said Mizuki. “Makes sense.”

The last thing to do before he left the house was to write a note, and Mizuki insisted on writing her own note, this one giving instructions on care for the herb dragon. She had fed it early in the morning, but it would need to be fed again. Privately, Alfric approved. Given Mizuki’s seeming recklessness regarding undone days, he’d wondered whether or not she would simply leave without thinking about the creature whose care she’d taken over.

They went into Pucklechurch proper, walking side by side. It was still rather early, but that was good, because Alfric wanted to get a good start on the day.

Conversation with Filera was rather short.

“I have these seven,” said Alfric, unloading the backpack. “Today is going to be undone, but I would appreciate it if you kept that to yourself. I’ll be back before sunset to get a report.”

Filera shook her head. “It’s an awkward thing, knowing none of this is going to matter.”

“It is,” said Alfric. “If you have any advice for yourself, or information you’d like me to pass on, let me know.”

She nodded. “And if you don’t undo the day?”

“Then I’ll give you some kind of compensation,” said Alfric. “I do my best to be honorable in my dealings. I’ve set this day up for a reset though, you shouldn’t need to worry.”

She nodded again. “I’ll think about it, but I have little hope for a grand revelation today.”

They left the temple, making sure that Alfric had made a small cut on his forearm using the dagger that would bring them home, and walked over to Bethany’s shop, where the wardrobe was being kept.

“Hi Mizuki!” called Bethany. “Can I show you something?”

“Sure,” said Mizuki.

Bethany held out a hand, and on it, there was a ring, one with a braided design on the metal. Alfric at first mistook it for gold, but on closer inspection, it was some kind of alloy.

“What?” asked Mizuki, backing up a bit once she’d got a look. “Are you … getting married? To who?”

“Jo Pedder,” said Bethany, smiling. “He asked me the day of the dungeon escape.”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “I didn’t know that the two of you were … together.”

“It was casual,” said Bethany, looking down at her ring and smiling. “At first it was a total shock, but then the more I thought about it, the more excited I was, and — here we are!” She laughed.

“Congratulations,” said Mizuki. There was a distinct lack of warmth, which Mizuki must have noticed in her own voice. “Really, I’m happy for you, and him. Let him know that, okay?”

“I will,” Bethany nodded. “You know, it’s been long enough, things have cooled down. I think maybe you should start talking with them again.”

“I talk,” said Mizuki. She shifted uncomfortably.

“You know what I mean,” said Bethany. “You’ll be coming to the wedding, right?”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “Roast pig?”

Bethany laughed. “You know it. But I would love to have you there, when it’s time, and for it to not be awkward.”

“Okay,” said Mizuki. “I’ll … make some effort to make up, I guess. Or at least to not be awkward.”

“You’ll be welcome too, Alfric,” said Bethany. “If you’re still around when we get things together.”

“Thank you,” said Alfric, nodding. “The next dungeon we do, I’ll be on the lookout for a good wedding gift.”

Bethany beamed. “Well, it might be a bit. I think it was a spur of the moment thing, to be honest. We were halfway expecting the day to be undone, all of us, so perhaps some things were said that might not otherwise have been said.” She looked at the ring again. “It’s his grandmother’s.”

“Congratulations,” said Alfric.

“Sorry,” said Bethany, giving a sheepish smile and hiding her hand behind her back. “Was there something that I could get you today?”

“We’re just here for the wardrobe,” said Alfric.

“Oh, just one second,” she replied. She stopped down below the counter and rummaged around before coming back up with a small sack. “Here, it’s your proceeds.”

Alfric took it and hefted it for a moment, then opened it and counted quickly. “Hmm,” he said. “That’s better than I would have thought.” The wardrobe had been there for nearly a week, and it had made them almost a thousand rings. “You’ve been getting a lot of people using it? At most, it should have been … four thousand? If there were sixty-six people every day. So this is averaging fifteen people a day?”

“Something like that,” nodded Bethany. “I think we get about that many coming through. I put up a little sign by the warp point, which I think has been helping?”

“I thought Alfric did that,” said Mizuki. “Nice work.”

“And I take my own cut,” said Bethany, nodding at Alfric. “Obviously I hope that you’ll be leaving it here, since a hundred rings a week for basically doing nothing seems quite good, but I understand if you need to take it somewhere else.”

“If you can, pay attention to who goes through,” said Alfric. “I want to know so we can tune the price. Ten rings to save six miles might be the right price, but it was just a guess on my part.”

“Can do,” said Bethany.

Alfric put the rings into his bag. Having the money wouldn’t make any difference, and he’d have to pick it up again on the second time through the day, but it was better to take it than leave it. “Thank you, but when I said that I was here for the wardrobe, I meant that we were going through it.”

“Oh,” said Bethany. “That will be ten rings, please. Twenty, if both of you are going through.” She beamed at him. “Only joking, of course.”

They went over to the wardrobe, which was in a place of prominence thanks to some rearranged shelves, and Alfric began fiddling with the dial.

“Six miles of walking, is that really what I signed up for?” asked Mizuki.

“Ideally not six miles,” said Alfric. “It’s six miles if you count from the center of the Traeg’s Knob hex, but if we spin the dial enough times, and are able to get a good bead on where in the hex the portal is pointed, we could maybe go through and only be a hundred feet from where the hex boundary is, which would mean a hundred feet of walking, then a warp to the center of Liberfell. If we had Isra, it might be trivial, but since it’s just the two of us, we’ll have to get lucky.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “Not bad.”

The big problem was that Alfric had seen relatively little of Traeg’s Knob. Each hex covered a fairly substantial area, and looking through a portal to a place with no landmarks wasn’t all that helpful. It really would have been child’s play for Isra, even if she couldn’t ‘connect’ with things on the other end of the portal without going through it, because she would know what grew near the big river that passed through Liberfell, or have some understanding of what was westward and what was eastward. He didn’t want to bother her or involve her in any way, mostly so he could avoid disclosure.

Eventually, by tracking the clouds in the sky as best he could, Alfric got what he thought was the best portal he was likely to get. Mizuki had gotten bored and went to continue on talking to Bethany, and he called her over.

“Ready to go?” she asked.

“I think so,” said Alfric.

“Not that it really matters, I guess,” said Mizuki.

“I don’t want to do this all over,” said Alfric.

“True,” said Mizuki. She peered at the portal as though she was going to second guess his choice, but stepped through without another word.

Alfric followed behind her, and as soon as he was through, there was no way back except the dagger.

“So are we really making a thousand rings a week on that wardrobe?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “It’s a good get. Divided five ways, that’s two hundred each, and it already takes into account the shop’s cut.”

“I could almost live on that alone,” said Mizuki.

Alfric smiled. “Almost. But you were saying that you wanted to do more dungeons.” They were standing around in the woods, and Alfric was doing his best to keep in mind which way Liberfell was for when they needed to get moving again.

“I do,” said Mizuki. “It just seems crazy that all this time, when I was getting a little worried about money, that it was as easy as going into a dungeon and pulling out something that would have me set for life, even at second elevation.”

“You’re third elevation,” said Alfric. “I checked with the censusmaster yesterday.”

“Really?” asked Mizuki. She looked at her hands. “I don’t feel any different.”

Alfric shrugged, then grinned at her. “Must be bunk.”

Mizuki smiled at him. “You’re actually decently funny, I don’t know if I ever told you that.”

“Oh, being funny is pretty easy,” said Alfric. “It’s just a matter of doing the research and putting in the effort.”

Mizuki burst out into laughter, though Alfric hadn’t actually been joking. He’d read a book, On Humor, that he thought had really helped him.

“Come on, let’s get going,” said Alfric.

“Lead the way!” said Mizuki.

They walked through the forest, which was thankfully free of underbrush. There was, instead, a type of grass that had grown long and lay down in thick mats, and above, trees with thick trunks that spread their branches and leaves wide. Every now and then, they saw a mossy rock sticking up from the ground, and if they were near enough, Mizuki would go to pat it, sometimes digging her fingers into the moss.

“It’s weird, right?” asked Mizuki.

“The moss?” asked Alfric.

“The undone day,” said Mizuki. “The knowledge that this is all going to go away, be reset, be … I don’t know.”

“Easier for me,” said Alfric. “I’ll have some memory of it.”

“I’m trying not to let it bug me,” said Mizuki. “But I dig my fingers into the moss, and I think about how that’s an experience that’s going to be stripped away from me.”

“If you wanted, I could bring you here,” said Alfric. “We could walk in these woods again the second time through the day, and you could dig your fingers in the moss, just like you’re doing now.”

“Not the same,” said Mizuki. She sounded somewhat sad.

“Maybe this was a mistake,” said Alfric.

“No,” said Mizuki. She looked at him. “It’s something I wanted to do, and I think I need to get better at seeing things through.”

“It’s not really a lesson that you’ll carry with you though,” said Alfric.

“Well, you’ll just have to relay a message from me to me,” said Mizuki. “Say, how will we know when we’re in the Liberfell hex?”

“We won’t,” said Alfric. “It’s possible we’re already through. Hex boundary markers are really clear in Dondrian, they use little towers spaced just right so that you can almost always see one if you’re looking and close enough to the boundary. But out here, they’re only on the paths, usually.”

“So we just keep walking and hoping?” asked Mizuki.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “If we warp early, we end up in Traeg’s Knob, and then it’s six miles of walking for certain. Even six miles is optimistic, actually, because the road isn’t terribly straight.”

So they walked, somewhat silently, until Mizuki began humming. Alfric eventually recognized the tune as being from Lerial and Marsc, the opening act, which somewhat surprised him. He had thought that the opera hadn’t left that much of an impression on her.

“Maybe I’ll see Rolaj,” said Mizuki.

“How have the letters been going?” asked Alfric.

“Fine,” said Mizuki. “Four from him but I’ve only sent two back. I was going to write another one today. I might, on the second time through today. You’d send information back for me, if I saw him?”

“Depends,” said Alfric. “You’d have to follow disclosure.” He wasn’t a fan of that relationship, but tried to keep it to himself and maintain some professional distance.

“Meaning?” asked Mizuki.

“If you learned something about him, or experienced something, you would have to tell him,” said Alfric. “I don’t know what your relationship is like, but it’s the kind of thing that can get thorny quite fast. If he told you that he loved you, or the two of you kissed … if you wanted me to tell you about that, then I would need your word that you would be clear to him that you had that information, and where it came from. I would also caution that he might hate you for it, or at least feel weird about it.”

“I guess,” said Mizuki. She was walking slightly ahead, having sought out another mossy rock. “I wouldn’t hate you, if you told me we’d kissed in some undone day.”

Alfric could feel the hairs on the back of his neck standing up. “It’s — not something that you need to worry about.”

Mizuki glanced back at him. “Too far?” she asked. “Come on, it’s just flirting.”

“I don’t want this to be a problem,” said Alfric. “If I have to tell you everything that happens between us today, then — why are you flirting?”

“I don’t know,” shrugged Mizuki. “Maybe I’m just thinking about how this is all going to go away, and I can do anything I want, and if I’m living life like there’s no tomorrow, which is kind of true, then.” She stopped and looked back at him. “Have we ever done this before?”

“I’d have told you if we had,” said Alfric. “I’ve done extra days since we’ve known each other, but I make it a point not to speak with you.”

“You know, if I were a less generous person, I might take that the wrong way,” said Mizuki.

“You’re well aware of why,” said Alfric. “I don’t want to create problems. If you flirt with me in the undone day, and then I need to then explain to you that we were flirting on a day that unhappened, then your reaction might be — I don’t know. Bad. As though I was taking advantage of you in some way.”

“You’re welcome to take advantage of me, if you like,” said Mizuki. She turned around and walked backward so she could watch him. “You know, I like it better when you have some kind of quip back.”

“Sorry, thinking,” said Alfric. “Try again?”

“You’re welcome to take advantage of me, if you like,” said Mizuki. Her voice was somewhat lower, her speech more exaggerated, and she gave him a big wink.

“I don’t think I would need any advantage, frankly,” said Alfric. His heart was beating faster. “It would be like giving the world’s fastest man a head start in a race.”

Mizuki laughed and turned back around. “Probably true. If you gave me the slightest bit of attention I’d melt in your hands.”

“Or even if I did nothing to encourage it,” said Alfric. He felt warm around his neck.

Mizuki giggled.

There was a dangerous feeling brewing in Alfric, one that he’d only felt a few times before. Especially on an undone day, it wouldn’t do for him to act on the flickers of attraction. That Mizuki seemed to treat attraction so flippantly, and that they were party members, and that Lola was still a problem, and Alfric might be re-pacted, were all strikes against Alfric doing anything with her, especially something like the offhandedly mentioned kiss.

But a part of him wondered how Mizuki would react if he did the very stupid thing and kept responding to her flirtation with some aggressive flirtation of his own, or what it might be like if they really did kiss. Talking back and forth, if he matched her, they might end up rolling around on the forest floor together. And that, naturally, would be wholly irresponsible of him, but this was the dangerous feeling that was brewing, the one which asked whether it being illicit and stupid might not make it more exciting and enticing.

It was the same sort of thinking that had led him to delve into dangerous dungeons alone. He had felt a pulsing need to do it, and the more he had thought about why it was stupid and wrong, the more he had felt a compulsion to give in and simply do it. There was a thrill in rebellion and defiance, but thankfully a thrill that he’d only felt rarely.

He wondered whether Lola simply felt that all the time.

“How much further?” asked Mizuki. She was slightly subdued following the lull in their conversation, and he wondered what had been going on in her head.

“We’re probably safe to do the warp now,” said Alfric. “But there’s a chance that we’re too far north or south, even if we’re west enough, which would put us in a hex we don’t want to be in. In that case, we have a six mile walk ahead of us.”

“Great,” said Mizuki, sighing. “Well, do you want to go first, or should I?”

“We can do it together,” said Alfric. “Race you?”

“You’re going to win,” said Mizuki, rolling her eyes. “Give me a five second head start?”

“Sure,” said Alfric.

But it didn’t end up being terribly close, because Alfric was fast and precise with the warp, and Mizuki was a few seconds late arriving, by which time Alfric had already stepped to the side. They were, as he’d hoped, in Liberfell, with most of the day left ahead of them. He only hoped that Mizuki would behave herself.

Chapter 70 - Undone III

They had lunch at one of the most expensive restaurants in Liberfell, a fancy place with room for only twenty, and a lunch that was served in many courses. It was a combination of Kiromon and ‘Central Inter’ food, though the latter was a bit confusing to Alfric, given that Inter was made up of quite a few historical ethnicities and the food varied widely between many of them that would be considered ‘Central’.

“I guess you get to do this a lot, huh?” asked Mizuki as they waited for their food. “Spend a hundred rings on some kind of neat experience, then undo the day so you don’t have to pay for it?” She did lean in slightly and lowered her voice, which Alfric appreciated.

“Sometimes,” said Alfric. “One of my uncles divides his life up into what he calls ‘oatmeal days’ and ‘meat days’, and you can probably guess which is which. But if you’re frugal in the ‘done days’, then you don’t get to have those experiences with other people, and you’re limited to what you can do in a day.” He shrugged. “It’s not usually all that relevant, honestly.”

“Because you people have so much money,” nodded Mizuki.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “And in my experience, there are very few things that lots and lots of money can buy that a fair amount of money can’t buy. The kinds of things that people put forward as delicacies, or the kinds of experiences you can have … I know you saw a lot in Dondrian, but you shouldn’t be fooled by it all, most of it you could have with a modest life.”

“Not the entads,” said Mizuki.

“No, not those,” said Alfric. “And not fast intercontinental travel. And there are services that cost quite a bit. But what I’m saying is that Verity’s people, they really focus on paying a lot for that littlest bit more, and some of the time, it doesn’t even matter if it’s even better, just that other people know it’s expensive.”

“Seems far-fetched,” said Mizuki. “People paying more, just because?”

“Not just because,” said Alfric. “They’re paying to pay, because when you have a lot, the only thing left is either the social stuff or gaining more power, unless you’re on the edge of what’s possible. Sometimes I think people pay a lot more for very little extra just for the feeling that they’re doing something with all that money.”

“Why are you talking to me about this?” asked Mizuki.

“What do you mean?” Alfric asked as the food arrived. It was a mutton steak, perfectly cut and expertly cooked, with a thick crust on it and sizzling fat. Humanity had been breeding sheep for a long time, and this one was from a Kiendall, with plenty of fatty marbling.

“I mean,” said Mizuki, taking a quick bite of her salad. “I’m not going to remember any of this, so why tell me about things? You’ll just have to tell me again, if you’re going to bother.”

“I don’t know,” shrugged Alfric. “I enjoy talking with you, and it just happened to come up. I wasn’t trying to teach you or anything. And I wouldn’t mind telling you again, if you found it interesting.”

“I did,” said Mizuki. “But it’s something that I’d need to see in person. In Pucklechurch … mostly we give things away, I guess. But it’s not really like that. When the Pedders roast a pig for the community, it’s not like they’re showing off, they’re just sharing what they have, right? They’re not trying to shove what they’ve managed to do with their farm in anyone’s face, which is what you’re saying rich people do.”

“I don’t know if it’s quite like that, I guess, even if it’s what I said,” said Alfric. “It’s such a dim view of people with wealth.”

“People with wealth who aren’t your family?” asked Mizuki.

“Yes,” nodded Alfric. “That.”

He focused on his food, and Mizuki focused on her own. It was a good meal, Alfric would give it that, but nothing all that special by the standards of Dondrian, not that Alfric had eaten at as many places as he might have. Sit down meals at a restaurant always felt a little extravagant to Alfric, especially because they took so much time. He was usually happier just getting food from a cart if he was in the city, or eating something from his pack if he was somewhere rural.

“I need to figure out how to make this,” said Mizuki, looking down at her salad. “And get Verity to plant some of this stuff in the garden.”

“We’re moving into summer,” said Alfric. “I think the planting season is mostly over.”

“I guess,” said Mizuki. “But hey, we have that growthstone, that will help, right?”

“It will,” nodded Alfric. “But I’ll have to go to Liberfell again to get it.”

“Oh, right,” said Mizuki. She pushed her salad in front of her, half-eaten. “I’m not sure how I feel about being a part of this undone day. I felt like it would be cool, peeking behind the curtain, but it’s kind of messing with me. I was talking to those other dungeoneers, having a good time, and I kept thinking that the experience of it would just evaporate and never really get replaced.”

“Sorry,” said Alfric. He felt slightly disheartened. “I won’t take you with me again.”

“I didn’t say that was my conclusion,” said Mizuki. “It was just on my mind. And if you didn’t take me with, it would still be the same thing, that same feeling. Because we live together, I would know instead of being blissfully ignorant.”

“I guess,” said Alfric. With Mizuki being done, he made an effort to finish quickly, and when their plates were whisked away, he left a heavy tip.

“Bastlekeeper?” asked Mizuki as they left the restaurant.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “Then Lola.”

“We’re talking to her?” asked Mizuki. “Well that’s got me nervous.”

“Me too,” said Alfric.

Meeting with the bastlekeeper felt like it was over too quickly, no more than a few words exchanged before they were off again. Both the herb dragons had hatched and been given their regular feedings, though the male was slow to gain energy. The bastlekeeper had actually sent a letter the day before, and it had probably already arrived in Pucklechurch, but it seemed likely that the herb dragons would benefit from Isra taking a look at them to give better advice on their care and feeding. There was really nothing more to discuss, and where Mizuki would normally have made more conversation, she seemed subdued.

“What do you think Lola wants from this?” asked Mizuki once they had left. It wasn’t too far to the southern road.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “If she’s telling the truth, then maybe nothing. If you did kill her, which — you think you might have?”

Mizuki gave an unhappy shrug.

“So I don’t know,” said Alfric. “If it’s a ploy — I guess we’re about to find out.”

The ‘tent’ wasn’t what Alfric had been expecting, built with relatively tall sides and a conical top. It was colorful, with red and white stripes, and a flap was pulled to one side to allow air in. Grig was sitting outside it, and stood when he saw them coming, raising a hand.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” he said. “Everyone else is out. I figured I would stick around, just in case.”

“She’s in there?” asked Alfric.

Grig nodded. He shifted from foot to foot. “It would be ideal if she didn’t actually die.”

“As a matter of disclosure, I’m planning to undo the day,” said Alfric.

“Oh,” said Grig. “Well. Alright, I guess I’ll be off then.” He frowned as he gathered his pack, and walked off without another word.

“Odd reaction,” said Mizuki.

“Not the first time he’s faced an undone day,” said Alfric. “But they didn’t turn out to be undone then. He’s probably thought a lot about what to do when he knows.”

He stared at the flap of the tent. Lola would have heard all of it, of course. He steeled himself, then went in.

The interior of the tent was lavishly furnished, with five hammocks set up to hang from the posts. There was a small stove next to a small chiller, and an oversized pillow that seemed like it must have been used as a chair. Alfric could immediately see bits and pieces of each of them in the place, whether that was clothes, equipment, or trinkets. Josen was always reading, and there was a stack of books wrapped in a leather strap, hanging down from what was surely his hammock. Mardin’s modal prayer wheel, a complicated device with rotating panels, was next to his as well.

And then there was Lola, laying in her hammock, breathing hard. There was sweat beading on her dark skin, and her lips were chapped, likely from a lack of water. Being time-sick was a horrible feeling, to be avoided if at all possible, and worse in some circumstances than others, as when you had just crested a peak of power into getting another day. If Lola wasn’t faking, or wasn’t playing it up, then this was about as bad as being time-sick got.

“Alfric,” Lola croaked. “You came.”

“What happened?” asked Alfric. It was the only question that mattered, at least to his mind. It was the only reason to come instead of staying away.

“Her,” said Lola, raising a weak hand and pointing an unsteady finger at Mizuki, who had stepped inside the tent.

“So, working backward,” said Alfric. “I intended to come to Liberfell today, with Mizuki. On your first day, you saw us, or learned we’d been through, and came to speak with us, against my express wishes. And Mizuki killed you?”

Lola nodded. “It’s the bindings. I can’t undo them without a lot of trouble, can’t make myself safe from her. She can detonate them.” She coughed once. She was breathing heavily. Being time-sick didn’t routinely kill anyone, especially the young, but if you were already sick with something else, or otherwise impaired, it could happen.

“Why would she do that?” asked Alfric.

“She hates me,” said Lola with a pitying voice. “You do too. She knows that the day will reset, that it doesn’t really matter. She knows it, even if you never did.”

Alfric’s lips were thin. “I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true,” said Lola. “I’m sorry, I know that I’ve lied, I know it’s hard to trust me, but it’s true.”

“I’ve never killed anyone,” said Mizuki. She was staring at Lola.

Lola had no response. She simply closed her eyes.

“It would be difficult to fake,” said Alfric, coming closer to Lola. He hesitated, then pressed a hand against her forehead. It was the first time he’d touched her since she’d stolen his team. “Very difficult to fake a fever on demand.” He looked at her skin. The bumps were there, faint but real, and also quite difficult to fake.

“That doesn’t mean I killed her,” said Mizuki.

“No, of course not,” said Alfric. “She could have killed herself the required number of times.”

“Mmm,” murmured Lola. “Sounds like me. I’d definitely be sick for a day just to talk to Alfric, I’m really that pathetic.”

“We can kill her to find out,” said Mizuki.

“See?” asked Lola, voice cracking. She wasn’t looking at either of them, just sitting in the hammock, putting effort into breathing.

“We’re not going to kill her,” said Alfric.

“If I have killed her, I want her to know that I would kill her again,” said Mizuki. Her face was set. “I want her to have some fear of me, to know that if she pushes things I’ll pop her like a grape.” She was staring at Lola, and Alfric had some sense that Mizuki was looking at the bindings, which were invisible to everyone else and only just barely visible to Mizuki.

“You’ll kill yourself too,” said Lola. “And Alfric. And then he’ll remember, he’ll know.”

Mizuki had switched to squinting. “I think I could direct the unbinding event. Maybe.” She turned to Alfric. “Let me know that, tomorrow. In case I ever have to.”

Alfric hesitated, then nodded.

“You’d let her kill me,” said Lola. She let out a weak laugh. “You really would. Because you hate me, and you know it doesn’t matter, and you want to see me dead. You admit all the things I said were true, that the undone days can be, should be, our playground.”

“It depends on what you did,” said Alfric. “The dungeon escape, was that you?”

“No,” said Lola. “No, it wasn’t.” She coughed once.

“She’d say that either way,” said Mizuki. “Especially now, when she can’t reset.”

“I know,” said Alfric. “It was pointless to come here. Nothing has been learned.”

“If you’re undoing the day, can you put me out of my misery?” asked Lola. “Might as well. No sense suffering through all this twice, and I heard Grig leave.”

Alfric hesitated, attempting to see what she might be trying. The cautious approach would be to simply leave her to her fate. It was unlikely that she would die, and if she was really serious about preferring death to running out the day, she could just kill herself. Besides that, Alfric was going to reset the day, and he didn’t intend to come to Liberfell the second time through.

“Here,” said Mizuki, taking her knife from her sheath. For a moment, Alfric thought that she was going to stab Lola with it, but instead, she handed it, handle first, to Lola. “Do it yourself.”

Lola took the knife, looking at it for a moment. Alfric was watching her, wondering what she would do.

“You always keep the option in your back pocket, don’t you?” asked Lola. Her grip was tight on the knife. “Never reset early, just in case you have to pivot. So if I killed myself, you could have the day continue on, and I would be out of your life forever, just like you want. I’d even leave a gap in the old team for you, one you could easily fill, and all you’d need to do is clean my blood from the hammock.”

“She’s not going to do it,” said Mizuki. “It was a fake offer.”

“Have you ever cut your own throat?” asked Lola, staring at Mizuki. The sweat was still on her forehead, and she seemed weak, but also angry. “It sucks, for the few seconds that you’re still alive. It’s incredibly hard to do, to overcome every natural instinct and hurt yourself so badly, and I have training, as does Alfric.” She let the knife drop to the ground and relaxed in the hammock. “Nevermind. I shouldn’t have sent Grig for you, not if she was going to be with you.”

“Send me a letter,” said Alfric. “Or, since I’m undoing the day, I guess none of this matters. If you want to patch things up, I think that’s probably impossible, but if you send me a letter, I’ll at least read it.”

Lola gave a weak nod.

Alfric left without saying goodbye. There was nothing to say. Lola hadn’t incriminated herself, and wasn’t likely to, not when she was on her last day. A part of him did want to kill her, just to make sure that she wasn’t lying about it somehow, but that went against protocol, and as traps went, it was remotely possible that there were some consequences for him somewhere, somehow.

“I do think I could survive ripping up her bindings,” said Mizuki. “I was looking as closely as I could. I should have asked Verity to boost my sight. I might have been able to work something out. And then I could have tried it with you sent away so I could give myself some advice.”

“Thank you for not doing it,” said Alfric.

“I’ll write you up something,” said Mizuki. “I don’t have a lot of experience with alienists, and I really should have hit the library in Dondrian to figure out their weaknesses.”

“You’d need a library card,” sighed Alfric. “But I don’t want you doing that to her.”

“It’s going to come to a head,” said Mizuki. “Whatever the truth, she’s being reckless, right? You don’t end up time-sick without being reckless. Even if it was me, which I don’t think it was, by the time she was on her last-but-one day, she’d have been able to easily avoid me, right? And if she’s being reckless, and it’s about you, then I think it’s going to, you know. Come to a head, like I said. Blow up in someone’s face, hopefully non-literally. And I want to be as ready for that as possible.”

Alfric stayed silent for a moment. “That’s good,” he said. “But it’s more likely that we’ll resolve this some other way.”

“What other way?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. He rubbed his forehead. “I think we’re going back to Pucklechurch. Hopefully Filera will be done, and then I can end this day.”

“I feel like neither of us really got what we wanted,” said Mizuki.

“No?” asked Alfric.

“You wanted a companion, I wanted a bit of fun,” said Mizuki. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t try it again, next time you’re going to undo a day. But it was a lot more ‘down’ than I had thought it would be, and I’m worried a lot of that is because of me.”

“No,” said Alfric. “It’s me. Undone days are like that sometimes. I need to get things done, but the only things that matter are those that happen in my own head, so it can get a bit isolating, a bit … dissociating is the word we use sometimes. Like I’m in a world that’s not real.”

“Which is kind of true,” said Mizuki. She was frowning. “I guess I never really thought about it like that, and tomorrow, or the second time through today, or however you want to put it, I’m going to unlearn that lesson.”

“I can talk to you about it,” said Alfric.

“Oh, I’ve got loads that you need to tell me,” said Mizuki. “It’s been a real day of personal growth.” She smiled at him.

“Ready to go?” he asked, holding out a hand.

Mizuki took his hand, then stepped up onto his boot, and he whisked them away to the temple in Pucklechurch, leaving Liberfell behind them.

~~~~

“The sword is interesting,” said Filera. She’d finished with the items he’d brought her, and had her report ready.

“Is it?” asked Alfric. “We thought it was just water breathing, or something like that.”

“It has that as its first feature,” said Filera. “But a secondary feature is that water you breathe out while underwater will serve as a barrier around you.” She placed her finger on the barnacled blade. “The upper limit is nearly twenty feet around you, and it will stick somewhat as you move through the water. Having a defense against underwater attacks would be quite helpful for both divers and underwater dungeons.”

“The blade is pretty useless in a fight though,” said Alfric. “And underwater dungeons … it takes someone particular to do them when there are so many other dungeons you could be doing. Many of the underwater dungeon entrances aren’t even marked.”

“Interesting is different from useful, I agree,” nodded Filera. She moved down the line. “The coin gives some measure of emotional understanding of the people around you.”

“Does it?” asked Alfric. “Rare, that. I’m glad we didn’t sell it.”

“It’s not terribly much more than weal and woe by way of emotional manipulation, non-specific and easily confounded,” said Filera. “But you’re right, it’s rare, and my guess, based on what I know of the markets, is that it might go for at least a thousand, even if it’s horribly imperfect.”

“Even the best are imperfect,” said Alfric, frowning. “A thing like that is the closest we might get to mind-reading, and entads are notoriously terrible about it. They read circumstance more than base truth.”

“You speak from experience?” asked Filera.

“It’s an undone day,” said Alfric. “I’d rather not repeat the conversation with you, if that’s okay.”

“The short version then?” asked Filera.

“A similar entad was used on me and the girl I was pacted to, when we were young,” said Alfric. “It spoke of good fortune, but we were young then, and still friends.”

“There was an element of prognostication?” asked Filera.

“Well, no, or only sort of,” said Alfric. “It was an attempt to read compatibility and fundamental nature. I don’t remember the specifics. It said we were good for each other, and we weren’t. It should have been at the upper end of what entads can do.” He shrugged. “Again, it’s something I’ll have to repeat to you later.”

“But the coin will sell, yes?” asked Filera.

“Yes,” nodded Alfric. “People will want to use it for hiring on help, or making decisions about love, and I’ll feel guilty about them thinking that it’s some promise of happiness.”

“And when you flip it around your party members?” asked Filera.

Alfric paused. “We’ve all felt weal, if we’re reducing the sensation down to that.”

Filera raised an eyebrow, but went on to the next entad without further comment.

The dagger, goggles, and blanket were all more or less what they’d figured out on their own, but it was still good to get a second look at them. The wand had some wrinkles, and was disappointingly limited.

“It won’t change the function of an entad, but it will have a dissociative effect on storage and other effects,” said Filera. “That means that you shouldn’t use it with anything with an active effect. And don’t use it on people either, it would be a high crime.”

“Understood,” said Alfric. “And as far as how it determines the new form?”

“There’s a complicated metric,” said Filera. “It’s what we call a grouping walk for all materials and features. Wood will be wood, stone will be stone … but everything will be different, and it’s possible with enough applications, you could end up with something a long way from where you started. Entad effects should stay the same, modified by the new form. You’ll need to be careful though, because you might end up with something that destroys itself, or is considerably weaker.”

Alfric nodded. It was about what he had already figured out himself. He’d been hoping that it was safe to use in other circumstances, like extracting someone from danger, or putting their storage entads inside, but if that wouldn’t work, he would figure out some better use. A pack, maybe.

The last entad was what Alfric was hoping would be his primary weapon, the bident.

“It’s impeccable in terms of durability,” said Filera. “Which is good, because the amount of power it can generate between the tips is quite large. It works at a thought, as I would suppose you’ve surmised, with power increasing in accordance with the mass of whatever you’ve pierced, following Pelpert’s Configuration for determining whole objects. There’s some math involved, if you’re interested, but I think it would suffice to say that it gets better the larger your target is. Of course, you might have trouble piercing a hide or carapace, but it seems a good get to me.”

Alfric nodded. “It is good, better than expected. Thank you.”

“I’ll forget all this,” said Filera. “I’m surprised you didn’t have me do this the first time.”

“People have different reactions to undone days,” said Alfric. He shrugged. “I wanted us to have a good working relationship. And the more people know I’m a chrononaut, the worse things might get for me, no offense.” And then there was the question of Lola, and the risk of using up days that might need to be used to counter whatever she was up to.

“It will be better this way,” nodded Filera. “I can be a different person on your undone days.”

Alfric nodded. There was something in the way she said it that made him feel a bit uncomfortable. He didn’t really like the idea that if people knew the day was going to end, they would act differently.

“Can I leave all this with you?” he asked.

“Don’t you — oh,” said Filera. “Of course, you don’t want to take it back home, because there’s no point.”

“Sorry if that’s weird,” said Alfric.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “And when you do this day over, you’ll talk to me? Tell me about whatever you’re going through? You’re carrying some weight.”

“I’ll speak with you, yes,” said Alfric. “And tell you all about Dondrian.”

He left the temple and almost went home, where Mizuki was preparing for dinner, but diverted to the general store instead. Bethany was still behind the counter, quite a few hours since they’d left her. She was leaned back and reading a book.

“Alfric!” she said, snapping the book shut. “Good trip?”

“Fine,” said Alfric. “Just wondering whether you had been watching who goes through the wardrobe?”

“Sure have,” she said. She reached under the counter and pulled out a scrap of paper, which had some disorganized writing on it. “I wasn’t quite sure what you wanted, so … let me know, I guess?”

Alfric gave the list a brief glance, and could immediately see that it was nearly worthless for his purposes. He wanted to know about the people so he could see how flexible they were in terms of what they were being charged for the wardrobe, and this was a set of observations about what they were wearing, how they talked, and a bit of gossip. It was his fault, clearly, but this was one of the benefits of having an undone day.

“It’s great, thank you,” said Alfric.

He walked home slowly, feeling out of sorts. Bringing Mizuki with him had, clearly, been a mistake, but Lola being time-sick had also been an unpleasant and unexpected complication. When he redid the day, she would presumably still be there, still time-sick. He did wonder how it had happened, but he didn’t think that it was likely that it had been faked, not without quite a lot of setup. And clearly, if it was a scheme, she’d gained nothing from it.

When he came home — he did think of it as home — there were already good smells coming from the kitchen.

“So I’m going to have a hangover twice, ay?” asked Hannah. “Seems a shame.”

“Sorry,” said Alfric with a shrug. “What’s for dinner?”

“I paid Xy to go run off to Tarchwood,” said Mizuki. “We’re going to have a very large, very fresh fish, which is why I’m getting started early.”

“And I assume you paid a lot of rings for that?” asked Alfric.

“You know it,” smiled Mizuki. “I didn’t strictly speaking tell her that she wouldn’t be able to spend the money because of the undone day, but …” she shrugged. “I’m not obligated to, right?”

“Right,” nodded Alfric. “And it’s better to let people go on about their lives anyway, just in case the day isn’t undone.”

“It’s going to be, right?” asked Mizuki. “Because I paid a lot for the fish, which should be here any minute.” She turned to the door. “Isra!” There was a pause. “Isra!”

“Party channel?” asked Alfric.

<Isra!> called Mizuki.

<Ouch, what?> asked Isra.

<Come help me with the meal?> asked Mizuki. <There are things you need to learn, and you said you wanted to know more.>

<Be right there, we were in the garden,> said Isra.

“You’re going to teach her?” asked Alfric. “Today?”

“I like teaching, at least for things where I know something, which is admittedly not much,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “I know it’s not going to stick, but … I don’t know. Maybe if I teach her wrong, you can have me do it better. I’m just done thinking about undone days, honestly, and I’m going to live out the rest of the hours I have left trying to be normal.”

“Except for the expensive fish?” asked Alfric.

“Except for that,” said Mizuki.

They all gathered together in the kitchen, mostly talking about very little at all. Isra had taken care of the herb dragon, which was much more mobile now. Against what Alfric thought was best, it had been given the run of the house. Isra had a fairly good handle on the creature, the same as she did on Mizuki’s cat Tabbins, but seeing a fresh dungeon creature curled up on a chair was a little disconcerting no matter what.

When Xy showed up with the enormous fish, Mizuki was ready, and the cartier was welcomed in to take part in the impromptu feast. It had felt to Alfric like Mizuki had started dinner far too early, but she had a better sense of cooking time than he did, and by the time the food was actually ready, Alfric’s stomach was rumbling.

They ate together in the dining room, fish soup, grilled fish, and little fish dumplings, and talked until the sun went down. Spirits were high, helped by quite a bit of wine brought up from the cellar, which Alfric drank only a sip of. Mizuki had cracked a special bottle.

It was a luxury that he wasn’t sure he should have taken. He would disclose the dinner to them, naturally, and he wasn’t learning anything personal, but there was some ethical risk involved, and it couldn’t wholly be justified. Someone might say something that was meant to be secret, or that was only said in a vulnerable moment, and he would have to either disclose, or carry it around, neither of which he would really want to do. It was so nice to sit down to dinner with them though, especially after what had been a bit of a grueling day. The fish was excellent, the conversation light, and he found himself with a smile on his face.

Alfric left the table just after dessert and went up to his room to prepare for the undoing. That mostly meant going through his day in detail and trying to commit everything to memory. He was happy that he was ending the day where he’d begun it, as he thought it helped with continuity.

Just before he was going to go back in time, there was a knock on his door.

“Come in,” he said.

“Hey,” said Mizuki. “Sorry if you’re … ending things.”

“No problem,” said Alfric.

“I just wanted to say sorry if things were weird,” she said. “Especially the flirting.”

“Not a problem,” said Alfric.

“I was thinking about how I would want you to tell me to knock it off,” said Mizuki. “And I think maybe a note? I know you can’t actually bring a note back, but if you could write me a note like it was from some alternate me. And let me know that it’s not, um, that fun for you.”

“It is fun for me,” said Alfric.

“It is?” asked Mizuki.

“It’s just … not going to happen,” said Alfric. “For a lot of reasons. So long as we’re clear it’s not going anywhere, I’m fine with flirtation.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki.

“I’m leaving now though,” said Alfric. “Just trying to keep the day straight in my head.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Mizuki. “Tell me all the things I’ll need to know?”

“Of course,” said Alfric.

And then he used that part of his mind that was always there, waiting to be used, and the world shifted around him. He was in his bed, and it was the witching hour. He went to his table and began writing out notes to himself, making a list of messages to pass along and a plan for the coming day. Once that was finished, he checked the guild messages to see whether there were substantial updates from anyone — there weren’t — and finally, lay back down in bed.

As undone days went, it had been a complicated one, and he was, for the most part, glad to be done with it.

Chapter 69 - Undone II

They’d gone to Herson & Son first, mostly because it was close to the warp.

“Mizuki!” said Rolaj. “What are you doing here?”

“Business, not pleasure,” said Mizuki. “Just seeing whether you have anything in stock, and whether you have any leads on those entads I told you about.”

“I’ll go look at the stock,” said Alfric.

“It hasn’t been long since you’ve been here, we don’t have all that much turnover.” His eyes were still on Mizuki, and he had a goofy grin on his face. “It’s only been what, a week and a half? Two weeks?”

“Something like that,” said Mizuki.

“I’ll leave you to it,” said Alfric, moving away.

“Well, I did find one of the entads though,” said Rolaj. “I talked to my dad, who is part of a guild of sellers, and they take stolen goods pretty seriously, even with it being so long. I have a letter for you, transcribed from a guild message, but if you want my father to serve as an intermediary between the two of you, it would probably be best to have some kind of compensation for him? Just as a thought.” He had a sheepish look.

“That’s great!” said Mizuki. “Where was the entad? And which?”

“The bottle, sold in a shop far to the east, in a town on the shore of Lake Galia.” Rolaj looked around the shop, confirming that it was, in fact, empty except for them. “If you can watch the store for ten minutes, I can run home and get the letter for you?”

“Of course,” smiled Mizuki. Rolaj left, almost at a run, and Mizuki turned to Alfric. “So, what are we going to steal?”

“Not funny,” said Alfric.

Lake Galia was the last of the Proten Lakes, so far east that it wasn’t terribly far from the eastern border of Inter, which in turn meant that it was a narrow sea away from Tarbin. Alfric wondered whether that was a coincidence.

“It’s a little funny though, right?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, we’d never actually do that, even in an undone day, but … you know. Probably reminded you of Lola, I guess. Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

“It’s fine,” said Alfric. He paused. “It’s actually not fine, but I don’t know if talking about it is going to help anything, because this will all be undone, and I don’t know what I could possibly say to you in order to make that kind of ‘joke’, if it is a joke, stop happening.”

“You think that if I had the power, I’d be more like … her?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “No. You don’t really want to hurt people. But you would allow your impulsiveness to shine, and I think that would create some awkward situations for you, which would be made more awkward by the need to explain them to people.” He paused. “And I think you’d have trouble with disclosure.”

“Wait, why did you say I don’t ‘really’ want to hurt people?” asked Mizuki. “I don’t want to hurt people. Full stop.”

“I just think you see violence against people as … an option,” said Alfric, trying his best to be diplomatic.

“It is an option though, right?” asked Mizuki. “Just one that we agree not to use.”

“You can’t treat it like it’s an option,” said Alfric. “And I was just hedging. I don’t think that you want to hurt anyone.”

“There was that guy I burned,” said Mizuki. “I’ve also definitely punched people before. Also nearly deafened a guy.”

“You deafened someone?” asked Alfric.

“Only nearly,” said Mizuki. “He’d pushed me into the river, so I blasted a spell beside his head, and he had to go see a cleric because of the ringing in his ear. That was it, no big deal.”

It sounded like a big deal to Alfric, but he kept his mouth shut. He had never hurt anyone outside of training or the occasional duel, always with some kind of structure and with healing on hand, always with the understanding that this violence was controlled and not ‘real’. He imagined that it was different for Mizuki, for whom physical violence was unlikely to ever actually injure someone, simply due to her size. Spells were a different matter entirely though.

They waited in silence until Rolaj returned, each thinking their own thoughts.

“Okay,” said Rolaj when he came back, slightly out of breath. “Any customers?”

“Not a one,” said Mizuki.

“Early morning isn’t the best time for them,” he nodded. He held out the letter. “Here you go. There should be instructions for how to get in touch with the guy out by Lake Galia through the regular post too.”

Mizuki took it. “Thank you so much,” she said. “We’re going to crack the case, I’m sure of it.”

“Good luck,” he nodded. “There are still some feelers out on the other things, and I’ll let you know if I hear anything.” He gave her an awkward smile. “Did you get my most recent letter?”

“I did,” said Mizuki. “And I’ll write back, this trip was just kind of unexpected.”

“Do you have time while you’re here?” asked Rolaj. “I’m at the shop until fifth bell, but free after that, if you want to do something.”

“Sorry, can’t,” said Mizuki. “We’ve got things to do, so we’re in and out.”

“No problem,” he said, but he deflated slightly.

They left the shop and began walking to the edge of town, where Besc’s shop was.

“I have to say, I don’t really see the attraction,” said Alfric.

“Yeah,” said Mizuki.

“You … don’t see the attraction either?” asked Alfric.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “We’ve been doing the letters, and it’s been fine, but he likes to talk about his family and some sport thing that I don’t really care about.”

“Whereas you want to talk about … ?” Alfric asked.

Mizuki shrugged. “Magic, entads, gossip, I don’t know. I used to think that when you talked about dungeons, it was at least interesting because you had some obvious expertise and passion about it, even if I didn’t care all that much, but the stuff that Rolaj really cares about puts me to sleep, even with his enthusiasm. I don’t know if it’s because it’s by letter or what. He’s nice, and he likes me, he’s respectful and kind, but I don’t know, I think you’re right.”

“Right about what?” asked Alfric.

“That I should break things off with him,” said Mizuki.

“I didn’t say that,” said Alfric.

“Yeah, but you were thinking it,” sighed Mizuki.

“If I say that I don’t see the attraction, and you say ‘yeah’, then I do think that the relationship should probably be closed out,” said Alfric. “But I have no real experience with any of it, so I wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Oh, I’m real good at ignoring people,” said Mizuki, smiling at him. “But I won’t make a decision about Rolaj today, or send anything back about it. So it’s just idle talk, I guess. And there’s not that much to break off, we’re not really partnered, just mutually interested, except I’m feeling not all that interested anymore.”

Alfric nodded.

“Let’s say that Lola was out of the picture,” said Mizuki. “Drowned in a lake enough times that she didn’t come back. Or something like that, anyway. What kind of woman would you be looking for?”

Alfric thought about that for a moment. “If I didn’t have a new pact?” he asked.

“Sure,” said Mizuki. “If you could just pick out your ideal woman without having to worry about your duty or whatever.”

“You always have to worry about duty,” said Alfric. “If I’m going to have children, I need to worry about what their mother is going to be like. That’s still duty. And I have to worry about how I would help her and support her, which is also duty.”

“Fine, fine,” said Mizuki. “Though I have literally never once worried about any of that stuff.”

“I’d want someone who understands me and supports me,” said Alfric, ignoring what he hoped was just a jest. “Someone who I can lean on. We’d end up leaning on each other. I don’t know. It’s not really something that I’ve been able to give all that much thought.”

“Even with all the undone days?” asked Mizuki. “What do you think about when you’re making those trips by yourself?”

“Dungeons, mostly,” said Alfric.

Mizuki laughed. “Always dungeons.”

“I like dungeons,” said Alfric. “And my life, for the next decade at least, is primarily going to be about them, so … that makes sense, right? It’s the thing that I’m devoting myself to.”

“I guess,” said Mizuki. “Not to be rude, but I sometimes feel like you would do well to grab a hobby.”

“Dungeoneering includes a lot,” said Alfric. “It’s got enough depth and breadth that there’s always something to do, always something to learn. It encompasses other hobbies.”

“If we can get moving through the dungeons a bit faster, you’ll be happier?” asked Mizuki.

“I will,” said Alfric. “But I want to keep the party together for as long as possible. Isra’s bow is very good, and the longer I can keep her on the team, the better. And Verity is a very good bard who I caught at the right time. It’s a good team.”

“And me too,” said Mizuki.

“You too,” said Alfric. “To be honest, you were the biggest surprise.”

“Not Isra?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Alfric. “Or at least, the surprise of her was mostly not related to the dungeons themselves. Capable hunters are as common as muck, and her being a druid doesn’t substantially change that. I had thought to fill the team out with a wizard, but if you have enough magic going around, a sorcerer is better, in some circumstances. The big question was whether you’d actually be good in the role, and it turns out that you are.”

“I feel like I have a lot to learn,” said Mizuki. “An embarrassing amount, actually.”

Alfric shrugged. “Sorcerers are usually going through a personal journey, even in Dondrian. Maybe someday there will be a proper school, but sorcs show up too little for that, I think, and a school wouldn’t really work because you’d have all these sorcs sucking at the same teat.”

“There are probably more books to read,” said Mizuki.

“Or you could read the same book again,” said Alfric. “I do that sometimes, when I’m trying to learn from a book. Tutors are better, but I have no idea where we’d be able to find a sorc tutor for you, or what they would teach you, or how we could pay them.”

“You’ve given it thought?” asked Mizuki. “Because I need to get better?”

“You’re our best offense,” said Alfric. “Whatever we can do to get more power out of you is going to pay more dividends than basically anything else we might do, aside from maybe getting Verity to be more powerful.”

“Mmm,” said Mizuki. “For the future, could you front load your compliments? I’m always a bit nervous about my position.”

“Why?” asked Alfric.

“Dunno,” shrugged Mizuki.

They got to Besc after not too much longer, and he gave them a hearty greeting before explaining that not all that much progress had been made on the growthstones.

“One exception,” he said, and went over to a small table and grabbed a disk as wide across as a dinner plate. “This is the first bit that I’ve gotten from that wood, a test just to make sure that all the processes were working proper, yours to keep if you’d like it, as I’m all done with it.”

Alfric took it in hand and looked at it, turning it over once or twice. It was dark brown and completely matte, heavier than it looked, and rough to the touch.

“Not much to see, kworma,” said Besc. He was smiling with his eyes. “I’ve given it a daylong test, enough to make sure it helps a plant to grow. Production on the rest is started, but it’ll take some time, just needed to make sure I wasn’t wasting tens of thousands of rings.”

“Good,” said Alfric. He started to remove his pack to put the growthstone in it, but Mizuki took it and slipped it into her bag instead. “Things have been going well here?”

“Well enough,” nodded Besc. “Always a bit nervous before the money comes in, if I’m honest, and I’m always honest.” He grinned at them. “Anything more you’re able to bring in, I’ll process it for you, just a matter of time.”

“Alfric?” came a voice from behind.

Alfric turned, wincing, but it was only Grig, and he was alone. The Vertex bard wasn’t in his adventuring clothes, and his instrument was nowhere to be seen. Instead, he had a preening sort of look with sharp cuts and bright colors, along with a necklace, bracelet, and two rings. It was more flamboyant than Alfric was used to.

“Grig,” nodded Alfric. “If Lola is around, I’d rather not see her.”

“She’s sick,” said Grig. “On her last day.” He looked nervous.

“I don’t believe it,” said Alfric. He said it almost on reflex.

“She’s sweating a lot, running a bit of a fever, threw up a few times,” said Grig. “And she’s got some bumps. She’s not moving much.”

“That does sound accurate,” said Alfric. It was perhaps on the worse end of the symptoms. “But I still don’t believe it, and even if I did believe it, there’s not anything I would do about it. She’ll be fine tomorrow.” He hesitated. “How is she on her last day?”

“Doesn’t really matter, right?” asked Mizuki. “Because it’s a ploy.”

“She’s not saying,” said Grig. “She just said that you two were coming to Liberfell today. She wants to talk. She … may have hinted that Mizuki killed her?”

“Why would I do that?” asked Mizuki. “Actually, why wouldn’t I do that?”

“What do you expect from me?” asked Alfric.

“I’m just letting you know,” said Grig. “She asked me to pass on a message, that’s all. This day is going to be undone by you, according to her, so … I don’t know. I thought that I would pass on the message.”

“Thank you,” said Alfric, keeping tight-lipped.

“Hey, did you know that Marsh and Hannah are a thing?” asked Mizuki.

Grig started. “Is that where he’s been sneaking off to?”

“Last night?” asked Mizuki.

“Every night since the dungeon escape,” said Grig.

“But … we weren’t around?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, if he was going to Pucklechurch, then we weren’t there.”

Grig shrugged. “Then I don’t know. He’s been gone, that’s all I know. He doesn’t answer the party chat, which is a bit rude, and doesn’t answer questions about where he’s been.”

“Things aren’t going well within your party,” said Alfric.

Grig laughed. “That’s one way of putting it. Another way would be that we’re on the verge of dissolving entirely, and not just because of Lola. There are too many reasons for us not to split, but it’s been rough. Josen keeps talking about having lost his arm, which I do understand, but you stand there listening to him complain about it while looking at him clearly having gotten his replacement, and … well, it’s party stuff.”

“The kind of thing that should be kept within the party,” said Alfric.

“Horrible advice, that,” said Grig, rolling his eyes. “We’re a tea kettle that’s getting ready to explode if it can’t vent some steam. Talking to the party would do nothing but increase the pressure.” He shrugged. “I think me and Mardin will stick together, but Marsh has always been in his own world, Lola is Lola, and Josen seems like he’s looking for an escape plan.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” asked Alfric.

“I don’t know,” said Grig. “We were friends, kind of, and I always liked you. I feel guilty, and now, kind of like a fool.”

“Did Lola tell you that she offered me her spot in the party?” asked Alfric. It was a bad question to ask, the kind that would lead to him having information that he wasn’t supposed to have, and disclosure to Grig would be difficult.

Grig’s eyes widened slightly. “No, she did not.” He paused. “Would you?”

“Mismatched elevation would be a problem,” said Alfric. He was very aware that Mizuki was standing there next to him, hanging on his words. “And team dynamics would also be cause for concern.”

“Elevation mismatch tends to go away,” said Grig. “Over time, anyway.”

“I know that,” said Alfric. “But we might face some brutal dungeons early on. And that would leave the issue of the team. I don’t have the entads that you do.”

Grig shook his head. “Well I don’t know. It feels like the answer to our prayers — or my prayers, anyway.” He sank slightly. “It’s a real mess.”

“It’s how adventuring parties die,” said Alfric. “Torn apart by internal forces, failures to adapt to outside forces, and once one person is gone, it’s hard to find a replacement, and that accelerates all the problems.”

“I kind of think we should go talk to Lola,” said Mizuki.

“Why?” asked Alfric.

“Because then we can see if she’s really sick or not,” said Mizuki. “And if she is, then she’s stuck with this day, isn’t she? And she can’t just undo it if she says something that she’s not supposed to say, or whatever. She’s vulnerable.”

“Unless she’s faking it, which seems likely,” said Alfric.

“Easy enough to test that, right?” asked Mizuki.

Alfric frowned. “By … killing her?” he asked.

“Wow,” said Mizuki. “You said it, not me. But yeah, that would work too. If you kill her and then still remember the day, that means that she wasn’t faking it. At most, she made herself sick by using up her days for some reason. But I don’t think she’s actually that devious.”

“She’s pretty devious,” said Grig.

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “I think she’s just bumbling around, acting like she’s got secret plots going on when she’s really just improvising everything and resetting when things don’t work out.”

“We’ll speak about it privately,” said Alfric. He turned to Grig. “No offense.”

“None taken, I guess,” said Grig. “You’re really resetting today?”

“I had planned to,” said Alfric. It was almost a necessity, given that Filera was spending five hours identifying items. He could, technically, get one of the other members of the team to go to her and tell her that the day wouldn’t be undone after all, but he only planned to do that if the circumstances were particularly dire.

“Lola’s lied to us about that,” said Grig. “Twice.”

“Ugh,” said Mizuki. “Said that she’d undo the day, then didn’t?”

Grig nodded. “She had excuses both times.” He was looking at Alfric. “I know we’re not friends anymore, but if I can give some unasked for advice, do whatever is in your power to put some distance between the two of you.”

“But you’re not going to take your own advice?” asked Alfric.

“I’ve got things to lose,” said Grig. He shrugged. “We’re in a tent set up on the south road, easy enough to find. Come if you want, or stay away if that’s better. And thanks for letting me vent, at least a little bit.”

“Of course,” said Alfric.

Grig turned and walked away, and Mizuki moved closer to Alfric as they watched him go.

“It really makes me glad that we have a functional party,” said Mizuki. “What a disaster.”

“I worry about what will happen with Lola if it falls apart,” said Alfric. “Right now she’s keeping up some pretense of being a dungeoneer. If she’s not even doing that, if there’s no one she at least needs to lie to, no one tracking her, no one talking to her over party chat, that might mean she escalates.”

“Hard to escalate more than a dungeon escape,” said Mizuki. “Or, not hard, but … hard to get away with something more extreme than that. Right?”

“Yes,” said Alfric. “Not that I think that would necessarily stop her. She likes pushing the limits, and it’s just a matter of where she thinks the limits are.”

“So do you want to go seek her out?” asked Mizuki.

“Not really,” said Alfric. “If you’re right about her improvising a lot, which I think you are, then I worry about what she might improvise for this situation, assuming she did run out of days.”

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think I killed her, let alone three times,” said Mizuki.

“All you would need is to kill her once,” said Alfric. “And then for her to go about the day in the same way in spite of that.”

“So are we going to talk to her?” asked Mizuki. “I can promise not to kill her, if that helps.”

“We’ll finish things up,” said Alfric. “And then … we’ll see if there’s anything to get out of it.”

Mizuki hadn’t visited the League office in Liberfell before, and she seemed taken with the place.

“This is way better than a hotel,” she said.

“Worse accommodations,” said Alfric.

“Free though, right?” asked Mizuki.

“If you’re in a registered party and actively engaged in dungeoneering,” said Alfric. “Yes.”

“Can we summon that one woman that Hannah was talking about?” asked Mizuki.

“Priya?” asked Alfric. “Not unless we have actual business, which we don’t, or if we want to get yelled at for wasting her time.”

“Hannah said she was cool,” said Mizuki. “Yelling at people isn’t cool.”

“Maybe we wouldn’t get yelled at,” said Alfric. “But she wouldn’t appreciate it.”

Unlike last time, there were other people in the League office, and based on the look of them, they were dungeoneers, though not outfitted for an adventure. There were more women than men, which was a bit unusual, and more than five, which meant that either some of them weren’t dungeoneers, or perhaps that there were two parties. They’d looked over when Alfric and Mizuki came in, then gone back to their conversations, perhaps a little subdued.

“I’m mostly here to look at the logs,” said Alfric. “You can mingle, if you want.”

“Sure,” said Mizuki as Alfric grabbed the big book full of reports. She went to where the other presumed dungeoneers were and introduced herself as though it were nothing, and within a minute their conversation had resumed its rhythms with none of the uncertainty that it had before.

Alfric was looking for a few things in the log book. One of them was, of course, more news from Vertex, but the other was a better overview of the teams that were operating in the area, which he hadn’t had enough time for when he’d been in Liberfell last time. Beyond that, he wanted to read more deeply on their next targeted dungeons, the better to be able to prepare for them, though that wasn’t entirely possible given the nature of dungeons.

To his mild surprise, he found a dungeon report by the team that had been to Hie Point before them, with their report sitting next to his own. He read it with some interest, though it was sparse on details.

They were a fairly new team out of Tarchwood, though not quite so new as Alfric’s own team, and had been through a series of fairly brutal dungeons. Even if their reports hadn’t been marked with dates, Alfric thought that it would have been easy enough to see their trajectory just from the tone, and he almost imagined that he could put them in order. They hadn’t gotten lucky, not in any of their dungeons so far, and the poor returns and subpar entads were eating into their morale in a serious way. They had started out with rented entads, which ate through quite a bit of their funds, and eventually gave those up in favor of equipment that they’d bought for themselves, or which they’d pulled from the dungeons.

Alfric felt bad for them. Many people got into dungeoneering for the money, and you could make good money, but it wasn’t as simple as going into the dungeons and pulling out immense wealth, not normally. The general rule was that eighty percent of the wealth came from twenty percent of the items, and people tended to talk about their best finds rather than the runs of bad luck. Worse, being properly equipped was necessary for extracting value from a dungeon, not just in terms of fighting off the monsters, but in moving all of the things inside the dungeon out. This party had rented entads for that purpose, then never ended up using them, which was money down the drain. Then, when they decided to stop renting the entads, they ran into a good entad that they were physically incapable of pulling from the dungeon, much to their distress. They’d tried to take it apart into pieces, but that generally just broke an entad, depending on what you were taking off. The entad, worth perhaps a hundred thousand rings, had broken.

It was sad, but also not terribly relevant to his understanding of the dungeon landscape in the area. Part of why he couldn’t stop himself from reading was that it so clearly felt like those months after he’d lost Vertex, when he was desperately trying to get a party together and everything was going wrong. He could imagine the same string of dungeons for himself, bad luck was all it would take, even with resets, and eventually, his view on being a dungeoneer would sour.

He turned away from the sad story of that group and toward more fruitful areas of the logs. Vertex had apparently done a single dungeon in the week and a half since Alfric had been in Liberfell, the same one at Hie Point, and there they’d encountered a dungeon on a nearly forty-five degree slant. Lola had written the report, and been brief about it, but it was subdued, at least for her. They had gotten relatively little of note from the dungeons, with the highlights being a sword that was added to her collection and a storage entad that was to be sold. They hadn’t encountered anything that seemed partway civilized.

The rest of Alfric’s time with the book was spent looking at their potential next dungeons, and there didn’t seem to be anything in particular to do with the information within. Laver Marsh, to the northeast, had a tendency toward waterlogged dungeons, not completely flooded in most cases, but with a foot or two of water, which was quite unwelcome. That one, at least, was better to go to once they had better equipment to deal with it. Kirtle Point, to the northeast, was on the edge of the Fractalwoods, and apparently had some influence from them, with relatively high amounts of ectad materials that could be processed into floatstones and weightstones. It was, by Alfric’s reckoning, probably the best place for them to go if they wanted something relatively easy. He made a special note of where each dungeon entrance was located in relation to the warp point, because that would determine how much of a hike they would need to do before going into the dungeon.

Finally, hours after he’d sat down, he felt he’d gleaned as much as there was to glean. He had taken notes, but those notes would need to be memorized as best he could, because they wouldn’t go back in time with him. Still, he was getting some broader sense for the dungeons of the area, and while dungeons might produce anything, there were always trends.

When he went to go find Mizuki, she was still with the other dungeoneers, eating from a plate of meats and cheese that had been set out on the kitchenette table. Some of the faces were different, but she was still happily talking.

“I kid you not,” she said. “I hadn’t even known that you could knock out a bard like that, but I sucked the magic right out of her, and the beam was as thick around as a barrel. And that still didn’t kill this enormous house of a bear until our cleric rushed forward and doubled the damage.”

“It’s the closest we’ve come to dying,” said Alfric.

“Good time reading?” asked Mizuki around a mouthful of cheese.

Alfric nodded. “Probably not the most productive use of my time, but it gives me some confidence in what we’re tackling next.”

“Logs don’t seem to be much use,” said a boy about Alfric’s age, tall and powerfully built.

“They need to be read in aggregate,” said Alfric. “And they’re partly for the League, not the dungeoneers, not that the League’s efforts in improving extraction have amounted to much.”

“We don’t do them, personally,” said a light-skinned girl in light blue wizard’s robes. “Too much work, and if you’re trying to get the next League key, you’re better off just doing a lot of dungeons.”

“Mizuki said you only have three under your belt?” asked the tall guy. “But it seems like you’re nicely set up to do a lot more.”

“Only three so far,” nodded Alfric. There were other things that he needed to get done in the day, but it would be some time yet before Filera would be done with the entads, and the task list he’d set himself for Liberfell was getting quite short. He didn’t mind talking to these people, but with the day being undone, there wasn’t much of a point to it. He didn’t want to know too much about them in case they met again. A brief encounter wouldn’t need disclosure on his part, but something more in-depth would. “But we’re hoping to increase our rate, yes.”

“We’ve done twelve,” the wizard explained. “Oli’s group, Tantaru, has done fifteen,” she nodded to the tall guy. “We’ve been sort of traveling together, having a co-party rather than a counterparty, helping each other out.”

“It’s how they used to do it,” said Alfric. “There was a program a few decades ago where they’d get prospective parties out of the Junior League to all be part of the same collective support group, usually with a counterparty that serviced as many as twenty parties.”

“Why’d they stop doing that?” asked Mizuki.

Alfric shrugged. “Mostly because of all the coordination problems, but also because it was seen as faintly exploitative. You had to pay in. Nothing to stop someone from setting that up for themselves, but if you look at a League office like this one, with room to put up three parties, obviously there are some issues with, er, stripping the city clean. If it’s fifty parties, which I think was as many as there were in the peak, you really don’t have economies of scale, you have locusts that will strip bare everything that they have. And local vendors know that, so you either have to set up systems to support the horde, or get gouged because you’re bringing too much demand to bear on limited supply.”

“I think I read about that,” said the wizard. “Still seems like it might be nice, to have more support, even if they’re bleeding you. The Overguard system, right?”

Alfric hesitated, then nodded.

“Like the big dungeoneering family?” asked Mizuki. She was grinning slightly.

“Doesn’t that run down the dungeons?” asked a girl who hadn’t spoken yet. She was small, shorter than even Mizuki, and looked a bit young to be a dungeoneer. It wasn’t impossible for someone to lie about their age, but it meant depending on no one speaking with a censusmaster about them.

He hadn’t caught any of their names, and hoped that he could escape the conversation without having to give his own. Among dungeoneers, it was very likely that at least one of them would have heard about his family, even being as far from Dondrian as they were.

“At low elevation, no,” said Alfric. “The rule of thumb is that each party of a certain elevation will reduce mana charge by that percentage, so running through twenty-five parties of second elevation would mean a reduction in power by approximately half, which would still be likely to be well worth it. And it reduces the risk as well.” He shrugged. “Not really relevant now, because the system has been dead for a long time.”

“But it’s like you said,” the tall guy frowned. “No reason that we couldn’t just collectively work together for something like that. We’ve got two parties, Tantaru and the Larks, and with your team we’d have three. Without someone at the top skimming things, we could pool resources and all make out better. Form a guild, maybe?”

“We’d be interested in that,” said Mizuki.

“We might,” said Alfric. “There’s extra overhead from coordination, but — this really isn’t the best day for us to be talking about this, we should actually be on our way.”

Mizuki said her goodbyes, and they managed to extract themselves from the conversation after only ten more minutes of idle discussion and promises to talk later, especially about the idea of forming a small guild together. Alfric made no such promises, but Mizuki did, which was a point of some concern.

“You know you’re not going to be able to hold to that promise, right?” asked Alfric.

“Sure I can,” said Mizuki. “All you need to do is tell me to. Just give me an explanation and I’ll follow through on it.”

“I’d need to memorize names,” said Alfric.

Mizuki began naming and describing all the people present, and Alfric stopped her halfway through.

“That particular topic came up because of something that I had added,” said Alfric. “Once I undo this day, that sequence of events won’t have happened. Maybe they’ll be responsive to the suggestion of forming a guild of dungeoneers, but it will take some doing. If you’d like, I can commit to telling you about the Overguard system and some of its pitfalls, along with the costs of creating a guild, but I don’t know that it will seem like such a good idea to you.”

“Well, you tell me,” said Mizuki. “Where are we off to now?” she had been following him without asking.

“Lunch,” said Alfric. “Then to the bastlekeeper, just for a check-in while we’re here, and then … Lola, I think.”

Chapter 71 - Hair of the Dog

Hannah had, frankly, drunk too much the night before, and she was feeling it in the morning, like someone had pinched her head. She hadn’t meant to sleep in her room at the temple, but she’d been as drunk as she’d ever been, and the temple had been much less far to walk.

Marsh was to blame, obviously. They had both gotten to the point when they’d been nice and liquored, when everything they said to each other felt buttery smooth and crystal clear, and neither of them had wanted that to end. Hannah had been around enough drunk people to know that she’d probably been talking the most extreme sort of nonsense, or diving deep into the philosophical underpinnings of Garos, or possibly something else, and she was vaguely aware that Marsh had been talking about his mother for quite a bit of the time, though she couldn’t recall the details very well. What she did remember was that he’d ended up slumped against the table while she was trying to blink back her double vision.

She’d paid for a room at the Angry Plum for him, and heaved him up the stairs with the help of two other patrons, and that had barely been enough, since he was a heavy man who was entirely dead weight. She had been prepared to make her way to the temple, which would have involved some stumbling, but he’d called to her, and asked — mumbling — if they could stay together for a while.

The bed hadn’t been big enough for the two of them, but she’d curled up next to him, resting her head on his chest, and when he came back to himself a bit — it wasn’t entirely clear to her, events that were divorced from causality, sensations more than actual memories — she remembered he had rough hands and a surprisingly delicate mouth. He was good at kissing, even inebriated, or perhaps she was inebriated, and any deficiencies were beyond her ability to notice.

And then, in the middle of kissing, he’d fallen back asleep, and for a moment she’d laid there with him, hoping that he would wake up again. That hadn’t happened though, and this time he was snoring, which wasn’t all that pleasant with how close they were, so she slipped off into the cold night and found the temple and her old bed there.

That was, at least, what she remembered and was able to piece back together from what fragments were left in the morning.

She’d woken up feeling cold and crusty, then trekked across town to Mizuki’s, hoping to get in before anyone else woke up. Surprisingly, Mizuki was in the kitchen, looking a bit anxious, but Hannah was feeling wretched, and didn’t have the time to spare. They murmured a few words of conversation, easily forgotten, and then Hannah went up into her bed, hoping that her headache would go away when she woke up again.

It didn’t go away.

She spent some time in the bathroom, taking a hot shower, then wandered downstairs. Mizuki was in the kitchen, as usual, along with Alfric. Isra was there too, as she’d apparently stayed the night rather than going to her house in the woods.

“Tea?” asked Hannah.

Mizuki laughed. “Coming right up. A bit of a celebration last night, I take it?”

Hannah nodded.

“Drink lots of water,” said Alfric. “Or tea, I guess.”

“And Marsh was fun, was he?” asked Mizuki, still smiling a little.

“Fun enough,” nodded Hannah.

“Did he mount you?” asked Isra.

Hannah had been reaching for the offered tea, and nearly dropped the cup. “He … no.”

“There’s a better way to ask that,” said Mizuki. “You can’t just come right out and say it, you need to kind of,” she made a sweeping motion with her hand, “to come in from the side. Hannah, will you want some food?”

“Yes please,” said Hannah. “And thank you.”

“How do you sweep in from the side with a question?” asked Isra.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “When I asked Hannah whether she had a good time, she could have taken that as a question about how things went with Marsh, and responded in kind, said ‘oh very good’ or something. Or I could asked for all the juicy details, or something like that. I could ask whether it had been passionate, or if it had gotten intense, without having to ask outright.”

“But there’s space for misunderstanding then,” said Isra. “Which … is the point?”

Mizuki beamed. “Exactly!”

“And what are you so chipper about?” asked Hannah.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “I was anxious about the undone day that Alfric was going to have, since I was going to be with him, and then he came down and said we’d already done it, and it was such a relief, like I had some obligation that suddenly melted itself away. It was great.”

“And the undone day?” asked Hannah, looking at Alfric. “How’d that go?”

“Fine,” said Alfric. “I got full identification on several entads, some information that will be useful for later, and was able to check in on Liberfell.”

“I helped!” said Mizuki.

“Mizuki helped,” nodded Alfric. “And we saw Lola, who was time-sick, on her last day. Nothing much was gained from that, I don’t think. I shouldn’t even have gone.”

“You said you weren’t going to speak with her,” said Hannah.

“I — I said that I wanted her communication with me to be by letter, and I was worried that it was something important rather than petty, and if it’s me making contact,” he shrugged, but he must have known that the excuses were rather pathetic. What had happened, Hannah wagered, was that he couldn’t stop himself.

“And you’re fine?” asked Hannah.

Alfric nodded. “I think we’re good to head to a dungeon tomorrow, depending on Verity.”

“I’ll be ready,” said Verity, who came down the stairs. Her hair was tousled and her feet were bare. She’d clearly woken up not too long ago. “It will take my mother some time to set something up, along with the transportation for me. I’ll need to figure out what to play, unless that’s taken care of for me.”

“Some of your own songs,” said Isra.

“Oh,” said Verity, coming to a stop. “I … don’t think that would be appropriate.”

“Why?” asked Isra. A frown crossed her face and was then lifted with what seemed like conscious effort. “I like your songs.”

“Well, thank you, but they’re not polished,” said Verity. “When people come to a concert, they want to see someone at the height of their abilities playing songs that have been tuned to perfection. It’s shameful enough that I’ve played concert halls when I’m so young. There are many people better than me, it’s just because — well, you all know.” She hesitated. “I’m Chosen. They think that makes me better.” There was a bit of a pause, as though Verity was opening the floor to questions, but Hannah held her tongue.

“So wouldn’t they want something new?” asked Mizuki. “Don’t they come wanting to be surprised?”

“They want new,” nodded Verity. “They don’t want songs from someone who wrote an entire show in a single week with no help or experience.”

“It’ll be more than a week though,” said Hannah. “It’s got to be, just to sell tickets, doesn’t it? You have some lead time.”

“More than a week,” nodded Verity. “Still not enough time, and I just don’t have the skill.”

“If you’d like, we can use undone days,” said Alfric. “I could memorize a song you wrote, then sing it back to you? Or at least get the lyrics right, if that’s what you’re focused on. Or send anything you wanted back to you, at least within the limits of my ability.”

“That,” said Verity. “Would be good. Maybe a single song of my own, among the more traditional canon? In terms of something that people would want to hear. Songs from a Dungeon.”

“What’s that?” asked Hannah. “Songs from a Dungeon?”

“It’s what I came up with, just now,” said Verity. “But I don’t know, I’m not a composer.”

“I don’t think any of us are really qualified to say anythin’ more than that we think you’re swell,” said Hannah. “But I think playin’ your own stuff might be better for you than goin’ back to the classics. You’ve said that, haven’t you, that you feel like you’re an instrument bein’ played by the old masters sometimes?”

“Sometimes,” said Verity. “Anyway, I don’t need to think about it for quite a while.”

“Best not to put it off too long though,” said Hannah.

“We just want to support you,” said Alfric. “We know your position is delicate.”

“Thank you,” said Verity. “But I would rather talk about dungeons, and hold off on concert talk for the rest of the day.”

Alfric, as usual, had something prepared. Their original plan, nearly a week ago, had been to take on Hie Point, then following that, Moil Meadows. The idea, at least as far as Hannah had understood it, was that the ‘close’ dungeons would be spread out with the ‘far’ dungeons, if they were going to be based out of Pucklechurch rather than roving around the area and sleeping in tents. Hannah had been a fan of the plan, since it meant that they’d be alternating longer trips with shorter ones.

The new plan was to simply go to the easy ones first, hoping that they could just find some better travel entad or use Xy’s services. Hannah wasn’t entirely sure why Alfric wanted a change in plan, but she was still feeling a bit out of sorts, and it didn’t wholly matter to her.

She’d had more to drink with Marsh than she’d ever had in seminary, and there had been some amazing and wild parties, especially when they were on break. She hadn’t been able to go home to visit her family, not on a consistent basis, so she’d been left with the others, and gotten into a bit of trouble.

“Kirtle Point, if it’s up to me,” said Alfric.

“There’s where the Fractalwoods are,” said Mizuki. “I actually had a guild thing, if that would be okay?”

“What kind of guild thing?” asked Alfric.

“Well, some years ago I had gone there, to the Fractalwoods, and figured out that it wouldn’t be that difficult to send things forward in time,” said Mizuki. “And then no one wanted me to do that, which I kind of get, especially because I couldn’t guarantee that it would work. But a couple of days ago I got a message through the guild that someone had been asking around, and I was going to arrange it, because I have dibs. Might take more than a day to arrange though, I’ll have to see.”

“You have dibs on the whole forest?” asked Alfric. He seemed skeptical.

“You’d understand, if you were a sorc,” Mizuki smiled. “So if we go there, it would be great, I could drown two birds with one bucket.”

“We plan on tomorrow?” asked Isra.

“If possible,” said Alfric.

“I’m going to Liberfell today, to look after the other herb dragons,” said Isra. “I have instructed Lerial to stay on the property. I think he’ll listen. He’s a sociable creature.”

“I’m spending the day practicing,” said Verity. “It was hard to get in the time when we were in Dondrian, and if I’m going to be playing a concert — I don’t want to talk about it, but I will need to practice.”

Mizuki frowned. “You’re more concerned about a concert than, you know, keeping us alive in a dungeon?”

“Yes,” nodded Verity. “Concerts make me very nervous.” Mizuki narrowed her eyes, and Verity giggled. “You know what I mean.”

“Dungeon tomorrow then, will be the plan,” said Alfric. He looked at Hannah. “You’ll be recovered by then?”

Hannah waved a hand. “And no goin’ out tonight.”

“I don’t really care if you go out,” said Alfric. “Even if it’s with Marsh again. But I’d really prefer that you don’t drink as much as you apparently did last night.”

“You don’t want your healer havin’ a hangover,” Hannah nodded. “Sensible, I s’pose.”

“I’d really rather that no one had a hangover, actually,” said Alfric. “At least, not on the day of.”

“No hangovers,” nodded Hannah. “Sounds nice.”

It was pleasant to be back home, even with a bit of a hangover, and the pinched-head feeling was going away with time and tea, and a bit of food in her belly. The rest of the day was completely empty, at least for Hannah, and she was at a bit of a loss for what to make of herself. There was more writing to do, in her thing that might eventually become a book, but she wasn’t going to devote herself to that, not when she was feeling under the weather.

She had finished most of her work on the house, though there were a few things that were beyond her. The foundation had been shored up, a few cracked stones had been mended, and the tiles on the roof had been replaced, where needed. She had also gotten up there and cleaned, taking down much of the moss and dirt, along with three small trees whose roots would have threatened the integrity of the house. They had all made appreciative noises about it, particularly Mizuki. But with that work done, there wasn’t all that much left for Hannah to do.

Eventually, once her mid-day meal had her feeling better, she decided on turning her attention to the interior of the house.

“Mizuki, is it alright if I symmetricalize some things?” asked Hannah. Mizuki had moved into the living room, and was sitting on the big couch with the herb dragon on her lap and a book in her hands. She was idly stroking the herb dragon, which looked quite content.

“Sure, fine,” said Mizuki. “Wait, not my knives.”

“Pots and pans though?” asked Hannah. “Plates and bowls?”

“If you do the mugs, don’t take the handles off,” said Mizuki, not looking up from her book. “And I don’t want two handles on them either.”

“I have a good understandin’ of practicality, thank you,” said Hannah. “I just wanted to know if there was some chip in a plate that you had some sentimental attachment to, or a glaze on some ceramics that you didn’t want changed.”

“Um, there’s a mug with a spiral around the outside, don’t touch that one,” said Mizuki. “Everything else shouldn’t matter, it’s already close to symmetrical.”

Hannah ended up spending a few hours in the kitchen, taking out small dents in the metalwork, fixing hairline cracks and one or two chips in the ceramics, evening out glazes, removing smudges, and doing what cleaning her clerical ability allowed. The kitchen itself couldn’t be made symmetrical, given where everything was positioned, and it wouldn’t be practical to do that, but Hannah did what she could. She even went so far as to make sure that everything in the chiller was as symmetrical as it could reasonably be.

It felt good to do these things, and always had, even from when she was little. She liked to have everything in order, straight and square, perfect and leveled. Whatever else was going on in her life, there was always symmetry, and even drawing on the power of Garos, she felt the connection growing stronger. Symmetricalizing nearly everything in the kitchen was, in a way, a form of prayer and adulation.

But once it was all done, there was still quite a bit of day left, and Hannah’s mind was still wandering back to the conversation she’d had with Prudence, which meant that she was also lingering on unpleasant experiences with the Church, and following that, the local cleric’s guild.

“I’m goin’ into town for a bit,” said Hannah. Mizuki was still in the living room, still on the couch, and still immersed in her book. The herb dragon had moved from her chest to her stomach, but that was the only difference aside from Mizuki’s place in the book having moved forward.

“Okay, have fun,” said Mizuki.

Isra and Verity were both in the garden, though they seemed to be talking more than they were actually working, and Alfric was nowhere to be found, though it wasn’t important enough to ask after him over the party channel.

By good fortune, Marsh’s marble alerted her just after she’d put on her shoes, though she waited until she was out of the house to answer him. She had to roll down her sleeve to get the image of him.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hullo,” replied Hannah. “How’re you doin’?”

“Bit of a wild night,” said Marsh. “I just wanted to say, sorry if — I didn’t mean to drink so much. Sorry if I tried to rush you.”

Hannah looked down at the image of him on her skin and on impulse, traced out his outline with a finger. “You didn’t,” she said. “I helped you to bed and kissed you goodnight.”

“Ah,” said Marsh.

“You didn’t push me, not that I recall,” said Hannah. “My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I’d guess that yours is worse.”

“Sorry,” said Marsh. “Felt like a bit of a waste of a night, not that what I remember of it wasn’t fun. Did you … talk a lot about your mother?”

“No,” replied Hannah.

“And … would you want to see me again?” asked Marsh.

“Not tonight, nor the next, but after that, sure,” said Hannah.

March broke into a smile. “I don’t know why, but I thought I’d made a scramble of things. Good to know I was my usual charming self.”

Hannah gave him a smile, but it was a bit forced. “I’ll speak with you later, two days from now.”

She put the marble back in her pocket. Marsh was nice, but already the cracks were starting to show. The entire reason she’d taken him up on a meeting after the dungeon escape was because he was a bit cocky and sure of himself, with a boisterous confidence that had its own particular charm. Strong, sure hands, that was what she saw in him, and here he was, trying to make sure that he hadn’t hurt her feelings or some such. It was nice, but she wasn’t in it for the niceness, and if he turned tentative and cautious, it felt like it was better to call the whole thing off.

Hannah ended up heading for the temple, which was effectively her second home. She had never really used the services of a cleric, not since she’d gone to seminary, and she stood in the center of the large empty area of the temple, trying to decide on which of the clerics she’d want to speak to. It was common knowledge that different clerics specialized in different problems, but she didn’t know what her problem was, if she had a problem at all.

Kesbin was for making peace with not having enough, whether that was a lack of material goods, a lack of love, or the death of a loved one. “God of Loss”, he was sometimes called, or “God of Lacking”, sometimes “God of Making Do With Not Having Enough”. That was perhaps in the region of what Hannah was feeling, but unfortunately, there was no cleric of Kesbin in Pucklechurch.

Xuphin was, in some way, the opposite, dealing with similar problems, but giving wholly different advice. Hannah had, on occasion, heard people say that the difference was between fixable and irreconcilable deficiencies, but in practice, it seemed to be more about different personalities and where people were in their life. If you went to Kesbin and said that you didn’t have a girlfriend, the cleric might say, ‘well, we must all make peace with not having a girlfriend’, and if you visited a cleric of Xuphin, they might say, ‘well, let’s talk about how to get you a girlfriend, in fact, let’s figure out how to get you two girlfriends’.

Bixzotl was God of Copies, but traditionally, at least so far as his social role went, he was God of Repetition, or God of Sameness. People went to Bixzotl to find some comfort and advice when their life was feeling too repetitive, or when wanderlust was threatening to take them away, or when they had some issue within a relationship. This was not particularly germane to Hannah’s situation, but part of the joy of a temple like this was in talking to clerics with different perspectives.

Qymmos was right out, naturally, even if it hadn’t been Filera. In Hannah’s opinion, Qymmos was the least useful of the gods, insofar as it came to giving advice to people. People thought of Garos as being the God of Order, but that was largely on the surface level. The Church of Garos had nothing on the Church of Qymmos when it came to liking things to be just so and championing order and tradition.

Hannah wondered whether this was how the lay people did it, when they needed advice. She had never noticed anyone sitting in the temple center fretting about which cleric to go to and what advice they could expect from each, but she hadn’t had a line of view to the temple center from the Garos section she’d lived and worked in. She imagined that it must have happened from time to time. Certainly people decided where to go on the basis of which particular cleric they liked best.

The feeling she was struggling with was nameless though, and it was hard to know which direction to choose.

“Doing okay?” asked Lemmel. He had somehow snuck up on her, which probably wasn’t all that difficult when her head was in the clouds.

“Fine,” said Hannah. “Or, no, just … unclear thoughts swimmin’ about in my head.”

“I have time now, if you’d like to talk,” said Lemmel.

“Oh,” said Hannah. “Well, I — I’m a cleric, same as you, and whatever’s on my mind, I’m not sure that it’s somethin’ you can help with.”

“I have a perspective that you don’t,” said Lemmel. “Besides, it’s been some time since we’ve talked.”

Hannah hesitated, then went with him to the part of the temple that was devoted to Garos, her old haunt.

“Now,” he said as he sat down in his familiar seat. Hannah sat beside him. “What’s troubling you?”

“I don’t know,” said Hannah. “I’m ill at ease and I can’t figure it out. It’s like havin’ somethin’ stuck between my teeth, but I can’t quite figure out which teeth it’s between, and it seems to be in a different place dependin’ on whether I’m using my tongue or my finger to get it out.”

“Do you know when you started to feel this way?” asked Lemmel.

“I don’t know,” said Hannah. “We were in Dondrian, and I had a run-in with someone I went to seminary with, Prudence, and she was doin’ well for herself. But I explained that I was a dungeoneer now, and — she was nice about it, always a nice girl, but even in makin’ the explanation, I felt bad about myself. But it seems such a small thing for it to stick with me for nearly two full days, and the weight I’m feelin’ doesn’t seem like it’s goin’ to let up.”

Lemmel steepled his fingers — symmetrically, as he often did — and spent a moment in silence. “What else is going on in your life?” he asked.

“Not all that much,” said Hannah. “We’re doin’ dungeons, and livin’ with the new party has been goin’ well, we’ve all got our place, it feels like, at least on the domestic side of things. In the dungeons I might feel of a little more use if people got hurt more often, or if it felt safe or wise to rush in and lay on a hex, or if I had more in the way of combat prowess — but there’ve been no complaints, which is good.” She didn’t mention Marsh, but Marsh felt more like a symptom than a cause.

“Mmm,” said Lemmel.

“And,” said Hannah. “Well, there’s somethin’ that I can’t tell you, because it’s a matter of some confidentiality, but …” she paused, trying to think about how to phrase it.

“You know as well as I do that clerics are trained to keep confidentiality,” said Lemmel.

“Ay,” said Hannah. “But I also know as well as you that it’s not an all-encompassing confidentiality, and I’ve never known you to be a gossip, but I worry that this information, if I shared it, might be hurtful to a friend, whether or not it ever came out. Seems the thing to do is just keep silent, even when talkin’ to a cleric.”

“As you wish,” nodded Lemmel.

“The secret — and I s’pose I’ll just talk around it — made me feel a bit small,” said Hannah. “It was a feelin’ of …” she paused, trying to think. “I’m twenty years old, you know, and sometimes I hear about younger people doin’ things, prodigies, and I feel like my life is wastin’ away.”

“You know I’m in my sixties, don’t you?” asked Lemmel.

Hannah nodded. She’d actually thought he was even older than that, though he didn’t quite move like an old man. “And I know what you’re sayin’, but that feelin’, that you could have done more with your life, or that other people are passin’ you by, or that this wasn’t what it was meant to be, surely that can’t get better as you grow older, right? When I’m thirty I doubt I’ll have distinguished myself all that much, and there will be all kinds of other people to compare myself to.”

“There will,” said Lemmel. “A bit of what you’re feeling is the double edge of pride.”

Hannah furrowed her brow. “What do you mean by that?”

“You do good work,” said Lemmel. “You know that you do good work. You know that you have strong faith, that you’re physically strong, that you’re capable. You’re very aware of your strengths, and you’re proud of them.”

A bit of scripture came to Hannah’s tongue, the third section command to know yourself and the world around you, but she bit it back.

“You have pride,” said Lemmel. “Not misplaced, I don’t think, but pride all the same, and that helps to make you capable. You did well with the dungeon escape. You do well with helping, in general. But look at the reflection of pride: it’s doubt. If you pin your self-worth on your capability, then when you find yourself incapable, or even just less than perfectly capable, your sense of self-worth might plummet.”

“And … you think that’s what happened to me?” asked Hannah.

“I can’t say,” replied Lemmel. “‘It is the self that is most equipped for its own examination, and sadly, most often fails at that task.’”

“The ‘sadly’ part was added later,” said Hannah.

“You never did like those additions,” said Lemmel with a chuckle. “The scholars were only trying to express the grief they felt at that phrase. But I do think that it would be good for you to take some time to look inside yourself, and if you come up with no answers, I’ll be here to talk to.”

“Thank you,” said Hannah. “And I don’t know if I ever said it, but I’m sorry that I left you here alone.”

“You did say it,” said Lemmel. “But even before that dungeoneer came along, you were itching to leave and ready to go. Some of that might be pride, as I’ve said, not that you don’t have things to be prideful about. You have a closer connection with Garos than I do, and a better understanding of scripture.”

“I do?” asked Hannah. It felt odd for him to say that outright.

“The problem is that you want to be someone,” said Lemmel. “And maybe dungeons are the way for you to do that, but with what you’re feeling now, I don’t know for certain. Like I said, I can only guess at what’s going on in your head. Do you think I might be on the right track?”

“Maybe,” nodded Hannah. She placed her hands on her knees. “You’ve given me somethin’ to think about that, and I’ll thank you for it. As well as the compliment on my profession.”

“You’re leaving?” asked Lemmel. He seemed a bit sad. “Well, I suppose you have thinking to do.”

“I do,” nodded Hannah. It might have been more polite to stay and jaw, but she needed a moment, she felt. “And if I figure myself out, you’ll be — well, not the first to know, but I’ll keep you informed.”

Chapter 72 - Frink Fruit

Mizuki came to Kirtle Point early, with two goals in mind. The first was to meet up with a farmer there to do some work, while the second was to get some actual practice in.

Countryside rarely had very much texture to the aether, though there were some exceptions, especially where magical plants or animals were involved. The forest around Mizuki’s house had a number of magical trees that altered the aether in their own ways, but they were relatively few and far between. The local twin oaks were the best of them, at least from her perspective, a type of tree that ‘twinned’ so that anything that happened to one oak also happened to the other.

The fractal trees that made up the Fractalwoods were something else entirely. Their branches simply kept splitting, always in twos, and at the end, there was an impossible green fuzz, so thick that it was difficult to see through. They were heavy magic, and a dungeon escape, but the forest grew slowly, and if it had been cause for concern, the whole thing would have been burnt to the ground by the Pyros in the space of a single hour. It was some kind of spatial magic, and the imbalance in the aether was in the direction of time, which was quite fun for Mizuki, but not terribly useful. Now though, somehow, someone had decided to take her up on her standing offer to send things forward in time.

The old man got there before her. He had gray streaking through his hair and a big hat shielding him from the sun. He was tall and wiry, with a beard that he pretty clearly took some pride in, given that it was long and forked in two. Small rings of metal circled each side of the part, and they were the only adornment he wore. He was standing next to two huge carts, each of them piled with large sacks. The lizzos that had pulled them grazing idly in the field under the watchful gaze of two young boys. A third child, a girl of about ten, was standing by the older man.

“I’m the sorc!” called Mizuki.

“Nice to meet you!” he called back. “We were told you could send things forward in time?”

“It’s one of the things I can do here, yes,” she said as she got closer. “What am I doing it with?”

“Frink fruit,” said the man.

“Beg pardon?” asked Mizuki.

“Frink fruit,” the man repeated. He reached into one of the bags and pulled out something that looked like a small orange pepper. He tossed it to her, and she just barely managed to catch it. “Try one.” The fruit was roughly the size of her pinky finger, a bit knobbly, and when she bit it, it was far more sour than she’d expected it to be, so much so that she wished she had something to chase it with.

“I know this,” said Mizuki. “It’s … kinu fruit?”

“Frink fruit,” the man said. “Not quite the same as kinu. Ripens early, around this time of year, and stays fresh for not much longer than a week. So that’s where you come in.” He held out a hand, and Mizuki shook it. “Name’s Gurt.”

“Mizuki,” said Mizuki.

“Naddie,” said the girl, not offering her hand. “Can you really send things forward in time?”

“It’s not something I would lie about,” said Mizuki. “And you’d find out I was lying pretty quickly.”

“Could you send me forward in time?” asked the girl. “So I could have my birthday sooner.”

“I might be able to, if you stayed really still,” said Mizuki, regarding her. “Maybe. People have a bit of resistance to that kind of thing. And I’d have to ask your parents.” She waited for Gurt to clarify their relationship — he seemed old to be the girl’s father — but he offered nothing.

“You can do the frink fruit?” asked Gurt. He gestured to the wagons and their sacks. “All of it?”

“Probably,” said Mizuki.

“The woman I talked to, she said that you wouldn’t be able to get it quite right, that I would have to come check for the sacks every day once it was time,” said Gurt.

“Uh,” said Mizuki. They were right next to the fractal trees, and she could see the aether. She stared at it for a moment. “I think I can actually probably make it pretty precise. I’d just need to … do some math, I think.”

“Math?” asked the man.

It was complicated though, and the more Mizuki thought about it, the more she thought that the solution she was going with wasn’t something that would have occurred to her a year ago. Casting something forward in time was pretty straightforward, given the mood of time floating around, but making sure it ‘landed’ in the right place was much more difficult. The insight she’d had was that with all the time floating around, she could just build up a clock and have that be a piece of the spell. It was a lot more complicated than doing it without a clock, and without having read that book, she wasn’t sure that she’d have even considered it.

“All I need to do is figure out how many seconds are in a year,” said Mizuki. “And then I can send it forward a year. I think.”

“I don’t need it sent forward a year,” said the man. “I need it sent forward, oh, six months, so it arrives in the dead of winter. Then I’ll have fresh fruit to sell when everyone is eating preserves or things from the chiller.”

“I can do that,” said Mizuki, trying to muster more confidence than she felt. She looked again at the sacks. There were a lot of them, enough to overfill two wagons. “I’ll need the fruits out of the wagons though, unless you want the wagons sent forward too.”

“No, no,” said the man, shaking his head. “We’ll unload.” He turned to the nearby field where the lizzos were grazing and gave a loud, shrill whistle using his fingers in his mouth. The boys came running.

All this moving of things took some time, and Mizuki pitched in, though she wasn’t the best at transporting heavy sacks. She was surprised by just how much there was, and said so.

“Frink trees fruit all at once,” said the man as he moved another sack. “We sell what we can, then try to put up the rest, but at a certain point there’s just too much, and you can’t even give it away, because everyone is so sick of frink fruit.”

“No offense,” said Mizuki as she hefted a sack. “But frink fruit, that’s a terrible name.”

“My great grandfather was Frink,” said the man. He was giving her a scowl. “He was responsible for the orchards in this hex.”

“Ah,” said Mizuki. “It’s just … a name that doesn’t make me want to eat it. That’s all. Sorry.”

“Mmm,” said the man, seeming somewhat disgruntled. They didn’t speak any more until the sacks were stacked up.

“Okay, I think all I should need to do is a single big spell,” said Mizuki.

“How will we know it worked?” asked the man.

“Uh,” said Mizuki. “You’ll come back in one hundred and eighty days, I guess.”

“That’s accurate?” he asked.

“To within a day, it should be,” said Mizuki. She did the numbers again and got the same answer. She hoped that she was accurate.

“There will be a fair amount of snow then,” said the man. “And we’ll need the carts to move all this stuff.”

“And you don’t want it frozen,” nodded Mizuki. “Otherwise you’d just use a chiller, right?”

He nodded. “Should maybe have packed in some warming plates, but it’s too late for that now.”

“Well, no,” said Mizuki. “I’m about to send those sacks forward in time, but you could come back to this spot, which you should mark, and place out some heating elements at any time in the next half year. It would also help to melt any snow.”

“A fair idea, though I’m not sure the frink fruit will be worth it,” nodded the man.

“Alright,” said Mizuki, clapping her hands. “One hundred and eighty days.”

She circled the area, trying to put some of what she’d been reading about into practice. This sort of thing, precision spellcasting with no worry about how long it took, wasn’t really what she considered herself to be good at. Trying to build a quick clock out of time magic was also not a particularly easy thing to do, even if it seemed like it should be. She had meant to come early so she could get some practice in, and she’d felt early, but he’d already been there, waiting for her. It made her feel nervous about the whole thing, like she was an amateur rather than a professional spellcaster, which was often how she felt.

“Just so you know, I’ve never done this before,” said Mizuki.

“I was told by your guildmate,” he replied. “She seemed skeptical. Like I said, the frinks are more or less worthless by themselves, at least this time of year, what I’m more worried about is not getting the sacks back, and the time and effort it took to get everything out here. We’re a mile away, but with two lizzos, that’s still some distance.”

“I can check on it with a bird,” said one of the boys who hadn’t been introduced. “In the winter?”

“You just want snowshoes for your bird,” the man scoffed. He looked at Mizuki. “Having second thoughts?”

“No,” said Mizuki. “Just trying not to mess it up.”

She stared at the large pile of frinks and spent quite a bit of her time thinking, trying to shape the magic in her head before actually drawing in any of the surrounding aether.

It wasn’t the most complicated spell she’d ever cast, but it was the one she was the most nervous about. She didn’t know this man, and he wasn’t a part of her town, so if she screwed up, there’d be no built-in gentleness from him, no understanding that they were part of the same community. And it was a complicated spell, especially because she was trying to set a target in time. She had likened it to casting the frinks forward, but internally, mechanically, it was quite a bit different, more like making the frinks skip the coming days. If she’d been asked, Mizuki wasn’t sure that she could articulate the difference, but she could see that it was there.

<Verity, can I get a minor boost in power?> asked Mizuki. <More, um, draw.>

<Sure,> said Verity. <Give me a moment.>

Mizuki felt bad for asking, especially since they were going to be doing a dungeon in an hour, but she wasn’t sure that she would be able to do it without help, and a failed spell might mean disaster, depending on how it failed. At best, it would send the frinks to some indeterminate point in the future, but at worst … she wasn’t sure, but time magic wasn’t something to mess with.

Mizuki drew in an enormous amount of ambient magic and made the spells using the same process she’d already gone through five times in her head. It was absurd how much Verity helped, especially when Verity was focused on a single aspect of boosting power. Mizuki’s range was suddenly enormous, and she was drawing from hundreds of feet away. It almost felt like too much power, and Mizuki held back, trying to hook the mana into the little awkward clock she’d made.

And then she couldn’t hold the spell any longer, couldn’t keep the magic in check for another overview, and the spell went off.

The frinks were gone.

“Okay,” said Mizuki. “Done.” She thought it was done. It was done one way or another, anyway. <Thanks for the song,> said Mizuki. <Sorry if it was draining.>

<No problem,> said Verity. <We’ll be there in fifteen or so.>

“Mmm,” said Gurt. He was squinting at the place where the frinks had been, as though he could check her work. “I suppose we’ll see, will we?”

Mizuki nodded.

“Now, as for payment,” said Gurt, turning to her. “Fifty rings, then another hundred when we have delivery.”

Mizuki frowned. “I … guess that’s fine.”

“Margins are slim,” said Gurt. “And it’s speculative, more for me than you. The whole shipment might be lost, and I still have to gather it up.”

“I said it was fine,” said Mizuki. Her cheeks were growing hot though. He took some rings off a heavy string, then handed them to her, which she pocketed without counting. Her sense of embarrassment was palpable. It was the thing she always hated about doing work for people.

She wandered off into the forest rather than help Gurt hook up the lizzos, which wasn’t something she really knew how to do anyway. The bark of the trees was likewise fractal, but only on the surface of it, and the interior was fractal as well, the rings self-similar. Mizuki wasn’t entirely clear what a fractal was, but she’d spoken with some people who were in the forest to study the trees. They hadn’t been there to try to figure out what to use the Fractalwoods ‘for’, they just wanted to learn more, and had been rather fun to talk with, in part because they were quite enthusiastic, though Mizuki hadn’t understood half of what they said.

Something in the magic was nagging at her. Not the spell, she thought that had done well, but some possibility of time. Going backwards in time was, obviously, very attractive, but it was apparently impossible in some theoretical aspect. That was what she’d been told, anyway, and she couldn’t see any way to prove anyone wrong.

Mizuki found a rock in the ground, and chucked it into the air, then quickly cast a time spell on it. It slowed down to a crawl as it moved along its arc. She watched it, squinting, and moved closer so she could look at it. The spell had wrapped itself around the stone, something that had happened without her thinking about it too much, and there was something like friction as it continued on its path through the air. Eventually, and after not more than twenty seconds, it gave out, and the rock went on as it had been, landing on the forest floor.

Mizuki frowned at it again. There were neat things to do with time as the dominant mood, but she felt like she was just scratching the surface.

The next fifteen minutes were spent casting more spells, moving through the forest and scooping up as much magic as she could. It was boring work, so she tried to make a game of it, seeing how big a spell she could do, and how far she could stretch her reach. She wished that she had accepted Alfric’s offer to come along, but she hadn’t been sure how long the business with the frinks would take.

<We’re just about to the edge of the forest, where are you?> asked Alfric.

<On my way,> said Mizuki.

She met them at the entrance to the forest, and felt a bit of relief to be with people she liked. Everyone was in their dungeoneering outfits already, and there were new pieces of kit since last time, including a bigger hammer for Hannah and some light armor for Isra on her forearms and shins. They walked together, taking the path to the dungeon entrance, and Mizuki shared what the contract work had been like. She tried to make her unintentional insult more funny than it had been, and left out the bit at the end when she had been given what felt like a paltry payment.

When they got to the dungeon entrance, she needed to change into her dungeoneering things, and this time didn’t make the mistake of telling anyone to turn around. Alfric did so anyway, because he was a gentleman, and she appreciated that.

Alfric unlocked the dungeon entrance and examined the collar with the blue runes on them.

There was something about dungeons. They always felt like they came on suddenly, even if it was something they’d planned for a whole week, something they’d mapped out and trained for. Actually going into a dungeon felt sudden, unavoidably so, a ‘so we’re really actually doing this thing’ feeling that was still there after three dungeons. Mizuki wondered whether it would ever go away. It was a world of blood and violence, and there was so little that separated it from the world they normally lived in.

“Is everyone ready?” asked Alfric.

“Very,” said Verity. She had her lute out and was holding it almost like someone would hold a weapon.

“Ready,” said Mizuki. “As ever, I guess.” They were about to cross the threshold and go from perfectly safe and healthy to mortal peril.

They descended together, and Mizuki felt a shiver go through her body as they passed from one world into another, the moment of expansive possibility and imminent danger washing over her. They’d been in three times now, and she’d come out unscathed each time, which allowed the natural fear she felt to turn into excitement.

They came out into a small room with an undersized door made of metal, so short that Alfric would need to duck to get through it.

<Good, no fight to start us off,> said Alfric. He stood next to the door with his bident and shield, eyeing it for a moment, then put his weapon down to take off his pack and set it in a secure location. It was good to have a basecamp right next to the entrance of a dungeon, that was something he’d explained to them, and explained a few too many times for Mizuki’s taste.

Alfric took a breath, then gave Verity a nod, which was her cue to start playing a rousing song about rabbits running from a flood in their warren. He opened the door and stepped through, bident at the ready, and Mizuki followed after him, ready to utterly destroy whatever she saw.

The metal door led into a stonework corridor, one that twisted as they went until they were walking awkwardly on top of the corner where the wall had met the floor. The twisting continued, eventually putting them on the surface that had been the wall, then on the surface that had been the ceiling, and that was when they got to the second door of the dungeon, a flimsy wooden one with visible gaps in the planks.

<Mizuki, what’s the aether like?> asked Alfric.

<Growth, space, time … difficult things to work with,> said Mizuki. There was an unevenness too, spikes where one was higher than the other. Some of this had to be from the Fractalwoods, but it was impossible to say what. She didn’t know the theory well enough. The Fractalwoods did things with space and with growth, and then the imbalance also got swept into the dungeon’s collection systems as well? She hoped they wouldn’t end up in another expansive room. <If we’re in a large area, I could grow you, temporarily.>

<It’s better for Isra,> said Alfric. <If you can do her bow and arrows too?>

Mizuki nodded, then remembered what he’d said about clarity. <Yes.>

<Breaching,> said Alfric, and he pushed through the next door.

The room was illuminated only by Alfric’s lantern, but it cast light on a cavern, one with a ceiling forty feet above, crawling with chitinous creatures, like crabs but with too many limbs and a hairy center region. They each had two dozen legs, and after only a brief moment, began throwing the legs at Alfric, using little pincer arms. Fighting creatures thirty feet above him wasn’t his specialty, and he knew it, so he moved forward to give room to those behind him, holding his shield above him and taking the hits as heavy legs were flung against him, each of them ten or fifteen pounds, thunking against him.

Isra came behind him and started firing arrows up at them, and Hannah in her full plate moved into the room as well, seemingly in order to give them a second target to throw their legs at.

Mizuki was worthless. She was trying to figure out something to do with her magic, something that would actually help to kill these distant creatures, especially because she was one of the only parts of their team that could manage proper range. With the ambient aether, the most she would be able to do was a weak firebolt, which seemed worthless. She needed Hannah to be doing something, or Verity’s song to leak more.

<Isra, making you big,> said Mizuki. She cast the spell as she said it, and hoped that it wouldn’t throw Isra off too much.

The effect was immediate and to Mizuki’s surprise, quite potent. Isra was nearly twice her size, and thankfully, that included all parts of her, meaning that she didn’t shred her clothes. She was thrown off, just a little, moving arms that had more weight to them, but she nocked an arrow and fired at the creatures. This time, the arrow hit much harder, puncturing straight through and pinning the creature to the ceiling.

Mizuki looked over and saw that Hannah had stumbled, maybe from a thrown leg having hit her, but she was leaning awkwardly to one side and moving around like she was drunk. There was nothing that Mizuki could do about that, and very little that she could contribute to the fight until there was more of a build-up of magic, but she did her best to have some awareness of what was going on while she waited for there to be enough charge in the air for her to contribute in some meaningful way.

She was the first to notice something that they might have been able to notice right from the start: the creatures on the ceiling weren’t clinging there with their feet like bats, they were simply standing on the ceiling, moving around without gripping it at all. And with Hannah having trouble getting to her feet, it was clear that something strange was going on.

Mizuki grabbed a rock from the ground and threw it up at the creatures, and watched as it followed a path that was utterly wrong. At a certain point it was falling toward the ceiling.

<Gravity is weird in here,> said Mizuki over the sounds of the fight.

It was the enlarged Isra doing most of the work, with Alfric serving as a distraction and shield as she put oversized arrows into them. She was getting them, but with her height, she was getting pelted with more than her share of legs, though they seemed to faze her less. Once Mizuki had said her bit though, Hannah was able to straighten herself out, and she began to run toward the side wall, then up the side wall, and finally, she was going along the ceiling to join the crab-like creatures in battle.

<Toss me up here,> Alfric said to Isra.

Isra paused for just a moment, then set her bow down and put out her hands. Alfric stepped into them, and she didn’t hesitate at all before she launched him up toward the creatures. The more she looked at them, the more they looked like bugs instead of crabs, but maybe it was the hair. Mizuki was worried that he was going to take too hard a fall, but he landed on one of the crab-creatures with a crunch and got to his feet without seeming to think too hard about the complete change in direction he’d gone through. He was in among them, fighting them with his bident, and it almost looked like he was going to be overwhelmed on several occasions, but Isra was firing arrows up into the melee. She seemed to be landing them perilously close to him, but they were mostly hitting their targets.

Hannah eventually arrived at where the monsters were, having gone the long way up the side of the wall, and began laying into the ones that were left with her hammer. Alfric was quite a bit bigger than her, and a skilled fighter, especially with the bident being able to cause small explosions within the creatures, but there was something about the weight and ferocity with which Hannah moved that made her seem more deadly. She was putting her whole body into the swings, where Alfric focused on an efficiency of action.

Isra killed the last of them, and by Mizuki’s estimation, had fired off more than twenty arrows in total, almost all of them having hit.

<Clear!> called Alfric. He was looking up/down at them from the ceiling. <Variable gravity.>

<I noticed,> said Mizuki.

<Is the whole place goin’ to be like this?> asked Hannah. <I feel ill.>

<I need some healing,> said Alfric. <Otherwise I’m going to be mostly bruise.>

<On it,> replied Hannah. She was breathing heavily, her energetic walloping having taken a lot out of her.

The rocky cave had two exits, each of them going off to the side, and Alfric was looking down them as he was being healed, bident at the ready.

<Really banged yourself up,> said Hannah as she laid hands on Alfric. <Not sure that launching into them was the best idea.>

<I was getting pummeled on the ground,> said Alfric. He looked up. <Isra, Mizuki, good job.>

<Nice work,> said Verity.

Mizuki looked at her. <Did you stop the song?>

<Still going,> Verity replied. She had the lute in her hands, and was plucking at it every now and then. <I can talk if I don’t talk too much.>

<That’s amazing,> said Mizuki. She looked over at Isra, who was slowly shrinking back down. <Are you okay?>

<Yes,> said Isra. <It was … odd. Everything felt off.>

<So do you want me to do it again, or not?> asked Mizuki.

<Yes, again,> said Isra.

<We should get going though,> said Alfric. <We’ll go left and come back later to clear right. Hopefully we’re not going to be faced with open spaces. I’m worried about the gravity.>

Mizuki was too, but with a first successful encounter under their belt, she was feeling good about the dungeon, and what it might contain within it. There were strange magics in the air, and this was her chance to prove that she had been working to get better. They were back in it, the land of danger, and it was starting to feel like a place she was meant to be.

Chapter 74 - Off Tempo

Holding a song was like being a bird soaring through the sky, attempting to hold her wings steady and drop as little as possible. She had loved to watch the seabirds that flocked by the docks of Dondrian on days when there was a little wind. They would seem to hover in the air, riding unseen currents, staying almost still. It was what she thought about when she tried to slow the song down to very near its breaking point.

Holding a song was something that she’d practiced quite a bit in the last week. There was a feeling to it, a steadiness, like a tiny gossamer thread that could bear almost no weight but was nevertheless taut. She had improved massively since first attempting it, but it was like that for most things, where putting in an enormous amount of time and effort got you most of the way there. Beyond that, there were probably tricks and secrets that she would have to learn from others, and incremental improvements that would come with time and practice.

Verity was proud of having gone what felt like a half hour in the tunnel, laying on her back and occasionally giving the lute a lazy strum. It was the sort of thing that would have been too difficult to manage just a few days ago. The skill wasn’t really applicable anywhere but the dungeons, of course, but it still gave her a sense of progress that she hadn’t had with her musical abilities in many years.

There was no way around the pool of water in the bat room, so they had to remove their boots, hike up their pants and skirts, wade across, and then dry off and put everything back on again. It was a pain, and slowed them down considerably, and worse, they would have to do it again on the way back. Beyond that, Alfric had left their more heavy or unwieldy things in the dungeon’s foyer, and would have to go back for them if the rooms beyond the pool required them. Mizuki had actually offered to make the trip, if it was necessary, and Alfric had thanked her for that but said it would be a lot easier for him.

The rain of bats had rattled Verity. It was the first time she’d thrown up from sheer stress and visceral reaction since her very first public concert, and like then, it was thankfully gone when the moment of terror had passed. Alfric having chocolate and mints on hand made everything better, not just because it got the taste from her mouth, but because he had planned ahead of time, and made sure she knew that it was okay. He hadn’t even said ‘hey, sometimes people throw up, it’s alright’, but it was clear from his preparation and immediate response. There was no judgment. When she’d thrown up after her first concert, her mother hadn’t been nearly so understanding.

Once they had their boots back on, they got battle ready and moved to the doorway, this one without an actual door. So far they hadn’t had to choose a direction besides going left in the first room, and it felt odd and somewhat claustrophobic to have everything be all in a line, but Alfric said nothing about it, so Verity kept her mouth shut.

The next cell was, for a change, a civilized place, and quite thankfully, seemed devoid of monsters, though they stayed on guard until they could declare it cleared. It was a workshop, one that was rather full of things, though Verity couldn’t name most of them. The primary thing it seemed set up to make was some strange piece of — possibly — clothing that was too small to be a hat and too large to be a shoe. It was shaped leather that seemed like it was designed for some kind of alien species, and had all kinds of embellishments and adornments which looked like they’d been made by the many tools that were sitting around.

The room had no conventional door, but a hatch in the floor off to one side, which they studiously avoided.

<Two entads,> said Mizuki, who had spotted them first, which was no particular surprise. <Er … both bows.> She held them up. One was blood-red and shiny, so large that it was taller than her, and the other was caramel-colored wood that was sanded matte. Both were strung, though there were no arrows about. <Do we need two bows?>

<No,> said Alfric. <We could do with selling them though.>

<This hammer too,> said Mizuki, picking up a mallet from one of the benches. She swung it twice and frowned at it. <Save it for later though, I guess.>

<And we’ll pack up what we can from the room,> said Alfric. He was looking around at the implements, most of them wood. <Henlings, mostly, valuable in that they’re odd. I don’t see much that any craftsman would actually use, but I suppose I don’t know.>

<These leather cap things aren’t anything, right?> asked Mizuki poking one of them with a finger like she thought it would bite.

<No, they’re nothing,> said Alfric. <And we should get going while the song is on.>

<I’m holding it,> said Verity. It was difficult to talk, and she could feel the song warble when she did, especially when she didn’t keep the yawningly-slow beat in the immediacy of her mind.

<Down we go then,> said Alfric. He went to the hatch and put an ear up to it. <Breaching now.> He didn’t say it like a question, but he gave people time to object, or to get into place.

Verity brought the song out of its slumber, the gossamer thread turning to a cable of steel. She added purpose to it slowly, layering in effects, and by the time Alfric had dropped down the hole, barely using the ladder, she had lent him strength and resilience. She was at the back of the pack, as usual, crafting her song without being able to see the recipients, ideally the last to be in the way of harm. If she was attacked, there was nothing she could do.

Hannah dropped down after Alfric, her plate armor offering her at least some protection, and Mizuki, far less equipped to take a hit, went down after with very little hesitation on her part. If she could cast spells through the party, there didn’t seem to be any need for her to put herself in harm’s way, but Alfric had apparently hit his head on the ceiling, so perhaps she wanted clearance. There was clearly a fight going on down there, with swipes and grunts that could be heard through the floorboards, and the occasional sound of metal hitting something. Isra slipped down the hole, leaving Verity alone, and there was really nothing for it but to give them as much support as she could without seeing them.

Her song was about weathering a storm, perhaps because of the rain of enormous bats, or because sitting in the workshop made her feel like being a little kid again. The weather in Dondrian was relatively mild and tightly controlled, but every now and then there was a thunderstorm that came through and rattled the windows. The winds would howl and the trees would creak, and there was absolutely nothing you could do but sit there, hope for the best, and put your faith in others.

The rains came down,
To wash away,
The bloody streets,
And slaughtered prey.

Verity didn’t think all that much about the lyrics, or where they were coming from, or what meaning they might have. They were morose, certainly, and not her best work. There was nothing that she’d want to put in a real song, not one that she was going to polish up and show to other people. She just went on, allowing the melody and the lyrics to flow from her.

After a few verses, the sounds of fighting died down, and the only thing that could be heard was scuffling. For a brief, heart-rending moment, Verity worried that they were all dead.

<Clear,> said Alfric. <Healing please.>

<Nice,> said Mizuki.

Verity breathed a sigh of relief, and put the song into its holding pattern before climbing down the ladder. It was further than she’d thought, almost twenty feet, a somewhat frightening height, but she continued on, because throwing up had been embarrassing enough, and being scared of getting down a ladder wouldn’t do.

The walls of the room were made of glass and looked out onto a wilderness area which surrounded it like they were the last spoonful of soup in the bottom of a bowl. There were several furry corpses, filling the place with the smell of blood, a sensation that was becoming quite familiar. It was a room within a room, and somewhat confusing given that they’d descended into it, but none of the geography was strictly impossible, only surprising and unintuitive. Verity’s mind tried to make sense of it, and she nearly lost the song, so she stopped thinking about it.

<Wait,> said Mizuki, who was looking out the glass. <So if we’d broken through the wall of the workshop, we’d have … come out the side of a cliff?>

<Possibly with some rock in the way,> said Alfric. <It’s a bit irrelevant. There are monsters in the grotto though, and lots of plants. No clear door.> He peered at the plants. <Gravity slopes here, I think, bowl-like.>

<Just clear windows,> said Mizuki. She pressed a finger against one of them. <Are we breaking the glass?>

<This doesn’t make any sense,> said Hannah, pressing a hand against the glass. <It’s a glass room inside a grotto with access through a ladder? There’s a workshop above us that, from what I can see, is encased in rock?>

<Dungeons don’t need to make sense,> said Alfric.

<This aggressively doesn’t make sense,> said Hannah. <This whole dungeon.>

<Kind of crap loot, too,> said Mizuki.

Verity held the song, and almost risked speaking, but she felt the chord wobble, so instead she stayed silent. In another month, she was certain she could get to the point where she could speak freely, at least if she did so with a good cadence, but she wasn’t there yet. She pushed the song faster, so she wouldn’t lose it.

<I think we’re breaking through,> said Alfric, frowning at the glass. <Otherwise it’s not a full clear.>

<Is there even anything out there?> asked Hannah. <Seems like a jungle, to be frank.>

<Two creatures,> said Isra. <Big ones. Not as large as the bear, but —> she pointed at what seemed to be random spots in the grotto, effectively on the wall given the uncomfortable slope of gravity. <There and there.>

<Do you have advice on how to handle them?> asked Alfric.

Isra frowned, then rubbed her forehead. <No.>

<Don’t push it,> said Alfric. He was gentle about it, but also seemed worried. From what Verity knew, the wrongness of the dungeons could get to a druid, their connection with the creatures working against them. <Okay, breaking the wall then, everyone be careful.>

<Do you want to be fast or big?> asked Mizuki.

Alfric hesitated. <Big,> he said. <Wait until I’m out of the tank.>

<Will do,> said Mizuki.

Verity picked the song back up to full strength and Alfric readied himself. He thrust at the glass wall with his bident and it cracked with little resistance, with the pieces of glass falling down from the entirety of the frame. He waited there, watching for one of the creatures, then cautiously stepped through the glass with his boots protecting him from the shards, bident held forward and shield at the ready.

They were slow, rumbling creatures, at least to start, but they picked up steam as they went, crashing through the underbrush and knocking aside small trees. They were visible, at first, mostly from the movement of the brush. Alfric moved in closer, though it was difficult to see them through the foliage, and when the first one appeared, moving fast for something so large, he darted close to it, using his magical boots to close the distance. Verity directed all the song’s power to him, multiplying his strength, and Mizuki’s spell hit him at nearly the same moment, almost throwing him off-balance.

The creature appeared through the oversized leaves, huge and imposing, long tusks on either side of a wide jaw. The skin was red and cracked like dried mud, the eyes big and watery, thick legs to support its bulk and a vapor coming off it like steam or smoke. Alfric dashed forward as soon as the creature was close, bident out in front of him, but his first strike glanced off the side of the creature, and it rushed him down. He was barely able to get his shield up in time, and it knocked him back. Alfric’s second thrust with the bident stuck down into the cracks in its skin, and then the flesh exploded outward, causing the creature to tip slightly to the side.

They fought, the two of them, an enlarged Alfric with his magical bident against a fat creature with surprising strength and heft. It was bleeding heavily from the first blast, but did manage to hit Alfric in the side of his leg with a fast-moving tusk. They circled each other, with Alfric trying to guide it away from the party and also trying to stab it with his enlarged bident again.

The second creature was slower to arrive, but larger, and seemingly more angry. As soon as it appeared, charging through the underbrush, Isra was there, having followed an arrow, and she went for its eyes before darting back following another arrow. She reappeared next to them, breathing hard.

There was very little that anyone could do. Alfric had gotten what magic Mizuki could provide, and Isra’s arrows were doing very little. Hannah had her hammer, but she didn’t have the benefit of size that Alfric had, and it was hard to imagine that her hitting the huge beast in its rump would do anything but earn her its wrath. She had doubled a wound, but it hadn’t been in a deep enough or vital enough place.

Alfric fought, a man made giant by Mizuki’s spell and strong by Verity’s song. He was taking hits, and there were limits to how much armor could protect a person. A tusk struck him in an unarmored spot just above his hip, and blood flowed freely from the wound, then the blind creature stomped on his foot, which caused him to howl in pain. Still he held fast with his shield and got in the strikes where he could, though only one in every four was able to pierce their thick hide.

Eventually, the first creature to come forward began to slow. Soon it was only breathing heavily and swaying, the blasts that Alfric had created through its flesh causing it to lose function. Another doubling from Hannah put it out of consideration as a threat. Alfric turned his attention to the blind one, the one which had stomped on his foot and tried to bowl him over, and he circled it carefully, taking care not to make noise. He lined up his strike with deliberate calm and drove the bident in as hard as he could, sinking it deep into flesh. The explosion was audible from outside, a whumpfing sound, and this one, carefully placed, was enough to kill the creature outright.

Alfric slumped to the ground, breathing hard, and Hannah rushed to him.

<I said not too many more hard hits,> she said as she tended to his wounds. <We’ve more dungeon left, and it won’t do for you to die, not after we’ve put in all this work.>

<I’m fine,> said Alfric. <Just exhausted. I’m supposed to be good against the big things.>

<Mizuki, how long does that spell last?> asked Hannah. She looked like a child standing next to Alfric. He was some fifteen feet tall.

<I have no idea, why?> asked Mizuki.

<Because it makes it harder to heal him,> said Hannah. <Can you stop it? Cancel it?>

<Uh,> said Mizuki. <No, I don’t think so, can’t you — I mean, you can still save him, right?>

<I’m bleeding, not dying,> said Alfric. He reached down to touch the wound above his hip, then winced and looked at his bloody hand. <I think it’s surface, just a bleeder, that’s all..>

<And two broken bones in the foot. You’re riding the high of battle,> said Hannah. <That’s the best time to patch someone up, before they realize how hurt they actually are.>

<I’m familiar, and I’m compensating for my own — oh, there it goes.> Alfric began to shrink back down, and as soon as he did, Hannah had worked her miracles, stopping the flow of blood and presumably fixing his broken bones. A few moments after that, she had gotten the dents out of his armor.

<I’m reachin’ my limit, ay?> said Hannah. <I can take the strain of maybe another serious injury, but not much more than that, so don’t two of you go gettin’ hurt at once, or there’ll be trouble.>

<We need to check for doors,> said Alfric. He moved to get to his feet, then failed to rise and instead slumped down. <I’m crashing.>

<Blood loss?> asked Hannah.

<No,> said Alfric. <Just too much battle for one day and a brain that’s frazzled by all the action. I might need a moment, or maybe a few moments, but we do need to check for doors, just in case more monsters want to join the party.>

<I’ll look,> said Mizuki. She seemed worried about Alfric, and was clutching at the edge of her shirt.

<Better that I look,> said Isra. <Or we can look together.>

The wild area, the grotto, was fairly large, and the two of them set off together, attempting to follow the edge. Verity watched them go, wanting to take part, but she was less well-equipped for it, and there was nothing she could do to help them except to give them a song.

It wasn’t really a grotto, that was just the word that Alfric had grabbed to refer to it with. Verity had noticed that a lot with the dungeons, the way they all gravitated toward words of convenience even when they manifestly didn’t apply. The ‘bats’ were too big, missing their heads, with worms on their chests and no legs to speak of, similar to actual bats only really in that they flew with leathery wings, but that word ‘bat’, once it was used, became the common term. It was something she was going to have to think about, if she was going to be serious about writing songs, especially if the idea of Songs from a Dungeon was to be executed on. She would have to be careful what she called things, lest people get the wrong impression about what a dungeon was like.

Hannah and Alfric were having a conversation outside the party channel, and Verity gravitated toward them. The song was still going, low and slow, just a trickle.

“I’m not sure it’s safe to go on,” said Hannah. “We’ll come out of this with three entads if there’s nothing in this room, plus some henlings. That’s enough, I’d think.”

“Enough for it to be a success?” asked Alfric. “I’m not sure that it is.”

“I don’t want you to burn yourself out on resetting subpar dungeons,” said Hannah. “And I also don’t want to press on when it’s not safe to do so just because you think we need more from this place to justify our time.”

“Not just our time,” said Alfric. “Dungeons are, on the individual level, a non-renewable resource. Each one we do, we need to go further afield. Weren’t you the one that wanted to go after the bear?”

“And you told me that it was too much,” said Hannah. “You brought it up in the post mortem.”

“We had enough then,” said Alfric. “The bear was an extra risk on top of an already successful dungeon. Here, we’re talking about making up for what’s likely been a subpar dungeon. The bows aren’t as bad as other weapons, since they can be used for hunting in the way that a sword can’t, though it will depend on their abilities, which are unknown. Still, three entads and some henlings, some tiles that we can sell to a supply store, if we can pick them up, no ectad materials so far — I’m on the verge of wanting to reset, though I’d ask the party first.”

“If it’s between a reset and pushin’ on, I s’pose I’d favor the push,” said Hannah. She was in full plate, face obscured, but Verity could tell she was frowning.

“How much left do we have?” asked Verity. She could feel the song wobble as she asked, and straightened it out as the words were out of her mouth.

“Unknown at this point,” said Alfric. “Five fights so far, we might only have a room or two. That we know of, at least one room off the main branching point.” He looked over to the underbrush. <Isra, check-in please.>

<We found an entad,> said Isra. <No doors. We’re halfway around the room. Lots of plants. We might want to take samples.> She had brought home a growthstone from Besc in Liberfell, and they’d had some discussion about what it would be used for, eventually deciding that it would be used for contained growth of dungeon samples, just to see whether they might be able to grow something profitable.

<Good, thank you,> said Alfric.

<Just wanted to make sure we weren’t getting into trouble?> asked Mizuki.

<I just wanted to know what kind of trouble,> smiled Alfric.

“Well, I s’pose I’ll defer to you,” said Hannah. “But I’m serious about not havin’ much more healin’ left to give, and we’ll have to have this conversation as a group, just so everyone knows that we’re on the same page. We’ve suffered through the dungeon, more than normal.”

Privately, Verity agreed. The rain of bats had produced a gutteral terror in her in a way that nothing so far had, above and beyond charging beasts and piles of ooze. The casual — even enthusiastic — disregard the creatures had shown for their own lives was shocking. Perhaps one of the reasons that Alfric wanted to press on was to find something worthwhile whose value they could bask in, something that would help morale to bounce back to normal, but she couldn’t imagine what it would possibly be.

<We found a little campsite,> said Mizuki. <Ashes still a bit warm, but there’s no sign of any people or whatever. No not-people. Two entads, and … okay, it’s weird, so I’ll just say it — they’re bows.>

<Two bows?> asked Alfric.

<Yes,> said Mizuki. <Which is super weird. That’s five entads, four of them bows.>

<It happens,> said Alfric. <Not often, but it does happen, just because of how the probabilities shake out. Sometimes you get seeming repeats of monsters or entads. Bring them back, along with everything of value, if you can.>

<Will do,> said Mizuki.

<No doors?> asked Alfric.

<No, and we don’t expect to find any,> said Mizuki. <Not much of the perimeter left to search.>

When Mizuki and Isra returned carrying the goods, they all had a discussion on the pros and cons of doing more of the dungeon. It was really a question of the available healing more than anything else, and Alfric’s argument that they should continue on was, if not persuasive, then at least persuasive enough. It was possible there was only one room left, back on the other leg of the dungeon they’d yet to explore, which didn’t seem so bad, and wasn’t even guaranteed to have a fight.

Verity held her song throughout the entire discussion. It wasn’t necessary, but this was a form of practice, and she was taking some pride in doing two things at once. Holding the song down so it had no effect and didn’t drain her but could nevertheless be wakened was very helpful, in this context, and there was something enticing about it, an area that was new and fresh.

Eventually, as the conversation dragged, Verity grew listless and bored, and pulled out a small notebook she’d brought with to begin writing down lyrics and pieces of song. There was nothing terribly good about it, but she did want a foundation to work from, an understanding of how and why her custom songs didn’t work. Writing in time with the silent song was helpful for both endeavors.

Eventually, and perhaps due to Verity having visibly checked out of the conversation, they got going, ready to finish the dungeon and hoping that there wasn’t too much left.

Chapter 73 - Corridor Squeeze

This was a strange and disorienting dungeon, and Isra didn’t like it. Gravity was something that a person was supposed to be able to take for granted. In this dungeon, her feet could be planted but her body unsteady, and the movements of the party around her were sometimes disorienting. They were there for the goods though, and the discomfort was temporary, so she put up with it as best she could.

Alfric seemed quite pleased.

<It’s actually extremely uncommon,> said Alfric. <And dangerous. But we should find lots of ectad materials here, which is good, and ideally some kind of entad that follows the same pattern.>

<Rare for that to happen,> said Hannah. <Entads don’t usually suit the space, or not that well.>

<True,> said Alfric, but he seemed chipper nonetheless.

They’d taken the left tunnel, and it went for quite a distance, enough that they began to relax. It had gotten somewhat tight as they’d gone through, until eventually they were crawling on their hands and knees. The gravity was pulling them in weird directions, and Isra’s stomach was rebelling against it. She banged up her knees and elbows along the way, from times when she overcompensated for the odd things that gravity was doing.

<Found the exit,> said Alfric. <I think we’re going to be dropping in, it’s about ten feet down. There’s a serpent but it hasn’t seen us yet.> Isra was grateful for the party channel, which allowed them conversation in relative silence.

<I’m way in the back,> said Mizuki.

<Can you make me bigger?> asked Alfric.

<No line of sight, I just said that,> Mizuki replied.

<Through the party link?> asked Alfric.

Mizuki was silent for a moment that seemed to stretch on. <I can try, I guess.>

<I’ll let you know when, I’ll probably have to take this combat one on one. The room is forty feet by sixty feet, I think. Gravity seems normal but it’s hard to tell. The serpent is coiled up, I’m hoping that the bident can kill him without too much fight.> His voice was deathly calm.

<Will we be able to get back up?> asked Mizuki. <Also, I’m very ready to be out of this tunnel, it’s cramped.>

<Think about how I feel,> said Hannah.

<We have gear to get back up,> said Alfric. <And your staff to stand on to get a leg up. Ready with the spell?>

<Ready, I guess,> said Mizuki.

<Now!> yelled Alfric.

Alfric was just ahead of Isra, and she had watched him wriggle out of the tunnel and drop down. She followed just behind him, slipping through the hole and trying her best to break her fall or roll into it. The room had a tile floor with a pattern of blue flower petals on it, seen and registered in her mind. Isra got to her feet just in time to roll away from a swipe of the creature’s tail.

The white ‘serpent’ had uncoiled itself, and as Alfric moved in to stab it, it split straight down the middle. Inside it was hollow, and the two halves straightened out until the creature was almost completely flat, like a ribbon.

Mizuki’s spell went off when Alfric moved in with his bident, causing him to both smack his head against the ceiling and miss his mark. He suddenly found himself fighting while crouched down, and his largeness created a problem for Isra, who needed to shoot past him.

Alfric fought against the creature all the same, crouched and cramped though he was. He wasn’t able to use his shield as effectively, and the ends of the bident banged against the ceiling and the floor more than once. He stabbed the creature, and it writhed around, but it slipped free before he could pin it against the back wall. Isra loosed her first arrow and walked along with it. She could see that the angle was bad and it would miss, but she drew and sent another arrow off, this one aimed directly at its head. The flat serpent had mandibles like a centipede and two large red eyes like spheres stuck awkwardly onto the end of it.

Her second arrow went straight through the creature, just left of its spine, but it seemed to be barely fazed by the damage she’d done.

Isra was back in normal time when Hannah dropped down from the hole. She landed wrong, putting too much weight on one leg, which buckled below her, and she screamed into the party channel, loud enough that Isra winced. She was back on her feet quickly though, likely healing through whatever injury she’d sustained.

<Don’t come down until it’s dead,> she said through the party chat. <Get help when you drop.>

Alfric’s efforts with the serpent were going poorly. The bident could poke a hole in it, and had poked enough of them that bright red blood was flowing from the creature, but it wasn’t ending the fight. Isra’s arrows, similarly, were passing through. She was trying to hit it in the spine, or in the head, but those shots were too difficult to make, especially when the flat serpent moved so quickly.

Alfric threw down his bident and shield and lunged for the creature, stomping on it and grabbing it. It didn’t take him long to have it pinned down beneath his enlarged mass, and once it was, he wasted no time pulling on it with all his might. Eventually it gave way, ripping from the holes they’d put in it until the beast was in two pieces. Alfric got to his feet and knocked his head against the ceiling, spinning around to look at the creature and make sure it was dead. It was still writhing on the ground, at least the half that still had a head, but it was purposeless motion, and it slowed down to a stop quite quickly.

<Healing,> said Alfric.

Hannah rushed over to him. He was covered in blood, and not all of it could have been the creature’s.

<You okay down there?> asked Mizuki.

<He’ll be fine,> said Hannah. <Can’t take too many more hits like that though, mostly from the loss of blood.>

<Not the best thing for us to fight,> said Alfric, looking down at the monster’s body. Hannah finished her work, and Alfric looked up at the hole, where Mizuki was looking down. <You still have the wand, right? And it’s still intact?>

<I haven’t actually fought anything yet, so yeah, it’s fine,> said Mizuki.

<Use it, it has my sack, which has rope in it,> said Alfric. <There are two things you could use to keep a bar in place, would you rather use a jackscrew or hammer in some pitons?>

<Uh,> said Mizuki. <You’d need to explain what those things are.>

She eventually settled on the pitons, and perhaps twenty minutes later, a rope was dangled down from the hole. It seemed a bit unnecessary to Isra, but the height was more like fifteen feet than ten feet, and it probably would have taken quite a bit of work to stack things up to get back to the hole. She had spent much of that time eyeing the room’s single door, thinking about what she would do if something came through it.

Mizuki slid down the rope, looking both up and down it with quite a bit of fear in her eyes, even though Alfric was there holding out his arms to catch her. Verity followed quickly after her, showing no fear or concern.

<No loot?> asked Mizuki, looking around the room.

<Nothing so far,> said Hannah. While they’d waited for the pitons to be hammered in, Hannah had made a thorough search.

<I think the tiles might be valuable,> said Isra. <They’re not stuck in place very well. I don’t know how valuable they would be.>

<We’ll talk about it later,> said Alfric. <Verity, the song is done?>

<No,> she said. <I kept it going.>

<Really?> asked Alfric.

<She was sitting in the hole with me, strumming her lute every now and then,> said Mizuki.

<Doesn’t that take concentration and power?> asked Alfric.

<Not if I do it right,> said Verity.

<Then let’s go, I guess,> said Alfric.

Isra wondered whether she was the only one feeling somewhat claustrophobic. The tunnel they’d gone through to drop down into the room hadn’t been that tight, not enough that she’d had to worry too much, but there was no give to it, and it was rock, not dirt. If it collapsed, there would be no way for them to get through it, or at least no way without some serious effort on their part. If it had collapsed on them, they would likely die. They were going to have to pass back through the tunnel, and the more Isra thought about it, the more she didn’t like it.

Alfric went to the room’s only door, readied himself, then tested the handle to see how much it would swing. He frowned after a moment, and pulled harder.

<Locked,> he said.

<Meaning?> asked Mizuki. <What do we do?>

<Hang on,> said Alfric. <Hinges are on the outside.>

It was another ten minutes before all that was dealt with, and then even more time to try to pry the door off. The locking mechanism wasn’t terribly complicated, but the deadbolt held fast. Eventually, the door came down, and they could see another corridor. Beyond it, there was a cavern of immense size, and they all came out into it to look. There were no obvious monsters, and it seemed as though it was safe, or at least safe enough.

<Not the biggest room we’ve seen,> said Alfric. <But after that tunnel, it’s a bit refreshing.> He held up his lantern, and it didn’t do much to illuminate the back wall. The floor of the cavern sloped down into still water with bits of bioluminescent blue motes, and the ceiling was likewise beyond the view of their lanterns.

There was something up near the ceiling. Isra could feel it more than see it.

<Put up a guard,> said Isra. <On the ceiling.>

Alfric put up his shield, hiding behind it, but it was pretty clear that he couldn’t see whatever it was that Isra was seeing — or rather, feeling. <Where?>

<I don’t know,> said Isra. <Up there, somewhere.>

Verity took her song out of hibernation and ramped it up, enhancing the vision of everyone in the party by so much that it was almost disorienting. Isra could see the individual threads on every piece of fabric, the individual strands of hair on their heads, every scratch and fingerprint on their armor, too much, really. And above, a hundred feet up, there were monsters on the ceiling. They were visible mostly from their wings, black leathery wings with red lines on the skin where the bones were. They didn’t hang down like a bat did, but pulled themselves flat against the surface, all in a cluster, looking almost like scales. There were at least a hundred of them, and Isra tried counting them, first one side and then the other, trying to get a sense of their numbers. Each was the size of a fat housecat, ten or maybe twenty pounds, big fat bats, or at least something that shared a surface similarity.

<Welp,> said Mizuki. She was staring at the ceiling. <That’s a lot of monsters.>

<No fireballs?> asked Alfric.

<I could maybe do a dinky one,> said Mizuki. <Enough to singe one of them. The dominant mood is time. Why aren’t they going for us?>

<They don’t know we’re here,> said Alfric. <Or they’re not hostile, which would be … well, very, very odd.>

<They’re hostile,> said Isra. She could feel it in them, that wrongness that was now becoming familiar. It was beyond seething hatred.

<Okay, so we try to go through the water to the other end, where there’s a door,> he pointed at the other side of the pool, where Isra could see, with enhanced vision, the outline, of it, <Or we can fight them.>

<Is there a reason to fight?> asked Hannah.

<Better to fight them on our own terms,> said Alfric. <If they wake up while we’re swimming, we could be in for a nightmare.>

<How deep is that water?> asked Mizuki. <I didn’t bring a swimsuit.>

<Hard to say,> said Alfric, peering over. <Hard to test without disturbing it, and there might be something down there. Isra?>

<Not that I can feel,> she replied. <The water is … knee deep? The light comes from a tiny jellyfish, thimble sized, harmless.>

<Possibly valuable,> said Alfric. <We should capture a few.>

<Stop,> said Isra. Alfric froze in place. <One of the bats had some dim awareness of us … I think.> It was so difficult to say, but there was a change, at least in one of them. Looking up, Isra thought she saw one of the resting creatures stir.

<Are we good?> asked Alfric. He was looking up at the ceiling, not moving an inch.

The creature, the one that had stirred, dropped down, twirling around to face them and doing a steep dive like a falcon going after its prey. The speed was so fast that even with enhanced senses it was difficult to track, and its movement through the air was loud enough to sound like a scream. Alfric brought his shield up and moved to block it from hitting Hannah, getting there just in time for it to catch the edge of his shield with a sickening crunch. The creature was dead, torn apart from the impact, and Alfric was gripping his shield arm in pain. The bat had no visible head, just a chest that was filled with things like worms, and the architecture of a mouth within it.

The rest of them had heard, and Isra had no idea how they were going to handle it, even if they could somehow get back into the corridor in time.

<Timely!> shouted Mizuki, which made absolutely no sense to Isra. The effect was immediate though, because time slowed to a crawl, not quite as slow as it was with her magical bow, but slowed nonetheless. The air felt thick, like moving through water, and breathing was so difficult that it was a struggle just to get a lungful.

The spell, if that was what it was, affected all of them, and it likely saved them from death. Isra pushed to the side, fighting the thickness of the air, and narrowly avoided one of the worm-chested bats slamming into her. She knew she needed to get back to the corridor, but the entire flock was descending from the ceiling now, and moving in a straight line seemed like a guarantee that she would be hit. It was all she could do to dodge and weave between the hurtling bodies, and the others were scrambling too.

Verity had been closest to the doorway, and made it in the quickest. Her song was still going strong, and she shifted it to raw speed.

Isra ran, which required taking her eyes off the plummeting bats. Everyone else was running too, and the rain of creatures couldn’t be entirely avoided. Alfric had his shield up, held above his head, and Hannah was covering her head with her hands, but they were still being struck, usually grazing strikes, but occasionally a solid one that staggered them and threatened to tip them. The impacts were horrifying, wet thumps and harsh cracks, the creatures killing themselves with their dives, breaking bones against the rocky floor, snapping their own necks.

Isra was struck in the shoulder just as she got through the doorway, and had to be helped by Alfric to make it to safety. He was limping with blood streaming out of his bad leg, and Hannah came after him, also bloodied about her face, her helm having not protected her, or possibly just turned what would have been a lethal hit into a serious injury.

Mizuki was the last to come in. She’d been watching the bats come down and twirling past them, more focused on that than safety or running. She had her staff in her hands and was hitting them aside, sometimes diverting them by only just enough. She didn’t seem like she’d gotten hit, but the sweat had matted loose strands of hair to her face, and she was getting gassed. She finally dashed toward the safety of the corridor, avoiding the descending bats with speed more than finesse, and came under the protection of the overhang just as the last of the bats hit the ground.

<Eyugh!> grunted Mizuki, <What was that! Worm bellies!>

The spell she’d made wore off, and they were all left panting, and in some cases, bleeding. It took Hannah a moment to get to her feet and start healing them, starting with Alfric, who had already suffered two nasty hits earlier in the dungeon.

<Did you see me moving out there?> asked Mizuki. <I was like fighting them off and dodging around and I kept thinking that there was no way I was going to be able to keep it up, that I was one bad move away from getting absolutely destroyed.> She held out her hand, which was shaking. <I don’t think I’ve ever been this amped up.>

Verity set her lute to the side and threw up. Isra went to her and rubbed her back for a moment, trying to help as best she could. There wasn’t all that much you could do for someone who had thrown up.

<There are mints and chocolates in the wand pack,> said Alfric. <They should be fine to eat, but they’ll be a little different from what I put in.>

Verity looked quite pale, and she gave a nod. Isra took the wand from Mizuki and used it to pull out Alfric’s sack, and eventually found both a waterskin and a packet of mints and chocolates. She did this using her uninjured arm, which made it take twice as long. Isra was dimly aware that she was under the influence of a battle rush, and that the pain would be felt more keenly very soon.

<Anyone else need healin’?> asked Hannah once she was done with Alfric. She had tended to her own head wound, but there was still a good deal of blood on her face.

<I got hit,> said Isra. <In the shoulder.> She hadn’t been moving it much. When she did move it, there was a bright flare of pain, like the sun had gotten into her brain.

<Oh,> said Hannah once she was touching Isra. <It’s ground pork. Let me see if I can do somethin’ about this.>

The relief, when it came, was incredible, and Isra rolled her shoulder a few times just for the feeling of being able to do that without pain. That phrase, ‘ground pork’, was rattling around in her head.

<You guys saw me out there dodging the birds, right?> asked Mizuki. <And that spell was, if I do say so myself, amazing for my first time doing a party thing. I’d kind of been thinking about it as soon as we got into the dungeon and I saw time was available.> She was staring at the dead worm-bats and gripping her staff with white knuckles. It was a virtual field of the dead, at least two hundred, their corpses spread out around where the party had been standing. <That was so good.>

<Not even remotely how I would describe it,> said Verity. She was leaned back against the wall with her eyes closed. Her face was pale, almost green. <I lost the song, by the way, sorry.>

<We all lived, right?> asked Mizuki. <Just needed some healing?> She finally looked back at them and saw their faces. <What?>

<I’m glad you had a good time with that,> said Alfric. <But as dungeon experiences go, it was a bit traumatic, I think. We’re going to take a little break.>

<I’m not saying that I had a ‘good time’,> said Mizuki. <But I was,> she wiggled her hips side to side. <I was moving, in the moment, holding onto this wonderful rhythm, dodging and slapping them to the side without a single thought actually going through my head. It was an experience, you know?>

<I was watching,> said Verity. <I got to safety and then I was sitting there, so worried that someone was going to die. I felt it in my throat.>

<Without the spell speeding us up, there’s a good chance one of us would have died,> said Alfric. <A single hit to the head might have been enough.>

<I did get hit in the head,> said Hannah. <Lost a bit of time, actually. I don’t remember gettin’ into the corridor, nor most of what I did when I healed you, so let’s hope I did a good job.>

<You’re fine now?> asked Alfric.

<Ay,> said Hannah. <Though I do need a rest.>

<We’ll have to make sure you don’t have a concussion,> said Alfric. <Look into my eyes?> He squinted at her. <Hrm, okay. Rest for now.>

<Is she going to be alright?> asked Isra.

<She’s probably fine,> said Alfric. <But having our healer injured or incapacitated is what I’d consider a worst-case scenario. That goes double given how difficult it would be to get back through the tunnel with a limp body. We’d have to go grab the stone.>

<I’m fine,> said Hannah. She was slumped against the wall, resting her head, with her helm removed. <No symptoms of a concussion other than the lost time, and I’ve healed myself up from the hits I took. A few broken bones, but now I’m right as rain.>

<A few?> asked Mizuki. <How many hits did you take?>

<With the lost time, I wouldn’t trust my count,> said Hannah. <I can’t even remember which bones it was I broke. Suffice to say I didn’t have such a wonderful experience of dodgin’ birds as you did.>

<They’re more like bats,> said Isra. <With worms on their chest. That’s also where their mouth is.> She glanced at the field of corpses. <Alfric, why did they do that?>

<Why were they suicidal?> asked Alfric. <That’s just dungeon madness. They wanted to kill us and didn’t care whether they died in the process, not that they were smart enough to realize what they were doing. Dungeon madness, usually, means trying to kill at any cost, though the interpretation, so to speak, differs.>

Isra felt bad for the creatures, which wasn’t unusual when it came to dungeons. They had been clustered, sleeping together, and then when they’d sensed people — maybe the noise, maybe the lantern — they had gone into a murderous frenzy, sacrificing their lives for no reason at all. The party hadn’t wanted these creatures to die. If the creatures had been docile, which was very possible under normal circumstances, they could have sat there peacefully for all the party cared. It was sad.

<Doing okay?> Alfric asked Hannah.

<Just fine,> she said, getting to her feet.

<We have nothing to show for this dungeon so far,> said Verity.

<We’re a third of the way done, by my estimate,> said Alfric. <Is everyone good to go? I do want to get something from this place.>

<The tiles,> said Isra. <And these jellyfish.>

<Yes, we’ll collect both,> said Alfric. <But they’re not really what we’re coming here for.>

They spent another few minutes resting up, checking themselves over and having Hannah make some repairs to their equipment, including a dent in her own helm. The dungeon, so far, had not been kind, and Isra was hoping that she wouldn’t have too many more injuries before the day was out.

Chapter 75 - Constrained

It had been a bad dungeon. There was a term for a truly awful dungeon, one with horrible monsters and no loot, a selden dungeon, often with that word, selden, spoken like a curse. This wasn’t that bad, since they had the bows, the mallet, and maybe a few other things of worth, but it was bad, the worst they’d experienced so far. The fights had been too difficult, the tunnels too narrow, and the terrain unwieldy.

There was a good argument for resetting the day and doing it all over again, and it was the first real test of bad luck as a party. If he did reset, it would be a real test of their ability to handle that as a party. Lola’s reports of her own team had him a bit on edge, and he did wonder how his party would react to being told that the dungeon was a bust, or to knowing that they had an entire day with him that he now remembered and they did not.

Lola was on his mind much more than she should have been. A dungeon required focus and consideration. It wasn’t a time for idle thoughts about an ex. He’d had a dream about her the night before, one where they were kissing, and it had been pleasant until he’d woken up and a gross feeling had washed over him, lingering there.

<Stop,> said Isra.

Alfric stopped mid-stride, allowing his forward foot to hover in the air. <Problem?>

<There’s a — wire, hair, something,> said Isra.

Alfric looked down, and could see nothing. He slowly moved his foot backward along the path it had already taken, then crouched down. He could only just barely see what she was talking about in the light of his lantern, and only from a certain angle.

<Huh,> he said. <That … is a trap of some kind.> He followed the thin thread into the wall, where it went between the bricks, and then looked carefully, trying to see what it might possibly trigger. <Traps aren’t common, not more common than people putting traps in their own home. Isra, can you see what it’s connected to?>

<See, no,> said Isra. <But I can feel it.> She moved forward. <There, behind that brick. Poison.>

<Poison gas, liquid, what?> asked Alfric, staring at the spot she’d indicated.

<It’s a shape,> said Isra, frowning in concentration. <An angled shape.> She seemed upset with the wall for not easily giving up its secrets. <Oh.>

She leaned down and cut through the tripwire with a knife, and a tiny section of the wall opened up almost immediately, revealing a small mechanism that fired an arrow directly into the opposing wall. It clattered to the ground, and she picked it up to look at it. The head was diamond-shaped and covered with a sticky-black oil.

<A poisoned arrow,> said Alfric. <That could have killed me. We don’t have anything we can use against poison.>

<It wouldn’t be lethal,> said Isra, staring at the arrowhead. <It would just make you throw up for six hours or so, assuming the arrow itself wasn’t fatal.> She said this with calm, as though it hadn’t just happened because of his carelessness and wandering mind. He was being a bad leader.

<We’ll be on the lookout for more traps,> said Alfric. <Where there’s one, there might be more.> That seemed to be true for bows.

He moved down the corridor with more caution, with Isra close behind him, trying to maintain as much focus on the dungeon itself as he could. Thinking about other things while in a dungeon was a good way to get killed — or at least to end up vomiting for six hours.

The corridor ended in another room, but before they could even enter it, a huge humanoid with missing teeth and a split nose launched itself at them. It was too large for the corridor though, and its shoulders couldn’t clear the doorframe, which left it frantically grasping at them and trying to wedge itself closer. The hand was almost as large as Alfric was, and if it could have grabbed him in its three-fingered grip, it likely would have been able to crush him. The giant was dungeon mad and constrained though, its head just barely through the door and arm fully extended, with Alfric beyond its reach.

Sometimes, you got lucky. It took some time to do safely, and Alfric was a little bit worried that the tunnel would collapse, but he very calmly pulled out his sword and began hacking away. He didn’t have enough power to slice through the fingers, but he cut them up enough that the creature was slamming its bloody fingers back and forth, articulation lost. It was still trying to squeeze itself further down the tunnel, or to grab Alfric.

<Speed me up, please,> said Alfric, staring at the creature as it strained.

<Oh, me?> asked Mizuki. She was well back, not wanting to get splattered with blood, which was sensible. <I mean, yes, of course me, no one else could do it, sorry, spell incoming, a little light on time but I think it will do.>

Once time had slowed, as it did during the nightmarish rain of bats, Alfric waited until the hand had flopped to one side, then dashed forward with his sword. He arrived at the wrist just as the hand smashed into the wall. The cut needed to be deep, slitting the arteries open, and he did as well as he could before dashing back to safety, nearly getting clipped by a bloody finger.

From there, it was just a matter of waiting. Blood was spilling down onto the floor by the cupful, and the monster was slowing down, the slapping of its hand getting slower and more wild. Eventually, it slumped to the floor. There were a few exceptions, but dungeon madness didn’t typically allow for much in the way of cunning or stealth, so when the monster was still, Alfric moved forward and put his hand to its mouth to confirm that it had stopped breathing. The head and body blocked much of the doorway, but there was enough room to squeeze through.

<Looks like there’s a room after this one,> said Alfric as he climbed the matted, bloody hair on the head.

<Uh,> said Mizuki. <Is there a way we can … not crawl over a giant dead guy?>

Alfric paused then climbed back down the hair. <I can put you into the stone, yes, it’s not far away.>

<Are you goin’ to get the blood off you, or … ?> asked Hannah.

Alfric looked down. The cut up fingers had sprayed blood all over him, and where the wrist had bled, the blood was nearly an inch deep and spreading into the cracks. <I was going to wait until I was done getting bloody,> said Alfric. <There’s a wooden bucket full of water in the stone, but I’ll have to take my armor off to go grab it, and I wanted to wait until all the fighting was done.>

<Fair enough,> shrugged Hannah.

<I’ll get the stone,> said Alfric. <But from the look I had into that room, it might have been the last one, so I think we might be moving to clean up.>

Some time later, Alfric had them pop out of the stone, well-clear of the corpse. The room the humanoid had been in was hewn stone, large and imposing, with two doors off to either side, both of them thick wooden ones. That was a bit of a disappointment, that there was more to this dungeon: Alfric wanted to clean up, collect their meager winnings, and go.

<Ugh, it’s absolutely rank,> said Mizuki, holding her nose and looking at the corpse. <Did he poop himself?>

From the other side, the monster could be seen in full. It had four small, stunted legs and spurs of bone sticking out from it at odd angles which had cut into the floor of the room. The creature was naked, and despite the generally human design, had nothing that suggested a life lived in the room, or an existence prior to being spawned by the dungeon. There was also nothing of note in the room itself, only refuse, largely in the form of rotting vegetables, which did little to help mask the smell of death and defecation.

Alfric had bought masks with herb pouches in Dondrian, but not brought them with, mostly because of space limitations, but also partly because they didn’t have the entad support to bring along absolutely everything that they might possibly want to have with them, and largely didn’t plan on lugging the book or stone around. Still, he cursed his lack of foresight.

He trudged on once it was clear there was nothing in the room worth taking. This dungeon had quite a few long tunnels connecting the rooms, which was good, as it helped to prevent an encounter with multiple monsters all piling into the same room. Alfric followed the left door first, being cautious in the corridor to check for traps, though that ended up being a waste of time. The corridor ended in a small room, little more than a closet, which had clothes that no human could wear without serious alterations. The fabric would be taken, since that was sensible, but they’d be lucky to get a handful of rings from it, and would be better off donating it to a quilting club or something similar.

Backtracking to the room where the giant still lay dead in the doorway, they then took the right path, and there, finally, they hit paydirt. It was a dining room, one with a large table and a number of chairs, and before each of those was a table setting. All of it looked normal enough, and a full set of dinnerware, along with all the silverware, would be worth hundreds, maybe more. The chairs could be sold too, especially as a set, and they were handsome pieces, beautifully carved and well-varnished.

<There at the end, under the table,> said Isra. She had her bow drawn and ready. <Monster.>

Alfric readied his bident, grimacing. He was praying that the fight would be short, and that they could end this dungeon on a high note before extracting as much of the valuables as possible, the better to improve the chances of doing a second dungeon in the very near future. He’d needed this dungeon to be smooth and easy with good rewards, and this was the final room, the last chance to have something that would improve morale.

And now there was a monster in the dining room, and Alfric was very worried that it was going to wreck everything he was hoping to sell. His mind, unaccountably and unfortunately, took a turn toward Lola.

<We’re going to try baiting it down the hallway,> said Alfric, trying to regain his bearings. <It’s not attacking, that means that it doesn’t sense us yet, so everyone go back, then —>

The creature lurched forward, knocking chairs aside, and Alfric stabbed it with his bident before even getting all that good a look at it. It was a small blue creature, as creatures went, not much bigger than a human, and it had scales all over, each of them oversized, none smaller than a handspan. The bident wasn’t useless against it, but it was having trouble finding purchase, which was becoming a running theme. Alfric focused on the threats, its fangs that were so long they pierced out through the bottom of its mouth, and its claws that seemed perfectly capable of slicing through flesh.

Alfric moved backward, and the creature followed after, whipping a tail behind it. Alfric winced as he heard something shatter, and did his best to pull it into the hallway where he could kill it.

Mizuki’s spell came as a complete surprise, unannounced. Alfric had thought that she’d scrape together time, if possible, but the texture of the aether was different in different parts of the dungeon. Instead, she went for growth, and it wasn’t on Alfric. Instead, the spell hit the creature, but only in the arm, expanding it to such a size that it wedged against the floor and ceiling of the corridor. There was a creaking, groaning sound as it tried to expand past its confinement, and Alfric worried about the stability of the stone walls, but it was the bone in the arm that gave way, snapping violently and shoving shards of bone out from under the scales.

The creature screeched and attempted to push forward, but it was incapable of moving with the arm as it was, and it was bleeding all over the place. Alfric backed up, not wanting to get covered in blood a second time, and waited to see what else it would take to kill the creature.

As it turned out, all it took was waiting. The blood kept pouring out of the break in the arm, slowing quickly, and the creature came to a stop in short order, slumping down.

<Did that kill it?> asked Mizuki.

<Yes,> nodded Alfric. <It seems so. And there were no doors in that room, at least not that I could see, which I think means we’re finally done with the fighting, at least if everything goes well. Keep your guard up, but it should be time for us to transition to stripping the place bare. Verity, I’ll leave it to you, but you can likely drop the song now.>

She closed her eyes and let out a sigh, and Alfric felt the benefits of her song fade from him.

They had to wait for Mizuki’s spell to wear off so the oversized arm wouldn’t be blocking them, and then they moved back into the dining room. Two of the chairs had been smashed, but perhaps not beyond the ability of Hannah to repair. A few of the dishes had also been either broken or chipped, but these could be put back together as well, given that the pieces were all still next to each other.

<Would having a big arm like that kill you?> asked Mizuki. She was in the dining room, but looking back at the scaled creature. <I mean, without the walls, if you were just in a field or something, would it kill you to just suddenly have an hugely oversized arm? Because there’s still blood pumping, and does the big blood … touch … the small blood? Are you bleeding out small blood into your own oversized arm?>

<I don’t know,> said Alfric. It seemed a bit of an academic question, and he was surprised that she had asked it.

<I would think it would only have a risk of killin’ a creature as much as cleanly cuttin’ off a limb would,> said Hannah. <Assumin’ that there’s not some change from big to normal at the barrier, once the spell is through.>

<I don’t think there is,> said Mizuki. <Also, I had kind of thought that if the arm grew too big it would just, uh, stop growing.>

<Are you okay?> asked Alfric.

<Huh?> asked Mizuki. She looked away from the creature and back to him. <Yeah, fine, just … didn’t really know my own strength there. I’d been thinking this was a bad dungeon for me, in terms of the dominant moods, but I guess I kind of ended up killing that one on my own.>

<How did you aim the spell?> asked Isra.

<What do you mean?> asked Mizuki, turning to look at her.

<I was standing in front of you,> said Isra. <So was Alfric. We were between you and the creature. How did you aim in order to make sure you didn’t hit us?>

<Oh,> said Mizuki. <Well, uh. I just … saw an opening and took it, that’s how you do it with your arrows, right?>

Isra shook her head. <I do my best not to fire where there’s any chance of hitting Alfric, not unless the situation is dire.>

<And … you think I shouldn’t have cast the spell?> asked Mizuki.

Isra shrugged. <It worked. I can’t deny that.>

<Sorry, if you need a sorry,> said Mizuki. She had a deep frown. <And sorry for not calling out the spell, it was one that I — well, I wasn’t sure would work. It’s easier to affect whole things, usually, instead of just a part of a thing, and — I should have called it out before I did it, sorry.>

<Save it for the post mortem,> said Alfric. <Right now, we need to be looking for entads and figuring out what our process is going to be like to get all these things out. A complete set of henling furniture and tableware is a good get. With the bows it’s enough to justify the dungeon even if there are no more entads, and even if the entads we do have turn out to be garbage.>

Mizuki squinted and walked around the large table, picking a few things up as she did, four in all. It was a good number, and brought their total for the dungeon to nine, which was respectable. Alfric followed behind her, grabbing up whatever she didn’t pick out. That some of these were entads and others not meant that they would be making the sets less even in numbers, but it was unavoidable, and as much as a nice set of henling dishes and silverware could go for, an entad could almost certainly fetch more. Most of what Alfric was grabbing looked mercifully normal. Sometimes you would get things like a plate with no lip, or a fork with a strange number of tines, or a spoon with holes through it, things that the dungeon had created that were off enough from normal that they were useless. Here, that didn’t seem to be a problem they would have to deal with.

<Two forks, a small bowl, and a plate,> said Mizuki. <This actually means that we’re well on our way to making our own kitchen ensemble. And actually, I already know what this fork does, I can feel it in my mind.> She held the fork out in front of her, with everything else balanced on the plate. The tines extended until they were each a foot long, then they wiggled around like tentacles. <Not super useful, but I’m calling dibs.>

<You already have a utensil,> said Verity. <I want something fun.>

<You do?> asked Mizuki. She raised an eyebrow.

<Yes, why wouldn’t I?> asked Verity. She folded her arms. <I like fun.>

<You do?> asked Mizuki.

<But maybe one of the bows will be fun, and Isra can teach me how to shoot,> said Verity. <Still, you don’t get dibs on the second cool utensil.>

<Oh, hey, it actually works without holding it,> said Mizuki. She’d set the fork down on the table, and it slowly lifted itself up, unsteadily, using the tines like little legs. Mizuki was concentrating, and she was able to make the fork run across the table, though there was very little fluidity of motion.

Ceramics could, thankfully, be put into the stone, and since Alfric had brought it with them, he began loading up the garden with all the dishes. The silverware needed to be kept separate, since it was metal.

<I think I’m going into the stone to rearrange, is that okay?> asked Mizuki.

<Sure,> said Alfric. <We’ll put as much in there as we possibly can. I was hoping for a better storage entad, but nothing we have seems likely to fit the profile.>

The table was the biggest item, but eventually, through careful maneuvering, they were able to get it into the stone as well, accomplished by having everyone lift it up, then have them ‘drop’ it in sync. It took a few times, but eventually they got it. The silverware was put into a sack, and they began working their way backward through the dungeon, taking everything of value.

The tiles ended up taking the most work, but Mizuki was able to craft a spell that worked on the grout they’d been put in place with. This cracked about a tenth of the tiles, but Hannah was able to fix most of the cracks, and it saved them what would probably have been a few hours of labor that they didn’t have the proper tools for.

<Can we do the entad testing?> asked Mizuki.

<I don’t think there’s anything we could discover that would increase profitability,> said Alfric. <There’s no point in entad testing here.>

<Fun though, right?> asked Mizuki.

<True,> said Alfric. <But entad testing also means taking a risk. If we don’t do the testing ourselves, I can just take everything to Filera on the undone version of tomorrow and report on the function first thing tomorrow morning.>

<No offense,> said Mizuki. <But that seems really lame. Is entad testing really that dangerous?> She looked down at the little pile they’d made in the dungeon’s antechamber, which consisted of the two forks, four bows, a wooden mallet, a bowl, and a plate. <And yes, the flowerpot, I know, but … still.>

This was, clearly, a morale issue, and more to the point, Alfric agreed. Testing out an entad and thinking about what it might do was fun, and taking them to a cleric of Qymmos to get a complete breakdown of their function was much less fun.

<Alright, we can do a little testing,> said Alfric.

<Nice,> said Mizuki, perking up immediately.

<But possibly outside of the dungeon?> asked Alfric. <We want to minimize the time we spend in here.>

There was something unpleasant about coming out of a dungeon, something that Alfric didn’t like. The dungeons were exciting, and the real world, if it could be called that, was not. He wasn’t sure where this distinction in his mind came from, the way that the dungeons felt like a dream, but it had always been there. The dungeons were, in some sense, like an undone day, a place which was separated by a hard line from the rest of reality. Everything within the dungeon that wasn’t taken out would disappear and fade away, never to be experienced by another living soul, washed away like chalk on a sidewalk.

There was a sense of loss that came from exiting a dungeon, a sense that the dream was over and real life had to resume.

They went to a field that lay just beside the Fractalwoods, one that hadn’t been turned to cultivation. It wasn’t clear whether it was owned by anyone, but there were no houses nearby. Greater Plenarch had been settled fairly late, and there were many places like this, areas that were nominally held by the hex, or in some cases, the province. There was some talk that in another few hundred years everything would be settled and claimed, which was how it was in the area around Dondrian for many hexes, but so far, there were still meadows that weren’t being put to use by people.

Mizuki took the fork, while Alfric took the plate, and the other three took bows and Isra’s spare arrows. One of the bows bound to Hannah, the other to Verity, and the plate was bound to the party. Mizuki and Alfric were left with each other for company.

<I’m surprised you picked something domestic, rather than a weapon of war,> Mizuki said into the party channel.

<Normal voices, please,> said Verity.

<Right, sorry, just got into the habit,> said Mizuki. “So, why the plate?”

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “The ‘weapons of war’ are bows, and those aren’t particularly interesting to me. We don’t need another bow. Who would use it?”

“I could use it, I guess,” said Mizuki. “Usually I just get the one spell in a room, unless we go long, so I could learn how to use a bow and then also shoot things after I’d done the spell.”

“You’re the best candidate, yes,” said Alfric. “But still not a very good candidate. I mean, you’re small.”

“Does that really matter?” asked Mizuki.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “You’d be better with a bow if you were taller — well, taller doesn’t really matter, longer and more muscular arms matter, but for a normal person, yes, that also means taller. And it would be better if you were a boy, you’d have more muscle to work with.”

“I thought women were better with bows?” said Mizuki, but she asked it like a question.

“Um,” said Alfric. “Why do you think that?”

“Dunno,” said Mizuki. “Is that not true?”

“There’s a strength difference between men and women,” said Alfric. “It’s a little less pronounced with a bow, depending on the application. If you need to drive an arrow through an animal’s thick hide, you need strength and a high draw. If what you need is the precision to hit a rabbit, it doesn’t really matter.”

“Mmm,” said Mizuki. “I guess. Do you wish I were a boy?”

Alfric thought about that for a moment.

“Wow, are you actually thinking about that?” asked Mizuki.

“Er, yes,” said Alfric. He looked over at her. His plate was still in his lap, and he was very aware that despite her enthusiasm for entad testing, they were mostly just sitting in a field talking. “You asked a question, I thought you wanted me to think about the answer.”

“I’m a sorc, I don’t need —” she waved her hand. “You know.”

“Extra height, extra muscle,” said Alfric. “Yeah. And the more we gear up, the less any of that will matter, and some of it will wash out entirely.” That was worth a quibble or two, but he had the sense that Mizuki didn’t like quibbles. “So to answer the question, no, I’ve never wished that anyone were physically different, and it’s a bit beside the point to talk about men and women when what we’re really talking about is height, weight, arm span, and things like that. It hasn’t once occurred to me to wish that you had a longer arm span.”

“Might simplify things,” said Mizuki.

“In what way?” asked Alfric, who was still thinking about arm span.

Mizuki gave him a look, then held up her fork. “Function follows form, right?” she asked. “So food is likely, or piercing something, or in that general vicinity?”

The meaning of the look was pretty clear, and Alfric was happy to have that conversation remain unspoken. That she had feelings for him, even if they were unclear or fleeting, was much more obvious after the undone day.

“Function and form are related to each other, usually,” said Alfric. “But sometimes you get a spear that bends in the middle, or a cup that works as a throwable weapon, or a flowerpot that shoots out a giant beam of energy.”

“Do you have rations in your pack?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, I know you must, but can I have some?”

“Sure,” said Alfric.

After that was sorted away, he spent some time playing with the plate. It didn’t give him any intuitive sense of itself, nor did it respond to all the most obvious mental commands he tried to give it, like the command to fill itself up with food. Entads could be tricky, and some were, in a practical sense, unusable without identification by a cleric of Qymmos. It was entirely possible that the activation method for the entad was something that would normally risk breaking it, or whose condition would just never be met.

“It’s a freezing fork,” said Mizuki, who had wrinkled her nose at the end. “Worthless.” She had speared a bit of meat, and it was, in fact, frozen. “Takes ages too.”

“We’ll sell it,” said Alfric. “Probably for not all that much.”

“Any clue on the plate?” asked Mizuki.

“Nothing so far,” said Alfric. He had begun putting food onto it and then pushing the food around, but that was accomplishing nothing but getting the plate dirty. “Could be it only works with certain kinds of foods. I’ll have Filera take a look.”

“Can I have the bowl then?” asked Mizuki.

“Sure,” said Alfric. He handed it over, and having little better to do, just looked around.

Isra and Verity were together, and Isra was showing Verity how to use the bow with what felt, to Alfric, like entirely too much touching to be practical. He didn’t know whether the two of them were an item or not, but they spent quite a bit of their time together, and it was clear that something was developing, even if it was with glacial slowness. If it could be a happy, healthy relationship, one that would help each of them provide support for the other … but it seemed like there was an equal chance that it would come violently crashing apart. There was nothing he could do though, short of trying to keep them away from each other, and he wasn’t about to do that. Maybe, if they did get together, he might offer them some advice, but he was hardly qualified to do that.

“It’s got some kind of reservoir,” said Mizuki, looking down at the bowl. She’d poured water from a waterskin into it, and was staring down at the bowl. She pointed into the bowl with a finger and touched the water line. “Do we have a drink that’s not water?”

“Sure,” said Alfric. “There’s a bottle of spirits.” The pack was beside him, and he dug around in it to pull out a small flask.

“Why?” asked Mizuki.

“Alcohol is good for disinfecting things,” said Alfric.

“Huh,” said Mizuki. She poured a splash of it into the bowl, then looked at the water line and frowned before taking a drink from the flask. She coughed and sputtered and made a face at Alfric. “Good gods, what is that?”

“To be a good disinfectant, it needs to be really strong,” said Alfric. “Sorry?”

“It’s fine,” said Mizuki, shaking her head. “Blegh, can you get me a chocolate to get the taste out?”

“Sure,” said Alfric. He dug around in the pack.

“I was really only doing that so I could taste what it was like,” said Mizuki. “Because the bowl … it’s putting the extra liquid somewhere, and I wanted to see whether it was all going to the same place, or if it was dividing them up or something.”

“Ah,” said Alfric, handing her a piece of chocolate.

Mizuki ate the chocolate, then tentatively took a sip from the bowl. “Yup, it’s watered down. Shoot. Far less useful. Right?”

“You have to think about who would want it,” said Alfric. “And some of that depends on things that we can’t test right now. If it can hold a lot of liquid, then it’s potentially a good storage entad, just not one that we’re going to be able to use. There’s a saying, for dungeoneers, that you can always imagine a more powerful version of an entad.”

“What do you mean?” asked Mizuki. “That we shouldn’t imagine it doesn’t have limits, because it probably does have limits?”

“Yes,” nodded Alfric. “It can be very tempting to think ‘oh, what if this bowl could hold an entire lake full of water, wouldn’t that be useful’, but generally speaking, you don’t see that sort of thing, or not often.”

“But you do occasionally see it,” said Mizuki.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “And if we have something like that, then we’ll sell it off for a good price, unless you can think of something that we could do with it to keep some of the money for ourselves.”

“Probably just a gallon or so,” said Mizuki. She looked up. “Oh, looks like Hannah has something fun.”

Hannah was using one of the bows, and rather than sending an arrow sailing through the air, she was picking up stones and pulling them back, lined up with the bowstring. For a normal bow, this shouldn’t have accomplished anything much except whacking the rock against the bow itself, or sending it a few feet in front of her. Instead, because of the magic of the bow, as soon as the rock was released, it transformed into an arrow, which sailed a good distance before landing. Hannah jogged over and picked it up, looking it over.

“Doesn’t actually seem that fun,” said Alfric.

“Hannah, fire the stone arrow!” shouted Mizuki. Hannah looked up, then nodded.

She drew back the stone arrow and loosed it, though she didn’t use her full draw. Instead of flying through the air like an arrow should have, it turned back into a rock and plopped to the ground not far in front of her.

“I think we can use this as a storage entad!” Hannah called. She had a smile on her face.

<We’ll pack up soon,> said Alfric. <Get home, get rested, have some dinner.>

“It was a good dungeon,” said Mizuki. “Though you said we were going to get ectad materials.”

“I said it was likely,” said Alfric. “Dominant styling would have suggested it would be more likely. But with dungeons, you get what you get.”

“You’re not still thinking of undoing it, right?” asked Mizuki.

“No, not at all,” said Alfric. “I’ll be watching Hannah for brain damage, we’ll take her to the clerics to get checked over, and we’ll try to figure these entads out a bit more, but overall it was successful, I think. Not wildly so, but it was workaday dungeoneering.”

“And then we take a day off,” said Mizuki. “And then do it all over again.”

Perhaps it was wishful thinking on Alfric’s part, but he thought that she sounded eager about it.

When they returned to the house, with Hannah having been cleared by the clerics, Alfric had a moment of wariness, a sense of Lola lying in wait. There was no sign that she’d been to the house, or in the house while they were gone, but it was always a possibility. Mizuki had locked up, but they were locks that could be easily defeated by someone who had taken the time and effort to learn to pick a lock. And if Lola had been in the house, she could have done anything from stealing to poisoning. What she would do was unclear.

The Lola problem needed to be solved. It was too much stress and too much of a distraction.

He tried to put it out of his mind. He had no solution aside from waiting for Lola to make a mistake, but it was clear now that the problem was weighing on him, enough to be a liability. He tried, once more, to push it from his mind. There was, after all, work to do.

Chapter 76 - Misgivings

Hannah did enjoy being fretted over by Alfric, though she was fairly confident that she did not, in fact, have a concussion. So far as she could tell, Alfric had never dealt with anyone having a concussion before, but he knew they were rather serious things, and was doing his best. There was a sweetness to Alfric, a way that he liked to take care of things and people. It wasn’t necessarily what she’d expected of him when she’d first met him, but it was nice.

They’d taken the dagger back to Pucklechurch, arriving at the temple, which was where they’d left it because that was where all the clerics were, just in case. At Alfric’s insistence, Hannah was checked over by both Filera and Lin, just to make sure there wasn’t some damage to her brain that she had missed. They had given her the all clear, and Alfric had said that it was good to have them check, which Hannah grudgingly agreed with. Those had always been her least favorite sorts when she’d been at the temple though, people coming in for what turned out to be nothing.

The rest of their day had been spent at the house, unloading whatever needed to be unloaded and cleaning up. The entads and henlings would be sold later on, likely with their next trip to Liberfell, but full identification would need to wait a few days. There had been nothing in the way of ectads, which sorely disappointed Alfric, who had been hoping for the material to make floatstones. Once all the work was done, it was time to rest and relax for everyone but Isra and Mizuki, who moved into the kitchen to start work on dinner. Alfric offered to help, but was shooed out by Mizuki, and ended up sitting on the couch next to Hannah, who’d just finished up with a shower.

“Still feeling okay?” asked Alfric.

“Fine,” said Hannah. “A bit of a headache, but it’s nothin’ I can’t manage.” She glanced toward the kitchen.

“I tried to help,” said Alfric. “And I offered to pay for dinner at one of the taverns.”

“She likes to cook,” said Hannah. She sighed. “So, how’d we do?”

“Frankly?” asked Alfric. “Pretty well, given the circumstances. Some very bad encounters there, I thought. The bats especially. But we were working well together, and it felt like some of the lessons had sunk in. There’s still a way to go, but … it was fairly good. We’ll do a post mortem and talk it over.”

“Mmm,” said Hannah. “Too much to heal, in my opinion, and yes, I do take that as a sign that things have gone wrong.”

“Are you … okay?” asked Alfric.

“I’m fine,” said Hannah. “A cleric can burn out, but it takes more than just correction of a few broken bones.” None of the breaks were all that bad either, no bones sticking out of flesh and no broken skin, which were quite hard to heal, especially if it needed to be done without setting things back in place.

“What is it like, to lose connection to your god?” asked Alfric.

“There’s a fraying,” said Hannah. “They often compare it to marriage, but I don’t have the expertise to say how true that is, having yet to experience marriage myself. You feel this love and connection, but then … oh, I don’t know, someone doesn’t do their share, or there’s a bit of snippiness, and you still love each other, you’re still partners, but it feels like there’s love lost, at least for a bit, until you’ve made it up to each other.”

“But it doesn’t go both ways,” said Alfric.

“It’s a metaphor, it’s not meant to be taken to every extreme,” said Hannah. “But in point of fact, it does go both ways. It very much is a relationship, albeit one that’s less tangible than others, with less in the way of communication. I can tell when it’s frayed, and I’m sure that Garos can tell as well, when the fraying comes from the other direction.”

“Does that happen?” asked Alfric.

“All the time,” nodded Hannah. “I do make concessions, ay? To practicality, sometimes, but also in other directions. Symmetry isn’t the only thing in my life, not by a long shot.”

“I suppose I can see why you find it irritating when Mizuki talks about running out of ‘juice’,” said Alfric.

“Oh, I can handle it just fine,” said Hannah. “If it helps her to understand, she can say ‘cleric juice’ all she wants.”

“You did well, by the way,” said Alfric.

“I got hit by quite a few bats,” said Hannah. “But I appreciate you sayin’ so. And you were right about pushin’ on, in the end. Also, it felt like you did half the work and Mizuki did the other half, though I wouldn’t want to undersell Verity’s contributions, and Isra got her share of arrows in.” Hannah felt a bit guilty for ranking her teammates.

“I’m not sure I handled the giant in the right way,” said Alfric. “It was dangerous to go for the wrist.” He sighed. “We can save some of this for the post mortem, which I’d like to put off until tomorrow, but I think there’s less to talk about this time.”

“Probably for the best that we don’t talk things to death,” said Hannah.

“Dinner in five!” called Mizuki from the kitchen.

“Smells lovely!” Hannah called back.

“This marks a historic occasion,” said Alfric. “It’s our first meal paid for out of the party fund.”

“Well, hurrah to that,” said Hannah.

She got up from the couch and stretched out. Symmetrical healing could do a lot, as could the minor bit of work that Lin had done from the power of Oeyr, but there was still a tiredness and soreness that came from having been beaten up and banged around. Hannah had taken more than her fair share of damage over the course of the dungeon, but the worst of it, in her opinion, was dropping down and breaking her ankle. It was a lesser injury, but there’d been so much lead up to it, looking down at the drop and knowing that it was far enough to hurt, knowing that it was coming, which made the whole thing feel so much more impactful. The impact of the break on her mind had been oversized. She did her best to shake it off.

Dinner was a large fish from the Proten Lakes, which Mizuki had apparently gotten the idea for from something that Alfric had said happened in an undone day. There it had been brought in express by Xy, but here it had come through a more delayed order placed through one of the town merchants, still fresh, but far cheaper. The fish was large enough that it had barely been able to fit into the oven, which hadn’t been helped by the fact that it had been stuffed with citrus, vegetables, and some kind of pork.

“We’re going to have lots of leftovers, unfortunately,” said Mizuki. “The fish is big enough to feed two full parties.”

Verity and Hannah had helped to set the table, and Alfric had helped with the final touches on the pan of roasted fingerling potatoes, which apparently meant crushing them prior to another round under intense heat. Mizuki had said that it was something about texture, and Hannah wasn’t entirely sure what the logic was, but they had ended up delicious, helped by butter, herbs, and salt.

“Why are leftovers bad?” asked Alfric.

“Depends on the food,” said Mizuki. “Sometimes, like with stew, I think leftovers are actually better, since the flavors have a chance to know each other and everything can set up and meld, but for fish, both the texture and flavor are just a bit wrong after a day in the chiller.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever noticed that,” said Alfric.

“Well, you probably didn’t grow up with leftovers all that much,” said Mizuki. “And also, you’re uncultured swine.”

Alfric laughed, and Mizuki smiled at him.

The best part, in Hannah’s opinion, was the fish’s skin, which had gotten crispy and could be eaten almost like a meat cracker, but all of it was good, and after a long dungeon that had come with its own challenges, a hearty meal was more than welcome. Hannah ate well, though she picked at the pork a bit. It felt to her like pork wasn’t a proper pairing with fish, not even as a stuffing, but she couldn’t justify that feeling in any way. It was delicious, just not proper.

There was wine with the food, a white wine pulled up from the cellar, which sometimes seemed to have wine in limitless supply.

“It’s all from my grandpa’s winery,” said Mizuki. “He sold the company to the workers when he moved, but one of the conditions was that every year, he would get a crate of their most recent batch. The crates get sent here, and he said that it was fine for me to drink it.” She shrugged. “If I ever did move to Kiromo, it’s not like I would take all of the wine with me.”

“You could,” said Alfric, sipping from his own glass of wine. “You’d just need the proper storage entads.”

“Well, I don’t really want to move to Kiromo,” said Mizuki. “But I would like to visit some time, if I could do it without having to spend a week traveling.”

“Shortest route is actually much shorter,” said Alfric. “It was one of the things I looked up while I was in Dondrian. You’d want to take a leycraft northeast, then take a portal into central Kiromo, then take a leycraft there to Kiro, where your family is.”

“You looked it up?” asked Mizuki.

“I did,” Alfric nodded. “Seemed like something that would be good to know. Of course, with the leycraft lines, you’d be paying quite a bit on both legs, and the portal charges a fee, mostly because you’re crossing national borders, and then on top of that, you’d be stuck until the reopening of the portal, meaning that you’d be in Kiromo for a month. And you’d have to plan around the portal opening in the first place.”

“But why did you look it up?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t know, it seemed like something you might want to know at some point,” said Alfric.

“You could also pay more, perhaps a lot more, to just go there by entad,” said Verity. She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin.

“There are trade-offs in terms of cost and speed,” nodded Alfric. “International travel, and even going from one side of Inter to the other, tends to be quite expensive if you want to do it quickly.”

“Unless you’re an Overguard?” asked Mizuki.

“Yes,” nodded Alfric. He hesitated. “And if you’re thinking that either of my parents could easily take ten minutes out of their day to whisk you to Kiromo, you’re not wrong.”

“But … they wouldn’t,” said Mizuki.

“It’s complicated,” said Alfric. “They might offer it as a gift, but if you came to them requesting it, that’s the sort of thing that gets a bit exploitative. In point of fact, they do sell trips for people at quite high rates, but for you to come to them and ask for a discount because you’re friends with me … it would be awkward for everyone, and I think they’d be inclined to say no unless circumstances seemed to demand it.”

“I see,” said Mizuki. “Well to be clear, I haven’t asked them, and I won’t. We’ll just have to find our own extremely long ranged transport entads.”

“Yes,” nodded Alfric, seeming relieved. “And it’s likely we have another trip in our future, right?” He looked at Isra.

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “I do want to track down the entads taken from me, as well as the person who took them. I don’t think the party needs to come with.”

“Would you want us to?” asked Verity. “I would like to be with you, to help you if I could.”

Isra frowned. “That’s very nice of you.”

“You don’t really have anyone,” said Mizuki. “Besides us, I mean. People shouldn’t do hard things alone.” The phrasing there stuck with Hannah, and she tucked it away for later, because she was sure that someone would give her cause to use it, perhaps even Mizuki herself.

“I’ve been living alone for years,” said Isra, still frowning. “I can take care of myself.”

“If we came with you to the eastern edge of Inter, we’d get exposure to some new dungeons,” said Alfric. “And I’ve never been out that way.”

“I don’t want to be a bother,” said Isra.

“No bother,” said Mizuki.

“I don’t even know if I’m going to go,” said Isra. “I only got the letter yesterday.”

“If you need us to butt out, just say so,” said Hannah. “People wantin’ to help can be oppressive, especially if it’s help you don’t want.”

“It’s not that,” said Isra. “I just … haven’t done anything to earn your help.” She was still deep in her frown, which she hid with a sip of wine.

Verity reached over and held Isra’s hand. “We’ll drop it for now,” said Verity. “Just know that you have allies that are eager to help you slay your enemies.”

“Thank you,” said Isra. “I need time.”

For dessert, there was rolled ice cream, made on the chilling plates that were paired to the heating elements when they weren’t in use. It had bits of chocolate from Dondrian in it, along with other bits of caramel and cinnamon. Altogether it seemed a bit busy to Hannah, who preferred her desserts to have less going on, but she refrained from saying anything, because it was apparently the first thing that Isra had cooked by herself.

“It wasn’t really anything,” said Isra, after she’d received a round of adulation. “Iced cream seems like it would be difficult to do wrong.”

“You would be surprised,” said Mizuki.

“You gave me instructions,” said Isra.

“And again, you’d be surprised,” said Mizuki. “Some people screw things up by doing things wrong, others make substitutions or end up with scrambled eggs, or something like that.”

“There are eggs in this?” asked Verity around a mouthful of ice cream.

“How do you do it without eggs?” asked Mizuki, who seemed utterly baffled by the question.

“In Dondrian it’s cream, sugar, and flavoring,” said Alfric.

“This is more of a frozen custard then isn’t it?” asked Verity, looking down at the bowl.

“I guess,” said Mizuki.

“How do you know so many people who failed to make this?” asked Isra.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Um.” She hesitated with her Anyspoon halfway to her mouth. “We had some basic cooking lessons in school.”

“Ah,” said Isra. “And I would have gotten them, if I hadn’t been kept from school.”

“Well, I’ll give you all the lessons,” said Mizuki. “I mostly learned from my parents, not school, a lot of the lessons for life skills were pretty basic, mostly just so people would have some kind of foundation. Getting people ten percent of the way down the road, that kind of thing. With cooking, not everyone needs to learn how to cook.”

“I have no idea how to cook,” said Verity.

“Alfric either,” said Mizuki.

“I know how to make decent camp food,” said Alfric. “But all you need for that is some meat and some vegetables and to just cook them until they’re done.”

“I’m skeptical,” said Mizuki. “But I do look forward to going camping together sometime.” She finished the last of her ice cream, tilting the small bowl back to get the melted bits. “Hey, you know what Alfric told me?”

“What?” asked Hannah.

“Vertex is living in a big tent, but they don’t even have a tent that’s bigger on the inside,” said Mizuki.

“Gasp,” said Hannah.

“It’s still a nice tent,” said Alfric.

“There are limits to how nice a non-magical tent can be,” said Verity. “There’s a reason that people live in houses rather than tents.”

“Why is it bad to live in a tent?” asked Isra.

“Noise from outside and inclement weather,” said Alfric. “Plus a lack of windows. And toilet setups for tents are … well, usually you have to have an outhouse, or a pit that you go in if you’re a step less fancy. You can also kind of forget about a shower, though there are bathhouses in a city of decent size, and people who are serious about it will have a compact waterstone pack.”

“A what?” asked Hannah. Normally Alfric had a tendency to go on a little bit, and very often it wasn’t entirely interesting or relevant, but every now and then he said something that illuminated some part of the world she never knew existed.

“So, most waterstones are regulated through pressure,” said Alfric. “You put the waterstone in a tank, and at a certain level of pressure, it stops working. This is all through some stuff that I don’t understand about ectads, but it’s a fundamental thing with how waterstones are processed, and one of the reasons for all the rules of thumb like not swapping waterstones into tanks they weren’t meant for.”

“You can, though,” said Mizuki.

“You can, yes,” said Alfric. “But you’re not supposed to, because you run the risk of the calibration being wrong and overflowing the tank, which ends with you flooding your house. Anyway, if you’re traveling, you really don’t want to be lugging a lot of water around, so what you do is get a waterstone and put it inside of a waterskin, making sure that it’s calibrated so it doesn’t burst the seams of the skin, and also that the waterskin can hold a bit of pressure. It’s not cheap, but it’s virtually endless water.”

“You’d need a quite strong stone to give you a shower,” said Hannah, frowning. “But you’re sayin’ that people have showers for themselves by turnin’ a waterskin upside down?”

“They could,” said Alfric. “But what’s more common is for them to have an oversized skin that can be expanded when they camp. The extra flaps are normally tied down, but at camp, they get untied, and there’s room for a lot more water, which means that the stone fills basically a few buckets worth of water, which is all you need for a shower. Not that you tend to need a shower unless you’re camping for more than a few days.”

“Have you gone camping a lot?” asked Mizuki.

“Oh, sure,” said Alfric. “I appreciate the wilderness. There aren’t really that many places left that are properly wild, but it’s good to get away from people for a bit and take a break from society, or as much as possible while still being part of a guild.”

“Pretend at bein’ master of your own destiny?” asked Hannah.

“Just so,” nodded Alfric. “But it doesn’t hold a candle to dungeoneering.”

After dinner, Hannah helped with the dishes, and once the dishes were done, she went to her room for a bit, leaving the door open a crack so the herb dragon could come in. Herby had the run of the house, with some minor instruction by Isra, and would occasionally come to sit next to or occasionally on top of someone. Isra had said that in the coming week, it would transition to eating herbs from the garden, and they were already talking about possibly building in some way for it to be able to go in and out of the house on its own. It was a wild creature, but under Isra’s direction, that didn’t matter so much, and they could treat it as essentially domesticated.

The creature that waddled into Hannah’s room was, unfortunately, the cat, Tabbins. He had taken a liking to Hannah, one which wasn’t entirely returned, not when he would plop himself down on her lap without caring that she was about to get up, or when he would wake her up in the morning by swishing his tail in her face. She had tried keeping the door closed, but then he would paw at it and mewl for her to open it, and she wasn’t heartless. She had been meaning to ask Isra if possibly the cat could be asked to be more considerate, but she hadn’t done it yet, mostly because she liked the cat’s affection.

Hannah sat down and made some notes about the dungeon, but her heart wasn’t really in it, and then Tabbins climbed up into her lap like he wanted to be petted, which took up a bit of her attention.

She didn’t know what she was thinking with the book. Even if she did finish it, and got some wortiers to make copies of it, or better, a publisher that made a good effort to release it far and wide, the most likely outcome would be deafening silence, or a small level of acknowledgement from her peers. There was a part of her that tended toward optimism at times, and she knew that was foolish, but there was precedent. On occasion, books about dungeon traversals did very well, though they tended to be written in a style to entertain, and some of the claims made within them were both questionable and impossible to check.

Hannah did eventually finish making her notes and drawing out a map of the dungeon, but she was less than satisfied with it. The project, when she’d first conceived of it, was to be to dungeons what Symmetrical Poetry had been to poems, a way of using Garos as a critical lens to engage with what the dungeons conjured up. For this dungeon though, there was less to examine. The most interesting had been the dining room, where all the places had been set, though not in an entirely symmetrical fashion, given that the utensils were placed with knives and forks on opposite sides of the plates. Everything else … well. Perhaps there was something to be said about gravity, or the tunnel where the floor became the ceiling, but it would take more thought, and it felt like attempting to make a tea from leaves that had already been used two or three times before.

Hannah thought about Marsh, but she’d told him that he shouldn’t contact her until the next day, their day off, and he was respecting that. This was good of him, but she was feeling a need for companionship and physical intimacy that, on reflection, wasn’t particularly healthy. A good bout of kissing would cheer her up, but it wasn’t a cure for malaise, and Marsh seemed like he might be having some different ideas about what it was they were doing together. An honest, open discussion about their relationship, if you could even call that, would almost certainly kill the last of her attraction to him, but there were no other prospects at the moment, and Hannah was starting to feel that perhaps she should just have that conversation and see whether they could continue on together in spite of her deep reservations.

They had the next day “off” and Hannah didn’t know what she was going to do with herself. She was going to pray and do what she could to repair the fraying, to center herself along the axes of symmetry and spend some time being in tune with Garos. It had been some time since she’d done any singing — she’d been in the choir at the seminary — and she wondered whether Verity would have any interest in making some music together. It seemed like a long shot, but Verity was sure to know all of the classic clerical songs.

Beyond that, there was also baking to be done, and Hannah settled on star bread. She got up off her butt to go look in the kitchen and see what all she would need to buy, which unfortunately meant dislodging the cat.

The most difficult thing about cooking in Pucklechurch as compared to the seminary in Plenarch, or better, her home in Cairbre, was that they didn’t have all the same ingredients. Sometimes they even claimed to have the same ingredients, but when the merchant said ‘cinnamon’ she meant something other than the cinnamon that Hannah was used to. Proper cinnamon quills were made from the dried inner bark of a tree, but the stuff sold in Pucklechurch as cinnamon was a leaf that had been dried and ground. The taste was fairly close, but they were two completely different plants, and they had different properties to them as well, with the leaf’s flavor a bit more pungent and working a little less well in breads. This distinction between cinnamon and ‘cinnamon’ was the sort of thing that made Hannah feel a bit of Qymmos.

The kitchen was short on eggs and flour, which was mostly due to Hannah’s baking, and she almost went out to get them before remembering that it was after dinner and the market and shops were likely closed. Star bread didn’t take much time, and there was really nothing that needed to be done, but that meant that Hannah was still left with that same listless feeling, which was not the kind of thing she should have been feeling after a successful dungeon run.

She was grateful when the marble in her pocket warmed up, even though Marsh was contacting her sooner than they’d agreed on. When she held in place and rolled down her sleeve to see him on her forearm, he had a serious set to his face.

“Lola is planning something,” he said. “I’m not sure what, but it’s set up for tomorrow. She’s planning an ambush in the morning, bringing our whole team to your house.”

“Are you plannin’ to fight us?” asked Hannah.

Marsh didn’t seem to find that funny. “She had a day of being time-sick,” said Marsh. “Ever since then, she’s been on a warpath. I don’t know what she’s planning, but she wants all of us there, and says that she’s got an announcement. I don’t think any of us want to go, but I’m letting you know ahead of time, because the next time you hear anything, it might be from her lips, and she might have done the day two or three times to be able to say just the right thing.”

“And does she know you’re sharing this with me?” asked Hannah.

“I keep my personal business separate from the party,” said Marsh. “They don’t know that you and I are — that we’ve been getting together. Not unless Lola got it out of me on an undone day, or not unless you’ve been blabbing to Mardin or Grig.”

“Mmm,” said Hannah. “My party knows. But that’s because we’re not dysfunctional.”

“Must be nice,” said Marsh. He gave her a thin smile. “Be careful. Stay safe.”

The image faded away without another word, and Hannah was left frowning at her forearm. She sat there for a moment, thinking, then went to go find the others. It seemed that they needed to prepare as best they could.

Chapter 77 - The Day Of

Alfric woke up in the middle of the night, as usual. There were no relevant guild messages, and he didn’t know what to make of that.

Time priority was a fundamental concept for chrononauts, but it was largely opaque from the inside, and inconsequential unless two or more chrononauts were interacting with each other. If Alfric and Lola both attempted to reset the day, then Lola would remember and Alfric would not, regardless of when in the day it happened. There were, from Lola’s perspective, days in which Alfric had wanted to reset and had attempted to reset which she could still see the inside of. If he attempted to reset at third bell and she attempted to reset at fourth bell, she would remember whatever happened after he’d tried to reset.

The obvious weapon to use against a chrononaut was a higher priority chrononaut. Alfric could, in theory, get in contact with a chrononaut who had higher priority and unused days, which would allow him to send information back to himself about whatever Lola had done on a day that she had intended to undo. It was, in practical terms, the only way to circumvent her ability to do whatever she wanted on her undone days — by having them be someone else’s undone days instead.

But if Alfric had done that on this day, then he should have gotten a message from the guild, and based on what Hannah had reported the night before, Lola was on her way. There were quite a few options for what that meant, and they ranged from very bad to moderately good, but it was difficult to say, and the lack of a guild message didn’t narrow it down all that much. There was a method of thinking about chrononautics which sequenced days in ‘order’, though order couldn’t always be untangled for two chrononauts who hadn’t interacted with each other, let alone hundreds. While there were many assurances that cause always followed effect and the resetting of time was a unidirectional process, there was little clarity from the inside. Nevertheless, combing through the guild messages, most of his family who were going to use their power had already done so, and it was close to the end of the ‘chrono timeline’, where Alfric and Lola took their days.

Alfric’s most likely scenario was that whatever happened on this day, it wasn’t going to be something that he was going to report to another chrono, though it might be because he wound up dead.

The whole thing was confusing, and Alfric somewhat hated it, especially when getting into the levels of play and counterplay that were involved. An adversarial relationship between chrononauts was a nightmare, and Alfric had a sinking feeling that Lola was better at the game than he was. He had no enthusiasm for it.

After checking the messages, Alfric had trouble getting back to sleep. If Lola was planning something, it was entirely possible that she was over in Liberfell at that very moment, awake at the witching hour just as he was, plotting and planning, or even putting events into motion with the benefit of foresight. Eventually he did sleep, but it was restless and uneasy.

It was unusually quiet during breakfast, but Mizuki did her best to fill the air.

“Kiromon cooking isn’t all that different from Central Inter cooking, not really,” she said. “I mean, maybe more of a focus on noodles, and obviously some different ingredients, and you guys don’t really eat rice all that much, but other than that, not so different.”

“You chop up your meat more than I’m used to,” said Alfric.

“I do?” asked Mizuki.

Alfric shrugged. His heart wasn’t in the conversation. “That might just be you though. In Dondrian, usually a person is served a large piece of meat and then cuts it up on their own, but you normally make all of the meat bite-sized.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “I’ll have to think about that. I don’t know if that’s a real thing that I do or not. I didn’t cut up your pork belly, did I?”

Alfric used his fork to spear a piece. It was nice and crisp, coated with dark sauce. “You did not,” said Alfric.

“Or that venison loin?” asked Mizuki.

“You did those meatballs,” said Hannah.

“They’re supposed to be like that,” said Mizuki. “It’s just how they’re made. Besides, smaller pieces mean more crust, and everyone knows that the crust is the best part. And hey, half the cooking I do would be considered Central Inter anyway, I never claimed that I was a Kiromon chef or anything.”

They were all a little bit on edge, including Verity once she made her way downstairs.

“Is she here yet?” asked Verity. She had woken late, as usual, but looked more disheveled than normal.

“Nothing yet,” said Alfric. “Have some toast and tea.”

“Do we still have some of that kizu marmalade?” asked Verity as she took her seat.

“All out,” said Mizuki. “There’s plum jam and cherry jelly. I was actually thinking that maybe I would put up something with frink fruit, since apparently they’re in season.”

“I know how to put things up,” said Isra. “I could help.”

“Hmm,” said Mizuki. “Okay, so long as we don’t have different ideas about what that entails. Have you ever made a marmalade?”

“I’m not sure what a marmalade is,” said Isra.

Mizuki launched into a rather long explanation of what a marmalade was, along with a digression on the differences between jams, jellies, conserves, and preserves, including some examples, all of which was wholly unnecessary. Alfric could feel his nerves fray just a bit. It felt like they should have been setting up for war. He didn’t have his armor on, and wasn’t planning to go into this encounter equipped, but the itch was there. They had talked about it the night before, and agreed that meeting Lola with violence wasn’t likely to do any good, as satisfying as it might have been. Killing her on sight was a short-term solution that could backfire spectacularly.

It was almost a relief when the knock came on the door.

It was Lola, and with her, as Marsh had told Hannah, the rest of Vertex. They looked alternately confused and uncomfortable.

“Now, I know you said that you only wanted to talk by letter,” said Lola. “But this is important, and it’s not something that I can do by letter.”

“Come around to the back,” said Alfric. “We can talk there.”

“Just so you know, we have no idea what she’s up to,” said Grig. “We were only told that we were all to go as a party, which we didn’t really want to do. But she said that yesterday, so … I don’t know.”

Alfric nodded. “In the back,” he said. “I’ll bring my party out. If your people are here, I have to assume that my people will also have a vested interest in whatever it is you have to say.”

Lola was smiling, and seemed pleased, which wasn’t a good sign.

It took some time to get everyone assembled, and Mizuki did her best to play host, which in Alfric’s view really wasn’t necessary. She offered everyone water, tea, or something to eat, all except for Lola. For a moment, Alfric was worried she’d offer Grig a tour of the house, but she refrained and eventually came to a rest beside Alfric.

“Oh, not her,” said Lola. “Her, I’d like somewhere else. We have history, even if it’s unknown to her.”

“Fine,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “I’m off then. Alfric, give me a call if you need me.” She walked away, off to the woods, as though she didn’t have a care in the world. This wasn’t particularly part of the plans they’d made the night before, but after being repeatedly told that they wouldn’t meet Lola with violence, she had said that she didn’t see any need to be a part of it, and that she didn’t want to sit by and be part of the plan to bait Lola out. <You let me know,> she added over party chat. <If violence is what you need, I’ll be there in a flash. For now, I’m waiting in the wings. I cannot stand that girl.>

“So, why have you gathered your party here?” asked Alfric.

“Well that’s just it,” said Lola. She began casting one of the universal spells. None of them were offensive, or at least not in the conventional sense. It took Alfric a moment to recognize it, and by the time he did, she had said it outright. “They’re not my party anymore.”

“Oh come on,” said Mardin. “You’re seriously going to try pulling this?”

“I am,” said Lola. “I’m out, out of the party, out of the dungeoneering game, hanging up my hat. I was only ever doing it to be petty and spiteful toward Alfric, and if I’m ever going to make a proper wife for him, I need to be the first to extend my hand in peace.”

“Alright, I’m out too,” said Josen. He began casting the same spell. Most spells like that, people cast from an instruction sheet, and that Josen was doing it without needing to consult anything was a clear sign that he’d planned for this, or something like it. From Lola’s face, this wasn’t something that they’d planned together, but she didn’t seem particularly surprised either.

“Three’s a party,” said Mardin with a sigh once Josen was done. “And now we have to stick together or lose the party bound stuff.”

“Josen, sweetie, you should have waited to see where I was going with this,” said Lola. “I’m handing Vertex over to Alfric, if he wants it, and he does want it.”

“I don’t,” said Alfric, folding his arms across his chest.

“That’s not what you said last time,” said Lola, putting her hands on her hips. “Is it because your party is here? Is that it? You don’t want to say, in front of them, that you’d rather have a serious dungeoneering party?”

“You’re not going to get away with lying to me about things I’ve said on undone days,” said Alfric. He didn’t think he would say those things, especially not to Lola. He didn’t even really think that he felt them. He liked his little life in Pucklechurch, and it had the right trajectory. “So if this was your play, congratulations, you’ve made it, and it didn’t work. I have a serious dungeoneering party.”

“Mmm,” said Lola. “Well unfortunately, I’m about to destroy your party.”

Alfric sighed. The theatricality was killing him. He couldn’t believe there was a time he’d liked that about her. “And how is that?”

“Your star bard,” said Lola, pointing a skinny finger at Verity. “Your family has fallen on hard times, and word from Dondrian is that your mother is trying to find some concerts for you to do.”

Verity’s lips were thin. “I suppose you had something to do with that.”

“Oh, of course not,” said Lola. “Your family’s financial troubles were serendipitous. I was, of course, gleeful when I heard about it, and got the family solicitor on the case right away. As it turns out, your father has sunk quite a bit of money into some supposedly revolutionary ectad business, and as it also happens, I have the financial power to buy him out and single handedly solve their money problems. You wouldn’t have to do concerts, and all I would ask is that you bow out of your current party. That’s the juicy carrot I’m dangling in front of you.” She was giving her cruelest smile, and there was a clear implication that if there was a carrot, then surely there must also be a stick.

Verity said nothing.

“Verity?” asked Alfric.

“I’m thinking,” said Verity.

“Would you?” asked Hannah.

“She could just be saying that,” said Alfric. “Don’t do anything rash.”

“I won’t,” said Verity. “I would need some kind of proof, and a contract, at the very least.”

Lola held out a hand and a sheaf of papers appeared there. “As I said, I had the family solicitor on it, and as I also said, I have my own share of the family fortune to draw on. The ectad business is perhaps not the most solid thing for me to be buying, but I can buy it.”

Verity looked at Alfric. He had no real idea what was going through her mind, but to her, it might have seemed like a fairly good deal. Saving her family from relative ruin without having to lift a finger, getting out of the obligation … Alfric could see how it might appeal, and as soon as Lola had proposed it, he could see that it would impact their relationship even if Verity ultimately refused.

“And you,” said Lola, pointing at Hannah. “You took a bit of digging, but I was able to have a few candid conversations with people from your seminary and former guild. A promising young cleric brought low by politics, quite tragic.”

Hannah’s face was set. “A contingent donation to the church then?” asked Hannah. “Is that it? A way for me to go back to the church in a position of power?”

“Relative power, yes,” said Lola. “Placement in a church with a handful of underlings, certainly. I can’t make you an archbishop, but a lesser role, certainly, somewhere you could prove yourself. You know, I read some of that book you’ve been working on —”

“How dare you,” said Hannah, and for a moment it seemed like she was grabbing for her hammer, though she hadn’t actually brought it with her. The only one armed was Isra, who had a knife at her belt and her bow in hand.

“You offered, dear,” said Lola with a little laugh. “And it’s a fine idea, the book, but you know that it’s going nowhere. You’re bringing glory to Garos in such small and insignificant ways, and you know this.”

“So you’d place a bribe,” said Hannah. “Everythin’ I hate about the church and how it works.”

“Dread politics and hideous influence,” said Lola, laughing to herself. “But if dealt with once, it wouldn’t need to be dealt with again.”

“The Church of Garos has more money than you’re able to swing,” said Hannah.

“Oh, but you know that’s irrelevant,” said Lola. “The Church has incredible wealth, but the individuals don’t, and even if they’re not taking the money directly, they might have their own pet projects that need funding. This wouldn’t be the first time a wealthy donor has suggested that someone might be perfect for a position within the church. At least in this case it’s not sheer nepotism, and you’re a proper cleric.”

“Choke on your own spit,” said Hannah. She seemed surprisingly angered by the offer, though Lola wasn’t exactly doing a soft sell.

“You’re angry because you want it,” said Lola, nodding.

“How many times have we had this conversation?” asked Hannah. “You should know I don’t deal with vipers.”

“What do you have for me?” asked Isra.

“Money,” shrugged Lola. “Money is wonderful, it solves almost every problem there is. You live in a dirty shack in the woods, and you’re lucky to be in the party in the first place, then luckier still to have that bow. Honestly, I don’t think I need to offer you anything, because with Verity gone, the party ceases to properly exist anyway. But I’m very nice, so I’ll give you a bit of payment too, for, say, services rendered.”

“Your parents give you too much,” said Alfric.

“Different philosophies,” said Lola. “But Alfric, the biggest difference is that I worked toward taking whatever I could, and you sat there thinking that you had to be a good little boy and do what you were told, even if that meant being poor and powerless.”

“And this is your way of endearing yourself to me?” asked Alfric.

“Oh come now,” said Lola. “Think about what I’m saying to you. All I’ve ever said to you is that you don’t need to shackle yourself. You can be free, not just on the undone days, but in other ways as well. You complain so much about how neat and ordered the world is, how there’s no mystery or danger anymore, and the only reason that’s true for you is because you make it so.”

“Even if I thought that was good advice, I don’t want to be with you,” said Alfric. “So you can destroy your own party, and attempt to destroy mine, and perhaps even succeed, but I will never spend more than one minute with you than I have to.”

Lola sighed. “So dramatic. And you say that, but here we are, talking again. It’s a sign that some part of you really does miss me.”

Alfric frowned. He looked at the other members of Vertex. Josen was still standing there, despite having formally exited the party. They were uncomfortable, but they were waiting for this to play out, to see how all the pieces fell, which meant that maybe they would welcome him back in as a breath of fresh air. The difference in elevation would be the biggest problem, and there would be interpersonal issues, but there were also things personal to Alfric. He didn’t want to leave his party. They had gone through a pretty bad dungeon with fairly mediocre loot, and then they’d all sat down for a nice dinner together. They were friends.

“He’s thinking about it,” said Lola with a smile.

“No,” said Alfric. “No, I’m not.”

“She’s thinking about it,” said Lola, pointing at Verity.

“I am,” said Verity. “But … I don’t think I can.”

“Ah, shame,” said Lola. “You won’t ditch this party to save your family and ensure that you never have to go back to Dondrian? Well, then I suppose if you don’t respond to the carrot, it’s time to bring out the stick.” She sighed, but there was still that same performance to it, and Alfric didn’t believe for a moment that she was regretful about what she was going to say. “No concerts then. You’ll be blacklisted at every venue. Worse, there will be rumors about your mother and father that will follow them to their graves. And believe me, I know bad rumors. Your father will be crushed in the company seizure.”

Verity was thin-lipped. “And I won’t have to do the concerts then.”

Lola rolled her eyes. “Don’t pretend that you don’t care about your family and your duty,” she said. “I know you do.”

“I don’t care enough that they can be weaponized against me,” said Verity.

“You’re barking up the wrong trees,” said Hannah. “I wouldn’t take a position bought for me within the church, not even on principle.”

Lola shook her head. “You say that, but only because the righteous indignation feels good to you. You never wanted to be a dungeoneer forever, it was supposed to be a lark, a reprieve from clerical work.”

“All the same,” said Hannah.

“You agreed to this idea before,” said Lola with a frown. “Is it the group setting? When I try this again, is the group setting a bad idea? Should I talk to you one on one?”

“You’re planning to undo the day,” said Alfric.

“Well of course,” said Lola. “If it had worked, that would have been great, but I think I learned my lessons here, so fine, the day is going to be undone. Besides, I had put it all at cross-purposes from the moment I started testing the arrows in my quiver.”

“Unbelievable,” said Mardin. “Or, exactly believable. You’re the worst.”

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” said Lola with a laugh. She turned to Verity. “How about you, care to tell me what works for next time?”

“Why would I do that?” asked Verity.

“It’s called negotiation,” said Lola. “Tell me what you want, what it would take to get you to leave, and I’ll do my best to deliver it.” She leaned forward. “I’m not your adversary, I don’t care about you, I just want you out of the way.”

Isra moved to stand beside Verity.

Alfric could sense the frustration wafting off of Lola. She had played her cards, and they hadn’t been good enough to get what she wanted. Worse, they hadn’t stirred the pot or gotten a good reaction. The time spent in preparation was wasted, and the day would need to be done again, and possibly again, until she found the right set of words.

There wasn’t even a full plan, just a set of levers that Lola had found or created, none of them making a full solution to win Alfric back, though half the point seemed to be to torment him in lieu of actually accomplishing anything.

“You’re pathetic,” said Alfric.

Lola folded her arms and glared at him. “Oh?”

“You talk about the freedom of the undone days, and this is what you do?” asked Alfric. “This petty manipulation, idiotic grandstanding that you dragged your party with you for, trying to provoke some reaction? Out of everything that you could possibly do, all the freedom that you claim we have, this is what it comes down to? You could kidnap us, torture us, but all you do is try to buy your way into my good graces. It’s the product of a dull mind.”

Lola spat to the side. Alfric had worried that he was laying it on too thick, too clearly provoking her, but it seemed to be working.

“Fine,” said Lola. “If we’re talking plainly, if you’re not going to remember this?” She pursed her lips. “I’ve spent the last few weeks working on this problem, and do you know the issue with people? They don’t always have handles to them. I snatched up Verity and took her away for a talk, and after she blabbered on about not wanting to be killed, she explained that she wanted a simple, normal life, one where she could be the unexceptional girl that’s buried under all that talent and godly promise. What do you suggest I’m supposed to do with that, Alfric?”

“You want my advice on how to get your way?” asked Alfric with a bitter laugh. “Stop pussyfooting around. You burnt a day on this and it wasn’t even bold. You keep saying that we can do anything, and you do these manipulations that you wouldn’t even need to be a chrononaut for.”

“She said she kidnapped me,” said Verity.

“She said that, yes,” said Alfric. “But it’s the kind of thing that she might say to make herself seem scary, like a kitten puffing up its fur.” He could feel the heat rising in him. He was trying to piss her off, but he was also venting real anger, which was a dangerous thing.

<Mizuki, be ready to come back,> said Hannah. She had faced away and covered her mouth, and Alfric wouldn’t have noticed if not for the words over the channel.

<Ready when you are, give the word, I’ll be coming in fast,> said Mizuki.

Lola let her alienist bindings unfurl, not all of them, just three curls of green energy that each took a blade from extradimensional space. “I’ve killed everyone here more than once,” said Lola. “I’ve sunk knives into all of your bellies. I slipped into that very house and poisoned your milk a few days ago. I’m not a monster, I always undo it, but yes, I do it, because sometimes it’s nice to know that you have real, absolute power over other people.”

Alfric narrowed his eyes, feigning skepticism. He had no real doubt that she was telling the truth, but a confession alone wouldn’t be enough. “You want us to believe you’re capable of that.”

Lola flicked one of the tendrils and sent her knife sailing through the air. It was fast, so fast there was no time for reaction, and Isra was left looking down at her belly, where the knife was sticking out. She let out a small moan and Hannah rushed over. After a moment, Mardin joined her.

“Alfric, my dear, you have no idea what I’m capable of,” said Lola.

“Internal bleeding,” said Hannah. She was supporting Isra, who was moaning in pain. The knife hadn’t been removed yet, and from what Alfric knew, that was the moment of biggest risk. The guts were also difficult for a cleric of Garos to deal with, though a cleric of Oeyr could offer something there.

“I’ll burn you to a crisp,” said Marsh, who had gotten into a casting stance.

“Oh?” asked Lola, turning on him. “Do you know how many times you’ve threatened me with that?”

“If you’ve been killing us in the undone days, then I imagine a lot,” said Marsh. “But the point stands.”

Lola used a tendril to flip one of her knives up in the air and catch it again. “I know you Marsh, I know all of you. You don’t like to use violence against people. Even in the dungeons you flinch back from things that look human. You’ve threatened me before, and it’s never stopped me from —”

She moved with blinding speed and was on him in an instant. He hadn’t come dressed for battle, so there was only a thin shirt stopping her knife from sinking into his chest. She bounced back, pulling the knife out, and watched him for a moment. He was gasping for breath, words not coming, and he stumbled slightly as blood wet his shirt.

“Don’t,” said Lola, looking at Josen. “You’re worse than him, do you know that? Always hesitant to make a move unless it’s your own skin on the line. Put down the staff, take off the bangles.”

Josen did what she requested, holding up his hands when he was done. Mardin had slowly, tentatively gone over to join Marsh, who was lying prone on the ground, but the cleric’s attention was split. He kept looking at Lola, worried that he would be next. It had become a hostage situation, and none of them were armed. The plan had been for Isra to use her bow and slip the ring on Lola’s finger, but Isra was down. Besides, he didn’t know if they had enough.

“The dungeon escape,” said Alfric. He was breathing hard. “It was you.”

“Of course it was me,” said Lola, rolling her eyes.

She was still watching them, seeing whether anyone was going to make a move against her. Hannah and Mardin were in conference with each other over Marsh, and Alfric was hoping that he hadn’t been stabbed in the heart. Isra was laying on the grass, the cloth around her stomach all bloody, but they had stopped giving her attention, which Alfric took as a good sign.

“Why?” asked Alfric. “To get to speak with me?”

Lola gave a little laugh, but she was still watching them to see whether an attack was coming. “It’s what I’ve been saying, there’s a joy in just doing things and seeing how they pan out. I hadn’t thought we’d be able to contain it, but we got lucky, and it all went well enough. I got to see your team and you got to see mine.” She turned to look at Josen. “Really, if the day’s going to be undone, I should kill you for trying to upstage me. You wanted to make your grand exit so badly, didn’t you?”

Alfric covered his mouth with his hand, trying to play it off as though he was trying to think about what to do. <Now.> “I don’t understand how you did it,” he said. “You had to have captured the monster from somewhere and put it into storage, right?”

Lola turned back toward him. “What’s your plan here, Alfric? Get a confession out of me, then go running to someone with higher priority?”

<Incoming,> said Mizuki.

“Something like that,” said Alfric. He desperately wanted to give Mizuki instructions, to tell her not to kill Lola, because that would undo all of their hard work, but Mizuki should have known that, and speaking into the party channel would have given the game away. Mizuki had the dagger that helped to sneak up on a person, but she needed to get close enough to undo the bindings, and once those were done, they would need to act quickly.

“Well, I’m going to kill you all,” said Lola. “Obviously. And the fact that I haven’t been stopped means that I’m probably going to get away with it. And then I’ll reset, because as I’ve said, I’m not a monster, and I’ll try all this again.”

“You were going to explain how you found the right kind of creature, how you knew what it did,” said Alfric. Better to have her talking than doing.

Lola narrowed her eyes. “Do you know what I love about you?” she asked. “One of the many things.”

“No,” said Alfric. He really didn’t.

“You play every game like you mean it,” said Lola. She began unfurling more tendrils, and Alfric was worried that any moment she would put up her shield as well. “You might have some infinitesimal chance of winning, but you still try to thread the needle anyhow. A lot of people just give up when the going gets tough. They resign themselves to —”

She was interrupted by a blow to her head.

Mizuki had descended from the sky, coming down and bringing her full body weight to bear with the attack. She had smacked Lola with a giant spoon.

Alfric moved in an instant, his easy demeanor dropped, and within a second he was on Lola, sliding a ring onto her finger. She turned to stone, and only then did Alfric take a breath.

“Is everyone okay?” he asked.

“Nah man, I got stabbed,” croaked Marsh.

“They’ll both live,” said Hannah. “I’m worried about Isra’s guts, but having a cleric of Oeyr on hand for fast healing is just about the best circumstance possible.”

“What was this?” asked Josen. He had quickly picked up his implements from the ground and rearmed himself. “Was this … planned?”

“Loosely,” said Alfric. “There was more improvisation than I’d have liked.”

“More stabbing than I’d have liked,” said Marsh. He looked down at his bloody shirt. “She punctured a lung.”

“Missed the heart,” said Hannah. “Hard to tell whether it was on purpose or not.”

“We’ll need to get both of them to the temple,” said Mardin. “Have the cleric of Kesbin clear out the internal reservoirs of blood, clean up anything we left in the wake of our healing.”

“We don’t have a cleric of Kesbin,” said Alfric. “They’ll need to go to Liberfell.”

Josen stepped forward and looked at the statue. “You’re intending to keep the day,” he said. “You’re intending to use this testimonial against her.”

“And the attacks,” said Alfric. “Yes.”

“Would have been nice to be in the loop,” said Marsh. He had taken off his bloody shirt, leaving him bare chested, and he kept rubbing the place where the blade had gone into his chest.

“Sorry,” said Alfric, though he only said it to be polite.

“Is that permanent?” asked Grig, who had been mostly silent up to this point. He went to inspect Lola’s stone form. “Did you … kill her?”

“It’s temporary,” said Alfric. “And only for today. I’ll report to my guild and they’ll have someone here just after the witching hour to collect her.”

“Still our word against hers, right?” asked Grig. “Will this … stick?”

Alfric went over to Verity’s bag and pulled out a slender book, which he cracked open. He leafed through it until he got to the conversation they’d just had, and felt a bit of relief that it was all there. The book didn’t tag who was talking, but it would have to do.

“Surveillance?” asked Grig.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “A weak form of it. But for this to stick, the day has to stand. That means no one gives any other chrononaut a reason to undo it, and dealing with the aftermath of the attacks, if any.”

“We should get to the temple,” said Hannah. “Internal bleedin’ on both counts, and a collapsed lung … I did my best to fix it, and Mardin did his work, but it’s the kind of thing that warrants some attention.”

“I hit her on the head kind of hard,” said Mizuki, reaching down to touch the statue. “I was worried she’d put up her shields, her alienist ones.”

“They’re volatile,” said Josen. “They’ve killed her before. I wince whenever she puts them up. And they wouldn’t have protected her from either Marsh or the full force of my staff. Nor from you.”

“Is she,” Mizuki took a breath, then looked at Hannah. “Is there a chance that I killed her?”

“If you killed her, she resets the day,” said Alfric. He bit his lip. “And if we think that’s the case, then better for us to seek out some higher priority chrononaut and have them send back the information at least, though that will probably guarantee that nothing serious happens to her.”

“Really?” asked Hannah.

“Do I need to be a part of this?” asked Marsh. “Because I’m ready to warp and don’t really want to have a bunch of blood floating around in my lungs if I can help it.”

“Come, I’ll take you,” said Hannah. She looked at Mizuki. “For what it’s worth, a crack to the head can kill, but it’s more likely to cause some short term damage.”

After a bit of discussion, Isra, Verity, Marsh, Hannah, and Mardin all left to go to the temple, having agreed that they’d be silent on the issue of Lola and that they’d give a cover story of training gone wrong. It was a temporary measure, just to make sure that the two serious wounds could be properly looked at. From the temple, they’d either wait for help from Liberfell, or go there on their own.

“There’s a second possibility,” said Alfric. “That Lola was hit on the head, and that the hit will kill her, but hasn’t yet. The ring suspends time for whoever is trapped using it, that was my experience confirmed by a Qymmic inspection.”

“Meaning that I might have murdered her,” said Mizuki. She was staring at the statue. “And if we wait until tomorrow to bring her out, then she’ll be just … looping through the aftereffects of a mortal blow a bunch of times until she’s out of loops.”

“Yes,” said Alfric. “And we need to talk about what we want to do about that possibility.”

Grig cleared his throat. “Are we all in this together?” he asked. “Talking about this, it’s tantamount to conspiracy to commit murder, isn’t it? Because you could save her by undoing the day, and by having her in the ring, we’re depriving her of the ability to save herself, which … isn’t good. If Mizuki did kill her in that way, then it seems to me that we’re all rapidly becoming accessories just by standing here and talking about it.”

“She stabbed two people and was going to kill us all, she said that,” said Mizuki. She looked over at Grig. “It had to be done, didn’t it?”

“I don’t know the law well enough,” said Grig with a shrug. “And we’re in Greater Plenarch, which might handle things a bit differently, and the point is, I don’t know.”

“Most likely she’s fine,” said Alfric.

“We’re talking about what we do if she’s not,” said Josen. “Personally, I would prefer her dead.”

“See?” asked Grig. “See, that’s the sort of thing that I don’t wager we should be saying, because if this somehow makes its way to court, someone will ask me, ‘how did you feel about Lola’ and I want to be able to say that I had some reservations, but if we’re all being pitted against each other —”

“You’re talking too much,” said Josen. “I would prefer her dead. Everyone else feels the same. You can’t ignore everything she said and did. In fact, if I thought we could get away with it, I would suggest dumping this statue in the nearest lake.”

“I don’t think we could get away with it,” said Mizuki. “She probably reports back to her guild or whatever, and someone would come looking. Everyone would have to successfully lie about it, and to chrononauts.”

“It’s irrelevant,” said Alfric. “We’re not killing her. We’re preventing her from redoing the day, that’s it. Everything else will be by the book.” He turned to Mizuki. “I’m sorry that the burden falls to you.”

“It’s fine,” said Mizuki, though it clearly wasn’t. “Your plan is to report this to … someone?”

“To my father,” said Alfric. “And as I said, he’ll probably be here first thing come the witching hour, having already talked with various people about the legal and political aspects.”

“If she escapes consequences, we’re doomed,” said Josen. “She’ll come for us and kill us, permanently.”

“Or make our lives miserable,” said Grig. “After she bought her way into the party, I kind of got the feeling that she ended up spending a year as a dungeoneer just out of burning spite.”

<There’s a cleric from Kesbin coming,> said Hannah. <We think they’ll both be alright, it’s just a matter of precaution.>

<Thanks,> said Alfric.

“I’m going to have nightmares about her,” said Mizuki. She had a deep frown. “Knowing that she’s out there somewhere, even if it’s in prison. It was bad enough before.”

“You didn’t even hear what she had to say,” said Grig. “Worse than I had imagined.”

“We’ll deal with her, one way or another,” said Alfric. He turned to look at Mizuki. “I’ll do everything in my power to protect you.” He hoped that was enough.

They ended up bringing the statue inside, though it made a grim counterpart to the wooden statues that his father had carved, which sat in a square at the edges of the garden. Grig and Josen eventually left, and some time later, Isra returned home with Hannah and Verity in tow.

They talked it to death, then when they felt exhausted by all the talking, they adjourned to their rooms and didn’t meet again until dinner, which Mizuki had prepared with Hannah’s help, a Kiromon-inspired dish of buns filled with meat and vegetables, pungent with spices once they were bitten into.

“I actually wish that I had been hurt worse,” said Isra.

“Why?” asked Mizuki. “You wanted to be stabbed?”

“A worse injury would mean more proof of harm,” said Isra.

“You’re lucky that Mardin was there,” said Hannah. “A gut wound like the one you had can easily be fatal, and there’s not a lot I could have done about it.”

Isra shrugged.

There was tension in the air, and it lasted until bedtime. The statue of Lola had been placed in the living room, prone on the floor, and no one wanted to go in there.

Alfric knew that he was going to have trouble sleeping. He sat in bed, willing himself to sleep, nervous about waking up for the witching hour, and thinking about Lola. It was possible that this would all wash away and be forgotten, and possible that they’d just consigned her to death. The hit kept going through Alfric’s mind, the image of Mizuki zipping down from the sky and smashing the spoon against Lola’s head.

There was a soft, tentative knock on his door.

“Come in,” he said.

It was Mizuki, of course. She was in her silk robes, typical nighttime wear for her, and she looked nervous. “Hey,” she said. “Can you … wake me up? When the witching hour comes, I mean. I was going to stay awake until it came around, but you said it’s right in the middle of the night.”

“I can wake you,” said Alfric. “Get some sleep.”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “I’m not sure I’m going to be able to. Are you … mad at me?”

“No,” said Alfric.

“I’d understand if it was complicated for you,” said Mizuki. “If … I mean, you were supposed to marry each other, she was your first girlfriend, your only real girlfriend, it would be — I’d understand, that’s all I’m saying. We never really talked about any of that.”

“We don’t need to, especially not right now,” said Alfric. “Maybe if this chapter of my life really is behind me, I could talk about it, but for now, we both need some sleep.”

“Okay,” said Mizuki. “Good night.”

Alfric sat in his bed. The guild message was already sent. His father and mother would get it just after the rollover to the next day. He had debated whether to encipher it, but had elected to mark it confidential with no message heading. In theory, that meant that no one except them would look at it, though there was no way to detect a snoop. It would all be public soon enough, and likely cause a stir, especially when Lola’s family, the Underhills, got word of it.

He did eventually fall asleep, and woke up before the guild messages went through, which meant that he hadn’t missed the witching hour. He sat there, nervous, stomach quivering from the stress, worried about what the result would be. It was entirely possible that they’d already had a council of chrononauts and that Lola’s fate — along with everyone else’s — had been decided.

The witching hour came and went. The guild message box filled up. Alfric breathed a sigh of relief, and got to reading.

Chapter 79 - Sleepover

Hannah hadn’t been intending to stay with Marsh. Her intent had been to use the wardrobe to get halfway to Liberfell, walk the rest of the way, check in, and then do a bit of shopping in the city. She’d called dibs on the dagger, which meant that it was really just the six miles from Traeg’s Knob to Liberfell that she’d have to walk. Marsh was staying at the Dragon’s Arm Hotel, the same place that they’d stayed when they’d all gone to Liberfell as a party, and Hannah went right up to the room where Marsh was convalescing, thinking that it would be a quick visit.

She hadn’t been taken by surprise though. She’d cleaned up and put on her best underwear. She hadn’t been expecting anything but a visit, but she’d wanted to be prepared for the possibility of more.

He’d called for her to come in, and he’d been laying there in a very large bed with his shirt off. One thing had led to another, and then Hannah didn’t really feel like getting dressed again.

“I should get stabbed more often,” said Marsh.

“We were headed in this direction anyhow,” said Hannah. She ran her fingers through the hair on his chest. “Sooner than I’d planned, but there is a certain charm to the wounded.”

“I was mortally wounded, thank you very much,” said Marsh. His hand was on her bare back, tracing up and down her spine.

“It’s not a mortal wound if you don’t die,” said Hannah. The hotel had nice sheets, which felt good against her skin, and the temperature of the room was nice and cool.

“Well you can take that up with Mardin then,” said Marsh. “He says that any wound that would have killed you without a cleric to heal it is a mortal wound. A wound that threatens mortality.”

“Well, ay, I see the sense in that,” said Hannah. “And I’d wager you’re right, it was the kind of stabbing that would have killed you if we’d not been there. Mardin more than me, I’m sorry to say.”

“You didn’t save my life?” asked Marsh, moving just a bit to look at her. “Well then perhaps I was a bit too hasty in bedding you.”

She slapped him on his chest.

“Ah!” he said with a sharp hiss. “My wound.”

“Could you really feel that?” asked Hannah, sitting up to look at him. He had a grin. “Or were you just fakin’ it, hopin’ that you’d get more of my special attentions?”

“Just fakin’ it,” said Marsh with a smile. He was teasing her accent, just a bit.

“And what comes next for you?” asked Hannah. “Movin’ on, I s’pose?”

“Is that why this happened?” asked Marsh. He was staring into her eyes. “You were worried I would skip town before you’d experienced everything I had to offer?”

“I have to say that my curiosity was rewarded,” Hannah replied.

For a moment there was fire in Marsh’s eyes, and it seemed like he was contemplating going a second round with her, which she’d not have minded at all. She hadn’t had any relations since leaving the seminary, and while this all felt a bit more casual than she was used to, it had also felt quite good, especially with a large, muscular man like Marsh. Whatever was going through his mind, he decided that talking was more his speed, perhaps because he needed a bit more time.

“The party is broken,” said Marsh. “Shattered. Josen is still out, though we’ve told him that he’s free to come back in. Lola’s entads were ‘recalled’ this morning. Lola’s father came by to take everything that belonged to the Underhills, leaving aside all the things that we acquired in the dungeons. That was a real blow to morale, I can tell you that, but we’d done a number of dungeons, and there’s plenty of gear for us, just of a lower quality. We’re down a member, or possibly two if Josen doesn’t pull his head out of his ass. But it’s not clear whether we’re going to be doing dungeons at all, going forward.”

“Do you have enough to live off the entads?” asked Hannah.

“If we’re splitting four ways rather than five, we’re probably fine,” said Marsh. “Lola is the one that left the party, and we have a party contract set up that cuts her out.” Hannah wondered whether Alfric had considered having the girls sign such a contract, and decided that he had wisely opted not to bring such a thing up. “It depends on whether or not she fights it though, but I got the sense from her father that they wouldn’t. If they fought it, it certainly wouldn’t be about the money, it would just be spite.”

“How far does the apple fall from the tree?” asked Hannah.

“Not sure,” said Marsh. “You’ll have to talk to Alfric about it.” He sighed. “Anyway, if we get everything in the hoard, then we have enough to live pretty modest lives for a bit, so whether we’d go out into the dungeon again — I don’t know. Three is a party, and if Josen doesn’t come back, I’m at the mercy of Grig and Mardin.” He shook his head. “If they want to ‘retire’ then I guess I will too.”

“And it’s back to Dondrian with you then,” said Hannah. “And you don’t have some marvelous entad that will let you come back to visit?”

“No, I don’t,” said Marsh.

“Shame,” said Hannah. To her faint surprise, and possibly just because warm feelings were flowing through her body, she felt a bit sad.

“So that’s what’s next for me,” said Marsh. “Maybe we’ll try to find someone else, spend the money on chrononaut insurance and do more dungeons, or maybe just live off the entads we’ve got and the money we’ve built up from everything else, making some money on the side doing real work.” He shrugged, gently enough that he didn’t displace Hannah. “An inglorious end to this chapter of my life, but at least I got stabbed in the chest. It’s a good story.”

“Mmm,” said Hannah. “I wish I could have done most of the work to save you, but lungs are a bit asymmetric, mostly to make room for the heart, and it was mostly Mardin.”

“Oh, I’ll change the story,” said Marsh. “It’s a much better story if you saved my life and then bedded me.”

“Feel free to punch it up,” said Hannah. She kissed his chest and smiled. She liked the hair there. “Tell them that when I was usin’ my healin’ touch I was shocked and intrigued by your manliness.”

Marsh laughed, and Hannah moved up his body so they could kiss, which lasted quite some time.

“And for you?” asked Marsh, pulling away after some minutes. Hannah had thought that they were going to have another round, but he again seemed more interested in talking.

“For me what?” asked Hannah.

“Are you … continuing along?” asked Marsh. “Dungeons with the Settlers, and a simple life in Pucklechurch?”

“Ay,” said Hannah. She felt a bit tense. “And why shouldn’t I?”

“What Lola said,” replied Marsh. “I thought — she was trying to get to you, that’s all, I thought that maybe it had worked in some way.”

“‘A promising young cleric brought low by politics’,” said Hannah. “I’m not sure it’s the right diagnosis, but it did strike home. And I have been thinkin’ about it since yesterday. It gives me too little credit for my own downfall, if you can call it that. There were mistakes made in how I dealt with people, mistakes that I might make again, since they come from my nature, but … she was wrong in how she phrased it, as though it was somethin’ that happened to me, rather than because of me.”

“So it cut deep, but not in the way she’d thought?” asked Marsh.

Hannah nodded. “And I’d already been havin’ some thoughts on my place in the world. I don’t think I’m goin’ to change what I’m doin’ all that much, but … I might change who I am.”

“I like who you are,” said Marsh.

“Nice of you to say,” said Hannah. She had rested her head back on his chest, since the kissing seemed like it wasn’t going to resume. “But in my experience you shouldn’t trust someone you’ve just slept with to give an honest evaluation of your character.”

“Nah,” said Marsh. “It’s before you sleep together that you have to worry, because then they might just be saying nice things to get in your pants.”

“Happen to you a lot?” asked Hannah.

“I can hear the smile in your voice,” said Marsh. “But yes, it has happened to me.”

Hannah sat up to look at him. “You were seduced with false promises?” she asked.

“Not false promises,” said Marsh. “Just … a woman who had no interest in me once we were finished. Which might have been fine, if we both knew that’s all it would be, but it stung because I had no clue.”

Hannah laid back down. “Sorry.”

“It happens,” said Marsh. “It was a while ago, I’m not hurt about it. Not much.”

Hannah kissed his chest. “Well, I should be going.” She didn’t move.

“Should you?” asked Marsh. His hand was on her back, and he gave her a little squeeze. “I was feeling a bit off, thought you might stick around to make sure that I was okay.”

“You know, if you don’t end up leavin’, it would be awful manipulative to keep me here,” said Hannah. “To say ‘oh, poor Marsh, I’ll likely never see him again’, and then you linger around Liberfell, that would be a rude thing.” She wasn’t sure why she was saying that, but it felt like a good sort of teasing.

“Unfortunately, you’re the only worthwhile thing about this region, no offense to Pucklechurch.” He paused. “I suppose if we could find a replacement, there are still dungeons left to do here, and that would mean that I could see you again, if you wanted.”

“Mmm,” said Hannah. “Just as I thought, this is all a ruse. I feel ashamed to have fallen for it.”

“Can I be serious for a moment?” asked Marsh.

“Who wasn’t being serious?” asked Hannah. She sat up to look at his face. “Be serious then, if you must.”

“I know you were just in it for a fling,” said Marsh. “You were pretty clear about that, which I liked. But you’re easy to talk to, and cute as a button, and if you were the only reason to stick around the area, I’d do it. I’ve got money to coast on, there are dungeons to mine out, we’re probably going to be recruiting from around here if we keep up with the dungeon thing …”

“Okay,” said Hannah. “That’s … somethin’.”

“Right,” said Marsh. He seemed to wilt.

“I like you too,” said Hannah. “Though we don’t know each other half as well as we should yet. There’s somethin’ between us, I’ll give you that. But we’re young, and it’s a time for us to be out and about, doin’ whatever we please with our lives. If you stayed here for me — well, I confess I’d be pleased if you stuck around, if we could keep the tryst goin’, if there were a chance for it to develop into somethin’ more — all that sounds good to me, and I see how your eyes light up at ‘somethin’ more’, but —”

“Alright, I’m staying,” said Marsh.

“Marsh,” said Hannah. She felt a bit of exasperation.

“It’s like you said, I’m young, I have time,” he replied, smiling. “When you’re young, you can do dumb things like sticking around town for a girl. And if we come out the other end with having slept together a few dozen times being the only thing to show for it, that’s fine by me.”

“I’m not agreeing to be partnered,” said Hannah.

“Oh, gods forbid,” said Marsh. He was still smiling. “We’re just continuing on like we were, just two people with an intense attraction to each other, and if you sometimes look out for me, and I sometimes look out for you, and we enjoy talking, hey, nothing wrong with that.”

Hannah frowned, but she couldn’t hold it. “You know, it was clever of you to turn around the ‘young and free’ thing on me.”

“I’m clever,” said Marsh. “It’s my best kept secret.”

“Very well kept,” said Hannah.

Marsh pushed her onto her back, and started kissing her, and if he thought that was going to distract her, he was quite correct.

~~~~

Hannah stayed the night. She was sending Marsh mixed messages, she knew that, acting more like a girlfriend than anything else, and she had said to him outright that perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if that was what they ended up becoming, which seemed to be setting them up for trouble down the road if she decided that it just wasn’t going to happen.

She liked Marsh though. Sleeping with him once hadn’t ‘gotten it out of her system’ as she’d thought it might, nor had it dampened her enthusiasm for seeing him again. It also hadn’t escaped her notice that without his prior warning, Lola would probably have had a few attempts at the day. Who knew how disastrously that could have ended up, especially if Lola had learned about the ring, or about Mizuki’s ability to fly, or any other things that would have allowed her to keep slipping away. Hannah didn’t feel that she owed Marsh, not in some transactional sense, but she was quite appreciative. His contact hadn’t been without its own risks. And he had been stabbed.

It was, she decided, the Qymmos part of her that was having the most trouble. There was a book she’d read once, the one that had firmly put her off Qymmos, Variations on the Standard Relationship, which attempted to catalog first what a relationship was, then all the axes along which it could be measured, and then the approximate clusters into which the space of all relationships could be divided. It wasn’t blisteringly stupid, but it was stupid, and Hannah had walked away from the book with rather the opposite opinion than the book seemed to be putting forward: classifying relationships was, in fact, pretty worthless.

They ate breakfast together, room service that had been ordered by Marsh. Hannah had followed her ‘quick and cold’ rule, ordering a bowl of overnight oats with berries and yogurt, and Marsh had gone for a full spread that was mostly meat and potatoes, with a few fried eggs thrown in there for color and a bundle of small tomatoes that had been cooked while still on the vine. Marsh, as expected, ate like a bear, but he apparently knew quite a bit about sausage-making and gave a lengthy critique of what the Dragon’s Arm Hotel had to offer. He also kept asking Hannah if she wanted to taste bits and pieces, and she let him feed her, which was nice in its own way.

<Hannah, are you ever coming back?> asked Mizuki, just as Hannah was getting done putting on the last day’s clothes.

<Ay,> replied Hannah. <Just about to use the dagger.>

<Did you have a good time?> asked Isra. There was something playful in her voice. She was a fast learner, Hannah would give her that, and it felt like she’d been waiting to ask the question.

<A very good time,> replied Hannah. <Went on for longer than I thought it would, in a good way.>

<No dungeon today,> said Alfric. <Take your time.>

Hannah was a bit disappointed that there wouldn’t be a dungeon, but it was something that could be discussed later. She wasn’t exactly feeling in fit shape to go back into a dungeon, not without a shower first. There’d been some temptation to have a shower in Marsh’s hotel room, but she had a good idea where that would lead.

Hannah used the dagger to go to the temple, then walked back home, enjoying the morning air.

She was just in time to see the herb dragon jump out of a second floor window.

The herb dragon had wings, but Isra had repeatedly assured them that the wings were vestigial, so it was quite a surprise to see her actually flying. The motion of the flight looked wrong though, and she was clearly straining enormously, but she was flying. Hannah stopped and looked at the dragon, not sure what to do. Isra had a longer trip to Mizuki’s house, and probably wouldn’t leave until Verity was awake, which always took a bit.

<Herby is flying outside,> said Hannah.

There was a moment of silence as they registered that. <She can’t fly,> said Isra.

<Well, I’m lookin’ at her, and she’s flyin’,> said Hannah. <And she’s out of the house, which isn’t where she’s supposed to be.>

<I’ll be right in, just need to get Verity up,> said Isra.

<I’m up,> Verity said, sleep lacing her voice. <Ish.>

<Don’t let her leave the area,> said Isra.

<Coming out,> said Alfric.

Herby was flapping hard, putting in the effort, but it was clear that now that she’d escaped from the house, she had no real clue what she was going to do about it. After a moment, and just as Alfric came out the front door, Herby came in for a landing on a branch of one of the nearby trees. Mizuki was out soon after, though her attention was more on the house than on the tiny dragon.

“Not a big deal,” said Alfric. “We’ll just need to keep track of her until Isra gets here, she’ll be able to exert some control.”

“Ah shoot, it was me,” said Mizuki. “I opened my window last night to let in some cool air, I’ve only ever had to worry about Tabbins, and he goes out on the roof sometimes.” She turned to look at the herb dragon. “Oh, it’s magic!”

“Magic?” asked Alfric.

“The wings,” said Mizuki. “Isra said the wings are vestigial, which means, um, tiny and not really useful? Not enough for it to fly.” She was squinting at the herb dragon up in the tree. “But it’s not flying with just the wings, it’s flying with magic too, I think. It would be helpful if it, you know, actually flew, but I’m pretty sure it’s magic.”

“It’s a she, not an it,” said Alfric.

“Right, right,” said Mizuki. “Not a very girly dragon though, is it?”

“Do you need me here to watch?” asked Hannah. “I was hopin’ for a shower.”

“I think we have this,” said Alfric. “We’re mostly waiting for Isra.”

Hannah trekked into the house, grateful that escaped dungeon creatures weren’t going to be something she needed to deal with. Her head felt like it was swimming, mostly because the last few days had too much in them. Between the dungeon escape, the trip to Dondrian, and everything with Lola, it felt like it had happened as a blur.

She felt better after a shower and a fresh set of clothes though, and by the time she came out of her room, the herb dragon had come down from the tree and been ushered back into the house without Isra’s help being required. Apparently a bundle of mint from the back had been used as a lure.

“Marsh is sticking around,” Hannah said to Alfric. “Hope that’s not awkward.”

“No,” said Alfric. “So long as I don’t have to be friends with him.”

“It might be nice if you were,” said Hannah. “Or at least not frosty. I’d thought I might like to invite him over to dinner sometime.”

Mizuki gave a little laugh. “What happened to him just being a fling?” she asked.

“He’s still just a fling,” said Hannah. “Don’t go gettin’ your laughs in just yet.”

“What, should I wait until the wedding?” asked Mizuki.

Hannah could feel herself blushing. “Well, ay, we had some words, and I might have said it wasn’t the dumbest thing in the world to imagine that we could be more than a fling, which wasn’t what I’d gone into it thinkin’. He’s nice.”

“He is nice,” nodded Alfric. “So long as someone doesn’t offer him more money to partner up, you shouldn’t have any problems.”

That was particularly uncharitable coming from Alfric, but Hannah let it pass without comment. “It’s not clear what the rest of his party will do, but I think he’s going to try to get them to stick around for a bit.”

“They’re sticking around,” said Alfric. “I already had a meeting with Grig this morning. Josen is tentatively back on the team and they’re looking for a fifth.”

“That was fast,” said Hannah, frowning.

“They’re trying to make it work,” said Alfric with a shrug. “But finding a competent fifth is going to take some time, and it’s going to be hard to do without going to a big city, which they might end up doing before coming back here.”

“They asked Alfric,” said Mizuki.

“Grig asked me,” Alfric corrected. “I said no. It’s a difficult thing to fit in with an established party even in the best of circumstances, and I have my own team. Plus the elevation and equipment mismatch would hamper us.”

“You need to stop mentioning the elevation mismatch,” said Mizuki. She was frowning at him, and this was clearly not the first time they’d had this conversation. “It makes you sound disloyal. Just say that you love us and wouldn’t leave us for all the riches in the world.”

“Alfric doesn’t really care about the riches,” said Hannah.

“Fine,” pouted Mizuki. “Just say that you wouldn’t leave us for all the great dungeon experiences in the world.”

“I want to be practical about it,” said Alfric .”And not to give you the wrong impression. I’m loyal, but —”

“Just end it at ‘I’m loyal’,” said Mizuki, smiling at him. She reached over and pushed his chin up to close his mouth. “There, much better without the endless qualifiers and caveats.”

“I’ll defer to your expertise,” said Alfric.

Hannah giggled. “Mizuki’s expertise in not sayin’ too much?” she asked.

“Oh hush,” said Mizuki. “Maybe you should keep your mouth shut too. You know, for symmetry?”

Hannah smiled, then turned to Alfric. “Is there a reason we’re not doin’ a dungeon today?”

“I just thought we could use some rest,” said Alfric. “And you were out last night, as was Verity. We want to be going into the dungeons fresh.”

“I’m up for a dungeon,” said Mizuki. She cocked her head to the side and looked at Alfric. “Are you not?”

“There’s other work to do,” said Alfric. “But I suppose it would make more sense to do another dungeon and then bring in a single larger haul. We’re not that constrained on carrying capacity, and we aren’t in need of restocking.” He looked at Hannah. “You’d be good to go? Because if you need more rest, that should take priority.”

“I communed with Garos,” said Hannah.

“Last night?” asked Mizuki, smiling.

Hannah rolled her eyes, but it was, in fact, true. There was ample divinity to be found in coupling.

“Oh, I got everything from the last dungeon identified,” said Alfric. “This is my second time through the day. Nothing of note happened there, aside from the entad identification.”

“Your second time through? Did we hang out?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Alfric. “I went out by myself to take some time alone.”

“Aw,” said Mizuki. “I like hearing about undone Mizuki, she sounds rad.”

“Anything worthwhile with the entads?” asked Hannah.

“Not particularly,” said Alfric. “The hammer flattens biological things without hurting them, the bow that compresses things into arrows can be used on even fairly large things so long as the string is being pulled back — it’s the best of the lot — and the other three bows are relatively weak. One of them will rust things the arrow strikes, another is half as strong as the last enemy it’s killed, and the third gives a defense against arrows. I can go over their properties in more detail, but it would be better to talk about them as a group. Also, I need to go talk to Filera and fulfill my end of the bargain, but I can do that whether we do a dungeon or not.”

“So far it’s two against one,” said Mizuki. “Right Hannah?”

Hannah nodded.

It took some time for Isra and Verity to come in, and once they did, there was some time spent with the herb dragon, looking her over and making sure that she knew not to go outside without the proper supervision. Then there was some discussion of the entads that had been identified, and some further experimentation with the ‘storage’ bow, which only Hannah could use. This eventually resulted in breaking one of the dining room chairs, though Hannah was able to fix it, since it was only a single leg that was shattered.

And then they were talking about the dungeons again, which seemed to be the topic of conversation that they kept drifting back to. There was a bit of risk in doing a dungeon, with this being Alfric’s second time through the day, but it wasn’t a large risk, and everyone seemed game.

There was coming to be something comfortable and easy about the team, a rhythm to their conversations that Hannah quite enjoyed. In the end, they decided that it was a dungeon day, and after a hearty lunch, they set off to see what the next dungeon would hold.

End Book 1

Chapter 78 - Law and Order

Mizuki went from being sound asleep to wide awake in a handful of seconds. Alfric’s hand was on her shoulder, nudging her out of her dreams, and she blinked a few times to clear her head.

“How much trouble am I in?” she asked. It was what she’d fallen asleep thinking about.

“I think it’s going to be fine,” said Alfric. He was in his pajamas, soft, shapeless clothes that made him look less serious. “You’re going to have to give a statement on what happened and what you were thinking, but that’s for the regular police. The chrononauts have already interviewed all of us a few times, including Lola.”

Mizuki felt true wakefulness come over her, a battle awareness as her body reacted to the danger her mind had sensed.

“She’s still in the living room, still a statue,” said Alfric. “The interviews were in undone days.”

“You people have your own police force,” said Mizuki, relaxing only fractionally.

“Not really,” said Alfric. “We’re a close-knit community and there are people responsible for dealing with chrononaut crimes, some of them on behalf of the community, others on behalf of the country, though I’d probably need a few dozen qualifiers there. But we can talk about it tomorrow. It doesn’t need to be dealt with now.”

Mizuki sighed and sank into her bed. “Well, I’m not going to be able to get back to sleep.”

“You’ve already spoken to people a few times,” said Alfric. “You’ll do fine. This day has already seen a lot of chrononaut scrutiny, maybe as much as three full years’ worth. My mother is looking out for you.”

“Three years?” asked Mizuki.

“That’s less than you’d think,” said Alfric. “Only a thousand undone days. Three hundred people taking three days each would be enough.”

“That’s insane,” said Mizuki. “How many chrononauts are there?”

“Around seven hundred, I think,” said Alfric.

“So a third of all chrononauts were working on this,” said Mizuki. “Or half.” Math wasn’t a strong suit, especially not in the dead of night. “Or have already worked on this, shared information or questioned us or … something.”

“Just a guess on my part,” said Alfric. “A lot of it was, uh, internal auditing, and — we both need to get back to sleep. I don’t want to have to repeat this for the party tomorrow.”

“Okay,” said Mizuki. She lay back down. “Can you …”

“Yes?” he asked.

“I don’t want to be alone,” she said. “It took me forever to fall asleep, and I kept thinking that she was going to come through the door somehow, and someone would steal her body from the living room, or I would be arrested.”

Alfric looked around the room, which was lit only by moonlight. There was a large chair in one corner, with a reading light, shuttered, beside it.

“The bed is big,” said Mizuki. “Room for two?”

Alfric was very still for a moment. “Alright.”

Mizuki couldn’t help the wide smile that came onto her face, and she was worried that this would give him the wrong impression of why she’d asked him to stay, so she turned away and pulled the covers over her, and kept herself facing away as he climbed into bed. It really did help her frame of mind to have him there, and she knew that if anything came through the door, he would spring into action.

~~~~

“There are a few reasons that it got so much attention,” Alfric said over breakfast. “The biggest one is that there was some worry that this was a move of some kind by forces unknown, and the investigations weren’t just investigations into this particular incident, but into the apparent failures of the systems that we have in place, which all spiraled out until it was touching almost every part of the chrononaut structures.”

“And this all happened in undone days,” said Hannah.

“It’s still happening,” said Alfric. “Not everything can be resolved in a single day, and not everything can be confined to an undone day. There needs to be a consensus timeline, and you don’t get that until after the day is — the term we sometimes use is finalized.”

“So if she was kidnapping people to torture information out of them,” said Mizuki. “That’s … a problem for all chrononauts?”

“No,” said Alfric. “It’s worse than that, because it’s a problem for society. Society needs to trust chrononauts in order to be able to make use of them, and chrononauts need to be able to trust each other.”

“And this threatens that,” said Isra.

“Yes,” nodded Alfric. “I hadn’t realized how much, but it does. If Lola was telling the truth about everything she’d done, there’s at least an implication that someone was helping her to cover it all up, just given the way that chrononautics work.”

“And … we’re not in trouble?” asked Mizuki. “I just want to be clear on that.”

“You’re not in trouble from the chrononauts, no,” said Alfric. “And very unlikely to be in trouble from the governmental authorities, though they move slowly and don’t wrap things up within a day. They’ll be treating this like no chrononauts were involved.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “In which case it was just a confession and some violence and was met with more violence in self-defense.”

“Not self-defense,” said Alfric. “Defense of others. You can’t argue that you were defending yourself if you were a ways away and not in any immediate danger.”

“Sure, sure,” said Mizuki.

There was a knock on the door, and Mizuki slowly got to her feet. “Should I be the one to answer it?” she asked.

“It’s your house,” said Hannah. She took a bite of the eggy bread. It was easy for her to be nonchalant, given that she hadn’t done anything except heal people.

“It’s probably not the police,” said Alfric. “They’ll be coming from Plenarch, and I wouldn’t expect them too much before lunch.”

“Okay,” said Mizuki. She walked on bare feet to the door, wondering whether she should change into different clothes. She was still in her night time robe, which she cinched tighter, just to look a little more presentable. Different clothes would take too much time though and was something she should have thought of beforehand.

When she opened the door, she was nearly bowled over by the dog.

“Emperor!” she shouted.

“Mizuki,” said Alfric’s father with a nod. Alfric’s mother was right beside her. “Can we come in?”

“Of course,” said Mizuki, taking a moment to stop petting the dog. “We’re having breakfast in the kitchen.” She faltered. “Sorry about —”

“Can you save it for just a few minutes?” asked Harmon. “There’s some disclosure we need to do.”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Right. Well, right this way.” She walked through the house, very conscious that she was wearing far too casual of clothes.

“Mom, dad,” said Alfric with a nod. His mother had a pronounced frown on her face, but it didn’t seem to be directed at anyone in particular.

“Hello everyone, we weren’t expecting to see you again so soon, and certainly not under these circumstances, but here we are.” He spread his hands wide, gave a ‘well what can you do’ gesture, then clasped them together. “Ria and I are just here for support today, but as a matter of disclosure I need to be forthright and tell you that this is the second time through this iteration of the day for both of us, and our fourth and sixth times through in total,” he pointed first at himself, then at his wife. “So I’ve already been here, as has Ria, and we’ve already spoken with you, and we more or less know how this is going to go.”

“And that’s why you brought Emperor?” asked Mizuki. She smiled. “Because I asked you to?”

“Yes,” smiled Harmon. “And today might be hard on you, but you’ll have him by your side.”

Mizuki frowned. “Hard on me because … ?”

“They’ll be asking you questions,” said Harmon. “Questions that need to be asked, but some of them will feel adversarial. The police, in this instance, are not your friends. They’re trying to get to the truth of the matter.”

“They wouldn’t even have shown up if it were someone else,” said Ria. There was darkness in her voice.

“We’re trying to do everything by the book,” said Harmon.

“‘By the book’ often means that someone is going through the book and picking out every little thing that might possibly go against the rules of said book,” Ria replied. “Sorry, I don’t want to have this conversation again, the point is, there’s a difference between doing things the normal way, doing them properly, and doing them by the book.”

“And this is ‘by the book’?” asked Mizuki. “Which is the bad one?”

“Yes,” said Ria. “There’s been some back and forth on the matter.”

“So I am in trouble?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Ria. “They’ll go hard on questioning you, they’ll try their best to make you shout in frustration or cry from exhaustion, but you did nothing wrong, and they have nothing to pin on you.”

“That this is being allowed is something of a concession,” said Harmon. “Lola’s parents and the Underhill clan … they don’t want you to be treated gently, on the belief that gentle treatment would be tantamount to, ah, lenience or condoning or some such.”

“Do I need a solicitor?” asked Mizuki.

“Yes, absolutely,” said Harmon. “One has been hired for you at our expense, she’ll be here before the police are.”

“Hello,” said Verity, who had come down late, as she often did.

“Verity,” nodded Ria.

“Is this trouble?” asked Verity. “I heard a little bit.”

“It’s fine,” said Harmon.

“I mean no offense,” said Hannah. “But it doesn’t feel fine.”

“What about the pact?” asked Mizuki. “Is that … off?”

“Yes,” said Harmon. “Firmly. And Lola will be dealt with, which is why there’s this remaining matter of … retribution, let’s call it.”

“That really doesn’t feel fine,” said Hannah.

“Retribution to within the extent of a fair application of the law,” said Harmon.

“Still not feelin’ fine,” said Hannah.

“It’s power and influence being used with ill intent,” said Ria. “It is everything that people criticize us for, and should make anyone feel awful. We have a saying, ‘they will come for you in the witching hour’. It’s meant to be a warning that we’re not immune, that we could realistically be hit with a violent revolt. It’s what happened to us in North Tarbin. But some people seem to look at that expression and think more about what they can do to protect themselves during the witching hour than they do about being a good member of society.”

“Ria’s passions are inflamed,” said Harmon, shooting them all an apologetic smile.

“I personally feel that Lola should be put to death,” said Ria. “It has been made clear to me that this will not happen, and that if I take matters into my own hands, all-out war between the chrononaut clans would be the result.”

Mizuki felt a chill run down her spine, and she had trouble deciding whether it was a good chill or a bad chill.

“Wow,” said Alfric. “That’s …” He pursed his lips. “I did tell you about Lola.”

Ria turned on him. “No,” she said, voice sharp, but she relented almost immediately. “No, you did what we had taught you to do and coached your words carefully, doing your best not to spread hearsay or to give voice to rumors. You didn’t know what was actually true, and you didn’t want to do reputational damage. What we heard from you was the weakest possible version of the story, and that’s because of how we raised you and what we taught you about what’s appropriate information to pass on.”

Harmon nodded. “Your mother and I are in agreement that in this instance, the lessons we taught you did not serve you well.”

Alfric frowned. “Okay.” It was a short reply, the kind that brought to mind the phrase ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all’.

~~~~

“I don’t really understand why, if I haven’t done anything wrong, I need to be coached,” said Mizuki.

The solicitor was a Chelxic woman named Mille, even shorter than Mizuki but with high-heeled shoes that almost made up for it. She was very reassuring and even-keeled, calm in a way that suggested she’d done this a thousand times before. Mizuki imagined that she must be expensive, and she had come in from Dondrian, though when introduced, had said that she’d also done a few years of work in Greater Plenarch. She wore a skirt and blouse that were fabulously tailored, and just the right amount of makeup, applied in just the right way.

“There are two reasons,” said Mille. “The first is that we don’t want you to have any lies on record, which will be less likely to happen if you talk to me first and I can correct you or confer with you if I spot an error. The second is so you don’t say anything monumentally stupid that will get you in trouble.”

“Okay,” said Mizuki. “Because if I am in trouble, just let me know, and then let me know how we’re going to get out of it.”

Mille tightened her grip on her pen for just a moment. She had been making notes. “One of the first things I tell clients is not to volunteer information. Answer the question as directly as you can and don’t offer anything else. If they have more questions or need context, that’s for them to ask, not for you to offer. But the second thing I say, which I think you might need to keep in mind, is that you’re not here to be funny. At best, they’ll find it amusing and then continue to do their jobs. At worst, you’ll say something that can be misconstrued or get you in hot water.”

“Short, simple answers, no laughing,” said Mizuki. “Got it.”

“I’ll be with you the entire time,” said Mille. “If they ask an inappropriate question, I’ll stop them, if you say something that I think you shouldn’t, I’ll try my best to cushion it or give clarification.”

“This is all making me very nervous,” said Mizuki.

“I’m sorry,” said Mille. “I’m just trying to get you ready. Now, let’s go over it again.”

~~~~

“Lola Underhill claims that you attempted to kill her in a number of undone days, and were successful in several of them,” said the taller detective. They were Jines and Laver, the tall one being Jines, both women, very alike except for the color of their hair, with Jines being brunette and Laver being blonde. They had uniforms and a uniform hairstyle. Jines did most of the talking. “Is this true?”

“Mizuki would have no way of knowing that,” said Mille.

“Let me rephrase,” said Jines. “Do you believe that you may have killed her on an undone day?”

“It’s irrelevant to the issue at hand,” said Mille.

“No,” said Laver, speaking up. “The inquiry is about state of mind and predilection toward violence.”

“Then those questions should be asked directly,” said Mille.

“They don’t need to be,” said Laver with an impassive expression. Laver’s role was somewhat different from Jines, and she seemed to be the authority on which questions were okay and which weren’t, which Mizuki found a bit confusing. Laver wasn’t a judge, but she was a detective who worked for the fact-finding arm of the judge’s court.

“Do you need me to repeat the question?” asked Jines.

“Um,” said Mizuki. “I’ve never killed anyone. I don’t know what it’s like to kill someone. She said that I killed her on undone days, but I don’t know the context. Knowing what I know about her, it might have been self-defense, but also, knowing what I know about her, she could easily have been lying.”

It felt like the answer had been too long, and that Mizuki should have just said ‘no’, but Mille didn’t seem upset, and they moved on.

There were so many questions. Some of them were simple and inane, questions about the layout of the land which they were going to check anyhow, or questions about her family and ‘position in the community’. They had simple, easy, relaxing answers, even if they didn’t seem all that relevant. Mille stopped some of them, which Mizuki didn’t really understand, but sometimes Laver would say that it was a matter of character, and apparently that counted for something.

“What were the exact words exchanged between you and Alfric before you came in?” asked Jines.

“Uh,” said Mizuki. “I don’t remember.”

“He quotes himself as saying ‘Now’ and you as saying ‘Incoming’,” said Jines. “Does that sound correct?”

“Prompting,” said Mille.

“Rephrase,” said Laver.

Jines sat for a moment and chewed her lip. “Did Alfric, to your recollection, describe the nature of the threat?”

“No,” said Mizuki. She wanted to add ‘But I knew it was Lola’, but Mille had told her to just directly answer the questions.

“So you used magic to fly through the air, back to the house?” asked Jines.

“Yes,” said Mizuki.

“And what did you see when you arrived?” asked Jines.

“Uh,” said Mizuki. “People were standing around in the backyard. Lola had three tendrils out. Isra was lying on the ground, bleeding — or, with a bunch of blood all over her, I guess I don’t know that she was actually bleeding. Hannah was by Marsh, who was also bloody. Alfric had Lola’s attention.”

“How did you know that the injuries were Lola’s doing?” asked Jines.

“There were two blades on the ground, and two of Lola’s tendrils were empty,” said Mizuki. She had gone back and forth over that with Mille, that Lola should logically have still been holding the blade that stabbed Marsh, but Mille had ultimately said that it didn’t really matter, so long as Mizuki was being truthful about what she remembered. “And her third tendril had another knife in it. Plus I know my own party well enough to know that they wouldn’t stab each other, even by accident, and I know Lola’s party a little bit. I can’t say they wouldn’t stab each other, but Grig seems like a good guy, and Mardin’s not very … intense. But if I’m being honest, it didn’t even really occur to me that it might have been someone else.”

Mizuki glanced at Mille, who had a slight frown. It was a bit too much information to give out, Mizuki realized.

“When you decided that you would attack Lola, did you fear for your own life?” asked Jines.

“Yes,” said Mizuki.

“You did?” asked Jines, raising an eyebrow.

“Yes,” Mizuki repeated.

“Why?” asked Jines.

“Uh,” said Mizuki. “Well, first off, I was dropping from a hundred feet in the air, and I was worried that if I screwed up my speed, I was going to just slam straight into the ground, which might not have killed me with Mardin and Hannah there, but — you know, it might have. And the second thing I was thinking was that Lola might kill me if she saw me, or if I missed, or she might activate her other bindings and — I’d have had to blow them, right? Which I think I could have done, but it would have needed to be fast, before she could kill me.”

“When you were above her, taking in this scene and making plans,” said Jines. “Why didn’t you leave?”

“Leave?” asked Mizuki.

“You were about to attempt something dangerous,” said Jines. “You feared for your life. Lola didn’t know you were up there. You could, at that point, have simply flown off into town to get help.”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “But … they’re my friends, they needed me. Even if they hadn’t been my friends I think I would have done it. I think without me, Josen was the only one that could have maybe stopped Lola, or maybe Marsh if he hadn’t been stabbed in the chest.”

“When you struck her, what were you trying to accomplish?” asked Jines.

“Uh,” said Mizuki. She looked at Mille, whose face was impassive. “I don’t know. I didn’t want to kill her, I just … we had talked about stopping her before, if she did something heinous or illegal.”

“Something that would allow her to be removed from your lives,” said Jines. “That was a question,” she added, when Mizuki had no response.

“Uh,” said Mizuki. “Mostly it was a worry that, I don’t know, she was going to do something to us. Alfric was worried that he was going to be poisoned. I was a little worried that we were getting bad dungeons because of her, or that she was going to try to tear the party apart, or that yeah, stuff like the dungeon escape would happen and maybe then not be contained.”

“When you struck her, what was on your mind?” asked Jines.

“Not breaking my legs with the fall,” said Mizuki. “And then what I would do if she put up her spectral shield, how I would break all her bindings without killing or hurting anyone around us, um, probably some other stuff.”

The questions continued. Sometimes it was the same question, and other times it was the same topic approached from a different perspective. Mille stopped the worst of it, but it seemed clear that Jines was looking for something, some kind of statement that would either catch Mizuki in a lie or incriminate her. Mizuki did her best to just tell the truth.

She did end up crying, and then they took a break. The question hadn’t been anything that was, on its surface, all that emotional, it was just another question about the house and who owned it, but the constant stream of questions had been wearing on her, and she was getting worried that she really was going to end up in prison, despite the assurances of Harmon and Ria.

“I’m fine,” said Mizuki. “Just rattled.”

“That’s what they want,” said Mille. “The questioning will go on for as long as it’s allowed to. Eventually Laver will bring it to a close, but this is just how these things work.”

“How have I been doing?” asked Mizuki.

“Fine,” said Mille. “You offer a little bit too much, but you didn’t actually do anything wrong, which means they’ll have nothing to pin on you. At best they can argue that you were just looking for an excuse to hurt Lola and remove her from the picture so that you could take her place, but there’s not nearly enough to make that kind of argument work in even a cursory fashion.”

“Okay,” said Mizuki. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” said Mille. “I am being paid, but it’s the sort of thing that I enjoy doing, helping someone for whom the system seems to be unjustly set on grinding down and locking away.”

“Is that what this is?” asked Mizuki. “They said it was by the book.”

“Some of this is untoward,” said Mille. “But not in a way that would be legally actionable or that would besmirch anyone’s honor. Jines has been skirting the line.”

“And Laver?” asked Mizuki.

“She’s a professional,” said Mille. “And I get the sense that she’s being lenient with Jines.” She shrugged. “The Overguards believe this to be the hand of the Underhills, and they’re probably right, but there are limits that this little game is being played within, which us mere mortals should take some solace in.”

“Not sure that I like being part of a game,” said Mizuki.

“You’re on the winning side,” said Mille with a shrug.

“And I am doing okay?” asked Mizuki. She really would have taken all the reassurance anyone was willing to give her.

“You are, more or less,” said Mille. “If circumstances were better, I would have had more time to prepare you, but the difference would have been rather minor, I think.”

“I don’t really understand what they’re doing,” said Mizuki. “All these questions, and … what’s the point?”

“Aside from trying to make you comfortable so you’ll be lulled into saying too much, or trying to put you off balance, they’re trying to establish a firm timeline, catch you in a lie — which isn’t going to happen, because you’re not lying — and beyond that, much of what Jines has apparently been pushing for has been establishing your state of mind.”

“Okay,” said Mizuki. “To be honest, I don’t know my own state of mind most of the time. It’s weird to me that people understand why they do things.”

“State of mind won’t really matter anyway,” said Mille. “Even if you absolutely hated Lola, even if you were deliberately attempting to kill her, it would be very difficult for them to do anything about it given the facts of the case, the clear danger posed by Lola in the moment, and the lack of actual harm to her.”

“Good,” said Mizuki. “And … thank you.”

“Of course,” said Mille.

When they got back together, almost all of the questions were about Alfric, which Mizuki didn’t like at all. Questions about how they’d met, questions about how he’d conducted himself, questions about when he’d revealed key facts about his life to the party. Mizuki couldn’t help but feel defensive.

“Alfric is kind and gentle,” said Mizuki. “He’s always looking out for us, almost to a fault. He’s got a strict moral code that he follows to the letter, even if some of it doesn’t make sense.”

“Doesn’t make sense? How?” asked Jines, raising an eyebrow.

“Chrononauts have — well, no, let me start over. Alfric was raised to think that a chrononaut shouldn’t take too much advantage of their power over others, and should disclose everything,” said Mizuki. “And yeah, it’s nice to know he thinks that. But if it were me …” She shrugged. “I guess I don’t know what I would do, but to me it’s a weird way of thinking. My parents always said ‘think of how it will affect others’, and for the chrononaut stuff it feels like the ‘how it affects others’ stuff is, um, at a remove? Also I guess I never really talked about the law with Alfric.”

“Why would the law matter?” asked Jines.

“Because I don’t want to do something illegal?” asked Mizuki. “And if he said ‘oh, I do the disclosure because that’s the law’ I don’t think I’d have blinked twice. But … from what I understand, it’s not the law, right?”

Jines and Laver gave each other a significant look, which Mizuki interpreted as ‘this girl really doesn’t know, does she’.

“Wait, is it the law?” asked Mizuki.

“There are virtually no laws within Inter regarding chrononauts,” said Jines.

“What, none?” asked Mizuki. “Aren’t they like, paid just to exist?”

“That would be one exception,” nodded Jines. “But it’s rather beside the point of why we’re here today.”

There were more questions, and Mizuki had a feeling that they were trying to get back on track, but her mind was elsewhere, on the idea that maybe there just weren’t any laws for chrononauts, or not ones that mattered, that there was a cabal of them enforcing their own internal laws with absolutely no accountability to anyone else. It was odd, and a bit frightening, and the result was that Mizuki wasn’t feeling the feelings that they might have been expecting her to be.

“Did you want Lola out of the way?” asked Jines.

“What?” asked Mizuki, somewhat shocked.

“The question is too vague,” said Mille.

“Clarify it, please,” said Laver.

“Did you want Lola out of the way so that you could have a relationship with Alfric?” asked Jines.

“No,” said Mizuki. “I mean, he didn’t want anything to do with her, she wasn’t in the way at all, and now their pact is broken, he’s probably going to re-pact with someone else, someone that he does like, or at least wants to make a family with.” She gave a little laugh. It felt unbelievable that this was what Jines seemed to be going with.

“This isn’t a laughing matter,” said Jines.

“Your opinion on what my client should or should not find funny is irrelevant,” said Mille with a mild voice.

There were even more questions about Alfric, but it was clear that they were trying to create some kind of jealous lover angle that just wasn’t there. Alfric was great, and he was attractive, and if he wanted to start something, Mizuki would be there for it, but she wasn’t in a state of utter desperation or frustration or whatever it was Jines wanted to coax out of her.

And then, mercifully, it was over. Jines and Laver thanked her for her time and said they would be back if they had any more questions for her, which Mizuki couldn’t even imagine, and once they were gone, Mille gave her a rundown on what she should expect and what she should do and say.

“Try not to talk to anyone about it, excepting your party, who were there for it,” said Mille. “Don’t have any contact with Lola unless it absolutely can’t be avoided, and I doubt that would happen given she’s been moved and the chronos are dealing with her. Mostly you just don’t want to contradict anything you said, or raise any questions about state of mind. I don’t think there’s anything there, but it’s the direction Jines was pointing, and if there’s someone pulling her strings, then that’s what they would probably go with. It’s extremely unlikely that this will ever see court in any fashion, and if it does, I’m already on retainer to help you.”

And then Mizuki was free to go about her day, like nothing had even happened.

She immediately went to seek out Emperor, and was pleased to find that he was still around.

There was a bit of a debrief rundown between Mille and Alfric’s parents, which Mizuki only half listened to. They seemed a bit bored, but that was because they must have listened to this all before. Jines and Laver had conversations with a few of the others as well, but these were much less in-depth, and Mille wasn’t sitting in on them, because no one else was in trouble.

“Are there really no laws about chrononauts?” Mizuki asked Ria.

“There are very few,” said Ria. “We’re a small community. We police ourselves, and our reputation … it’s not sterling, but it has so far been good enough that we haven’t had laws foisted upon us.”

“You know we came over here, to Inter, five hundred years ago?” asked Harmon.

“Yes,” said Mizuki.

“Has Alfric talked about why?” asked Harmon.

“No,” said Mizuki. Which was strange, now that she thought about it. “Or, if he did, I didn’t listen well enough.”

“Our ancestors took over,” said Harmon. “They were the rulers of North Tarbin — the proto-nation that would become North Tarbin. Not tyrants, per se, but not good rulers. Just because a person has the ability to grab power for themselves doesn’t mean that they should take it. And there were designs to expand further, efforts to consolidate that power. It was an ugly time.”

“They came for us at the witching hour,” said Ria.

“We fled,” said Harmon. “Or ‘they’ fled, depending on how you want to frame it.” He glanced at his wife. “Five hundred years ago, to me that’s enough I have to consider those different people.”

“Inter — or what would become Inter — wanted us,” said Ria. “They wanted the power we could provide. It’s worked out well for them, frankly. But the lesson of our early history was one that we’ve done our best to keep alive. Some of what Alfric believes … our own approach, on the Overguard side, is to stand up straight, be polite, disclose when you need to, and follow a set of strict rules in order to command respect.”

“If you don’t, they’ll come for you at the witching hour,” said Harmon.

Mizuki shuddered. “And you believe that?” she asked. “I don’t think we would.” She wasn’t sure that ‘we’ was the right word. She didn’t consider herself to be in a big group of all people who weren’t chrononauts, but that was certainly the way Alfric’s parents were talking.

“It’s something any right-thinking person would have done to Lola,” said Ria. She had a grim face. “And if they see Lola, if they know about her, if they know that she’s off locked away by us rather than facing mortal punishment, they’ll start to see us differently.”

Mizuki thought about that. “I guess so. More than they do.”

“I’m giving you a ring,” said Ria, pulling a matte black entad from her pocket. “It will blend in with your skin. It will allow you instant contact with me.”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Well … thank you.” She took the ring.

“Our son believes in self-sufficiency,” said Ria. She glanced at Harmon. “To a fault. It would be better if he didn’t know you had this ring, but it’s probably unavoidable, and you’ll have to follow your own conscience. I might come back to collect it in a month or so, depending on how things shake out. If there’s trouble, contact me, immediately, don’t worry about waking me up, don’t worry about it feeling like it’s too small. If Lola shows her face anywhere near you or Alfric, I’m going to kill her.”

Mizuki swallowed. “Well. Okay.” She slipped on the ring, and it felt cold as it wrapped itself around her knuckle and sank into her skin. “Did you offer this same thing to Alfric?”

“I did,” said Ria. “He rejected it.”

“Ah,” said Mizuki. “… why?”

“He’s very principled,” said Harmon. “More than we are, frankly. But I also think he hates the idea of being able to call his mother at a moment’s notice if things aren’t going his way, even if that’s sensible.”

“Whatever else, he’s a young boy,” said Ria. “It clouds the mind.”

“Do you think it likely that Lola stays locked up?” asked Mizuki.

“A month ago I would have thought it unlikely that someone like Lola would be allowed to exist,” said Ria. “Now, I’m less sure of our position.”

“Thank you,” said Mizuki, “For all the help.”

Ria nodded. “Let’s hope that you don’t need any more.”

Chapter 80 - The Sunken House

The excitement with Lola seemed to have come to its conclusion, and Isra was quite happy for that. The wound to her stomach felt completely fine, but Hannah had urged a plain diet, one without anything too sour or spicy, just so that her guts could have a bit of time to ‘rest and relax’. Isra wasn’t particularly pleased by that, and it seemed a surfeit of caution, but at least she hadn’t been told to be on bed rest.

“I’m going home,” said Isra, once she’d been questioned by the police. They’d been much less interested in her account than Mizuki’s, which Isra found somewhat irritating. Isra was a victim and had been stabbed, unprovoked, which felt to her like it should have been worth a few more questions. She didn’t have a firm grasp on this sort of thing though. “Just for tonight. I’ll be back in the morning.”

“Oh,” said Verity. She looked at Emperor, who was curled up on the floor next to the herb dragon, and Tabbins, who had retreated to a position on top of a cabinet and was giving the dog an evil eye. “Will these creatures be okay?”

“Emperor is a good boy,” said Isra. “Tabbins feels threatened. If Lerial misbehaves, it will be because she’s eating too much from the garden. There shouldn’t be any problems. I can … push harder, if needed.”

“No, I’m sure you’re right,” said Verity. She was standing by the door, lingering there. “Is there … can I come with you?”

Isra stopped where she was. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “It just feels like you vanish into the woods sometimes, and we’ve been sleeping together — in the same room — for a few weeks now. We’re friends, right?”

“We are,” said Isra. They were, in point of fact, best friends, which felt not just important to clarify, but vital. She kept it to herself though.

“I just wanted to see where you live,” said Verity. “And I don’t have anything planned for the rest of the day.”

“My house is nothing special,” said Isra, though she realized as she said it that it was a lie. Her house was where she’d spent most of her life, the place she’d been born, the place she shared all her memories with her father.

“Could I come anyway?” asked Verity.

“Of course,” said Isra, though it didn’t feel like an ‘of course’, it felt like ‘if you insist’.

Taking a moment to break down their interaction, Isra had said ‘my house is nothing special’ and meant ‘I don’t want you to see how I live and how I was raised’, then Verity had asked to come anyway, which meant that either Isra hadn’t done the signal correctly or that Verity had decided to ignore it for whatever reason. It was the sort of thing that Isra noticed when she stopped to ponder what was going on, and there were no good answers to be had, at least not without asking. For a moment she debated having that conversation, but she knew that it might be awkward, despite how good of a friend Verity was, or perhaps because of it.

They took a moment to gather up their things. It soon became clear that Verity was packing for a night at Isra’s house, and Isra wasn’t sure how she felt about that. There was a spare bed, the one belonging to Isra’s father, and it would be a bit of a walk from the warp point for Verity to get home on her own, but it was one thing to have Verity visit, and another for Verity to spend the night. It was possible that Verity was simply planning for the unknown, throwing extra clothes into a sack on the off chance they went late together, but it gave Isra an odd feeling. There was uncomfortability, but also excitement at the prospect. Mostly, Isra was feeling that when Verity saw the house, she would immediately have second thoughts.

Verity even went so far as to grab her lute, and that made Isra feel warm, because it meant there might be a chance for a private performance. There had been more of those, of late, sometimes at night when Isra was drifting off to sleep, and the dreams that came with a bard-induced sleep were always better, milk and honey, sorrel and witchwood.

They trekked through the forest together. It was good to be back in nature, back among the things she understood much better.

“How is your stomach?” asked Verity.

Isra thought about that, and what Mizuki had said about flirting.

“I’ll show you when we stop for a break,” said Isra.

Isra had taken the lead: she knew all of the paths the animals took, and the thicker ones that were forged by humans. She couldn’t see Verity, but worried, with Verity’s silence, that the comment had gone too far in some way, or perhaps been delivered with the wrong tone. Rather than glancing back, Isra looked through the eyes of a nearby bird, and was able to catch a glimpse of Verity blushing.

Isra was overdue for another talk with Hannah. There had been some subtle signs that Verity was interested in some kind of relationship, but what that might mean, what would come after, was an uncomfortable mystery. Isra had a good idea how their bodies might fit together, and a part of her was very eager for that, if she had read the subtle signs correctly, but after, or on a continuing basis, she was afraid that she would very quickly make a mistake.

“It’s easy to make mistakes when cooking,” said Isra.

“Oh?” asked Verity. “I mean, I would imagine so, but how do you mean?”

“The instructions are simple, but in practice … I do what Mizuki says to do, and then she comes to tell me that I’ve done it wrong,” said Isra. “I don’t know if she’s a poor teacher or I’m a poor student, but maybe it’s a bit of both.”

“She doesn’t seem inclined to teach,” said Verity. “Especially with cooking, I think she ‘knows’ quite a bit, but there’s so much instinct in play that when she tries to pass on her knowledge, she ends up leaving too much out. Though from what I’ve heard, at least she has some understanding of the craft.”

Isra chewed on that. “There are people who are good at a craft without understanding it?”

“Oh yes,” said Verity. “It happens in music every now and then. Someone will come into formal education knowing how to play songs, sometimes knowing how to play well, but not having any of the foundational knowledge. It’s all just rote, memorized rules without any understanding. I’m given to understand it’s even more common in the trades. A carpenter might understand what to do when a particular glue won’t hold, but not why to do it. Healers were like that too.”

“Healers?” asked Isra. “Clerics?”

“No, before clerics,” said Verity. “Or rather, there wasn’t really a time before clerics, but there was a time when they were much less common, and — I don’t want to speak beyond my knowledge, but there was a time when there were all sorts of remedies for all sorts of things, and they didn’t necessarily know why the remedies worked, just that they did.”

“The same for me,” said Isra. “I know what herbs to give for different ailments, but not why or how they work. I couldn’t teach someone else, not easily.”

Verity was silent for a moment, and Isra took another look at her from a bird’s eye view. Verity seemed to be in high spirits, perhaps because there’d been no communication from her mother, or maybe because it was a free day.

The song started slowly, but built as it went, without any magic in it, just a product of Verity’s voice. It was a light and pleasant song about a gardener who was filled with superstitions, and most of the lyrics that Verity wove into it were in the form of some specific nonsense that the gardener was doing.

He placed pinecones beside his beds,
He’d heard it scared the loggerheads.

He always dug a rose-hole twice,
To keep away the spring-time mice.

Isra enjoyed it immensely. It was a silly song, and Verity was always a joy to be around when she was in a silly mood. She kept the song going for as long as she could, always returning to the chorus when she needed a break from thinking up new things for this silly gardener to do, then plunging back in once again. Eventually, she stumbled, and Isra, whose own mind had been working, added a verse of her own.

His first cucumber was always tossed,
To help avoid a late spring frost.

Isra was rewarded with a laugh from Verity, and the song continued on, but now they were singing together, with Isra’s imperfect voice serving as poor harmony to Verity. Isra had learned to sing from her father, but hadn’t had all that much practice beyond what she sometimes sang to herself in the woods or while doing chores around the house. For the rhymes, they alternated, sometimes taking turns with the couplets, other times with one of them throwing out a line for the other to finish. It was a sloppy method of song-making, but it was great fun, and Isra felt herself really getting into it, forgetting for a moment that her own voice was so greatly outclassed by Verity’s. They ended it when Verity tossed out a line that ended with ‘hut’ and Isra rhymed it with ‘butt’, which sent them into peals of laughter.

“I suppose that one isn’t going to go into your book,” said Isra.

“No, it might!” said Verity. “It’s incredibly long, and I won’t be able to remember half of it, but it’s silly and bright, and if I can use it to communicate to people what it’s like to be free in the world with someone,” the sentence seemed like it ended early. “I want people to feel, and not just because I’m blasting them with bardic power. The power fades away, it’s the song that sticks with you, that keeps going on in your head days after the last note has faded, it’s the lyrics that you recall.”

“And you think that people will get that from this song?” asked Isra.

“From our song?” asked Verity. Isra glanced back, and Verity was smiling. “I don’t know. It might be one of those things that depends too much on context, that no one would actually understand unless they were here with us, and if they were here with us, it would be totally different. If I were playing that song in a theater, it would have to be different, because I would want to evoke the warm spring day, the perfect weather, the way you keep looking at me through the birds.”

Isra felt an intense wave of embarrassment and kept looking forward so Verity couldn’t see her face.

“You do it sometimes when we’re in the garden,” said Verity. “Ever since I learned that you were a druid, I’ve thought to myself, ‘I wonder if that’s Isra’. And I came to the conclusion that yes, usually it is. You’re the reason the flowers smell sweeter, the reason that every day has nice weather, and the reason that the birds are very attentive to what I’m doing.”

“Sorry,” said Isra.

“Sorry?” asked Verity. “Well the last thing that I would want is for you to be sorry about it. I like it. You’re with me even when you’re not, and I like when you’re with me.”

Isra smiled, then turned back to Verity so Verity could see the smile.

As they walked, Isra focused a part of her attention on the house. She hadn’t been expecting company, and the house was a bit of a mess, so she very discreetly sent a bird ahead to check that the place was clean. Dishearteningly, the place was very much not clean. The bed wasn’t made, the furniture was in disarray, a stack of stones had not yet been sorted up onto the shelf. Isra had been treating her home less like a home lately and more like a place where she stored her things in between nights spent at Mizuki’s.

Isra had learned quite a bit about druids in the past month, some of it from her guildmates, and other bits and pieces from Alfric and Hannah. She had always conceived of it as ‘talking’ to the creatures, plants, or natural features, but it seemed that in truth it was something else entirely. The ‘talking’ could be entirely silent, which she’d always sort of known, and the infusion of self could be more straightforward, more forceful, pushing her own will down onto that of a creature.

She attempted this from a distance. A family of raccoons lived in a tree not far from Isra’s house, and she called them forward using the bird. They scampered over, opened a window, and let themselves in, then started cleaning up, quickly doing the dishes and putting some things away. It took almost all of Isra’s attention, and she nearly stumbled over a root.

“Isra, are you okay?” asked Verity.

“Oh,” said Isra. “Sorry, just … thinking.”

“Sorry if it was rude to ask,” asid Verity.

“If what was?” asked Isra. “I … might have missed the question.”

“Oh,” said Verity. “I was just feeling peckish, and wondering whether we were going to, um, eat at your house, if you had food.”

“Even if I didn’t have food, it wouldn’t take much to hunt and forage,” said Isra.

“Oh, I would love that,” said Verity. “If I could come with, I mean.”

“We can have a fresh meal then,” said Isra. She faltered. One of the raccoons had just dropped a plate, and they were all spooked. The window was open, and Isra ushered some birds in to pick up the pieces, but what she really needed was a bird that had a love of shiny things. “I’ll try to make it like a meal.”

“Like a meal?” asked Verity. Isra almost missed it, because one of the birds had pooped on the floor, and there was some difficulty in pushing a raccoon to get a rag and clean it up.

“Um, not just a collection of ingredients,” said Isra. “Not just cooked hare and a single carrot on a plate.”

“Was that … a possibility?” asked Verity. “Also, are you okay? Is it your stomach?”

“My stomach is fine, I’m just — cleaning up,” said Isra.

“Cleaning up?” asked Verity. “How are you — oh.”

“We’re almost there, I didn’t want it to be messy,” said Isra, but it was increasingly clear that it was very much going to be messy. She’d been too far away, trying to get them to do too much, and the addition of more animals had only made things worse. A handful of squirrels had been added in to help with the dishes, and they were now playing in the sudsy water.

“Is that … hygienic?” asked Verity.

“They’re clean animals,” said Isra. She paused. “It’s the hair I worry about, but I’ll give the dishes a once over.”

“I see,” said Verity. “That is, ah.”

“Sorry if it’s weird,” said Isra. She was flushed with embarrassment. She stepped around the bend and pointed. “Here’s the house.”

It was almost invisible if you weren’t looking for it. The roof had been covered with sod and had quite a bit of underbrush growing on top of it, with roots that had dug in deep under Isra’s coaxing to make sure that the beams would all fit snuggly together and the rain would be kept out. The house itself had been built in a depression, which seemed to Isra to have been dug in at some point, though it would have been before her memory. The windows were rather small, owing to the narrowness of the gap between the edge of the roof and forest floor. A small staircase led down to the door. Sitting outside, just under the eave, was the large chiller which she mostly kept extra meat in. Beyond, there was Isra’s own garden, one which was starting to bear fruits and vegetables, but which had been a bit neglected.

“Wow,” said Verity. “It’s beautiful.”

“It’s not,” said Isra. “It’s been overtaken by nature in too many ways, and I don’t have the knowledge or skill to fix it. It’s also too small.”

“The rooms of Mizuki’s house are giant,” said Verity. “If that’s the comparison you’re making, it’s not a fair one.”

“I went to your house,” said Isra. “And to the Overguards’.”

Verity was still looking at the house, and she gave a little laugh. “The Overguards are a large family with as much wealth as they could ever want, and my own family is — you know. None of these are fair comparisons.”

“It is small though,” said Isra.

“True,” said Verity. “But whether it’s too small is a matter of your needs, isn’t it? Do you wish you had more room?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. She frowned. “I never really thought about having a different house.”

“I like the idea of a small house,” said Verity. She was still looking at Isra’s house. There was a sound of something breaking from inside. “Is that … do we need to do something?”

“They’re just cleaning up,” said Isra.

“Ah,” said Verity. “And when you say ‘they’ …”

“Just a moment,” said Isra. She’d been concentrating on the animals, trying to direct them, but it wasn’t going all that well. The squirrels had been a mistake.

She had them leave the house all at once, birds flying out of the window first, then the squirrels, and finally the raccoons, whose paws were still wet. The window was on the wrong side, so Verity was witness to this stream of animals leaving the house.

“Ah,” said Verity. “That is rather a lot of animals.”

“It was messy,” said Isra, frowning. “I just wanted it to look nice for you.”

“You should have seen my room at The Fig and Gristle,” said Verity. “I lived like a slob. It was nice, for a change of pace.”

Isra regarded the house. “I suppose eventually we’ll have to go in.”

“I’m prepared,” said Verity. “In my mind, it’s going to look like it’s been ransacked by a raccoon, but I know that it can’t possibly be that bad.”

Isra slowly approached the door and opened it. She took one last look around, and decided that there was nothing she could hastily fix before Verity came in.

“Oh,” said Verity as she took a few tentative steps inside and looked around.

If you were generous, you might say that the house had several rooms, but it did take quite a bit of generosity. Isra almost felt like making a joke about it, but it felt like it relied too much on self-deprecation, so she held off. Then Verity didn’t say anything, which made Isra nervous, so she went ahead with the joke anyway.

“This is the foyer,” said Isra, gesturing at the three-foot wide strip of house that needed to be kept clear so the door could swing open. Most of her shelves were there, along with her winter clothes, for lack of a better storage place. “And here’s the breakfast nook.” She pointed at the table, which was missing one of its two chairs. “Past that curtain is the bedroom, and you can see the master bath beside it. The kitchen is, naturally, beside the dining room.” She pointed again to the area she’d called a breakfast nook. This wasn’t an original joke, it was one that she’d read in a book, but she had found it quite funny, and hoped that she hadn’t botched it.

Verity gave a smile that indicated that she appreciated the effort, but didn’t find it all that funny.

“Where do you … I mean, when there are things you want to do, where do you find room?” Verity looked more confused than anything else, and her eyes kept going to the tile floor and the rugs that were laying on top of it.

“I go outside,” said Isra. “Most of what I do is outside.”

“I think I’ve changed my mind,” said Verity. “It is quite small.”

“Too small?” asked Isra.

“Like I said, that depends on you. But I think I would go insane,” said Verity. “There’s a part of me that sees it as cozy, and I don’t think I need all that much room, realistically, but you can hardly move around. And with two people …” She stopped. “How did you and your father manage it?”

“We were almost always together,” said Isra. “But by the time I was ten, and would get on his nerves, he trusted me to be alone, and if he needed space, he would go outside. He would say that he was going for a hunt and that I could stay in, but then he would come back in, too late to have been hunting, and without anything to show for it.”

“What do you think he was doing?” asked Verity.

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “Taking time to himself, I suppose. By the time I was five, I was already fairly self-sufficient. He was a good father, in some respects, but I liked when he left and I could be on my own.”

“In some respects?” asked Verity.

“He taught me well, to read and write, to hunt and fish, to think clearly, all kinds of things to help me survive,” said Isra. “But especially now, I’ve found myself wishing that he would have let me have a normal life, one with other children. Being with the party, it’s been so simple and easy, with so many points of confusion cleared up. My father — there are questions that he never had a chance to answer, because he was dead before I thought to ask them.”

“Was he … rough with you?” asked Verity.

“No,” said Isra. “Or, I don’t know, because I’ve only ever had one father, but no, he never struck me.” She didn’t know if that was quite what Verity had meant. “When I was younger he would hold me down sometimes, if I was being, in his words, a brat. I don’t know if that’s normal.”

“My mother hit me,” said Verity. “Not once I was older, but I remember it happening a few times when I was little. I once overheard her saying that one must never hit a child in anger, but that if it was done with deliberation and calm, it could help to straighten a child out when nothing else would work.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. “Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “It seems cruel to me, but if it gets the desired result … I always understood it as something my mother didn’t want to do but felt was necessary. I was never afraid of her, or at least not the threat of pain.”

“It seems cruel to me too,” said Isra. Her father had been her world, in many ways, even if there had been secrets between them, even if he hadn’t done quite as she might have wanted. She looked at the curtain that separated the beds from the rest of the living space. “Can I show you where you’ll be sleeping?”

“Yes, please,” said Verity. “Oh, but I suppose I never asked if I was sleeping here tonight, I had just packed with that in mind and — I don’t want to impose.”

“I think now that you’re here, it’s no imposition,” said Isra. “I don’t have much hospitality to give, but I would give it all to you.” She pulled back the curtain. “The bottom bed will be yours.”

“Good, thank you,” said Verity, but Isra felt like there was a bit of forced enthusiasm there.

“The mattress won’t be as good as at Mizuki’s,” said Isra. “But the sheets are clean, and it’s filled with feathers.”

“Do you — do you just have this bed made and ready?” asked Verity.

“Yes,” said Isra. She kept herself from fidgeting. “I was feeling lonely, some months ago, and had thought that I might … invite someone home with me. To sleep together.”

“I … see,” said Verity. “Wait, do you mean actually sleeping together?”

“Yes,” said Isra. “I understand now that ‘sleeping together’ implies coitus, but at the time I only had some vague notions. I’d thought that someone would … I don’t know.”

“Can I ask a frank question?” asked Verity.

“Yes,” said Isra. “Please.”

“When you were thinking this, was it men or women you’d be inviting back to your place?” asked Verity. She was looking tense, like this question was the stillness of a small prey when a predator came near.

“I wasn’t thinking,” said Isra. “I was just … I don’t know. I didn’t think that I would invite them, because if I did, it would likely be in the wrong way, and they would be confused, or laugh, or feel embarrassed. I thought, somehow, that they would invite themselves, and I would somehow say yes, and it would all just magically work somehow.”

“It would be nice, if it were like that,” said Verity. “If the right kind of people would just come up to you and ask if you wanted to be friends.”

“It did happen,” said Isra. “Just … not quite in the way I expected. I was approached in the middle of the day and asked whether I wanted to join a dungeoneering party.”

Verity shifted uncomfortably and set down her lute case along with her sack of clothes. She cleared her throat. “Mizuki said that her initial approach didn’t work out, when she asked you about the dungeon?”

“Did that … bother her?” asked Isra.

“No,” said Verity. She sat down on the bed, feeling the cushioning. Isra was worried she would make a comment, and decide not to stay. “Well, a bit. I think she was just confused.”

“I like when people are straightforward,” said Isra. “It was some time ago, so I don’t remember exactly, but Mizuki was talking a lot and I didn’t fully understand why. Alfric’s approach was more straightforward. I understood what he wanted.”

“Straightforward,” nodded Verity. She bit her lip. “So when you were talking about bringing someone home, that was about friendship?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “It was nesting behavior. I’ve never had friends, unless you count the animals.” She sat down beside Verity on the bed. “I never thought of myself as lonely.”

“You have us though,” said Verity. “And we’re not going away.”

“You might,” said Isra.

“No,” said Verity, shaking her head.

“When Lola made her offer, that she would take care of your family if you left the party, you considered it,” said Isra.

“I did,” said Verity. “But … a part of what I was thinking about was how much it would hurt to leave. When it was all over, I was thinking to myself about how I really would have thrown my family under the wagon for this party.”

“And should, maybe,” said Isra.

“It won’t interfere,” said Verity. “I don’t think so. I’ll just be gone for a bit once a week.” She frowned. “I don’t want to talk about that though. It’s been pressing on my mind, and I just want to have fun. Lola is in prison, we can celebrate, right? And you can show me what your life is like when you’re not spending the night at Mizuki’s.”

“Yes,” said Isra. She got up from the bed, ducking to keep from hitting her head. “Let’s go hunting.”

Chapter 82 - As Easy as Falling Down

Pate Knob was an area of large hills, each of them covered in grass, like upside down bowls beneath a blanket. There were a few trees here and there, but the area was dominated by grass more than anything else. This region of Greater Plenarch had more of a scheme to the names than elsewhere in Inter, which came, in part, from its shorter history relative to the rest of the nation. There was a small town at the center of almost every hex, which typically gave the name to the hex, and if it was relatively flat, it was typically a ‘Point’, as in ‘Hie Point’, while if there were lots of hills, or one hill near the center, it was called ‘Knob’. Alfric had been prepared for Pate Knob to have rockier terrain, as they’d seen in Traeg’s Knob, but it was all grass-covered hills, virtually as far as the eye could see.

“What causes this?” asked Mizuki, looking out over the many hills. They were nearly uniform in shape and size.

“A bit of a haycock shape,” said Hannah.

“Haycock?” asked Mizuki. “You made that up.”

“It’s a word,” frowned Hannah. “It’s a heap of hay in a field, a cone shape.” She made the shape with her hands.

Mizuki narrowed her eyes. “That’s a haystack,” she said.

“There’s soft rock beneath the grass,” said Isra, who was crouched down. “I’m not sure exactly what happened, but it would have been a long, long time ago.” She had a pronounced frown.

“Something upsetting?” asked Alfric.

“No,” said Isra. “I was just wishing that I knew. Or that I could figure it out.”

“What’s a pate, anyway?” asked Mizuki.

“The top of your head,” said Alfric, patting his own. “So whoever saw this thought that they looked like a bunch of heads, I guess.” He took in a deep breath, smelling the summer and the dampness of the grass. “Come on, it’s this way, I think.”

There was a little path between the rounded hills, which went alongside a thin trickle of water. Pate Knob was one of those hexes that rarely got any traffic, and unlike Traeg’s Knob, it didn’t even have a public house next to the warp point. The hills were bad for farming, and no one was hurting all that much for farmland anyhow, so it was a relatively empty hex. Traffic had silently routed itself around the hex, so the roads were even less developed than elsewhere in Greater Plenarch.

The dungeon entrance itself was surprisingly well-kept, though some of that seemed to be from recent maintenance. The door was firm oak, well-varnished, and the stone collar around the door had been cleaned enough that it was pure white, the runes clearly visible. It was all set into the side of one of the hills, deep enough that there was a bit of structure around it, clearly added later, as though at some point the dungeon entrance had been excavated out.

“Everyone ready?” asked Alfric. He got a round of affirmative replies and readied himself, then unlocked the door and slipped inside.

Alfric was praying for an easy dungeon, a gentle dungeon, even one without much in the way of loot. They were all at the same elevation again, and in theory that meant it might be slightly easier just on principle, but he wasn’t about to hold his breath. A handful of useless entads that they could keep as toys or trivial conveniences, that was what he was hoping for, if it meant a dungeon that wouldn’t present mortal threats. A dungeon where Hannah wouldn’t have to do any real work of healing, that was what he was looking for.

The opening room was safe, which was always a relief. It was a limestone cavern approximately twenty feet across, with wet walls and no good dry place to set all the things they didn’t want to be carrying into battle, but after a bit of thought, Alfric drove a few pitons into the soft stone and gave them a place to hang things.

“Why do we keep going into such wet places?” asked Verity. She was fiddling with the pegs on her lute. “It’s murder on the instrument.”

“We’ll find you a better lute,” said Alfric. “If it doesn’t happen organically, we’ll just go buy one. You can play other instruments though, right?”

Verity glared at him. “With a concert on the horizon, I’m not going to be cross training.”

“Fair,” said Alfric. “I was just thinking about options. An instrument that can survive any conditions and still sound good will be, ah, perhaps a bit expensive. If it has to be a lute, even more so.”

“It’s bad enough that I’ll likely be using a different instrument for the concert,” said Verity. “Though the finger flute does make things easier.”

“We should get moving,” said Alfric. “I think everything is squared away here, and we’re prepared for a speedy exit if need be.”

“Lead on,” said Hannah with a nod. She was in her entad full plate, helm down, with a hammer ready to bash things. Alfric envied the armor, and wanted a set for himself. It was the kind of thing that there was little cause for in the real world, which meant that a suit would come relatively cheap, but one that would resize to him would be much more expensive, and getting a suit altered for him would be horrendously expensive.

“Mizuki, what do we have for the aetheric weather?” asked Alfric.

“Fireballs,” said Mizuki with a grin. “I’m going to torch the crud out of whatever we come across. I’ll try not to make it too loud, but no promises.”

“Good,” said Alfric. “Earplugs in then. Make sure you’re not breaking the loot. Verity, maybe put some power on Mizuki, at least at the start of the fight?”

“Will do,” said Verity. She was holding her lute slightly differently than she had in past dungeons, and Alfric wondered whether this was some new form she was trying. He hoped that it would work out for her. She put her earplugs in place, and Alfric did the same. They were waxy lumps he’d read about while in Dondrian, and fairly cheap, though they’d have to use new ones each time. <I’ll be starting now.>

She struck up a melody that was slow to begin but built over time:

The tempest raged across the sea,
But I had you and you had me,
We held together ‘neath the sail,
And watched the kraken, large and pale.

In the first real room, Alfric caught only a flash of the creature, a large one of hooked limbs and green slime, opening its mouth for a huge roar. Then Mizuki was there beside him, shouting <Fireball!> at almost the same moment she sent the projectile speeding toward it. The earplugs, which were firmly in place, were godsent, because they meant less chance of being permanently deafened. When Alfric opened his eyes again, the creature was completely dead, bits of it blasted up against the walls in what seemed like an unnecessary display of power.

<I love fireballs,> said Mizuki. <Also I love bards making me into a minigod.>

<Easy on the blasphemy,> said Hannah.

<I said mini,> Mizuki replied. She had a smile plastered on her face.

The room had four doors, which was a bit unusual, with two of them on the ground level, and the other two reachable by climbing up stairs to a balcony. It was dark, lit only by their lanterns, and Alfric spent some time thinking about the doors. There didn’t seem to be anything in the way of valuables, and Mizuki would have called any magic out.

<Which one, captain?> asked Mizuki.

<The lower ones first,> said Alfric. <We want to be able to retreat, and that will be harder on the stairs. Better to take the easier paths first, even if the difference is marginal.> It was very much a question of preference, but Alfric was in a low-risk mood, especially given that he didn’t want to be time sick if this dungeon didn’t pan out. He gave a brief pause to allow for dissenting opinion, then moved to the left door.

Mizuki was muttering ‘fireballs fireballs fireballs’ under her breath.

The door opened up into stairs that led down, treacherous stairs that weren’t quite right for a normal human stride length, and weren’t quite level. It was, again, dark, and Alfric gave out a word of warning so that people would watch their step. Alfric found it curious that this was relatively civilized, given how little settlement the hex had, but it was the kind of curiosity that a dungeon always presented. Perhaps Pate Knob had a long history and some long-forgotten ruins buried under brush.

At the base of the stairs, there were furry creatures with long ears that trailed onto the ground behind them, and if not for the muck they were moving around in, they would have been white.

There wasn’t even a fight to be had, since the first step was too high for them. They tried to jump up, and were screeching, but they had only tiny little claws, and two sharp front teeth, and they couldn’t make it to Alfric. Alfric leaned down and picked one up by the scruff of its neck to look at it.

<Good fur,> he said. <We might want to take these for domestication.> There were twelve in all, which was a good starting population. <Isra, thoughts?>

<I don’t know,> said Isra. <They give me a headache.>

<We’ll take them,> said Alfric. <Let me get out a sack.>

A short time later, all of the furry critters had been lifted up with some amount of caution and put into a large sack, which was then tied up tight and put into a wooden cage, which was then placed into the garden stone entad. It was all a definite risk, but there could potentially be quite a bit of upside if the hair was worth anything. Dungeon mad creatures could be bred, so long as they could be settled down, which was usually done by keeping them unaware of people for long enough.

The room itself was cave-like, with thick muck on the ground, and Alfric stepped carefully as he moved to the next door.

<Loot,> said Mizuki. She was looking at the muck, squinting, as she often did, to see the magic better. She reached down into the muck, making a face, and pulled out a bow. The face of disgust she’d been making grew more extreme. <No more bows!>

<Might be good,> said Alfric. <Set it on the stairs, we’ll grab it when we go back up. No, off to the side so we don’t trip on it if we have to make a hasty retreat.>

Mizuki set the bow in a better position. <Alfric, I have fireballs, they’re basically my specialty, we’re not going to have to run for our lives.>

<You’re lucky I’m not superstitious,> said Hannah. <You’re jinxing it.>

The muck-floored room led off down rock tunnels made up of the same soft stone of the central cave. It wasn’t a clean division between room and hallway though, with the tunnels instead being like two extensions of the room that got smaller as they went until eventually they were slits that were difficult for a fully armored person to slip through.

The leftward passage opened up into a small chamber with a pile of rocks in the center of it. Alfric initially worried that they might be eggs, or some kind of sleeping creature, which might have been a problem given the narrowness of the passage and how many there seemed to be, but they were just rocks. A quick look from Mizuki was enough to confirm that they were ectad material, capable of making good dehydrators, and Alfric was able to gather them up without too much work.

The rightward passage got overly narrow, just as the leftward one did, but then the ceiling began to gradually lower, and Alfric was forced to back out lest he get stuck. More than one dungeoneer had unintentionally trapped themself in a narrow passage, thinking that it would open up, or that they would be able to come back the way they came. There was a story, often shared around campfires in the Junior League, of a man who had wriggled himself into a tight passage, only to have his party members be unable to extricate him. They had stayed in the dungeon for three days trying to free him, and had eventually left him there, having no better options.

The party back-tracked, taking the bow with them and spending a moment to secure it with their other things back in the entryway.

<Small potatoes so far,> said Mizuki. <And you know I love small potatoes, but not in this context.>

<Lower right door,> said Alfric. <No major combat so far, be on your guard.> It would be wrong to say they were ‘due’, but right to keep in mind that major combat was very possible, and that they couldn’t be lulled into complacency.

Again there were stairs descending down, and these had a slight slant to them, making them especially treacherous, which meant that Alfric needed to take his time and ensure that the others were doing so as well. It was, again, dark, which was a bit of a theme for the dungeon thus far, and gave it a greater sense of danger than it would otherwise have had.

When they reached the bottom, they found themselves in a cavernous room, one with stalactites and stalagmites that were accompanied with a steady drip of water from the ceiling. There were monsters as well, but they were already dead.

<Creepy,> said Mizuki as she peered at them. <Why are they dead?>

<It happens sometimes,> said Alfric. <Sometimes the dungeon creates things that are just … non-functional. Mastics, they’re usually called, but they’re rare enough that there’s not really a reason to call them anything. Either the dungeon creates them dead, or they’re created without a proper mouth, or heart, or lungs, and by the time we get to them, they’ve already gone through their death throes.>

The monsters were long, with skinny, emaciated limbs and a thick pelt around them. Alfric didn’t want to spend a lot of time looking at them, but Hannah stopped for a moment to touch one of them.

<For my book,> said Hannah, which meant that she must have been using her clerical power of diagnosis.

Mizuki was sweeping the room for magic items, and eventually reached down to one of the corpses to pull up a sack that had been slung over what you’d have to be generous to consider a shoulder. <Magical sewing needle,> she said, pulling out a thin piece of metal. <And also a magical thimble? Not sure if they’re connected.>

<Good,> said Alfric. <Moving on?>

<Sure,> said Mizuki.

Between the stalagmites was a passageway that led deeper into the dungeon, and for a moment, Alfric wondered whether it might connect up to the other passageway that had been too narrow for him.

Instead, it led to a wide open room with a flat floor but more stalactites hanging down from above. In the center there was a chest with clawed feet, and as Alfric began to cautiously approach it, it lunged toward him.

<Hold!> he yelled as he saw Mizuki’s hands come up.

There were, within dungeons, creatures that disguised themselves as trinkets or furniture or other things. They’d come across monsters like that in their very first dungeon, in fact, a collection of flying creatures that looked just like books before they’d gone flapping through the air to attack.

But there were also other ways that something like a chest could move at a person, and they were too valuable to risk lobbing a fireball at.

The chest came to a halt in front of Alfric, clawed feet moving with eerie realism as they brought it to a stop. It was a large, heavy thing, solid oak construction with thick pieces of wood, and metal panels at the side and also on top. There was beauty and artistry to the construction, detail on the dovetails and raised scenes on the panels, which were all different from each other and seemed to be made of tin.

<That’s the conservatory,> said Verity, who’d come forward and was pointing at the design.

<This is … an entad?> asked Mizuki. <Not a creature?>

<Yes,> said Alfric.

<How can you tell?> asked Isra.

<It’s not trying to kill us,> said Alfric. He leaned down and gave the chest a tentative touch. It didn’t move from where it was. <Even if it just follows us, it’s probably good. If it follows us when we don’t want it to, that’s less good. Being able to put everything into it, the book, the stone … that would be very good.> He reached forward and slowly lifted the lid of the chest, then peered down inside.

<Seems shallow,> said Mizuki, who had stepped forward. <Are there other compartments?>

The interior of the chest went down only a few inches, and Mizuki was right, that was suspect, and implied a false bottom or other compartments, or something. Alfric reached forward and pressed on the bottom, and was slightly relieved to find that he could push it down with some ease.

<We’ll test later,> he said. <For now we should keep moving.> He looked around, and the room seemed to have no exits, so he went back the way he came, glancing back to see what the chest was doing. As soon as the last person got more than five feet away from it, it followed along, this time at a bit of a jaunty trot. <We’ll hold off on putting anything into it until we have to, better to test it first, and we don’t want to do that now.>

<I kind of want to do that now,> said Mizuki.

<You know what I mean,> said Alfric.

They went back to the room with four doors, this time aiming at the top two. They’d covered a number of rooms already, and had a few things that were technically encounters, but Alfric hadn’t gotten his bident bloody yet, and it was setting him on edge. It would be a good dungeon if he didn’t have to kill anything, but a dungeon where Mizuki was the only one doing any work would feel a bit hollow.

The top two doors, as it turned out, connected to the same place. It was too wide to be a hallway, with walls of the same white stone, but for a room, it was incredibly long, so much so that they couldn’t see the end of it. The lanterns were good, but there were limits to illumination, and one of the problems with coming into a dark place with a light was that it had a tendency to attract monsters in short order. They heard it before they saw it, and Mizuki called out a shout of warning that her fireball was on its way.

The creature was large, built with an oversized mouth with hundreds of tiny teeth. It thundered forward on all fours — no, on all sixes — fists slamming on the ground as it covered distance in a hurry. It opened its mouth for a huge roar, and that was right where Mizuki aimed the fireball.

Afterward, she would claim that the creature had closed its mouth around the fireball and had a brief, confused expression before being blown apart. This was hard to argue with, given that everyone else was following proper protocol and not looking directly at the fireball when it went off. That the monster would stop and attempt to process a fireball in his mouth, that it would have feelings of confusion or worry about the situation, strained credulity. Mizuki insisted though, and seemed to think that it made a good story, and Alfric hadn’t been looking, so it was remotely possible.

Verity had been empowering the spell, and they were hit with a spray of blood and chunks of gore. The aftermath was gruesome, almost comically so, though Alfric kept his opinion on the humor of the situation to himself. Explosions were sometimes tricky things, the force of them acting in unexpected ways, and Alfric had heard cases of even a very serious explosion not doing as much damage as it seemed like it would, since the energy would simply bounce off heavy armor. Here, the creature seemed to have closed its mouth around the fireball just before it unleashed its full force, which had the effect of magnifying the damage. Its face was largely missing, and flesh hung from the shattered jaw. There was no sign of the teeth.

“Ow,” said Mizuki, touching her forehead. <Sorry, ow.>

<Are you okay?> asked Alfric, turning to look at her. They had all been splattered by blood, and Verity was carefully cleaning her lute with a cloth, though she’d been at the back and shielded from the worst of it.

<I think I got cut with a tooth,> said Mizuki, whose hand was on her forehead.

<Let me take a look,> said Hannah. <Ach, not a good one.>

<There are good head wounds?> asked Mizuki, who patiently stood there as Hannah examined her head.

<There are symmetric head wounds,> said Hannah. <You’ll have a little red cross on your brow until we get you back to the temple. Sorry.>

<Ugh,> replied Mizuki. <Thanks,> she belatedly added. <When am I going to get my own full plate?>

<Soon,> said Alfric. <Or at least a helm that covers more. Moving on?>

They took the long room slowly, worried there would be another monster. If it was like the first, it would be trouble, as Mizuki had sucked the air clean of magic, and Alfric didn’t particularly like the larger monsters, which they were relatively weak against.

Eventually they had walked the length of a city block, and still the room kept going. Unfortunately, it was sloped down, and gradually became more sloped as they went. Before it got too steep and there was a risk of slipping, Alfric brought them to a stop. The chest was following, but seemed to have no trouble keeping up, and gave no sign that it was affected by being on an uneven keel. It had navigated the earlier stairs just fine.

<We might have to end here,> he said, looking down at the remainder of the room, which showed no sign of stopping.

<We have almost nothing,> said Mizuki.

<That happens,> said Alfric. <But it looks like this is going to get steeper, and if there’s another door at the bottom, then getting back up might be such a significant challenge that we end up stranded.>

<We can call it here,> said Hannah. <I’d rather not be stuck at the bottom of a pit.>

<Can we climb down a bit more?> asked Mizuki. <Hammer and pitons and all that, just to see if the extra hundred feet gets us anything?>

Alfric thought about that. <Done carefully … sure.>

He got out the gear, moving with all due caution. The ground was slightly wet in places, and he was painfully aware that if he began slipping, he might not be able to recover, especially as the slope of the floor became more extreme. Falls could kill, and even if they didn’t kill, they could maim you enough that you couldn’t get back up. Without as much of a chrononaut safety net, there was a heightened tension, and Alfric found himself enjoying the higher stakes, perhaps in spite of himself.

Proper climbing was better done with a harness of some kind, but Alfric tied a rope around his waist, using knots that he prayed would hold. It wasn’t immediately clear to him which god was the best for knots, but he ended up on Xuphin, God of Infinity.

A hundred feet wasn’t all that much, not in the context of how long the room was. As he moved though, his lantern illuminated an opening on the steep grade.

<I have something,> said Alfric. <I think the rope will reach.>

He was worried that there would be something in the hole he was descending to, and that he would have to fight it while holding onto the rope or depending upon his knot, but the recess had nothing in it, only another passageway to parts unknown.

<Follow me down, it shouldn’t be too steep,> said Alfric. He stepped into the entryway and undid the knot. Getting up would be more difficult, but not all that challenging. At the end of the alcove there was another door, and there was just enough space for all of them to cram in together.

A round of assent later and Alfric was pushing through the door, alert to the fact that something on the other side might be trying to kill him.

The lantern illuminated a room with a ring of stones in the center, and hulked over within those stones, a creature the size of a small wagon. Alfric moved slowly, shield ready, but it was still. He wondered whether it was another mastic, but he wasn’t about to drop his guard. When Alfric was at the ring of stones, he stopped, and that was when the creature lunged forward.

Wet fur split open and slimy appendages came forward, which slammed hard against an invisible barrier. The creature roared from a mouth with crooked teeth and lunged again, attempting to break through the barrier, but whatever invisible force was holding it back, the creature couldn’t penetrate.

<What in Oeyr’s anus is this?> asked Mizuki. <Do I need to fireball it?>

<Hold,> said Alfric.

<Mood is weird,> said Mizuki. <Not even sure I could fireball if I needed to.>

<Describe it?> asked Alfric.

<Vile harm,> said Mizuki. <Killing intent. A mood that hates you and wants you to die.>

<Let’s get out of here,> said Alfric. <Now.>

They backed up slowly as the creature smashed against the invisible barrier over and over again. At a certain point it stopped, sniffing around at the stones, and that was when Alfric started to get truly worried. Dungeon madness was a curse, but also sometimes a gift, since it meant that sneaky tactics like ambushes or traps were barely ever used. Every now and then though, there was a creature for whom the dungeon madness meant something else, especially when there was a barrier that couldn’t be overcome with raw force. Something with enough of a brain left to stop smashing a barrier would be smart, and that meant that it would be much more dangerous if it actually did get out.

Isra went up the rope first, sure on her feet, and Verity came after, followed by Hannah. Having to evacuate in this way was something that Alfric had worried about, but he’d pushed those thoughts to the side and declared it an acceptable risk. Now he was second-guessing himself. He’d recognized the stones as something incredibly old, a device that had been built by a civilization who only deployed them for certain dangerous scenarios, and that meant that the creature trapped within those stones —

As Mizuki was going up, her foot slipped on a rock, and that was enough to set her off-balance. When her weight came down on the angled rocks, her grip slipped, and then she was falling down past where Alfric’s lantern light shone.

He would need to go down after her, taking the plunge into the unknown depths. Mizuki had a lantern of her own, but it was only a small one that she kept tucked away most of the time. He couldn’t see her at all.

<Mizuki fell, going after her,> Alfric said into the party channel. He had almost forgotten his training and the need to keep everyone on the same page. <Continue on without us.>

<Fireball,> said Mizuki over the party channel, her voice causing a cool wave of relief though Alfric, because that meant she was still alive. Her voice sounded strangely calm. Below, far below, there was a flash of light so bright that Alfric couldn’t make out whatever it was illuminating. <Again.> A second flash of yellow-orange light followed the first, and there was a long moment of silence.

<Mizuki?> asked Alfric.

<Think it’s dead,> said Mizuki. Below, so perilously far Alfric wondered how she had survived, Alfric finally saw a light, her little palm lantern. <I’m hurt. Can someone —> There was a pause, and Alfric could just barely make out the figure below looking up. Mizuki swore.

<Coming to get you,> said Alfric.

<How?> asked Mizuki.

<Do we need to come back?> asked Hannah.

<I have a plan,> said Alfric. <Hannah, stay where you are, be ready to leave. If I go silent, it means I’m dead, or far worse, unconscious. Most likely this is a reset, but we can’t play it like that.>

<What’s the plan?> asked Mizuki.

Alfric was holding onto the rope and looking up the slope to where the chest is. <I’m going to try riding the entad.>

The chest was having no problem at all gripping the slope, though by rights it should have been slipping. It seemed to stick close to the closest person, and with Isra, Verity, and Hannah having gone up, and Mizuki having gone down, it was there on the wall next to Alfric, patiently waiting.

The first step was to climb up the rope until he got to the place where he’d pounded in the piton, and the second step was to untie the knot and then wrap the rope around the chest. This took some doing, but with Alfric right next to it, it wasn’t moving at all. It was tempting to anthropomorphize the chest, but entads were never like that, never “alive” in the way that they might sometimes seem to be. The chest seemed patient, but that was just a matter of projection.

Once the rope was tied around the chest, Alfric tried to think about next steps. Getting down to Mizuki would be easy, and easier still with the chest, but getting back up would be more difficult. If Alfric couldn’t get down to Mizuki and bring her back up, the whole day was shot and would need a reset, which would leave him time sick, and was the entire reason not to do a dungeon unless fresh. He was doing his best to keep his head though, and after a quick test, he hoped that he had cobbled together enough plan pieces that something could be done with them.

Alfric lowered himself down the slope with exaggerated care until the chest started to move. Once it did, he held his feet, allowing it to close the distance between them, paying attention to how fast it was going.

He did it again, holding onto the rope as he went further down the grade, but this time, as the chest approached, Alfric backed up more, keeping the rope taut. The chest followed at a fairly sedate pace, and then they were off, the chest supporting him and also following behind him.

As they got to a steeper part, Alfric was eventually left dangling, and the chest seemed to have no problem walking on walls, though it never quite got to a sheer vertical. The distance between them was kept constant, and because of that, the chest continued to direct itself downward, carrying Alfric like a jury-rigged crane.

The slope never actually became vertical, and after a bit, it began to get less steep. Mizuki’s small lantern was some distance away from the wall, so Alfric figured that something like that had happened, and it also helped to explain how she had survived such a high fall. Most of it had been slipping and sliding down rather than full-on falling.

Eventually Alfric reached her, with the chest trailing behind him. The ground was covered in black, brackish water, perhaps a foot deep, and Mizuki was standing by the edge of it with a large sword in one hand and a helm in the other. Behind her, illuminated by Alfric’s lantern, was a huge humanoid creature whose body still had places where there were glowing embers.

<Hi,> she said.

She looked in rough shape. Her chestplate was dented, and she was bleeding from one leg, but it was hard to tell anything else about her, because she was also covered in muck, presumably from the slime. She was smiling, but looked awfully tired, as though she’d stayed up too late or done too much heavy labor.

<Got some entads while I was waiting,> said Mizuki. <They were both on the guy.> She gestured at the creature she had killed. The sword was big enough that Alfric was surprised she was holding it, but it was an entad, so it was possible that explained it. <How are we getting back up?>

<We’re riding in the chest,> said Alfric.

<How?> asked Hannah over the party chat.

<It goes to the nearest person,> said Alfric. <That doesn’t include people inside of it. I don’t know if we’re too far away from you, but if we are, it’s possible that you might need to come back a bit.>

It took some time to figure out the logistics of climbing into the chest. While the height wasn’t a problem, the chest wasn’t quite big enough for the two of them to stand up in it side to side. Eventually they squished themselves in, and Alfric pushed them down a bit with his palms flat against the interior sides of the chest, low enough that the lid closed.

“Is this going to work?” asked Mizuki. “What do we do if it doesn’t?” She was barely audible with the earplugs in.

“Reset,” said Alfric. “You’ll help take care of me when I’m time sick, right?”

“Of course,” said Mizuki. She looked at the bottom of the lid, which was lit by their lanterns. “How long do we wait?”

“Not sure,” said Alfric. “In theory we should be moving. I don’t want to open the chest while it’s climbing the side of the wall.”

“Fair,” said Mizuki.

But shortly after that, Hannah opened the lid and looked down on them, and then they went through the hassle of getting out of the chest, which was marginally helped by the chest itself seeming to want to disgorge them.

They were in the main entryway, where their things were hung on hooks, and had gotten there far, far faster than Alfric had expected. They hadn’t tested how fast the chest could go, but it seemed to Alfric that it was much faster than he’d been imagining it to be.

<Och,> said Hannah when she touched Mizuki. <Quite the fall.>

<Ooo,> said Mizuki as she was healed. <I love healing. I don’t tell you that enough. Praise Garos.>

<’We should not value them for their works, but for their nature,’> Hannah quoted.

<Seems backwards, but I’m not in a position to argue,> said Mizuki.

<It’s considered a troublesome passage, aye,> said Hannah. <Not false, but people have trouble with it.>

<We can talk about it on the road,> said Alfric. <We’re out of here.>

It wasn’t a full clear, but Alfric contented himself with the spoils they’d gotten. What he’d seen would have to be passed along to the authorities so they could deal with it, but the dungeon had been completed, and the day wouldn’t have to be wasted. He couldn’t say that it was easy, not at all, but then again, dungeons weren’t supposed to be, and for once, Mizuki’s fall aside, it didn’t seem that they’d been thrown anything that was far beyond their capabilities.

He was hopeful that this meant the next dungeon could be much sooner than they’d been in the past, and at the thought, even though he was caked with grime and gore, a smile spread on his lips.

Chapter 81 - Beruchald's 6th

Verity was in an unexpectedly good mood, which she couldn’t fully account for. She was electing not to question it too much, and to simply enjoy the day with just her and Isra together.

Verity had never hunted anything, but she was eager to learn. She hadn’t actually ever killed anything either, though she was less eager for that. When she thought of rabbits, she thought of them either as small, cuddly animals, or as cooked meat, largely without thought given to what happened in between those two forms. She vaguely recalled a lesson from one of her tutors about water shifting into ice and back again, and rabbits were not like this, having two distinct identities. That was how it was in her head though.

“It’s important to pay attention to the wind,” said Isra. “Animals will run if they catch your scent.”

“But you know where the animals are, don’t you?” asked Verity.

“I do,” said Isra. “And I could call them forward, the rabbits at least. They wouldn’t be able to sense my killing intent. Deer are more difficult. I don’t know what it is about the larger animals. I had thought that it was just a matter of nature, but now I think perhaps it’s just size. I’ll need to ask the guild.”

“Is that going well?” asked Verity. “The guild?”

Isra nodded. “There’s one druid in particular who is very thorough with his answers.”

“Good,” said Verity. “I’m glad.”

“He asked to meet up,” said Isra. “I never replied to that part of his message.”

“Ah,” said Verity. “Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “I was worried he would — that there were undertones I was misunderstanding. It’s harder when it’s just text.”

“Undertones of … attraction?” asked Verity.

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “Maybe. There’s affection in his words.” She shrugged. “I think he’s happy to have someone to share his knowledge with.”

“Mmm,” said Verity.

They walked through the woods, each thinking their own independent thoughts.

Verity had something of a mood of Xuphin. She wanted more, and much of that was, yes, in the direction of relationships. Isra seemed cagey about that sort of thing, and had refused to directly answer Verity’s questions more than once. All Verity wanted to know was whether Isra was interested in boys or girls, but Isra had so far declined to answer, even when asked — not directly, but so close to directly that it seemed to make no difference. There was clearly something in the air between them, little touches or comments, little looks. The birds had stopped watching Verity after she’d commented on them, but they had started up again, if with a bit more discretion and guilt when they got caught.

Dancing together had been magical. The shared archery lesson had been too. And now they were in the woods together, all alone, with the rest of the party occupied. Verity worried that she was taking things too quickly, that she was pushing it along when there was friction getting in the way, but that was a bit the mood of Xuphin. Many of Verity’s thoughts were lewd, particularly horny in a way that wasn’t fit for any but the most low quality pamphlets. There had been a rather famous devotee of Xuphin with thirty-two husbands, a woman who was so famous that the tale was almost certainly embellished to the point where it lost its value as truth. That was the feeling though, as if Verity could have taken on a hundred lovers, as though that would be the thing that would bring her to prominence in the eyes of Xuphin. That would, of course, never happen. Verity had no real desire for polygamy, and was far too reserved in any case. It was the feeling though, as though she wished to be rolling across a field of naked women.

The hunting lesson went disastrously, at least from the perspective of getting something to eat. Verity had only just learned how to badly use a bow, and when Isra spotted a rabbit, it took time and effort to line up the shot, only for the arrow to go wide, or for the rabbit to dart away at the last second. Verity was using Isra’s arrows, so at least there was no risk of them breaking or needing to be retrieved, but it was still a bit disheartening. There was always more walking after a miss, and a bit more talking about technique, but Verity’s arm was wearing out surprisingly quickly.

“You need to understand its strategy,” said Isra. “A rabbit will freeze, blend in, try to hide. Your eye sees movement better than anything else. You try to flush it out, and when you do, it will zig-zag, trying to shake you.”

It was a lot of information at once, too much to keep in mind while also trying to be more effective with the bow than a sack of garbage would be.

Finally Isra pointed out a rabbit that was sitting next to a mossy stump, and Verity drew back her arrow, hoping that this time it would find its target. Again, the rabbit jumped away just as the arrow was in flight, but this time it turned back, bouncing into the path of the arrow that it had very nearly escaped.

“Did you do that?” asked Verity. She was breathing heavier, and her eyes were on the rabbit, which had stopped moving from the moment that the arrow had pinned it to the stump.

“No,” said Isra. “It was all you.”

“Well, call it luck then,” said Verity. She approached the rabbit cautiously, as though it might get up and fight them. She was surprised by how nervous she was. “What do I … do?”

“Dress it,” said Isra. She’d pulled a knife from a small sheathe on her hip. “Did you want to, or can I?”

“Mmm,” said Verity. “You do it, but I’ll watch? For next time.”

Isra took the rabbit and made a slice from the throat down to the butt, then cracked the rabbit open and began ripping out what seemed to be quite a bit of the rabbit’s insides, the entrails and other things which Verity didn’t know the names of. She was a lover of words, but it had always been enough to know that a spleen and kidney were in there among the viscera. The last thing Isra did was to remove the rabbit’s skin and cut off its head, with both main parts quickly tied to her belt. The rest was left on the ground, presumably for Isra’s animal friends to eat.

“That was fast,” said Verity.

“It needs to be,” said Isra. “And we need to get it cooking fast. Once the creature dies, there’s a small window before it seizes up, and if you miss it, you need to wait two days or so before it loosens. If you eat it in that window, when the body is tense, it will be too tough to chew.”

Verity nodded. It was making her slightly queasy, but she pushed the feeling down. Again there was a feeling, as there’d been in the house, of the idealized vision of these things hitting cold reality. “Lead on.”

They made their way back to the house, and they apparently had wandered much less than Verity had thought they did, because it was a quite short walk. Along the way, Isra pulled a few roots from the ground, ones that bore a resemblance to ginger, carrots, and potatoes, though not like what Verity was most familiar with — they were stunted, wild versions, she thought. These were plucked without much seeming thought on Isra’s part, and a few leaves were torn from plants they passed by the handful.

When they got back to the house, Isra flipped up the single heater on her stove and placed a large pot on it, then took a small, unlabeled bottle from her chiller and poured an amber liquid into the pot.

“So you do cook at home?” asked Verity. “I know you said that Mizuki was treating you like an infant.”

“Not an infant,” said Isra. She was cleaning off what she’d gathered in the sink, having placed the rabbit skin off to one side. “But we’re going very slow. She’s still learning how to teach, I think.”

“Mmm,” said Verity.

The pot was hot in no time, and Isra placed the rabbit in it, which was soon searing away. She went to work with her knife, cutting up the vegetables, and she threw them in soon after, then poured some water from the tank above the sink and splashed that in as well. She covered the pot with a lid, then washed her hands.

“Now we wait, I think,” said Isra. “A month ago I wouldn’t have cooked the vegetables, or cut them.”

“And you and Mizuki are good friends?” asked Verity. “I suppose we don’t really talk about her much.”

“I’ve spent the most time with her,” said Isra. “After you. I enjoy her. She’s very cheerful.”

Verity was very aware that she was not a naturally cheerful person, and it was something that she wished were different about herself. Every time she tried to act cheerful, it felt false, like she was putting on a show for people, and putting on a show was a familiar feeling that did quite a bit to drain her mood. This was a happy day, which she was happy for, and she hoped that it would last, especially if that was what Isra wanted.

Verity was a bit bothered by the living conditions though. Animals coming in to clean up, the way that Isra handled the raw rabbit and didn’t immediately wash up, the dirt on the floor — Verity had thought that Isra lived in a picturesque little cabin in the woods, and while this was true, the reality of that little cabin was a bit sobering. Isra was a druid, and marched to the beat of her own drum when in her own realm, but it was a stark difference from how they lived at Mizuki’s, where there was some actual care taken to keep things neat and clean.

The word that Verity’s mind kept dancing around was ‘poor’, but that wasn’t even quite it.

When Verity had been ten years old, she had gone to a family retreat, which was a small affair with perhaps twenty people, on the occasion of her grandparents celebrating forty years together. They had stayed in cabins on a lake, a cluster of them that had been rented out, one for each family, and it had all been very rustic and cozy. It had informed her idea of what it was like to do without, but they hadn’t really lacked, and it had all been a matter of playing pretend.

There was, perhaps, in Verity’s mind, an image of Isra as a wild girl, and that image was starting to crumble. The bathroom was frighteningly small, the stove had only a single burner and looked like it could just barely fit the single large metal pot that Isra had, and the bed was going to be a challenge to sleep in. The wildness was unattractive, and that was okay, because Isra didn’t owe Verity attractiveness, but it was still a bit startling. When they’d been walking through the woods together, Verity had been imagining she would see the home of the Princess of the Woods, a quaint, wild, but also somewhat domestic habitat.

There were pieces of it here and there, especially the collection of things that Isra had set up against one wall, but Verity couldn’t shake the feeling that what she wanted was to sand down all the bumps and warts of the place. It felt like an awful thing to want. It felt like everything her mother had ever tried to do to her. Where was this feeling coming from? Was it something her mother had instilled in her, something that couldn’t be shaken? Or was it something else?

“Am I the first person you’ve had here?” asked Verity.

“Yes,” said Isra. “Sorry if it’s —”

“No, no,” said Verity. “It’s — I was just thinking that must limit how much can be done with the place, if you need to carry everything on your own from town, if you never hire anyone for repairs, not that you necessarily have the money for that, but — I don’t know.”

“When I was thirteen, they would have taken this home from me,” said Isra. “Or, perhaps, just put me in a new home and left all this to rot. I avoided people. I had been stolen from and — it wasn’t a good time in my life. And money … I didn’t want to put more into a home that I was thinking of leaving.”

“No?” asked Verity.

“I have the money to live better than this,” said Isra. “Even before we started the dungeons. I was saving it up, thinking that I would start over somewhere, in a place where being odd wouldn’t be as remarkable.”

“A city?” asked Verity. “That seems … not like you.”

“It’s something that happens in stories,” said Isra. “The main character goes to some new land, and everyone understands that they’re foreign, that they need simple things explained to them. Some kind mentor takes them under their wing.”

“Ah,” said Verity. “So, not a city, just somewhere you could start fresh.”

“I don’t know,” said Isra, shaking her head. She grabbed a towel from a rack and lifted the lid of the pot. The smell was good, but Isra wrinkled her nose and began adding more things, apparently dissatisfied. Among the additions was salt from a small jar, taken out as a pinch, and a splash of dark brown liquid from a little bottle that was kept unchilled. Even in the best of circumstances, cooking was a strange alchemy to Verity, but here nothing had a label or familiar packaging.

A thought had been percolating, and Verity allowed it to rise up to her tongue. “If we keep up with the dungeons, eventually we’re going to want to move,” said Verity. “And … you know you’re welcome at Mizuki’s house. I think — and I don’t mean to pressure you — that we would all like it if you lived there with us, really lived with us.”

“I know,” said Isra. She looked around as if trying to find a place to sit, but Verity had taken the only chair in the entire place.

“Okay,” said Verity. “Then I’ll say no more. But I will say that we would help you move whatever you wanted to have moved, sell whatever you decided you didn’t need anymore, and get you properly situated.” She looked at the shelf of stuff. “Alfric would help build you a shelf, and we could get little labels made, if you’d like that.”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “There’s something in my heart that would break if I left this place to rot.”

“Then we could also help in the opposite way,” said Verity. “If you — well, if you wanted a new chair, or a second chair, we could bring one of the ones we got from the dungeon. We could help shore up some of the sagging in the house, you could tile your floor with those tiles we picked up … I don’t know if that’s help that you would want, but I know Mizuki is arranging things with Angun on your behalf. If you wanted,” she stopped, not wanting to offend. “If you wanted me to hire someone for any kind of service, I would help you with it.”

Isra looked in the pot again, face set. She poked at the rabbit with a fork. “I’d like a haircut.”

“Okay,” nodded Verity. “I can help with that.” She was fairly sure she’d have said that no matter what Isra had asked for.

“I want to go shopping for clothes, to get things that are less,” she gestured at her outfit.

“Less … practical?” asked Verity. Isra nodded. “But you must shop for clothes already, right?”

“I don’t think I do it correctly,” said Isra. “I want clothes for when I’m in town. Clothes for temple day, if we’re going to go as a group.”

Verity frowned slightly. “You don’t tailor your own clothes though, do you?” Everything that Isra wore seemed to be well-made, most of it proper textiles, not pants made of rabbit furs or anything like that, though there was an animal-skin jacket hung up on a peg. “I mean, you must have some experience buying clothes from the market.”

“There’s a woman who comes in the spring,” said Isra. “I make sure not to miss her.”

“A woman?” asked Verity.

“From Tarbin,” said Isra. “Or … maybe her parents were. Dark-skinned, like me. She sells outfits in a style that’s comfortable to me.” Isra used the towel to take the pot off the heater and then flipped the element closed, pairing it with the chiller. There was a characteristic hiss as the frost touched the heat. “I think she knows me.”

“The woman?” asked Verity. “She knew your father?”

“No,” said Isra, shaking her head. She lifted up the lid of the pot, setting it aside. “I mean … she knows that I buy from her, and remembers me from year to year. I’ve needed new clothes every year, and though she’s never mentioned it, she always has several outfits that fit me nicely, all well-made and quite cheap.” She pursed her lips. “Suspiciously cheap.”

“Ah,” said Verity. “Well I think you look nice.”

Isra smiled. “Thank you. But would you help me look like I did at the opera?”

“I don’t think I have that level of expertise,” said Verity. Isra had been dazzling. “And I don’t think that we have that kind of budget, even if we pool our money. But yes, we can go to an atelier in Liberfell, or convince the group to make a trip into Plenarch.” Or, possibly, if Verity was going to be making regular trips to Dondrian, they could go there together. She didn’t want to think about that though.

“Good,” said Isra. “Dinner is ready.”

The chair situation had to be resolved first, and Isra went outside to grab a stump, leaving Verity all alone for a moment. When she was by herself, the house didn’t seem so small, and she could imagine Isra at home alone, reading through library books and listening to the woods around her.

The rabbit was pulled from the pot and pieces were taken off it and plated, along with some of the vegetables, which were somewhat mushy.

“I’m still learning to cook,” Isra apologized. “To cook properly, I mean.”

“It’s better than I would have done,” said Verity, which was a serious understatement. Cooking wasn’t one of the five womanly arts, and in Verity’s only foray into cooking at age thirteen, she’d learned that it was possible for a single piece of chicken to be both burned and raw.

The food was good, better than Verity had been worried it would be, though nothing like Mizuki’s cooking. The rabbit was lacking a bit of crispiness to its skin, but it was still tender, and the flavors were good. Verity had always heard that food tasted better if you hunted it yourself, but she didn’t particularly think that was true.

They talked over dinner, largely about food and what they each liked to eat in the winter months when it was harder to find something fresh, even for Isra. There were, on one of the shelves, several ceramic crocks that were filled with all kinds of pungent things, some of them from recipes, and others of Isra’s own creation. The chiller in the kitchen was rather small, not big enough to hold a winter’s worth, and there were apparently more large crocks outside, sitting under the eaves of the house, though given it was early in summer, most of them had been emptied.

“It’s very different in the winter,” said Isra. “When enough snow falls that it deadens the sound, when you can see tracks through the snow clearly … I take the chilling element off the stove and hang it outside, letting the stove heat the whole house. It gets nice and cozy.”

“It sounds nice,” said Verity. “With a little bit of — not hot chocolate, because you don’t have that, but … tea?”

“Hot tea on a cold day,” Isra nodded. “I know all the best plants for it, or at least those that grow in the area. Sometimes I have a fire outside, and revel in the smoky smell that coats my clothes.”

“‘The smoky smell that coats my clothes’,” said Verity. “‘Winter’s breath and curled up toes’.”

Isra smiled. “I would accept a post-dinner song, if you felt one coming on.”

Verity got out her lute and thought for a moment before starting in on her song. The song before, their little rhyming one, had been fun, but she wanted something soft and comfortable, like a warm sweater, a sense of being insulated from everything the outside world had to offer.

She put magic into the song. Emotional manipulation was difficult the more complex it got, and Verity was aiming for something incredibly complex, the very specific feeling of being glad to stay inside when the weather outside was bad, but generalized so that it was sitting tight and comfortable while the world was swirling around you in the distance. It was, she realized partway through, the feeling of being in a cabin with a friend while your mother was off planning concerts for you.

“Mmhmm,” said Isra when the song concluded. She swayed slightly. “That was strong.”

“Too strong?” asked Verity. “Sorry, it might have been the party link, my songs work better on you than a normal audience.”

“I think it resonated,” said Isra. “You work with what’s there.”

“I have another in me, if you’d like,” said Verity. “I brought my lute because I really do need to practice every day, but I can go do it somewhere else if you’d like.”

“No, I want to hear you play,” said Isra. “I always want to hear you play. I need to do dishes anyhow.”

Verity was tempted to do something whimsical and imaginative, something she actually felt like playing, but there was a very real chance that she was going to have professional work soon, and though she loathed the thought of it, she needed to get in time with some of the pieces that she would be expected to play in a concert. People liked the classics, the sprightly notes of Lessi and the throbbing tempo of Beruchald, and Verity needed to get back to the level of technical skill they demanded.

Isra did dishes while Verity played Beruchald. The music felt stale and boring to Verity, though Beruchald wasn’t particularly noted for being stuffy. It was nothing like playing in a dungeon, where she could alter the song to suit what was going on. When Alfric went in for a heavy swing, she could punch up the note, and when Mizuki announced that there would be some deafening explosion, the song could pause to work it in. Some of that was actually useful, but in terms of aesthetic, it couldn’t be beat. Beruchald, played properly, was like a dull, lifeless rock by comparison, and every bit of variation and interpretation she added to it felt like a breath of fresh air.

“What was that?” asked Isra once Verity was done. She’d finished all the dishes and sat back down on the stump. “It wasn’t your usual style.”

“That was Beruchald,” said Verity. “Did you like it?”

“I did,” said Isra. “I almost had to stop to listen to it. Are there more in that style?”

“Beruchald was a person, that’s not the name of the song,” said Verity. “Sorry, I forgot who I was speaking with. Beruchald was a composer who lived some hundred and fifty years ago, and that was, technically, a rendition of a transcription for solo stringed instrument of the third movement of his sixth symphony, which was done by a virtuoso lutist named Carmellia. Beruchald’s great work was a set of symphonies, which he worked on for much of his life, and his last eight symphonies were all in the theme of seasons.”

“Which one was that?” asked Isra. “And why eight?”

“There are four ‘main’ symphonies and four ‘transitional’ symphonies,” said Verity. “What you just heard was only a piece of the Summer Symphony.” She tried to weigh whether what she wanted to say would count as bragging. “Beruchald is considered one of the best composers to have ever lived, and Carmellia’s transcription for solo stringed instrument is one of the most technically demanding pieces within the entire canon of solo stringed pieces.”

“So you’re saying that it’s impressive?” asked Isra.

“It’s — yes,” said Verity. “Sorry, I don’t like to brag, but — I feel as though you won’t know me, truly know me, until you understand what it is I’ve spent my life training to do.”

“Go ahead,” said Isra. “Because I don’t understand. You make good music, but it’s more than that, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” nodded Verity. “There are professional musicians, people who spend a majority of their working life playing, who cannot play that piece to the level of perfection and polish that is demanded from a concert-level performance. I was able to play it well enough at sixteen. I’m actually really, really good with a lute. That wasn’t the best performance I’ve ever done, I’m rusty, but I was playing it from memory without sheet music, in less than ideal conditions, and — I can see now that it’s going to be nearly impossible for me to share this with you.”

“I’m sorry,” said Isra. There was a cool impassiveness to the way she apologized, as though she wasn’t actually sorry, but Verity had known her long enough to know that this was just how Isra was.

“It’s nothing to be sorry about,” said Verity. “I mean, you’re a druid, your entire perception of the world is so different from mine that I’m like a blind person, right?”

“I suppose,” said Isra. She gave a little frown. “But I never knew that I was a druid. You always knew you had a gift, didn’t you?”

“I never felt like I did,” said Verity. “I felt like I was just barely holding on, barely keeping up, training twice as hard to get half the results, always just at the limits of my abilities. And sometimes it felt like I was behind everyone else, and that there was nothing that I could do to catch up with them. I couldn’t see what I was doing wrong, couldn’t progress to the next level.”

“So how did you?” asked Isra.

“I think, in retrospect, they were just lying to me,” said Verity. “Especially when I was younger. They wanted me to feel that way so that I would push myself harder. Maybe calling it lying is wrong, but they knew that if they praised my talent, I would rest easy and not put in so much effort.”

“Your mother is awful,” said Isra.

“Okay,” Verity laughed. “Well, you do understand.”

“What was it all for?” asked Isra. “Did your mother care that much about music?”

“No,” said Verity. “It was for prestige, and I suppose the money that it could bring in, though I don’t think that was the biggest consideration until recent years.”

They were interrupted by some chatter on the party channel, mostly asking whether Verity would be home, and checking to make sure that things had gone well. Alfric was still a bit on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but his parents had given their assurance, and Verity thought that this was just extra caution.

“Did you still want to stay here?” asked Isra. “You don’t have to. There’s still light, you could warp and be in before it’s dark.”

“I still want to stay here,” Verity nodded, whatever her misgivings. “If that’s okay.”

“It is,” said Isra. “If you want to … to know me.”

“I do,” said Verity. She looked around the house. “I think that before I came here, I had the wrong idea about you. Or, a different idea.”

“And this new idea,” said Isra, eyes steady. “It’s better?”

“More true,” said Verity. “And more valuable, for that.”

They each got changed, which was done more or less in front of each other, as they’d done for quite some time. Since coming back from Dondrian, Isra had new underthings, which were quite fetching on her.

They talked a bit more, but the sun eventually set, and the single light in the house, along with the lack of proper seating, felt like it was forcing them toward bed. Isra took the top bunk, and Verity took the bottom, and they tried to talk as they normally did before falling asleep, but it was harder to hear each other, and they couldn’t see each other’s face, which made the whole thing awkward.

Eventually, Isra’s responses were slower to come, then breathing took on the characteristic slowness it had when she was sleeping, and Verity was left alone with her thoughts.

The Verity of a Thousand Conquests, who left Satisfied Lovers in her Wake would have handled things differently. She hadn’t mentioned the new underthings, nor asked to see Isra’s stomach, hadn’t made a move that would at least resolve the question of whether there might possibly be something between the two of them. There was still time, perhaps, to climb up into the top bunk and softly kiss Isra awake, but of course that could backfire horribly in a number of ways, perhaps even if Isra would normally be interested. Verity wondered whether that was how history’s greatest lovers were, if they were simply people who went for it and accepted that sometimes it would destroy friendships or cause offense or be, perhaps, a bit morally questionable. It was a nice fantasy, but not something that she would actually do.

Eventually, fantasies — perhaps untoward fantasies, if they were unwanted — ran their course, and Verity was left to think about the future. The future loomed, and her mind went to the issues that lay there, the conversations that she would have, the things she would do, and be forced to do.

And the next day, there was a dungeon waiting, which put all other thoughts to the side. She liked that about dungeons.

Chapter 83 - Oeyr's Hand

Mizuki visited the temple clerics, who were thankfully having a slow day.

“I’ve never really understood why Oeyr got healing,” Mizuki said to Lin as the cleric checked her over. The wound on her leg had been healed by Hannah, but the wounds from the fall had been extensive enough that a cleric of Oeyr was needed. The criss-cross cuts on Mizuki’s forehead in particular had been something that Garos wouldn’t touch.

“You daydream during the sermons,” said Lin with a small grunt. He was on the older side, but a grunt like that made him seem ancient. “There’s always a question about what to do with the ones like you. Words can’t reach the minds of those who don’t listen.”

“Sorry,” said Mizuki, though she didn’t feel particularly abashed. “I mean, I do listen sometimes, but I don’t remember the healing sermon, if you did one.”

“I do one every year,” said Lin. “It’s a staple.”

“And?” asked Mizuki. “Is there a short version?”

“Healing is an emergent property of the body,” said Lin. “That’s about it, truth be told, the rest is just giving examples.” Mizuki had stripped down for the clerical inspection, and was trying not to be self-conscious about it, but Lin was poking and prodding. “You certainly took a fall, if this is where Hannah got you back to.”

“Do you have examples?” asked Mizuki.

Lin scoffed. “As I said, the sermon I give once a year is mostly examples, so yes, I have them. But if it will bring you closer to Oeyr, then the best example as it relates to the body is the clotting of the blood. When blood sits outside the body, it clots, coagulates, and we can think of this as a simple rule.” He paused in the rote recitation and gave a thoughtful look. “Though with the way things are, it’s likely to be the result of a set of deeper rules.” He shook his head. “This same ‘rule’ is what causes your wounds to seal on their own, if they’re small enough, and there are people whose bodies do not follow that rule, whose blood does not clot. Oeyr is not about these rules, but about what emerges as a consequence of them, especially the unexpected or unintuitive behaviors, though of course emergence encompasses even that which is mundane.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “Okay.”

“I can see that the lesson is not taking,” said Lin with a sigh. “Tell me, when you break a bone, how does it heal?”

“Um,” said Mizuki. “I’m guessing the answer you want isn’t ‘a cleric heals it’.”

“I mean naturally,” said Lin.

“Bones heal naturally?” asked Mizuki. “Is that true?”

Lin sighed. “The body can heal itself back to what it was in many more circumstances than people believe,” he said. “When a bone breaks, first there’s a clot, and later a callus. The callus starts soft and gets harder, and then there will be a lump of bone around the break, which will gradually get narrowed down to what the bone originally was.” These were, to Mizuki, just words.

“Um,” said Mizuki. “Okay?” All the healing was done, and now this was just a chat with a cleric, but Mizuki found herself wanting to understand, maybe because Lin seemed to think that it was simple. “But how do you know that’s a rule, rather than anything else? Other than your god, I mean.”

“We can see what happens when the rules go wrong, or when they’re missing, or when they apply to things they were never meant for,” said Lin. “The body only has a limited capacity to ‘know’, most of it is a set of simple rules, and those rules are revealed to us in their misapplications — in what emerges.”

Mizuki frowned. “So you’re just … speeding up the rules?”

Lin frowned. “In a sense. And there are limits to what we can do, more stringent limits than most people seem to believe. The body uses resources in the course of the application of these rules, and we don’t even have names for all those resources, let alone a way to replenish them. There are rules that govern the way things break down, rules that govern how vital reagents are transformed into the stuff our body actually uses.”

“Hrm,” said Mizuki. She touched her forehead, where the wound that Hannah hadn’t been able to heal had been. It had bled quite a bit, and now there was a scar there.

“The sermon on healing is coming up,” said Lin. “Another few weeks, I would wager. You’ll still be in town?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” asked Mizuki.

“You’re a dungeoneer, aren’t you?” asked Lin. “They don’t have a tendency to stick around.”

“Ah,” said Mizuki. “Well, I don’t know. I think we were going to step up the dungeons, but it will be a while before we need to relocate.” She shrugged.

“And the house?” asked Lin. “If you’ll be selling it, I know a few interested buyers. It’s a unique place. Better to get moving on it quickly, if you can.”

“I … hadn’t thought about that,” said Mizuki. “Thanks.”

“If you want the scar removed, you’ll need Obbrech,” said Lin. He took some holy oil and put it on her hands, cleansing them. “He’s in, I think. I know the young sometimes fancy their scars. For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s terribly fetching.”

“Thank you,” said Mizuki with a curtsey.

Obbrech was the cleric of Bixzotl, God of Copies, and when Mizuki got to his part of the church, he saw that he was in conversation with Lilla, a girl who had been two years above Mizuki. She’d had a failed marriage the year before, and by the way the conversation was going, she was on the prowl. Both of them were standing, and it seemed like Obbrech was trying to get her to leave, at least by his body language. She was using her fingers to twirl her hair, and her chest was forward, on display like a hen. When Obbrech spotted Mizuki, he seemed relieved, and said his goodbyes to Lilla.

“What can I do for you, Mizuki?” asked Obbrech. She was surprised that he knew her name. He was attractive, and Mizuki could see the appeal of his sandy hair and dimpled cheeks. He had a kind face and slightly tanned skin, a suggestion of blended parentage or possibly just more time working outdoors than a cleric normally got.

“Forehead,” said Mizuki, pointing at the scar. “As Lin said, it’s not ‘fetching’, though I haven’t looked in a mirror to confirm.”

Obbrech examined it, and Mizuki tried not to look at his face as he leaned in. He had very white, very straight teeth with slightly outsized canines. “Would you like it moved?”

“Moved?” asked Mizuki.

“To a more fetching place,” said Obbrech. He smiled at her. “The key to a good looking scar, in my opinion, is a bit of asymmetry, though I’m sure Hannah would disagree. A good scar draws attention to your best features, like an accent. Odd, in a good way.” He leaned back a bit, evaluating her face. “There, by your eyebrow, to draw attention to your eyes? Or on a cheek?”

“No,” said Mizuki. She could feel the heat rising in her cheeks. “Just remove it, please.”

“Very well,” said Obbrech. “I’m going to touch your head, is that okay?”

Mizuki nodded. He had long, slender fingers, but there were surprising callouses there. The alteration was over in a moment, and Mizuki’s fingers went to where the scar had been. It was completely gone, leaving flat, smooth skin.

“Huh,” she said. “I’ve never had Bixzotl’s healing before, I don’t think.”

“It’s not really healing,” said Obbrech with a shrug. “You weren’t hurt, it was cosmetic. And technically it was just cloning one part of the skin into the other part.”

“Still,” said Mizuki. “Thanks, now I don’t have to walk around with a dorky scar.” She beamed at him, and she saw his smile falter. “Sorry, was it something I said?”

“No, no,” said Obbrech. “But if that’s all, I should be going.”

“Sure,” shrugged Mizuki. He was being weird, and Mizuki didn’t really understand it. “I wasn’t, um.”

Obbrech raised an eyebrow.

“Nothing,” said Mizuki. “Just, Hannah had said that you got kind of annoyed by all the girls, and I didn’t want to, ah — nope, it’s dumb, nevermind.”

“Mmm,” said Obbrech, but some of his displeasure had left him. “I’ll have to speak with Hannah and see what she’s been saying.”

“Just that you’re young and handsome, and that your time gets eaten up by, well, Lilla and the others,” said Mizuki. “And I — that’s not me. That’s all I wanted to say.” She was feeling a hotness in her chest. She’d said too much, too quickly, and gave a little curtsey, bowing out and leaving to a stammering and awkward goodbye from him.

Mizuki needed a long bath. She’d gone into the garden stone and washed up there, but that had only a tub of lukewarm water and a set of spare clothes, very welcome but inadequate in the face of the muck she’d rolled through. She faintly stunk of it, but she hoped that she had been clean enough not to be offensive to the clerics in the temple. Every now and then, when she turned her head, she caught a whiff of it, a dank and musty scent.

Everyone else had gone ahead to the house, at her insistence. They’d set out late in the day, at least by their usual standards, and had come back so late that dinner wouldn’t start until after dark, maybe long after dark if she got her wished-for shower in.

But when she got home, she smelled food, and a brief glance into the kitchen was enough to confirm that Hannah and Isra were doing something in there. It smelled good.

“I’m going to shower,” said Mizuki.

“Go, shower,” said Hannah, who was handling dough. “We’ve got it well in hand.” She didn’t say what was well in hand, but Mizuki figured that could be a surprise.

Alfric was stepping out of the bathroom when Mizuki came up. He was in a clean shirt and pants, but they were both loose, not yet tucked in or buckled. He saw her once he stopped toweling his head and grinned.

“I don’t think there’s anything better than getting clean after a dungeon,” said Alfric.

“Let’s hope,” said Mizuki.

When she was in the shower, she was surprised by how much grime and dirt there was still left on her. Dried blood had found a few places to hide on her, and when she washed it away, it briefly turned the water pink before slipping down the drain. There were black flecks of something in her hair, and they seemed to be in endless supply, each scrub of her head producing more of them, which followed the pink water down the drain. She had never thought of it before, but with five people in the house, and with the intensive showers following a dungeon, they would probably have to muck out the desiccation chamber in the basement more often.

The shower went long, as her showers sometimes did, and eventually she was sitting there beneath the hot water with her head resting against the blue and white ceramic tiles as the water ran down her body.

She was thinking about being down in the bottom of the pit. More specifically, she was thinking about the second fireball, the one that had felt necessary to finish the creature off. She wasn’t really sure how she’d done it, given that she hadn’t held anything back the first time. She had seen some of the movements of the creature after that first hit as her eyes adjusted back down to the dim light of her miniature lantern, and she had just tried to mimic what Verity did. That shouldn’t have been possible, or Mizuki had never heard about it happening, but it had felt like she’d expanded her own range, sucking in more aether for a second strike.

<Dinner is ready,> said Hannah.

Mizuki reluctantly shut off the water, then toweled off and went to her room to find something to wear. Tomorrow was going to have to be laundry day, but she wasn’t going to do anything else with her time, so she slipped on the robe she usually wore in the morning.

Dinner was already laid out, some kind of open-faced sandwich, a relatively flat bread with all kinds of things piled on top of it.

“Long shower,” said Hannah.

“Sorry,” sighed Mizuki. “I’m just feeling a little worn.”

“You took a tumble,” said Alfric. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

“You’d be battered and bruised tomorrow, if not for the clerics,” said Hannah.

“To the clerics,” said Mizuki raising a glass of wine that had been poured for her. There was less enthusiasm in her voice than she wished there was.

They ate in silence for a bit. It was a good meal, which Mizuki thought was mostly down to the crust they’d managed to put onto the top of everything and the way the melted cheese lent it some creaminess. There was no great design to it, just a good blend of things, like honey, fresh herbs, small chunks of meat, and some kind of creamy sauce that Mizuki thought Hannah was to thank for.

“I’ll contact the authorities in the morning,” said Alfric. He cleared his throat and pushed his empty plate forward. He’d been the first to finish, as he often was. “I know I didn’t really explain what the thing in the cave was, and I can do that now, if that’s okay.”

Mizuki nodded. She was curious, but also feeling like she needed a nap, or just to go early to bed, and like any explanation might roll right off her. She’d had so much energy nearly the whole way through the dungeon, but after she was out, she’d deflated.

“There was a huge civilization before our time,” said Alfric. “They used to call them giants, but that was just because of the size of the things they built, the scales they did things on. It was so large that it was hard to conceive of otherwise. They were humans, though. The dungeons are the work of the Editors, but the stones with runes around them, those are the work of those people. Same with the giant stone on Mizuki’s land.”

“What happened to these people?” asked Isra. She was very interested, leaning forward, her food half-forgotten.

“We don’t know,” said Alfric.

“The Hand of Oeyr,” said Hannah.

“Hard to say,” shrugged Alfric, not quite disagreeing. “Their civilization fell apart into smaller, lesser pieces for some reason.” He eyed Hannah. “Reasonable people can disagree on what really happened.”

“I don’t understand what ‘the Hand of Oeyr’ would even mean,” said Isra.

“You get your food from the woods,” said Hannah. “Some people are a step removed, they get their food from you, and some people are two steps removed, they get their food from someone who got their food from you. Could be any number of people involved in that, hundreds of people, and there are all kinds of other things, like buildin’ houses or gettin’ ectads, there’s really no limit to how complicated it can all get. And a complicated system can get so complicated that no one really understands how it works, and if somethin’ goes wrong, it can just,” she made a motion with her hands like she was snapping a branch.

“Could that happen to us?” asked Mizuki. She was feeling a little more awake now, but some of that was alarm at the prospect of everything falling apart.

“No,” said Alfric. “Or, probably not. We don’t have enormous systems, especially not out in Pucklechurch. If the whole hex were severed from the rest of the world, it would be self-sufficient. A place like Dondrian is more vulnerable to things that are in the region of Oeyr’s Hand, but it’s not like it’s an unknown thing that could come from nowhere. A lot of the national budget goes toward system insulation.”

“Plus we live in an age of clerical unity,” said Hannah. “And we have chrononauts. And the Editors have made a lot of changes in all that time, some of which seem like they’re probably aimed at havin’ better systems, though it’s hard to say why they do things, and harder still to say whether they’re meetin’ their goals.”

“So we don’t need to worry about this … collapse?” asked Isra.

“You especially,” said Alfric.

“What were the stones then?” asked Mizuki. “And the thing trapped there?”

“Well,” said Alfric. “That, I can’t say for certain. The dungeons don’t tend to recreate what’s on the outside very literally, they’re inspired by it, at least in some way. But in the non-dungeon world, the lost civilization did a lot of this, um … capture. They would encircle and entrap beasts of incredible power.” He shrugged. “We’re not entirely sure why, but we think it’s possible they just didn’t have the means to kill them. That would be at odds with their prowess as builders, but,” he shrugged.

“So … what happens?” asked Mizuki. “You called someone in, are they going to shut down the dungeon?”

“For a bit, maybe,” said Alfric. “That we found something like that in the dungeon suggests that we might find something like that in the hex, and if it’s intact, and contains something, then someone will come in and find the circle, figure out what’s inside it, figure out if we can kill it, then hopefully kill it. And if they can’t kill it, then they’ll seal it up as much as possible and then elevate the dungeon risk so it requires a higher key.”

“How do you know all this stuff?” asked Mizuki.

Alfric took a sip of his wine. “You pick it up over time, I guess. I like learning things. I like reading. When I was little, I wanted to be an archeologist.”

“Is there anything you didn’t want to be when you were little?” asked Hannah with a little laugh. “Sailor, explorer, soldier, spy? I’m not keepin’ a list, but if I were, seems it would be pretty long.”

“Always targeted at the wild spots,” said Alfric. “But dungeoneer has them all beat.” He coughed lightly. “Speaking of which, how do we feel about the dungeon?”

“Middling,” said Hannah. “Easy battles, save for some fright at the end of it. Decent enough loot.”

“We need to figure out how to get the chest to stop following us,” said Isra. It was sitting in the doorway of the dining room. It was, thankfully, party bound, but it was going to be a troublesome thing, because what they would ideally have liked would have been to have it follow instructions and sit in a corner of the house when it wasn’t in use.

“Tomorrow will be an undone day and I’ll get it identified,” said Alfric. “Along with the other stuff.”

“The thimble is armor,” said Hannah, who was saying it in Mizuki’s direction. “Probably going to Alfric.”

“Aw, you did testing without me?” Mizuki asked.

“Just a bit,” said Hannah. “You said it was party bound.”

“Well, what does it do?” asked Mizuki.

“Armor,” said Alfric. “I’ll be taking it, if that’s okay with everyone.”

“Yeah, but what kind of armor?” asked Mizuki. “You can’t just say it’s armor, that’s boring, what kind of armor, how does it work?”

“The thimble extends to cover the whole body,” said Alfric. “Or we think so, it got as far as my shoulder. It takes some time, growing slowly, but peels back and collapses down easily. I think for full body coverage, if that’s where it ends up, will require a half hour’s notice or something like that, but it flexes well, breathes far better than it should, and seems to offer good protection. It morphs, just a bit.” He held up a hand, spreading out his fingers. “Switches from mitten to glove with only a little force.”

“Is there a difference between a mitten and a glove?” asked Verity with a frown.

Hannah turned to her. “How did you survive winter in Pucklechurch?”

“I stayed inside,” Verity shrugged. “As I assumed all right-thinking people did. Dondrian doesn’t really get snow, or cold, or have seasons in any meaningful sense.”

“A glove has room for the fingers,” said Mizuki. “A mitten is more like a sock.”

“Ah,” said Verity. “I had never really thought about it.”

“We’re going to get you some proper clothes this winter,” said Hannah. “Clothes that will mean that you don’t just sing yourself warm.”

“We’re going shopping,” said Isra. “We can look at winter clothes.”

“Poor time to buy them,” shrugged Mizuki. She pushed her plate forward. “We have more entads to test, right?”

“If that’s how you want to end the day,” said Alfric. “Or you could wait until tomorrow, which would be a bit safer.”

“I need something,” said Mizuki. She was feeling jittery. “And there’s nothing in the world that’s better than entad testing.”

Alfric raised an eyebrow, and seemed quite skeptical about that. “Well, we have a lot left to do, the only reason we know the thimble is because I tried it on while we were waiting for you to be done at the temple.”

“Let me clean up first,” said Mizuki. “Then we’ll get our stuff out and see.”

Doing dishes went faster with many hands, and for a moment they were all in the kitchen together, though Verity was the only one who was actually helping Mizuki. This struck Mizuki as a little bit odd, since Verity only rarely helped out around the house, which had never been much of a bother since it was clearly outside her expertise.

“Doing okay?” asked Verity. She was standing next to Mizuki at the sinks, and gave a friendly bump of the hips.

“Fine,” said Mizuki. “Just a lot of not understanding going on today, one of those times when it feels like I’m walking through a library full of books that are written in a language I don’t know.”

“Yeah?” asked Verity.

“You probably don’t know what that’s like,” said Mizuki.

“Oh, I do,” said Verity. “That’s how it always felt with music. They start slow, and then it’s one more thing, and one more thing, and different techniques, and it feels like it will never, ever end. And it still hasn’t ended, but each new thing I learn means there’s just slightly less that’s left. I think that’s how you go about it, just chip away and hope that eventually you can look back at all the chips and see that you’ve made a little alcove for yourself.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “Except you’re like one of the best musicians in the world at the age of eighteen, so …”

Verity cleared her throat. “Well, yes. Though I wouldn’t say that I’m anywhere in contention for best in the world, a lot of the accolades I was given were just because I was Chosen.” She paused. “I think.”

“See, this is why elevation is bunk,” said Mizuki.

“It’s not bunk,” said Alfric, who had been engaged in other conversation. “It’s just that being good at music isn’t really a part of the background calculation the Editors created.”

“Because it doesn’t help to kill anyone?” asked Mizuki.

“Probably,” Alfric shrugged. “And while Verity is a very good musician, especially considering her age, in terms of bardic magic, she’s still got a lot of progression left.”

“You’re so sweet,” said Verity with a roll of her eyes. She put the last of the dry dishes away and looked at her hands. “Pruny fingers aren’t so good to play with, so I suppose we’ll all sit down in the living room for some entad testing.”

Normally they broke apart for entad testing, but it was getting late, so they made up some rules for a little game, which had surprisingly been Alfric’s suggestion. They would only do one entad at a time, and each person would get a minute or so with it to try whatever they wanted before it went off to the next person. This ended up involving a lot of shouting, some of it helpful but most of it silly.

“Stab yourself!” called Hannah.

“For the last time I’m not stabbing myself,” said Verity, though she was poking all sorts of other things, trying to get the needle to do something interesting.

“I’m going to run to get some thread,” said Alfric. “I’ll be right back.”

“Is that allowed?” asked Verity, whose poking had produced nothing. She handed the needle to Mizuki, her time having run out.

“Seems like it,” said Mizuki. “But I have a special trick that Alfric doesn’t know about.” She looked over at the doorway and smiled at Alfric as he came back in. “Alfric, give me the thread.”

Verity laughed. “Some trick.”

“You can get your own thread,” said Alfric, though he’d almost handed it over.

“What if I said please?” asked Mizuki.

“Still no,” said Alfric.

“It’s my thread,” said Mizuki, which was just a guess.

“It’s from a sewing kit that was paid for with my own money, for the party’s use,” said Alfric.

“See!” said Mizuki. “For the party’s use, I’m a member of the party, it’s mine to use.”

“Your time is up,” said Hannah.

“No way that was a minute,” said Mizuki.

“It probably was,” said Verity. “Be a good sport.”

“Alfric, I blame you,” said Mizuki as she handed the needle to him.

It took him most of the minute to thread the needle, which Mizuki knew from experience was a tougher thing to do than it seemed like, though in this case Alfric wasn’t helped by the combination of chatter and the wine he’d had with dinner. Eventually though, he got the thread through, and from there it was just a matter of giving the right thing a poke.

“Thread changes to match,” said Alfric. “It’ll be interesting to see whether that can be exploited or not.”

“How would you?” asked Isra.

“If it’s a true matching, creating material from nothing like an ectad, or transformation, I guess, since you still need thread, then you can turn low-quality thread into high-quality thread,” said Alfric. “I don’t know what the most expensive thread in the world is, or what the cheapest is, but you could make some kind of little machine that would turn a spool of one into a spool of another. Then it’s just a matter of running that and making money. Though there are bound to be all kinds of entads that do something similar, and they’re already up and running, so it’s a matter of trying to take a piece of the pie.”

Isra nodded. “Undercut them.”

“Or go in with them,” said Alfric. “Form a cartel, if possible, at least a local one.”

“Dirty,” said Hannah, shaking her head.

That got them into a bit of a debate, and the idea of entad testing was set aside for a moment so they could have at it. Mizuki didn’t really like the conversation, mostly because she felt like she’d been completely left in the dust. She understood what a cartel was, but the arguments about whether or not they should exist, whether they were inevitable, what the response of the government should be like, was all over her head. She didn’t think that they were even going all that in-depth on it either, but it felt like she was forced to sit there, mouth closed, lest she say something completely stupid about it. A lot of people in trades formed a guild, with Isra and Mizuki both being in guilds for their own profession, but there was nothing like price-fixing going on there, and no one had ever even talked to Mizuki about what she should be charging. Mizuki’s own take on the subject, which she knew lacked depth, was that it sounded nice to have someone telling her how much things needed to cost.

The helm was party bound as well, and Mizuki grabbed it before the conversation on cartels was even properly finished, hoping that she could get things moving along. Unfortunately, there wasn’t all that much of a game to play, because the effect was obvious right away, and might have been guessed by the design of wings that came up from where the ears were. Mizuki floated up, and the conversation stopped entirely as they watched her feet leave the ground.

“Huh,” said Alfric. “Pretty good.”

“I’m going outside,” said Mizuki, and she moved toward the back door, floating above the hardwood floors before anyone could say anything. Alfric called after her, but then she was out the door and up into the air.

The helm moved her faster than she moved when sprinting, though in the air, it was hard to tell. It wasn’t quite the same as flying under magical power, but it was fast enough and with a slight bit of weightlessness. A hundred feet into the air, she stopped and looked around, seeing Pucklechurch from above, as she’d done many times before. She felt her hair, and noticed that it was weightless, floating in the wind. It was good to fly, it always was, and now she was going to be able to do it pretty much whenever she wanted to.

<Mizuki, come down,> said Alfric. There was a note of authority in his voice that she normally liked, but here felt wrong. <We don’t know how long it lasts.>

Alfric, unfortunately, had a point, and Mizuki began a slow descent, her view of the lights of the town beneath the starry sky gradually lost.

“Please don’t do that again,” said Alfric when Mizuki’s feet touched the ground.

“Sorry,” said Mizuki. “Just blowing off some steam.”

“If it was the argument —” he began.

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “Come on, let’s test the sword and,” she sighed, “bow, then go to bed. But once we figure the helm out, I have to warn you, and everyone else, that I’m going to be taking primary possession of it.”

“That’s fine,” breathed Alfric. “I’m just glad you didn’t plummet to your death.”

“Me too,” smiled Mizuki. “But there’s always tomorrow.”

Chapter 84 - The Spare Lute

Visits from Marsh had become a daily thing, complicated only by the fact that he was living in a tent and she lived with four other people. They needed some place to be together, and eventually they had settled on an entad taken from his team’s stash, a blanket that allowed access to a very small little interior room. It was only just big enough for a bed, and cramped if they were doing anything but laying there together, but it was cozy most of the time, and inside it, their privacy was almost absolute.

Hannah was worried about the sheer velocity that their relationship seemed to have. After their long liaison at the hotel, she had thought it would be good to pull back a bit, to slow down, and she had utterly failed to keep up with that. Marsh would give her a call, and she had yet to turn him down.

“I think the fact that we never found good housing put a lot of pressure on us,” said Marsh. He was, she had found, often hot and heavy when they first came together. Roving hands led to the feeling of his curly beard as he kissed her body. It was good, great even, but she found herself drawn to the way he liked to talk, after the act.

“I think it was Lola that caused the problems,” said Hannah.

“Oh, it was,” said Marsh. “But if we’d had some kind of mobile house, or full-range teleportation we wouldn’t be compelled to sell, then maybe we could have spent the time when we weren’t in the dungeons away from each other.”

“Or gotten different tents?” asked Hannah.

“The tent was magical,” said Marsh. “And nice, as tents go. You know, thinking about it, maybe the big problem was that we were a team that Alfric had put together, and we focused too much on trying to be efficient. Separate tents would have been great. Even better would be to just have different places and come together when we were doing dungeons. It’s not like we don’t have a party channel.”

“Mmm,” said Hannah. “We’re doin’ fine in one large house.”

“I’m green with envy, truth be told,” said Marsh.

“No luck finding a fifth?” asked Hannah.

“Two interviews, actually, no one who passed muster though,” said Marsh. He sighed. “It’s slim pickings here, and I think we’re being picky.” He paused for a moment. “Did you want to hear about them?”

“Sure,” said Hannah. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“I wouldn’t want to bore you with talking shop,” said Marsh.

“Not at all,” said Hannah. “Shop interests me.”

“First one tried to extort us,” said Marsh. “She was a bright young girl, had broken up with her party not too long ago, some speciality in close combat that you don’t normally get in a woman. Taller than me, actually, beastly good with a sword, she claimed. But she came into it thinking that we were desperate, and she spent a lot of her time trying to say what a bad position we were in, and how bad we needed her, then said that she’d need a third share rather than a fifth, at least to start.”

“Why would a person do that?” asked Hannah. “Well, I can guess, aye, but I want to hear your guess.”

“Her old team retired,” said Marsh. “All but her. Not too many more dungeons under her belt than we had, but she had a puffed up idea of herself, or maybe just wanted to extract as much money from the business as she could, another ten or twenty dungeons.”

“Mmm,” said Hannah. “And given that you’d just kicked out an unequal member, you didn’t want another.”

“I think it was that demand for more,” said Marsh. “It grated, even if we are in a bind.”

“Knowin’ not enough about the situation, I’d think she was after validation,” said Hannah. “It wasn’t so much about the dungeon as knowin’ that she was good enough, knowin’ that she was wanted.”

“Maybe,” said Marsh.

“And the second reject?” asked Hannah.

“Oh, a nice man, but not right,” said Marsh. “He was the right elevation, but clearly a bit touched, and ten years older than any of us. Simple sentences, things like that, and he got confused rather easily. We never really got it out of him, but it seems like he suffered a head wound in a dungeon and wasn’t quite right afterward.”

“Oof,” said Hannah. She was, of course, thinking of her own head wound and the seriousness with which Alfric treated it.

“Yeah,” said Marsh. “He seemed happy, and he’s had dungeons under his belt since that happened, but yeah, oof. If you catch them early, sometimes you’re fine, but either they didn’t catch it early, or it wasn’t enough. I hate it.”

“It, meanin’?” asked Hannah.

“The reminder that we’re mortal,” said Marsh. “The idea that the dungeons really can kill a person.”

“Ah,” said Hannah.

“You never feel that?” asked Marsh.

“I do,” said Hannah. “Just … less keenly than you, I’d expect.”

“I’ve done a lot of dungeons,” said Marsh. “Scraped through plenty of times. Of course, sometimes the scrapes grow in your mind, the times that it was just an inch between skin off my knee and missing a whole leg. And Josen lost an arm recently, of course.”

“No major traumas for us,” said Hannah. “Broken bones, lacerations, that sort of thing, a few hard hits. Mostly in Alfric’s direction, honestly, which is for the best. He’s got the right mindset for pain.”

“Which is?” asked Marsh.

“Pain is temporary,” said Hannah. “In the old days, or without a healer present, pain was a sign that something was critically wrong, but now, it’s just … not really necessary. The pain is the worst part of breaking a leg, not the break itself. You just get a cleric, or get someone to get you a cleric, warp to the center of the hex if you’re somewhere civilized … I don’t know, there’s a whole Oeyr sermon on this, and a lesser one for Garos.”

“What’s the Garos version?” asked Marsh.

Hannah appreciated this deeply. She was rarely asked about Garos by the party, and without being a proper part of the temple, there were no sermons to give and no one coming in needing the advice that Hannah was trained to give.

“In short,” Hannah began.

“It doesn’t need to be short,” said Marsh. “I like listening to you talk.”

“To my words, or the sound of my voice?” asked Hannah.

“Both,” replied Marsh with a smile. In his defense, she’d set him up for that.

“Well, the short version, because I have things to do today that don’t involve hiding out inside a magical blanket,” said Hannah. “There’s at least a part of the Garam Ashar that’s about responsiveness, the ways in which one thing reflects another in far more abstract terms than you normally see or think about. If there’s a problem, there’s a solution, that sort of thing. The positive implies the negative, and vice versa. So that leads to interpretations of somethin’ like this, where the body’s response to a problem, to callin’ attention to the problem, is pain. And eventually, it gets divorced from that purpose. The object creates its negation, then the object is gone, leaving only the negation, a form of lamentable asymmetry. It happens all the time in human realms, where a law outlives the subject it was legislating, or the organization outlasts whatever its origin was.”

“This is some deep religion,” said Marsh.

“Mmm, no,” said Hannah. “Because it’s actually in the holy book. The true deep religion is all the things that were built up over time, implications of implications, or just inventions. A lot of it has been excised in the various reformations though, especially those that came with the unity of the churches. It used to be that the Church of Garos denied the other gods, in their philosophy if not their existence, and it had to explain everything through symmetry, where nowadays sometimes we say ‘oh, go talk to the cleric of Xuphin’.”

“Does a part of you still wish it was the old days?” asked Marsh. “When you could be in a place where it was all Garos?”

“Oh, there was a time when I did,” said Hannah. “When I was, say, sixteen, still doin’ all the deep dives on theology, my head afire with it all. I’m still not a moderate, obviously, but I’ve mellowed, and I think I understand what it would actually be like, to be in a society that had only Garos. More people payin’ lip service, more contortions of the holy book, more politics within the Church … seems to me that I’d find that a special kind of terrible, and if I’d gotten my idle wish at sixteen, I’d have soon regretted it.”

“Mmm,” said Marsh. He stroked her hair. “This is nice.”

“It is,” said Hannah. She hesitated. “Sorry if I talked too much.”

“Not at all,” replied Marsh. “I don’t think about this sort of thing often.”

Hannah slowly disentangled herself from Marsh and escaped from the blanket into her room. There, she got more properly dressed and brushed her hair for a moment while Marsh came out. He was quite fine to look at, in part because of the smile on his face. It was what she’d said she didn’t want, and now she was worrying that she was a liar. She had been worried that she was talking too much, that she was boring him, instead of just being herself, come what may.

“Ah, Grig is coming,” said Marsh. “With an offer for Alfric, seems like. I might as well be here for it. Alfric hates me least, I think.”

“Does he?” asked Hannah.

“Sure,” said Marsh. “He thinks I’m simple.”

“Are you not simple?” asked Hannah with a smile.

Marsh grinned. “Simple enough.” He moved to her, and they kissed, with his hands finding her waist. “You said there were other things you had to do today?”

“There are,” said Hannah, disengaging. “Tomorrow though, if you’d like?”

“Mmm,” said Marsh. He rested his nose in her hair and held her close. “You spoil me.”

“Yes,” replied Hannah. “That’s the worry.”

Marsh paused for a moment, holding up his hand. “Oh, Grig is actually almost here, when he said that he was coming, I’d thought he meant later.”

“If it’s business, I’m going to go down to see what it’s about,” said Hannah. She checked herself over in the mirror above the dresser. She was slightly disheveled, but there was nothing for that, and it wasn’t enough that she imagined anyone but Mizuki would comment.

Hannah went downstairs, with Marsh following after, and she was just in time to see Grig coming into the dining room. He was carrying a heavy case.

“Alright, why do you have a lute?” asked Alfric, who was still standing in spite of Grig taking a seat. Alfric didn’t sit down until everyone else had. Isra and Mizuki were nowhere to be seen, but Verity was there with her fingers steepled.

“It’s for Verity,” said Grig, taking the instrument out of its case. “Eight strings, which is too many, but she’s got the thing that gives her more fingers. The actual entad effect allows parallel playing to give accompaniment, so you’re effectively playing a few lutes at once, and it’s a resilient instrument.” He picked it up by the neck and made as if to smash it against the table. “Er, I was going to demonstrate, but I just realized that I don’t want to hurt the table.”

“We’ll take your word for it or get independent testing,” said Alfric. “And this is just a gift, presented to someone you barely know, or is it more than that?”

“It’s a trade deal,” said Grig, smiling. “All we want is some chrononaut insurance.”

Alfric grimaced. “That’s not a business that I’m in.”

“Well, no, and I know that,” said Grig, he was still smiling, and he was a good enough actor that it didn’t feel forced. “But you see, in this particular case, you wouldn’t be managing a lot of clients, it would only be us, and we wouldn’t need to set up separate channels, because we essentially already have that. The only thing that we’d need is coordination on which days we’re doing dungeons.”

Alfric sighed. “Verity, I’ll need you to test the lute and see whether it’s worth using. That’s step one.”

“Wonderful!” said Grig. He slid the lute across the table to her, seeming quite pleased that it was going even that well. “I was thinking that we’d do it contingent on your schedule, arranged in the morning, with a message from us at night, and reset contingent on either a negative message or no message at all.”

Alfric held up a hand. “Slow down. I need to think about it.”

“Sure,” nodded Grig.

Verity had picked up the lute, and was looking at the ‘head’ of it. “There are no pegs. How is it tuned?”

“It’s not,” smiled Grig. “It’s self-tuning.”

Verity frowned, then pushed her chair out a bit and held the lute in her lap, plucking each of the strings in turn. “They’re at least standard notes,” she said, plucking the strings. “But this seems like it would be exceptionally annoying to play, at least to start, and I’d be hamstrung by what the lute thinks about tuning.”

“It’s a problem, yes,” said Grig. “But Marsh was saying that you’d been complaining about the tuning of your lute, and the problems of going into wet environments, and this will handle moisture really well.”

“What time period were you thinking?” asked Alfric. “Chrononaut insurance, with you as my only client, limited to preapproved days not exceeding one in every three, how long would you need for this lute?”

“Let her play it first,” said Grig. “But you are interested? It’s just insurance, in case something goes wrong, hopefully we won’t need it at all, but Josen is adamant that we have a failsafe, especially since we’ll be adding a new member.”

“So this is to keep Josen as part of the team?” asked Alfric.

“No,” said Grig. “This is to keep Josen from spending a huge chunk of our money paying one of your family members. In my opinion he doesn’t have enough faith in the team, and got too used to doing this with a safety net.”

“Under Lola’s leadership you had a lot of resets,” said Alfric. “That’s one of the things that I’m thinking about, when considering whether to take the offer.”

“Lola said we reset a lot, but who knows,” said Grig. “And we’ll be a different team, obviously, hopefully one that’s more, er, functional.”

Verity began to strum the lute with her extra fingers, and the sound was striking, like a full chorus of lutes. Looking at the fingers was a mistake though, as they made Hannah’s eyes water. Verity didn’t just have extra fingers, whatever the lute was doing, it caused multiples of the fingers to appear, superimposed on top of each other, and moving through each other. Verity took her time with the song, thirty seconds or so, and brought it to a close.

“What was that?” asked Grig. His eyes were wide.

“Hrm?” asked Verity, looking up at him.

“That song,” said Grig. “That was amazing.”

Verity frowned at him. “Just something I threw together.”

“You wrote that?” asked Grig.

“I improvised,” said Verity.

“You improvised?” asked Grig.

“You are a professional musician, aren’t you?” asked Verity.

“I’m a bard,” said Grig. “I play, but it’s all from a set list, it’s not — to put something like that together on the fly —”

“It wasn’t entirely on the fly,” said Verity. “I knew the direction I wanted to go in before I started. And I have been playing my lute for several hours a day practically since I was old enough to hold one.” She forced a smile. “Sorry if it was a bit much.”

Grig’s mouth was slightly open. He looked at Alfric. “Well now I understand why you came all this way for her.”

“Most of that is actually incidental,” said Alfric. “I mean, she’s very good, but that’s of only marginal utility when it comes to doing dungeons.”

“Which makes the ability to do multiple parts at once somewhat worthless to us,” said Verity. “It’s a fine instrument, and solves some of the problems that I have, but sound output and harmonic layering aren’t really the issues that need to be addressed.” She shrugged, then looked at Alfric. “I do want it, but not that badly. If I got it, the only thing that would replace it would be something equally sturdy that also had an effect worth writing home about. Not that I would write home.”

“Do you want to smash it against something?” asked Grig, seeming hopeful. “It was going to be quite impressive.”

“A better test would be to get it wet,” said Verity. She leaned down and spit on the lute, right on the strings, then strummed it. Whatever she was looking for, she seemed impressed. “It’s fully waterproof?”

Grig nodded, then turned to Alfric. “Here’s what I’m looking for,” said Grig. “Coverage for the entire time we’re in the region of Greater Plenarch.”

“There are seven hundred hexes,” said Alfric. “So, no.”

“At most, it’s two years’ coverage,” said Grig with a frown.

“One year of coverage,” said Alfric. “No more than a hundred days total, and a cap of five resets.”

Grig stroked his chin and thought about that.

“This is mostly for Josen, right?” asked Marsh. “Seems like we only run into issues if we fail too many times.”

“Does this work out, money-wise?” asked Hannah. “No good havin’ a deal like this if there’ll be problems down the way.”

“The lute would be hard for us to sell,” said Grig. “And for Alfric’s side of things —”

“It doesn’t work out,” said Alfric. “Chrononaut insurance is expensive, more than the lute is worth.”

“Okay,” said Grig. “Well.”

“That doesn’t mean that I won’t do it,” said Alfric. “I’m just saying that the reduction in cost, for me, doesn’t come close to keeping this even.”

“I could sweeten the pot,” said Grig. “Our counterparty was provided by Lola, and they’re gone now, having dumped a virtual warehouse full of things on our doorstep. Two or three trifles?”

“Mizuki does love trifles,” said Alfric with a sigh. “Four trifles, then we can call it even.”

“Five,” said Verity. “One for each of us.”

“You have the lute,” said Grig with a frown.

“Yes,” said Verity. “But it’s not something for me, it’s something for the job I do.”

“Fine, fine,” said Grig. He held out his hand to Alfric. “Deal?”

“Deal,” said Alfric with a sigh. “We can hammer out the details later.”

“You’ll have to come to Liberfell for the trifles,” said Grig. “But that can be later. And they do need to be trifles, tiny things, minor entads.”

Alfric nodded.

“It’s good that we can work together again,” said Grig. “Even if it’s just in this capacity.”

“Mmm,” said Alfric. He turned to Hannah. “You’re fine being the conduit? With the message entad, it shouldn’t be much of a burden.”

“It’ll be fine,” said Hannah.

“If things don’t work out between us, someone else can take the marble,” said Marsh. “It shouldn’t need to be a big deal.”

Marsh and Grig left together, toward Liberfell, and Alfric ended up beside Hannah while Verity played with the new lute.

“‘If things don’t work out between us,’” said Hannah. “Implying that there are things which might or might not work out.”

“And?” asked Alfric. “Is he wrong?”

“Not strictly, no,” said Hannah. “There was also a bit of casualness to it which … I don’t know.”

“You’d prefer he clung to you a bit more?” asked Alfric.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Hannah, waving a hand. “Doesn’t matter. Or it does matter, but I don’t think it does to think about too much.”

“You’d prefer a symmetry of affection,” said Alfric.

“Aye,” said Hannah. “Hard to know how things stand, other than that he likes spendin’ time with me, and I with him, and we’re not partnered, but …” she shook her head. “I’m bein’ a bad friend. How do you feel about the deal?”

“It’s awkward,” said Alfric. “Grig wants to pretend that it’s water under the bridge.”

“Has he apologized?” asked Hannah.

“He has,” nodded Alfric.

“Good first step, that,” said Hannah with a nod. She was pivoting back into clerical mode, trying to see things from Alfric’s perspective. Maybe what he needed was just a friend, someone to offer support, a shoulder to cry on or someone to say ‘I agree, that’s terrible’, but she would try the clerical approach first, an actual solution to the problem.

“It feels a bit like cheating,” said Alfric. “I wanted to work my way up, not take money for being a chrononaut.”

“Ah,” said Hannah. If that was the direction he was coming from, it was quite different than talking about the betrayal. But perhaps he was coming at it from multiple different directions. People were like that sometimes, a ball of different thoughts that were difficult to disentangle. “And were you fine with this solution, bein’ slightly underpaid?”

“Significantly underpaid,” said Alfric. He was looking off in the middle distance, not focused on the here and now. It was a nice day outside, though slightly warm for Hannah’s tastes, the kind of day that made her wish for a good breeze or a deep shade. “You know, I could be a part of that side of the family business for six months or so and make enough that I could outfit the whole team in entad gear. And it would feel so hollow, but standing here not doing that also feels hollow.”

“I have to ask — did a part of you just want to help them?” asked Hannah.

Alfric shrugged. “Maybe. I put the team together, did most of the planning, it would be good to see them succeed. Vindicating, in a way. A testament to my knowledge of dungeons, maybe.” He shook his head. “I don’t think they’re good thoughts to have, they’re not true, the success of Vertex doesn’t actually reflect on me, but for them to scatter to the winds would be sad in a way that does feel personal, as much as they’re not my friends.”

“But they were your friends, and at least for Grig and Marsh, it seems like there’s still some affection there,” said Hannah.

“I don’t know if we were friends,” said Alfric. “It’s one of the things that I’ve been thinking about. You? You feel like a friend to me, and I’ve only known you for a month. I care for you.” He was still focused somewhat on the distance, but he turned to give her a glance. “Sorry if that’s mushy.”

“Not at all,” said Hannah. “I care for you too. For the whole party, naturally.”

“I think with Vertex, we spent time together, and learned each other’s idiosyncrasies, but we weren’t friends, not really,” said Alfric. “We were business partners, heavier on the business than the partners.”

“Aye,” nodded Hannah. “And that was difficult to realize.”

“It means that I never really had friends growing up,” said Alfric. “Or they were just this particular sort of friend, the business friend, or the school friend that you lose touch with the moment school lets out.”

“I had friends like that in seminary,” said Hannah. “Drifting-apart friends. It would be easy to keep in touch, but we never made any effort to, not even a flimsy pretense of us makin’ the effort.”

“That’s how I thought this would be,” said Alfric. “Our party. We’d do a few dungeons, then go our separate ways.”

“Not now?” asked Hannah.

“No,” said Alfric. “I think it was the offer from Lola that made me realize that this is the party I want, come what may. Maybe it would have happened with Vertex too, if we’d been living together and doing the dungeons.”

“Or maybe we’re just more in line with you,” said Hannah. “In our own ways. The difference, perhaps, bein’ that you didn’t pick us.”

“I did,” said Alfric, frowning.

Hannah laughed. “You picked Verity, who’s similar to you in many respects, and who is probably least close to you, if you don’t mind my sayin’ so. The rest of us were picked up because we were warm bodies who could fill the right roles, more or less.”

“Well,” said Alfric. “True, from a certain point of view.”

Hannah laughed again. “I’m havin’ some tea, would you like some? It’s a lazy day today.”

“Of course,” nodded Alfric. “And thanks for listening to me whine.”

Chapter 86 - The Unexpected Past

Making regular trips to Liberfell was a new thing for Mizuki, and she was loving it. With the wardrobe, it was basically just down the road, assuming that they got their positioning more or less right and didn’t screw up the warp, and with the dagger, they could make a single trip back to Pucklechurch.

They weren’t the only ones getting the benefits of being closer, and Mizuki had heard some quite positive things from other people in Pucklechurch, especially those who made the trip on a regular basis. Mizuki couldn’t imagine walking to Liberfell on a regular basis, but some people did it, and the wardrobe was helping them out a lot. There was something she really enjoyed about that, making her town a better place by bringing in entads. Alfric had said that entads flowed toward the big cities, where there were richer buyers, and Mizuki really didn’t like that. It tied back in with their earlier conversation about money, and how money was boring. It didn’t seem fair that the cities got cooler things than a town like Pucklechurch. Maybe, through dungeoneering, they could change that … except that they would run out of local dungeons unless they got better travel. Everyone seemed to be talking about them leaving, as though it was inevitable.

“Do you want to leave Pucklechurch?” Mizuki asked as they walked away from the warp point.

“Didn’t we just?” asked Isra.

“No, I mean … later,” said Mizuki. “When we’re out of dungeons, or when we’re done with dungeons. Do you want to be in Pucklechurch for the rest of your life?”

“Not the rest of my life,” said Isra.

“Maybe that’s too long a time span to think about,” said Mizuki.

“It is,” nodded Isra. “I don’t want to spend too long in Pucklechurch. I feel like I’ve wasted too much of my life there.”

“You’re eighteen,” said Mizuki with a frown.

“And you’re only twenty-two,” said Isra.

“Did you hear Bethany back there?” asked Mizuki. “She said that she was late getting married, and I agree with her. There are a number of girls from our class who are on their second or even third children. And then there’s me, who has nothing on the horizon, no kind of life except this dungeon thing, which is good, but it’s going to take us away.”

“It will take time,” said Isra. “As things are now, we can easily get to a lot of different dungeons.”

“How long is that going to last?” asked Mizuki. “But the sad thing is, I really do think that I’d leave. I wouldn’t want to, but … yeah, I would do it. Probably. And then how long would we be dungeoneering for? And how is it possible to raise children when you’re going off to dungeons every third day?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. It seemed like an almost silly thing to worry about. “You could ask Alfric’s mother?”

“I feel like that would give her the wrong impression,” said Mizuki with a little laugh. “‘Hah ha, Mrs. Overguard, how do you handle having a baby and doing dungeons, just curious, please reply back within the next nine months.”

“Nine months?” asked Isra.

“Well, not nine months,” said Mizuki. “It would be like a month or two before you knew, so seven or eight months.”

“Excuse me?” asked Isra.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Just … a joke about how if I asked her for child-rearing advice, she might think that I was pregnant.”

“And that’s how long it takes for a person?” asked Isra. “Nine months?”

Mizuki tried to contain herself, she really did. “How do you not know that?”

“People are opaque to me,” said Isra with a shrug. “I can tell you how long it takes for any other animal, but for humans,” she shrugged again. “Nine months seems long. Longer than even the biggest of the bears.”

“Well I’m pretty sure it’s accurate,” said Mizuki. “Or at least, that’s what people say.”

They had stopped outside Herson & Sons, the entad shop, and were carrying on this conversation. Before they went in.

“Were you and Alfric flirting earlier?” asked Isra.

“Oh boy,” said Mizuki. She immediately felt flustered. “Let’s go in, we can talk about it later.” She didn’t really want to talk about it later though.

“Isra!” said Rolaj when they came into the shop, which wasn’t what Mizuki was expecting. He had a smile for the both of them. “I was hoping I would get to see you in person again. I have something for you.” He reached down below the counter, moved some things to the side, and brought a large bottle up from below. “Behold!”

Isra stared at it, and there was a moment of silence.

“Er, this is it, right?” asked Rolaj. “It would be very awkward if it wasn’t.”

“This is it,” said Isra. She stepped forward and touched the rim of it. The mouth was relatively small, like a wine jug, and the glass was thick. Mizuki pegged it at being a gallon, maybe a bit less. The dirt inside looked more like silt, and there was a tiny tree in the center of it, so big that it wasn’t clear to Mizuki how a person would get it out.

It took Mizuki a moment to realize that Isra was crying, but once she realized, she rushed in and wrapped Isra in a hug. Isra just buried her face in Mizuki’s shoulder and let it out, and Mizuki murmured gentle nothings to her. This was how Mizuki’s mom had always handled things. It lasted what felt like a long time, and Rolaj silently disappeared, coming back later with two cups of hot tea and a handkerchief.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” mumbled Isra when she was finished.

“It’s okay,” said Mizuki. “It’s fine.” Her shoulder was tear-stained, but being able to help, if only in a small way, felt wonderful.

Isra turned to Rolaj with puffy red eyes. She took the handkerchief he offered, wiped her face and cleared the snot from her nose, and clenched it in her hand and looked down at the bottle again. She took a deep breath, cleared her throat, then looked up at him. “How much do you need for it?”

Rolaj shifted a bit, looking embarrassed. “It was stolen from you,” he said. “Legally, it would have to go through some channels, but if there were an investigation, it would probably end in your favor, and be returned to you at no cost. So, it’s yours to keep.”

Isra’s lip trembled, and Mizuki tried to get ready for another bout of tears, but Isra nodded and held it back. “Thank you,” she said with a strained voice.

“The entad seller wasn’t too happy to be losing it, but he saw the writing on the wall, and better to give it up rather than risk having it taken,” said Rolaj. “The thief’s name is mud now, if he’s still east of the Proten Lakes. Merchants talk.”

Isra nodded. Her eyes were still on the bottle.

“Well, this is a nice surprise,” said Mizuki.

Rolaj nodded. “Fast, by our standards. I was worried that it would take weeks to make its way to us, but there was a different shipment to Plenarch, and we piggybacked on it.”

Mizuki got the sense that this might not be the full truth, but that was just a feeling. She was really, really hoping that this wasn’t something that he had done to win her favor. All the niceness he’d displayed hadn’t convinced her that it was worth pushing ahead. Most of the problem was the distance between them, though the ease with which they’d gone to Liberfell made it seem like a little bit of a lie. Maybe the problem was also the letters: epistolary novels were in vogue at the moment, and it felt like Rolaj had possibly read one too many of them.

Isra straightened up. “I’d like to repay you and your father, along with the seller out east.”

“Oh,” said Rolaj. “Well as I said, it’s yours to keep.”

“Something to show my appreciation,” said Isra. “Something to mark us as friends.”

“Uh,” said Rolaj. “I really don’t need anything, and I don’t think my father does either.” He seemed almost ready to leave it at that, but Isra was doing her thing where she was staring him down, whether that was consciously or otherwise. “Something that doesn’t cost you much, I guess, like a meal or … or something.”

“Smoked meat?” asked Isra. “Honey?”

“Either of those would be much appreciated,” said Rolaj, relaxing.

“Both,” nodded Isra.

“Alright,” said Rolaj. He smiled. “Did you come in here because Alfric gave you some forewarning, or was there something you needed?”

“Just visiting our favorite entad shop!” said Mizuki. It was the wrong thing to say, the absolute wrong thing to say, and she regretted it immediately, but it was becoming clear to her that while she did need to break it off with Rolaj, she wouldn’t be doing it today.

“Have you pulled anything good?” asked Rolaj.

Mizuki was thankful that there was something else to talk about, and pulled her helm — the party’s helm, technically — out of her sack. “Flight,” she said. “Not appraised, but it’s everything I’ve ever dreamed of. Almost eighteen miles an hour!” This was a wild approximation, but she had taken it out for a morning flight and done a little bit of math. Alfric had considered this dangerous, since it hadn’t been appraised, but she’d stayed low to the ground, low enough that she’d only have needed some clerical attention.

“Wow,” said Rolaj. “I think the best we have for flight right now is a flute, and it’s kind of garbage, only works when you’re blowing into it.”

Mizuki put the helmet on and hovered in place. One of the neat things about the weightlessness of the helmet, she’d discovered, was that if she was perfectly still, her hair would start to float around her too, as though she were underwater. The same went for her clothes though, and she dropped to the floor before the culottes began to rise too high.

“Very good,” said Rolaj. He had an appreciative smile for her, and it made her feel bad.

“You’re talked with Vertex, right?” asked Mizuki. “Do they have anything worth taking? A ‘trifle’, they said. Something they might have tried to pawn off here that was interesting but not that useful?”

“I’ve talked with them,” said Rolaj. “They have hundreds of entads sitting beside their tent at the moment. More than we can absorb, really, and more than they have the storage for, which is awkward. The mayor is none too happy about it, actually, feels like it’s an eyesore, but they apparently don’t have much in the way of money.” He shrugged.

“They’re dungeoneers, they should have money,” said Mizuki. “Enough to rent a house, surely.”

“Short notice,” said Isra.

“How long could it take to rent a house?” asked Mizuki. “Surely not more than a few days. It’s been a week.”

“Time and money,” said Rolaj with a shrug. “Aren’t your two groups … friends?”

“Kind of,” shrugged Mizuki. “Anyway, I’m not helping them to move, and I wouldn’t be able to find a place for them, so I guess they’re on their own.”

“I would help them if they asked,” said Isra.

“Really?” asked Mizuki. “I guess I would too, if Grig came up to me and said ‘hey, we really need some help’.”

“Because you’re a nice person,” said Isra with a nod.

“I’m okay,” said Mizuki.

“Do you have time later?” asked Rolaj. “While you’re in Liberfell? Like I said in my last letter, I was thinking that we might have a proper date.” There was a hopefulness to him that Mizuki hated, an almost painful eagerness.

“Um,” said Mizuki. “Look, you’re really sweet —”

“But you’re not interested?” asked Rolaj. He visibly deflated, and his cheeks went red.

“Um,” said Mizuki again. “It’s just … I don’t know.” She took a breath. “No.”

“It’s fine,” said Rolaj, though his voice was close to cracking. “Thank you for giving me a chance.”

“Sorry,” said Mizuki. She couldn’t help but cringe, and she knew that wasn’t the face she should be making.

It was incredibly awkward, painfully awkward, made more awkward by the fact that Isra was there. Mizuki hadn’t meant to do it, but it had been percolating in her head for some time, and then it had just slipped out. Every second that they spent in the store with him felt like agony, maybe because they were all avoiding the subject, and it took some time to get the bottle properly situated in Mizuki’s bag, taking up the space that the helmet had occupied.

When they were out of the store, Mizuki groaned. “Sorry, that was horrible.”

“It seemed amicable to me,” said Isra.

“I guess,” said Mizuki. “It could have gone a lot worse, I’ve had break ups that end with yelling and accusations and stuff like that. I hated it though, absolutely hated it. There’s a part of me that would have rather gotten married to him than have to go through that.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. “He seemed nice.” This was the kind of not-quite disagreement that Isra probably wouldn’t have offered after a breakup if she’d grown up with human friends.

“He was nice,” Mizuki admitted. “I think maybe if he’d lived in Pucklechurch, I might have been able to do it, but letter writing isn’t my strong suit, and going to Liberfell, even if it’s easy, felt like such a — a chore? Or something we’d need to schedule, anyway. I can’t just pop by his house and see if he’s in.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. She was, at least, not frowning like she normally did. “So you want someone close?”

“I guess,” said Mizuki. “Or maybe just … someone where we can be more spontaneous.”

“Someone we live with?” asked Isra.

From someone else, Mizuki might have taken this to be gentle ribbing, but Isra seemed quite serious. “I’m not interested in Alfric,” said Mizuki. “It’s just flirting.”

“But you don’t talk about it,” said Isra. “So how do you know?”

“Uh, he’s Alfric,” said Mizuki. “He’s a brick.” She saw that this wasn’t enough. “He’s easy and uncomplicated, if he were interested in more than flirting, I would know, and the fastest way I would know is that he’d just outright tell me.”

“And if you wanted more, you wouldn’t do the same?” asked Isra.

“It’s — I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “Not usually my style. Though maybe it should be, so I don’t keep wasting the time of nice young boys like Rolaj.” That was real cause for reflection. Usually she would just flirt with someone, and if there was someone she was interested in, and the flirting was so overt it couldn’t be ignored, eventually he would make the first move.

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” said Isra.

“Well, sure, nothing much invested, nothing much lost,” said Mizuki with a wave of her hand. “But thank you.” She reached over and gave Isra’s hand a squeeze. That felt like maybe a little much, but after having comforted Isra through a bout of crying in the middle of a store, it did seem like they should be closer.

They walked together, at least a little bit in their own heads, or so it seemed to Mizuki. Her thoughts kept going back to Rolaj and the absolutely terrible way she’d handled things. It would have been better to put it off, to just put up a front, and to not do it in front of Isra, not when Rolaj had just done what felt like a big favor.

The bastlekeeper’s place was on the edge of town, nice and big, with lots of room for all the animals. When Mizuki had first been there, she’d thought of it as something like a zoo, but after having been to the Dondrian zoo, she now realized that she hadn’t actually understood what a zoo was like. The bastlekeeper ran a pet shop, though many of the pets had some commercial function, and it wasn’t really much more than that.

When they went inside, Cate was there.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Awkward.”

“Hello again,” said Cate with a slight nod. It couldn’t have been more than an hour since they’d seen each other.

“Why are you here?” asked Isra.

“Business,” said Cate. “Perrin is the only bastlekeeper in three hexes and the best in six, or so he claims.”

“Seems like the kind of thing you’d need to ask the other bastlekeepers about,” said Mizuki. She looked at Perrin. The old man had looked at them expectantly when they’d entered, and given a wave of a hand, but was offering no support. “No offense.”

“None taken,” said Perrin. “Can I help you with something quick?”

“No,” said Isra. “We wanted to talk about taking the herb dragons from you.”

“Ah,” said Perrin, putting a hand to the back of his neck. “Well, how do the three of you know each other?”

“I know many things and many people,” said Cate with a wan smile. “But in this case, I came because they saw something in a dungeon that was of interest to the province, and will require some work on my end.”

“Cate and I go back,” Perrin explained. “I’ve known her what, twenty-odd years now?”

“They have been quite odd,” Cate nodded.

“What business do you have here?” asked Isra.

It was impossible not to read that as hostile, no matter how Mizuki tried to think about where Isra might be coming from. Whatever the bad feelings were, they’d been amped up by this coincidence. Maybe to Isra’s thinking, this wasn’t a coincidence, they were both here for the dragons. But that would be silly, wouldn’t it? Besides, Perrin didn’t own the dragons, he was just raising them, and entitled to the first clutch, so even if Cate had wanted to buy them, she would still have been sent back to them.

“I am Seeker of Secrets,” said Cate. She arched an eyebrow in Isra’s direction. “Perrin is not only a bastlekeeper, but a beastmaster as well. If there is something entombed within Pate Knob, there’s a moderate possibility that the dungeon there has been expressing it in different ways. I will, naturally, be going to the local Adventurer’s League office, to speak with Priya, but I thought I would see Perrin first.” She looked at Isra, shiny green eyes fixed in place. “You were worried I was attempting to poach your dragons.”

“I was,” said Isra. For a moment, it felt like she was going to hold the gaze with Cate, two statues looking forever into each other’s eyes, but then Isra turned away, to Perrin. “We can come back.”

“Shouldn’t take long,” said Perrin. “You can mill about, or come back later.”

“We’ll come back later,” said Isra with a curt nod.

“Hey, before we go,” said Mizuki. “Cate, were you a dungeoneer? Alfric wanted to know.”

“No,” said Cate. “I’ve never set foot in a dungeon.”

“Alright, thanks,” said Mizuki.

They left together, and by that time, some of the bad feelings had started to rub off on Mizuki.

“It was only a little suspicious,” said Mizuki once they were out of the shop.

“It felt very suspicious,” said Isra.

“Alfric thought that maybe she was just an eccentric, too many things from a dungeon,” said Mizuki. “But I guess that theory is a bust. So where’d she get her entads from?”

“A shop,” shrugged Isra, as though that particular part of it wasn’t important. In fairness, it probably wasn’t.

“Well then where’d she get her money?” asked Mizuki.

“Any number of places,” Isra shrugged. “Do you think she has a lot?”

“The quality of the entads says yes,” said Mizuki.

“You think that Perrin will stand against her?” asked Isra, glancing back at the shop.

“He should,” said Mizuki. “Seemed like a stand up guy to me. And if she rejected an offer of a hundred thousand each already, there’s an upper limit on the bribe she would be able to offer. She’s got money, but three hundred thousand would be, er, not to agree with Alfric, a huge amount. Enough to start a business, enough to buy a nice house … a lot.”

“You think I pressed too hard,” said Isra. “I was hoping that she would counteroffer.”

“And she should have,” shrugged Mizuki. “I don’t know what’s going on with her. Maybe she really does think that you should do some due diligence and doesn’t mind whether or not she gets the dragons now or later. I would kind of hate to lose Lerial, but there will be other dragons, I guess.” The thought of a hundred thousand rings did put some salve on that potential wound though, and while the final sum would undoubtedly be less, she wasn’t so smitten with the herb dragon that nothing could make her part with it.

“If she were patient, she wouldn’t have been at the bastlekeeper’s,” said Isra.

“True, if it’s not a coincidence,” shrugged Mizuki.

“Where are we going?” asked Isra. She had been letting Mizuki lead.

“We’re doing a quick lunch,” said Mizuki. “It’ll be better for us to get some food and give Perrin some space.”

“Unless he sells the dragons out from under us,” said Isra.

“Well we weren’t going to stand in the store watching him, were we?” asked Mizuki, but it seemed like that was exactly what Isra had wanted to do, even if she knew that it wasn’t something normal people did.

Lunch went slowly. Isra didn’t seem to particularly feel like talking, and Mizuki thought that might be about the dragons, but while they were waiting for their food, Isra reached for Mizuki’s bag and pulled out the bottle entad.

“Are you okay?” asked Mizuki.

“I think I’m sensitive about being stolen from,” said Isra as she looked at the bottle. The tree inside was dead, and would need to be removed, which Mizuki was still curious about.

“Well, this is one item back,” said Mizuki. “We’ll get the other.”

“I don’t think of myself as sentimental,” said Isra. She pushed the bottle forward and folded her arms, then rested her head on them so she could look at it. “But I guess I am.”

“That’s not such a bad thing to be,” said Mizuki. “I am too. I keep getting asked by people whether I’m going to be sticking around Pucklechurch, and what’s going to happen with the house, and … I don’t want to leave. I grew up in that house. I have so much history in Pucklechurch, you know?”

Isra shook her head, not taking her eyes from the bottle. “I can imagine though.”

“With Alfric I get it,” said Mizuki. “He’s been planning to leave Dondrian his whole life, he was always going to be a dungeoneer, come what may. And for Verity, life in Dondrian was all pressure and stress with people who didn’t like her or wanted to use her for their own purposes, and … whatever, it was tough for her in ways that I don’t really understand, I guess, but I’ll take her word for it. But Hannah? She never talks about her home in Cairbre and rarely mentions her sisters. I don’t get that.”

“She was young when she went into the seminary,” said Isra. “It all had time to fade.”

“I guess,” said Mizuki. “I should ask her about her family back home, but you’re right, you hear more seminary stories from her than anything else.”

“You don’t talk about your sisters that often,” said Isra.

“They were younger,” shrugged Mizuki. “Young enough that we didn’t really spend all that much time together, I guess. I didn’t see them as really being, um, people. And I get letters from them every now and then, but they’re pretty few and far between, and — Akina is really kind of a scholar, reads a lot, cares a lot about being precise on things. Chizu is the younger one, it’s kind of hard to tell what her deal is. More like me, I guess.” The truth was, she hadn’t thought about her sisters all that much in the past few years, and hadn’t mourned them being a continent away, which made her feel like a bit of a bad sister. They had been young and annoying though, and while they were probably less young and less annoying now — Akina was practically an adult, which was weird to think about — the thing that connected them was having lived together. “Huh.”

“What?” asked Isra. Their food had just arrived, and Isra reluctantly pushed the bottle to one side.

“I just haven’t thought that much about them,” said Mizuki. She looked down at her bowl of noodles, which was piled high, shaved slices of pickled beet and thick slices of pork sitting on top of the flat noodles. “My grandfather loomed so large in my childhood, he’s the one I think about the most. He was very much a patriarch, with mom and dad kind of,” she searched for the word, and found ‘subordinate’, which sounded like it was implying a bad relationship, “less central.” That still sounded bad.

“All I had was my father,” said Isra. She glanced at the bottle, as though imagining that it would be stolen again, and when it hadn’t moved, she dug in. She had ordered a bowl of Chicken Five Ways, and Mizuki had a bit of lunch envy. From a distance, it was impossible to tell what the five ways were, but there was chicken skin, egg, and some hunks of chicken, along with plenty of herbs to give it some green.

“We’ll get the other things back,” said Mizuki. “Make an effort, anyway. We’ll find Angun and make sure he gets his punishment. And … if you wanted, we could try to figure out where you came from and why.”

Isra paused with her fork halfway to her mouth. One of the five ways was a chicken sausage, apparently. “It’s probably not interesting,” said Isra. She resumed eating. Food was good for the soul, Mizuki had always felt, and some of the worry and sadness that had been with Isra seemed to be flowing away.

“If you don’t want to know, that’s fine,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “I would want to know.”

“You think it’s odd,” said Isra.

“I think as it stands, it doesn’t add up,” said Mizuki. “But if it’s not important to your life, then I guess I’ll shut my mouth about it. I can shut my mouth, when it’s appropriate.”

Isra ate more of her noodles, not saying anything until she was finished. “I want to move in with you.”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. She had been playing out conversations in her head while eating, and this wasn’t what she thought Isra would have landed on.

“I’ll need to move things,” said Isra. “And I don’t know what I’m going to do with the house I lived in.”

“We can figure it out,” said Mizuki. “Probably no one will want to live there?”

“Probably not,” said Isra. She seemed sad about that, and Mizuki could think of nothing to make her feel better.

“Then we can give it a funeral,” said Mizuki. “Hannah can write a nice speech, and after we’ve taken everything out of it, we can get together and celebrate the house, and it coming to an end.”

Isra nodded. “I’ve never been to a funeral either.”

“In my experience, they’re much less fun than weddings,” said Mizuki. She wanted to ask if Isra’s father hadn’t had a funeral, but kept her mouth shut, because obviously he hadn’t. “Maybe it’s a dumb idea, to have a funeral for a house.”

“No,” said Isra. “I like it.”

Mizuki smiled. “Well, do you want to go see a man about some dragons?”

“Yes,” said Isra, rising from her seat. It seemed that for a moment, she’d forgotten to be paranoid about the Seeker of Secrets.

But when they got to the bastlekeeper’s, Perrin had their dragons ready, both of them hale and hearty, munching on herbs that he had provided to them. They had grown less than Lerial had, and were just now starting to stretch their wings.

“I’ve been thinking it over, and I can release them to you,” said Perrin. “So long as you keep up your end of the bargain and give me some of the first clutch. Not that I haven’t enjoyed the missives from you, Isra, but it’s clear that your standards for care are higher than what I can provide, and it’s better to let you have them if what we’re most interested in is the breeding.”

“Can we take them today?” asked Isra.

“Ay,” nodded Perrin. “You’re a woods witch, you can keep them in check better than I. But if they escape, there will be all kinds of trouble landing squarely on your head.”

“Did she ask about them?” asked Mizuki.

Perrin eyed her. “In passing,” he said. “She said your offer was a hundred thousand for each? That seems steep, given the care and feeding they’ll need, and the uncertainty.”

“I need to know what the market is like,” said Isra. “I was also hoping that you could tell me what we can expect.”

“Well,” said Perrin, putting a hand to his chin. “Depends on what kind of buyer you can get, but if they fly, and if they can make good pets that don’t run away, then I think there’s a fair bit of money to be had. Of course, some depends on the size of the clutch and the frequency of the breeding, but people want pets all the time. Selling them for a thousand a piece, you’d need three hundred to make up what you’re asking from her, which wouldn’t be unreasonable, though it becomes less so when you take into account how much time and effort it might take.”

“People would pay a thousand?” asked Mizuki. “For a pet? You can get a cat for free.”

“A pet dragon, one of a kind, would fetch a high price,” said Perrin. “But three hundred thousand would be on the far upper limit of what they’d command, especially now, when there’s still much we don’t know.”

“If you were to buy them from us now?” asked Isra.

“Me?” asked Perrin. He picked up a pencil from the counter, but didn’t write anything with it, only tapped it against the wood as he thought. “Well now, for the set of all three, I’d say a thousand rings. That’s given how little we know, and the costs involved in raising them. There might still be some commercial possibility for them, their meat or eggs.”

“Gross,” said Mizuki. “But thanks.”

“Can you put me in contact with other bastlekeepers?” asked Isra. “The next time Cate asks, I would like to have numbers on hand. She wanted them without much conversation.”

“She’s a nice woman,” said Perrin. “Thoughtful and kind.”

“I never said otherwise,” said Isra, frowning at him.

“All the same,” said Perrin. “If you meet her as equals, you’ll be able to unload the dragons on her simply enough, and my guess is she’d pay a premium, especially if she came here with the creatures in mind.”

“I’ll try to do better,” said Isra. “Sorry.”

“No skin off mine,” said Perrin.

They got all their arrangements in place, and got ready to use the dagger back to Pucklechurch with the two new dragons in tow. Mizuki kept asking Isra whether they would get along, or how they would keep all three of them in line, and Isra kept explaining that she would handle it all, that it was just a matter of exerting her influence on them.

But it was as they were walking home from the temple that Mizuki realized something vital: the two other dragons did not yet have names. That was something that would have to be rectified at once.

Chapter 85 - Seeker

It was largely by chance that Isra was the one to answer the door. Mizuki was in the kitchen, preparing lunch, and Isra had just come down from using the upstairs bathroom. There was some question in Isra’s mind about whether it was appropriate for her to be answering the door, but she did almost live there, more nights than not, and it was likely to be someone that she knew, or at least knew of. Answering the door was something that normal people did, and Isra wanted to be normal, though she was also aware that normal people didn’t spend so much time internally debating things before doing them, and they didn’t focus much of their time and effort on being normal.

The woman was tall, taller even than Alfric, and she had very straight, very white hair that went down almost impossibly far, to her knees, which seemed like it would be a complete pain to keep clean and out of the way. Her face was lined with age, though not overly so, and in a pleasing way that made her seem like she might be a font of sage wisdom. Her eyes were almost blinding green, and it was hard to tell whether they had their own luminance, or whether they were simply that bright. Her clothes were, like her hair, so long as to seem impractical. She had robes that nearly touched the ground and obscured her feet, the sleeves so long her hands were likewise hidden.

“Is this the home of Alfric Overguard?” the woman asked, lifting an eyebrow. Her voice was hard like metal but also somewhat yielding, in a way that made clear she was willing it to bend.

“It is,” said Isra. She had never answered a door before, and couldn’t recall having seen someone else do it, and so was somewhat lost on what came next. As was her habit, she kept her mouth shut lest she appear ignorant.

“May I speak with him?” asked the woman after a small moment.

“Yes,” said Isra. She looked into the house. “Come in. Take your shoes off. Please.”

The woman followed, seeming to float, and Isra noted that she didn’t take her shoes off, which meant that either she was using magic to not touch the floor, was barefoot, or was perhaps just very rude.

“Alfric,” said Isra. “For you.”

Alfric came out from the living room with a smile on his face. “You’re the woman from Greater Plenarch?”

“Yes, Cate Peregrin,” she replied. Her smile stretched across her face in a way that Isra felt was a bit unnatural. “We had your report, and I felt it better to deal with it quickly, just in case.”

“If there is a monster trapped there, it’s been trapped for centuries,” said Alfric. “Hardly worth moving fast on.” But he seemed pleased to be talking with her, whatever his reservations.

“I’ll need to know what you saw in the dungeon, in detail,” she said.

“Of course,” nodded Alfric. “Here, in the dining room.” His eyes moved to Isra. “Do you have insights you’d want to share? I would want Mizuki there too, to talk about the feel of it.”

“No insights, no,” said Isra. “The monster was dungeon mad, same as all the others.”

Alfric nodded, then turned to Cate. “I’ll grab Mizuki, you can get yourself settled.”

Isra found herself drawn to the woman, and followed her into the dining room, where they each took a seat.

“Alfric was explaining that there might be something buried in the hex,” said Isra.

“It’s very possible, especially in this region,” the woman replied. “Humanity was swept out of the area and only recently came back in.”

Isra took ‘recent’ to mean on a very long time scale, hundreds of years. It was dizzying to think about, the casual way that people could talk about a dozen generations, and that was for humans, nevermind the animals and plants that had gone through comparatively endless cycles in that same time span. Isra had trouble conceiving of even a hundred years, and wondered what was different with other people that they were able to blithely discuss such things.

“Alfric was saying you might have some insights?” asked Cate.

“I’m a druid,” said Isra. “But I saw very little of the trapped creature. Peering too deeply at them, with the dungeon madness, makes me feel awful.”

“I see,” nodded Cate. “And what can you tell me about the containment?”

Isra frowned. “Didn’t Alfric send a letter to you?”

“It’s good for me to get different perspectives,” said Cate.

But Isra was saved from having to go in depth on anything by Alfric and Mizuki joining them. There was a round of introductions, and after that, Alfric launched into an explanation of everything that they had seen. He was remarkably observant, Isra noticed, able to say with certainty what shape the stones had been, and with a better description of all the creature’s features than Isra would have been able to give. He must have been looking closely and actively remembering, preparing for this moment.

“Mmm,” Cate frowned. “That does sound very close to what we occasionally find. It will, unfortunately, take some looking into.”

“Can we help?” asked Alfric. “If you need an extra pair of hands, we’re available.” He glanced at Mizuki. “Or I’ll help, I guess I can’t speak for others.”

“Most of the work is in scouring the area with entads,” said Cate. “It can take some time. And because of the way dungeon instantiation works, what you found might be from you, or from a long-ago trap, or an adjacent hex, or even someone who had passed through.”

“Is that true?” asked Alfric. “Someone passing through the hex could influence what’s in the dungeon? I hadn’t heard that before.” He seemed somewhat concerned, though Isra wasn’t sure about what. At a guess, it was because there was some new information about dungeons he didn’t know.

“It’s all theory,” she said with a wave of her hand.

“Sorry,” said Mizuki. “I’m … not exactly clear on who you, um, are?”

“Cate Peregrin,” she said, placing her hand on her chest, though she’d said as much in the introduction before. “I’m with the provincial authority, charged with responding to certain threats and curiosities. My official title, if it helps, is Seeker of Secrets.”

“Wow,” said Mizuki. “What do I have to do to get a cool title?”

Cate gave a high, tinkling laugh. “Be very old, and know many secrets,” she replied. “Though much of my duties are in chasing down things that turn out to be nothing at all, and in practice, I’m semi-retired. There was little to clear from my plate when I decided to come out here.”

“Nothing? Like this might be?” asked Alfric. “Sorry. I saw the containment, and thought that it meant … something more.”

“And it might,” she replied. “There’s a very good possibility that it is. But it will take time to search through the area, and there’s cause to be careful with such things, if it is a trap that’s been left behind. There’s —”

Lerial hopped up onto the table, and Cate stopped and stared at the herb dragon.

“Isra, can you get her down?” asked Alfric.

“No,” said Cate, holding out a hand. She was staring at the herb dragon with a certain intensity. “What is that?”

“The species doesn’t have a name yet,” said Alfric. “We’ve been calling it an herb dragon.”

“There’s more than one?” asked Cate. She seemed shocked by the animal, and wasn’t taking her eyes off it.

“Three,” said Alfric. “One male, two female. We hatched them from dungeon eggs.”

“It eats herbs?” asked Cate. She held out her hand, and by some unseen magic, there were herbs in it when she unfurled the fingers of her fist. Isra immediately reached out with her senses, but the herb was unfamiliar, something sharp and pungent.

Lerial went for the herbs with a speed they hadn’t yet seen from the herb dragon, and took them from Cate’s open palm. It was behavior that Isra hadn’t seen before, the way Lerial snatched the herbs as though they might disappear, and retreated with them to safety once they were in her tiny claws.

Cate finally looked up at Alfric. “Where are the other two?”

“In Liberfell, with the bastlekeeper there,” he said. “We may try to move them here though, the better to breed them.”

Cate’s eyes had lost any friendliness they had, but after a moment, it returned. “I have a fondness for dragons,” she said. “How much are you selling them for? As a set?”

“We hadn’t discussed it,” said Alfric. “At this point, we’re still looking at what profit might be had, and want to know what kind of breeding we’ll be able to get out of them.”

“A thousand rings each?” asked Cate.

“We haven’t done our due diligence,” said Isra. It was a phrase she’d picked up from one of the druids in her guild. ‘Due diligence’ just meant making sure you weren’t making a huge mistake. “We need to speak with other potential buyers first.”

“What would you need as payment for me to take this dragon from you right now?” asked Cate. “You have some uncertainty about the value, and other buyers, but I would pay you more if I could have them today, without consulting anyone else.”

This was raising Isra’s hackles. It had the smell of a bad deal. The woman had seen something with the herb dragon, knew something that they didn’t, and was trying to pull one over on them. If someone offered you a deal that seemed too good to be true, there was probably some catch. Was a false dragon like this worth hundreds of thousands? It seemed remotely possible to Isra.

“One hundred thousand each,” said Isra.

“That’s outrageous,” replied Cate, though if she were outraged, she was doing a very good job of keeping her face impassive.

“It does seem high,” said Alfric, giving Isra a doubtful glance.

“Future earnings,” said Isra. “In five years we could have a clutch of them. In ten, an entire industry. I don’t know when they’ll be sexually mature, or how they’ll handle breeding, but this might make us money long after we’re too old to run dungeons.” Her face was set, and she knew from past experience that this was how deals were made. Cate would come back with a counteroffer, and they could work something out.

“I’ll let you do your due diligence,” said Cate, frowning slightly. Her eyes had gone back to the dragon, and there was something there. Greed, perhaps. She turned back to Alfric. “As for your offer of service, I’ll let you know. Pucklechurch is the closest town to Pate Knob, and I saw a good tavern on the way in.” She stood from the table. “I have work to do. If you’ll excuse me, I need to get started.”

They said their goodbyes, and then the three of them, Alfric, Mizuki, and Isra, were left at the dining room table.

“Hopefully she wasn’t too offended,” said Alfric. He was frowning a bit.

“Mizuki, did she seem magical to you?” asked Isra.

“How so?” asked Mizuki. “Entad robes, and her necklace was probably an entad too.”

“When she fed Lerial?” asked Isra. “What was that?”

“Dunno,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “Whatever magic it was, it was over before I had a good look. You should count yourself lucky that I was able to see the entads at all, my magic sight has gotten a lot better lately.”

“She was odd,” said Isra. She felt deflated though, and it was clear that whatever instinct she was feeling, the others weren’t sharing it.

“Some people are,” said Alfric. “My guess is she’s a former dungeoneer with a fairly long career, but that’s just the sense I get, I didn’t get much biographical information when I made contact. ‘Seeker of Secrets’ is a very suggestive title for a person to have.”

“I want a neat title,” said Mizuki. “Hey, we should all have titles.”

“You also want to name every entad,” said Alfric.

“Uh, yes,” said Mizuki. “I’m just bad at names, otherwise I would name everything in my possession.”

“But then when talking about them, you have to explain every name to someone outside the party,” said Alfric.

“Simple, just don’t talk to people outside the party,” said Mizuki with a smile.

Isra thought that this was probably flirting, or if it wasn’t, she didn’t actually know what flirting was. There was a back-and-forth to the way they talked, a teasing familiarity that she had seen often in her books. She wanted to ask them, but had the sense that this would be quite rude, and resolved to do it when she was alone with Mizuki, who seemed to like to talk more.

“Isra, do you want to do due diligence?” asked Alfric. “Or would you rather I handle it?”

“It would involve talking to people?” asked Isra.

“Er, yes,” said Alfric. “You have somewhat of a relationship with the bastlekeeper in Liberfell, if you could talk to him about pricing and find some potential buyers, that would be wonderful.”

“You think I should have just taken the money,” said Isra.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “I would have accepted a thousand a piece, that’s a pretty significant amount, though I also agree part of what we’re selling is the risk.”

“What does that even mean, selling risk?” asked Mizuki. Isra was glad that Mizuki had asked, because she had never heard the concept either.

“Let’s say you have an object that might be worth a hundred rings, or might be worth a thousand,” said Alfric. “Its actual value is in the future, but you can sell it before then. Obviously you don’t sell it for a hundred, because there’s a chance it might be worth more, and just as obviously, you should definitely sell for a thousand, because it’s not going to be worth more. The question is what’s a good point to sell at between those two extremes, and a lot of that comes down to risk.”

“Just sell at the midpoint?” asked Mizuki.

“There’s an argument for selling lower,” said Alfric. “Less than you think it’s going to end up being worth in the end, even on average. What you’re doing is taking money now because you might not be able to get the money later. You’re selling the risk of failure to someone else.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” said Isra.

“It’s complicated money stuff,” said Alfric, waving a hand. “My tutors didn’t spend all that much time on it, and it’s not incredibly important, but my father was trying to get me schooled in finance. There’s a lot of talk of risk and how it can be avoided or capitalized on, especially for chrononauts, who can alleviate short-term risk.”

“I cannot imagine anything more boring than money,” said Mizuki.

“You’re a dungeoneer,” said Isra. “Which you do for money.”

“No,” said Mizuki, holding up a finger. “I do dungeoneering for things. Money lets me get those things, but money itself is only interesting as a path to things, and it’s the least interesting path to things. There are people who just deal with money all day in the cities, and to me that feels like a waste of a life.”

“I don’t think it’s that bad,” said Alfric. “We have to deal with money within the party.”

“We have to,” said Mizuki. “It’s a chore, like cleaning out the muck room, or doing dishes. It’s not fun, it’s the thing that you do so that you don’t have to live in filth and squalor.”

Alfric shrugged. “But as far as chores go, it’s not that bad.”

“I don’t like haggling,” Isra offered, not sure that it was a good contribution to the conversation.

“No?” asked Alfric. “But you’re pretty good at it.”

“I’m mean when I do it,” said Isra. “It’s hostile, adversarial.” This was another new word. She’d always had a good vocabulary, thanks largely to her father, but she’d been adding to it over quickly over the past year. “I don’t think that it should be. I want to be more gentle.”

“Understandable,” said Alfric. “And it’s a skill that I need to work on. Understanding what things are worth is one thing, though I won’t say that I’m quite there yet, but dealing with other people will take me some time.”

“I’ll speak with the beastmaster,” said Isra. “I was going to Liberfell anyway, to check in on the other herb dragons. I was thinking of convincing him to let me take them.”

“Why?” asked Alfric.

“We know them better now,” said Isra. “And they want to fly, which he can’t safely allow them to do. I’m a better caretaker for them, better able to watch what they eat and provide a good environment.”

“A sound argument,” said Alfric. “I hope he sees it that way.”

“She didn’t seem odd to you, this Seeker of Secrets?” asked Isra.

“Maybe a bit,” shrugged Alfric. “But I come from dungeoneers, and eccentricity is common among that sort, which is either from the profession, the entads, or the dungeons themselves, hard to say which.”

“Are you going today?” Mizuki asked Isra. “And if you are, can I come with you?”

“Yes,” nodded Isra. “You want to see Rolaj?”

“Er,” said Mizuki. “Right, Rolaj. I owe him like five letters. Maybe today is the day I break it off, not that there was really an ‘it’.”

“Just like that?” asked Isra, raising an eyebrow.

“Meh,” replied Mizuki with a shrug. “There’s no sense of frustration on his end from all the extra letters he’s been sending me, but if I’m not feeling it, it’s cruel to let him think there’s something there.”

“Here, let me give you the dagger, it should take the two of you with no problems,” said Alfric.

“And I’m taking the helmet,” said Mizuki. She frowned at Alfric. “Say, don’t you have an identification on that sword and bow yet?”

“No,” said Alfric. “There’s no rush, I will tomorrow. Today is my obligation to Filera, and I want to keep her happy.”

“I still don’t really get what she sees in you,” said Mizuki. “She hasn’t been asking me about my experiences in dungeons. Let her know that I like to talk, would you?”

“I guess,” said Alfric, though it didn’t seem likely that he was going to mention it.

Mizuki turned back to Isra. “Do you want to grab Verity?” asked Mizuki. “She had said you were going to go shopping together.”

“She needs to practice,” said Isra. There was a temptation to ask Verity to come with, certainly, but Verity had been bemoaning the relative lack of practice, and getting back into ‘concert condition’, which apparently involved an incredible amount of practice on very specific pieces. The dreaded letter from Verity’s mother hadn’t come in yet, but they were expecting it any day.

“Then it’ll be just the two of us,” said Mizuki with a smile. “Nice.”

They took some time to gather their things, and left not too long afterward, walking together to the general store. It wasn’t a market day, and the town always felt quieter when there wasn’t a market, more sedate in a way that Isra wasn’t sure she liked. It had taken her some time to acclimate to the markets and the expectant eyes of all the merchants, but it was a space she felt comfortable in after having spent so long there.

“I can’t actually see entads that well,” said Mizuki, unprompted.

“You can’t?” asked Isra.

“They affect the aether, but not very much,” said Mizuki. “I kind of squint to see them.”

“Okay,” said Isra.

“So if she had some kind of magic to her, some entad that you were feeling or seeing, I might have missed it,” said Mizuki. “I’ll be on the lookout next time we see her.”

“Ah,” said Isra. “It’s probably nothing.”

“I think people should trust their bad feelings,” said Mizuki. “That probably goes double for you, given all the druid stuff.”

“Bad feelings?” asked Isra.

“You know, someone just doesn’t feel right, or that sense like there are some eyes on the back of your neck,” said Mizuki. “Maybe you don’t get that. There’s a little part of you that just … feels off?”

“Was that how you felt the first time you met Lola?” asked Isra.

“A bit,” said Mizuki. “But I didn’t know what was off about her. I just thought it was a weird encounter with a weird girl. I don’t know.”

“You didn’t feel the same about Cate?” asked Isra. “That she was … off?”

“No,” said Mizuki. “Old, self-possessed, and sure about what she wants, with a definite style, but that could be anyone. She’s the kind of old lady I’d like to be some day. And she seems to like dragons, which … who wouldn’t? They’re incredibly rare, creatures of legend.”

“Next time we go to Dondrian, you should see the museum,” said Isra.

“Are we going to go to Dondrian again?” asked Mizuki. “It’s incredibly expensive unless you want to take a long time.”

“Verity is going,” said Isra. “We could have her bring us in the garden stone.”

“Mmm, probably not,” said Mizuki.

“Why?” asked Isra.

“Entad stuff,” said Mizuki. “I was talking about it with Alfric, who knows a lot about how these things are. Some entads let you bring people or things with, and others don’t, and the ones that do let you bring people with are used for that, at a higher price, usually. So Verity will probably be coming into Dondrian through the cheapest method there is, and you won’t just be able to be a free rider.”

“We have the dagger,” said Isra.

“True,” said Mizuki. “Does it really have that kind of range?”

Isra shrugged. “The entad seller said that it did. I don’t know if it was evaluated by a cleric of Qymmos, or just a guess from what testing they could do.”

“Worth a shot,” said Mizuki. “How much did Alfric pay for it?”

“Seventeen hundred,” said Isra.

“Yikes,” said Mizuki. “Sight unseen? Without actually testing the range?”

“You wouldn’t have done that?” asked Isra.

“I’d have asked a local cleric to look at it,” said Mizuki. “Or something, I don’t know.”

“Clerics usually charge for entad identification,” said Isra. “At least, that’s been my understanding. We’re getting a special deal.”

“Filera,” said Mizuki, sticking out her tongue. “Is it weird that I don’t like it?”

“Bad feelings?” asked Isra.

“Eh,” said Mizuki. “Kinda.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. She wished that she were Hannah, who would have some insight to give, or Alfric, who could at least be practical about it, or even Verity, who was nice and supportive and could say nothing at all without the silence being awkward for everyone involved.

“Anyway, it’s probably just me,” said Mizuki. “I know I was saying that you should trust your bad feelings, but maybe not your bad feelings about what other people are up to?”

“I think I’m the wrong person to ask,” said Isra.

They came to the general store, and Bethany was there, beaming. “We have a date!” she said. “Second of Arctus. And your party is obviously all invited.”

“So soon?” asked Mizuki. It was a month away.

“It’s going to be huge,” said Bethany. “He’s the first of the Pedder boys to get married, so the family feels it needs to be a production. I imagine half the town will be there for the party, if not the ceremony, but you’re welcome to come to both.”

“I’ve never been to a wedding,” said Isra. She hoped that this was a safe thing to say.

“Oh weddings are wonderful,” said Bethany. “Mine is coming a bit late, but I think it’ll make up for it in size. You’ll be there?”

Isra blinked. She was being addressed directly. She had thought that the invitation was a courtesy, but Bethany seemed eager to have her there. “Yes,” said Isra. “I wouldn’t want to miss it.” This was true; Isra had missed enough weddings in her life.

“Excellent!” said Bethany, clapping her hands. “Would it be possible that I could ask you a favor?”

Isra kept the frown from her face. “You can ask, of course,” she said. She forced a smile, to try to make it a little joke, but from the cringe on Mizuki’s face, it wasn’t quite successful.

“Well, what I had heard is that you’re a druid, right?” asked Bethany.

“Yes,” said Isra. She shifted uncomfortably.

“I was hoping — oh, I don’t know, for something magical,” said Bethany. “A flock of doves flying through the church, or something like that?”

“Oh,” said Isra, relaxing. “I was worried you’d want something difficult. I can do a flock of doves.”

Bethany gave an excited clap. “Wonderful! And if we could keep it under wraps, just so it’s a bit of a surprise, that would be great.”

“Do you want anything else?” asked Isra, surprising herself with the question. “A moose to ride away on, or a bear to announce your entrance?”

Bethany’s eyes went wide. “You could do that?”

Isra nodded. “It would take some concentration, but yes. And I could grow some flowers, given enough time.” She thought she had read that people liked flowers for special occasions.

“I couldn’t let you do all that,” said Bethany, though it seemed like it pained her to say it. “Let me see what I can scrape together in the wedding fund.”

“Of course,” nodded Isra.

“Well that’s wonderful,” said Bethany. “I’m extremely excited about the wedding, as you might have noticed, but there’s so much to do.” She looked around the shop. “Do you need anything, or were you just here for the wardrobe?”

“Wardrobe,” said Mizuki. “If there are still charges left.” She seemed light on words.

“It’s early yet,” said Bethany. “It usually doesn’t run out until around fifth bell. Alfric had me raise the price, and it’s been going later, but still running out, which means the price will probably go up again.”

“Money,” said Mizuki with a wave of her hand. “That’s an Alfric conversation.”

They spent some time at the wardrobe, spinning the dial back and forth so that they could try to find somewhere at the very edge of the Traeg’s Knob hex in order to minimize how long they would need to walk. Determining where the portal was opening up was left to Isra, and an issue of reading the positions of the clouds as well as microbiomes of the region. It was technically possible to find a portal on the edge of the hex, but in practice, it was random enough that it would take hours. They settled on a forest that Isra thought was close, and which Mizuki had seen before on an earlier trip.

“This is a wonderful forest,” said Mizuki. She took her shoes off for a moment and dug her feet into the springy moss with a sigh.

“What makes it a good forest?” asked Isra.

“Lots of tall trees with no low-hanging branches,” said Mizuki. “Very little underbrush, lots of moss, interesting stones.” She shrugged. “I’m sure you have opinions on what makes for a good forest.”

“I’ve never really thought about it,” said Isra. “I like tall trees. A sense of being in twilight.” She hesitated. This was the sort of conversation that she really needed to get better at. “I like a quiet forest without too much chatter from the animals, paths that the animals have forged but no signs of them, rounded stones that show incredible age. Age, I think, is what makes for a good forest. A prairie or swamp feels less old, even if it’s been around for centuries.”

“Mmm, I do like age,” said Mizuki. “Are you curious about this trapped thing? Ancient civilizations and all that?”

Isra shrugged. “Will we get to know more? Cate seemed to think that it would take a while, if there was anything there at all.”

“I’m already getting my hopes up,” Mizuki smiled.

They talked as they walked, and walked what was probably a bit further than they needed to go into the Liberfell hex. Mizuki was simple and easy in a way that Isra quite enjoyed, and the bad feelings about the strange new woman slowly faded away.

Chapter 87 - Composition

Verity played the new lute, stretching it to its limits and seeing what could be done with it. The lute that she’d used for concerts in Dondrian had been one of the best lutes in the world, and this certainly didn’t rival it, but there were a few similarities. That lute had been called the Full Orchestral Lute, and could produce the sounds of an entire symphony orchestra, though the sounds were produced together by a single instrument. It was taxing to play, but it would have been impossible without the way that the entad invaded the brain and pulled from the performer. It could produce sounds from instruments that Verity had no training in, up to the level of her skill with a lute. That single entad instrument was one of the reasons that she’d trained in the lute at all.

This new one, called the Constitute Lute (according to Grig), was far, far weaker. It seemed to have a thing for eights, having both eight strings, and being able to mimic eight lutes at once. When she’d first seen it, she’d thought that perhaps it had eight strings so that it could have a perfect octave, but no, the tuning had been set up — or simply existed, since entads had no true creator — so that there were repeated high and low notes to provide extra resonance and depth. It was non-standard, obviously so, but not terribly far from standard tuning, and the sound was nice.

She wondered whether it would be possible to use this new lute in the upcoming concert. She debated sending a letter off to her mother, but there had still been no word from Dondrian, and she didn’t want to start a line of communication. There was, perhaps, in the back of her mind, the idea that this whole issue of concerts in Dondrian would run into trouble of some kind or another, or that the impending seizure of her father’s company would cause utter collapse for the family, and then she wouldn’t have to do anything at all. This was absurdly wishful thinking, but Verity couldn’t help herself.

She wondered, idly, whether this particular lute might help her learn faster. There were very rare and very particular entads that could make a person better at something, so she supposed that it was possible. When she played, she was effectively playing eight lutes at once, so perhaps an hour of practice with it might equate to eight hours of normal practice. There was no simple way to test that though, and she wasn’t going to reduce her practice time, not with the concert looming.

Still, as she played she found herself spending her mental energy on composition rather than the actual mechanical motion of her fingers. She had been inspired to make a tune of eights, eight brothers going off to fight in a war at their father’s behest, good little soldiers who would inflict violence and pain upon distant lands to try to win his approval. Each of the knights was given a different lute, played in a slightly different style, and because she didn’t have eight voices, Verity attempted to tell a story entirely through the instrumentation.

Four hours passed in a heartbeat, and at the end of it, Verity had something that she was horribly disappointed by. It wasn’t finished, not hardly, but she still thought there was something in the bones of the piece, something that was compelling and interesting and worth pursuing. She had a horrible feeling that she would get it as good as she could and find that she didn’t know how to make it better, even while understanding that it was subpar. She wasn’t sure what she would do then.

It was after there was a knock on the door a second time that Verity realized she might be home alone. She preferred party chatter over the channel to be kept to a minimum, at least when she was practicing, since it felt so intrusive, but this did mean she had no idea where anyone else was.

But as it turned out, the person at the door was Xy, their local cartier. Verity immediately felt herself get flustered.

“Oh, hi,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“Mail for you, express,” said Xy with a smile.

Verity felt her heart climb up into her throat, and her eyes went to the letter, which indeed was an off-white envelope with a blue and black wax seal. This was stationary that her mother was fond of.

Xy handed the letter over, and when Verity reached for it, Xy went in for a kiss. It wasn’t a good kiss, too quick, too dry, too unexpected, and Verity was feeling ill with the letter in hand.

“Sorry,” said Verity, pulling away. “Sorry, I just —”

“No,” said Xy, “I was just — trying to be cute, sorry, I’ve been thinking about you.”

Verity looked down at the letter. “It’s from home.”

“Ah,” said Xy. “Sorry about —”

“No, no, it’s okay,” said Verity. “I just — my mind wasn’t there. Isn’t there.”

“Right,” nodded Xy. Her cheeks were flushed, and not in a good way. “Well, I’ll leave you to it.”

“It’s —” Verity began, but Xy was already off and away.

It had been a perfect opportunity. No one else was home. Verity would have the bedroom to herself, Xy was clearly ready, had clearly been thinking about it … and the letter was still in Verity’s hand.

Verity went into the dining room and set it down on the table. She didn’t want to open it. She was still sitting there when Isra and Mizuki returned some time later.

“Oh wow,” said Mizuki. “Is that from your mom?”

“Yes,” said Verity.

“And you’ve just been sitting there staring at it?” asked Mizuki.

“Yes,” nodded Verity. “It’s going to say something that I don’t like.”

“Would you like me to read it?” asked Isra.

Verity thought about that. It was a cowardly thing to do, to have a friend read it first. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”

Isra took the letter and broke the seal, reading quickly. Verity watched Isra’s brown eyes as they tracked back and forth. Isra probably wasn’t aware of it, but the frown on her face was deepening, and that was making Verity’s heart beat faster. The reading seemed to go on for ages, perhaps because there were multiple sheets of thin paper with her mother’s spider-web fine handwriting. Mizuki read each page when Isra was finished, and the paper sat there, tempting Verity to join in.

“Okay,” said Isra when she was finished.

“Wait,” said Mizuki, who was still reading. They stood there for a bit while she finished.

“Can I say?” asked Isra.

“I don’t know if I want to know what was in it,” said Verity, putting a hand to her forehead. “Sorry for being such a milksop about this.”

“It’s what friends are for,” shrugged Mizuki. “I didn’t think it was that bad, just some things that need a counteroffer. Or a slap upside the head.”

“It’s two days a week, starting three weeks from now,” said Isra. “A string of six concerts.”

“Twelve concerts, technically,” said Mizuki. “Since it’s the ‘same’ concert on back to back days.”

Verity felt her stomach twist. “I had said once a week.” And even that she’d regretted immediately.

“She appears to have interpreted it as you being in Dondrian once a week,” said Isra. “Over the course of two days.”

Verity let out a long sigh. “Alright. Alright, how do I — wait, which pieces?”

“There’s a long list,” said Mizuki. “Most of these I haven’t heard of. Lots of Beruchald?”

“Each has a different program,” said Isra, who had picked up the letter again. She gave it a deep frown. “She says that the selection was compiled with the help of a former teacher, based on what people will find enjoyable.”

“Marla?” asked Verity. “It’s Marla, isn’t it?” Isra nodded, and Verity let out a moan. “I hated Marla.”

“Well then I hate her too,” said Mizuki. “Anything we can do?”

“No,” said Verity. “No, I need to read it for myself, to see how bad it really is, to get a handle on what she’s asking of me.”

“There’s a lot of guilting you into it,” said Mizuki. “Just so you’re warned.”

“Thank you,” said Verity. She took the first page of the letter and steeled herself. Knowing the parameters, that was good. It meant that she could deal with the actual content without a sense of foreboding.

It was, overall, not as bad as she’d been working it up to be. Yes, her mother was making all kinds of demands, many of them quite unreasonable, but Verity had expected that. And yes, her mother was laying on the guilt as hard as could be, but that was expected as well. Really, it was a bit startling how transparent it all was. Verity could practically tear it apart into its component pieces to point out what each section and comment was meant for: it was a composition of its own sort, not just a communication between mother and daughter or between performer and manager, but a tool used by one person against another.

“She needs me,” said Verity when she set the letter down. “She’s lost without me.” Saying this out loud didn’t quite make her feel better.

“You already knew that, right?” asked Mizuki.

“I didn’t realize how desperate she was,” said Verity. “How much she’s depending on this.” She looked down at the letter. “There’s less pressure when the words are written. She can’t answer all my objections before I have them, not when she knows how that will look.” It was a bit of a marvel to see it all laid out. She looked up at Isra and Mizuki. “Thank you for looking it over. It took some of the sting from it.”

“Okay, but what are we going to do about it?” asked Mizuki.

Verity faltered. “That, I don’t know.”

“A counteroffer,” said Isra.

“Well,” said Verity.

“Do you want help writing it?” asked Mizuki. “I’ve been getting some practice with letter writing.”

“I — yes,” said Verity. “Though I can’t have you fight my battles for me.”

“Why not?” asked Isra.

“And it’s not really a battle,” said Verity. “I just need to — to temper her expectations.” Though in the letter, her mother hadn’t seemed to leave room for argument.

“She’s setting things up,” said Mizuki. “Probably has already set things up, just to pressure you, if I understand your mom right. Rent out the concert hall so that if you say no, you’re costing a lot of people a lot of money and damaging your reputation, that kind of thing?”

“That — is probably accurate, yes,” said Verity. She swallowed. “Which means that I need to get a letter back to her as soon as possible.”

“It won’t matter though?” asked Mizuki. “Even if she didn’t say it, the manipulation is probably already in place. Or she’d lie about it.”

“My mother isn’t a liar,” said Verity. Her mouth had a sour twist to it, and she made an effort to calm herself down. Mizuki was only offering solidarity. “She’s manipulative, but she’s also scrupulous. It’s beneath her to lie.”

“Well, okay,” said Mizuki. “Sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“You’re right that it wouldn’t matter,” said Verity. “The problem, the real problem, is that I don’t actually want her to be destitute. I don’t want her to suffer. I just want her to quietly live her life in Dondrian, and for me to live my life here.”

“I don’t know if we’re staying here,” said Mizuki.

“No?” asked Verity. She looked at Isra. “Is that true?”

“Dungeoneering will take us away,” said Isra. “Mizuki and I were talking about it. We have time though.”

“Ah, that,” said Verity, relaxing slightly. She looked at the bulge in Mizuki’s bag, and realized that she’d been monopolizing the conversation. She also didn’t particularly want to dwell on her problems. “Did you get anything interesting in Liberfell?”

“Two dragons,” said Isra. “And …” she reached into the bag and pulled out a large glass bottle, roughly the size of a cabbage. “This.”

“Oh,” said Verity, looking at it for a moment. “Is this it? The bottle you’ve talked about?”

Isra smiled and nodded. “Mizuki, do you have some long metal sticks? I’d like to get the old tree out.”

“I have long-handled tweezers, if that would help?” asked Mizuki.

“What are those?” asked Verity.

“Easier to show,” said Mizuki. She left the dining room.

“We brought back dragons,” said Isra with a smile. “They’re flying around outside now. Perrin hadn’t been able to do that for them. He was too worried that they would escape. And Cate was there, for some reason, but she didn’t try to buy them or take them.”

“Who is Cate?” asked Verity.

“Oh, you weren’t there for that,” said Isra, faltering. “She was from the province and came to talk about what we saw in the dungeon. She offered to buy Lerial.” There was some excitability to Isra that Verity didn’t often see, like a normally stand-offish cat offering affection when you returned home after a time away.

“We’re not selling Lerial,” said Verity. “Are we?”

“I don’t think we should,” said Isra. “But it’s a matter of money.”

“I suppose Alfric would give it up for the right price,” said Verity with a frown.

“We have them all together now,” said Isra. “We’ll find out whether we can get a clutch of them, and I can do my best to make sure they grow. They are commercial animals, not pets.”

“I suppose,” said Verity. “But I like when Lerial is in among the herbs. It makes the gardening seem more worthwhile.”

Mizuki came back with needle-nosed pliers, which she handed over to Isra. “Here,” she said. “Something like this?”

Isra used it experimentally for a moment, squeezing the handles and then testing the spring that forced them apart, then put the end into the bottle, down far enough that she could grip the dead tree by its trunk. She moved slowly and carefully, wiggling it back and forth, and she was able to slowly extract it from the bottle, leaving the dirt behind.

“I was worried that it would grow bigger,” said Mizuki as she looked at the small dead tree.

“I wouldn’t have done it inside,” said Isra. She took the bottle and turned it upside down, shaking it a bit, and the dirt stayed where it was, at the bottom of the bottle.

“See, and there I was worried you’d get a bunch of dirt on the table,” said Mizuki.

“The dirt is a part of it,” said Isra. “It’s a feature of the bottle.” She raised an eyebrow. “You know that I wouldn’t dump hundreds of pounds of dirt onto our table, right?”

“Er, right,” said Mizuki.

“This was something we did every week or so, once we’d harvested the tree,” said Isra. There was something loving in the way she looked at the bottle, like a childhood toy. “It was my favorite thing in the winter months, the only way for us to get fresh fruits.”

“There are fresh fruits at the market in winter,” said Mizuki. “Shipped express from elsewhere.”

“Expensive,” said Isra with a frown. “Far too expensive.”

Alfric came in the front door at that moment, calling hello, and he was in the dining room in just a moment. “What are we — oh, is this the bottle?”

“It is,” said Isra. “I’m thinking about what to plant in it.”

“Alfric, Dondrian doesn’t really have seasons, right?” asked Mizuki.

“We have seasons,” said Alfric. “No snow though, and it’s a relatively narrow range of temperatures. It’s twenty or thirty degrees cooler in winter.” Verity had experienced a single Pucklechurch winter, and knew that this was absolutely nothing in comparison. “Why?”

“I was just thinking that you probably don’t have to deal with seasonality of food,” said Mizuki. “We were talking about fruit in the winter, which is expensive here, at least if you want it fresh. Preserves and pickles, much less so.”

Alfric shrugged. “We mostly ate entad-made food.”

“Ah, right,” said Mizuki.

“What’s the output like on that bottle?” asked Alfric.

“Output?” asked Isra. “Meaning?”

“If you wanted to make as many fruits as possible,” said Alfric. “If you wanted to maximize revenue from it.”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “A hundred oranges over the course of a week?”

Alfric’s eyes went wide. “Ten days total, seed to the end of production?”

“Something like that,” said Isra. “I don’t know. Why?”

“He thinks it’s valuable,” said Verity.

“It is valuable,” said Alfric. He turned to Mizuki. “Did he sell the fruit in winter?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” said Mizuki with a frown. “Or I guess if he did, maybe he didn’t sell it in Pucklechurch?”

“A hundred oranges is a lot,” said Alfric. “A hundred oranges, out of season, would be worth — I don’t know, a lot. At least a few rings each.”

“He left sometimes,” said Isra. “Went out and didn’t say where he was going, or … lied about it.”

“It doesn’t add up,” said Alfric. “When you told me about the entad, I’d thought that it sounded too good to be true, but I didn’t want to say anything given that it had gone missing. But from what you’re saying, it would be a constant revenue stream, the kind of thing that you’d just never find sitting in a random cabin in the woods, not unless it was bound or —” He stopped himself, but the word ‘stolen’ hung in the air.

“If he were alive, I would ask him about it,” said Isra. “At the time, I didn’t think much of it.”

“A running theme, it seems,” said Mizuki. She hid her smile behind a cup of tea.

“I’d love some tea, if there’s still water left,” said Verity.

Tea, inevitably, turned into a bit of a production. Hannah made them bread almost every day, but she had also been gradually stocking the kitchen with cookies in different tins and jars, and Mizuki brought almost all of these out, arranged on a huge platter. Hannah’s style ran towards symmetry, of course, but there were all kinds of designs, and she’d been doing experiments with some chocolate they’d brought back from Dondrian. Added to the selection of cookies were sweeteners for the tea of different kinds, honey and lump sugar, and there were three different kinds of jams and spreads for the bread, along with rich yellow butter. For some reason, unknown to Verity, the butter in Pucklechurch was much more yellow than she’d ever seen in Dondrian.

Hannah showed up at a fortuitous time, though she hadn’t responded when she’d been invited over the party channel, and by her ruddy cheeks, she had hustled to return home, or perhaps been engaged in some other physically strenuous activity.

“Some of those cookies would be better off in the garbage,” said Hannah. “Chocolate is a temperamental ingredient, one that I’m none too fond of, at least so far. The taste might be good, but it’s a difficult beast. A sugar glaze I can get glossy, but this,” she held up a cookie which had a coating of chocolate on the top of it. It wasn’t remotely glossy. “And it burns easily, seizes up when it comes in contact with water, there are all sorts of issues I’ve had, and I’m sure that there are all kinds of solutions to those problems, but they’re a bit beyond me.”

“The taste is good,” said Mizuki.

“Well, ay,” said Hannah. “I appreciate you sayin’ so, but it’s just not what I’d wanted to create, and it’s a bit frustratin’, that’s all. I’ve had these ideas in my head and haven’t been able to match them.”

“I’ve been feeling exactly the same,” said Verity. She was surprised at how excited she was about that. “I’ve been trying to work on composition, to actually work on it, seriously, and everything that I’ve been coming up with is so riddled with problems that I’d be laughed out of a concert hall. I spent four hours today on something that seemed like a good idea at the time, but at the end it was just … mush.”

“Can we hear it?” asked Isra.

“Oh,” said Verity. “Well, do you … like mush?”

“I like your playing,” Mizuki offered.

“Mush it is,” nodded Hannah. “If you don’t mind playin’ your mush. You are eating cookies you’ve effectively disparaged, mind you.”

Verity looked down at the cookies and took a sip of her tea. “I didn’t say that I didn’t like the cookies,” she said. “Only that I was dealing with the same thing, the feeling of not having things come out just as I wanted, knowing that there were probably tricks that could help, or lessons I needed to learn, but nothing more.”

“Well, I’d like to hear what you’re so embarrassed about,” said Hannah. “But I wouldn’t want to put any undue pressure on you, so I suppose it’s no big deal. I do like your dungeon songs, which come to you on the spur of the moment, or near enough, and if you’ve somethin’ for us to hear that you worked harder on than that other stuff, I think we’d all like to listen.”

“And we can give you advice,” said Mizuki. “In case you want it.”

“Ah,” said Verity. “I think if I’m going to perform this very rough and unfinished composition, it will be without much in the way of commentary after the fact. If that’s okay.” Really, what she wanted to say was that she wanted praise or nothing, but she was trying not to make cowardice a running theme of the day. If they did say nothing, that would be just as bad as mean or dismissive comments.

She went up to her room and grabbed her lute, along with the sheet music she’d been writing. It was incredibly messy, done in a shorthand she’d invented on the fly, and it would be virtually useless when actually playing, because as much as the finger flute and the lute together would allow her to move sixty-four fingers, she still only had two eyes to read the sheet music.

She did the performance standing, as she played in the dungeon, an unfamiliar piece with an unfamiliar instrument. These were not exactly ideal conditions, but at least the lute tuned itself to perfection.

As she was in the middle of the performance, she realized what she’d been missing: the father. It was a composition of eight knights, one for each of the parts the lute could play, but the voice of their father, the king, was absent. It wasn’t a problem, per se, but it was what would tie the piece together. Unfortunately, it would need something to make it distinct, and since the tuning couldn’t be changed all that much, she would have to think about what the king himself should sound like within the bounds of what the instrument could do. Better for the king to have some other sound though, trumpets or something like that to stand in contrast.

Playing the lute took her concentration, but she couldn’t keep the other thoughts out, and the performance was undoubtedly worse for it. Still, it was a composition with no lyrics to go with it, as they were only half-baked, and the story itself was still a work in progress.

When she finished, Mizuki burst into applause, and the others quickly joined her.

“It was so long,” said Mizuki.

“Ah, sorry,” said Verity.

“No, no,” said Mizuki. “You just said that you were still working on it, and I’d thought that meant it would be a short little thing.”

“It should be about seven minutes,” said Verity, looking at her hasty sheet music.

“It was incredible,” said Hannah. “Did you weave in symmetry for my sake?”

“Yes,” said Verity. “I had it in mind.”

“I didn’t notice that,” said Isra. She was slightly reserved, more so than usual. “There were no words.”

“No lyrics, no,” said Verity. “I don’t know if there will be, there are already eight parts, and quite a bit of amazing music tells a whole story — delivers a whole feeling — without a single word needing to be said.”

“I like your voice,” said Isra.

“I know it means nothing, coming from me,” said Alfric. “But if you had told me that was a song by one of the masters, I would have believed you.”

“Well, thank you,” said Verity, but he was right, it didn’t mean much. Comparing her with someone like Beruchald was, of course, absurd. But without Alfric having musical training, it was difficult to explain the depth to which the comparison was in-apt. Verity was a bear in the woods knocking rocks together compared to Beruchald, or Cannling, or any of the others.

“You should play it for Grig,” said Mizuki. “He would tell you it was amazing.”

“Maybe,” said Verity with a shrug. “He’s also much more of a bard than a musician.”

The fawning continued on for a bit, which Verity was grateful for. They weren’t musicians, but they seemed to genuinely appreciate what she had created, and she was happy that she could bring something of value to them, especially since Hannah and Mizuki provided the fruits of their labor so often.

“I kind of don’t get what you mean about a story though,” said Mizuki.

“Um,” said Verity. “I don’t understand what you don’t understand.”

“The music provides the story,” said Alfric. “Each of the eight lutes was a different character, I think, and they start out sprightly and bright, and grow darker over time, more of a feeling of battle, or sorrow, or something like that. And it’s only at the end that they come together again, overcome their foe or whatever it is, and the music returns to the brightness.”

Mizuki twisted her mouth in a frown. “I guess.” She gave Verity a skeptical look. “And you were trying to tell a story?”

“I was,” nodded Verity. “But with music, it’s alright if you don’t immediately grasp it, part of hearing a new piece is having your own reaction to it, your own interpretation.”

“Like with Beruchald’s seasonal pieces,” said Isra. “Only he told people outright what they were.”

“Yes,” nodded Verity. “But there are parts that are left as a puzzle for you, feelings that you’re left to connect on your own. Beruchald might tell you outright that it’s a winter symphony, but you’re left to interpret the stillness of the third movement as being the quietude of the woods after a big snowfall. Something which I didn’t really understand until I’d experienced a proper winter, incidentally.”

“So what was the story?” asked Mizuki.

“I’m still working on it,” said Verity. “The whole piece needs something more, and while I was performing it, I was thinking about all the things I could add to it, places where I’m just dipping back into stock melody or engaging in repetition when I should be doing something fresh.”

“Can you give me a hint?” asked Mizuki.

Verity thought about that. “No,” she finally said. “I’ll play it for you again, in a week, when I’ve worked on it more, and you can listen to it with a story in mind. Let me know what you notice, what you feel.”

“I know very little about music,” said Mizuki. “I can hold a tune, and I sing on temple days, but it’s really not something I could tell you much about.”

“Indulge me?” asked Verity. “If you liked the composition, I’d like to know what you get out of it. It’ll help me make it better.”

“Deal,” said Mizuki.

“When I came in, I saw there were three dragons flying around outside,” said Hannah. “Does anyone want to tell me what that was all about?”

The conversation moved on from the composition, and Verity was happy for that, since she couldn’t have asked for any more praise. She had asked for little commentary after the fact, but it was the praise she craved, and had gotten in abundance. All her misgivings about the composition had been assuaged, and while she knew that she could make it better, and roughly knew how, she had some renewed confidence in her endeavor as an amateur composer.

Mizuki and Isra seemed to have had quite the day together, and Verity let herself be swept away with the stories of this mysterious woman, and after that, Alfric talked about what he’d been up to, and Hannah carefully talked around the fact that she’d been with Marsh. It was nice and lovely, and the cookies were soon gone from the big plate.

Verity was almost able to forget about the letter from her mother and the looming concerts. Almost.

Chapter 88 - Stewing

Too long had passed between dungeons.

It was getting warm, proper summer weather in Pucklechurch, and Alfric was surprised by how much heat there was. He was used to Dondrian, which was always a bit on the warm side, and he’d thought that Pucklechurch in the summer would be the same, but no, it actually got hotter, perhaps because it was inland. He found himself sweating as he trained, soaking his shirt in the beating sun.

<Isra, any chance we could get some cloud cover?> he asked.

<Of course,> said Isra.

The clouds moved in, taking their time, and Alfric took off his shirt, letting his skin breathe. He was in the backyard, and hoped that it wasn’t too indecent. There was an argument for training in the heat with his full armor, but he wouldn’t be able to go as long that way, and if they were going yet another day without a dungeon, he wanted to make the most of it.

The sword had been appraised, and while it had two abilities, both of them were underwhelming. The first was material in nature: anything the sword touched, it could temporarily take on the attributes of, with the time lasting for a day. Alfric had a tiny sliver of harkmetal that he’d used on the sword, which would make it sharp and durable … but there were entad swords that were sharp and durable on their own, without needing to apply an effect every day, and so it wasn’t anything all that special, just a different way of arriving at the same effect.

The other effect was to draw in ambient conditions and expel them afterward, but it too was problematic, mostly because of the long time it took to charge up and the weakness of the effect when it actually happened. If it sat in a room for a day, it would have the power to expel air, and if it were sitting in a basin of water, it would expel water. Alfric had tried putting it in a fire, or against a heating element, but it didn’t take on fire, it took on heat, and the blade of heat seemed quite weak, not the searing cuts he’d been hoping for. It was, at best, good for a single strong attack per dungeon, but that didn’t seem to justify taking it with, not until he had a way to quickly swap between weapons in the middle of battle.

He trained with the sword nonetheless, mostly for the difference in feel from his bident.

The helmet was something else, a godly piece of equipment on the battlefield, and while Mizuki had a strong affection for zipping around Pucklechurch with it, there was absolutely no way that Alfric was going to let her have it in the dungeons.

One of the primary problems of dungeon combat was that of height, especially against monsters of unusual size. Against something the size of a raccoon, you would often find yourself stabbing toward the floor at an awkward angle, and against a giant, you might find yourself unable to strike at anything but his legs. The helmet didn’t do much about racoons, but it meant that for larger creatures, Alfric could get right in their face or other vital upper bits.

He practiced flying, allowing the helmet to provide him with momentum, zipping forward to put his whole body weight behind a thrust or a spinning slash. The helmet didn’t grip the head, but rather, made everything feel a bit weightless, as though the earth had no hold on him anymore, and it was difficult to adjust to. Normally, a lot of the power of a sword stroke came from the legs and a firm stance against the ground, but when flying, it was more about the body moving in at high speeds.

Toward the end of it, sweat was dripping down and Alfric was out of breath. He drained his waterskin and toweled off, and then looked up at the house, where he caught Mizuki looking at him. She disappeared almost as soon as she realized she’d been spotted. Alfric watched the window for a moment, and saw the top of her head appear very briefly before she quickly ducked back down.

This was all enormously more awkward than if she had just given him a friendly wave.

While Alfric was cooling down, sword and helmet set to the side, he went through the guild messages, which hadn’t had much for him. There were two dungeon reports, both fairly sparse on details, and a rather lengthy discussion on his brother’s proposal for a chrononaut newspaper. The idea wasn’t new, but the last time a chrononaut newspaper had been around was at least a generation ago.

From some of the back and forth, the previous newspaper had shut down due to mismanagement rather than a lack of demand. It turned out that a newspaper with information from undone days needed to actually function as a competent newspaper first and foremost, one with articles that people would want to read, and news “from the future” could only be so compelling. The other major issue was that most newspapers used some form of chrononaut information already. Much of the familial discussion was about attempting to compete with existing business interests. A chrononaut newspaper was one thing, but it was entirely another if ‘the chrononauts’ had their own inferior newspaper that came at the expense of the regular newspapers. It was all of only mild interest to Alfric, internal family politics that he had no strong opinion on.

There was also some discussion of Lola, kept to its own thread, one which he had not yet put a single message into. She was, apparently, being kept on a small island under house arrest, seemingly in perpetuity, though she would stand trial for her crimes in Plenarch at some point. Those crimes included only the dungeon escape and the assault. The government of Plenarch would do nothing about what had happened in undone days, but she would get a slap on the wrist for everything else, which was down to her family connections and wealth, and the lack of much ‘real’ harm. Alfric wasn’t particularly happy about that, but there wasn’t much that could be done about it, and the family was handling matters with far more vigor than the civilian authorities could. He did wonder what the guild messages of the other clans looked like, but there were back channels between clans, and he hoped that they were in full use.

The last item of interest was an open thread about pacting, which Alfric had also not offered his input on. It wasn’t explicitly a thread for him, just one in general use for his branch of the chrononauts, but it had clearly been brought back up as a topic of conversation because of Lola. Alfric was free to be with who he wanted, at least for the time being, and the list of eligible women was vanishingly small. There were only two viable candidates for Alfric, one a widow who was five years his senior, the other a girl that was five years younger. Neither interested him in the slightest, but that wasn’t really the point of the pact, it was to procreate in a way that would help to build up the population of chrononauts. The older one being a widow was momentarily puzzling to Alfric, since death was unusual for their kind, until he saw that it was a suicide. He hadn’t heard about that, but he didn’t pay all that much attention to the grapevine, and it was the kind of thing that a different branch of the family might have wanted to keep quiet.

He considered making a plea that he not be required to make the pact, but it was a duty, not just to the clan, but to Inter as a whole. The more chrononauts there were, the more forewarning the world had. Chrononauts prevented the worst calamities, so long as they could be dealt with on a one day horizon. Alfric hadn’t personally contributed much to the world, but the mere existence of chrononauts was considered a universal good.

Alfric pulled himself away from the guild messages and looked out at the backyard. The garden was coming along nicely as spring had turned into summer. It was manicured and managed, the overgrown plants having been trimmed back or pulled out, and in due time, there would be a bounty of food, most of which Mizuki had already spoken for. The herbs had been planted with what felt like foresight, given how hungry the three dragons were going to be, and there was much variety for them. Isra’s touch was obviously helping, as was the weather she controlled.

When Alfric had properly cooled down, he put his shirt back on and went inside. Mizuki was there, working on dinner, though it was rather early for that. It was stew again, and from what she’d said, it was a meal best prepared well ahead of time.

“I wasn’t watching you,” said Mizuki.

“It’s okay if you were,” said Alfric. “I’ve said that I can help you do combat training.” He wasn’t quite dense enough to believe that this was why she’d been watching him.

“Do you like tomatoes in your stew?” asked Mizuki.

“They’re fine,” said Alfric.

“When I do stew, it’s as many root vegetables as I can find, plus some goat or lamb, plus tomatoes,” said Mizuki. “But the tomatoes are the odd one out, I’ve always felt.”

“I don’t have a strong preference,” said Alfric.

“Oh, plus some onions, garlic, herbs, all that stuff,” said Mizuki. “Hannah made some good bread this morning, nice crusty stuff that’ll go good with the stew. Do you think we need some other kind of vegetable to go with it? Stew is like eighty percent vegetables to start with, but there’s not all that much roughage, and I don’t want to add in cabbage.”

“I think it’ll be fine either way,” said Alfric. Mizuki was talking a lot, and Alfric wasn’t entirely sure why. “I’m going to get some reading done upstairs, dinner will be an hour or so?”

“Two hours, maybe more,” said Mizuki. “I’m giving it time. Stew is always better when the flavors have melded together.”

It was, in Alfric’s opinion, too hot a day for stew, but he kept his mouth shut and retreated upstairs. He had a guess at why Mizuki was acting awkward, though he didn’t think that it should have been a big deal. She had been watching him train, and thought that he looked attractive. Was that so difficult a thing for her to admit? Alfric would have readily admitted to thinking that she was attractive. It didn’t mean anything, just like their flirting didn’t mean anything. They’d now had a few undone days together, and she was always much more flirtatious, and Alfric found himself enjoying that. If she was going to be awkward about being attracted to him though, that was a problem.

He put it out of mind though, since there was nothing actionable. His thinking, as always, returned to the dungeons.

It had been too long since they’d done one, at least in his opinion. That last dungeon had been a rough one though, given how much danger Mizuki had been in, and while the chest was a good get, and the helmet was better, he felt like it had made the others a bit skittish. Hannah had also shared a third-hand story about someone who’d taken a head injury in a dungeon and never recovered, and while she wasn’t outwardly rattled by it, there was a bit less enthusiasm from her. Adding on to all that, Verity had the concerts coming up, and needed to be able to competently perform the entire stack of sheet music that had come in the mail.

Everything that he could do in undone days had already been done. The entads were all identified, all information that could be extracted from the dungeon reports had been, and there were limits to how much he wanted to speak with various merchants, as well as limits to how productive that could be. He’d made trips to Liberfell and trips to Tarchwood, had scoped out future dungeons to make sure he knew where they were … and now it was time to delve again, to get into the guts of a dungeon where he could see the unknown and interact with things that were unique and interesting.

His parents had warned him. They’d said that life gets in the way. One of the problems was that dungeoneering was simply too profitable: you could coast on the money you got from the dungeons for weeks, maybe more, even when it came to a group of five people whose expenses needed to be paid. Mizuki’s view on money being meaningless was a bit extreme, but it was how a lot of people seemed to feel when push came to shove. Each dungeon ended up being less worthwhile than the last because you had the money to cover your basic needs, and then your extravagant needs, and then why were you even doing it?

Alfric was doing it because it was fun, or if not fun, then at least meaningful, compelling, something that gave his life a sense of purpose. The others all had something else, some hobby or something that they’d rather be doing than getting covered in muck and gore. Not that Alfric liked the muck and gore, but there was something about showering off after a day in the dungeon that greatly appealed to him.

<I’d like to do a dungeon today,> Alfric said into the party channel. This was much more spontaneous than he normally was, but the feeling had been brewing, and it felt good to let it out. He assumed that they would say no, and that would be that.

<I’m up for it,> said Mizuki. <Stew is almost done, I can just put it in the oven at a low temp and we can come home to hot food. Give me fifteen minutes.>

<Usually we start earlier in the day,> said Hannah. <But sure.>

Alfric waited for something from Isra or Verity, and the channel was silent for what felt like a long time.

<We’re in,> said Verity. Apparently they’d been in their own private conversation.

<We should get going then,> said Alfric. <Mizuki, I’ll get your stuff together while you finish the stew?>

<It’s already together,> said Mizuki. <Everything is cleaned and packed up.>

<Then I’ll get my own stuff,> said Alfric.

Everything was already packed, and had been for quite some time. The book had been reorganized, the rock garden was laid out with everything they could possibly need, and the chest was filled up with anything that didn’t fit in either of those. Mizuki had deemed Alfric a pack rat, but to him, there seemed to be no sense going into a dungeon without all the tools you might possibly need. You could do every dungeon only once, after all, and leaving behind potentially tens of thousands of rings because you didn’t have a pickaxe or bandsaw didn’t make any sense to him. That all these tools had cost a lot of money was, of course, a good argument, but those costs would be recouped by materials extraction, and besides, most of them had been bought used and would be sold when they were replaced with something better, or possibly at the end of a long dungeoneering career.

With his armor on, Alfric was ready to get into the proper mindset for a dungeon. He felt the fear, which was always there, but he trusted in his training and abilities, and on top of the fear, overwhelming it, was excitement.

He pulled out his map of the region, looking at it. It had to be Callipygian Point, that was the last ‘close’ hex aside from the waterlogged Laver Marsh, and it was on the way to Tarchwood, which meant that he’d been through there several times. He knew all this, but he looked at the map anyway, as though there were some calculations to be done.

They met in the kitchen, where Mizuki was using two big oven mitts to put the pot into the oven at a low temperature.

“I’m nervous about doing this,” said Mizuki. For a moment, Alfric thought that she was talking about the dungeon, but then he realized that she’d meant leaving the stew in the oven. “I’ve done it before, I’m just worried that we’ll get a crusty bottom or something. Usually I come in for a stir every half hour or so.”

“No need to keep it heated then,” said Hannah. “It’ll just be cold stew in a few hours.” She looked at Alfric. “That’s all this is, a few hours?”

“Probably,” said Alfric. “Though it’s hard to tell with dungeons.”

“I think it’ll be fine,” said Mizuki. “Though if we come back to a burned down house, I expect you to reset the day.”

“Deal,” said Alfric with a nod, though if that happened after a successful dungeon run, it would be a sharp sting. He hadn’t had to reset a dungeon yet, and was hoping he could keep that streak going.

They went into town together, and the wardrobe, which had been seeing greatly increased business as word got out, thankfully still had charges left. There was, of course, some obligatory conversation with Bethany, who was very excited for the upcoming wedding. Alfric sometimes spoke with her on undone days, primarily about business, and if he didn’t hear another word about the wedding until it was actually happening, that would be perfectly fine with him.

“What does callipygian even mean?” asked Mizuki once they were through the wardrobe and had rallied at the warp point.

“It means having a pretty butt,” said Alfric.

Mizuki giggled, then looked at him. “Wait, are you serious?”

“Yes,” said Alfric. “I had to look it up.”

“Use it in a sentence,” said Mizuki.

“Er,” said Alfric. “‘The woman was quite callipygian.’ Or ‘When she walked away, he noted that she was callipygian.’”

“Literally no one would understand what you’re talking about,” said Mizuki. “And why did they name this place that?” She looked around, as though she was going to spot some beautiful buttocks on the horizon.

“It’s a nice word,” said Verity. “Though not one I’ve ever heard before. Callipygian. Horrible rhymes though.”

“There’s a mile to walk,” said Alfric. “Then we’ll be down in the thick of it. I’d like for us to be moving fast, to minimize the risk that the house burns down.” Alfric wasn’t overly concerned about that, though the more he thought about it, the more he wished he’d pushed Mizuki harder to shut the burners off entirely.

They talked as they walked, of course, though very little of it was of consequence. Whatever weirdness was going on with Mizuki, she seemed to be over it, though she was talking about stew more than seemed to be warranted.

A mile from the warp point, they got to the dungeon entrance. It was in better condition than some they’d seen, and more built up, with a roof over the top of it to keep the rain out, and flagstones arranged in a pattern around the collar. The key turned easily in the lock, and with a round of checks, they were in.

The entryway was, again, without any monsters, which was always for the best. The chest had made packing less of an issue, so long as it stayed in the back, where the fighting ideally wouldn’t reach.

The chest was something special, with a number of very good abilities, but the best of them was its ability to move very quickly over all kinds of terrain, which would have made it incredible even if it didn’t have extradimensional space and a sturdiness that could rival a dragon’s scales. They hadn’t brought it with them when they’d warped. Instead, they had let it run to them once the warp was completed. It had crossed the twelve miles in less than five minutes, and from what Filera had said in an undone day, it would be able to do incredible speeds like that over extreme distances so long as it was on a relatively straight path to the closest person in the party. Alfric had checked three times that it wouldn’t be putting anyone in danger.

<What’s the weather?> Alfric asked Mizuki, as he’d gotten in the habit of doing.

<Um,> said Mizuki. <A weird one, not something that I’ve worked with a lot,> she said. <It’s, ah, discordance, I guess?>

<What does that mean?” asked Alfric.

<I don’t know,> said Mizuki with a shrug. <It’s sort of, um, a messy room, or a song that’s out of tune, or something like that. I don’t know what I’m going to be able to do with it, unless — well, I’m not promising anything, I need to work out something.>

The one benefit of having a longer lull between dungeons was that Mizuki really did seem to be putting effort into learning. Alfric had been the one to get her what books he could, but she’d been reading them and even making notes. It hadn’t particularly helped her in describing the mechanics of what she was doing to others, but he did think there had been some improvement. They practiced together in undone days sometimes, and he gave her her own notes.

<We can wait,> said Alfric.

<Uh,> said Mizuki. <I’m saying that I’m skeptical that I’ll be anything but deadweight, not until Hannah and Verity get going.>

<I’m hopin’ to save myself for healin’,> said Hannah.

<Right, which is a problem,> said Mizuki. <Because discordance is — it’s a conceptual mood, it needs something to go with it, if I had other things I could do a chaos fireball or something.>

<You could scramble an enemy?> asked Alfric.

<Not really,> said Mizuki. <I mean, it’s not so much physical change, it’s more — I don’t know. I can try things, but I want to wait and try them on actual monsters, you know?>

<Fair enough,> said Alfric. <We’ll be down on strength until you get it sorted, if you can at all, so we’ll want to be ready for a retreat.>

The doorway had no door, and only led to a hooked corridor, so Alfric led the way. Verity had started her song early, and while the newly acquired lute was a good get, it was considerably louder when played in full, which wasn’t particularly to Alfric’s liking. The hook to the corridor was also not particularly nice, since it meant that if someone came looking for them, he would be facing it head-on without much support from Isra or Hannah. Verity must have been thinking the same thing, because her attention seemed to be on him, hardening his body and making his weapon and armor feel light.

He’d gotten ten steps down the corridor when a creature came careening around the bend. It had very little in the way of natural weaponry, but made up for that with speed and aggression. Its front paws windmilled down against Alfric’s shield, breaking bones in its hand, and puke-orange blood sprayed out. Where droplets hit the skin of Alfric’s face, they stung, and Alfric did his best to thrust forward with the bident and stab it in what was probably its guts. The longer the creature’s blood stayed on his skin, the more the feeling of irritation grew, but there was no time at all to worry about that, not when the monster still lived. It had too many arms and a lumpy rib cage, with long hair obscuring the rest of its features. The face was barely visible beneath the shaggy mane that whipped back and forth, mostly just flashes of white teeth and beady black eyes.

An explosion from the bident, right in the creature’s gut, caused it to stagger, and from there, a second explosion from a repositioned bident, this one at the chest, caused it to fall to the ground. As soon as it was down and Alfric had confirmed that there was nothing else coming, he called for a retreat back down the corridor.

<Secure the passage,> said Alfric. <This is burning like crazy, I need to neutralize the acid.>

He opened the trunk with shaking hands and rummaged through the pack, half blind, until he found the soda ash, which he spread across his skin. Hannah laid hands on him, but this was precisely the sort of thing that the healing of Garos was terrible at, given that the acid had spread on both sides of his face. His whole body was wracked with tremors as he waited for the soda ash to do its work, the pain close to the limit at which he’d start crying. It would almost certainly call for the reset of the day, since acid burns were notoriously difficult for clerics to deal with, but he took a deep breath and tried to let the soda ash do its work.

<What’s acid?> asked Isra after a minute had passed.

<Sour things,> said Mizuki. <Like lemon juice or vinegar.>

<It’ll be fine,> Alfric lied. A creature having acid for blood was a bad roll of the dice, that was all, and there was no particular lesson to draw from this. He’d been burned with acid only once during training, and it had left an outsized imprint on him before he reset the day.

<I don’t think it’s acid,> said Isra.

Alfric tried to look at her, but his face had become swollen, and he could barely see. Hannah was over by the doorway, hammer at the ready, but nothing had come through.

<It’s not?> he asked.

<It’s poison,> said Isra as she stepped closer to him. <Mild and fast-acting. You’ll be fine in ten minutes.>

<Oh,> said Alfric. <Contact poison?>

<Yes,> said Isra. <I think. Try not to ingest it.>

Alfric nodded, and a knot of tension released. Being burned in the face by droplets of acid was something that had long been a fear of his, and there was a lesson to be learned, which was that you couldn’t simply go with what you feared, you needed to assess. It was likely that putting soda ash on his face was still the right call given what he knew, but the idea of poison hadn’t even occurred to him.

It took some time for the swelling to go down enough that Alfric was comfortable continuing on, and when his face was no longer plumped up, it felt like it was sagging, like the skin had stretched out. It was Hannah’s professional opinion that this too would fade with time, but it was an inauspicious start to the dungeon.

Alfric was hoping for full plate armor sooner than later, and this was proof enough that he needed it. He’d been wearing the helmet that allowed for flying, and unfortunately, it was open at the front, providing no protection. If he could be fully ensconced in armor with protection from the elements and free range of motion, most of his woes would be resolved. The entad thimble had wrapped him in flexible metal, but it was proving inadequate for the stronger hits.

They stepped over the creature’s body in the bent corridor and continued on, Alfric with his spear held in front of him.

Chapter 89 - Theater of Mind

It felt good to be back in a dungeon, though part of the reason that Hannah had said yes to it was a smidge of guilt. She had been spending time with Marsh, probably too much. He was a distraction from what she was trying to do with her life. If she’d known, going in, that she was going to be seeing him almost every day for many hours at a time, or if she had realized that they would fall asleep cuddled up together, she might have rebuffed him. But he was fun, and it was as he’d said: she should live in the moment rather than trying to chart some path of optimal freedom.

And even when she was in the dungeon, she caught herself thinking about him. She could be obsessive, that was in her nature. It was one of the things that made her a good cleric. Thinking about a boy while in life or death situations was a bit much though. The suddenness with which they’d decided to do this dungeon had made it more difficult for her to switch gears, that was what she told herself.

The curved corridor led to a small room with a crude fire in it, which thankfully vented upward into a chimney, as otherwise it might have smoked them out. Alfric had said that one of the things they’d eventually have was a way to keep them from having skin contact with anything, as well as complete air filtration, but that was quite a bit down the line. Over the fire, supported by a few branches, was a bubbling pot of brown, and Mizuki wrinkled her nose but said that the pot was magical.

<We’ll tip the pot and come back to it later,> said Alfric. <It’ll be too hot to put inside the chest, and I don’t want to deploy the chiller for it.>

<We have a chiller?> asked Isra.

<There’s a paired heater and chiller in the bag,> said Alfric. <Either can be a life saver in the right situation.>

Sometimes Hannah thought that Alfric enjoyed spending time and money having an organized response to every single situation more than he actually enjoyed the dungeons. The acid — though it hadn’t been acid — seemed to have rattled him, and his face was only slowly returning to normal.

The cauldron of soup was kicked over and the rest of the room was searched, and then they moved on.

It was a normal dungeon, more or less. They’d been in enough of them that there were surprises, but really, it was more variations on a theme. The ‘trap’ had been a surprise, as had Mizuki’s tumble, but Hannah could already see that they were nearly seasoned. The surprises would be fewer and further between, and their gear would be better each time, and with Alfric having undone days left, there was really not all that much danger.

They killed a two-legged creature with a single arm and no face or sensory organs that they could see. It held an axe in its hand and swung it at Alfric with wild abandon, but Alfric put it down, and they moved on.

They fought bushy-tailed animals that leapt onto and off of the walls, making leaping attacks with foot-long claws, and Hannah waded in with her plate armor, which made her impervious to their hits. She swung the hammer wildly, crushing ribs and skulls, until at last she was panting in the center of the room, having done the majority of the killing work.

They came across a pack of creatures with intense magic, ones that could go insubstantial, like a ghost. There were six of them, and they had a habit of becoming material with a weapon midway through them, fused there and stuck in place. They had no special weapons though, only brute strength, and eventually the hits that landed were able to put them down, and the weapons that had been embedded in them were retrieved and cleaned.

A room with a foot of brackish water had slow-moving humanoids covered in hard minerals. Despite their slowness, they were incredibly strong, and their mineral armor made them very hard to kill. Alfric’s bident was useless, and he was grabbed by the arm, squeezed so hard that his wrist broke in two places. Hannah came in with the hammer to save him, and once he was clear, it was a matter of moving away, down the corridors, enough so she could heal him. With a corridor between them, they were able to take the creatures on one at a time, though Hannah’s arms were aching by the end of it. She had transferred the liquid metal of her armor to the head of her warhammer, and swinging it a dozen times had left her winded and slightly numb.

<Incredibly painful,> said Alfric, rubbing his arm where he’d been grabbed.

<You don’t normally scream,> said Mizuki.

<Screaming can get you killed in a dungeon,> said Alfric, as though that explained everything, as though he’d conquered the human need to yell out in pain through sheer necessity and training. It was, she supposed, remotely possible, but how little he vocalized serious injuries had always been a bit shocking to Hannah. Some people were like that though. In the seminary, she’d dealt with a farmer whose arm had been flopping to one side, broken in three places, and he’d been holding it like this was a minor inconvenience.

They made their way back through the jumble of rooms, with the chest trundling after them. Mizuki and Alfric handled most of the appraisals, which amounted to piling things into the chest and occasionally having Mizuki mark them as entads. Across six rooms they’d found four entads, and to Mizuki’s exaggerated disgust, one of them was yet another bow. The other two, aside from the soup pot, were a pen and a dirk, neither of which seemed on the face of it particularly good, but it was hard to tell without testing or a query from a cleric of Qymmos.

<Still trying to figure something out, sorry,> said Mizuki. It was the twentieth time she’d apologized for not really helping much. Every now and then she would get out a weak spark or explosion of some kind, but it wasn’t doing all that much, and their normal method of engagement was to have Mizuki unleash before combat had actually started. If she was using her magic after they’d engaged, she needed to do it while being mindful of those who were in the melee, which was difficult. Hannah had very nearly gotten hit by stray magic more than once, though hadn’t suffered any injury.

They pushed on, through yet another doorway, and stopped there together to look at what had been unveiled.

It was a huge room, a theater, and they were at the back of it, looking down a long aisle between the seats. There was a balcony overhead and dozens of rows of seating, all done in cushioned red velvet and embossed gold leaf. You didn’t need to be Alfric to think that this sort of place was worth a lot of money. The seats would be torn up and put into the garden unless they had too many nails, in which case they would be carefully loaded into the chest up to its limits, which Hannah didn’t really know anything about. There were thousands of seats, which meant that they might be there for a day or more.

The stage wasn’t empty. Many rooms had monsters, and this one was no exception; they were all crowded up on the stage, two dozen of them, each with their own instrument of unique design. Only one faced away, taking the place of the conductor, and he was the largest of them, standing twenty feet tall. It was, altogether, a symphony of monsters, and as the party watched, the concert started in earnest.

When the music started, it was a horrible racket, but when silence followed that, Hannah realized that they’d only been making sure their instruments were in tune. The proper music followed, and it was … not all that bad, for all its strangeness. Hannah looked at Verity, whose eyes were wide.

<This is the Ellusifé,> said Verity. Her voice was soft, only audible because it was over the party channel.

<It’s what?> asked Alfric, turning to look at her.

<The Ellusifé,> said Verity. She was staring at the performers.

Alfric looked around at the theater they’d found themselves in. <You’re right,> he said.

<It’s where the concert will be in two weeks,> said Verity. There was sorrow in her voice, and her eyes were still on the performance taking place. The music wasn’t bad exactly, but there was something about it that grated, especially as it went on. Hannah couldn’t say exactly what.

<Do you know this song?> asked Isra.

<No,> said Verity. <I don’t think it’s a real song. Minor key, saccharine, sounds difficult to play — limited, repetitive, it’s — I don’t know.>

<This is the Ellusifé,> said Alfric, who’d finished looking around. <That doesn’t make any sense. Dungeons aren’t supposed to have direct copies of things, and certainly not on that scale.>

<Like the trap we found?> asked Isra.

<That probably wasn’t this one to one,> said Alfric. <I’ve been to this theater, the copy is — well, exact.>

<Are we fighting that whole orchestra?> asked Mizuki. Her eyes were forward, on the performers.

<It seems difficult to do,> said Isra. <There are so many of them. We’re outnumbered by a wide margin.>

<I might be able to do something,> said Mizuki. <I … might have a plan.>

<This place is valuable,> said Alfric. <Whatever else is true about it, however much it looks like a place that it can’t possibly be — the dungeons don’t pull things from a person’s mind, they’re not like a dream.>

<I influenced the dungeon,> said Verity.

<That’s not how it works,> said Alfric.

Verity gestured to the theater, as though that proved her point. <It’s the Ellusifé, the exact theater. The place that’s been on my mind. I’ve performed there twice and will again. What other explanation could there be?>

<I don’t know,> said Alfric. He fell silent. <It’s odd.>

<We need to deal with the here and now,> said Hannah. <Whatever’s weird here, a proper talk about it can come later, unless we think there’s some unique danger?>

<No,> said Alfric. <Probably not, though without Mizuki, I don’t know how we’re going to handle the conductor.> The conductor was so tall compared to the others, waving a baton that could be used as a cudgel.

<I said I had a plan,> said Mizuki. <A shaping to the discordance. I think I can take out, um, at least the big one.>

<Then we should make a plan and get ready,> said Hannah. <They haven’t taken notice of us yet, maybe because it’s dark, maybe because they’re focused. We can get the drop on them.>

<I wish we could record this,> said Alfric. His mind was still on the oddity of the theater, which was a bad place for it to be. <We should take measurements, make drawings.>

<We’re gonna strip this place, aren’t we?> asked Hannah.

<Right,> said Alfric, looking around. <We’ll be spending some time here, enough to remove quite a bit of it. We can compare later.>

<Is there a reason to do that? Compare?> asked Mizuki.

<If the seats are exact matches, if it really is a clone of the Ellusifé, then this is fundamentally weird,> said Alfric. <Almost certainly related to Verity being a chosen of Xuphin, but if it’s repeatable, controllable, it will alter the future of dungeoneering forever. And even if it’s just her, by the will of Xuphin, then it’s something we need to know more about.>

<I feel sick,> said Verity. She had closed her eyes.

<Sit down, take a breath,> said Alfric.

<It’s the music,> said Verity, shaking her head but taking a seat anyway. <There’s false progress in the song, too much repetition, a return to simple melodies. It’s a misbegotten symphony.>

<We’re going to silence them soon enough,> said Mizuki. <If we’re done with the philosophy?>

They worked out as much of a plan as they could, though the music started to grate on everyone after not too much time had passed. Whether or not Mizuki’s attack would bear fruit was an open question, but if she were able to handle the conductor, then Isra could move in and puncture the players with arrows, and Alfric and Hannah could do the work of tearing through whomever remained. Verity would be shifting focusing, first on Mizuki, then Isra, and finally Alfric. For the last phase of the song, she was going to attempt something that she’d never done in a dungeon before: a progressive melody, one which would compound his strength the longer she played. Eventually she would lose it and the whole thing would fall apart, but for a time, Alfric would be able to fight with enough sheer muscle to make up for their lack of numbers.

Mizuki’s spell did not disappoint. It brought the music to a screeching halt, and the conductor turned toward them as though he was going to roar in anger before promptly falling apart. Whatever she had done, it had caused his internal organs to all slip right out of his torso onto the floor of the stage. For a moment, it seemed as though he might keep going anyway, but he fell shortly after, and the concert members rose from their seats as if to avenge him. His body tipped over and he fell into the front row, gushing blood and unmoving.

Isra zipped back and forth, and the creatures thankfully fell to an arrow each, at least if it was well-placed. As she thinned the crowd, Alfric and Hannah moved in, weapons at the ready. The creatures were humanoid, using their instruments as weapons, a shiny brass horn raised like a hammer, or a string violin that would surely explode into pieces of wood the moment it hit their armor.

All of the monsters were humanoid, though there were variations among them, extra arms, extra legs, patches of hair on the sides of their faces, horns in awkward places and bits of what looked like rot. They were dressed, though, in different outfits of black. Too human for Hannah’s tastes, but they attacked without any apparent cognition and uttered nothing that sounded like a word.

Hannah beat and bashed her way through them, bringing down her hammer on their heads or aimed squarely for their stomachs. The hammer felt better with a big wind up, its massive head crunching bones when it hit, but she was already worn down from the earlier battles, and found herself winded after three giant swings. Hannah backed off, going defensive as she tried to catch her breath. The musicians were beating against her with their instruments, and there were too many of them, threatening to mob her. While her armor was protecting her, she was going to be bruised and broken.

The song had transitioned into its progressive phase, and Alfric came to Hannah’s rescue. He’d dropped his shield and was using the bident with a two-handed grip, plunging it into the humanoids and using his whole body weight to fling them away, as easily as if he were using a pitchfork to move hay. He flung one of them to the side with the bident, moving it with such power that the floor cracked beneath his feet, and it twisted through the air, slamming into several others. One of the musicians came at him from behind, and he elbowed it in the face, splitting the skull in two. In no time at all he had cleared her, and he went at the others, slicing the bident through the air with enough speed to shatter bones.

Hannah did nothing more than watch while trying to recover her stamina. Her arms felt like jelly, and she set the head of the hammer on the ground so she wouldn’t need to hold it up. She was going to have to call it after this room, if there were any rooms left. The might of Garos was incredible for healing, but her god was limited in his ability to help with endurance.

Alfric moved with such speed and power that it seemed like he was fighting against himself to keep from over-rotating or sending himself into the air. Verity’s progressive song was making it so that instead of normal footwork, he was leaping from enemy to enemy, those that remained. When he physically connected with one of them, the counterforce pushed him back, with the power of a punch not fully contained by his connection with the floor. Alfric was a fantastic fighter, Hannah had seen that, but he was in a new circumstance, and having trouble adapting to it. It was getting him into bad situations, mobbed by the musicians, which he got out of primarily with brute strength. At one point he grabbed one of them by its wrist to throw it off balance and ended up ripping the arm off entirely.

The song faltered, then ended, right as Alfric was dispatching the last of them. He’d dropped his shield and lost his bident, and now he was barehanded and in the thick of it. They grabbed him, having already smashed their instruments, and he allowed them to, then launched himself up in the air with the helmet. It was slow, with two of them dangling on him, but he reached the top of the expansive theater within twenty seconds, and from there, he peeled them off, letting them fall down to thud, lifeless, against the ground.

<We did it!> shouted Mizuki, just as Hannah slammed her hammer down on the last of the stragglers.

<Now we did it,> said Hannah. She looked over at Isra, who was rubbing her arm and wincing, and Verity, who had a somewhat stunned expression. <Are you alright, music girl?>

<Uh,> said Verity. <It was never like that in practice.>

<In a good way or a bad way?> asked Hannah.

<Need healing,> said Alfric as he landed next to Hannah. Blood was dripping out from his armor, the same arm he’d injured earlier.

<I felt so full,> said Verity. <Like I could keep it going forever, like I could hit infinity. There’s normally some feedback from the songs, some sense of how much I’m doing, and I could feel the strength wafting off you Alfric, a — a vapor. And it feels like I could keep playing for hours, but I know that I’m more or less tapped.>

<There’s more of the dungeon left to do,> said Alfric. He glanced at Hannah, who had repaired his arm. From what she could tell, none of the monsters had injured him, which meant that he’d probably mangled his arm by using so much strength. It was also possible that he’d wrecked it when the strength had suddenly left him. <Hannah, you’re exhausted, we can take some time, but it’s partly your call.>

<I overdid it,> said Isra. <A dozen shots in so short a time is too taxing.> She was rolling her right shoulder, stretching to alleviate the overexertion.

<Nice trick, dropping them,> said Mizuki.

<Thanks,> said Alfric. He twisted and turned his newly repaired arm. <I do think we’re done with combat, if the dungeon agrees. No more rooms.>

Isra had a rotator cuff injury, which was no particular surprise. She pushed herself hard when she was using the time-dilating bow, and the last shots invariably had worse form than the first ones. She’d been working on her endurance, but there were limits to how much endurance a person could have, especially when drawing back with full power so much in such a short amount of time, and also doing that while walking. The problem, at least so far as Hannah could diagnose as Isra’s cleric, was that Isra was engaging in an all-out sprint, but for her arms rather than her legs.

<Thank you,> said Isra once Hannah was finished with the healing.

<Anyone else?> asked Hannah.

<Verity and I stayed back with the chest,> said Mizuki. <I could feel the progessive melody, but the best I’d be able to do was some weakening, and that wouldn’t have been much. Sorry again for being useless this dungeon.>

<You killed the giant,> said Alfric.

<Well, yeah,> said Mizuki. <But in terms of kill count, I’m way at the bottom.>

<Have you been tracking kill count?> asked Verity.

<Seems unfair to the healer and the bard,> said Hannah, though with her armor, hammer, and the work she’d put into getting strong, she was effectively their second front line fighter.

<It’s a bad idea overall,> said Alfric. <Kills are a bad metric, and if you focus on them, you’re likely to do stupid things for stupid reasons.>

<Alright, fine,> said Mizuki. <I was just trying to spice it up.>

<We’re in the Ellusifé,> said Alfric. <Isn’t that enough for you?>

<I’ve never been there,> said Mizuki. <Maybe if I had, I would be shocked that it was an exact replica, but I have to take your word for it.> She shrugged. <Seems rich.>

<It is,> said Verity. She was looking around. <We should take some of this home.>

<We’re taking all of it,> said Alfric.

<Do we have the tools?> asked Hannah.

Alfric smiled. <Of course we have the tools.>

<Do we have the room?> asked Hannah.

<The chest is a perfect pack animal,> said Alfric, nodding to the entad. It gave the impression of milling about, mostly in how it followed the edge of the group. <The storage capacity is unreal. And there’s internal protection as well, so the stuff at the top of the internal vertical column won’t crush the stuff at the bottom.>

<I don’t believe you ever told us how much it could hold,> said Hannah.

<Eight hundred short tons,> said Alfric.

<Is that a lot?> asked Mizuki.

<A lizzo is about two tons,> said Alfric. <So we could fit four hundred lizzos in it.> He looked around the theater. <The chairs are obviously the biggest thing, but we’ll want to take other things as well, as much of the embellishment as possible, the chandeliers, the panels, the lighting … we’ll have to clear backstage, if there is a backstage, but there’s probably more to grab there.> His eyes went up. The theater was well-lit, and he narrowed his eyes at those lights. <Verity, does the Ellusifé have ectad lighting?>

<Yes,> said Verity. <Very high power, aimed directly at the stage with carefully ground lenses.>

<It’s unusual to see ectads in a dungeon,> said Alfric. <Not unprecedented, but if we take the lights as well — this is a very good payout.>

<We’re lucky we didn’t get my room at the conservatory,> said Verity.

<It’ll be hundreds of thousands of rings,> said Alfric. <If we sell these seats for even just ten a piece, that’s twenty thousand, and I imagine we can get much more than that. They’re velvet with gold leaf.>

Mizuki was staring at the theater. <How long is all this going to take? Because this was supposed to be a short dungeon, and I have that stew going. It will burn if we’re in here for a day.>

<Er,> said Alfric. He looked at the seats, then up at the balcony, where there were more seats. By a quick count, there had to be at least two thousand. Verity would probably know the exact number. <Well. Crap.>

<We’re going to be here at least a day,> said Hannah. <Maybe more. Maybe considerably more.> She frowned. <This is a lot of seats. If we grab them all, let’s say five minutes each, which seems quite fast to me — they’re fastened in, ay?>

<They are,> said Alfric, who had bent down to look. <Connected sets of three, with … nails, looks like. We have crowbars.>

<It’s already been two hours,> said Mizuki. <I would really rather my house not burn down, and it probably wouldn’t burn down, it would just fill with smoke from the stew, but I don’t want that either.>

<Not two hours,> said Alfric. <Two hours including travel time, maybe, but still probably not.>

<Mizuki could go home,> said Hannah. <She could make sure that everything there is fine.>

<No,> said Alfric, biting his lip. <If something has gone wrong —> He turned to Mizuki. <Party channel doesn’t work across the dungeon boundary.>

<Really?> asked Mizuki. <I guess we’ve always been in the dungeons together. That’s super inconvenient.>

<Almost nothing crosses the boundary,> said Alfric. <Undone days being one big exception. So if we send you home, you won’t be able to return to the dungeon, and you won’t be able to send word back.>

<Wait,> said Mizuki. <I wasn’t saying that I would go back, I don’t want to ditch out on the work.>

<You don’t?> asked Verity.

<No,> said Mizuki, turning on her. <I don’t. If we’re going to be sweating our butts off pulling up seats, I want to put in the work so that when we’re sitting there counting out all our earnings, I don’t feel like I did nothing against the monsters and put in no labor. I’ve gotta do something.>

<I didn’t mean any offense,> said Verity. <I was just saying that avoiding the hard labor of pulling up seats should have an appeal for anyone.>

<Someone should go home,> said Alfric. <It’s just a matter of whom.>

<The herb dragons won’t heed my commands indefinitely,> said Isra. <They’ll need to be kenneled and fed.>

<Or you should be the one to go,> said Alfric.

<No,> said Isra. <I’d rather put in the work here too.>

<Alright, who wants to go?> asked Alfric.

Hannah looked around the group and saw that no hands were going up.

Mizuki turned to Verity, and before Hannah could intervene, said the less delicate version of what Hannah had been thinking. <It’s okay if you want to leave,> said Mizuki. <No one will think less of you.>

<I’m extremely capable of putting in work,> said Verity.

<You need to practice for the upcoming concerts,> said Alfric. <You need to be able to answer mail from your mother if it comes.>

<We’re six miles from the border with Pucklechurch,> said Verity. <For me, it would be a longer walk than for Mizuki. She can use the helmet, but it frightens me too much for me to zip over.> This was true, though Hannah thought that Verity was overselling it a bit. They had all taken their turns with the helmet, which was party bound, and Verity had gotten three feet off the ground before landing with wobbly legs and declaring it a form of transportation suited only for maniacs.

<Alright, how are we settling this?> asked Alfric. It was, in Hannah’s opinion, the wrong thing to say. A better strategy would be for their party leader to decide how it would be settled, then settle it, or better, just make a firm decision that he would stand by. They would follow what he decided, even if there were some grumbles. Trying to figure out a fair and equitable arrangement just meant that there would be more argument and potential for bad feelings.

<No one wants to be the one to go, but someone should go,> said Verity. <Is it between me and Mizuki?>

<Yes,> said Alfric. <I’m the chrononaut, I need to stay in case something goes wrong, and — meaning no offense — Hannah, Isra, and myself are better suited to physical labor.>

<I do plenty fine with physical labor,> said Verity. Her eyes had a spark of defiance, and whatever was going through her mind, Hannah thought it likely that her current disposition could be traced back to her feelings about her mother.

<A contest, to see who gets to stay,> said Hannah. <Game of chance?> That was, in her opinion, for the best, just so there would be no hard feelings.

<Spoon flip,> said Mizuki, taking out the Anyspoon. <Right side up, I go, back side up, you go.>

<Sure,> said Verity, as though this weren’t at least a little bit a point of pride. It was an unexpected clashing of egos, and entirely avoidable, in Hannah’s eyes, though she was sure she’d have a better understanding of what had happened and why when she’d had a chance to think it over.

Mizuki flipped the spoon around, so fast that it was a blur in the air, and it clattered to the ground on the stage floor, facing up. Mizuki stared at it for a moment.

<Best two out of three?> asked Mizuki.

<You said you’d go,> said Hannah. <Someone has to, we probably would for the dragons even if you weren’t worried about the stew.>

<But I’m going to be so lonely,> said Mizuki. <Two, three days you’re going to be in here?>

<We’ll be in here for as little time as possible,> said Alfric. <You’re not going to miss anything, and no one will think less of you.>

<And I get to take the helmet?> asked Mizuki.

<Er,> said Alfric. He glanced at Hannah. <I need it in order to take the lights out.>

<But part of the argument was that Verity didn’t want to use the helmet,> said Mizuki. <So —>

<You’ll have to walk,> said Hannah. <We’ll give you an escort to the dungeon entrance, then you should get going.>

<I don’t like this,> said Mizuki. <Just for the record. It’ll be written down in the log book, that Mizuki didn’t like this.>

<It doesn’t record party chat,> said Alfric.

<Well, all the same,> said Mizuki. <Try not to do too much bonding without me.>

It took some time to bring Mizuki back to the dungeon entrance, and once she had left, there was some sense of enormity hanging in the air. Mostly it was the size of the job in front of them, and the knowledge that they would be in the dungeon for multiple days doing back breaking labor. At least a little bit of it was knowing that they would have only each other for company, and only what comforts they’d brought along.

Hannah was hoping that Alfric’s over-preparedness extended to long stays in a dungeon.

Chapter 91 - Liferaft

Mizuki was so incredibly bored, and it was only the first day alone.

On a normal day, the full house allowed Mizuki to bounce around and see what other people were doing. Sometimes she helped (or ‘helped’) with Hannah’s baking, or with Verity’s gardening, or she sat down for yet another impromptu lesson on dungeons with Alfric. When no one was up for anything interesting, she would usually have a meal to work on, or a book to read, or there would be cause to warp into town.

Her books were boring and she was all alone. She didn’t need to cook because there was a huge pot of stew meant for five people. The dragons were kenneled, and they occupied her for a bit, but not nearly long enough. Tabbins had made himself scarce.

She could hardly remember how she’d made it through four years alone. There were will o’ wisps to chase, she supposed, though that was more suited for the evenings, and she could go talk to people in town, but Bethany would want to go on about the wedding, and everyone else would want to talk about how surely Mizuki was going to move away soon, and neither of those were conversations that she wanted to have again.

The worst part was that they’d kept the helmet of flight. On a logical level, she understood that Alfric needed it to strip out the chandelier and the lights and the other stuff. On an illogical level, flying with the helmet was the best thing she’d ever done, and the novelty hadn’t worn off, if it ever would. She wanted to fly again. The last time she’d been out, she’d gone as high up as she could, so high that the air got thin and she started to get really cold. The world had at once seemed so large and so small, and she wanted that feeling again, but perhaps with warmer clothes on.

Late in the day, around dinner time, there was a knock on the door. Mizuki got excited wondering who it could be and hoping that it was for her, but it was just Marsh.

“I tried Hannah yesterday and got no response, and then twice again today,” he said. “I’m probably worried over nothing, but is there a reason? Is she okay?”

“She’s fine, just in a long dungeon looting some stuff,” said Mizuki. “Have you eaten?”

“Not yet,” said Marsh. “What was the loot?”

“Here, come in,” said Mizuki. “I have some stew that needs eating.”

Marsh hesitated, just for a moment, but accepted the offer, and not long after that, he was sitting at the dining room table with her eating some stew. She had gussied the stew up a bit, putting on a quenelle of sour cream and sprinkling some fresh herbs on top. It was Mizuki’s second time eating stew, third if she included the bite she’d had with eggs that morning, and she was already a little sick of it.

“A recreation of a Dondrian theater?” asked Marsh when Mizuki had explained. “That’s … not something that I’ve heard of before.”

“It’s something Alfric hadn’t heard about before,” said Mizuki. “And there’s hardly anything he doesn’t know about dungeons.”

“I’m familiar,” said Marsh with a laugh. “But everyone is fine?”

“All fine,” said Mizuki. “But the stew was going to burn if we didn’t get out in time, and I guess it made the most sense for it to be me to leave.” She still didn’t feel like that was true. She didn’t even feel like it was true that the choice should have been between her and Verity: it should have been Verity. Verity was physically weaker, Mizuki was pretty sure, and more than that, Verity had a series of concerts coming up that she needed to practice for.

“This stew is amazing, by the way,” said Marsh as he took another big bite. “Hannah is always going on about your cooking.”

“Oh, good,” said Mizuki. “I do try.”

“And thanks for feeding me,” said Marsh. “You really didn’t have to.”

“Nah,” said Mizuki, waving a hand. “You’re Hannah’s boyfriend, that means you’re practically family.”

Marsh hesitated. “Is that what she says?”

“She doesn’t call you her boyfriend, no,” said Mizuki. “But come on, she spends so much time with you, talking about you, sighing wistfully while looking at her forearm — I mean, that could mean anything, maybe she’s wishing that she had larger forearms, but it seems like she’s wishing she’d hear from you.”

Marsh smiled. “Nice of you to say.”

“Well, don’t tell her I told you,” said Mizuki. “And I don’t know, she does say that this isn’t what she planned for. I think in her mind there were maybe going to be a lot of brief flings, and then she accidentally found you and you’re perfect. Might just take her a bit to realize.”

Marsh was blushing. “How much longer will they be in the dungeon, do you think?”

“I’ve got no idea,” said Mizuki. “I’m already going stir crazy. I don’t know how people live like this, not knowing if their friends are alive or dead.”

“It happened with my mom and dad sometimes,” said Marsh. “They went out to respond to some kind of calamity out on the eastern edge of Inter when I was nine, both of them together, and my uncle watched after me, but he refused to say that they’d be alright. I was terrified.”

“Why would he do that?” asked Mizuki, raising an eyebrow. “They were alright, weren’t they?”

“Oh, they were fine,” said Marsh. “As for my uncle, I don’t know, I think he just wanted to be straight with me. He explained that they were probably fine, but he kept saying that there was a chance for things to go sour. Which is true, don’t get me wrong, it’s always true for that kind of thing, but … I don’t know. I do wish he’d just said that it was going to be okay, that there was nothing to worry about.”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “I mean, they have Alfric with them, they’ll be fine, but a part of me just wants them back.”

“I do want her back,” said Marsh with a surprisingly wistful sigh for a guy that big. He caught himself and gave Mizuki a look. “Can you keep a secret?”

“Of course,” Mizuki lied.

Mizuki was terrible about keeping secrets. This wasn’t out of any malice, nor because she was a gossip, but because she had trouble keeping track of what she was supposed to say and what she wasn’t. Secrets introduced too many moving parts to a conversation. And sometimes if she caught herself before she let a secret slip, it would hang there in her mind, crowding out other thoughts. Sometimes, the other person in the conversation would notice this and ask about it, and then the secret would come out, or at best, it would be known that she was hiding something. Isra, by contrast, seemed like she’d be great at secrets, because Isra spoke little and only with what seemed like a lot of deliberation.

“I’ve fallen badly for her,” said Marsh. He sighed. “For Hannah, in case that wasn’t obvious.”

“It was,” said Mizuki.

“I keep trying to play it cool, but …” He shook his head. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“You seem like you’re doing a good job so far,” said Mizuki.

“I feel like it’s going to fall apart and I’m going to have no idea why, or maybe I’ll know exactly why,” said Marsh. “And I can’t talk to my party about it, because they don’t care at all, and I don’t have other friends.”

“We can be friends,” said Mizuki. “I’ve never had a real guy friend.”

Marsh stared at her. “What, never?”

“Well, some guy friends who became boyfriends,” said Mizuki. “Or who were only friends because one or both of us wanted something more.” She shrugged. “I don’t know if you’ve met the Pedder boys?”

“They roasted a pig, right?” asked Marsh. “After the dungeon escape?”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “I kind of thought I would end up marrying one of them. But there was a time when we were just friends … only maybe none of us thought that we would stay friends. I don’t know, it’s so hard to look back.”

“Ah,” said Marsh. “But … Alfric?”

Mizuki’s brain did that thing where there was the obvious answer which needed to be censored, but trying to censor that answer took up all her ability to think, so she just sat there with her mouth open.

“None of my business,” nodded Marsh.

“No, it’s not that, it’s — I don’t know,” said Mizuki.

She had seen Alfric training shirtless and felt something inside her give way. The thought had been ‘Oh shoot, I’m in love with Alfric’. It had been like an epiphany, one that had recontextualized their entire relationship and every interaction they’d had up until that point. The feeling had lasted for half an hour, and then began to fade away, but it still hadn’t faded completely, and Mizuki wasn’t sure that it would.

There was a whole long list of reasons why Alfric would be the best boyfriend ever, and even if Mizuki was very ungenerous, the list of reasons why he’d be terrible had only two or three things on it. That wasn’t their relationship though, and he’d been quite clear that he didn’t want that kind of complication in his life, which she thought was pretty fair after all the Lola stuff.

She’d already decided that her feelings were stupid and she wasn’t going to pursue him, and this wasn’t going to be one of those times where she said ‘oh this is a horrible idea’ and then she did it anyway.

“Yeah,” said Marsh into the silence. “Sometimes these things can be hard to figure out.”

“You know I’m four years older than you, right?” asked Mizuki.

“You are?” asked Marsh. “I guess you read as younger.”

“I haven’t lost that youthful glow just yet,” smiled Mizuki.

“Well, let me know if I can … help?” asked Marsh. “It’s really more Hannah’s department, and I think Alfric still has a ways to go to forgive me.”

“Of course,” said Mizuki. “And let Hannah know you’re invited over for dinner whenever you want.”

Marsh eventually took off, and Mizuki was left alone again. For a moment she felt recharged, but it didn’t last very long, and the books she was reading didn’t seem to hold her interest.

It was entirely possible that the party would come back at virtually any moment. She didn’t know how long it would take for them to gut the theater, but it had been an entire day and then some already. When they finally left the dungeon, they would probably contact her through the party channel, and then she could rest easy, knowing that nothing horrible had happened.

<Hey, are you guys there?> she tried.

There was no response. It was good to know the party channel still worked, but also a little frightening. Alfric had said that there wasn’t supposed to be communication in or out of the dungeon, but did that mean that if they all died in there, she’d just have a ghost channel, a place she could talk where no one would hear her words?

She felt alone in her big house, more alone than she’d felt in years.

~~~~

There was still no message from the party in the morning of the second day, and Mizuki tried to go about her day. She’d resolved to go to Liberfell, or possibly even further afield, just to give her something to do, but she’d broken off things with Rolaj, and there wasn’t a lot to do in Liberfell aside from some shopping and food.

She had just finished with breakfast when Kell showed up at the door.

“Kell!” she said. She was surprised to see him. Since the dungeon escape, she’d seen him a few times around, and on temple days he would make an effort to seek her out and say hi. “What brings you around?”

“Is Alfric home?” he asked.

“Oh, er, no,” said Mizuki. “He’s in a dungeon at the moment, won’t be back until later today, or … possibly tomorrow.”

“Ah,” he said. He shifted from foot to foot. It might have been her imagination, but he seemed more magical than he had before. He had his staff with him, soaked in magic, and had a necklace and bracers that she didn’t remember him having. He was, actually, pretty well-armed, assuming that it wasn’t all utility, which it might be. “Well, I guess I’ll come back, unless you have time to talk?”

“I do,” said Mizuki, though she had her bag over her shoulder and her boots on. “Backyard or dining room?”

“Backyard is fine with me,” said Kell. “It’s the kind of day that no one would want to be indoors for.”

They got themselves settled in the backyard, which involved a lot of oohing and aahing at the garden. Mizuki hoped that it would be fine for a few days without Verity and Isra.

“So what’s up?” asked Mizuki as she sat on one of the benches.

“I’m thinking about joining Vertex,” he said.

Mizuki blinked at him. “Did they try to recruit you?”

“I came to them, we had an interview, and then they extended an offer to me,” said Kell.

“They already have a wizard,” said Mizuki.

“You can run a dungeon with two wizards,” said Kell. “Even as many as three is probably fine, though it’s ill-advised to go in without a healer and someone who can guard or block. The plan, if I’m going to be a part of their party, is to have Mardin and Marsh take on half-fighter roles. They’re both bigger guys, more comfortable up front.”

“You’re only first elevation,” said Mizuki.

“Fifth, actually,” said Kell.

“What?” asked Mizuki. “You were on the shortlist for this group. Did you just somehow jump up elevation?”

“Well, yeah,” said Kell, rubbing the back of his head. “I, uh, did some dungeons solo.”

Mizuki stared at him. “That’s really dangerous.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know. The first one, I figured that I would just go in with a build that was heavy on defense and high on burst damage, and if I ran into something I couldn’t handle, I would leave as fast as I possibly could. And … it went alright, so then I did another, and another.” He shrugged.

“How many?” asked Mizuki.

“Six,” he replied. “Apparently elevation goes up faster when you’re the only one in there.”

“Six is as many as I’ve done,” said Mizuki. “How?”

“I didn’t grab everything,” said Kell. “Mostly just the entads. And it wasn’t a full clear every time. I saw a monster who’d have a hard time fitting in your kitchen and just left rather than trying to kill it. But I didn’t really come to talk about that, I came to talk about your feelings on Vertex and whether they’re worth joining up with. Actually, I came to talk to Alfric about that, but if he’s not here, and won’t be for a bit … I guess I’d like your opinion.”

“On them?” asked Mizuki.

“How they work as a team, whether or not they’re professionals, that kind of thing,” he said. “We dealt with the dungeon escape alongside them, and aside from Lola, who’s out of the picture, they seemed functional and strong. They’ve had a downgrade by having their best entads repossessed, but they’ve taken a lot from the dungeons already. The interview was okay. So … ?”

“Uh, Grig and Marsh seem nice,” said Mizuki. “I think every time I talked to Josen or heard him speak, he was an ass. And Mardin I don’t really know, aside from one conversation where he was trying to downplay everything Lola had been doing. Not like he was trying to cover for her, but like he just didn’t think it was a big deal.” She shifted in her seat on the bench. “You know, it’s really hard for me to say, and you should talk to Alfric, though I’m worried that he’ll talk your ear off about proper party configuration instead of the personalities involved.”

“And he’s not going to be out of the dungeon for a bit?” asked Kell.

“Unfortunately, no,” said Mizuki. “And I was the one who got kicked out.”

“Why?” asked Kell. He immediately seemed defensive on her behalf, which she appreciated.

“Oh, someone needed to take the stew out of the oven so it didn’t burn,” said Mizuki. “And we’ve got some tiny dragons that need taking care of. And I’m the weakest person there, with no power to my magic, so … whatever.”

“Sorry that happened to you,” said Kell. He fidgeted with some of his magical gear. “Do you enjoy it, dungeoneering?”

“Mostly,” said Mizuki. “I like the entads, and sometimes I like seeing all the cool weird stuff, but it’s scary, and I don’t think I would do it without Alfric.”

Kell nodded. “That sixth dungeon I did, I almost died. It made me re-evaluate. And Vertex has paid for Alfric’s help, which is worth something to me.”

“You were doing a dungeon a day or something?” asked Mizuki.

“I was just … I don’t know,” said Kell. He shrugged. “Coming home was a lot different from what I thought it would be. But when I went to Kiromo, that was different from what I thought it would be too, so maybe I’m just bad at knowing how things will be.”

“You really shouldn’t go into dungeons alone,” said Mizuki. “The stuff will be more than five times stronger. I’m told.”

“When you kill most things in the dungeon, you do it many times over, right?” asked Kell. “You don’t just barely kill them?”

“I mean, I guess,” said Mizuki. “Most things will die to one burst of whatever’s handy, and if their guts fall out onto the floor because I scrambled them, that’s just, uh, death, you know? Doesn’t really matter what else they have going on unless they can fight while they lose all their blood.”

“It’s like that for a wizard too,” nodded Kell. “Most things will die to a single beam of concentrated power, or a blast, or whatever else I have configured. And it’s less dangerous for wizards, because the elevation metric doesn’t take into account our mana load.”

“I don’t even know what that is,” said Mizuki.

“It’s, ah, sort of the basic unit of wizardry?” he asked. “Our overall ability to have a large pool and good constructions? Though there are elements of personal skill that limit it too.”

Mizuki shook her head.

“Mana is like … a currency,” said Kell. “There are large stones that are pulled up from the ground and given out to wizards, or in some cases purchased, which is where we get our power from. We can spend that currency on either constructions, which do things on their own, or on power for the pool of available mana, which is the, or a, reservoir. So the currency ends up having ah, two sections, I guess.”

“But it doesn’t matter how much you bring into a dungeon?” asked Mizuki. “It doesn’t affect elevation?”

“You’d have to ask Alfric,” said Kell. “He’s the dungeon guy, right? Even Vertex seems to think so.”

“He would know, yeah,” said Mizuki. “You know, I never really knew all that much about wizards. We’re supposed to be mortal enemies.”

“I don’t take any of that old stuff seriously,” Kell replied with a laugh. “They did talk about it in school though, how a sorcerer could absolutely wreck a wizard without even giving it that much thought.”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. She pointed at his necklace, which was half-hidden by his long shirt. “Right there, I could undo that and force the energy — the pool — out into your chest. Pow. Through the heart.”

“Mmm,” said Kell. “That’s why if you ever need to fight a sorc, you do it from a distance. See, what I should have done was knock on the door and then snipe you from behind a tree.”

Mizuki smiled and crossed her legs. “Are you busy today?”

“No,” he replied. “I have some constructions to work on, but I’m still on the business planning end of things, seeing what will work out for me. Most of my plan for today was coming here and figuring out what I wanted to do about Vertex.”

“I was going to Liberfell. Are you interested in coming with me?” asked Mizuki. “I don’t know how you’re settling in, but —”

“Sure, absolutely, I’m up for an adventure,” said Kell. “What are we doing?”

“Killing time until my party gets back,” said Mizuki. “But with that said, we can use the wardrobe, so it’s really not so much walking. And … shoot, I was going to say we could use the dagger, but I guess it’s keyed to Alfric.”

“I don’t know what those are,” said Kell. “Wardrobe? Dagger? These are entads?”

It took Mizuki some time to explain, but that was okay, because she liked to talk about entads and Kell was an attentive listener. She eventually explained the other things too, their full travel suite, the stone and the chest for putting people in, and the helmet for flying.

“I can actually just take us, if we’re going to Liberfell,” said Kell. “How much do you weigh?”

“Um, hundred and ten?” she asked. “I think? Why?”

Kell went into his pocket and fished out an amulet with the pattern of a sun on it, and Mizuki looked at it. It was an entad. “It lets me go to it twice a day,” he said. “I can carry my own bodyweight plus a hundred and twenty-five pounds of organics and another fifty of inorganics.”

“Okay,” Mizuki said slowly. “And you have a way to get this to Liberfell?”

Kell smiled and pulled out a slingshot from his back pocket. The fork was made of metal and the band was some stretchy material, with a little pouch in the middle. This was also an entad.

“You’re going to slingshot the amulet twelve miles?” she asked. “That’s insane.”

“It’ll be more like twenty-four miles,” said Kell. “But yes. The maximum range is about fifty miles.”

Mizuki’s eyes were wide. “How fast is that thing? You could punch a hole through a tree!”

“It’s magic, not brute force,” said Kell. He handed it to her. “Did you want to try it?”

Mizuki took the slingshot from him, grinning at it, then went searching through the garden to pick a good stone. Many of the stones had come from the nearby stream, some of them placed in the garden by Mizuki herself, and she found a good one, nice and rounded, river-smoothed. She set it into the slingshot’s thong and pulled back, aiming toward the woods.

“Oh wow,” she said. The entad didn’t just launch things, it came with some sense of where they would go. When she aimed at the tree with the slingshot drawn, she could tell exactly where it would hit, a spot that changed as she wasn’t able to keep her hand steady. “This is nuts.” She stopped and then pulled back again, aiming it up. She couldn’t see in her mind’s eye where it would land, but she had some sense of how far it would travel. She released the stone and it flew up into the air, quickly out of sight into the forest. It hadn’t actually been moving that fast though.

“Nice,” said Kell, plucking the slingshot from her. “That sense of where it will land isn’t perfect, by the way, and gets worse the further you’re sending it. What I think is happening is that it imparts some kind of weird physics on whatever you’re firing, maybe allowing it to partially ignore gravity and friction, but … not entirely? So when it flies through the air, it’s affected by wind, just a smidge, and when you know where it’s going to land, that’s a prediction, but it’s based on current conditions rather than whatever the conditions will be when it’s in flight.” He shrugged. “It’s incredibly hard to test though.”

“Take it to Filera?” asked Mizuki.

“Er, that would be kind of a waste,” said Kell. “I’ve already tested it enough on my own, and with the time it takes to get identification, there’s no way the amount I’d have to pay would be worth it.”

“Oh, right,” said Mizuki. “I forgot that we have a special deal with her. She does the idents on undone days.”

“Wow, must be nice,” said Kell. “I think I’ve spent more time figuring out entads than I have in dungeons. Hey, check this out.” He stood up and held out his arm, which promptly vanished, leaving an empty sleeve that fell down. “It’s from a small bottle I got.” His arm reappeared in his sleeve. “I can do more than that, but it’s kind of worthless. The arm is still, uh, ‘there’, it’s just … also not there? Works for the legs as well.”

“Weird,” said Mizuki. “You know, I like the entads because they’re little puzzles, tiny mysteries, but I like identification because sometimes you get stuck on a puzzle and you stay stuck there, which I’ve never liked.”

“You might have made a good wizard,” said Kell. “There are a lot of puzzles.”

“I don’t think they’d be the kind of puzzle that I like,” said Mizuki.

“Maybe,” shrugged Kell. He looked up at the sky, judging the position of the sun. “Well, shall we?”

“Sure,” said Mizuki. “Let’s see how this amulet of yours works.”

Kell took the amulet in hand, loaded it into the slingshot, and aimed carefully with a half draw. He released, and they watched it sail off into the distance. There was something weird about the way it moved, as it was clearly under magical influence.

“What if it hits someone?” asked Mizuki.

“It’s never happened,” said Kell.

“Or breaks a window?” asked Mizuki.

“Then I’ll pay for a window and make my apologies,” shrugged Kell. “It’s going to land somewhere in the Liberfell hex, most of that area isn’t windows. It’ll be fine.” He gave her a look. “This isn’t the kind of thing I’d think you’d worry about.”

“No?” asked Mizuki. They didn’t really know each other, aside from maybe stuff when they were kids.

“Do you remember throwing a rock through that window?” asked Kell, pointing over at the house.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Yeah, I do, but I was — I wasn’t trying to throw it into the window, the window was open and I was trying to get a rock to land on my bed.”

“And you don’t remember me being there at all?” asked Kell.

“No, I do,” said Mizuki. “But that had to have been like ten years ago, right? Mostly what I remember was getting in trouble.”

“The amulet should have landed by now,” said Kell. “Ready?”

“I suppose,” said Mizuki. She took his offered hand and stood on his shoes, something that they did with the dagger from time to time. “I don’t know why I’m nervous.”

“It’ll be fine,” said Kell.

The world smeared around them, and it was loud in a way that Mizuki hadn’t expected, but a moment later they were standing on a rooftop in the middle of downtown Liberfell. It thankfully didn’t have a slope to it, though if it did, the amulet probably would have fallen off. Instead, they were on a flat roof, the kind that was probably heated in the winter to keep the snow from building up, and there was a nice little garden there with flowering bushes and a line of herbs. Mizuki went to the edge and looked down. They were three stories up.

“Wow,” she said. “This is great.”

“I don’t think we’re supposed to be here,” said Kell, looking around. “Sorry.”

“Do you think whoever owns this place would really mind?” asked Mizuki. She picked up the amulet and handed it to him. “Most people are understanding when magic does something a little unexpected.” She looked over the edge again. “Nice shot, by the way, we’re basically right in the center of the city.”

“The entad assists,” said Kell. “Come on, we should go.”

Mizuki stopped and sniffed at a flower, then cast the warp. It wasn’t until they had met up again that Kell seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Being in places I shouldn’t be makes me nervous,” Kell replied. “It’s the kind of thing you can really get in trouble for in Kiromo.”

“Really?” asked Mizuki. They walked out of the warp building together, into the city streets. “Just for accidentally being on someone’s rooftop?”

“Part of it was that I was an outsider,” said Kell. “I — I don’t know how much you know about Kiromo, what it’s actually like as opposed to what our grandparents and parents said. They care a lot about where you’re from.”

“And being half-Kiromon means that you get called out on things?” asked Mizuki. “That kind of makes me worry for my little sisters.”

“It’s not so bad,” said Kell. “And apparently better than it used to be, which is the whole reason our families went back.”

“Well, I don’t know much,” said Mizuki. “My grandpa used to talk a lot about it, and got into politics, but mostly what I got from that was there was a lot of stuff about different ethnicities?”

Kell nodded. “The nation of Kiromo as it stands now is a collection of three to seven historical nations, depending on how you count, a result of the pressure towards consolidation from some of the things that Editors have been implementing over the centuries, and as a response to Inter’s sheer size. But Kiromo has done things a lot less successfully than either Inter or Tarbin, at least when it comes to being a single coherent nation, and — I’m boring you.”

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “I mean, I’m used to Alfric going on about a bunch of stuff that, maybe, I don’t actually need to know. There’s something comfortable about it. My grandpa did it too.”

“Mmm,” said Kell. It seemed like maybe he didn’t appreciate the comparison, but that didn’t stop him from going on. “In Inter, you can go from province to province and not really know that it’s happening, but it’s not like that in Kiromo. You go into a different province and they wear different clothes, have different customs, different buildings, different food, and different history. I didn’t really go outside of that one province, but there’s some — I don’t want to call it animosity — but some suspicion of outsiders, even people from within the same nation.”

“Sounds horrible,” said Mizuki. “I thought things were different under the new Emperor?”

“They are, a bit, but it’s better, not good.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I’m happy to be back in Inter, even if it’s not quite what I had remembered.”

They walked through Liberfell without all that much on their schedule, which was being driven by Mizuki anyhow. Mizuki had been making what felt like pretty regular trips to Liberfell, but normally she had some destination in mind, and this was a good opportunity to freely explore.

Kell liked to talk, and he also liked to listen, and Mizuki felt some of the tension that had been building up in her slowly release. There was something very normal about Kell, stable and steady, in a way that really did remind her of Alfric. She ended up talking about Alfric, maybe too much.

They had lunch together, and later, dinner. Mizuki was a bit surprised that Kell had nothing else to do with his day, but apparently he was shopping around for a job as a dungeoneer. They did do a few things that he’d wanted to do, like stopping by the local wizard’s hall, where he spoke with a few wizards while Mizuki milled about and tried not to look like a sorc. There were plenty of constructions there, machines that the wizards had built for various purposes, and Mizuki was very careful not to touch anything, or even look at it too hard.

“Thanks for spending the day with me,” said Mizuki as the sun began to set. “You really didn’t have to. I’ve been told that I can be a bit much.”

“Not at all,” said Kell. “We should get going though, so you don’t have to walk home in the dark.” He got out his slingshot and amulet, and aimed carefully at the horizon. The amulet sailed off into the distance. “You’ll let me know when Alfric comes back, so I can talk to him about Vertex?”

“Sure,” said Mizuki. “I’ve been expecting something over party chat all day, but I guess they’ll be there two nights.” Another night at home alone stung.

She stepped on his feet and he whisked them home, into the woods this time, and once the amulet was collected, they warped together.

“I guess I’ll see you around,” said Mizuki.

Despite basically spending the whole day together, she almost wanted to extend it, especially knowing that she was going back to an empty house. There was a part of her that wanted to invite him to her house, but she worried that would send him the wrong signal. Their day had been perfectly platonic, and there had been a few points when she’d worried that he’d place his hand on her thigh, or casually wrap his arm around her, or where touch would linger — but he’d kept his distance, and nothing she’d been worried about had come to pass.

Then they’d parted, and Mizuki walked home as the sun set. She talked into the party channel as she went, though of course there was no response. There was hope for tomorrow.

Chapter 90 - Cloister

Isra was surprised, at the end of the day, how little progress they had made on disassembling the theater. Alfric had tested the doors to make sure that there was nothing hiding behind them, and found that the majority of them led nowhere, being purely decorative. The two that weren’t had been hastily and thoroughly barricaded. There was a backstage area, but it was devoid of life. Isra found it curious; there were ropes hanging down and all kinds of sand bags and set pieces. She hadn’t really contemplated what the back area of the opera had looked like, but it must have been something like this.

Much of their first day — the day they’d had left once Mizuki had done a final sweep for entads and then gone — was planning, preparation, and assessment, which Isra had very little hand in. The seats and the lighting were the largest items, as well as being the majority of the work, but the walls were covered with artwork and many surfaces had ornamentation that seemed quite expensive. Alfric wanted to take these too, if at all possible. Some math was done, just to see how long this would all take, and Alfric took out the first set of chairs to get some measure of how labor intensive it would be.

<For just the seats, we’re looking at sixty hours of labor,> said Alfric. <The seats are in sets of three, five minutes each … that’s about right.>

Isra thought the estimate was optimistic. He had been pushing himself to go as fast as possible, not working with the slowness that came with repetitive and strenuous action. He wasn’t accounting for time to rest either, though she wasn’t sure that was a part of the concept of an hour of labor. She supposed that it wasn’t.

<Sixty hours,> Alfric continued. <That’s fifteen a piece, or about two days total.>

<For just the seats,> said Hannah. <And you’d have to double it if you want a more accurate picture, ay?>

<Four days then,> said Alfric, not seeming at all perturbed by the idea his estimate might be off by double. <That’s not too bad. It’s good payment.>

<Are we starting tonight then?> asked Verity. <It’s past when we would normally be eating dinner.>

<We’ll eat, rest up, get some sleep, and start early in the morning,> said Alfric. <The balcony has no exits, it’s the safest place for us to set the trunk, which is virtually impervious and can be told to stay put. We’ll be inside the stone, where we have housing.>

<We do?> asked Isra.

Alfric nodded. <I set it up not long after we got the stone, it’s nothing fancy, just water, food stores, a latrine, and some tents. There are pallets set out to receive goods, but I don’t think we’ll want to use them if we have the trunk.>

<And we’re fine in the dungeon for so long?> asked Verity. <You said that we shouldn’t stay in them if we could help it.>

<I did say that,> said Alfric. <But we should be fine. There are two doors leading out of the theater, but monsters don’t tend to move through the dungeon on their own, and we’ll beat a retreat or kill them if they come through the barricades. And like I said, we’ll be up on the balcony while we sleep. No, the biggest thing we need to worry about is the air.> He looked at Isra. <I’ll want you to make regular checks to make sure that it’s still good to breathe. Air is notoriously difficult. Too much of the wrong kinds of air can kill you, and too little of other kinds can kill you, and even if the mixture is right, too high of pressure or too low of pressure can also be quite bad. You’ll just feel sleepy or dizzy or like you need a nap, and then you’ll never wake up. We have vent stones, enough for five people to breathe indefinitely, but I don’t have masks for them, not like we’d ideally want.>

<Oh, come now,> said Hannah. <You bought five vent stones powerful enough to keep us breathing?>

<Yes,> said Alfric. <On the thinking that they could save our lives some day.>

<Was that with your own money, or with the group fund?> asked Verity.

<Group fund,> replied Alfric.

<There’s such a thing as being too prepared,> said Hannah. <But it’s a discussion for another day. Puttin’ thousands into edge cases doesn’t seem like where I want to be with this overall venture.>

<They’ll be sold back with little depreciation,> said Alfric.

<We’ll talk on it later,> said Hannah. <Now then, let’s get into the stone and go eat. There’s nothin’ like a pitched battle to work up some appetite.>

Hannah had some measure of the work ahead, that much was clear, but Isra could see that she was putting a veneer on her feelings. The actual battle had been at least an hour before, maybe more, and most of what they’d been doing had been boring administration in preparation for extended labor.

The trunk was positioned up on the balcony of the theater, and the stone beside it, mostly out of a surfeit of caution.

The garden stone had changed considerably since the last time Isra had been in there, and it was clear that Alfric had been spending some of his restless downtime there. There were more pallets set up, a handful of cages made without metal, a makeshift latrine that Isra wasn’t looking forward to using, and a set of five tents which had all been pitched and set up ahead of time.

The garden stone had been appraised, as had most of the other entads they used on a regular basis. It was a curiously lifeless place, in a sense. Plants there were in a state of suspension, resilient to damage but also incapable of growth. The lighting never changed. Alfric had proposed that they could use it as a place to keep plants in the winter months, and that seemed to still be an option, but there was only an acre of space, and for it to be truly worthwhile, it would need to be done at scale. He’d tried keeping fruits in it, but apparently those weren’t covered under the protection of the garden stone, so it was either trees or nothing, and they wouldn’t grow inside. Getting into and out of the stone was also not particularly straightforward, and in Isra’s opinion, this was just the sort of thinking that Alfric sometimes did. He liked challenges and puzzles, more than had been clear to her when they hadn’t known each other.

Dinner had to be made outside of the garden stone, and it was a bit of a meager affair, largely because they hadn’t gone into the dungeon with the expectation that they’d be eating there. Alfric, of course, had stocked the garden stone with food, but it was all food that could last for months at a time. Beans, rice, and cured sausage were a hearty meal, but it didn’t hold a candle to Mizuki’s cooking. Isra had been looking forward to stew.

“See, what you could have done was put some plants in the garden,” said Hannah as they ate from their wooden bowls. “They’re in stasis here, so it’s not like they’d need to be watered or go bad, right? Just a head of lettuce sittin’ there for us to eat in a little pot.”

“That’s an excellent point that unfortunately doesn’t really help us right now,” said Alfric. He hesitated. “Well, no, doesn’t help. I was trying to think whether we could grow anything within the dungeon, but we don’t have ectad or entad support, and even with Isra’s help, I’m skeptical that we could extract any usable seeds from what we have.”

“It would take too much time,” said Isra. “But for the future, yes.”

“Is this what we’re eating this whole time?” asked Verity, who had finished her bowl. “Not that I’m complaining, I’m just curious. I was looking forward to stew.”

“This, or variations on it,” said Alfric. “Rice and beans, some meat. There’s a brick of dried spinach, something I picked up in Dondrian, but we’ll use that later.” He picked at his meal, and Isra couldn’t help thinking that he was probably missing the stew too. This was at least partially Mizuki’s fault for all the stew-talk on their way to the dungeon. “You know, some people live like this.”

“Like what?” asked Verity with a raised eyebrow. She looked down at her empty bowl. “Field rations?”

“Inside dungeons,” said Alfric.

“How?” asked Isra.

“Why?” asked Verity.

“The answer to how is easy enough,” said Alfric. “They have entad and ectad support. With the right collection of stones, you don’t even need entads at all, but scaling can be an issue. Making a dungeon into a livable habitat is supposed to be pretty difficult, not to mention inherently unsafe.”

“And as to why,” said Hannah. “I suppose it’s hermits and the like?”

“What’s a hermit?” asked Isra.

“Someone who lives alone in the woods,” said Verity. “Not like you though.”

“Why not like me?” asked Isra.

“Um,” said Alfric. “Usually a hermit is someone who lives outside of society by choice, rather than chance.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. She felt insulted, though she wasn’t exactly sure in what way. The term, ‘hermit’, seemed to fit her, but it also felt like a bad word.

“Anyway, it’s not all hermits,” said Alfric. “Sometimes people want to opt out without actually being alone. A whole party can go into a dungeon together, and the five of them can live there. It’s extremely uncommon, but I used to read stories.”

“Where do the stories come from?” asked Isra.

“People who come out later,” said Alfric. “Or in two cases I know of, their children.”

“Children?” asked Isra. She leaned forward. “Children … born in a dungeon?”

“Yes,” nodded Alfric. “In theory, you could have a whole civilization packed away in a dungeon. Once the monsters have been cleared out, it’s just a series of connected rooms, or in some cases a bit more than that. There’s a limit of five on party size, but there’s a loophole that allows more people to be in a dungeon. Anyone born there gets to stay.”

“I haven’t read up on it, but it seems a bit horrific,” said Hannah. “People dodgin’ the province.”

“From what I’ve heard, yes,” said Alfric. “Some of the people who try to live in dungeons are criminals attempting to evade justice. Again, it’s very rare, but it’s an area of interest for me.”

“Does that work?” asked Hannah. “You’re a wanted man, you run into a dungeon, kill whatever’s there, and you live out your life?”

“Depending on how well you prepare, sure,” said Alfric. “But it can be grim, as I think everyone seems to be suggesting about my meal.” He smiled, and they laughed, which did a lot for the mood. “Frankly, unless you have incredible preparation, it’s probably worse to be stuck in a dungeon than whatever the state might do to you.”

“And there might be people who live their whole lives in a dungeon,” said Isra. “Born in a dungeon, thinking that it’s the entire world.”

“There are a few books like that,” said Alfric. “Pure fiction.”

Isra wasn’t sure if he had understood what she was saying or not, but the meal had come to a close, and she was tired. She had no sense of how long it had been since they’d gone into the dungeon, nor did she have any idea what time it was on the outside. The garden stone didn’t have day or night, but Alfric had thought of that and given them masks to cover their eyes, which was something.

Isra disrobed in her tent and lay there, feeling the padding of the bedroll and staring up at the fabric. This was closer proximity to the others than she usually had, excepting Verity, who was normally across the room. She could hear them as they got settled, and she listened as Alfric showered off, removing what blood and grime he hadn’t gotten off before dinner. Hannah, a few tents over, was saying her prayers to Garos, murmuring so low it was difficult to make out the words. It seemed to Isra that Hannah was talking about the theater they’d found and what it might mean.

Verity slipped into Isra’s tent with barely a sound, and they were soon laying together.

“We’re going to have to furnish this place with some creature comforts,” said Verity.

“Are you sleeping with me tonight?” asked Isra. The tent wasn’t all that large, but there was room for two, if they were cuddled close to each other.

“Just a private visit,” said Verity. “Alfric had tents all ready and set up, and there are thankfully toothbrushes, but it’s clear he was thinking of budget. No extra clothes for us either, not that I’d expect it.” She was dressed in only her underthings, as was Isra. Isra liked that they were comfortable enough with each other for this level of intimacy.

“He was probably just thinking that it would be for an emergency,” said Isra. “We might be here for a few days.”

“As much as a week,” said Verity. She gave a little downturn of her lips, an expression that served as a very fast, very small frown. She did it often.“Sorry for earlier.”

“Earlier?” asked Isra.

“For wanting to stay,” said Verity. “For making it a big deal with Mizuki.”

“I didn’t mind,” said Isra. “No one wanted to be the odd one out. You were vocal about it, that was all.”

“Mmm,” said Verity. “But it did make sense for me to go. I guess. I just didn’t want to be consigned to the house by myself for a full week with nothing to do but practice for the concert. It would have felt like my mother was taking even more of my life from me.” Alfric had said two days, Hannah had said four, and Verity was now saying a full week. It was hard to tell time in the dungeon, even for Isra, and she wondered how they would even track it.

“I’m glad you’re here,” said Isra. She reached out a hand until her fingers found Verity’s. “Not that I don’t like Mizuki, but …” She trailed off.

“You and I have a special relationship,” said Verity. Her voice was soft.

Isra was keenly aware of their closeness and the extent of their skin contact. There was something about touching another person’s body with her own, the way the surfaces shaped to each other. Isra was laying on her back and Verity was on her side, and the curve of Isra’s hip was fitting into the hollow where Verity’s thighs met her abdomen. This was closer than they normally were to each other.

“Xy kissed me,” said Verity.

“Oh?” asked Isra. She could practically feel the jealousy moving through her, like a rush of spring meltwater. “When?”

“When I got that first letter from my mother,” said Verity. “She just … moved forward and kissed me.” There was more she wanted to add, clearly, but she left it there.

Isra didn’t know how to respond to that. She stayed quiet. Her heart was beating quickly, too quickly, as though she was in the middle of a fight. It was surprising how upset she was, really, especially given that she had no claim to Verity. Mating behavior in animals had always seemed so strange, and Isra had always been a bit puzzled by the way that two bucks would lock horns over a doe, but it snapped into place and made sense now. She would have to find out what humans did instead of locking antlers or getting in fights with each other.

“Sorry,” said Verity, after the silence had stretched on.

Isra still had no good response. The feelings that were rippling through her seemed like they had no good expression. She felt like crying, but as a matter of principle she didn’t like to cry, and she wasn’t about to start over this. So she just extracted her fingers from Verity’s and sat there, staring up at the tent.

It was all made worse by the fact that Alfric and Hannah could probably hear the entire conversation, if indistinctly.

There was safety in not saying anything, but there was also danger. This was what was so hard about people. You could sit there in silence and people would infer all kinds of thoughts, and if those were the wrong things, you would have to explain how and why they were wrong. But then they might not even say what they had inferred, so you couldn’t know, and couldn’t say.

“I’ll go,” said Verity. “Let me know when you want to talk.”

She slipped away without another word, as silently as she’d entered.

After perhaps ten minutes of sitting alone, Isra got up from her tent and sat among the small flowers for a bit. There was a strip where the ectad tree trunk had laid down, a place where the small native flowers had been crushed, and while they had sprung back, the difference between the ones that hadn’t been crushed could still be seen. Isra wondered how long she would still be able to tell the difference.

When another ten minutes had passed, Isra went to Hannah’s tent. Hannah was good for advice, calm and understanding, and she’d never made Isra feel stupid for her feelings. Verity hadn’t either, not intentionally, but obviously the problem couldn’t be discussed with Verity.

Hannah was asleep though, snoring softly, and Isra realized that she was wrong, that either Hannah hadn’t heard the conversation, or was simply not that concerned with it. In her mind, Hannah had been invested in what was happening in the tent.

A quick check confirmed that Alfric was asleep as well, or if not asleep, then at least on his side with his mouth part way open and eyes closed.

Isra returned to her tent. She had thought about going to see Verity, who was surely not yet asleep. Verity was slow to sleep and late to rise, and the conditions in the tents, while fine, didn’t lend themselves to a quick sleep. But whatever Isra would eventually say to Verity, she didn’t have the words yet, and if Isra crept into the tent, she would have no words, leaving her no better off.

Sleep came slowly. It was Isra’s first time sleeping in a dungeon, but that wasn’t the thing that was bothering her.

~~~~

It was hard to say whether or not Isra woke early, but she did wake first. Alfric didn’t rise too much after her though, and after a long drink of water and a trip to the latrine, he sat down beside her.

“Ready to get to work?” he asked.

“I am,” said Isra.

“I’ll be wearing the helmet but nothing else,” said Alfric. “We’ll want to be able to grab weapons in a hurry if we need to. This is an operation that would be better carried out with a full clear done, but the barricades should be fine. Monsters don’t tend to wander too much, even if they’re hungry, which they probably will be.”

“Most of the time will be spent on labor,” she said. It was a hollow nothing of a contribution to the conversation, but Alfric nodded.

“I’m strangely looking forward to it,” he said. “The seats will be monotonous, but the lighting and the big chandelier will be more interesting, as will some of the panels, if we can get them to fit. That curve to the opening hallway is going to severely limit what we can take out, but we could do the larger pieces one-by-one with the wand, possibly. Obviously it’s ideal to fit everything we can into the trunk.”

“No guild messages,” Isra eventually offered.

“No,” said Alfric. “Information blackout when you’re in a dungeon. It’s one of the things that makes the longer ones hard. It’s also hard for your loved ones, not knowing whether it’s just an extended dungeon or whether something bad has happened.”

“Your arrangement with Vertex would mean that they can’t do a dungeon longer than a day,” said Isra. She hadn’t cottoned on to that until that very moment, but all their dungeons thus far had been shorter affairs, typically embarked on early in the morning.

“That’s not technically true,” said Alfric. “They would just have to send someone out, like we did with Mizuki. Not ideal, but if they have enough stuff to strip out … I could see it.”

“You think this will be worth it?” asked Isra.

“Oh, definitely,” said Alfric. “A year from now, I’m hopeful that it won’t be worth it, that we’ll be making so much from our dungeons or investments or anything else that we can afford to leave something like this behind. Or we’ll have entads that can speed all this along so that it won’t be as time intensive.”

“Such as?” asked Isra, her imagination momentarily failing her.

“Oh, telekinesis of some kind would be excellent,” said Alfric. “That flute of Verity’s will also probably be helpful, come to think of it. But there are other options too, beyond just being able to apply force. A better method of extradimensional storage would be great.”

“You were singing the chest’s praises,” said Isra.

“Sure,” shrugged Alfric. “And it is very good in very many ways. The capacity is unreal. But it will be replaced in time, as all things will. The helmet is good for flight, very good, but I won’t have it forever. The thimble armor is a good get, but I can already feel the deficiencies. You remember my mom’s sword?”

“It would be hard to forget,” said Isra. “The sword that could single-handedly win a war.”

Alfric laughed. Perhaps he hadn’t heard the deference in her voice. “Well, it’s the weapon that she settled on now as her primary, but it’s not the first weapon she picked up and found in a dungeon. She’s been through dozens, maybe as much as hundreds, and switches between a small selection as she needs to. I think there’s something to that, accepting some level of … impermanence.”

There was something about the way he was speaking that was atypical for him, and it was difficult for Isra to put her finger on what it was. It was as though he was attempting to impart a lesson of some kind, but in a more roundabout way than he normally did. Alfric’s lessons were clear and straightforward.

“I was, ah, listening last night,” said Alfric. “Not intentionally, but our tents are close, and I didn’t have my earplugs at hand. It’s hard not to hear. I’ll reposition the tents sometime today, so it’s not an issue.”

“Ah,” said Isra. She attempted to make a connection to what he’d said before, and her mind failed her. “I don’t have a right to be angry.”

“But you do feel angry?” asked Alfric. He leaned in slightly and glanced at the tents, to make sure no one was moving.

“I don’t know,” said Isra.

“There’s something between you and her,” he said.

“I don’t know,” Isra shrugged again. “I had thought we were … building up to something.”

“I don’t know if you want advice,” said Alfric.

“Yes, please,” said Isra. “I keep waiting for someone to tell me what to do.”

“What I was saying about impermanence,” said Alfric. “You can’t latch onto the first thing you come across. The bow, that’s — it’s really good, and there’s a chance you’ll still be using it fifty dungeons from now. But you need to be open to using something else. You need to have the understanding that maybe this isn’t forever, and that’s alright.”

“And in this metaphor,” said Isra. “You think Verity is … the bow?”

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “I think you would be better off trying to not see this as something monumental and vital. What Hannah and Marsh have, a casual thing, that might work better than, ah, whatever you have now. But I’ve only ever had one romantic partner, and she stabbed you in the stomach, so I might not have any clue at all what I’m talking about.”

He left it at that, and Isra ruminated on it.

Hannah got up not too long after that. She made a show of stretching out, but Isra had a feeling that the timing was a bit too convenient, and that she might have been listening in just a bit herself. Isra didn’t mind, she only hoped that Verity hadn’t caught any of it. The feelings were embarrassing. A quick check showed that Verity was still asleep in the tent, looking peaceful in her slumber.

“I had a thought last night,” said Hannah. “Which is that the food situation is dire. So I was thinkin’ about what we have, and what we can do to make it better, and it occurred to me that we do have herbs. Those masks, remember?”

“Ah,” said Alfric. “I suppose that would work. If you wanted to take over food preparation?”

“Walked into that one, did I?” laughed Hannah. “But ay, I would be happy to. I’ll take some inventory of what we have while we wait for Verity to rise.” She glanced at Verity’s tent. “Might be able to make a full meal before she’s up …”

“We’ll wake her early,” said Alfric. “We need to get a move on.” He turned back to Hannah. “Feel free to use the mints or chocolate, but we have very little of both.” Those, intended for consumption to take the taste of vomit out of a person’s mouth, had been their dessert the night before.

“I’ll scrape somethin’ together,” said Hannah. “Overall I’m quite pleased to be doin’ this, unmakin’ a theater. There’s something very symmetrical about it, if you think hard on it.”

“Is there?” asked Isra. “The theater wasn’t ever made. It was a dungeon creation.”

“Well, ay,” said Hannah. She seemed nonplussed. “But Garos has some thoughts on birth and death as bookends to a person’s life, and it’s not a principle that gets applied to structures so much, especially since they’re so often asymmetrical beginnings and ends. Mostly the end comes from rot or fire. There’s some symmetry in rot, at least for a house of wood, but not so much in fire.”

They skipped breakfast. This was the normal mode of eating in Dondrian, and Alfric thought that if they were going to be stuck eating variations on the same thing many times, it might be better to do only two meals a day.

And then they were back in the theater, with their gear stripped off but with weapons in a known and strategic position, ready to begin tearing out pieces of the theater.

The chairs were in sections of three seats, with the legs nailed into position through a hole that had then been covered with putty and then paint. The best way to take them out, which they’d covered the day before, was to use something called a crowbar to carefully pry up the leg without damaging the chairs all that much. This took some doing, but so long as the damage was asymmetrical, Hannah could fix it quickly and without much issue, though she did complain that it was exactly the sort of thing that Garos was ill-suited to, presumably for theological reasons.

It was difficult, sweaty work, and Isra lost herself in it. She did her best to go at a steady pace, finding a rhythm to the work, the same way she did when breaking down a large carcass. It was hot in the theater though, and she stripped down to let her sweat cool her, leaving her headscarf and the shirt with its longer sleeves piled up by the weapons. It wasn’t quite the sweltering heat of summer, but the work was difficult, requiring much of her body weight and frequent repositioning.

In the rare moments she wasn’t working, Isra’s eyes were drawn to Verity. Physical labor was not a strong suit for Verity, but she was giving it her all with the same stubborn determination that she brought to a difficult piece of music she was learning. Like Isra, Verity was only minimally dressed, with her pale arms levering her own crowbar. She was beautiful, Isra decided, made more perfect in those moments of concentration and grit.

They hadn’t talked. Normally they gravitated toward each other, but now it was the opposite. They worked on different sides of the theater, in their own sections. Isra did want to talk, to be with her, but she didn’t know what to say or how to explain.

So instead, Isra ran through conversations in her head.

“I am hideously, irrationally upset that you kissed Xy,” Isra might say. “I am angry that you would fool around with her when you could fool around with me.”

“Oh,” Verity might say. “I had no idea that would interest you. You never said, or really gave any indication.”

“I was waiting for you to make a move,” Isra might say. “I can’t lead you onto the dance floor when I don’t know how to dance.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Verity might say. “Xy has already laid claim to me, and she knows her way around a woman much better than you do.”

“Let’s just drown her,” Mizuki might offer. “Find some quiet pond and hold her down until she’s not moving anymore.”

But it probably wouldn’t go like that. It was more likely that Verity would say something eloquent and thoughtful, that she would have taken lessons in how to deal with this sort of situation. The night before she had seemed to deal with it gracefully and with due consideration, giving Isra time and space. Whatever Isra was planning to say once they spoke again, assuming they did speak again, it was certain that Verity was planning to say something too. Verity’s plans were surely more complicated, more nuanced, and with the benefit of experience.

They took a break for a late lunch, which they had up on the balcony. Hannah had cooked, and it was an improvement on what Alfric had made, but that wasn’t saying all that much. There was more in the way of flavor, but it was still simple fare. Isra had gotten too used to Mizuki’s cooking.

“My hands are a mess,” said Verity, holding them out. “I’m getting blisters.” She was saying this to the group, rather than to Isra.

“I’ll do what I can,” said Hannah. “Try to use one hand more than the other, if you can.”

“These fingers are for lute playing,” said Verity. She sounded apologetic. “Gardening too, but there I usually have gloves.”

“There are gloves in the pack,” said Alfric. “With a crowbar you shouldn’t need them, and they might not fit, but they’re there.”

“Thanks,” said Verity.

“So, I’d like to take five minutes and take stock,” said Alfric. “We’re roughly four hours in, I think, and we’ve removed about a hundred and fifty seats. That … isn’t great.”

“It’s still a good wage, assumin’ the seats can be sold for enough,” said Hannah. “Thirty rings a piece? That means an hour’s work is gettin’ us somethin’ like … a thousand, split four ways?”

“I don’t know if it will be thirty a piece,” said Alfric. “Also, it’ll be split five ways.”

“I liked the idea of splittin’ it five ways more when I hadn’t just put in so much work,” said Hannah. “But ay, it’s what we agreed to, we’re a team. I do wonder what she’s doin’ out there on her own.”

“Keeping out of trouble, hopefully,” said Alfric.

Chapter 92 - Frank Discussion

Verity hadn’t been prepared for how long clearing out the theater would take, and when the scope of the work became obvious, she didn’t want to be the one to say ‘maybe I’d rather not’. She did think those words though, repeatedly, especially when she began to develop calluses on her hands in the places where she was gripping the crowbar. The gloves helped, but they were also slightly uncomfortable.

There was not a single thing that was good about stripping seats out of the dungeon, actually. The food was repetitive and also not terribly good, there was a faint stench of blood and death even after Alfric took some time to move the bodies he could backstage, she didn’t have a spare set of clothes, and the tent wasn’t particularly comfortable.

She kept thinking that someone would say ‘maybe this is enough’ and she would pipe up with ‘surely each additional chair is worth less than the last, and each hour we’re in here is more draining than the hour before’. But no one ever did say that it was enough, and she didn’t want to prove that she was the wrong choice to stay in the dungeon to do the hard work. Ripping up chairs gave her plenty of time to think about why it had been so important for her to stay, and she’d come to the conclusion that maybe she’d been a bit impulsive or contrary.

She already felt like her role in the group was different from the others, pure support for their endeavors, and if she’d left it would have put her further away from them. Worse, she’d have been spending time preparing for the concerts, practicing and refining, with no one to talk to. She hadn’t wanted to go home and be alone for a few days practicing the same pieces over and over again. She had wanted to be with her friends, talking with them.

Not that the conversation in the dungeon was all that much to write home about.

“So, how was your day?” Hannah asked at the end of their third solid day of taking apart the theater. She said it with a chuckle, a little joke, and Verity had a sour feeling. Three days ago, she might have found it a bit funny.

“I think we’re getting faster,” said Verity. “It shouldn’t be more than another day.”

“Half a day,” said Alfric. “If that. I was hoping that we could leave at the end of tonight, but I don’t want to leave anything behind, not just for the funds, but because I want to be able to compare as much as we can against the original.”

“Why?” asked Verity.

“To map the phenomenon,” said Alfric. “It’s really hard to say from where we’re sitting right now whether the theater is a copy pulled from the real world, or whether it’s pulled from your mind and then maybe altered to fit. I haven’t been to the Ellusifé more than a few times, and it’s not like I memorized some detail that I could use to confirm that it’s accurate.”

“Ah,” she said. “I didn’t see anything out of place.”

“Well,” said Alfric. “I’m operating under the assumption that this is all you somehow, so it would all have to match everything that you’ve seen, extrapolated somehow.”

“It’s early to start havin’ theories,” Hannah. “I’m sure there are scholars who’ve seen this sort of thing before,” she held up a hand because Alfric had opened his mouth to interject. “Not this exact thing, but maybe in the wide world of dungeons, millions of dungeons that get run, there’s been some kind of aberration, somethin’ the scholars know about, or bounds to the problem, or things like that.”

“This is the eighth time we’ve had this conversation,” said Verity.

“You’re the one who asked why I wanted to compare,” said Alfric.

“It was a rhetorical ‘why’,” said Verity. She knew she was being snippy, and took a breath. “I’m much less enthused about this than you are.”

“I know,” said Alfric. “Sorry.”

“No, I’m the one who’s sorry,” said Verity with a sigh.

Dinner was rice and beans again. Verity felt like she was starting to get used to it, which was a frightening thing. One of the things they talked about with some regularity, from their small collection of conversations, was what they would eat once the theater was stripped and they went back out of the dungeon.

“I’m just hoping there’s some stew left,” said Alfric. “But Mizuki has probably eaten most of it already. I wonder if she would make another batch for us?”

“Ice cream for me,” said Verity. They’d talked about it enough that she had a stock answer. “We’re missing out on fats. Maybe some crispy pork.”

“I’ll want some advice on what to keep in here if we do this again,” said Alfric.

“I don’t ever want to do this again,” said Isra.

“The plants in pots, I mentioned,” said Hannah. “Takes advantage of the stasis in here.” They spent most of their free time in the garden stone space, which at least had the benefit of not stinking of death. The constant sunshine — or mimicked sunshine — was getting very old.

“We could bring animals,” said Isra. “Something we could slaughter. Or a chiller.”

“The next time we’re overnighting probably won’t be like this,” said Alfric. “It’s much more likely that we’re just in for a two day stretch next time, having cleared out the hostile creatures and then with extra work to do on stripping out things of value.” He bit his lip. “It does depend on whether we find another Ellusifé.”

“If we do, I don’t want to do this again,” said Isra. “There are easier ways to make money.”

“It depends on what kind of prices we get on these things,” said Alfric. “There might literally not be any easier way of making money. I don’t want to count chickens before they’re hatched, but this is a haul.”

They talked about the money often, and Verity didn’t usually join in. The money might be enough to keep her family in good standing, but from the amounts they were talking about, it didn’t seem likely. She was also a bit skeptical of how much the chairs were actually worth, and that was something that was on her mind quite a bit while she was endlessly ripping them up. Was the five minutes of work worth ten rings or a hundred? The seats had small little metal labels on them, and she couldn’t imagine someone paying for that unless the seats were being sold to a theater. And if they were sold to a theater, how often did theaters get built, or replace all their seats? Her skepticism had grown as their stay went on until she’d convinced herself that they’d get almost nothing for their labor.

After dinner she usually practiced her lute. It wasn’t something that she wanted to do after spending so much time with a crowbar in her hands, but practice was something that needed to happen every day, lest her skills begin to rot. She had sequestered herself in the dungeon, but the concerts were approaching. Unfortunately she hadn’t had the foresight to put sheet music into one of their storage entads, so she was playing from memory, which was never the best. She was getting more familiar with the pieces that she already knew best, and if her memory of a piece had an error, she was making it more firmly embedded in her mind.

The theater was, in theory, of Xuphin, since she was a Chosen of Xuphin, but the entire experience smacked of Bixzotl, God of Copies. There were two thousand two hundred seats, more or less identical, pulled up through the same mechanical motion repeated over and over. They ate the same meals every day, and they’d found themselves repeating conversations as well. And when all that was done, Verity practiced with her lute, producing copies of songs that had been copied by other musicians a thousand times before.

She’d had a nightmare that she would be in the dungeon until she was old and gray, that somehow they would keep finding theaters and keep being compelled to clear them out row by row.

On the fourth night in the dungeon, sleep came on slow. Her mind had too many thoughts, and while she’d always heard that hard physical work helped people to sleep, she had decided that this was simply a lie people told to try to extract work from others.

Isra had stayed mostly silent since that first night. Verity wasn’t sure that they were still friends, or whether they could be friends in the future. She’d tried to give Isra space, but now too much time had passed, and there was no way to say ‘are you still angry with me or what?’ It was all incredibly awkward, and largely Verity’s fault.

Three days had been more than enough time to tear apart their brief conversation a hundred times. Verity had developed several different ways of thinking about it, and when she approached it in her mind, it was a choice between which of the thoughts would dominate and which of the narratives she’d constructed would win out.

Verity had only mentioned that she’d kissed Xy because she’d felt guilty, and she’d only felt guilty because it felt like maybe there was something with Isra, some actualization of their relationship on the horizon. It had felt like it was going to happen in that very tent, on their very first night. The nature of that ‘something’ had been a subject of much speculation by Verity, both before the night in question and after. That Isra felt put off was proof that there had been a ‘something’ and that Verity might have ruined it, or possibly squandered an opportunity.

One of these threads of thought was a compilation of all the times that the ‘something’ had been painfully obvious. The slow dance they’d shared together, the times they’d slept in the same bed, the way they spent so much time together, the moments of vulnerability and sharing … but at the time, it had felt like there was something deniable about it.

In art there was always a matter of interpretation, some of it by the artist, some of it by the audience. Where one person could read contentment, another person could read melancholy. Where someone heard ecstasy, another person could hear unstable mania. The thing Verity was most worried about was that she’d misread their relationship, that she and Isra were not even remotely on the same page as far as what had been happening between them.

Verity was in her own head too much. She kept meaning to talk to Hannah, who was trained not just in giving romantic advice to people, but in giving advice on exactly this sort of situation between women. Unfortunately, Hannah had been having private talks with Isra, and Verity worried that it might seem like she was attempting to use Hannah as an intermediary, or possibly as a spy. There was, certainly, a conflict of interest there, though Hannah hadn’t said as much. Verity thought that perhaps the supposed conflict of interest was just a way of justifying not having to talk with Hannah.

Verity had thought that what was happening between her and Isra was some kind of slow feeling each other out, perhaps because Isra was unsure of her own attraction, and definitely because Verity was unsure of Isra’s attraction. What it might have instead been was that they were just going Isra’s speed, which happened to be slow. Maybe Isra really was like a wild animal, one that needed to be fed with exaggerated slowness and care if it was ever going to be domesticated. Perhaps up until three nights ago it had been going exactly as was best for Isra, and now she was just back to being skittish.

All this was guesswork without talking to Isra, but Verity had still not done that. The ball was in Isra’s court, wasn’t it?

There was another thread of discussion in Verity’s head, which was the one where she discussed with herself whether or not she’d done anything wrong. She had spent hours on this topic, weighing in from all sides, and the answer appeared to be ‘yes, but no, but yes’. It was exhausting and fruitless to think about, but Verity felt bad, and allowed herself that bad feeling, because Isra wasn’t talking to her, and what was the point in trying to absolve herself? It was easy enough to pin this on Xy, but if Verity had been effectively partnered with Isra, if that was the nature of the ‘something’, then it was clear that Verity should have put a stop to that arrangement much sooner. If Isra was upset, it seemed certain that was what she was upset about.

It was very clear that the time in the dungeon was wearing on Verity, and she wasn’t sure how much more she could take.

Isra slipped into the tent without warning and laid down next to Verity, close beside her. Verity had been laying on her back, staring at the ceiling, and Isra was on her stomach, propped up by her elbows.

“Hi,” said Verity.

Isra stayed silent and looked into Verity’s eyes.

The kiss came slowly, though not tentatively. The meeting of their lips was soft and tender, with the artful firmness of someone taking the lead in a dance. Isra moved with surety, and Verity did her best to yield. It was a moment that Verity had been dreaming about, sometimes fitfully, and now it was happening. She did wonder whether it was a dream, but she never realized her dreams were dreams until she woke up, and the sensation was too real. She tried to burn everything into her memory, to savor it, but there were too many individual pieces to think of, the way Isra was slightly on top of her, the gentleness of her lips, the faint smell like woodchips or cinnamon, curled hair hanging down, the warmth of her breath, the sounds that seemed to flood her ears, all of it.

Verity had no idea why this was happening, or why it was happening now, but she let her thoughts float away.

~~~~

In the morning, Isra was gone, and then it really did feel like a dream. Verity wondered whether it had happened at all. They had fallen asleep together, cuddled up close, skin against skin, and hadn’t said a word. In the cold light of morning — metaphorically, given that the garden was a timeless place and mildly warm — Verity was left wondering why it had happened and how, and who she needed to thank.

Everyone else was already eating a breakfast of rice and beans, but Verity had eyes only for Isra. She was without her headscarf, the curls of her hair hanging down and looking gorgeous, even though they’d been stuck taking short showers with something Alfric called ‘powdered soap’. Isra gave Verity a knowing smile, then went back to her bowl of food as though that was it.

“Last big push today, and we’re home before nightfall,” said Alfric. “If we don’t get the last of the seats … then that’s fine.” He glanced at Hannah, and Verity wondered whether they’d had some private discussion on this point.

“Good,” said Verity. She was feeling chipper. The rice and beans even tasted better, though Hannah had been experimenting, and perhaps it was just a matter of having hit on a good combination. “I’ll be very happy to leave this place behind.”

“Does it help, do you think?” asked Hannah. “Takin’ this place apart?”

“Help in what sense?” asked Verity, arching an eyebrow.

“With the emotions you feel over the comin’ performance,” said Hannah. “I’ve seen you up on the stage, doin’ your practice.”

“That’s only to get a more accurate sense of things,” said Verity. “On the day of, I’m not going to be playing with this lute. And presumably the whole thing won’t have a stench of dried blood, the floor won’t be wrecked, and the theater won’t have been looted, but I suppose one never does know.” This got a smile from Isra, and Verity smiled in turn.

“We’ll have some rest once this is all done,” said Hannah. This was directed at Alfric, though he hadn’t shown all that much sign of needing rest, in spite of the fact that he’d been putting in more than his share of the labor. Verity suspected that he’d had an undone day where he’d left the dungeon; if he had, he hadn’t disclosed that, and she hadn’t asked.

“We’ll rest,” nodded Alfric. “Though with the way the chest works … right now we have a very tall vertical column of loot. We’re not taking enough to build our own huge theater, but it’s got to be close. Unfortunately, all that stuff is stacked up in whatever order we were able to put it in, which means that when we sell any of it, that will mean unpacking all of it. So … what we need, ideally, is better storage, which we don’t have.”

“This is a thought that’s been brewin’, has it?” asked Hannah.

Alfric nodded. “It’s something to think of down the road, but ideally we wouldn’t be packing more things on top of the theater parts, because with the chest’s capacity, there’s a risk we compound the problem by putting it off.”

“If I never see another theater seat, it will be too soon,” said Verity.

“We have a full day of work ahead of us,” said Alfric.

“I don’t know what day it is,” said Isra. “It might have been four days, or six.”

“I doubt we worked too much,” said Alfric. “But I suppose that’s a possibility. The daylight in the garden has been throwing off our ability to tell time. I’m hoping that we have a timepiece in the future, but it was something I considered fairly low priority. The most vital thing we’d need it for is making sure we didn’t pass over to the next day for the purposes of chrononaut stuff, but I don’t think I would ever put us in that kind of position.”

“Hopefully we’ll make enough from this venture that we can get everythin’ you want … which seemed to be a whole room full of things for us to pull from,” said Hannah.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “Two rooms, ideally, plus a walk-in chiller if we’re pulling meat, which, with Isra, I’m hoping is something we begin doing more of.”

“I’m afraid more logistics will make my head explode,” said Hannah. “And the more we spend our time talkin’ about this sort of stuff, the more glad I am that we have someone who enjoys it.”

“It is interesting though, isn’t it?” asked Alfric.

There were some murmurs, but not any explicit agreement. A few days ago there might have been some conversation, but it died out quickly, and then it was time to pull out more of the chairs. Verity was okay with that though, because Isra was smiling at her.

They worked together for most of the day, and talked together, really talked, though not about what had happened the night before, or about that ‘something’ between them. It was like coming out into a warm spring day after months of winter, and it made the labor bearable. They kissed twice, proof that the night before hadn’t been a one-time thing, quick kisses in stolen moments when they were putting a set of chairs into the chest, or when they were working together to remove a particularly stubborn nail. It was strange to see Isra with such a persistent smile on her face. It had never been Isra’s default expression.

Later in the day, after lunch, Verity found herself next to Hannah.

“Things goin’ well?” asked Hannah. She had been getting sweaty, and had been doing most of the work stripped down, with the leggings she normally wore beneath her armor rolled up to show her thick calves. Her breasts were tightly bound, with no shirt.

“Very,” said Verity. “Thank you, for whatever advice you gave Isra.”

“Your talk went well?” asked Hannah.

“Not much talking,” said Verity, which bordered on being an indecent amount of gossip. It was said with a grin that couldn’t be suppressed.

Hannah gave a hesitant smile, but it didn’t stay on her face for long. “Well, if I can give you some advice, and hopefully this isn’t an overstep, I think the two of you should be doin’ a pretty hefty amount of talkin’. Talk about what you want, what you like, how you think things are goin’, how you think things should go, what you expect from each other —”

“Like you and Marsh are doing?” asked Verity.

Hannah’s frown was quite pronounced, and Verity felt like she deserved that. “I don’t know what it is I want, or how to balance the different things I want. It’s one of the things that I’ve been thinkin’ on while we’ve been in here, what the shape of my life is goin’ to be like, and how Marsh fits in with that. You and Isra … are you partnered now?”

Verity pursed her lips. “We haven’t talked about it.”

“I saw you kiss,” said Hannah. “And I’ve seen the looks you’re givin’ each other. But I s’pose if you haven’t talked about where things stand, you can’t say. I get the sense that I’ve stepped past my bounds a bit too much though, so I’ll leave you to it. If you do want advice, you let me know. It’s somethin’ that I have some trainin’ in, especially between two women, especially between two young women who maybe don’t have much idea what a relationship should be like.”

Verity took a breath. “I’m sorry for being catty.” She’d found herself apologizing a lot lately, perhaps because she’d been on edge and too quick to offer insult.

“It’s fine,” said Hannah. “You’re happy, which isn’t your default state, and you wanted someone to share the happiness with you.”

Verity was momentarily startled, because this was exactly what had happened, and she hadn’t even fully processed it. She had wanted someone to share in her joy, and Hannah was the only one available, because she was sure that Alfric was holding back some words about how inappropriate and unprofessional the relationship was.

“I am happy,” said Verity. “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Hannah nodded. “And I’m happy for you, I just want it to work, and if you don’t talk to each other … there’s a chance that it will work anyhow, but then it is chance. A good partnership, in my opinion, shouldn’t be left to chance.”

“You might be right,” said Verity. She glanced across the mostly stripped down theater, looking at Isra, who gave a friendly wave back. “And what did you tell her?”

“There are limits to what I can say, but the same, mostly,” said Hannah. “I said that if there are problems, they need to be talked about, that there are always areas of negotiation, that communication is vital and shouldn’t be skipped over because it’s awkward or difficult. All stock advice, really. Garos puts emphasis on reflecting back and forth, mirroring each other in your own heads. Think about what the other person is feelin’ and how you would feel, see the places where there’s some symmetry between the two of you. Obviously I can’t discuss the specifics of what I talked about with Isra, but relationships are actually pretty simple, it’s just navigatin’ the emotions and the mental state of the other person that sometimes need — or want — some help.”

“Thank you for not taking the dig about Marsh personally,” said Verity.

“Please,” said Hannah. “I know that I’m doin’ things wrong there, mostly because it’s not what I’d planned on. And you should remember that I’m a professional. I wouldn’t be much of a cleric if I got upset when people lashed out at me. We do our best not to escalate. I’m just tryin’ to look out for you in my own way. You’re both friends, and I want you to do well together. And I know you both have some problems with communication.”

“Both?” asked Verity. “I was raised knowing how to speak with people.” That Isra wasn’t was left unsaid. That wasn’t a bad thing, but it was a thing, and the suggestion that they both had problems with communication, perhaps equal problems with communication felt absurd.

“You were taught to be proper,” said Hannah. “But you’ve said yourself that your mother didn’t seem to hold much respect for honest emotional communication. You’d get shut down or deflected, so you learned not to express it.”

“Ah,” said Verity. “That. Well, there you may have a point.”

The conversation did dampen Verity’s mood a bit, and put some of what had happened into context. Isra had been told to go talk, to have a lengthy discussion about their feelings and what they meant to each other, and rather than talking, Isra had decided that wordless kissing was what the situation needed. Verity was happy with that, very happy, but it did make her a bit nervous, because it meant they’d skipped past the talking. Hannah seemed convinced the talking was necessary, and the kiss had felt to Verity like a non sequitur, but she decided that she was simply going to adjust to this new reality, and if Isra didn’t want to talk about it, that was fine.

They ate lunch, rested up, then continued on with the work. They had, in the end, managed to remove almost all of the seats, most of the panels, the chandelier, the majority of the lighting, and other bits and bobs. Reclaimed wood was relatively cheap, so they’d left most of that in place, especially given the labor that would have been involved in taking the entire stage. There was also fairly significant damage to the stage, along with the first few rows of chairs, many of which had been bloodstained from the battle. Still, much of the theater had been taken apart, everything that wasn’t nailed down had been packed into the chest, and many things that had been nailed down had their nails removed.

“I think we’re done,” Alfric said. “There’s more we could take, but we’re hitting diminishing returns, and I think we all want to get home.”

“Oh thank the gods,” said Verity.

“Let’s go home, and hope that home wasn’t burned down,” said Hannah.

They went down the path they’d last been down several days ago, with Alfric armed and moving slowly, just in case there was some kind of surprise waiting for them. Thankfully, there was nothing.

Coming out into the real world was a literal breath of fresh air. Verity stood for a moment in the sunlight, face turned up, breathing air that hadn’t been fouled by their breathing, and feeling cool wind against her skin. The dungeon had gotten worse the longer they’d been in it, and she hadn’t fully grasped how bad until she was out. She wanted to write a song about it.

“I used to like the garden stone,” said Verity with a sigh. “And now I never want to go in there again.”

“Er,” said Alfric. “You need to go back in so that I can use the dagger.”

“I’ll take the chest instead,” said Verity. “I’m quite serious about taking at least a week break from being in the stone. I want good, properly cooked food, a long bath, and some time to not think about dungeons.”

“Alright,” said Alfric. “Anyone else going to stay out of the stone?”

“I’ll go in,” said Hannah.

“Two can fit in the trunk,” said Isra with a nod.

<I really don’t know what it is,> said Mizuki. <He’s nice enough, attractive enough, interesting enough, he’s just not —>

<Mizuki, we’re back,> said Alfric.

There was silence in the party channel.

“Was she … talking to herself into the party channel?” asked Verity.

“Must have been,” said Alfric.

<Well I’m mortified,> said Mizuki. <How much of that did you hear?>

<Just the last sentence,> said Alfric. <Sorry, I would have stopped you sooner if I’d realized that it wasn’t meant to be public.>

<Ha ha, yeah,> said Mizuki. There was a brief silence. <Awkward. But anyway, you’re all home? No one died?>

<We’re just outside the dungeon,> said Alfric. <And yes, we’re finally done, with what we hope are hundreds of thousands of rings worth of things to sell. If it’s not too much trouble, we’ve been eating rice, beans, and sausage, so some kind of good dinner would be very much appreciated.>

<On it,> said Mizuki. <But you mean lunch, right?>

“It’s before noon,” said Isra. She was looking up at the sun. <Our timekeeping was imperfect.>

<In which direction?> asked Alfric. <Has it been four days or five?>

<Including the day we first went in there, it’s been six,> said Mizuki. <Come home quick. I’ve been missing you guys. Let me know what you want for dinner, I’ll probably have to run into the store, or I can whip something up.>

<Stew,> said Alfric.

There was a pause from Mizuki’s end. <I’ve been eating stew basically the whole time you were gone, sorry. I’ll figure something else out.>

<We’ll be home soon,> said Alfric. <We’re on a bad schedule, it’ll take some time to adjust.>

<See you soon!> said Mizuki.

There was some faffing about as Alfric put everything metal into the chest, then loaded Hannah into the garden stone, then took off on his own. That left Verity and Isra next to the chest, which would run along once they were inside it. They were alone, together, for the first time in days.

Isra’s kiss was more urgent this time, and perhaps a bit more confident. At least some of the night before had been them learning how to kiss each other, a process that was sometimes slightly awkward, but they’d made it work, and it was clear that they were going to be getting more practice in. On this point, Verity was firmly committed to the idea that practice made perfect.

A small part of Verity was distracted by Hannah’s words, and the fact that she hadn’t really had a conversation with Isra about what this was and where it was going, but that inner voice was easily drowned out. The only thing that stopped them from staying there at Callipygian Point was Mizuki loudly saying into their ears that lunch was ready.

Chapter 93 - Catching Up

Alfric was overwhelmingly happy to be back in the house. They hadn’t taken quite as much as they might have from the dungeon, but leaving meat on the bone was a classic dungeon issue, and you did eventually end up with a lot of unsellable junk if you took everything. The trick was taking only the best junk, which Alfric thought they probably had.

And coming back meant seeing Mizuki again, who Alfric had really missed. There was something she added to the group dynamic that he hadn’t fully appreciated until she’d been gone.

“I didn’t get into trouble!” said Mizuki. “Why does everyone think that I can’t go five days without getting into trouble? I lived on my own in this house for four years before you people came along.”

“And did you get into trouble?” Alfric asked.

“You should be aware that I know the answer to that question,” said Hannah. “So think carefully before you lie.”

“I got in heaps of trouble,” said Mizuki. “But it was only small trouble, and while you were gone, I didn’t even manage any of that. I was good. Do you want to go first, or should I?”

“We took apart the theater,” said Hannah. “Nothing much of note happened, it’s better summed up with a list of what we took, which won’t take all that long.”

“No, there’s got to be more,” said Mizuki. “You were there five days, and I spent a lot of that time thinking about what must be going on. Did a monster break through the barricades and you had to fight it? Did you suddenly realize you were in mortal peril from the air supply and had to race to safety? Give me the details.”

“Alright,” said Alfric.

He was halfway into his explanation of the difficulty in getting the chandelier down when he realized that her face had fallen, so he switched the story to include all kinds of minutia that he knew she wasn’t interested in, including the specifics of the tools he’d used, the relative weights of every piece involved, and how he’d managed to get leverage.

“You’re making this boring on purpose,” Mizuki finally said, interrupting him.

Alfric smiled. “Only once I could see how painfully bored you were.”

“Mean,” said Mizuki.

“And what were you up to?” asked Hannah. “If it wasn’t trouble.”

“Oh, lots of things,” said Mizuki. “But where are Verity and Isra?”

“Erm,” said Alfric. “It seems like they may have made things official.”

“You mean,” said Mizuki. She made a circle with her thumb and forefinger of one hand, and then moved like she was going to insert a finger of the other hand into the circle, then stopped in confusion. “Wait, what is it for girls?”

“I don’t think there is one,” said Hannah.

“Lame,” said Mizuki. She made a circle with each hand, then bumped them together.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to speculate on,” said Alfric. “I’d rather allow them their privacy.”

“I can’t believe I missed out on that,” said Mizuki.

“You didn’t miss anything,” said Alfric. “It’s between them, not between us.”

“Very noble of you,” said Mizuki with a nod. “I’ll get the juicy details from them later. Though … I don’t really get it.”

“Get … what?” asked Hannah.

“The whole, you know,” said Mizuki, gesturing vaguely. “I don’t understand what men like about women, so it’s even harder to understand what women like about women. So I’m just kind of baffled. It’s like, some people like olives, right? And there are these two people who are both good friends, and they’re sitting down to eat a bowl of olives, and I wish that I could join in, or at least, I don’t know, have a discussion about olives. Or say ‘yeah, I like olives too’.”

“Er,” said Alfric. “And to be clear, in this case eating a bowl of olives is … having sex with a woman?”

Mizuki blushed. “You know what I mean.”

“I really, really don’t,” said Alfric.

“It’s okay to not ‘get it’,” said Hannah. “But maybe don’t say that in front of them, or make comparisons to eating olives.”

“Right,” said Mizuki. “I’m just … trying to express something. Confusion, I guess, or a feeling that I’m missing out.”

“Again,” said Alfric, “Just to be clear, you think the thing you’re missing out on is … having sex with women?”

Mizuki nodded. “You get it. If all my friends are doing it, why doesn’t it work for me? That kind of thing.”

Alfric shook his head. Sometimes he really didn’t understand Mizuki. This was what she was greeting them with after five days away.

“Anyway,” said Mizuki. “I’ll keep my mouth shut about it around them, and when I get the juicy details from one or the other, I’ll just imagine that they’re talking about a boy.”

“So what were you up to?” asked Alfric.

“Oh, um,” said Mizuki. “You know, on the third day I was thinking that I should have a little report ready to go about what you all missed, but then you were gone so long, and it wasn’t clear what I should be keeping track of, and I didn’t know what you would care about. Oh! That guy, who I helped with the frink fruit? He stopped by with a jar of frink fruit jam. He was very curt with me, but I think maybe that’s just how he is. We didn’t really talk, but it was nice. Alfric, Kell stopped by wondering whether or not he should join Vertex, but I guess too much time passed, because he joined Vertex anyway. And I had them all over for dinner last night, since I had bought a bunch of food thinking that you guys surely couldn’t be gone for long, and I was worried that it would spoil.”

“How did that go?” asked Alfric, raising an eyebrow. It felt odd, that his former team would be all together in the house, eating Mizuki’s food.

“Oh, just fine,” said Mizuki. “It was their first meal as a team, actually, though they’re waiting for you to come back so they can have a safety net.”

“Mmm,” said Alfric. He still wasn’t convinced that the deal was a good one, and perhaps it was explicitly a bad one that he’d made out of some misplaced obligation toward the team.

“Grig is trying to keep it all together, Josen thinks he’s better than everyone, Mardin is treating it like a joke, and Marsh is —” she looked at Hannah. “Missing you.”

“Ay, I miss him too, there’ll be no secret about that once I get showered off,” said Hannah.

“We’re kind of friends now,” said Mizuki. “He came over a lot, looking for you, hoping that you’d be by, and they were waiting on Alfric for dungeons anyway.”

“Wait,” said Alfric. “They’re taking Kell when he’s only first elevation?”

“He’s fifth,” said Mizuki. “He did a bunch of dungeons solo.”

Alfric gave a pronounced frown. “How did he get a key?”

“Dunno,” shrugged Mizuki. “I didn’t ask him. But you said that you could get a key pretty easily, right? They mostly just see whether you have any experience. And he’s got some military training, for whatever that’s worth.”

“You’re really not supposed to go alone,” said Alfric. “A wizard has the best shot, if they can have both offense and defense, or a surplus of offense, but there’s such a high chance that it’ll be lethal when compared to normal dungeoneering. I’ll have to talk to him.”

“He came out fine, and with a few good entads,” said Mizuki. “He’s actually a really skilled wizard with a, uh, better collection of stones? Or something? He’s been talking to me about wizardry a lot, I kind of want to give it a shot.”

“You want to become a wizard?” asked Alfric, raising an eyebrow. “You’re already a good sorc. And you’d have to go to school. Plus you’re a little old to be starting.”

“Ouch,” said Mizuki, clutching her heart.

“I’m showerin’,” said Hannah. “Then I’m puttin’ on somethin’ nice, hopin’ that there’s lunch, then goin’ to track down Marsh.”

“He’s staying in town,” said Mizuki. “At The Angry Plum. We may have had a little too much to drink last night.”

That gave Hannah pause. “You were with Vertex? Or just you and him?”

“No trouble,” said Mizuki, holding up a hand. “Not that you were saying there might be, but — he’s my first legitimate male friend. He talks about you a lot.”

“Wouldn’t I be your first legitimate male friend?” asked Alfric.

“Right, sure, he’s my second legitimate male friend,” said Mizuki.

Hannah went upstairs, and Alfric went into the living room to take a seat. He was tired, mostly because of the hard labor and the drifting sense of time, but also because he’d been cooped up in the dungeon for so long with only the same three people for company. Dungeons were great, but sticking around in a single dungeon was, somewhat surprisingly, very mentally taxing.

Mizuki followed him. “I suppose the shower is going to be in pretty regular use?” asked Mizuki.

“Do I need it?” asked Alfric. “We were showering in the garden stone, I had a pretty good setup there.”

Mizuki leaned over and sniffed him. “Yup, you need a shower.”

“After lunch then?” he asked.

“Time to get started, I guess,” sighed Mizuki. “Go do your business. Or keep me company in the kitchen.” She moved without waiting for him.

“I’ll keep you company,” said Alfric. He yawned. “It doesn’t feel like lunch. Down in the dungeon, we must have drifted off the clock, and for us, it’s more like dinner. I’m going to have to make sure I know my schedule so I don’t miss the witching hour.”

“Can I help with some of the work?” asked Mizuki. “I feel bad for not being in there with the rest of you.”

“There’s a lot of work, actually, and I would love your help,” said Alfric. “The trunk is going to need to be unloaded, and the garden needs to be cleaned up from our stay there, with everything reset and repacked. We ate through a lot of our supplies, which will need to be replaced, and there are lots of improvements to the food supply we thought up while eating through the rice and beans. We’ll be moving in some plants that can just live there, ready for the eating. Lots of shopping, lots of trying to find a buyer for the theater stuff, lots of work left to do.” He yawned again.

“You’re dead on your feet,” said Mizuki. “My guess is you did twice your share of the work?”

“I’m bigger and stronger,” said Alfric. “And I think if everyone else had their way, we wouldn’t have stayed there so long. I’m praying to Xuphin that we get a good payout from it, because if we don’t, it will mean that I wasted everyone’s time.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” said Mizuki. She was rummaging around in the chiller. “I … might not take my share.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Alfric.

“When we first went dungeoneering, you wanted to use some complicated system to make sure that everything was fair,” said Mizuki. “And me staying home for practically a week while you guys did hard labor in isolation is definitely not fair. Besides, I did nothing in that whole dungeon.”

“Most of the money is going right back into the group,” said Alfric. “Or, we should talk about it once we have the money, or some glimmer of money on the horizon, but it does seem like a lot of it is just going to be group money. And if there’s money to distribute, you are going to get your share, just so there aren’t bad feelings.”

“You’ve changed your mind about loot distribution?” asked Mizuki.

“I guess,” said Alfric. “I do think it made sense when we didn’t know each other, to have some kind of system of bids instead of just a system of dibs, but —”

“Do you think they’re related?” asked Mizuki. She had a pan on, and was grilling thick pieces of pork, mixed in with apricots. Alfric’s stomach was rumbling, as they’d elected not to eat another meal of rice and beans before leaving the dungeon. A second large pan joined the first, this one with asparagus, which was at the end of its season.

“What?” asked Alfric.

“Dibs and bids,” said Mizuki. “It seems like they’re related.”

“I’ve got no idea,” said Alfric. “You know, I never did get to explain the system in full.”

“And you never will,” said Mizuki with a little laugh. She turned to him. “This looks good to you, right? It’ll be about ten minutes, I think.”

“Pork, apricots, and asparagus,” said Alfric. “It looks amazing.”

<Ten minutes until food, get it while it’s hot!> Mizuki called into party chat. “I was going to make potatoes too, but they take too long.” She looked at him. “I really did miss you, sorry for making fun of your system.”

“It’s not really my system, it’s a common system used by a lot of dungeoneers,” said Alfric. “Even some long-lasting groups. It’s not what I’d been planning to do with Vertex, but it wasn’t that far off either.”

“I like the way we do things now,” said Mizuki.

“I do too,” said Alfric. “Everyone gets what they need, and we don’t worry too much about how it all shakes out. Which is why you shouldn’t give up your share. The dungeon before this one, you did far in excess of your share. It’ll balance, in the end.”

“It’s only spells,” said Mizuki. “And I would be ten times as powerful if I were a wizard too. From what Kell says, the biggest barrier wouldn’t be the stones, which he could lend me, it would be that first hump, getting to be able to build a vessel that can hold some mana.”

She had been piling things up on a plate, which she handed over to Alfric. He took it from her and got some silverware, then dug in, not waiting for the others. He was sure that they would understand, and it was anyone’s guess how long Verity and Isra would spend taking some time to themselves.

“I actually trained to be a wizard, briefly,” said Alfric. “I didn’t have the aptitude for it. They say that if you don’t get your first vessel by the time you’ve been at it for six months, it’ll take you two years.”

“You’re the patient type though, right?” asked Mizuki.

“Mmm,” said Alfric. The pork was incredible after so long in the dungeon. The apricots tasted sweeter, the asparagus fresher, and while he wouldn’t say that it was quite the best meal he’d had in his entire life, it really did come close. At some point the others came in and ate, and the conversation that he’d been having with Mizuki was put on hold for a moment.

“This is literally the best,” said Hannah. “I haven’t had a finer meal.”

“Top ten meals of all time for me,” said Alfric.

“I should have you all get stuck in a dungeon more often, if I get compliments like this,” said Mizuki. She’d eaten a lighter meal than the rest of them. “And I wasn’t even really putting that much effort into this.” She turned to Alfric. “You were saying that you never got much wizardly education?”

“I got education but had no talent for it,” said Alfric. “I put in the time and didn’t get any results. It happens. Anyone can be a wizard, but not everyone can be an effective wizard. If you’re going to have Kell training you, you’ll be at a disadvantage, but I guess it’s possible you learn whether you’re good enough.”

“And basically all you do at the start is learn how to build a cup?” asked Mizuki.

“Mizuki is going to be a wizard?” asked Verity, looking up from her food. “We’re going to have to hear all about what you were up to.”

“I gave the brief version already,” said Mizuki. “Met some people, made some new friends, was bored out of my skull a bit, got some work done because I had very little else to do, cleaned up around the house, did everyone’s laundry, took care of the dragons — oh, Cate stopped by, twice.”

“What did she want?” asked Isra. It was the first time Isra had said anything. She’d been too busy making moon eyes at Verity.

“Our dragons,” said Mizuki. “Also she wanted me to let you know that work will be starting on the excavation soon, because they did find the buried thingy, and it does seem like there’s a monster imprisoned there. Not what we fought, something else.”

“And you didn’t give her the dragons, right?” asked Isra.

“I was tempted,” said Mizuki. “But no, I didn’t want to get yelled at. The second time she came, it was with some gifts. I think she was a little annoyed that you’d said you were going to figure out what a good market price was, then unexpectedly left for almost a week. Anyway, I talked with her for a good hour or so both times, she’s nice.”

“What gifts?” asked Alfric.

“Oh, nothing unusual, just some food, and a lot of herbs for the dragons,” said Mizuki.

“Let me see,” said Isra, standing up.

“Relax,” said Mizuki. “This happened yesterday, and I didn’t feed the dragons herbs because I knew you’d be suspicious. You can go in and check on the dragons, but I checked on them this morning, and they’re fine. I really don’t think Cate is a dragon thief or anything, she’s just really into dragons. You wouldn’t accuse Alfric of being a dungeon thief, or Hannah of being a Garos thief, right?”

“I’ll go check on them now,” said Isra. She glanced at Verity. “They probably want to spread their wings.”

“I think I did a pretty good job,” said Mizuki. “Though they’re ravenous and growing quickly, and I’m not sure that the herbs we’ve planted will be enough for them in the long run. Plus Cate said if we’re going to keep them, we need to think about how we’re going to have fresh herbs available to them in the winter months.”

“And she’s offering to take them off our hands?” asked Alfric. “But at a lower price than a hundred thousand per?”

“Something like that,” said Mizuki. “I told her from the start that I wasn’t the money person, that was either you or Isra. And Cate does seem nice, just really interested in the dragons, and not willing to pay the ridiculous price that Isra was asking.”

“I don’t think it was ridiculous,” said Verity. “It was the opening of a negotiation.”

“Sure,” said Mizuki. “Oh, you have mail, by the way.”

Verity blanched. “Ah.”

“Sorry,” said Mizuki. “I didn’t open any of it, I wasn’t sure whether you’d have wanted me to, or if there might be something urgent that would have required a response from you. There’s also a package, which … might be a lute?”

“A lute?” asked Verity. “They would never send a valuable lute through the mail, not even with a dedicated courier, and they would never leave it here without me being expressly handed it.”

“I did have to sign a thing,” said Mizuki. “It’s sitting up in your room.”

Verity swore and got up from the table, then turned back and grabbed her plate to take it into the kitchen.

“I’m going to shower, then rest,” said Alfric.

“I’m goin’ to see Marsh,” said Hannah. “Don’t expect me back until late.”

“Well what am I going to do then?” asked Mizuki.

“The latrine in the garden will need to be cleaned out,” said Alfric. “I emptied it into the dungeon before we left, but —”

“Nope,” said Mizuki. “I’m not doing it unless I draw the short straw.”

Alfric sighed. “Alright, I’ll arrange the drawing of straws later.”

Mizuki watched him, not seeming sure whether or not that was a joke. “I’ll help you with it, I guess.”

“It’s fine, I’ll just do it,” said Alfric. “Not a huge deal.” And it wasn’t, but it was also something that he didn’t particularly want to do.

“No, I will help,” said Mizuki. “If I’m not going to contribute in the dungeon, and not going to do any of the work of stripping things down, then I can at least make sure that you’re not the one burdened with all the poop work.”

Alfric nodded, feeling relief. “Now I really do need to shower.”

“Listen,” said Mizuki, pointing a finger up. “The shower is running.”

This was true, the shower was running. Alfric hadn’t called dibs on it after Hannah, but he had wanted to get properly clean before taking at least a quick nap. For the rest of the day, he’d resolved to do no work, and the day after would be an undone day, where he was also not going to do any work aside from getting the entads identified. But he had wanted to shower. The house had two bathrooms, but only one bath, which was on the second floor.

<I’m next in the shower,> said Alfric into the party chat. <Try not to take too long, please.>

There was a brief pause. <We won’t,> Isra replied.

“We?” asked Mizuki.

“Well, at least they seem happy,” said Alfric.

“You’re not a fan?” asked Mizuki. “I think they’re cute together.”

“I do think they’re cute together,” said Alfric. “But … well, I don’t like to gossip, and this feels like gossip.”

“Fine, fine,” said Mizuki. “Keep your thoughts to yourself. I’m going to go flying, did you want to come with?”

“The helmet doesn’t allow for two,” said Alfric.

“We can walk to the stone in the backyard,” said Mizuki. “Then I can fly with sorcery, and you can fly with the helmet. I’ve never flown with someone before.”

“Sure,” said Alfric. “And then I’m going to shower, and then I’m going to rest.”

They talked a bit as they walked, but Alfric’s mind was elsewhere. He was thinking about Isra and Verity, and the complications that it might bring. He was happy for them, and tried not to lose sight of that, but he’d have been a bad team leader if he didn’t try to anticipate the issues. The biggest issue was what would happen if they broke it off for whatever reason. They all lived in the same house, though Isra would probably retreat back into the woods, and while people could have amicable breaks, and the dungeoneering was supposed to be a professional endeavor, it was also possible that the break would be a bad one that turned the dungeons into a toxic or awkward affair. Having two people in a party be partnered wasn’t the worst thing in the world, though it took the right two people. Dating within the party was significantly more worrisome though, simply because relationships often didn’t work out. And everyone had heard stories about party members being too familiar with each other over party chat, or on the other hand, airing their dirty laundry.

He worried that his experience with Lola was coloring his thinking. There’d been a time when he really had loved her, or thought that he loved her. They had showered together on a few occasions, before it had all gone sour. The tainted memories washed over him, giving him a piquant, bittersweet feeling. He was tired, that was what it was, and he really did need some sleep before making any big decisions or committing to anything.

They reached the large stone, and Mizuki climbed up on top of it.

“Ready?” she asked as Alfric put on the helmet he’d been carrying.

“Ready,” he replied, lifting a few feet up into the air. He’d been using the helmet in the dungeon, mostly for getting everything that was high up, but outside, it gave far more in the way of freedom. He reveled in the wind on his face and the freshness of the air, appreciating it like a deep breath after being underwater, or a meal of pork and asparagus after little but rice and beans.

Mizuki crouched down low and then launched herself into the sky, and Alfric shot up after her.

He was slower than her, which he found somewhat surprising, since the helmet was quite fast by the standards of running speed. She flew toward the house at a fast clip, then glanced behind her to see him falling behind and slowed to let him catch up.

“I should have been born a bird!” she called over the winds rushing around them.

He chased after her, smiling, until he was flying beside her with his arms outstretched. They held in that position for a moment, fingertips almost touching, until Mizuki pushed ahead with her superior speed and flung herself up into the air.

“Catch me!” she shouted out, the words difficult to hear and almost lost in the whipping wind.

For a moment Alfric didn’t realize what she meant, and only watched her falling, but the words registered and then he was off into a dive, going after her as she began to plummet to the ground. She was moving fast, faster than the helmet would allow, and he positioned his body like a falcon as it goes after prey, streamlined. He saw her expression just before he caught her, wild and free, with a mischievous grin, and then he wrapped his arms around her, one across her back, the other around her waist, pulling her close and then using the helmet to slow them down before they hit the ground. He turned them around so that he would take the impact and he could support her with his entire body.

As it turned out, they had quite a bit more leeway than he’d thought, and they ended up drifting to the ground with her on top of him.

“Wow,” said Mizuki. “Nice catch.” Alfric’s back touched the ground, and she climbed up off of him, brushing herself off.

“That was dangerous,” said Alfric. “Were you — if I hadn’t caught you —”

“You saw me go up before I stopped flying, right?” asked Mizuki. She frowned at him. “I’ve done this literally hundreds of times, I know my limits, and I’ve hardly ever gotten seriously hurt. I had a good enough hold on the spell to stop myself before I hit the ground, by a wide margin.” She softened slightly. “I just thought it would be fun. And it was.”

“You scared me,” said Alfric. He let out a breath. “In a good way, I guess. It was exhilarating.”

“Then we can do it again tomorrow,” said Mizuki. “But for now, I’m going to take that helmet from you and go do some flying on my own. I need to get all the stuff for dinner tonight, and I need to make it a good one, lest anyone think that I’ve lost my edge.”

Chapter 95 - Thinking Outside the Box

Alfric had said that being a dungeoneer involved a lot of travel, and Isra supposed that this would simply be her life now, going from place to place. Dondrian had been fascinating, a place with thousands of owls whose eyes were easy to see through, teeming with people, perpetually warm with the winds of the vast ocean coming in at every hour of the day. There had been many new rules to learn, rules about which side of the street to walk on, rules about certain people not to talk to, things like that. She hoped that some of that knowledge would transfer, but the good thing about a city, in Isra’s opinion, was that it was okay to be from somewhere else. People would give you leeway if you messed up. And if they didn’t give you leeway, the odds were good that you were never going to see them again.

Plenarch was a different city, the sea lending a different flavor to it, the winds carrying different smells, and the way it was spread out over islands in a lagoon with a bridge to the mainland gave it a character of its own. There was a faint smell of fish that seemed to perpetually hang in the air, even when they were in the middle of one of the islands, and there was a smell of smoke that was occasionally so heavy that it could almost be tasted. There were a large number of cats in the city, perhaps because of the fish, or perhaps for pest control. Isra’s understanding of Dondrian’s owls was that part of why they were used was to deprive insects and rodents of food, something they were largely successful at. In Plenarch, they seemed to use cats to kill anything they didn’t want around.

It was a strange, lovely city. The one problem with Plenarch was that Verity wasn’t there.

The house that Alfric led them to was an odd one, shaped like a cube that had been sunken into the ground. The front door was a square as well, one set into a different square on the front. The squares were already clearly going to be a running theme, and Isra wasn’t sure whether she liked them. They waited for some time after Alfric had knocked.

“She knows we’re coming,” Alfric said. Isra took this for an apology or explanation. The sentence was of those sideways things that she had been practicing, a way of saying one thing while meaning another.

“The house is an entad,” said Mizuki. She was squinting at it. “It’s the biggest entad I’ve ever seen.”

“Is it?” asked Alfric, looking at the house. “It seemed unusual.”

“I would love a magic house,” said Mizuki. “How do you get a thing like this out of a dungeon?”

“Typically you don’t,” said Alfric. “But if you’re a seasoned dungeoneer with some very nice storage entads, you could take it that way, either shrink it down or warp it into a holding place, or something like that. Then again, we don’t know what the house does, so maybe it grew to this size.”

The door finally swung open, and they found themselves looking at someone whose face wasn’t human. He had deep jowls, like a bulldog, and was covered in fine brown fur, with large, rheumy eyes that quickly scanned them. He was dressed in fairly normal clothes despite his appearance, a close-fitting shirt with long sleeves, and loose pants that accommodated legs that bent backward. His hands had long fingers covered in black scales, only three fingers to a hand, one of them bent inward like a thumb.

“Welcome,” he said, his Inter perfect, his voice low and rich. “Please don’t be alarmed by my appearance. Are you Alfric Overguard?”

“I am,” said Alfric, keeping his surprise, distrust, disgust, or whatever else he was feeling from his face. “Is my aunt Penny in? I believe we were expected.”

“She’s out at the moment, due to an emergency,” said the creature. “My name is Willam, one of her permanent guests. She asked me to show you to your quarters, if that’s alright with you. If you’d rather not interact with me, I would suggest waiting three hours, at which point she’ll be back, and I apologize for the inconvenience.”

“A tour from you will be fine, Willam,” said Alfric. “I’m familiar with my aunt’s work.”

“Excellent,” replied Willam. It was now clear that his odd face had been tightly controlled before, and he gave them a wide, expressive smile, showing rounded teeth like pebbles on a beach.

They followed Willam into the house, through the large square door. The inside was composed almost entirely of squares of various kinds, composed of squares, which were used to make up most of the furniture. It gave everything a very blocky appearance, and Isra found herself unsettled as they moved through the foyer and into the large dining room.

“What’s with all the squares?” asked Mizuki.

“The house, as you might have guessed, is entadic in nature,” said Willam. “It can create any object composed of perfect cubes, with the strengths of the entad being related to how large and perfectly composed the cubes are. Each room is a perfect cube, or composed of two or three of them, each doorway is a square set within a sub-divided face of a cube, and so on. You’ll notice that the ceilings are quite high in many of the rooms in order to accommodate this.”

The dining room was massive, almost as tall as the church in Pucklechurch, with the ceiling forty feet above them. It was a cavernous space that made Isra feel small. A chandelier was hung from the center, and it descended down on a thin wire to perch just above the table, like a spider hanging above its prey. Isra couldn’t imagine dining there, but she supposed that they would. The table was just as square as everything else. The motif of squares was broken up in places by furs, statues, and greenery, but it was an unsettling and unwelcoming house. Isra wondered if the others felt the same.

“This is wild,” said Mizuki, who kept looking around. “I love it. Wait — is that statue also made of cubes?”

Toward one end of the dining room there was a statue of a woman, a nude. As they moved closer to it, following in Mizuki’s wake, Isra could see that it was true. The woman, laying on her side, was composed of cubes, each of them slotted into a grid shape that extended in three dimensions. Up close it was difficult to make out that it was a woman, but the illusion was convincing from far away. She was laying on her side, hand on one hip, looking off into the distance from beneath a large bushy hairstyle with a defined part.

“That’s my aunt,” said Alfric, frowning at the statue. “Penelope Overguard. Not a true aunt, she’s a second aunt once removed, I think. In the guild though.”

“How do we feel about tasteful nude sculptures of ourselves in the house?” asked Mizuki. She reached out and touched the curve formed by the series of cubes. “Can I touch this?” she belatedly asked Willam.

“Everything in here is made from the entad,” said Willam. “It cleans itself.”

“Neat,” asid Mizuki. She looked over at him, eyes taking in his features, then looked back at the statue. “Does she … is she married? Partnered I mean?”

“No,” said Willam. “She was pacted, if you’re familiar with the practice, but the children are now grown, and they felt no need to continue as a family except at special occasions — holidays, mostly.”

“And there are others of you in the house?” asked Mizuki. “Other, ah, dungeon … monsters?” She had paused as though searching for the correct words, but she had obviously failed.

“A creature taken from a dungeon is referred to as a bastle,” said Willam. “Lady Overguard prefers the term bastlefolk for those under her care, though a bastle is generally a pet or commercial animal, and there’s some disagreement.”

“Well what do you prefer?” asked Mizuki.

“Bastlefolk is fine,” said Willam. “And to answer the question, there are three others who live in this house. None of them are like me though. I was pulled from a dungeon alone, and am now a species of one.”

Mizuki frowned. “How does that — you know what, sorry for the questions, I’ll mind my own business.”

“We’re accustomed to the questions,” said Willam. “I personally don’t mind them. I’m not as true a believer as Lady Overguard is, but I do believe in doing my part.”

“Okay, so how does that work?” asked Mizuki. “Someone pulled you from a dungeon and then … brought you here?”

“Thirty years ago, yes,” said Willam. “A small, poorly-funded group found me in a crib after having killed the dungeon-mad creatures who I share a nominal species with. They had heard of Lady Overguard’s initiative and brought me to her for the generous reward she was then offering for bastlefolk. After a quick check, a cleric of Qymmos — Mansin, who is still part of the initiative — declared that I was a model case. I resided at the Tender Hearts Home in Dondrian for my first ten years, and now live here, with Lady Overguard.”

“How many of you are there?” asked Mizuki. “Bastlefolk?”

Willam hesitated. “It depends to some extent on how we’re counted. Of those at my own level, there are four here and seven in Dondrian, with perhaps another dozen outside those two cities. There are another fifty or so whose behavioral, social, or intellectual disability severely limits them, and I believe at the moment there are several hundred whose disposition is as-yet unknown.”

“Wow,” said Mizuki. “That’s —”

“A complicated issue,” said Alfric. “One that you can discuss at length with my aunt, if you feel like you need to.”

“I was going to say grim,” said Mizuki. “Hundreds of dungeon babies and there are like two dozen people to show for it?”

“Thousands, in fact,” said Willam. “And yes, I don’t believe there’s anyone who wouldn’t agree that it’s quite grim. Lady Overguard speaks on the grimness of the endeavor quite often.”

“If we could see our rooms now, that would be wonderful,” said Alfric.

Isra watched this all. Mizuki didn’t like to be corralled, but was also legitimately interested. Hannah was standing back, making no contribution to the conversation, which seemed to be because she felt that it wasn’t her place, or possibly because she didn’t think her thoughts were appropriate. Isra’s own feelings on these bastlefolk felt uncomplicated. She was glad that these people had been rescued from the dungeons, and sad that the dungeons occasionally made such things. She felt a kinship with them, perhaps inappropriately, and wanted to ask Willam what it was like to be a creature that was perpetually out of place. She held her tongue.

They were led to their rooms without much further discussion, through the House of Cubes. There were plentiful guest rooms, it seemed, and the one Isra was placed in seemed overly large, a cube twenty feet to a side, with a four-poster bed whose frame was also shaped like a cube. It was all so elaborate, and gave a feeling of wealth far beyond what Isra had seen in Dondrian. Verity had joked that Isra was getting a very skewed view of the world, having seen some of the most expensive and unique houses in Inter and little else, and this house was doing nothing to help with that.

Isra had a sack which had been placed inside the trunk, and she spread out her meager belongings on the bed. She had a change of clothes for the next day, but she’d grown dissatisfied with her wardrobe, particularly in comparison with Verity. The particular style of dress that Isra was accustomed to was popular in Tarbin — or what her father had always said was popular in Tarbin. It was proper, in some ill-defined way, to keep her arms covered even in the height of summer, to wrap a scarf around her head and tuck her hair back. Her father had never really explained why this was how they dressed in Tarbin, but among the books they kept were a few that proclaimed the virtues of modesty and made it seem as though showing skin and flowing hair was an invitation for … they never really said what, but she had taken it to be mating behaviors.

There was still a part of her that felt naked without the headscarf, but there was a different part that felt like giving it up would take her a step farther from her father. To give up both the clothes and the house felt like walking too far from where she’d come from. She could get used to going around with more of her skin showing, inviting attention and attraction — she had done it enough since joining the party — but it was attached to a sense of loss. Isra wanted to be like Verity, able to smoothly glide through conversations, graceful and poised, always knowing the proper thing to say, but she was starting to become convinced that it would mean a loss of self. And perhaps if Isra were to become more like Verity, wearing the same clothes, styling herself in the same ways, Verity would like her less. Verity wanted a wild wolf in the woods, that had become clear, and Isra yearned for the warm embrace of civilization.

Isra had wanted to go shopping for clothes with Verity, but that wasn’t going to happen on this trip. Isra did want clothes though, and this would give her a chance to buy something without Verity seeing it ahead of time.

They were getting ready to head into the city for their various purposes when Penelope Overguard returned. She swept into the house like a storm, loudly and with the wind of her exclamations, with two teenagers, a boy and a girl, trailing behind her. Like her, they were dark-skinned, and both looked rather sullen in contrast to her boisterousness. The so-called Lady Overguard greeted them with a wide smile.

“Alfric!” she called. She wrapped him in a hug. “I’m just so happy to have you out this way, when I heard you landed in Pucklechurch I had hoped that we might have a small reunion. I keep telling the family that we haven’t had a reunion in far too long, but of course there are concerns about too many together in the same place.” She released him and waved a hand.

“Aunt Penny, these are the other members of my party,” said Alfric, gesturing to the group. “Our bard, Verity, had to stay back in Pucklechurch, but —”

“Oh, I was so hoping we might get a small performance,” said Penelope. “A sneak preview of the coming concert series? I do have tickets.”

“You do?” asked Alfric.

“It’s the talk of the town in Dondrian,” she replied. “And of course news trickles down to those of us who can make the trip.” It wasn’t clear whether she meant people with special entads, people with enough wealth, or both. “But do continue the introductions.”

Isra watched. Penelope Overguard was close to how she’d been depicted in the cubic statue, though older, and with a few more pounds. She had wide hips and a bright smile, and though she must have been at least sixty, she didn’t look it. She had a hat with such a wide brim that it was almost comical and a dress that moved along with her in a sinuous way. Isra decided that she liked this woman. When it came Isra’s turn to be introduced, she only nodded, but she tried to make it clear that this wasn’t merely a perfunctory nod.

“I do know your buyer,” said Penelope. “I sold to her a few times, back when I was in the business. That was nearly thirty years ago, though it took much longer than that for us to clear our warehouse. We had a setup that allowed us to take absolutely whatever we wanted, and we did, with some abandon.” She turned to the two teenagers she’d come in with, frowning slightly. “Kali, Pek, would you like to be introduced as you are, or could I convince you to show yourselves around friends?”

“I’ll stay as I am,” said the girl, who Isra assumed was Kali, an assumption that was born out less than a second later. “Kali Overguard, bastlefolk. I’m wearing an entad to keep me normal.”

Penelope frowned again. “That’s not the language that I would prefer you use.”

Kali shrugged. “I’m going to my room. I’ll be down for dinner.” She turned to the party. “It’s been nice meeting you.” It was very clear that this was a perfunctory and grudging display of manners. She slipped away, off to some other portion of the large cubic house.

The boy, Pek, removed a ring from his finger and transformed.

He was taller, in this new form, though mostly in the neck. His pale face was studded with rounded rocks, each of them sitting within a cavity that seemed made for them, limned with opaque wetness. The features of his face were otherwise normal, though perhaps his eyes were a bit small and his nose a bit big, mouth wide and teeth off-colored. His arms forked, with two forearms on each: these fitted neatly into his flared sleeves, which Isra had thought were a matter of style.

If Isra had seen something like him in a dungeon, she wouldn’t have thought twice about killing him. It was a sobering thought.

“We met Willam,” said Mizuki. “Is there a reason he doesn’t get a disguise?” It was the first thing anyone had said after the silence that followed Pek revealing himself.

“Willam has one,” said Pek. “Whether to wear one or not is — complicated. I wear mine when I’m out. Kali — she’s my sister — hardly ever takes hers off.”

“I collect such things, disguising entads,” said Penelope. “If you find something suitable, I’ll offer a premium price for it. But of course we would rather fix the problem from the other end, naturally.”

“The other end?” asked Alfric.

“We would rather the bastlefolk fit in with society and have no need to disguise themselves as human,” said Penelope. “If people would accept them as they are, they would have no need to blend in. In Dondrian, they are known within their neighborhoods, and we’ve made good progress in Plenarch as well. There are, however, some differences in thought.”

“I need to spend some time with my books,” said Pek with a deep bow. “It was a pleasure to meet you.”

Once he was gone, Penelope turned to them. “And how are we enjoying Plenarch so far?”

“We only just got here,” said Alfric.

“Well, you’ll have dinner with us here, won’t you?” asked Penelope. “It’s entad-served, whatever you’d like.”

“Sounds great,” said Mizuki.

“We were going to take in the city, if that’s alright with you,” said Alfric.

“Of course!” clapped Penelope. “And perhaps over dinner we can discuss the finer points of the bastlefolk.”

“If we had encountered any likely babies, we’d have brought them to you,” said Alfric. Isra saw Mizuki raise an eyebrow, but she said nothing. When they’d talked about thinking dungeon creatures, Alfric had mentioned babies only as an aside.

“Yes, of course,” said Penelope. “But there are other things to consider beyond simply that.” She waved a hand. “We can have the discussion over dinner. It’s been so nice to see you, I feel like the last time we spoke in person was — four years ago?”

“Seven,” said Alfric.

“And you were just a boy then,” said Penelope. “Now a man grown, and your parents are so proud of you.”

“Thanks,” nodded Alfric. “It’s kind of you to say.”

“Well, I’ll talk your ear off later,” said Penelope.

They warped out together, then went their separate ways, leaving Isra alone in the city. She had a fair number of rings in her pouch, and was on a quest to find some clothes that would look more like what she routinely saw around Pucklechurch, or that matched some of the dresses that Verity wore.

She took her headscarf off when she wandered into the store, and pretended to be another person, an airy dilettante who went into such stores every day of her life, and couldn’t possibly have cared less about the dresses, which she was an expert in. This was a technique that Verity had suggested: sometimes, when she was particularly anxious or needed to present a face, she would simply pretend to be someone else.

It was nice to smile, and nice to not have a care in the world. The woman who ran the shop seemed happy to have someone to talk to, and Isra kept her supplied with a steady stream of questions about the various cuts of the dresses, the materials, and the fabrics. Most of the dresses would need alteration of one kind or another, but Isra was convinced to try one of them on, and it was close enough that she could walk out of the store wearing it, though it would need the attention of a seamstress. It was so much more convenient to have everything custom fitted by an entad, but the shop didn’t have anything like that. Alfric’s mother had spoiled them, it seemed.

The dress was a purple panel dress with fluttering bits of fabric at the shoulders, and the only bad thing about it was that she would need other things to go with it. Her shoes looked too large and clunky with the dress, and of course something would have to be done with her hair as well, or she would have to get a hat to hide it. Still, she looked like a different person, which was what she had been going for.

It was a bit surprising how much you could learn by listening to experts, and how eager most people were to share something about their area of expertise. Plenarch seemed like a friendly city, more than Dondrian, and in a different way from Pucklechurch or Liberfell. The people of Plenarch felt eager to talk, and without so much a veneer of professionalism.

In some stores she said she was a dungeoneer, in others a druid, and while she never lied, she chose different things to emphasize about herself. She told a cobbler about Verity, saying the word ‘girlfriend’ for the first time. To a perfumier, she described spending nearly a week in a dungeon stripping out everything, getting sweaty and grimy, wanting to smell nice for a change.

She spent far too much money, especially at the salon, where they put polish onto her toenails and fingernails, and spent some time doing things to her hair that she didn’t fully understand. Part of the reason that she was willing to part with so much money was that she wanted the experience, not like it had been when Alfric’s mother had done all these things, but the experience that Verity had undergone before performances, getting prim and proper with all that entailed.

She didn’t haggle for much. Haggling was something that she didn’t particularly enjoy, though everyone told her that she was good at it. Most of what she did when haggling was treating the other person like an enemy, and she didn’t want to be enemies, not to people who were only trying to make some money. There were other ways to haggle with people, she knew, a way of trying to sell things by pretending that you were a friend to the merchant, or that you were giving a good deal, but she had virtually no experience with that except having been on the receiving end of it.

At the end of it, she didn’t look like herself. She was more womanly, more mature, as though she’d aged five years in an afternoon, and while she wasn’t sure that she had attained anything approaching style, she had gotten a look that worked. If the way she dressed was an invitation, an enticement, then it wasn’t enough of one that it caused anyone to stop and talk with her, or even look at her more often than normal. She liked fitting in though, looking like a woman with somewhere to be, perhaps the kind of woman who lived in a giant cubic house.

She ended up nearly late to dinner, even though the dinner was served much later in the evening than she was used to. The table was set, and people were being seated, which left Isra just barely enough time to drop her bags in her room.

“Wow,” said Hannah. Isra sat down beside her. “What have you been doin’ all day?”

Isra held up a hand and grinned. “Do you like them?”

Hannah took Isra’s hand and looked at the nails. “Quite the transformation.”

“But do you like them?” asked Isra, her smile momentarily fading. She wasn’t sure what she would do if the answer was ‘no’.

“You look very fetching,” said Hannah. “Mesmerisin’. I wouldn’t have expected it of you, that’s all.” She looked at the nails again, which were a deep red. “You look amazin’.” Hannah gave a closer look at Isra’s face. “All this makeup though, it’s — well, what will you do tomorrow?”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” said Isra. “Wash it off, put more on. I want Verity to see.”

“You had help with this though?” asked Hannah. “The blending is very clean, the lines are nice.”

“I had help,” said Isra. “It didn’t seem hard.”

“I think this is good for you,” said Hannah. “But you’re jumpin’ in the deep end, and the expert, to the extent we have one, is three hours flight away.”

“She’s under pressure,” said Isra. “I don’t want —”

They were interrupted by a knife clinking against a glass. All of the glasses were cubes and all the plates were square, though they seemed to have been made to match the house rather than created by some entad. The lip of the plates was a concession to practicality. Their uniformity suggested that they weren’t magical, and Isra wondered where the food would come from.

“Greetings all!” said Penelope with a clap of her hands. “We are honored to have guests here tonight to share in our largesse, to dine with us, to learn with us, to experience each other. I believe all introductions have been made, so I won’t waste much time before handing it over to Hannah. I always enjoy it when a cleric joins us.”

If Hannah found this request to be a surprise, she didn’t react in the slightest, instead rising just as Penelope sat.

“The Garam Ashar does not refer to humans,” said Hannah. “In the translations, sometimes those particular words are used, but in the proper godly language, delivered unto us by the gods themselves, the words are agnostic. We thinking beings are far more alike than we are apart, and even where we’re different, we reflect each other. I am glad the bastlefolk have been able to find a home, and I pray for the blessings of Garos upon it. May our meal suit this beautiful home, with the certainty of the gods.”

“Nicely done,” said Isra with a conspiratorial voice as Hannah sat down.

“Thanks,” said Hannah. She seemed surprised that Isra would have commented, and she was right to be surprised, because normally Isra stayed quiet. “I had it prepared, just in case. I think it needed a readin’ from the Garam Ashar, but I couldn’t think of one offhand. The theological question is an interestin’ one.”

There were several entads for food, which were passed around the table as though they were communal serving dishes. A ring the size of a bracelet extruded proteins, a brush left pasta in its wake, and roasted vegetables fell out of a shaker and expanded to full size once they were on the plate. There was much discussion about how to actually use these things, but there wasn’t the same bounty of possibility as at Alfric’s family home, and no little ‘game’ of having to figure anything out. Kali, who sat on Isra’s right, explained in brief how the entads worked.

Isra’s eyes went to Kali’s plate a few times. The bastlefolk girl didn’t seem to be eating anything like normal food, and she’d had the entads put some very hard, shiny things on her plate. They looked suspiciously like small rocks, and Kali picked them up with her fingers, one by one, and slipped them into her mouth, where they were swallowed without any obvious chewing.

“I eat rocks,” said Kali, after the third time Isra looked. She had a flat voice, without any obvious emotion to it.

Isra was silent for a moment as she tried to figure out what kind of response that warranted. She could ask what kind of rocks, but this was a bastlefolk, and she seemed to just want to be left alone, at least so far as their differences went. Surely these kinds of dinners weren’t uncommon, and the questions that came when someone else saw her eating rocks would be mostly the same.

“Sorry, no one said when we were introduced, what do you do?” asked Isra.

Kali blinked at her. “Do?” she asked.

“Your job, your vocation,” said Isra. “I’m a druid, and a dungeoneer.”

“Oh,” said Kali. She blinked. “I don’t really do anything.”

Isra frowned. She didn’t know how to handle that response. “I collect things.”

“What things?” asked Kali, with a frown of her own.

“Rocks, sticks, bits of bone, wood, mosses, little plants, feathers, objects of that nature,” said Isra.

“Why?” asked Kali. She used her delicate fingers to place another rock into her mouth, and it made a visible bump in her throat as she swallowed down.

“I just like them,” said Isra. “Some rocks are interesting, worn in particular ways, or with banding, or holes in them, or holes that have been filled in by some other sort of rock. There are rocks with good colors, or interesting shapes, or made of materials that you don’t often see. And then, when I’m feeling off, I can go look at my rocks and marvel at them.”

That seemed to give Kali pause. “I don’t know what that would be, for me.”

Isra returned to her meal, thinking the conversation was done. For the puck of meat she’d wanted poultry, and it seemed to be layered turkey, chicken, and squab, interleaved with very thin layers of herbs. It was good, though unconventional, and she cut it apart, eating it with the incredibly thin pasta she’d brushed onto her plate.

“You looked different when we came in,” said Kali.

“I went shopping,” said Isra. She showed off her nails. “And had a manicure.” Kali was still giving a questioning look. “I wanted to look pretty.” Verity had always said that Isra was pretty, just as she was. “Pretty in a normal way.”

“A normal way?” asked Kali.

“I was raised in the woods,” said Isra. “My father followed Tarbin customs. I didn’t learn that I was a druid until some months ago. I always felt apart from everyone, different, and that’s because I was different, I just didn’t know it.” She thought about what she had to say and tried to turn it into a funny anecdote. “Did you know, until about two months ago, I thought that everyone could look through the eyes of a bird and it was just that it was taboo to talk about? People would talk about the weather, and I thought that they were pretending not to be able to control it.”

Kali had, over the course of their conversation, seemed to come to life, her face taking on some animation, her movements less economical. “That’s insane.”

“It is,” nodded Isra. “I felt like the stupidest person in the world. But my father had died and I’d been on my own, so I had plenty of time to build up wrong ideas about the world.”

“But your parents must have known you were a druid?” asked Kali.

“I never knew my mother,” said Isra. “If my father knew, he never said. And then I was on my own. As I said, I had a lot of time to build up wrong ideas. But now I know, and I think I’ve figured out how to fit in.” She looked down at her nails again. “Right?”

“I want to be normal,” said Kali. She had a distant look.

“Aren’t you?” asked Isra.

Kali paused for a moment before answering. “A few days ago I had a bad breakup. He — he said the same thing, that I was normal, but it wasn’t true. I wasn’t normal enough for him.”

“We could go drown him,” said Isra. She smiled, but Kali looked aghast. “Sorry, that was a joke.” It had been funny and strangely reassuring when Mizuki had said it, and Isra wasn’t sure where she’d gone wrong in the delivery.

“I loved him,” said Kali. “Still do, really. But he left me, because I wasn’t … enough.”

“I’m sorry,” said Isra. She had no words to help, and felt useless. Kali seemed on the verge of crying, though it was difficult to tell, and Isra had almost no experience.

“It’s fine,” said Kali. “It’s our lot in life. Pulled from the dungeons before we could say whether we wanted to be. Always outsiders. Curiosities or a set piece for a debate.” She got up from her seat, though dinner was only half over, and rushed away from the table.

“I handled that wrong,” said Isra, partly to Hannah, partly to the empty air.

“No,” said Hannah. “It’s a tough position. But, maybe, from what I overheard, it might just be that she’s a teenage girl, full of normal feelings that press down on her like they’re tryin’ to turn her grapes into wine. Hard to say. I wouldn’t take her to be too indicative of how it is to be a bastlefolk, is all I’m sayin’. I’ve been around this house more than you and spoke with a few of the others.”

“Okay,” said Isra. “If you say so. Should I … go after her?”

“Sit and eat,” said Hannah. “If someone wants some space, better to give it to them.”

Isra sat and ate, and her thoughts turned, not just on the notion of the bastlefolk and how normal Kali seemed, but on the idea of being normal, of being young and in love.

She missed Verity, fiercely, though they’d seen each other just that morning. She hoped that desperate longing for one another would never go away.

Chapter 94 - Bridges

Hannah found Isra and Verity mildly annoying as a couple, but at least some of that was because her very good advice seemed to have been silently ignored. And it was going well now, at the start of things — or continuation, given that in practical terms they’d been dating for weeks without admitting it — but when the trouble came, they wouldn’t have given themselves the tools as a couple to handle it. Neither was terribly good at communication, and in both cases it was a matter of how they were raised. Isra just didn’t have anyone, and Verity had likely been punished or ignored whenever she attempted to say something emotionally honest.

The whole thing had encouraged Hannah to speak more openly with Marsh, not that she’d ever really held back with him. For the most part he’d seemed delighted by what she had to say, mostly because she’d caught a case of feelings for him. She’d badgered him when he was circumspect about his own feelings for her, as she didn’t want to be the only one pouring her heart out, and he’d eventually said that yes, he’d fallen for her, which had made her feel so warm and gooey that it was almost sickening.

It was easy to get wrapped up in another person, but she did her best not to let it affect her life too much.

“We’ve got a potential buyer for most of the theater stuff,” said Alfric in the morning. It had been about a week since they’d crawled out of that miserable dungeon. “Out in Plenarch. I actually have an aunt in the city who’d like to see me, and we could spend the night with her, though it might be cramped with the five of us.”

“I can’t,” said Verity. She’d been getting up earlier in the morning, Hannah had noticed, perhaps because of how her sleep schedule had adjusted after the dungeon, or maybe because she was sleeping next to someone who woke early. “I have to be putting every waking hour toward practice. I’m not ready for the concert, but it’s happening whether I want it to or not.”

“Fair enough,” said Alfric. “It doesn’t need to be all of us. I was thinking that with the helmet, it’s not more than four hours by flight, and it might be fun to see the city, or to get some necessary business done.”

“Four hours?” asked Mizuki. “Blegh. I like flying, but that sounds horrible.” She had pen marks up and down her arms, doodles, and it seemed to catch Hannah unaware every time. It was ridiculous.

“It’s worlds better than any other method we have,” said Alfric. “And if you’re not the one to fly, then you’ll be spending time in the stone.” He turned to Isra. “I’d like you to come along and help with negotiations, plus it would be helpful to have you do some dragon talk with some of the bastlekeepers there.”

The herb dragons were a point of contention in the group, though Hannah herself wasn’t overly invested in them. There were emotional arguments about the dragons being their pets, and there were also economic arguments about whether or not they were worth keeping for long enough that they might breed. Alfric didn’t strictly speaking want them gone, but he did see them as something of an obligation, and worried about feeding them in the winter, though that was far off.

“I’ll come,” said Isra with a glance at Verity.

“Who is the buyer anyway?” asked Mizuki.

“Koyama Nesk. She’s a speculator,” said Alfric. “Not someone who would use the stuff herself, just someone who thinks she can sell it on for a reasonable profit. I spoke with her by mail, and she didn’t agree to buy the whole lot, but she did give a prospective offer on the basis of what I described to her.” He was smiling slightly.

“Give us the number then,” said Hannah. “And given how you’re grinnin’ like a schoolboy, I assume it’s a good one.”

“Four hundred thousand rings,” said Alfric.

There was some stunned silence around the room. That was well in excess of what they’d been expecting, and even split five ways, that was as much as some people made in a year.

“It’s not final,” said Alfric, holding up a hand. “And she hasn’t even seen what we have. But it is a pretty decent offer.”

“Pretty decent?” asked Mizuki. “It’s amazing.”

“It’s the first offer,” said Alfric. “It’s also from someone looking to resell, and in practical terms it’s local. We could get more by cutting out the middle man, or going further afield. I sent a letter to the Ellusifé but haven’t gotten word back from them yet, and might not get more than a brief reply stating that they’re not interested.” He turned to Verity. “It might be nice to have your help with that? Talk to your mother, so she can mention it to someone she’s in contact with?”

“Mmm,” said Verity. “I — I’ll do that, yes.”

“Good,” said Alfric.

“Plenarch has a big magic school,” said Mizuki. “I might go there, if we’re going to be in the city for the day.”

“Mizuki,” Alfric began.

“I’m not enrolling, I just want to see if there’s anyone who can tell me whether it’ll be worth it,” said Mizuki.

Alfric looked like he wanted to argue the point. “So long as it doesn’t impact the schedule.”

“Any word from your guild about why we got the Ellusifé?” asked Hannah. “Or the League?”

“Nothing that bears repeating,” said Alfric. “One of the reasons that I wrote to the Ellusifé was so we could get some comparison to the real place, but again, there’s been no response, and there’s been more than enough time for them to have gotten my letter and replied back.”

“And the stuff that doesn’t bear repeatin’?” asked Hannah. “I’m writin’ a chapter for my would-be book about our time in that theater, and it would be nice to know why we got somethin’ special.”

“There have been a few scattered cases of near-clones,” said Alfric. “There’s no common denominator though, and they’re only near-clones, not actual clones. And even when they’re near-clones, they’re typically representations of things that exist within the hex, not distant things or things that are in the minds of the dungeoneers. Everyone seems to agree that it’s important, but they don’t agree on whether they expect it to be repeatable. I’m finding it frustrating and disappointing.”

“You felt like it would revolutionize dungeoneering,” said Hannah.

“I still do,” said Alfric. “But we’re going to need to run more dungeons to test it, and,” he looked at Verity. “I want to give you time, I know this is income that your family needs to weather a seizure. Do you think you can squeeze in a dungeon each week while the concerts are ongoing? Because if you can’t, we’re taking almost a month off.”

“Sorry,” said Verity. She tilted her head back and let out a sigh. “Yes, a dungeon a week, but they can’t last more than a day, and I really do need to keep the distractions to a minimum.” Hannah saw a downward quirk of Isra’s mouth, which passed by without comment.

“Then I’m getting ready to go to Plenarch,” said Alfric. “In theory, we’ll only be gone a day and a night. I do have to warn you that my aunt is a little eccentric, even by dungeoneering standards, but she means well.”

“Can we get some context on this eccentricity before we meet her?” asked Hannah. “I don’t want to make a fool of myself.”

“Unless it’s better as a surprise,” said Mizuki.

“We had that long talk about thinking monsters in the dungeon?” asked Alfric. “She — I was told that it was impolite to say that she collects them, but she runs a small institute. It’s in Dondrian, not Plenarch, but she might have a satellite office there, I’m not entirely sure and didn’t ask.”

“Wait,” said Mizuki. “What?”

“Sorry, she doesn’t go into dungeons looking for them,” said Alfric. “She actually doesn’t go into dungeons at all anymore, and, er, doesn’t think that people should go into dungeons. But if you go into a dungeon and you fight some kind of thing that seems like it might be a thinking creature, and then you find some kind of babies that aren’t affected by dungeon madness, you can bring them to her, and she — or her institute — will try to raise them and give them proper lives.”

Mizuki’s eyes had gone wide. “That’s crazy.”

“Okay, so maybe it was good that I brought this up before we went,” said Alfric. “Saying that it’s crazy is probably not what you want to go with.”

“I didn’t mean crazy crazy,” said Mizuki. “But it’s — I mean, what happens to them when they’re adults?”

“The goal is that they go live in society,” said Alfric. “In practice, most of them are housed within the institute for the rest of their lives, because they’re unfit for society in one way or another.”

“And we’ll get to meet some of them?” asked Mizuki.

“You don’t want to,” said Alfric. “There’s a good chance my aunt won’t mention it at all, but there’s also a good chance that if you give her any kind of encouragement, she’ll talk your ear off.”

“Well I actually do want to meet some,” said Mizuki, folding her arms.

“You want to meet ‘people’ who are missing core functions?” asked Alfric.

Mizuki unfolded her arms. “I mean, kind of, yeah?”

“Alright, don’t tell my aunt that either,” said Alfric. “You know, maybe it’s a bad idea to stay with her, we have the money for a hotel.”

“She doesn’t like her institute being like a zoo,” nodded Mizuki. “Okay, those are good ground rules, I think I’ll do fine.”

“She was also a long-time dungeoneer,” said Alfric. “Though she’s a bit down on the profession overall, and I think part of why she extended the invitation when she saw the guild messages was that she wants to try to talk to me about it, but I’m not sure.”

“I have some things to pack then,” said Hannah. “I assume we’re not doin’ any dungeons while we’re out there?”

“I might scout,” said Alfric. “Go to the local League office and read some reports, that kind of thing. But no, we shouldn’t do a dungeon without a full complement, especially if it’s Verity we’re missing.”

Hannah internally cringed at that: in a team, it was best to maintain the fiction that everyone was equally valuable and irreplaceable. No one else seemed to pick up on how he’d worded it though, and it passed without comment.

They broke and went their separate ways, with third bell being when they’d meet at the warp. Hannah hoped that Marsh would contact her so they could meet up before she left, and not for the first time she wished that the marble she kept safely tucked in her pocket went both ways instead of just being for when he wanted to talk with her. She had been hoping that they’d get some kind of minor entad that would let them talk a little faster, but the entads for the most recent dungeon had been somewhat disappointing on that front, and were expected to bring in little money when they were eventually sold.

There had been a minor incident with the soup pot, in fact. Its power, which couldn’t be shut off, was to instantly homogenize anything that went past the rim, turning it into indistinct slurry. In theory this made it a very good blender, but it was simply too difficult to use and too dangerous to keep around. If you tried to stir pumpkin soup, the spoon, whether wood or metal, would be liquified and then perfectly distributed among the pumpkin. This applied to everything, including fingers, which Alfric had learned when he’d reached into the soup pot to clean it out. He had thankfully yanked his hand back before there was too much damage, but it was an object lesson in how dangerous an unknown entad could be, and how careful testing should be, at least in an ideal world.

For quite a while, Alfric tried to figure out how to use it in combat, but its weight and shape made it impractical no matter what he tried.

All the other stuff was — not worthless, but worth selling. Many of their entads had been sitting in storage though, waiting for a trip to a larger city or some use with other entads. They didn’t have any particular need of money at the moment, and Hannah suspected that one of the reasons they were holding onto so many useless things was that Mizuki and Alfric had such strong affections for them, though each in their own way. The pen they’d found could write on skin, with the ink staying there, indelible, for six full days. It had been fun to play with, certainly, and Hannah had surprised Marsh by having his name ‘tattooed’ below her belly button, but she had a feeling that the pack rats were going to win out, and it would be kept in a closet somewhere until the end of time.

She did like the dirk though, and with the consent of the party, had taken it for her own. Cuts made with it could be mended later just by holding the two halves together, which was useless in combat, but quite helpful for the healing arts, though more because she could cut off someone’s clothes than because she routinely needed to cut into people and try to get at whatever was wrong inside them. Besides that, it felt good to have a weapon that could be carried around in the day-to-day, something which wasn’t true about either her weapon or armor.

As she was changing into a different outfit — something that would be more proper for the city, and for sitting in the garden stone for a few hours — she saw the ‘tattoo’ she’d given herself. It had been a little joke, but the way Marsh’s face had lit up was very gratifying. If anyone else had seen it, she’d have been properly mortified, which wasn’t something that happened to her often, but she’d liked hiding it there for him, and liked even more the feeling of him finding it.

When she was all packed, she went downstairs to wait for the others. She had an urge to leave Marsh a letter, but that was patently ridiculous, given that the marble worked across continental distances and they would surely be keeping in touch, along with the fact that she’d only be gone for a day.

<I’m ready,> said Alfric. <Everyone else?>

<In a bit,> said Mizuki. <Am I flying, or are you?>

<You said you didn’t like flying enough to fly for four hours straight,> said Alfric.

<We can take it in shifts?> asked Mizuki.

<I wouldn’t mind a shift,> said Isra.

<Fine by me,> said Alfric. <I’ve plotted out a course on the map, we’ll be going in a straight line, it should be easy enough. And it’s not like I’m looking forward to four hours in the air. Make sure that you’ve packed something warm, the wind can be a bit much.>

It took another fifteen minutes for everyone to get ready, which was mostly because Mizuki needed to pull out winter clothes, then also wanted to pack some ‘quick’ food for them. Once all that was done, they stepped into the garden stone.

In the week since they’d stripped the theater, Alfric and Mizuki had worked to clean out the garden and make some modifications. There was now a more permanent structure for the latrine, one that had been built from purchased lumber and put together with clever joinery rather than the use of nails. This was a new skill for Alfric, and he’d apparently put the thing together four times in undone days before doing it ‘for real’. He had said that he planned to build a better living space for them, with simple beds, a crude kitchen, and a few other creature comforts. A week ago she might have said that he was planning too much, but if they were ever to have to overnight in a dungeon again, let alone longer, there were far worse things to spend time and labor on.

“I’ve been helping,” said Mizuki. She had her hands on her hips and was looking around the area. “I think Alfric loves a project. A year from now, if we don’t upgrade, this is going to be a mansion.” She looked up in thought for a moment. <Alfric, do you want us talking over the party channel? I would hate to exclude you.>

<I’m fine,> said Alfric. <I’ll let you know if I get bored.>

The trip went quickly, and during Isra’s turn flying, Hannah even got in a brief nap on her bedroll. It didn’t feel like they were flying through the air, it felt like they were killing time, and with the majority of the party in there, it was easy enough to find something to talk about. Conversation always seemed to go back in the direction of the dungeons, especially when Alfric was around, but that was alright, since Hannah spent a fair amount of time on dungeons herself.

They were nearly there when Marsh made a call via the marble, and Hannah held it with her sleeve rolled up, a now familiar habit.

“We’re going to Plenarch today and won’t be back until tomorrow,” said Hannah. “Sorry.”

Marsh’s face fell. “I was hoping to see that tattoo again.”

“You were hopin’ to see me naked,” said Hannah with a smile. “But I think you’ll survive.”

“Do you have time to talk?” asked Marsh. “Kell joined us today, we’re gearing up for our first dungeon under the new management.”

This was Marsh’s preferred euphemism. The old management had been Lola, mostly by virtue of the fact that she’d brought in the money, but also, in part, because she’d replaced Alfric and naturally slipped into that role. Their new party leader was Grig, mostly because he was the one putting the most effort into keeping the team together; Mardin was too aloof and Josen was too prickly.

“I can talk, but we’re almost there, so I might have to cut you short,” said Hannah.

“Josen is being an ass, more so than usual,” said the image of Marsh on her forearm. “I’ve been trying to figure out why that is, and I’ve got a couple of theories that I want to run by you.”

“I’ve never really met Josen,” said Hannah. “So if you’re askin’ for my professional opinion as a cleric, it’ll be woefully uninformed.”

“Noted,” smiled Marsh. “So my first theory is that he doesn’t like Kell, which isn’t that unusual, because Josen doesn’t really like anyone, but maybe he hates Kell for being another wizard, or because they’ve already gotten into a few disagreements about the finer points of wizardry.”

“Very possible,” said Hannah. “But Kell knows how to disengage?” Kell lived in Pucklechurch, and had been around a few times, once to speak with Alfric about Vertex, the other times because Mizuki had invited him for meals.

“He does,” said Marsh. “Which might be part of it?”

“Josen likes to butt heads,” said Hannah. “He likes to have it out, even if he doesn’t do that in particularly productive ways, so if someone doesn’t have it out with him, he feels like he’s being cheated, like they’re not playin’ the game.”

“See,” said Marsh. “I don’t get how you do that, you say that you don’t know Josen, but you get him so well.”

“I’m just tellin’ a story,” said Hannah. “I don’t know Josen, but I know people well enough and that’s one way that a person could be: unfulfilled because they can’t keep on with their patterns. Could be I’m completely wrong, and I wouldn’t know, because I’m workin’ off what you and Alfric have said about the man. Could be that losin’ his arm was hard on him and he’s snippy because he’s worried it will happen again, could be that he’s got some romantic trouble he’s not sharin’ with the group, could be that he feels put upon to be doin’ the dungeon in the first place, could be lots of things.”

“I should send a letter to the Church,” said Marsh. “I should let them know how wrong they were about you.”

“Yes, that would be swell,” laughed Hannah. “They’d surely see the error of their ways and make me a bishop.”

“I really do think you’re marvelous,” said Marsh.

<I think I see Plenarch,> said Mizuki.

<It should be pretty hard to miss,> said Alfric. <If your bearing is off, just go to the coast and look from there, it’s in a large lagoon.>

“We’re done with the trip soon,” said Hannah. “But thank you. And I’m sure Josen will settle himself down. You said that he does well in a dungeon. With you up at the front givin’ him the protection he needs, you’ll do fine. You’re pretty marvelous yourself.”

He beamed at her, and for a moment she thought that he was about to say that he loved her, but instead, the image of him winked out.

<Landing now, everyone out,> said Mizuki.

They stepped out of the stone one by one and into the city of Plenarch.

Hannah somewhat wished that she could have seen the city from the air, but supposed that she would be able to take her turn with the helmet at some later time. The city jutted out into the lagoon, having been built on small islands that were linked together with stone bridges. It was protected from the waves of the Plenum Sea by the Hring Barrier, and the waters were calm, only the barest lapping of waves. The buildings were of two styles, with tall buildings of stone toward the center of the islands and shorter buildings with timber frames, often on stilts, out near the edges. There were a huge number of docks and boats, some of them smaller, but others that were massive affairs with huge sails or other means of conveyance, mostly used for fishing. The sails were dyed in reds and yellows, and a slight fishy smell pervaded the area.

It was a very familiar place for Hannah: this was where the seminary she’d gone to was located. She knew the streets better than she knew Pucklechurch, but it felt far less like home, and she had no particular plans to return to her old stomping grounds.

The chest sat on the dock Mizuki had landed on. It had easily kept pace as they’d flown toward Plenarch, zipping along through the trees and fields beneath them.

“This is Plenarch, right?” asked Mizuki. “It sure would be awkward to land in the wrong city.”

“It’s Plenarch,” said Hannah.

“We should warp,” said Alfric. “Then we want to go across Ibis Boulevard, then up Norbis Lane. That will take us to my aunt’s place, where we can settle in before we explore the city. I don’t think there’s a lot we need to do in order to get ready for the meeting with the buyer tomorrow, since we already have a written inventory.”

The warp was a busy place, though nothing like Dondrian, and after some movement and jostling they each briefly sat beneath a wide-brimmed hat which teleported them over to a different part of the city.

There were bridges everywhere, which Hannah quite enjoyed. There was something of Garos in a bridge, mostly because of the way the math worked out and the forces needed to be balanced for the purpose of physics. Most bridges were an arch, which was pleasing, since the parabola was a holy shape. Beyond that, bridging was also symbolic of Garos, the bringing of two sides together, the calling attention to two sides.

Most of the bridges in Plenarch weren’t built with any explicit holy reference to them beyond the usual — no matching of stones, no patterns of symmetry, just what was dictated by the engineering. There was one exception to this, the largest bridge that connected the lagoon islands to the mainland, and Hannah glimpsed it every now and then as they made their way through the city. The center of it had a small temple above the roadway, accessible via stairways, and identical stained glass windows on every side. She had been there dozens of times, usually for small services, and she’d given her first sermon there, which she was sure she would find rambling and self-important if she heard it now.

The nostalgic part of her was thinking of food. The Plenum Sea allowed for plenty of fishing, and they ate fish more than any other meat. Wood-fed ovens were a common affectation in the sturdy stone houses, a sign of wealth and prominence, one often mimicked by those in wood houses, though much more carefully. Driftwood swept toward Plenarch from all over the Plenum, creating a nuisance on the seaward side of the Hring Barrier, and merchants sold it for cooking fires at a pittance. Hannah had learned to bake from her mother in Cairbre, using an ectad stove for incredibly consistent and even temperatures, but she’d cut her teeth on wood stoves at the seminary, where tending a fire was part of an extremely old religious ritual from the ancient ages. Keeping a fire symmetrical was no mean feat, but Hannah had been quite good at it.

The Ibis Boulevard was in a section of the city that Hannah hadn’t visited too often. The street ran down the center of one of the lagoon islands that was large enough to have some proper soil and trees on it, ones which had been planted ages ago and likely supported by growthstones, as they towered above the surrounding buildings, spreading shade. The street they took off the boulevard was a quiet one, with hardly any foot traffic, and the houses were surrounded by sizable yards that were a rarity in Plenarch, a costly sign of wealth.

The house Alfric walked up to was, by his own admission, one he’d never seen before, and Hannah gave it a critical eye. It didn’t fit in with the houses around it, the style not favoring heavy windows or brightly-colored clapboard shutters, and the roof didn’t have the slant that kept snow off. The skin of the building was a dull tan, with none of the siding or brickwork that some of the others had. The shape of the house was odd, nearly a perfect cube if you imagined that it was partly buried in the ground, and when she looked at the windows, she realized that they were perfect squares as well. The faces of the cube were five by five, if it was a cube beneath the surface.

She wondered what it was like on the inside, and supposed that she would find out.

Chapter 96 - Square Meals

Alfric had thought that his aunt Penelope might want to talk about the so-called ‘bastlefolk’, but he hadn’t realized just how much she had to say on the subject. She was one of those guild members who didn’t comment on guild messages all that much, and from what he’d reviewed before coming to Plenarch, largely just posted minor encouragements and other cursory engagement that served more as proof-of-life than anything else. There was no guild thread for her work with the bastlefolk, though there might have been one in the archives somewhere, beyond Alfric’s admittedly light searching.

“You said, earlier, that you would bring in any dungeon babies that you found,” said Penelope once the food was on her plate. “I do find that heartening, as I know some see it as a burden, and in many cases, not a burden they’re willing to take on.”

“It seems sensible to me,” said Alfric. “If we accept that the dwodo and feil are people, then we need to also accept that bastlefolk are too.”

“Ah, but it’s hard to say what’s sapient and what’s not,” said Penelope. “We’ve taken in thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of babies, and much of the time they’re simply unthinking things, incapable of reaching maturity, occasionally incapable of sustaining life for longer than a week. That’s with entad and clerical assistance, mind you. The grimness of the task cannot be overstated, and the ratios, I believe, are part of the reason we’re having trouble becoming part of ongoing conversation.”

“Mmm,” said Alfric. “You’re wondering why people aren’t talking about this more, you mean?”

“You were in the Junior League,” said Penelope. “And you’re in the League now. How often does the issue come up?”

“The broad issue, or the narrow one?” asked Alfric.

Penelope gave a little laugh. “And what are those, to your way of thinking?”

“The broad issue is the sapients or potential sapients created by the dungeons,” said Alfric. “Or even broader, the moral position of humanity when compared to the dwodo, feil, and — kind of incidentally — the bastlefolk. The narrow issue is just the babies.”

“And?” asked Penelope. “How many times, in all your repeated days, did they come up?”

“Not often,” said Alfric. “In Junior League it was just a day spent on the subject, mostly talking about how incredibly rare actual sapience was, and how dungeon madness is incurable. The upshot was that it doesn’t really matter. I don’t think I spoke about it with anyone in the proper League, though we had a discussion within the party after fighting roughly humanoid creatures.”

“Much of what gets taught in the Junior League is how to deal with the bad feelings,” said Penelope. She ate a small bite of the entad-created meat. “They don’t want their little dungeoneers to be traumatized.”

“Most people just don’t think about it,” shrugged Alfric. “Which is probably not what you’d prefer, but —”

“Have you heard why I stopped doing dungeons?” asked Penelope.

“No,” said Alfric.

“I was younger — much younger, this was nearly forty years ago — and had already set myself up for life.” Penelope sighed. “The same as you’re attempting to do now, I suppose. I had done hundreds of dungeons, nothing compared to your mother, but by the standards of the common dungeoneer, enough that I was a dyed-in-the-wool veteran. I had slewn all sorts of creatures in that time, and pulled all sorts of bastles out whenever I could. I had a huge pile of entads and a large house bought with the money. It was the good life that I had always dreamed of, and I kept my drive in a way that many others did not.”

“Do you mind if I listen in?” asked Mizuki. She’d been seated with Pek on one side and Alfric on the other, and apparently her conversation with Pek had run dry.

“Not at all,” smiled Penelope. She’d barely touched her food, and Alfric had been focusing on eating as he listened. He was more interested in the biographical details than anything she had to say related to philosophy. “At any rate, I hope the scene is set. I was at the highest heights a dungeoneer can dream of, in the relative prime of my life, thirty years old and not feeling an ounce of decline. And then we went into a dungeon and found a nursery. We heard them before we saw them, the squalling of three dozen babies. We’d been in the dungeon for five hours or so at that point, which meant that they had gone that long without food, without a change of diapers, without attention. And there was something about it, perhaps that I had children of my own, that hit me differently. I scooped all those babies up, against the objections of my party, left to go get them help, and quit being a dungeoneer that very day. That was the start of the institute in Dondrian, those thirty-seven babies pulled from a single dungeon.”

“And … what happened?” asked Mizuki, leaning over slightly to speak past Alfric. Penelope was at the head of the table, which made this slightly less awkward.

“I ran myself ragged trying to take care of them,” said Penelope. “I bought a space to keep them all in, bought cribs, hired on staff … and watched as they struggled with living in our world, eventually dying one by one. A cleric of Qymmos can tell you many things about a person, but diet is especially difficult for them, as nutrition is apparently enormously complex. Some of the bastles are created needing specific diets, foods that are vital for them that only the highest quality of entad can produce, if it can be figured out at all. A druid can help,” she nodded in Isra’s direction, “but only so much.”

“They died,” said Mizuki. “The thirty-seven babies.”

“It took four years for the last of them to perish,” said Penelope. There was sadness to her, but also a firmness that reminded Alfric of his mother. “They grew but never developed. And they were so human too, which isn’t important to me now, but was at the time, little too-pink babies with over-large eyes. The last of them, Keif, was three feet tall with all his baby fat, incapable of any apparent thought at four years old, no sounds except his piercing cry.”

“Sorry,” said Mizuki. “But if you’re trying to pitch us on something, I don’t know that this is the way to go.” She casually used a fork to pierce a piece of food on Alfric’s plate, stealing from him without even looking. Alfric couldn’t decide whether this was annoying or endearing. She had gone exotic on her choices, and now wasn’t eating all that much of what was on her plate — multi-colored pasta and fish from the deep sea.

“I was hoping that Alfric in particular would empathize,” said Penelope. “He’s been the talk of the guild lately, in one way or another, and he’s got a strong sense of morality. He shows more dedication to disclosure than perhaps others do. Alfric understands that doing the right thing is difficult but necessary, and unlike some, he’ll follow through on the difficult things. And you, Mizuki?”

“Um,” said Mizuki. “I mean, yeah, I can see where you’d have to take a baby out of the dungeon, or take care of it until you could pass it off to someone. But …” She trailed off, and Alfric hoped that she would think before forming her next thought. “I can also see why people don’t do that. It’s a hassle. For us, it would be about four hours of our time, maybe more, and trying to take care of a baby that we don’t even necessarily know is going to survive even with a lot of help, or which won’t become more than a meatloaf — that’s what my grandfather said, that babies were kind of like meatloaf for the first year or so, not interesting or even really people yet, a bun that got done baking outside the oven — and in the wild or on farms it’s different, a deer is still pretty much a deer when it’s born, outside those first few minutes, and a kitten can move around almost at once, they don’t take long to be tiny cats, so human babies are kind of an aberration.”

“There’s a risk that all your efforts are for nothing,” said Penelope, which was a generous takeaway from Mizuki’s rambling.

“You think it’s something like one in a hundred?” asked Mizuki. “Babies taken from dungeons that become, um, actual people?”

“Less,” said Penelope. She seemed not to mind that this made her case much worse.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “It seems like you’re coming at this from a place of compassion.”

“But you disagree?” asked Penelope.

“I don’t think she disagrees,” said Alfric. “She just thinks of it maybe in terms of costs and benefits.” He gave Mizuki a look and she raised an eyebrow. It would have been rude to talk over party chat in front of his aunt, but he wanted to reiterate that they were guests. While losing their housing for the night seemed quite unlikely, there was no need to be rude to their host.

“Mmm,” said Penelope. She looked around the table. “It looks like we’re all done here. Who would like to retire to the sitting room for dessert? I picked up some lovely khyon from the store, it won’t take but a moment to prepare.”

The clearing of plates took some time, and they slowly moved into another room, one that had a sunken seating area that encircled a fire pit. Fires were a big thing in Plenarch, Alfric had noticed, with the smell of smoke almost ever-present. Hannah had said it was because the city had an almost endless supply of driftwood that washed up against the nearby shore, directed there by the waves from a huge stretch of ocean, but Alfric suspected that there was more to it. Perhaps in the beginning it had been because there was a ready supply of wood that wasn’t good for building, but eventually it had become a bit of a cultural thing. The fire pit in this room, for example, certainly wasn’t fed by driftwood, and the deeper Alfric peered into the flame, the more certain he was that some kind of entad was responsible. The flame repeated itself, roughly once every minute, like someone stuck humming the same handful of lines from a song.

“You were saying that it was, perhaps, not worth it,” said Penelope once they had seated themselves. She’d handed out their dessert, which was something with crunchy breading and a gooey interior, soaked in a sugar syrup that was then dusted with tiny pink flowers. There was a skewer for eating it with. Alfric found it a bit cloying, but it was also delicious.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “It’s … I mean, it must cost a lot, to keep all those babies that don’t end up becoming anything.”

“Oh, certainly,” said Penelope. “But with entad support, the costs can be brought right down, and it’s only a matter of labor, which largely comes from volunteers. I do have to say that I’ve heard the objection before, that my money would be better spent on, say, helping human children in need.”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “The thought crossed my mind.”

“Inter takes care of human children,” said Alfric. “Taxation funds orphanages, where necessary, and by historical comparison, it’s largely not necessary.”

“I guess it’s not really about the money,” said Mizuki. “Or the labor, or whatever. It’s more a feeling that, um … I don’t know. It feels like it’s way out at the edges of what compassion should demand of a person? My grandfather used to say that there was only so far your morals should extend in the service of others.”

Penelope raised an eyebrow. “An uncommonly bold sentiment.”

“He was from Kiromo, at a time when things were bad there,” said Mizuki. “When he was in his twenties, he had a choice between trying to stay, which seemed like the right thing to do but also like it wouldn’t have affected all that much, or leaving to start his own life somewhere else. He thought you didn’t need to give your heart and soul for someone else, even if they were suffering. You have a duty to kindness and compassion, but there are limits to that, I guess. I don’t know, he’d have said it a lot better.”

“And you think that it’s beyond the bounds of moral necessity to make sure that the bastlefolk have a home?” asked Penelope. She glanced briefly at Willam and Pek, who were now sitting beside each other. There were other conversations going on around the fire, and Isra was deep in conversation with Pek, who had resumed using his human disguise. Isra’s makeover hadn’t gone unnoticed by Alfric, and he wasn’t sure what to make of it.

Mizuki shifted in her seat, clearly uncomfortable with being the focus of attention. “I’m not really the deep thinker of the group,” said Mizuki.

“I’m only trying to understand where you’re coming from,” said Penelope. “Obviously I have my own stance on the issue, and I’ve spent a good deal of my money and my life on this project. My ulterior motive for offering you room and board was to have this conversation, but of course I don’t want to press too hard.”

“Sorry, aunt Penelope, but I’m not sure I understand what you want,” said Alfric.

“Mmm,” said Penelope. “I would like the ideas and ideals I hold dear to be spread far and wide. I plant seeds that take a long time to grow, I think that’s the only way that true change can come about. It’s as your friend said, some people will see a baby in a dungeon and think about the odds, then decide that it’s not worth the ‘hassle’.”

“I don’t think I meant it like that,” said Mizuki.

“I’m not going to last forever,” said Penelope. “The truth is, the homes we’ve set up have been using the largesse from my dungeoneering days for decades now, and they will for decades to come, but not in perpetuity. We’re at the point now where we’re doing our best to hold ground, rather than advancing.”

“Ah,” said Alfric. “And you’re hoping for some new blood?”

“Yes,” she nodded. “But first I need to convince you of the rightness of our cause, and then after that, as your friend says, the necessity of it.”

Alfric felt something in the pit of his stomach, an uncomfortable sense of dread. “I’m not on a path to become a great dungeoneer like my mother was,” he said. “Or like you were. We’re barely doing a dungeon a week.”

Penelope nodded. “As much as I refrain from offering my input in the guild, I do read all the messages. I know your position.”

“I’m saying that I won’t have the same kinds of funds that you’ve had,” said Alfric. “Not unless things take a turn for us. And … I’m not sure that I have the same drive to clear a full dungeon as often as I physically can.” That was difficult to admit, but it was a conclusion he’d been coming to for a while and felt inescapable. It wasn’t simply that he’d never match his mother’s pace, it was that he didn’t actually want to. The theater had been a brutal amount of work. “If you’re looking for someone with deep pockets, I don’t think that I can be that person.”

“Hmm,” said Penelope. “I’m looking for someone who can take up the mantle when I’m dead and gone. I have another four decades in me, at the most, but perhaps less based on how things go in our family. My mother made it to one hundred and fifteen years old with all the finest entad assistance and clerical aid, but those last five years weren’t kind to her. Age is inescapable. Whether you have the money or not is less important than being a stalwart ally, and if you have no interest in the institution, I’m hoping that you will at least consider a role as an advocate. As you get older, if your interest in the dungeons holds, there might be a place within the League for you, and that’s a place we need allies.”

“This is a lot to think about,” said Alfric. “I don’t know what I’ll be doing a year from now, let alone ten years.” The same uncomfortability was there, the obligation pressing down, an offer that he really should accept but didn’t quite want to. He didn’t know much about his aunt’s work, but he had always felt that it was good that someone was doing it.

“I’m working on a book,” said Penelope, briefly turning away. “If possible, I’d like you to read through it. Your parents have mentioned that you’re a reader?”

“Books are where all the good information is,” said Alfric. “And I thought you already wrote a book? On the bastlefolk? Or will this have a different focus?”

“Did you read the first book?” asked Penelope. “It was published some thirty years ago, and while I made sure it was a large print run, there was never anything like a demand for it.”

“I haven’t read it, no,” said Alfric. He had intended to, but kept putting it off, and he’d have had to request a copy from his parents, which would also have to be done through the guild channel. Alfric worried that would look too much like he was trying to gain favor, which was more or less what it would be.

“It got a review in one of the major Dondrian papers,” said Penelope. “It was called a ‘self-righteous screed’. It’s been some time since then, but I still remember so many turns of phrase from that review. It took another ten years after publication for me to realize that they were, in fact, right.”

“And the new book is … better?” asked Alfric.

“It’s more personal,” said Penelope. “It’s an oral history of the bastlefolk, in their own words. I’ve been collecting stories for quite a while now. I think when I started, I had somewhat the wrong idea about things, and collected the wrong sorts of stories — stories about the prejudice and disfavor, the alienation of living in a culture that typically sees ‘your kind’ as something that’s killed for valuable loot. Or more than that, the alienation of a world not built for you. And it is an unkind life for the bastlefolk, largely because of the attitudes that people have, even if they’re not outright hostile — more rare, nowadays, thankfully. But the stories that work, those that touch people, tend to be more gentle. I don’t like the term ‘humanizing’, but it’s a good one, in this case.”

“I’ll read it,” said Alfric. “In an undone day, most likely. Let me know when it’s ready for review.”

“A copy of the provisional manuscript will be sent tomorrow,” said Penelope.

“Do you … call for people to stop doing dungeons?” asked Alfric. The first book had done that, he knew.

“It’s something that I go back and forth on,” said Penelope. She tilted her head. “Where do you stand?”

“Respectfully, I’m going to keep doing dungeons,” said Alfric.

Penelope nodded. “There is no argument I could possibly make that would change your mind. And, given that, if I tell you to do something that you clearly are never going to do, all I’ve done is made myself easy to ignore. So I think, depending upon the audience, a soft approach is sometimes best. You’ll have to tell me what you think though, how swayed you are, and how swayed your peers might be.”

“I can do that,” Alfric nodded.

“And if you have no interest in the cause, no feeling that this is a right and proper thing to devote a bit of your time, effort, and money to, then perhaps you can guide those who might be amenable toward me,” said Penelope.

“I can,” nodded Alfric. But his heart sank, because the problem wasn’t one that could be solved, not even if he fully agreed with her.

The conversation moved on to less important things, with Isra asking about Verity’s upcoming concert, and Mizuki asking all kinds of vaguely insensitive questions about the oddities of the bastlefolk, but Alfric’s mind was on the base question.

The world depended upon the dungeons. Ectads lasted a long time, but they wore down eventually, and the only place to get ectad materials was from the dungeons. Entads could last forever, but there were various sources of erosion of the global supply, both from those bound to people who would eventually die, and from the simple wear and tear that many entads went through over time. Lastly, there was the issue of the bastles and clandes, which were perhaps not quite as pressing, but they were one of the bounties of the dungeons, new species of plants and animals, the most useful of them providing for new crops or domesticated animals, albeit on the scale of decades.

And henlings! He’d nearly forgotten about them, though the haul he was due to sell the next day was, in essence, a henling, depending on how many hairs you wanted to split. Many people had homes that were nearly filled with things that had come from dungeons in one way or another, whether that was as whole pieces or from reclaimed wood or textiles. It was rare to find clothes that properly fit a person in a dungeon, but it wasn’t so rare to find clothes that could be altered to fit, or taken apart so that the largest pieces of fabric could find a new home in a quilt or a mixed-fabric dress.

The material considerations were too great, and it wasn’t simply a matter of greed. Lives would become demonstrably worse if the dungeons were shuttered. It was nice that this was a clear and obvious answer to any call to stop going into the dungeons, because it meant that the situation didn’t need to be looked at much more closely. If someone like Penelope came along and said that the dungeons needed to be closed down so that suffering wasn’t created whenever someone went in a dungeon, people could simply say ‘oh, so you want us to die of heatstroke in the summers and freeze to death in the winters?’ Alfric supposed that if there were no dungeons, people would find other ways to adapt to a life without ectads, but he couldn’t imagine a place like Pucklechurch being settled, not when it got so cold in the winters. They would have to heat their homes with fires, but so much smoke seemed like it would be a problem, let alone how many trees would have to be cut down.

If you really cared about the bastlefolk, either as they currently existed or as they existed in potential, you obviously couldn’t stop people from doing dungeons, but you could make dungeoneering better for them in various ways. Dungeoneering was only lightly controlled, largely to encourage people to do it as much as they wanted without restrictions. If potential dungeoneers were vetted a little better, and given some amount of schooling before they could go into the dungeons — nothing like the full Junior League experience, just two weeks or so — then you could teach people what to do with potential bastlefolk, among other things.

But the Junior League did exist, and it largely avoided talking about the bastlefolk, except to say that thinking creatures were so rare that they were mostly not worth talking about. Alfric had cause to wonder whether that was motivated by a desire to get people into dungeons or simply reflected the common thinking of the people who had made the Junior League happen.

He wasn’t sure that he was going to help his aunt Penelope, or whether he was going to contribute to the cause in any meaningful way. He would read the book if she sent it over, and give some advice, if there was advice to give, but she was looking for someone who would do more, someone to run the organization, or at least provide it with material support. It seemed to Alfric that it would be better for these efforts to be led by one of the bastlefolk, but there were so few of them that perhaps none of them had either the inclination nor the aptitude. There was also the issue of funds, which would surely become a bit of a problem when dealing with hundreds of dungeon babies, and perhaps that was the most important thing he might bring to the table — if the dungeon party ever really got up to speed.

“Lost in thought?” asked Mizuki as they retired to their rooms for the night.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “Penelope gave me a lot to think about, and so I am.”

“It was interesting to meet the bastlefolk, I thought,” she said. “They’re very different from each other. Though it does make me think twice about going down into the dungeons.”

“Does it?” asked Alfric. “That’s, ah, an alarming thing to hear.”

“Nah, I’m not thinking about quitting, not for this, I was just thinking about what it’s going to be like next time we’re down in a dungeon, if we come across something that looks like a person.” She sighed. “Though Willam was saying that looking like a person isn’t even really that important, because the only reason a thinking creature would look like a person is because that’s what’s off floating around in the world. So I don’t know. Maybe there are lizards that are perfectly capable of thought.”

“They’re called dragons,” said Alfric.

“You know what I mean,” said Mizuki. They had reached the door to her guest room, a square divided into four parts so that it could serve as double doors. “I’ve got a big bed in my room. I know you took the little room, but there’s no reason we couldn’t share.”

“I don’t think it would be proper,” said Alfric.

“Oh come on, like you really care about that?” asked Mizuki. “We live together. We’ve slept in the same bed before.”

“No, thank you,” said Alfric.

“Suit yourself,” Mizuki shrugged. She went into her room as though it had been a simple, careless offer, nothing more, and he was left to continue down the hallway to his own tiny room, one that was apparently the room of last resort in the house.

The bed was sized for a single person, and the room was only just barely big enough for the bed. Willam and Penelope had both apologized for it, asking whether they might find him some better accommodations for him, or whether one of the house’s occupants could give up their room for the night. Alfric had been gracious and understanding, as he normally tried to be, and it wasn’t a big deal either way, since he was only using the room for changing clothes and sleeping.

Mizuki was always more flirtatious in undone days. There was something about knowing that she’d have no memories that she felt was liberating, even if she had accepted that it was best to treat the undone days as being ‘real’. With the work that Alfric had been putting into carpentry, something he had only middling aptitude for, there had been plenty of time the two of them had spent together, sometimes with her acting as his assistant. She had been putting in work, which Alfric both appreciated and found a bit surprising. She also talked almost constantly, which Alfric appreciated a bit less, and found not at all surprising.

There was a bit of a sticky ethical question with regards to Mizuki, which mostly had to do with how much he should be reporting to her. Obviously if there were any sustained physical intimacy, he would need to say that, but the flirtations had not yet risen to that level, and the brief lingering touches and excuses for physical contact could be brushed off. Their eyes met locked sometimes, and she would grin at him in a knowing way. If he reported all that to her when the day was undone, he worried that he would just be reporting on his own feelings, and if he wanted to do that, he could do it without the undone days. Still, she was skirting the lines of what would require disclosure, and sometimes it felt like he was too.

The right thing to do was to maintain a completely professional relationship with her, but the right thing to do was hard sometimes.

Tomorrow they were looking to make good on the windfall of the dungeons, and Alfric wondered how much of those funds he’d feel obligated to put towards which causes.

Chapter 97 - Flight of Fancy

The most disappointing thing about flying was the clouds, and it wasn’t even close. Clouds always looked so light and fluffy, like giant pillows in the sky, and through her life, Mizuki had often lay on the grass looking up at them, wondering what it would be like to land on one of them. She had pictured them as being springy and soft, pushing gently back against her.

The annoying thing, the thing that no one had told her, was that clouds were really just batches of fog that floated high up in the air. If you dove down into a cloud, rather than landing in a mountain of feathers, you would just shoot right through, getting cold and wet in the process. It wasn’t even an interesting kind of wet, like diving into a lake or submerging yourself in a tub, it was just a dampness that kept building until you were soaked.

What was tough about the disappointment of clouds was that no one seemed to care about this deep and personal betrayal. Mizuki had always liked clouds, and it turned out that they were just wet mist, and no one else seemed to think that this was as much of a bummer as she thought it was.

Still, she loved flying. The helmet was like a gift just for her, and she used it whenever she could, including while they were in Plenarch. She wore it while going about her day to day, since it was faster than even a dead sprint — or her dead sprint, anyway — and she loved the feeling of leaving a store and then launching herself into the air at maximum speed. It was a strain on her body, and the wind tried to rip at her clothes, but it was so fun, and sometimes she could see people below her looking up in surprise.

She’d had the helmet for long enough that she’d made some changes to her wardrobe to accommodate it, mostly so that she wouldn’t lose clothes in the air, wouldn’t flash anyone, and wouldn’t lose her bag or any of the things in it. She was secure in her setup, and could happily take off into the sky once she’d gone through all the things that needed to be done before the flight. The dramatic exit from a store was a regular occurrence and it hadn’t gotten old yet.

Plenarch from the sky was amazing, with the stark blue of the lagoon, the darker blue of the ocean beyond, and the city below. Ships passed, mostly for fishing, though a few for long distance travel or shipping. The freight ships tended to be pretty small, with entad storage on board to safely handle whatever was being transported: their garden stone had a comparatively terrible entry method and restrictions on its contents, but the size was pretty good. There were thousands of entads like it out there, almost all of them in use by cartiers or freight ships or through more esoteric transport. Far in the distance, poking up from the water, was one of the moving mountains of the dwodo, its path through the ocean taking it within view of Plenarch. She hadn’t noticed it on the way in, but they moved so slowly that it must have been there the day before.

Mizuki carefully extracted a sandwich from her bag and unwrapped it from the paper, then began eating it while she watched the ships going by on the water and the people walking past far beneath her feet. When looking far out at the water, she could almost delude herself into thinking that she could see the shore of Kiromo, but it was another hundred and fifty miles to the west at the narrowest point between continents, and she was pretty sure that Plenarch wasn’t at the narrowest point. Still, some of the ships below were probably headed that way, sending goods the slow way.

She was mildly surprised when a woman came flying up from the ground. She had a vest with wings attached to it, giant bird’s wings with pure white feathers. The wingspan was enormous, dwarfing her, nearly twenty feet across, and she moved slowly as she made her way to Mizuki.

“Hey!” she called as she approached. The wings were oddly noiseless, and Mizuki wondered whether that was because of some magic on them or because huge wings just weren’t as loud as she thought they’d be.

“Hello yourself!” said Mizuki. “Nice day for it!”

“You can’t be up here!” the woman called. She finally got into position, and whatever magic was happening with the wings, she was holding in position by beating them rapidly. Mizuki was glad that it wasn’t too loud.

“Why not?” asked Mizuki. She hung in the air some fifteen feet away from where the woman had ended up.

“It’s dangerous,” the woman said. “You have to come down. Follow me.”

“I’m fine,” said Mizuki. “I’ve used this helmet a lot.”

“There have been some dragon sightings lately,” said the woman. “It’s not safe to be up here, even less safe than using an entad to go above street level normally is, so you’ve had your fun, but it’s time to get down.”

“Um,” said Mizuki. “Are you part of the city guard or something?”

“I am, yes,” said the woman. She reached into her pants pocket and pulled out a gleaming tin and copper badge with a little arch on it, among other embellishments. “Marli Barker, of the City Guard of Plenarch.”

“So there’s some law about me being up here?” asked Mizuki. She very pointedly did not give her name, and wouldn’t give it unless asked.

“It’s dangerous for you to be up here,” the woman replied. “But no, there’s no law about it, not yet.”

Mizuki had dealt with this sort of thing before. She’d been chased off all kinds of places in Pucklechurch when she was hunting for new and interesting magic, and sometimes she understood, because she was on private property, and other times she didn’t, because it was a public space. Eventually she’d realized that sometimes when people said ‘you have to go’ what they really meant was ‘I want you to go’, and if you said ‘I have to go, or what happens?’ the answer was that they would keep making a fuss about it but didn’t actually have the authority to move you.

Normally Mizuki wouldn’t have made a fuss about things, but she wasn’t doing anything, she was just having a little lunch a few thousand feet above the ground. That she was getting the boot for this seemed utterly absurd to her.

“If it’s not against the law, I’m staying up here until I’m done with my sandwich,” said Mizuki. “And if there’s a dragon flying around, I want to see it.”

“If you fall, who has to patch you up or clean your body off the pavement?” The wings were still beating rapidly, but the woman had her arms folded across her chest.

“I don’t want to make this into a thing,” said Mizuki, though she kind of did. “I’m just up here, minding my own business, and clearly I wouldn’t be having lunch in the sky if I was risking death. So if it’s not against the law, then I guess I’ll just say thanks for thinking of me and telling me to be on the lookout for a cool dragon.”

The woman frowned. “Please come down?”

Mizuki laughed. “Well, I can’t say no if you’re polite about it.” She wrapped her sandwich back up and put it gently in her bag, then winked at the woman and dropped.

The helmet was fast, but letting gravity work was approximately a billion times faster. The acceleration was insane, the whipping of wind unparalleled, and this was exactly why she had an outfit for flying, because it would have been easy to lose a shoe, or to have a dress pushed up to her armpits. Instead, everything fluttered around her, and she screamed with the thrill of it, glancing briefly at the winged woman who was rapidly becoming just as tiny as the people down below had been.

Slowing down took some doing, and Mizuki tried to time it just right so that it would look cool, as if she was an acrobat making a perfect stick. Instead, she hit the ground a bit too hard, and the shock went straight up her legs to her spine, which stung hard but didn’t seem like it had caused any real damage. Still, she wasn’t able to stride away like she’d planned on doing, and the woman with the wings landed next to her, far more gracefully, not long after.

“So, dragons huh?” asked Mizuki.

“You’re not from around here?” the woman asked.

“I’m from four hours east by flying helmet,” said Mizuki. “If you consider that ‘around here’.”

“I don’t,” the woman replied. “And yes, there have been a few reports of a dragon, a quite large one, especially in the last few months. You should plan to stay on the ground while you’re here. A dragon could snatch you out of the sky.”

“Seems really unlikely,” said Mizuki. “Dragons don’t like people.”

“We’ve had a rash of missing persons,” the woman said. “We think it’s related.”

“What do you mean missing persons?” asked Mizuki. “People just … vanishing?”

“Hard to say, and not something we’re discussing with the public,” the woman replied. “But it’s not out of line with what we know about dragons. Please don’t tempt fate by going up in the air again.”

“We’re leaving tomorrow,” said Mizuki. “I don’t think it’s going to be a problem. And I have always wanted to see a dragon.”

“They’re terrifying,” the guard replied. “We’ve tried to track it — we think it’s the same one across multiple sightings — but to no avail. I’m very serious that putting yourself up in the air makes you significantly at risk.”

Mizuki shrugged. “Thanks for the advice, I guess, I’ll find somewhere else to eat my sandwich.”

She left without saying goodbye, still faintly annoyed by the whole thing. There was something that Alfric often alluded to, which was that the world was too ordered and safe, and she had never realized just how right he was. Dragon or not, a person should be able to fly through the air like a bird without getting called down. Mizuki guessed that there had been some busybody who complained, which was exactly the sort of thing that might have happened in Pucklechurch, but at least the complaints would have had to wait until she was on the ground.

While the others were out trying to make a deal for selling a bunch of the theater stuff, Mizuki was enjoying Plenarch. They had a fish market there, and she’d spent some time in it, looking at the bounty on offer. Normally if she wanted fish, it would be either small river fish or something from Lake Gornorian to the east, but the ocean was a different beast, absolutely filled with shrimp, eels, sea snakes, crabs, clams, and all sorts of other things. This was the basis for much of Kiromon cooking, and a part of Mizuki wanted to take it all to a kitchen and whip something up, but things were always harder to make the first time, and she wasn’t even sure that Penelope’s house had a proper kitchen, let alone whether it was open for strangers to cook in.

After the market, she found herself a few blocks away from a large domed building that Kell had talked about often. It was Ræðmcræfto, better known as Rayedhcraft, or The Rayedhcraft School, one of the largest schools for wizards in the region. The dome was a teal blue, the tiles that coated it visible by the way each reflected light in a slightly different way. The dome was topped with a spire which pointed straight up to the sky, one of the tallest things in the whole city. The actual Rayedhcraft was a large campus that spread across several buildings, but the dome was their main auditorium, used for assemblies and sometimes as a wide open place for sparring and training.

She made her way to it, feeling a bit nervous.

The way Kell had put it, wizardry was actually pretty easy once you got a handle on it. The biggest thing was drawing wizardly energy from a stone and then shaping it, and that took six months of really monotonous work, or a lot more if you didn’t have the ‘aptitude’ for it. Then you just worked on three or four things, and one day you’d be able to shoot giant laser beams out of your hand — or more likely out of your staff or necklace.

Mizuki felt like she could do it. She had a better understanding of magic than most people, and didn’t need anything special to see a wizard’s work. Both Kell and Josen seemed to think that being a wizard didn’t get a sorc all that much, though Kell’s way of phrasing it was better. The real benefit was being able to produce custom aetheric disturbance, which could be used as fuel for sorcery, but if there was nothing else in the aether, it was almost always better to configure wizardly stuff for whatever purpose you would do with sorcery. The energy for a sorc came from inefficiencies in the wizardly process, and it was better to just be a better wizard.

If you wanted to go to Rayedhcraft, you submitted an application, paid a fee, and then there was an interview, then maybe more interviews, then eventually you got in. If you did well, you’d be given room and board, encouraged to stay until you were a fully trained wizard who could go out and work. And if you didn’t have the aptitude or the diligence or whatever else, you’d be denied a spot, having soaked a year or more of your life into the pursuit of something you weren’t actually good at.

There was absolutely no way that Mizuki was ever submitting an application, and if she did, she probably wouldn’t be granted an interview, and if she did get an interview, she would probably flub it. She still thought about being a wizard though, and what that might be like. Kell had gently said that she was a bit old to be embarking on a new career anyway, which felt both mean and untrue, though he hadn’t meant it that way. If it took something like six years to become a proper wizard, if you were good and put your nose to the grindstone, then she could be a wizard starting at the age of twenty-eight, and it felt like she’d still have most of her life ahead of her then, though she’d hoped that she’d get married and have some children, and wasn’t sure how attending this school would work out for her.

She ended up in a courtyard of the campus, where tall trees shaded most of the area and short grass gave people a place to lay in the sun. She had taken the helmet off and stuffed it into her bag, but that left relatively little room for her to shed layers into. When not up in the sky, exposed to the winds, it was much warmer. She found a place in the shade, a pretty tree with broad leaves, and sat beneath it, trying to picture what it would be like to be a wizard at Rayedhcraft. Soon she’d get word on how the sale had gone over the party channel, and the flight of fancy would be done with.

It wasn’t too long until a girl sat down next to her. “You don’t mind, do you?” she asked.

“Not at all,” said Mizuki.

“This is the best tree in the place,” the girl said. “In my opinion.” She reached into her bag and began pulling out bits and pieces of magical equipment, including a handful of rings and a small pair of glasses. Once that had all been spread out on the grass, the last thing to come out of the bag was a small metal pot which had been latched shut, which the girl set carefully to one side. “Just getting some practice in while I eat.”

Mizuki watched. She was burning with questions, especially since her magical education with Kell seemed to be moving at a glacial pace. At Rayedhcraft they were big on fundamentals, making sure that at every step a wizard had proper constructions and was in full control of everything before the next step could be added on. There were safety reasons for doing this, but Mizuki felt the need to rush ahead and ask about more exotic things. What she really wanted was to chase some elusive aetheric moods, particularly the one that would allow her to create some lasting spells with sorcery, but Kell wasn’t entirely sure what would cause that, and it was slow and labor-intensive for him to switch his configurations around.

“Sorry, I’m a novice,” said Mizuki. “Why rings?”

“Oh,” said the girl. “Well, it’s for a study I’m taking with Hollingsworth, with a focus on interoperation of independent anchors. I can show you really quick, if you’d like?” She handed the glasses over to Mizuki, who put them on. It did help to show the magic, but she didn’t really need them. “Okay,” she said, picking up a ring. “This is just a super simple converter with an attached well, which isn’t filled at the moment, so it’s completely safe. The converter is light, green spectrum, pretty weak with a strong limiter, again for safety. But if you see at the rim of the anchor, there’s a bracket? That links up with a different bracket in each of the other rings, which in theory form a failsafe conduit between them, allowing mana flow, with mental valves. So in theory, the result should be that no matter which order the rings go on, I should be able to use all the mana from each of the wells for expression from each of the anchors.”

Mizuki frowned. “But … why?” She hadn’t understood everything, but she still thought she should have been able to see the point of it. “What’s the practical application?”

“Oh, no, it’s just principle work,” said the girl. “And it’s not working right now, because something is wrong in how the brackets latch, or maybe how the conduits line up, or … any thoughts?”

“No,” said Mizuki, shaking her head. It was well past the point where she should have said that she wasn’t a wizard, but she handed the glasses back and said nothing about it. She looked at the latched tin, which contained the lunch. “What’s that?”

“Just lunch from the commissary,” the girl replied. She undid the latch at the side and it suddenly became clear that it was a little tower of dishes, three of them in total. The bottom one was rice, the middle one was meat, and the last was roasted vegetables. A small fork and spoon were pulled from a clip under the lid.

Mizuki was immediately in love with this method of lunch on the go. She wanted to ask how a person went about buying one of these little stacks of dishes, but didn’t want to reveal ignorance, just in case this was something that any student would have known. This was exactly the sort of thing that got a person into trouble when there was some misunderstanding that needed to be cleared up early and wasn’t, like someone calling you by the wrong name and then you getting to be friends while they remained wrong about the most basic fact of you.

“Anyway, the practical application, once you’ve got the technique down, is mostly power transfer, nothing all that flashy,” said the girl. “It’s a neat way to save on either mana, time, or both. And it’s not quite foundational, but if you want to talk about artisanal applications, it’s considered necessary.” She squinted at Mizuki. “You’re a bit new?”

“Uh,” said Mizuki. “Prospective student.”

“Ah,” said the girl. Immediately the mood grew awkward.

“I should get going,” said Mizuki. She hurriedly put on her helmet. Maybe she could just fly away and then never come back.

“Wait, you were looking at the rings though?” asked the girl. “The glasses are only an enhancement. You were just pretending to see?”

“I’m a sorcerer,” said Mizuki. “I can see all of it, just, uh, haven’t had any education yet.”

“Wow,” said the girl. She put her rings away and stood up. “That’s — you’re going to be a student here?”

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “We’ll see.”

“There’s a professor who studies sorcerers,” said the girl. “He might be interested in helping your application go through, if you’re waiting on it.”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Well that’s — I was going to just fly off.”

“I’m not sure it’s a good idea for a sorcerer to be around so much magic,” said the girl. “But — if you were interested, could I show you to his office?”

Mizuki hesitated. “Sure.”

“My name is Ingrid,” said the girl, holding out her hand.

“Mizuki,” replied Mizuki. Their handshake was weak and slightly damp, mostly because Mizuki was nervous.

“Here, this way,” said the girl.

Mizuki followed, though she kept her helmet on, just in case she needed to make a quick escape. She wasn’t expecting that she’d be led to an execution, but you never did know, and wizards had once been mortal enemies of the sorcerers. It wasn’t that way now, but the way Ingrid had put away her bits of magic definitely felt defensive.

“Sorry about misleading you,” said Mizuki. She glanced back at the tree as they went into a tunnel through a building. Ingrid had left her meal there.

“It’s fine, I just assumed,” said Ingrid. “Besides, there’s something absolutely wonderful about someone else having made a social mistake, no offense. I get to be magnanimous and wave it off as though it was nothing, and if I make a mistake, then it’s nothing for me to worry about. It’s very freeing, don’t you think, to be able to drop any formality?”

“Um, sure,” said Mizuki.

“Right through here,” said Ingrid. She held a door open, and again, Mizuki felt like there was something threatening about that, because it meant that once she was through, there would be someone at her back. She decided that this was just paranoia though, and moved through.

The office was practically a library, with bookshelves covering each wall. A ladder on rollers allowed access to the upper levels that couldn’t be reached from the floor. Light came in through a tall, skinny window behind the desk, but also from ectad lighting studded like jewels around the place. Sitting at the desk was a ridiculously tall man with a long beard and traditional wizard robes with the sleeves tied back to keep them out of his way.

“Professor? This is Mizuki, she’s a sorcerer, she’s a prospective student, I thought you might want to speak with her.” Ingrid smiled in a forced way.

“Oh?” asked the man, finally looking up from a letter he was penning. He took his hand from the quill and it kept going of its own volition, an entad of some kind. She wondered how it worked, but tried her best to pay attention to the professor.

“Mizuki, this is Professor Arturo, Professor, this is Mizuki — um.” She paused.

“Yono,” said Mizuki. She held out a hand to the professor, and he took it as though afraid of it.

“Fascinating,” he said. He spared only a brief glance toward Ingrid. “You came for the bounty?”

“Er, yes,” said Ingrid. She cast Mizuki an apologetic smile. The professor reached down into a drawer of his desk as the quill kept on going and pulled out a small badge, which he looked over for a moment, then tossed toward Ingrid, who made a deft catch and then slipped out of the room with a thanks that was so swift and soft that it lingered in the air.

“A bounty?” asked Mizuki.

“If Ingrid didn’t explain it, I have a standing arrangement with the students,” said the professor. “If someone brings me a sorcerer, they can eat from the commissary using my badge for a month.” He sighed. “But I see that she didn’t explain much. You are interested in enrolling as a student here?”

“Um,” said Mizuki. “Well, uh, I have a friend who’s a wizard, and he’s been talking about wizardry, and — there’s some stuff about aptitude so it might be that I don’t have that, I guess, and I wouldn’t stay at the school if I wasn’t able to make the basic cup thing.” She swallowed. “I thought that this place covered room and board? Why does anyone need your badge?”

He looked at her. “That’s your question?”

“Yeah, I guess,” said Mizuki. “I kind of don’t know what I’m doing here.”

“There’s food at the commissary,” said the professor. Mizuki tried to drill his name into her head so she wouldn’t forget it later, Arturo, no first name given. “But it’s all made in bulk, with the dishes picked out by our cooks. There are other, better options for someone with a badge.”

“And you can just hand it out?” asked Mizuki.

“Professors are given a wide allowance here,” said Arturo. “For example, I can offer you admittance to this institution right now.”

“What?” asked Mizuki. She was startled by that. “I mean — are you saying that you could, or that you are?”

“I am,” said Arturo. “Obviously you can take as much time as you’d like to think about it.”

“But … why?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, normally there’s an enrollment process or something, right?”

“I have an interest in sorcery,” he replied. “I’ve had a few sorcerers enter the school on my request, but none that have stayed in the long term. At the start of every semester, I tell my students that I’ll offer a bounty for whoever brings the next sorcerer to me, and it appears that young Ingrid has taken it, whether you join up or not. If you’ve no interest in joining the school as a student, I could compensate you for your time as we go through a series of interviews and tests.”

“Um,” said Mizuki. “Can I think about that too?”

“Of course,” he nodded. “I do have to warn that the compensation will be rather nominal, no more than you’d likely get paid for a few days of work.”

“Don’t you have, um, local sorcs?” asked Mizuki.

“Are you not local?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

“No,” said Mizuki. “I’m from out in Pucklechurch.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know where that is,” he replied.

“Two hexes east of Liberfell,” she said. He still gave no sign of recognition. “Just west of Lake Gornorian?”

“Ah,” he said. “And you’re here as a prospective student?”

“No,” said Mizuki. “I mean, yes, I did come here to check it out, I have a friend that’s a wizard and he’s been talking it up, but we came to Plenarch to sell some stuff. I’m a dungeoneer.”

“Some people work other jobs while they attend the school, though we don’t prefer it,” said Arturo, frowning slightly. “But if you’re so far away, it would be a bit of a change for you.”

“Yes,” Mizuki nodded. “I was just looking into it. Kell seemed to think that if I had some aptitude, it might be worth it, especially since a sorc doesn’t actually end up doing a lot.”

“Kell?” asked Arturo, raising an eyebrow. “Your wizard friend? Not Kell Westing, surely?”

“You know him?” asked Mizuki.

“He made a name for himself here, a few years back, though he was never a student of mine,” said Arturo. “How did you know him?”

“He was a childhood friend,” said Mizuki. “Now back in Pucklechurch.” She immediately felt a rush of embarrassment.

“He did speak with me a few times,” said Arturo. “He’d asked me a number of questions I didn’t know the answers to, and I went digging into what books I could find, only to be dissatisfied with the depth of coverage. I took a greater interest in sorcery after that, seeing that our understanding was so underdeveloped. Odd, that he’s somewhere so … small.”

“But you never answered my question about local sorcs,” said Mizuki. She was trying to divert from what felt like an insult to Pucklechurch, though it was true that it was quite small when compared to Plenarch. “Have you done something to scare off the locals?”

“One of the outstanding mysteries of sorcery is how sorcerers are formed,” he replied. “We believe potentiality comes from bloodline, but actuality comes from something else. You find sorcerers more in rural areas, less in the cities. Plenarch has only three, and yes, I’ve spoken to them. I’m on good terms with them, but they have no interest in the sort of long-term collaboration I’ve been looking for.”

“Well, I’ll think about it,” said Mizuki. “With our current entads, it’s a four hour flight.”

“There have been a few dragon sightings,” said Arturo. “I’d be careful about flying through the air.”

Mizuki resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “When do you want to know whether or not I’ll be a student here?” asked Mizuki.

“There’s no rush,” he replied. “Classes are in full swing, and it would be better for you to not have to play catch up or sit around too much, though the first six months of magical education do tend to be the same tedious practice over and over again.”

“Making a cup for mana,” said Mizuki with a nod. “Kell told me.”

“Six months if you have the aptitude, mind you,” said Arturo. “It would be more if you had no aptitude, and normally we release those students that take too much longer, though I’d make an exception if I could have a sorcerer attending this school and collaborating with the grand pursuit of knowledge.”

“You know, we were mortal enemies,” said Mizuki. “Wizards and sorcerers? Would that … be a problem?”

“I would think not,” replied Arturo. “It’s somewhat common these days for a wizard to not know his own history, or to not feel any particular kinship for the wizards of old. If it becomes a problem, we would go to the headmaster for resolution, but that’s far down the road, if you decide you’re serious about wizardry. And it would go without saying that you’d be prohibited from using wizardly creations as fuel for your own magic.”

“Alright,” said Mizuki. She wouldn’t do that, and resented the implication that she just bumbled around destroying things willy nilly. “Well, look, I didn’t mean to stay here for so long, I was just passing through. But I’ll think about what you said, and if it’s something that I want to do — Kell said that if I got a mana stone, I could do the practice on my own? To make the cup?”

“Possible,” said Arturo with a pronounced frown. “But there are other things you’ll learn while you work your way towards that first step in wizardry, and we strongly prefer oversight. Beyond that, our techniques have been honed with time, and you’d have help here. Better not to embark on your own, if you can help it.”

“Alright,” shrugged Mizuki. She hesitated. She’d been lying when she’d said she had other places to go. “I can answer some questions now, if you’d like.”

It took about an hour to get the preliminaries out of the way. There were mostly simple questions about when Mizuki could first remember doing magic and what it felt like for her, along with some family history, which Mizuki was happy to give. In a way, this was an ideal conversation, where someone was intensely interested in her life, and while the professor seemed maybe a little irritated by some of the answers she gave, especially by the things she didn’t know, they went along pretty smoothly.

They were interrupted by a distant ringing of bells, and the professor put down his quill with a sigh. “I have a class starting soon, but thank you for what we’ve been able to get done.” He reached into his large desk and quickly counted out rings, then slid them across to her. “Actually, I’m going to be late. You can see yourself out, it was a pleasure to meet you, and let me know when you can do this again, ideally with experiments.”

He got up and left in a hurry, apparently having overstayed, and Mizuki picked up the rings, adding them to her pouch. It was two hundred rings, all told, for an hour of talking about herself, which was more than she’d ever made from sorcery itself. She sat there for a little bit, looking around, then left and shot up into the air once she was outside.

Mizuki wasn’t sure how serious she’d been about becoming a wizard, but it sure was a shock to come to the wizard college and be instantly handed an offer for enrollment with very few strings attached. She was left questioning how serious she’d actually been about being a wizard, and how much it had just been a stupid flight of fancy that she’d been induldging. It was tempting to take the offer, to embark on some new adventure … but she had a house filled with friends, and a sort of career she was already working on. To use the professor’s words, the potentiality of becoming a wizard had become an actuality, something so close it could be touched, and needed to be considered.

She flew low to the ground, not wanting the attention of the city police again, and went to go find the others. She wasn’t sure how they would take it.

Chapter 98 - Deals

Hannah was finding Isra to be a bit distracting. Their druid looked like a different person, and it was shocking how well the transformation had gone, removing every trace of her Tarbin heritage and completely feminizing her. It wasn’t as extreme as what Alfric’s mother had done to them on the night of the opera, but it felt more complete, less like a temporary spell that had been cast over Isra. The makeup was a little less good than it had been the day before, with everything having been washed off and reapplied, but it was still better than Hannah would have expected. Either Isra had gotten some lessons, or she’d been closely watching Verity, or both.

Mizuki hadn’t been interested in helping to sell the parts of the theater, and no one had particularly needed her to come with, so she’d gone off on her own while the three remaining members of the party had headed for their meeting. This technically meant that Mizuki had come along entirely for moral support and would have done nothing of any significant value, but Hannah didn’t imagine that she’d be doing much either, so she couldn’t complain. Mizuki had said to give her a call if they needed help moving anything out, and with the helmet, she could be there at a moment’s notice.

The woman they were going to see owned Seaside Salvage, which was on the mainland, across the large bridge that led to the lagoon islands. It was a sprawling junk yard, though there was at least some semblance of organization, with stacks of tiles, pieces of lumber, racks of textiles, and different bits of metal.

“This place is enormous,” said Isra, looking around.

“It’s big,” nodded Alfric. “There are a lot of things that get taken from the dungeons. Some dungeoneers run their dungeons like it’s a salvage operation, taking everything, pulling up floorboards, ripping loose carpets, that kind of thing. If you want to build a house with reclaimed materials, it’ll cost you a pittance, the only problem is you need to spend more on labor, and they tend to look hideous.”

“Should we be doing this?” asked Isra, whose eyes hadn’t stopped moving. Again, the girliness was distracting. It was like being with a different person. Maybe there was also something about how she was acting too, but that might have just been Hannah’s imagination. Personally, Hannah’s aesthetic preference went the other way — she liked a manly girl — but she had never really noticed just how attractive Isra was.

“Stripping dungeons?” asked Alfric. “No, I don’t think so. In terms of value, it’s usually entads, then ectads, then henlings, then goods, then finally reclaimed materials. Bastles and clandes are … sort of outside the usual ranking. If we had entads that would allow us to take more furniture or materials, it would change things, but no, in terms of value … probably not, or not for the whole party. The dungeons are arguably not worth it at all for Verity.”

“Why not?” asked Isra.

“The quoted offer, the reason we flew out here, was four hundred thousand,” said Alfric. “That’s from a truly exceptional dungeon. But that’s also how much Verity is going to make from a single concert.”

“The gross,” said Hannah. “Her actual cut of that will be quite a bit smaller.”

“Four hundred thousand?” asked Isra. “To hear her songs?”

“Two hundred rings times two thousand seats,” said Hannah. “We spoke with her about it, in brief, just to get some sense of what the money situation is like. But as I said, there are a number of people who take their cut from that, before we get to the money that goes to her and her family — mostly her family. There’s advertising to consider, the cut the theater takes, the cost for programs and renting the instrument, all other sorts of things. But yes, the gross is about as much as this week long labor from the four of us.”

“I hadn’t realized,” said Isra. “That’s … a lot of money.”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “The concert will be a big deal. Lots of work on her mother’s part, and it seems to be working, at least so far as I can tell. All that pressure on Verity though, I don’t imagine that’s good for her.”

“She’s been feeling it,” said Isra.

“Well, we shouldn’t stand around,” said Alfric. “We’re early, but not that early.”

The woman they were meeting with was old, maybe even older than Penelope, with sun-beaten skin that looked like leather. She wore heavy clothes despite the relatively warm day, and her gray hair was hidden beneath a wide-brimmed hat. Beside her was a man who might have been her son, but didn’t get an introduction. She said her name was Jules, and she’d apparently been running the salvage yard for decades.

“A fine trunk,” she said, walking over to it. “I saw it walk in behind you, like a tame dog.”

“It’s good, yes,” said Alfric.

“We’d be getting all the stuff out of it?” asked Jules. “Slow or fast?”

“Slow,” said Alfric. “But not really much slower than unloading a wagon, I wouldn’t think.”

Jules undid a clasp and pulled a necklace up from beneath her shirt. “Any effects I need to know about?”

“What is that?” asked Alfric, narrowing his eyes at the necklace she’d removed.

“It’s a scanner,” she replied. “I was going to ask before I used it, but there are some types of storage it just doesn’t work with.”

“Extended space,” said Alfric. “Large capacity, all vertical, no compression.”

Jules nodded. “And can I use this to take an inventory?”

“Of course,” said Alfric with a nod.

Jules lifted the lid of the trunk and peered down at the chairs there, then released her necklace, which floated in the air for a moment before zipping down, the little teardrop leading the way and the chain links following like a tail.

“Should just take five minutes or so, maybe more,” said Jules. “In the meantime, I heard there was some special provenance, did you want to tell me what that’s all about?”

Alfric went over it, in brief, not that there was all that much to tell. They had been able to get some confirmation that the theater they’d encountered wasn’t an exact copy of the Ellusifé, just close enough that it was noteworthy. It was strange, but nothing that anyone really had much to say about.

“It is odd,” said Jules. “I’ve heard of a lot of dungeons in my time, and while that isn’t the oddest of them, it’s odd enough that I’ll want to take a second look at the goods. How close is this to what’s in the Ellusifé, do you think?”

“My brother took a measurement for me,” said Alfric. “So far as we can tell from that, it’s to within a sixteenth of an inch.”

“And the seats are all uniform,” said Hannah. “I measured that myself.”

“I’ll have to confirm with my own clerics,” said Jules. “For a sale this size, there’s all sorts of checking over that needs to be done. I was going to ask whether you’ve been in the business of dungeons long, but I do recognize the name Overguard. I’ve had more than a few of your people come through here over the years.”

Hannah spared a glance for Alfric. He kept his face impassive, but she knew that he didn’t like his family being brought up too often. Reminders of the advantages he had, whether the chronomancy or everything else, were something that he tried not to show his annoyance about, but Hannah knew him well enough to see the signs he was bothered.

“Do you have a buyer?” asked Alfric.

“I think I can move what you’re selling, elsewise I wouldn’t be buying,” said Jules. “But we’ll see what you actually have, what condition it’s all in, and all that other stuff. You’re looking to move the whole lot, rather than just having it in pieces?”

“Ideally,” said Alfric. “Our storage options at the moment are pretty limited, and we don’t really want to be left trying to divy up what we have, trying to find buyers for each individual piece. That’s negotiable though. I wouldn’t want you taking things off my hands at a steep discount because they were part of a package.”

Jules looked down into the chest and held out her hand, which the necklace zipped back to. Hannah hadn’t actually seen it, but she could imagine the necklace having darted its way down through the vertical column of everything they’d taken, like a tiny spelunker.

“Now then, we can step over to my sand table, if you don’t mind,” said Jules. The table in question was close by, three feet to a side and with a high lip to keep in what seemed to be quite a bit of fine-grained sand of a purity and quality that meant it hadn’t just been scooped up from the beach. Jules held the necklace out, with the teardrop piece of metal dangling down.

The sand moved beneath it, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed, shifting around, until eventually it resolved into images created from sand. Hannah had gone to the beach a few times in seminary, and made sand castles only once, but the comparison seemed apt. Rather than a castle though, there were hundreds of tiny sculptures, more delicate than the human hand could produce. It was the entire inventory of the chest, organized and rendered in sand.

“Now,” said Jules, not taking a moment to revel in the magic. “Seems like you’ve got nearly two thousand seats, though they’re in sets of three, then a great deal of paneling, some lighting, a chandelier — all about as I had been told. That’s good, some people overestimate their hauls.”

“We can take out whatever you’d like to look at,” said Alfric. “But without your assistance, this is probably at least a full day’s worth of work to unload.”

“So you want this to be bought sight unseen?” asked Jules, arching an eyebrow.

“We can empty the chest,” said Isra, stepping forward. Some of the casual happiness she’d put on display the night before and in the morning had left her, and she was, again, quite cool and composed. “It’s just a matter of whether you want that done here. It’s all quality goods, as good as the best you’d find in Dondrian, hardwoods and engravings. And if you aren’t interested, we can take it elsewhere.”

Jules blinked at her, then looked at Alfric for a moment, and then back to Isra. “I think I will do a spot check, if you don’t mind, but the way you say your chest works, I naturally have to worry that you’ve put the best specimens toward the top.”

Isra only nodded. “It would be sensible, if we’d had the time or planning for that. Let’s start now, and we might be able to finish a survey before we lose too much light.”

“Hannah?” came a voice from Hannah’s right. She turned and looked, and had a long moment of trying to place a familiar face in a new context.

“Irinniri,” said Hannah. “What are you doing here?”

“I go by Iri these days,” she said with a smile. “And I work here. What are you doing here?”

“Here, let’s step aside,” said Hannah. She gave the negotiation some distance, and Iri came over.

They’d briefly dated in seminary. Irinniri was of mixed ethnicity, so much so that Hannah almost wondered whether it was deliberate on the part of her ancestors. Irinniri — Iri now — had always joked that she’d gotten the best features of all of them: long flowing black hair, bright green eyes, light brown skin, and a wide, winning smile. It was the sort of thing that had felt flirtatious and alluring for her to say at the start of their relationship, then conceited and off-putting later on. Iri was, or had been, a bit full of herself, but for a time she’d been very much what Hannah had wanted. Back then, she’d dressed in more male fashions, with trousers and long-sleeved shirts, but with the passage of a few years since they’d seen each other, Iri had apparently transitioned to something slightly more feminine. She still wore pants, but they were wide enough that they flowed almost like a dress, and she had a very functional blouse instead of a simple shirt. A pendant hanging down showed a symmetrical symbol, not one that was considered holy, but a definite nod toward Garos.

“I haven’t seen you since we finished the seminary,” said Iri, smiling. “Or before, maybe.”

“It was before, ay,” said Hannah. “Not more than in passing, anyhow. You’re working here, you said?” They had ended things amicably, but then not been friends after that, which had felt like a bit of a shame. Iri was the first person that Hannah had ever been physical with.

“I am,” nodded Iri. “I actually worked here while I was in the seminary, on a part time basis, and once it came time for placement, it seemed like this was a better use of my talents. I had gotten really good at renewal and repair. And you? I’d always thought that you were going to end up a bishop somewhere.” Hannah tried to keep her face set, but apparently Iri still knew her too well. “Sorry, I didn’t mean — well, if you’re in the dungeon game, that’s good, right?”

“Right,” said Hannah. She kept her lips tight.

“I mean, I ended up here,” said Iri. “Not where I thought I’d be when I went into the seminary, I have to tell you that.”

Hannah relaxed slightly. “Life leads us on some unexpected paths,” said Hannah. “You’re happy here though? I always found repair work to be a bit soothing.”

“It’s good!” said Iri. “Really good. Some of the work is rote, simple reflections, but other times there’s something more complicated that demands special attention. Either way, it’s rewarding. I’m making things whole, or in rare cases, helping to break them. And there’s a cleric of Qymmos here that I work with who I really gel with. How about you? How did you, ah, end up doing the dungeon thing?”

“I got placed in Pucklechurch,” said Hannah. “It’s a small town of about a thousand people, way out to the east. It wasn’t anywhere on my dream list, and … I tried, really I did, but I wanted out.”

“I really don’t mean anything by it,” said Iri. “But I’d thought that you would get a better placement than that? You were always so enmeshed in the culture of the seminary.”

“Not in a good way,” said Hannah. “I ruffled too many feathers.”

“Ah,” said Iri. “I can see that.” She gave a contemplative look toward where the negotiation was ongoing. Several of the pieces had been pulled from the trunk, and the sand sculptures were shifting. “Do you think you’ll go back some day?”

“I don’t know,” said Hannah. “I thought so, once I was done with the dungeons, and I’m writin’ a book about what we’ve been doin’ there, how it reveals Garos, but … that might be a lost cause. Maybe after dungeons there’s something else. I don’t know how long I’ll do the dungeons either, though we’ve got a good haul here.”

“I might be asked to look at it, just to warn you,” said Iri. “Normally I do repairs, and Karla does the analysis, but she’s out today helping a grieving family.”

Hannah raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t her business, and it was impolite to pry, but tragedies were pretty rare, and when older people died, it was usually not cause to bring in as many people as possible. When Hannah had been in Plenarch, there were a hundred clerics of Qymmos, and there shouldn’t have been cause to bring in one who wasn’t normally doing clerical work.

“If you haven’t been around Plenarch, you might not have heard,” said Iri. “There have been some disappearances lately, six in total, we think, though it’s hard to say given the specifics. They’re not conventional disappearances, with people going off and never being heard from again, they’re something else. For some of them, people leave behind notes, for others, they just never show up at their destination. All over a handful of months, but it’s gotten to the point where there’s some serious work going into figuring out what’s going on.”

It was clear from this that Iri had been wanting to gossip, and raised the subject mostly because she wanted to talk about it.

“People leave notes?” asked Hannah. “How’s that a disappearance then?”

“The notes are cryptic,” said Iri. “Stuff like saying that they’re leaving on a journey, that they won’t ever be back, that they’re safe and happy but can’t say more.”

“And then the people just … disappear?” asked Hannah.

“Yes,” said Iri. “Sometimes taking things with them, other times not, sometimes with a note, other times without any word to anyone, just a shop cleared out with no explanation. And one of the disappearances was a whole family, carpenters, seven of them gone, from the grandchildren up to the elderly parents.”

“Ah,” said Hannah. “So when you said six, you meant more like a dozen people?”

“Something like that,” said Iri. “And now there was something in one of the broadsheets, and people are sending out letters to see whether their friends ever did make it to their destination, or whether there have been more of these disappearances than we’d thought. That’s where Karla went off to, to help with a family whose daughter never ended up at her destination.”

“Ah,” said Hannah. “And with the censusmasters, it would be hard for there to be some mistake about that.”

“She could be in some other hex, and it will take some time for word to go out through the whole province, but it would take quite a few things to go wrong for her to not show up and not tell anyone,” said Iri.

“Our bard ran away from home,” said Hannah. “Said she was leavin’, then left, not tellin’ her parents exactly where she was goin’.”

“That’s a cruel thing to do to your parents,” frowned Iri. “Home life, or just rebellious spirit?”

“Both, I think, though more the former than the latter,” said Hannah. “If she’d come to me for advice, I’d have plenty to offer, but she’s more a friend than a parishioner.”

“Ah,” said Iri. “Well, we don’t think these are cases of people just leaving Plenarch. The net is widening now, with the scope of the issue known, and there will be more going forward. Given how unusual it is, there’s been a lot of attention focused on it.”

“Mmm,” said Hannah. “I s’pose there would be. We’ll keep our eyes out, though our party has a chrononaut, so there are limits to how concerned I can be about random dangers. And if it’s a dozen people over the course of quite a while …” She trailed off. “It’s been good to catch up, but it seems that they’re comin’ to a conclusion.”

Talking about a public tragedy always felt a bit unseemly to Hannah, as though the interest was impure. She loved gossip, always had, but there was a time and place for gossip, and horrible things happening to someone else didn’t feel like they were a part of proper gossip. If some young girl had been killed, or had otherwise gone missing, that was horrible, and not the sort of thing that Hannah wanted to spend her day chattering on about. Perhaps it was just the way that people talked about bad things, as though someone else’s misfortune was the highlight of their day.

There were limits to how bad things could get, usually. There was at least a day’s warning for any major disaster, and most natural disasters could be averted in one way or another, with the exception of earthquakes. Hannah had once been a keen student of history, and knew how different their circumstances were than those of their forebears, and she wondered whether a bit of pain and hardship weren’t somewhat of a global problem for the people of the world. Sure, people broke bones, but they were knitted back together again, usually within the hour. Major storms were usually stopped in their tracks, or at least diverted around the large population centers by either entads or druids.

There were probably people who were talking at great length about these disappearances because they wanted to solve the problem, but there were lots of others who wanted nothing more than something disturbing to speak about.

Hannah had been wrong, and the negotiation actually did take a bit longer, largely between Jules and Isra, with little contribution from anyone else. It seemed to Hannah that Isra was a bit off her game, and for a moment, it felt like the whole thing was going to fall through, meaning a waste of a trip … but then Jules caved, and a handshake sealed the deal. All the back and forth was done in a single moment, and Hannah felt the tension drain out of her. It wasn’t as though they needed the money, not really, but it was a sizable sum. The offer had been for four hundred thousand by letter, and in person, with a review of what the party had, Isra had managed to get them an extra fifty thousand.

“Who do you bank with?” asked Jules. “It’ll take some doing to get that sum to you.”

“We have an account set up with Carliers Provincial Trust,” said Alfric.

“We do?” asked Isra.

“Yes,” nodded Alfric. “I set it up the day before.”

“I don’t understand,” said Isra.

“Oh boy,” said Alfric. “You mean, about banking in general?”

Isra nodded. “I know people keep money in banks.”

“We’ll get into it later,” said Alfric. “Jules, when will we be unloading? And where to?”

“Here, now,” said Jules. “It shouldn’t take long to get through the trunk, we have entads that are good for transfer.” She swept a hand to the yard. “Most of what you see here is the sort of thing that people like to come in for, but we do have extradimensional space for surplus or client requests.”

“Did you have a buyer lined up?” asked Isra.

“I’d prefer to have that conversation a bit later,” said Jules. “Or maybe not at all. If I did have a buyer, I wouldn’t want you to think that I’d bilked you out of profit by moving fast.”

“How much is the buyer offering?” asked Isra.

Jules sighed and waved her hand. “You agreed on the price, we shook hands, the deal is done. I’ll be taking my cut, you can be sure of that, but I’ll also be doing some refurbishing and installation, paying my own people, that sort of thing. If you’re going to be sore about it, best that you not know.”

Isra deflated slightly. “I just want to know. You were holding things back.”

“You’re good for your word?” asked Jules, looking at Isra, then Alfric.

“We are,” said Alfric. “And we’re new at this, still learning the ropes. If Isra can take you for more, she wants to know about it.”

Jules gave a little chuckle. “Still seems bad manners to me, telling someone your cut. But alright, it should be nine hundred thousand or so from the buyer. Now, that comes with some labor on my end, which will need to be paid out, the use of some tools, a good deal of time and effort to get that deal made — but on the other hand, some of the stuff I can’t use, so it will get sold on later unless I can make more deals.”

Isra frowned at that, then turned to Alfric. “We got into the wrong business. We should have been doing this.”

Jules laughed, and the moment seemed to pass.

The trunk was manhandled by some of the men who worked at the salvage place, and Alfric stood close by as they pulled out seats and panels.

“How are you?” Hannah asked Isra.

“I don’t enjoy negotiations,” said Isra. “I knew she was hiding something, but I didn’t want to press.”

“No worries,” said Hannah with a shrug. “Did you want to announce to the others over party chat? We got quite the sum. It’s good news. They’d want to know.”

<The sale is done,> said Isra. <Four hundred and fifty thousand rings. Alfric has proposed that we put half toward the group fund, then split the other half evenly.>

<I’m going to need to figure out how banks work,> said Mizuki. <Where are you guys, I’m pretty much done.>

<On the mainland,> said Hannah. <We’ll be crossing the main bridge soon, you can either wait there, or go there and then get more directions.>

<On my way,> said Mizuki.

<Congratulations,> said Verity. <Will you be coming home tonight?>

<Depends on how long unloading takes,> said Alfric. <They’re going fast, but it might be nightfall before we’re done. Still, we’re going back by knife, which should be instant, so unless they call it off, my guess is we’ll still make it.>

<I’m less sure,> said Hannah. <We’ll keep you updated.> She walked over to Alfric. “We still need to say our goodbyes to your aunt, and collect our things from her house.”

“We could split up and do that now,” Alfric frowned. “I have the sense that she wanted to talk with me some more, though we already had a second conversation this morning.”

“Well, ay,” said Hannah. “And not a conversation you want to have?”

“No,” said Alfric. “But one that might be necessary. Not as a condition for us staying, but … morally.”

“You were going to explain banks to me,” said Isra.

“I can handle this,” said Hannah. “Though I’ve never used a bank myself.”

Teaching Isra about banks took another hour or so of time, during which Mizuki flew in from the air, having apparently decided to fly around and figure out the location for herself rather than getting directions. Isra didn’t trust the idea of a bank, which Hannah thought was pretty sensible, but Hannah was eventually able to convince her that a bank was necessary for handling such a large sum of money. Going to the bank gave them one more thing to do though, and Hannah was skeptical that they’d be able to get back to Pucklechurch at a reasonable hour.

“I kind of want to stay an extra day,” said Mizuki. “Though I’m not sure there’s enough food for Verity.”

“She’s not a dog,” said Isra with a small giggle. “She can take care of herself.”

“Don’t you, um, miss her?” asked Mizuki.

“Very much so,” nodded Isra. “But she needs time to herself, to practice. She said to me that I was … a distraction. And she said it in a way that was a compliment, but I think also not.”

“Rude,” said Hannah. “Though she’s under some stress, I s’pose.”

“She is,” said Isra. “If she weren’t, I might have stayed with her.”

Hannah worried about that, since it seemed like a very early crack in the relationship, but these were extraordinary circumstances, what with the concert coming up. Verity was playing a massive theater on relatively short notice, thanks to the hard work of her mother and a fortuitous opening in the schedule. The sound of concert music came from the upstairs room more often than not. Still, Hannah didn’t like the idea of Verity calling Isra a distraction. It wasn’t her place to offer advice, so she held her tongue, but it did seem like the sort of thing that could be easily solved by the two girls having a longer, deeper conversation.

“Well, I had a bit of a day,” said Mizuki. “I got a sandwich from a local shop with little chunks of breaded shrimp and some kind of spicy sauce. It was almost aggressively sour, I think because it had pickled vegetables in it, but it was a good mix of flavors, and I might inflict my own attempt on you when we get home, substituting river shrimp.”

“You told us to never let you cook river shrimp again after last time,” said Hannah.

“Did I?” asked Mizuki. “Oh, because they’re tedious to clean?”

“Yes,” nodded Isra. “You were quite annoyed.”

“Ah, well, that’s true,” said Mizuki. “Maybe I’ll try it with chicken then.”

“If this is goin’ to take the rest of the day, we should think about what we’re havin’ for dinner,” said Hannah. She looked at Mizuki. “Was that all you did with your time? Ate a sandwich?”

“Er,” said Mizuki. “I mean, nothing else serious. I flew around, got told off by a guard woman with wings, then went to the wizard college and got offered free entry by some old wizard who had an interest in sorcery.”

“You really should have led with that,” said Hannah.

Mizuki shrugged and looked over at Alfric, who was still supervising the removal of things from the trunk. “I don’t know if I’m going to do anything about it. The dungeons come first. I did make two hundred rings though, which was pretty great.”

“You understand that your share of this sale comes to forty-five thousand rings?” asked Hannah.

“Well,” said Mizuki. “Yes.” She looked over at Alfric. “Let me be the one to tell him about me being a wizard? I’m not sure how he’s going to take it.”

“So you are plannin’ to do it?” asked Hannah.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “Maybe. If I can fit it in. They prefer that people be there and not have other jobs that get in the way, which makes sense, but I don’t know how hard and fast of a rule that is. And Verity is doing those concerts anyway, which means that we probably have more downtime, more tightly scheduled dungeons.” She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she repeated.

“We’re not getting this done today,” said Alfric, who came jogging over. “We could, but Jules wants to go to the bank with me rather than giving me a letter of credit, and the workers usually kick off about now, so I guess it’s going to be done tomorrow morning. Hopefully that doesn’t cramp anyone’s plans. We can go individually, if we want, but there are some logistics to figure out with that.”

“I’m fine to stay,” said Mizuki. “I actually wanted to stay.” She seemed like she was about to say that she had wizard business, but held her tongue.

“I have shopping to do,” said Isra.

“More shopping?” asked Alfric.

“More,” nodded Isra. “Do you like the way I look?”

Alfric took a moment to look her over. She was in a different dress than the night before, red with tiny white stars on it, but she had the same wide hat, and had redone her makeup. She couldn’t be mistaken for a different person, but it was a rather dramatic change. “You mean do I think you look better, like this, with a dress and your hair free?”

“My hair isn’t free,” said Isra. “I have a hat.” She hesitated. “But yes, I want to know if it looks good.”

“It does,” said Alfric. “And yes, better, I would say, though — it goes without saying that it’s not functional in a dungeon.” Isra rolled her eyes, and Hannah thought that it might have been the first time Isra had ever done that. “Right, right.”

“You know, it’s a bit insulting to take such a long time to tell a girl she looks pretty,” said Mizuki.

“Is it?” asked Alfric. “I was just trying to make a judgment, to not just think ‘oh there’s Isra’ but to reflect on what I was seeing and what my feelings were.”

“Well if it’s me,” said Mizuki. “Then you need to not take such a long time.”

“Can I just say that I’m spending the time admiring you?” asked Alfric with a grin.

“There’s not a problem in this world that can’t be solved by honeyed words,” said Mizuki. “That’s how the guard got me down.”

“Got you down?” asked Alfric.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Um.”

The explanation of her run-in with the city guard took longer this time, and Alfric was left with a pronounced frown at the end of it.

“Well what’s a dragon going to do?” asked Mizuki. “Sneak up on me? They’re as large as buildings! And this one is supposed to be a big one, so … you get that it was just an excuse because someone complained, right? Someone who should have been minding their own business? The helmet is safe, it’s been checked by a cleric, and if there have been disappearances, I’m not particularly worried.”

“It’s more the principle of the thing,” said Alfric.

“If a guard tells you to do something, you would just do it?” asked Mizuki.

“Yes,” said Alfric.

“They’re just people,” said Mizuki. She put her hands on her hips. “I’m not against laws, but there wasn’t a law, it was just someone wanted me down because, I don’t know, they had nothing better going on in their life than bothering me.”

“Fine,” said Alfric. “I think it’s pretty clear that I won’t change your mind.”

“Excellent, you’re learning,” said Mizuki with a smile that didn’t quite cut through the disagreement.

It wasn’t long until Alfric headed to the bank with Jules. Hannah took her own path back to the house, electing to walk on her own, looking at the city and its bridges, thinking about her time in the seminary and how she’d ended up as a dungeoneer in the middle of nowhere. There was something sad about it in a way that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Maybe it was the lack of choice, though at least dungeons had been more of a choice than her placement. This was the second time she’d run into someone from her seminary days, and the second time there had been some expectation that she’d be something more than just a dungeon runner.

It took Hannah some time to reach the house, and she ended up being late for dinner, though it was a less formal and more scattered affair than the night before. Marsh contacted her in the evening, and they had a very long talk, one that lasted so long her voice felt worn out by the end of it. Marsh was a good listener, and a good boyfriend, and she almost made the mistake of not telling him that before they both went to sleep.

In the morning, Hannah woke up to a crisis. Kali had gone missing.

Chapter 99 - Moving Mountains

“What do you mean missing?” asked Alfric.

Penelope was smoking a long pipe with something sweet-smelling, and didn’t seem terribly concerned. A breakfast spread was laid out in front of them, served so that anyone could take what they wanted.

“This is my seventh time through the day,” said Penelope. “So you’ll have to forgive me for giving the terse version. Kali is missing, and cannot be found. She was here for dinner and then went to her room, but as of the witching hour last night is gone, as though she’s vanished from the face of Ibris. I have talked with everyone present, all whereabouts of everyone else have been accounted for, but Kali must have either slipped out of the house after dinner when she should have been in her room, or been taken without anyone noticing. There are no signs of a struggle, and some of her things are missing, which would suggest she left voluntarily, but to where … I have no idea. I’ve spoken to every censusmaster within a three hex radius and none have been able to find her. I don’t think there’s anything more that anyone can do at the moment, so that’s that.”

“What’s in the pipe?” asked Mizuki.

“A blend of sweetgrass and honey-vetch,” replied Penelope, looking at the smoldering pipe for a moment. “I have a pipe you could use, if you wanted to join me.”

“It’s a mild poison,” said Isra.

“The sweetgrass releases tension,” said Penelope. “I was the closest thing that Kali had to a mother, and loved her like she were my own. So if I seem languid, it’s because I yelled at a great many people on my sixth time through the day, and don’t want to repeat that. There’s only so much that can be accomplished in a twenty-four hour span, and I’ve already finished everything I could think of.” She looked over at Pek and Willam, and Alfric was relieved to see that none of this was news to them. He suspected that they’d been woken in the middle of the night. Pek in particular seemed to be slightly dazed, though it was hard to tell with the rocks embedded in his skin and the different muscles of his face.

“Anything else to disclose?” asked Alfric. He felt mildly annoyed, because if she’d been through the day six times prior to this, there should have been a lot that she learned about them.

“Oh, this and that,” said Penelope. “I have to say that when I invited you here, I didn’t expect that I would be spending a week with you. I had cause to change my opinion about most of you, largely for the better, but there were no major secrets that came out, only minor interactions and some information that was disclosed during the questioning, which was largely about Kali.”

“Thank you,” said Alfric, though this was less than he would have liked. It was always like that with disclosure though, at least in his experience. People could hardly be faulted for not holding entire conversations in their heads, especially not over multiple days. Still, there was this sense that an incredibly one-sided thing had happened, and he had never liked it. He’d also come into his power later than most in his family, and been on the ignorant end of undone days far more often than he’d have liked.

“Can I try some of that?” asked Mizuki, pointing at the pipe.

Penelope regarded her. “You never seem too bothered by the fact that Kali is missing.”

Mizuki paused. “I mean, I like to think that if I could do something, I would, but you just said that I can’t do anything, so …”

“It’s fine,” said Penelope with a wave of her hand. “Just an observation. And yes, I can get you a pipe, I used to collect them. We can have a contest to blow smoke rings.”

“I don’t know how to do that,” said Mizuki. “But I bet I’m great at it.”

Penelope released a smoke ring that curled from her lips, moving slowly. “Yes, I’m sure.”

“What do you need from us?” asked Alfric.

“Nothing,” said Penelope. “In this case, Mizuki’s disinterest is warranted.”

“It’s not disinterest,” said Mizuki with a frown. “But if someone says to me that there’s nothing I can do, I’m usually going to believe them. Or if someone says that something is boring … usually they’re right, you know? I do want to know what happened to Kali, and I hope she’s okay, but — why worry about something that I can’t control?”

“And would you feel the same if one of your friends were missing?” asked Penelope.

“Er,” said Mizuki. “Depends on how and why they went missing. If Verity went missing before the concert, which is maybe not likely, but certainly possible, then I guess I would feel the same. I’d try to find her, but I’d also stay relaxed, because either she would show up or she wouldn’t, and there wouldn’t be much that I could do about it.”

“Was Kali in a guild?” asked Alfric. “A party?”

“She was in a house party,” said Penelope. “She’s left that. No guild, at least not that I knew of. But Alfric, you shouldn’t worry too deeply, Mizuki is right, and you’ve already done enough.”

“I haven’t done anything,” said Alfric.

“You know what I mean,” said Penelope.

Alfric did, but it was cold comfort. Hannah had talked about the other disappearances and what they entailed, and a part of him had wanted to do something, whatever that would be. There was no obvious connection to the dragon sightings, and Alfric could only imagine that people were mentioning them in the same breath because they were two rare things that were happening at around the same time. People feared dragons, so when there were a few sightings of them, flying far off, they would naturally draw conclusions.

“We might stay another night then,” said Alfric. “Just so we can be on hand tomorrow, if you need us to be.” He glanced at the others. “Or I’ll be on hand, at least.”

“Your gusto for public service is noted and appreciated,” said Penelope. “But there are people far more qualified to handle these matters, and in my experience thus far, more undone days being thrown at the problem aren’t likely to help. And after all, it might well be that Kali went off on her own.”

“She didn’t seem happy,” said Hannah. “And teenagers have done dumber things.”

“She, or whoever took her, took the disguise entad,” said Penelope. “It was one of the best we have, a lamentable loss, but outside of a censusmaster being able to tell us her true name, she might look like anything, might have taken on any disguise.”

“Dangerous,” said Alfric with a frown.

“Oh, not at all,” said Penelope. “Or, we didn’t think. It’s restricted to someone not of your own species, so it would be worthless for humans, more or less. And I’ve been assured by many people in the know that when it comes to spying on our humanoid neighbors, we’ve got more than enough magical support.”

“There’s a dwodo mountain nearby,” said Mizuki. “Visible from the air, just barely. Could she have gone there?”

“How would she have made the trip?” asked Penelope, leaning forward and blinking slowly. The herbal mixture she was smoking seemed to be powerful stuff, and Alfric tried not to breathe too much of it.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “It’s just, you said that you checked with the censusmasters all around, and I was wondering whether you checked with them, with their mountain in the ocean and whatnot.”

“They wouldn’t have a censusmaster,” said Pek, who so far hadn’t said anything. “When the Editors set up the voting systems, they weren’t thinking about moving mountains.”

“Or, more darkly, they were thinkin’ about them,” said Hannah. “And wanted to favor humans, or at least the human way.”

“They’re not nefarious,” said Isra.

“They make assumptions about the world,” said Pek. “The Editors have a frame that they operate within. Using the warp takes a hand with at least three fingers. Party communication only works with a voice. Guild communication works only with certain languages. There are languages that are dead now because of that.”

“Pek,” said Penelope with a sigh. “This isn’t helpful.”

“It’s an observation,” said Pek. He turned to Alfric. “Lady Overguard doesn’t seem to think that these observations help the cause.”

“People trust the Editors,” said Penelope. “And even if they didn’t, most of the grievance, from a bastlefolk perspective, is in the past. It’s crying over spilt milk.”

“It’s a necessary conclusion,” said Pek. “If you want an understanding of human society as built to favor humans in unexpected ways, then you have to have that same understanding of the Editors. The two go together. You want to bury the criticism of the Editors because it’s inconvenient.” He was upset, though it was fairly obvious to Alfric that this was about Kali, who was more or less his sister, rather than about what assumptions the Editors built into the systems of the world.

“Or,” said Mizuki. “Maybe it makes sense that we orient certain ways?”

“Let’s not get into this,” said Alfric.

“Right,” said Mizuki. “We should get going to the dwodo mountain.”

“And put a hold on that smoke ring contest?” asked Penelope.

“You can’t just fly to the dwodo mountain,” said Alfric.

“Is there a law against it?” asked Mizuki. She turned to Penelope before waiting for an answer. “This is something we haven’t tried before, right? So it’s worth trying?”

“There would be no way for her to get there,” said Penelope. “I’ve taken an entad inventory, the disguise one is the only one that’s missing. I’ve spoken with any number of boat captains and dockmasters, and if she left that way, she was very good at covering her tracks, including against provincial authorities, who have been looking into this as much as I have, aided by my observations. So, do you really think that she might have gone to live with the dwodo, or do you want some excuse to go see the dwodo?”

“Both?” asked Mizuki. “I don’t really have anything else going on today.”

“If this day isn’t going to be undone, I’ll be shopping,” said Isra.

“I was serious when I was asking whether it was illegal,” said Mizuki. “Because if it is, I won’t do it.”

“Do the dwodo speak Inter?” asked Isra.

“Ah crud,” said Mizuki. “But they probably have an attache or liaison or something, right? Or there are merchants who speak Inter?”

“I speak just a little,” said Alfric. “There’s a common core, three thousand words or so, that cover about ninety percent of the language and don’t vary much between their mounds.”

“Mounds?” asked Mizuki. “Uh …”

Alfric sighed. “Alright, no, we’re not doing this if you don’t even know what a mound is.”

“It’s just another name for their moving mountains, right?” asked Mizuki. “Or the city that’s in the mountain? I can see from your face that I’m close.”

“I’m not comin’ with for some mad quest to speak with the dwodo,” said Hannah. “It seems like a sort of tourism I’m not interested in.”

“I’ll join you,” said Pek. “It’s better than sitting here.” He looked at Mizuki and Alfric. “If that’s acceptable.”

“I haven’t said I’m going,” said Alfric. “Though I suppose it’s better than sitting here.”

“Then it would fall to me to sit with the trunk at the salvage yard?” asked Hannah.

“Or we can go visit the dwodo afterward,” said Alfric.

“I can do it,” said Hannah with a sigh. “You just keep Mizuki from makin’ trouble, will you?”

“I don’t know why I have such a reputation for trouble,” said Mizuki. “I haven’t done anything.”

“Didn’t you say you almost broke your legs yesterday?” asked Isra.

“I said I almost injured my legs,” said Mizuki. “And they’re still a bit sore. But that’s not trouble.”

“She has a high threshold for trouble,” said Penelope. “Bashing someone’s head in with an oversized spoon and narrowly avoiding provincial punishment, would that count?”

“Narrowly?” asked Mizuki.

“Well, from what I’ve heard,” said Penelope. “There was quite the campaign to string you up as an example, or just to make the Underhills feel better, or some such.” She took a long drag from her pipe and let out another slow smoke ring. “I have to say, I should have tried this as a method of cooling my head several days ago. I can almost forget that my charge is missing.” She looked at Pek. “She didn’t like me calling her my daughter.”

“I can stay, if you need me to,” said Pek. “Otherwise I’ll do something to feel busy.” He slipped back into his human disguise and looked at Alfric.

“We can go now,” nodded Alfric. He looked at Mizuki. “I want you to be on good behavior. No gawking.”

“Me?” asked Mizuki, placing a hand on her chest. “I wouldn’t dare, you know that.”

They ate what was left of their breakfast and got ready to go, with the party splitting up to go their separate ways. Isra didn’t seem to trust banks, and had simply taken her share of the lump sum in the form of copious and high-value rings. Alfric was slightly worried that she would be robbed, or if not robbed, then that she would entice some unsavory character to take advantage of her. That was much more likely, really. When Alfric was little, he’d traded away a quite valuable entad for a pittance, and didn’t realize the error until much later. Isra didn’t seem the type to fall for a scam from someone she’d just met; she dealt with her relative naivety by being distrusting and brusque.

The travel arrangements took some time, and Alfric began to second guess himself. Flying off to the dwodo mound was crazy, and definitely the sort of thing he wouldn’t have done if he didn’t have an undone day available. Mizuki had asked a third time whether going to see the dwodo was legal or not, and Alfric had given her a long yes and no answer that he’d hoped would dissuade her from going. It was the only real untried avenue, which was confirmed by probing his aunt Penelope a bit more. He suspected that the herbal blend she was smoking had a little something extra in it, because she was going through it quickly and growing increasingly slow with her answers.

Alfric thought that she’d spent at least some of her six undone days crying, and now there was only emptiness left and the hope that work on a longer time scale might find her wayward ward.

None of the other disappearances had been solved. It might have been that they weren’t disappearances at all, that separate groups of people had, for whatever reason, decided to leave lives that had often been fairly stable without much in the way of clues about where they’d gone, or by lying about where they’d gone. If it had been one or two people, it could be chalked up to something like suicide, or someone doing a dungeon on a lark and being swallowed up by it, but the circumstances didn’t suit that, and the demographics didn’t either.

Critics of dungeoneering sometimes said that they were workshops that produced tragedies, but at least these were tragedies that mostly happened to people who were young and without much to lose. This was a view that wasn’t particularly popular, but Alfric considered it good that dungeons weren’t regularly gobbling up children or parents. And even then, it wasn’t as though death was a regular outcome, not for someone who’d passed the qualifications set by the League.

“I’ll be flying,” said Alfric.

“Mmm,” said Mizuki. “I propose a game of chance.”

“You don’t speak the language,” said Alfric.

“I still propose a game of chance, but I’ll give you a handicap,” said Mizuki.

Alfric glanced at Pek. His sister — or at least the only other person of his kind — was gone. Mizuki was being a bit unserious about it, though that was more or less her style. Even after the stuff with Lola, and sometimes after a bad dungeon, she was generally pretty upbeat about it.

“Fine, fine, you can fly,” said Mizuki. Alfric wasn’t sure whether or not she’d caught his glance. “I’ll stay in the stone with Pek. Watch out for dragons though.”

As Alfric rose into the air, he tried to think about all the ways in which a dragon wasn’t a threat to him. Firstly, he was a chrononaut, and secondly, he had practiced the warp extensively. As fast as a dragon could move, it would be visible from a very long way off, and while there were all sorts of stories about dragons and their abilities, Alfric had never taken the ‘loads of flying invisible dragons’ theories all that seriously, especially when there had been dragon sightings around Plenarch. If dragons could turn themselves invisible, why would they allow themselves to be seen?

He kept low to the ground anyhow, and in short order was out over the water, where he stayed close to the caps of the waves. He quite enjoyed flying, and was hoping that Mizuki wasn’t making an ass of herself with Pek — though she had a way with people sometimes, and for all that he thought she was sometimes a bit too casual with what she elected to say, there was something winning about it. Maybe you didn’t need to carefully control your speech if what was at the core of you was something most people liked.

The moving mountain of the dwodo loomed on the horizon, and Alfric kept most of his attention focused on it. They moved slowly, and this one was headed away from Plenarch, continuing on its long walk across the seafloor to parts unknown. Somewhere at the base, hidden beneath the waves, were legs so massive that up close they would look like features of the terrain, and if the mountain was in deep water, they might extend down so far that a human would need entads to survive. The part of the mountain that Alfric could see, that which wasn’t hidden beneath the water, was red-colored, like rust, with tiny spots of green that seemed like they might be moss, except that at the scale of it all, they were surely gardens, orchards, or parks. There were terraces in place, but less than he had expected, perhaps because their mountain didn’t stay perfectly level as it moved. The march was slow, the movement perceptible mostly by the wake, surely no more than a mile a day — still more than most mountains moved.

It was hard not to think about what Pek had said, and how right he had been. The Editors had reshaped the world, setting down new rules, and those rules were at odds with how the dwodo lived. With their moving mountains, the dwodo were essentially nomadic, which meant the system of hexmasters and the other associated roles were effectively non-functional for the mounds. At a mile a day, they wouldn’t be in any hex for longer than two weeks, and that wasn’t even enough time to establish residency. Similarly, the warp was less than useless to them, it was both a vulnerability and a liability. If someone used the warp, they would more than likely be sent into the ocean, or if ne’er-do-wells mapped things carefully, they could use the warp to enter into secure areas.

The really shocking thing was that Alfric had never considered any of this. He knew quite a bit about both the dwodo and feil, and actually had one of the dwodo as a tutor for a time, largely for language learning. Still, he had never considered how their way of life was disadvantaged by the systems as they’d been set up. He’d never seen that it was different for them, and had never asked. If possible, he would ask some questions during the visit, but he suspected that they’d be turned away in short order, or possibly sold something and then turned away.

The complicated answer of whether or not landing on a moving mountain without permission was legal hinged largely on the differences of their nations and what each considered to be criminal, and in what circumstances. Inter considered itself to have good relations with all the dwodo mounds, and engaged in some level of trade with them, though it was Alfric’s understanding that the mounds considered each other to be different nations — or nations in some nominal sense, because they didn’t meet the necessary prerequisites to be a nation in the same formal sense that Inter was. The dwodo considered humans to be two-eyes, mildly elevated in dwodo culture, but still heavily bound by rules and strictures, and anything more than a short visit was likely to create some serious issues that might get a person punishment of one kind or another, particularly in the form of enucleation — surgical removal of an eyeball.

Alfric hoped that they would be okay, but it was definitely more risk than he normally burdened himself with. He did want to talk to the dwodo and see if they had any information about either Kali, or the dragon, or the other missing people, since it seemed like it might have been something that was overlooked. He didn’t expect anything that happened to be fruitful, but this was the sort of venture you embarked on because you never really could say.

Alfric circled the mountain once, looking for a good landing spot, then double-checking to make sure that the courtyard he’d seen was a public space and not one of some cultural significance. Each of the dwodo mounds was different from the others, with meetings between them to facilitate trade happening only on the order of every twenty years or so, and even then, unequally. That meant that as much as you might know about “the dwodo”, you couldn’t say that an individual dwodo mound didn’t do things differently.

Alfric was swarmed by dwodo children from almost the moment he touched down on the tiles, and he greeted them with kindness, apologizing for the intrusion and asking whether one of them could find an adult. His skill with the language was rusty, and if he ended up doing the day over, he resolved that he would spend at least an hour or two brushing up. He could make out only every other word the children spoke, but part of that was because there were a half dozen of them, and all were talking at once, asking him questions and talking excitedly. They were calling him ‘stranger’, ‘human’, ‘sink-eyed’, and a few other things that were less polite, but they seemed to mean well. One of the children ran off, and he hoped that it was to get an adult.

The dwodo didn’t look that different from humans in most respects. They looked slightly hunched, largely because their necks held their head forward rather than being stacked upright like a human’s spine normally was. Their skin was various shades of grey, their mouths were wide, their noses small and rounded, and they were, to a one, bald, but none of that was terribly exceptional. Pek was far more different from human than the dwodo were, given the rocks on his face that were ringed with wetness. No one would have mistaken the dwodo children for human, but the way they moved and played wasn’t so different from what human children did.

There was one exception to this general sameness though, and that was in the eyes. Dwodo had large foreheads, which looked similar to a person’s but were doughy to the touch — not that Alfric had ever touched one — and for the children, the eyes seemed to be placed almost at random in that expanse of flesh. The dwodo could move their eyes though, plucking them from their face and placing them in a different location, and they could trade eyes with each other, or give them over as a measure of respect. Quite a bit of their culture revolved around this, and people were divided into classes on the basis of their number of eyes. Out in the wider world, they tended to have two eyes in the conventional position, which they considered to be ‘as the human custom’, but Alfric was prepared for more exotic arrangements. The underclass on a moving mountain had only a single eye, and their clerics and leaders could have as many as a dozen.

While he was waiting, Alfric took out the stone and placed a hand on it, calling Mizuki and Pek back. Mizuki came out in a hurry, and as she appeared in the courtyard, the children yelped in surprise, then crowded around her.

“Their eyes!” she said as she looked down at them. “That’s amazing!”

It was hard to tell how old the children were, but if they had been human, Alfric might have guessed that they were seven or eight.

When Pek came out, he was in his disguise, which Alfric was silently thankful for. He did wish that being one of the bastlefolk wasn’t a problem, but in point of fact, it was a problem, and if they could pretend that Pek was simply a human, it would simplify matters enormously.

“Oh gods that one tried to grab my eye,” said Mizuki, standing up. “They do know that our eyes don’t come out, right?”

“They’re kids,” said Alfric. “They’ve probably never seen a human before.”

“What do we need to do to speak to whoever is in charge?” asked Pek.

“One of the kids is going to get someone,” said Alfric, though there were adults on the periphery looking in and apparently content to allow the children to dance around the visitors.

“She wouldn’t go here,” said Pek.

“I know,” said Alfric. “But it’s still something to try.” He hesitated, because this wasn’t the sort of thing he was good at. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” said Pek. He bit his lip. “She’s run away before. Penelope didn’t mention that. I thought you should know.”

“Penelope has had six days to find her,” said Alfric. “Is your sister good enough at running away to hide from a chrononaut with enormous wealth and power?”

“No,” said Pek. “She’s not.”

“We might find something here,” said Alfric.

“It’s better than nothing,” nodded Pek.

“Okay, that one was too fast for me,” said Mizuki, rubbing one of her eyes. “Ah, crud that stings. No more crouching down.”

“There’s our man,” said Alfric. An older dwodo with seven eyes was coming toward them, carrying a gnarled walking stick he was using for support. The child who’d gone to fetch him went back to the others and began talking rapidly and loudly, gathering them up and moving them away.

“Visitors,” he said to them in a gravelly voice. Dwodo lived a bit longer than humans, which made it hard to estimate his age, but everything about how he moved and spoke said to Alfric that he was an elder. He wore flowing robes and simple sandals, but all of it was well-made, and Alfric suspected that much of it had come from the humans. Some of the gold threads looked expensive. “Why have you come?”

“It’s a matter of some urgency,” said Alfric. The dwodo’s eyes were arranged in a honeycomb shape, and Alfric kept his focus on the central eye. “People have been going missing in Plenarch. A young girl went missing yesterday, and we were hoping that she might have just come here. We don’t mean to intrude, we’ll be gone once we know whether she’s here.”

“We have questions about the disappearances,” said Pek. “And whether you’ve seen the dragon.”

“Mmm,” said the old man. “Disappearances.” He shook his head. “You are the first visitors since we started moving south two days ago. Your girl is not here. We would know.”

“But the disappearances?” asked Pek. “The dragon?”

“Mmm,” said the old man. “You have time?” he asked.

“Nothing but,” said Alfric, though that wasn’t strictly true.

“Then come,” said the dwodo, turning from them. “We can talk.”

Alfric followed, feeling reluctant. There was a chance that this was nothing, a very good chance, but he naturally hoped that they were about to learn something important from the dwodo after all. If the day could be reset, and Kali could somehow be saved from whatever fate had befallen her … but she’d been gone when Penelope had reset to the witching hour, and it seemed likely that whatever force had removed Kali from the world, it had known to work around a chrononaut. That would be especially true if Kali were complicit in her own disappearance in some way.

When he turned to Mizuki, she mouthed ‘seven eyes!’ and raised her eyebrows up and down.

Chapter 101 - The All-Seeing Eye

The whole thing was pointless, and Alfric knew it. Running their own investigation of the missing people parallel to the one that was being done by actual professionals back in Plenarch was never going to bear fruit, not even if they found a single thing that the investigators had missed. He would go back to Plenarch and report what he could, but he didn’t expect that it would help anyone, and he suspected that he wouldn’t even end up undoing the day. Penelope had already had a great many goes through it, and everything he’d tried to contribute would have been done a number of times already — except, apparently, this. So he would try, and had resolved himself to not be too disappointed when due diligence was not rewarded. In his experience, due diligence usually wasn’t rewarded, but it was important for the times when it paid off.

Though sometimes you went to a small town and collected whoever was available to run a dungeon, and it turned out to be the best decision of your life. Alfric wasn’t sure whether or not there was a life lesson there, but he suspected that it was just dumb luck on his part.

The large dormitory had a five-eyed dwodo on staff to greet them, a woman who spoke nearly perfect Inter with little accent. From the way she greeted them, Alfric suspected that she’d been warned that they would be coming in soon.

“You may not enter rooms unless invited,” she said. “If there are problems, you will be removed from the mountain. Are we clear?”

“Yes,” nodded Alfric. “We only wanted to speak to people who might know something. If you know anything —”

“No,” the woman replied, terse.

“So are you like … the shepherd for all the foreigners?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t think it’s important,” said Alfric. He suspected that this woman held the position as a duty, or possibly a punishment, though she had five eyes, and that meant a position of some power and influence, at least if his dwodo tutor had been correct. The mounds were all different though, with their own rules, and he was painfully aware that he was out of his depth.

“I’m a landlord,” said the woman.

“What’s that?” asked Mizuki.

“I’ll explain later,” said Alfric.

“You always say that,” said Mizuki. “Besides, we have the time.”

“Do it elsewhere,” said the dwodo woman. She gestured to a doorway. “The common room is through there.”

Alfric had hoped that she would drop the subject, and he was rewarded when they moved into the spacious common room, where there were plenty of people around. One of them, a tall man with fluid movements, sprang to his feet as soon as he saw them, abandoning a conversation with a dowdy woman to come join them.

“More foreign two eyes!” said the man, opening his arms wide. His shirt was of a style that was particularly popular in Dondrian, slightly open at the front, with flowing fabric. He beamed at them with pearly white teeth, and Alfric felt a quickly brewing distaste for the man that wasn’t quite rational. “What brings you to our fair mountain? Are you visitors, or here to make a home?”

“Just visiting,” said Mizuki. “We’d heard about some missing dwodo and wanted to see whether anyone around here knew anything.” This wasn’t strictly untrue, depending on how it was parsed.

“You’re from Plenarch?” he asked. He held out a hand. “Mesi Onchard, at your service.”

“We’re from farther afield,” said Mizuki, taking his hand. “I’m Mizuki, this is Alfric, and this is Pek. We’re not here officially, but we are here unofficially, if you catch my meaning.” Alfric had no idea what that meant, except that she was perhaps trying to create an air of authority where no actual authority existed. “But the dwodo we’ve spoken with haven’t been keen to share with us, and there’s something else going on, we think. We were hoping that you people might have heard something. The botanist in particular, there’s something there.” So far as Alfric knew, that was a pure guess on Mizuki’s part.

Mesi leaned in. “It’s Wolin’s daughter,” he said in a stage whisper. “He’s the king of the mountain-skin, more or less. The dwodo don’t like to talk about these sorts of things, but there was a minor panic when they realized that she had gone, and they’ve been gossiping about it, which they do in their own way, without actually mentioning that she’s gone. It’s the same when someone dies, they don’t do funerals like we humans do, they have their priests dump the body into the sea, or off the side of the mountain, and then never speak of it again. It’s fascinating. But they do gossip, speaking around the subject.”

“Why do they do that?” asked Mizuki.

Mesi shrugged. “If you live with the dwodo for long enough, you’ll come to know that they have their own particular ways. You’d have to speak to Djanni,” he pointed a thumb in the direction of the woman he’d been speaking with, “if you want a theory as to why the dwodo are the way they are, but their whole perspective on history is quite unique in how different it is from the normal human outlook. This is actually the third mound I’ve been a part of, and these oddities are endemic to the dwodo, not anything to do with this particular group.”

He was talking a lot, and had the look of someone who might go on for hours if he’d been allowed to. In fact, it seemed as though they’d rescued Djanni from a conversation she hadn’t been all that thrilled about. She had resumed reading her book, but was looking up often enough that Alfric suspected she was listening in.

“And the others?” asked Mizuki.

“Less important,” Mesi shrugged. “Less gossip. And it wasn’t just that Wodi was the daughter of Wolin, who has reign over most of the surface of the mountain, it was that she was the botanist, the expert in keeping the fragile ecology of the moving mountain from getting upset too much. We don’t have the kinds of resources that a hex has, so it’s much more difficult trying to root out unwanted plants, and we pass through so many different climates and biomes and everything else that comes with it.” It was interesting that he said ‘we’, despite being a foreigner.

“What will the mountain do without her?” asked Alfric.

“Oh, there are two apprentices,” said Mesi. “But there’s been some discussion of whether they’ll be able to keep up with the demands of the position.”

“She wasn’t happy here,” said Mizuki. “What can you tell us about that?” She was, Alfric thought, putting on a bit of a voice, an authoritative tone that she wasn’t quite pulling off, at least to his reckoning.

“How much do you know about the dwodo?” asked Mesi, raising an eyebrow.

“Everything I know I’ve learned today,” said Mizuki with a bright smile. “But I learn fast.”

Mesi laughed and gave her a grin. “Oh, I like you. Well, they care about the eyes, you see, it’s very important to them, not just for seeing, naturally, but for what they consider the natural order of things. Everyone is born with two, save for a few unfortunates, and there’s a process using a number of clerics that allows them to make more, but it’s somewhat tense given so much rests on it. It would probably suffice to say that Wodi was on one side and Wolin was on the other.”

“And that’s why she wasn’t happy?” asked Alfric. “Ocular economy?”

“Oh, that’s just the gloss,” said Mesi. “In truth, it’s probably the same old thing it always is, an idealist getting frustrated by a system that they feel powerless to change. There was a whole back and forth between the two of them, some of it public, other bits riding the undercurrent of gossip, and I’m sure pieces that are hidden from everyone.”

“Lots of gossip then?” asked Mizuki.

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Mesi smiled.

“The dwodo have a strong belief in privacy,” said Alfric.

“Well,” said Mesi, wiggling a hand. “They believe in keeping speculation to a minimum, and prying into someone’s private affairs isn’t really tolerated, but talking about things that are ‘public’ in one way or another, that’s quite allowed, even if it can be frowned on from time to time.”

“Ah,” said Mizuki. “So you’re not allowed to ask about where someone is, but you are allowed to offer up information?”

“A bit,” said Mesi. “Not quite how I would phrase it, but you learn early on that you’re not supposed to ask questions, you’re supposed to provide answers, and that’s how you get answers in return. But when you first come here, obviously you have loads of questions and no information that anyone really cares about.”

“I see,” said Alfric. “And that’s all you have to tell us about the missing dwodo?”

“Ah, well I was hoping that you’d have something to give back to me,” said Mesi with a smile. “It’s the dwodo way, after all, and when on the moving mountain … I’ve gotten used to their ways, that’s all.” He gave them a hopeful grin.

“My sister went missing last night,” said Pek. “She’s not human or dwodo.” He fiddled with his ring and the human form vanished. Alfric was paying closer attention to it this time, and at the moment of transition it was almost as though the human version of Pek was a sheet falling down from him, if only for a fraction of a second.

“Wow,” said Mesi. His eyes traveled up and down Pek. The woman, Djanni, got up from her seat and came over. “What are you then?”

“Bastlefolk,” said Pek.

“I don’t even know what that is,” said Mesi, letting out a breath. “You’re … a dungeon creature?”

“He’s a person,” said Mizuki with a pronounced frown.

“Well, yes, of course,” said Mesi. “I just … you were taken from the dungeons as a child? Before the madness?”

“Yes,” said Pek. He put his ring back into place and the human form returned.

“Fascinating,” said Mesi, still looking Pek over, perhaps trying to see whether there was a flaw in the disguise somewhere.

“My sister looked like me,” said Pek. “There’s a very slim chance that she came here, though she might have been in a disguise, like mine. She could look like any human, male or female, or like a dwodo. If you’ve heard anything, we’d like to know, and if you hear anything after we leave, send word to Penelope Overguard in Plenarch. You’ll be handsomely rewarded if it helps to get my sister back.”

“Will do,” replied Mesi with a nod. His eyes had not left Pek, in a way that Alfric felt was a bit unseemly. “But unfortunately, there’s not all that much I can tell you that I haven’t already. If I’d known that it was a serious matter, I wouldn’t have gone on with that gossip. The other two, Pila and Nolli, were less important within the community: a mason and a groundskeeper, respectively, skilled in their trades, I’m told, but neither was a lynchpin.”

“Disaffected?” asked Alfric.

Mesi shrugged. “I knew neither of them personally, but I’ve kept my ear to the ground, and I would say … oh, somewhat? Pila lusted for status but was stuck as an apprentice, two eyes to her name, while Nolli was a bit acerbic. That’s through the grapevine though, after the fact, and just like humans, the dwodo try to explain the things that have passed, sometimes without knowing the true cause.”

Mizuki rubbed her forehead. “No notes though?”

“Not that I’ve heard,” said Mesi. “This was all some time ago though, and the dwodo might not have volunteered the information into wide circulation.”

“It happens sometimes that the dwodo leave the mound for one reason or another,” said Djanni, who had been silent up until that point, and hadn’t yet been introduced. “Often it happens in waves. One person leaves, then others follow them. Twenty years ago there was an exodus of nearly a dozen young dwodo. There’s some worry that it will happen again.”

“A mysterious disappearance?” asked Alfric.

“No,” said Djanni, shaking her head. “They were all friends, adamant about leaving the mound, and founded a colony on the Shattered Peninsula.” That was in northwestern Inter, if Alfric’s memory served him right, a series of islands, in spite of the name. “So far as I know, they’re still there, but I would love to follow up with them at some point.” She cocked her head to the side and looked at Pek. She held out a hand. “Djanni Sensdaughter. I study the dwodo.”

Pek shook her hand. “Pek.” He left off the Overguard surname, which Alfric had noticed the bastlefolk sometimes used. Alfric wasn’t sure what he felt about the bastlefolk using it, though he supposed it wasn’t all that different from an adopted child using the surname. He was even less sure how he felt about Pek leaving off the surname.

“We haven’t had any newcomers,” said Djanni, “and they would be funneled here. We’re kept cloistered.”

“Even if she were disguised as a dwodo?” asked Pek.

“We would definitely know about a newcomer from another mound,” said Mesi. “We’ve heard about it every other time it happened.” He looked down at Pek’s ring. “You’re telling me you have an entad that lets you look like anyone?”

“No,” said Pek. “Mine is much more limited. It allows anyone to look like,” he looked down at himself. “This, I guess.”

“Fascinating,” said Mesi.

“Are there other people we could talk to?” asked Alfric. He looked around the room. “It’s a large place.”

“There are two dozen of us,” said Mesi. “A smaller group than it sounds, with better living than we’re owed, at least in my opinion. I doubt any would know more than I do, but I’ve been wrong before. There are the artists up on the fourth floor, but they’re generally out of the loop, and a few diplomats who don’t talk to the rest of us and might know something.”

It all took a very long time, so much so that Alfric thought that they might have to cut it short in order to report what they knew to the Plenarch city guard. Mesi joined them as an unofficial part of the unofficial investigation, tagging along to introduce various people and point out their areas of interest. Djanni hovered around as well, though mostly to speak with Pek. She was erudite and straightforward in a way that appealed to Alfric, but she didn’t seem to understand that Pek wasn’t interested in her questions, and it wasn’t until Mizuki stepped between them and started giving Djanni attention that she left.

The rooms were almost all richly appointed, which made Alfric think that perhaps he was wrong in his assumption that having this place be a wide tower was a statement of contempt. This little enclave of humans was set apart from dwodo culture, but it did seem like a good place for a person to live.

“We do have to earn our keep,” said Mesi in a low voice. “But the dormitory had stood with vacant rooms for a long time, and I suppose they’ve wanted to keep them filled, so it’s practically free to live here. I’ve been worried for some time that there will be a wave of people coming in and I’ll get displaced. There’s nothing like the protections you’d find in a human city.”

“It’s getting late,” Alfric finally said, once they had spoken to the last of the artists. The woman had given a quite long explanation about how she painted landscapes that could be seen from her balcony, and while Alfric was happy for her in an abstract way, it told him nothing interesting about the missing people.

“Are we really going to leave?” asked Mizuki. “We haven’t even, you know, gone to investigate where they disappeared from.”

“We’re not allowed to,” said Alfric. “And even if we were alright with breaking the law and insulting the hospitality we’ve been shown so far, I really don’t think we would find anything. If it’s the same thing as has been happening in Plenarch, it’ll look like either someone dropped everything and went away, or like they decided to take a trip or a new direction in life. We have names, occupations, timeframes … it’s nothing that helps right now, but it needs to be handed over, preferably before the day is over.”

“So you can … reset?” asked Pek.

Alfric nodded. “Assume that I won’t, but if there’s something actionable, something that we — or someone else — can use then I’ll reset, report to Penelope, report to the Plenarch authorities, and hope that it can do some good.”

“But you don’t think there’s anything we can use,” said Pek.

“No,” said Alfric. “I don’t. Whoever or whatever is doing this, it’s taken a lot of variables into account. And if the people are going willingly …”

“I don’t think she would,” said Pek. “Why wouldn’t she say something?”

“Maybe that was part of the deal,” said Mizuki. “Absolute silence about where you’re going, not allowed to tell anyone?”

“Who would agree to that?” asked Alfric.

“I might have,” said Mizuki. “I mean, not now, but if you had offered me a good enough deal a year ago … maybe, I guess?”

“You said that you didn’t care too much about money, that money was boring,” said Alfric.

“I didn’t say that I would be offered money, did I?” asked Mizuki. “Something else though, maybe I would have accepted.”

“I don’t think Kali would have,” said Pek with a frown. “But … I don’t know.”

“We’ll figure out a solution,” said Alfric. “Penelope will have already raised flags. It’s just not the sort of thing that can be solved in a single day, that’s all.” He wasn’t entirely confident in that, but it couldn’t be that there was no solution. He knew that there were unsolved mysteries, but there were precious few of those in the modern world, and they were either mammoth mysteries that couldn’t be solved by a dozen scholars working on them, or mysteries so tiny that the necessary evidence had been easily worn away.

They left the moving mountain behind, with Alfric again flying, in spite of Mizuki’s protest that it was her turn. If there was a failure with the helmet, or some kind of complication, she might end up in the water, and he had no confidence in her ability to warp under pressure, especially not while trying to tread water. She found the objection silly, but had eventually relented and gone into the stone with Pek.

The flight back to Plenarch gave Alfric some time to think, and his thoughts were all turned in on themselves. He’d gone there expecting to accomplish nothing but making himself feel useful, and he’d accomplished nothing, but there was still a hollowness, because this bad thing had happened and he could do nothing about it. One of the joys of being a chrononaut was that you had all kinds of power to prevent bad things from happening, so much so that the list of lives saved by a single chrononaut could run into the thousands in a given year. Here, he was helpless.

When he landed back at Penelope’s cubic house, he touched the stone to get the others out, then prepared himself to fly back into the sky.

“You don’t want us to come with you?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, I can talk to the authorities, right?”

“Better that you not,” said Alfric. “I don’t want to bring you to their attention.”

“Because of the Lola thing?” asked Mizuki.

“And because you were impolite to a guard yesterday,” said Alfric. “Besides, I want you to go help Penelope in any way you can. Have that smoke ring contest with her, if she’s up to it, something to take her mind off a hopeless situation.”

“Alright,” said Mizuki with a frown. “But you’ll tell me everything that there is to tell, right?”

“Penelope should also know it all,” said Alfric. “It’s just a matter of whether she’s sober.”

“Thank you, for doing more than your share,” said Pek. “I appreciate it, even if it’s fruitless.”

Alfric nodded. “Penelope’s a distant aunt, and I guess that makes you and Kali distant cousins.”

“Though Alfric would also have done the same for anyone,” said Mizuki. “I’m actually surprised we didn’t become freelance detectives the moment we heard that there were people missing.”

“We’re not freelance detectives,” said Alfric.

“Because we don’t get paid?” asked Mizuki. “I feel like if we found a bunch of missing people, the money would flow in. And if you squint, it’s sort of like doing a dungeon.”

“I want to go speak with the necessary people before they go home for dinner,” said Alfric. “We can have an extended argument about it later.” She was flirting with him, he was pretty sure, and while he normally enjoyed the back and forth, he simply wasn’t in the mood.

“Don’t work yourself too hard,” said Mizuki. Her face had lost some of its glee and she was giving him a sympathetic expression. “There’ll be more to do tomorrow.”

Alfric nodded, then shot up into the air, which was always Mizuki’s favorite way of leaving a conversation when she used the helmet.

Almost all of the civil services of Plenarch were clustered on a single island in the lagoon, and Alfric tried to move quickly, worried that he wouldn’t be able to see anyone. It wasn’t necessarily vital to get the information to them as quickly as possible, given that the ‘case’ was so incredibly cold and hadn’t been immediately solved with all of the days that Penelope had thrown at it, but it was better to do it now so that when Penelope threw more days at the problem, the information wouldn’t need to be reintroduced each time.

Alfric eventually came to the office of a harried detective who had papers all over her desk. Set in the middle of it was a device, likely an entad, which had small arms protruding from it, each of which was rotating around the center, like an orrery. She looked up from beneath a mass of curly hair and looked at him.

“Alfric Overguard?” she asked. “I was told to expect you.”

“When?” asked Alfric, frowning.

“This morning,” she replied. “By your aunt. She said that you might have something.”

“Oh,” said Alfric. “Well … yes. We went off to the dwodo mountain and spoke with them. Apparently they’ve had some disappearances of their own. I was hoping that wasn’t known to you, and that it might help.”

“We knew,” said the detective. She was still staring at the device.

“Oh,” said Alfric.

“I hadn’t had a chance to go out there,” said the detective. “Anything that you can tell me would be appreciated. I’d say that you saved me some trouble, but I’ll have to go out there myself to confirm.”

Alfric said what he knew, trying his best not to betray too much of the confidence that Wolin had placed in them. Most of the information had been repeated by Mesi and the others in one way or another, but he thought that there was still something suspect about getting information that way, and didn’t want to be perceived as someone who couldn’t be trusted with secrets — not even if that perception was from someone who he would likely never see again.

“I see,” said the detective. She had taken notes as she spoke, and when she was finished, that piece of paper joined the others. “It’s not much, but it’s something.”

“How did you know about the missing people on the mountain?” asked Alfric. “Penelope didn’t know.”

“We might not have told her,” the detective replied. Her attention had returned to the orrery, though whatever it was tracking, it wasn’t the motions of the stars. “Since the story was printed in the paper, we’ve had all kinds of reports, which have been stretching us thin. Your aunt wants to be a part of it, but she’s got to understand that there are limits on how much we can allow a civilian into an investigation. Especially one who’s a person of interest.”

“Person of interest?” asked Alfric. “A suspect?”

The detective sighed. She flicked one of the extended arms, and it rotated rapidly around the center of the device before slowing itself down.

“No,” said the detective. “Someone involved, that’s all, someone who we’re keeping an eye on. We don’t think that your aunt did something to Kali, but now that the story is out, the public is in heat, and we do need to consider that some of these cases might be people taking advantage of a crisis.”

“She wouldn’t do that,” said Alfric. “She loves those children like they were her own.”

“Yes, I’ve heard,” the detective replied with a wave of her hand. “And I don’t think that there’s anything that points to her. All I’m saying is that we can’t talk to her all that much about what we’re doing, especially not since she’s a chrono.”

“Meaning what?” asked Alfric.

The detective looked up from her entad and stared at Alfric. “You’re a chrono too?”

“I am,” replied Alfric. You had to say, if someone asked you point blank.

“It’s bad enough when rumors spread out from mouth to mouth in the normal way,” said the detective. “With a chrono, a rumor can spread before we even have the information in our hands. A criminal can get a second chance to cover their tracks. A special operation needs to be protected not just before it happens, but after too.”

“We cooperate with the city guards,” said Alfric. He thought about his aunt. “At least, as a general rule.”

“I tell you what, if we have a use for you, we’ll be in touch with your aunt, who was certainly in touch with us this morning,” said the detective. “Now if there’s nothing else, I need to figure this out.”

“Can I help?” asked Alfric.

The detective sighed. “No.”

After that, there was no possible reason left to stay, and Alfric made a trip to the other side of the small island, hoping for a meeting with the censusmaster, just to see whether any of the dwodo had disembarked at Plenarch and then stuck around. According to Wolin, their ‘natural’ names weren’t the same as the names everyone used for them, which wasn’t supposed to be how it worked. Alfric couldn’t remember offhand what criteria the census used, but he did know that you could change your name as it appeared on the census with time and recognition.

Unfortunately, he found himself waiting in a lobby with almost a dozen other people, and the queue was moving with all the speed of a leaf drifting on a lake.

<Alfric, will you be back for dinner?> asked Hannah.

<Start without me,> said Alfric.

<Anything fruitful?> asked Isra.

<No,> replied Alfric.

It was almost dark when he got in to see the censusmaster, a creaky old man with a shelf full of books in neat rows behind him. They went through introductions — what felt like the fiftieth time that Alfric had done that — and got to business.

“I’m hoping that you can help me,” said Alfric. “I have three names, all of dwodo, and I’d like to know whether they’re in the hex or not. I was warned that the names might not match, so if you could find any dwodo in the hex and give me a list, that would be appreciated.”

“The names won’t match,” said the censusmaster. “The dwodo have internal names. Easy enough to see the patterns though, give me a moment.” He looked off into the middle distance. After some time had passed, he began writing on a blank sheet of paper without looking at it, his fingers moving with precision. “There.” He slid the sheet of paper to Alfric.

There were four names, and nothing lined up with what he’d been told. Alfric frowned, trying to see whether something there was a few steps away from the information he had, if perhaps some of the information about the three missing dwodo was a few steps off, but none of it was close. The ages and occupations just weren’t close enough for any of this to be worth trying to track any of these people. And if the dwodo had left the mound to go live in Inter, they hadn’t necessarily settled in this hex.

Alfric sighed. “Thank you for your help.”

“Not what you were looking for?” asked the censusmaster. “I should warn you that I might not have gotten them all. It’s an internal name, so if one of the dwodo didn’t want to be found, they might have picked something innocuous. The census doesn’t gather information on species, they would blend right in.”

“No, I think this is a dead end,” said Alfric. He hesitated for a moment. “Would it be possible for someone to hide from the census?” He fully expected the answer to be no, but he wasn’t sure, and he’d waited in the queue for long enough that he wanted to get something from this meeting.

“There are entads that interact with the census,” said the censusmaster. “They’re rare, but they’re out there. The most common form draws information from the census in one way or another, but a few do alter the census information in various ways. I would have no way of knowing except by being able to draw conclusions from a conflict between reality and what the census tells me. If you have an example of that, let me know. It’s not illegal per se, but it makes my job more difficult.”

“So,” said Alfric. “Plausibly, someone could be in the hex and hiding from the census?”

“It’s unlikely, but yes,” said the censusmaster. “I would have no way of knowing. The census is imperfect in that regard, a valuable tool but not the all-seeing eye that some people say it is. Now, I need to get home to my wife and children, is there something else you need me to look up?”

“No,” said Alfric with a frown. “Just trying to puzzle things out, thank you.”

“It’s my role,” replied the censusmaster. “Think of me the next time you vote.”

Alfric left the building and took off into the air. The sunlight was fading but there was enough light from the city below to fly by, and he zipped over the islands to Penelope’s house, trying to work out what he was missing. It felt like he could put it all together, but that was probably just a fleeting feeling.

“You’re quite late,” said Mizuki when he came in. “Dinner is done. I learned to blow smoke rings though, do you want to see?”

“Sure,” said Alfric. She had a small pipe in her hand, but didn’t seem to be impaired, and he hoped that it was just an herbal mixture, something that would have a good taste but wouldn’t affect her too much.

Mizuki took a puff and then blew a perfect smoke ring, which curled through the air and eventually lost its shape. “All you have to do is,” and then she blew another smoke ring, which wasn’t terribly instructive. “So, nothing for all our troubles?”

“No,” said Alfric. “You know, I had said at the start of the day that I was mostly trying to make myself feel like I was doing something, but I had a feeling, as though I was going to be able to make something of it all. But now it’s all going up like smoke.”

Mizuki blew another smoke ring. “I am good at this.”

“I need to eat,” said Alfric. “We’ll stay the night here to be ready for tomorrow, but if there’s nothing we can help Penelope with once she’s undone a few days, we’ll head out in the morning.”

“Isra bought a lot of stuff,” said Mizuki. “She looks cute.” She puffed another smoke ring, this one in the direction of the ceiling. Alfric was thankful that the house was self-cleaning. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” said Alfric. “Failure just doesn’t sit well with me, and I feel like today was … not a waste, but not what I had wanted.”

“Life is like that sometimes,” said Mizuki with a shrug.

“I guess,” said Alfric.

And the next morning, there was still no sign of Kali, still no clue that had been uncovered which solved everything, only clues that raised more questions.

“I’ve been through the day six times,” said Penelope. “I’ve obtained entads that give a limited view into the past. They show her packing and leaving, but I’ve lost her after that. I’ll try again today, but she gave me the slip deliberately, with forethought.”

“At least it was of her own volition,” said Alfric. “And she’s alive. That’s something.”

“It’s something,” said Pek with a dark countenance.

They talked on the matter, but it again felt like it was going nowhere, and Penelope had already had this conversation a number of times before. In her brief summary, it seemed as though they’d spun their wheels talking about it, and hadn’t had success in tracking Kali.

“Let me know if you find out more,” said Alfric.

“Of course,” said Penelope. “And think about what I’ve said. Kali leaving … it was because she was unhappy, I think. It’s hard to reckon otherwise.” She pursed her lips. “We need people to help fight for the bastlefolk.”

Alfric made no firm commitments, but it had been on his mind. There, at least, there might be something that he could do.

Chapter 100 - Universal Truths

Mizuki felt proud of the garden stone and what they’d made of the place. She had been Alfric’s carpentry assistant, which she continued to insist was a totally real thing, and she’d helped him move things around, though her strength was no match for his. Still, she had put in a huge amount of work, partly to make up for the fact that she hadn’t helped with the theater at all, and the garden was essentially a second home for them now. She was going to have a whole kitchen in there eventually, and if there hadn’t been the whole kidnapping thing, she might have spent some time flying around the city and picking up a bunch of stuff for it. It made more sense to just wait and grab a bunch of henlings from a dungeon the next time they came across a vaguely kitchen-like room, but she was impatient. Alfric had been a little overbearing in how much he went on about the need to clean things that were going to be used in cooking, and ideally having them be checked over by a cleric of Qymmos, which seemed like it was a little overly cautious given that they had Isra. Still, there was apparently a risk of something like lead, which was apparently not good for the constitution, even in very small amounts.

Mizuki showed the space off to Pek, who seemed somewhat listless and frustrated, and as nice as the garden stone had become, there wasn’t all that much to it. The trip to the mountain would take some time, and that left her alone with someone she didn’t really know how to handle.

“Are you holding up okay?” asked Mizuki. “I know she was your sister.”

“She wasn’t, not really,” said Pek. “She’s the same species, that’s all, it’s just that there are only two of us.” He paused for a moment. “When I was little, I thought we would get married.”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “And … that didn’t work out?”

“There was never any real spark of attraction,” said Pek. “It would have to be like a chrononaut pact, loveless and businesslike, only for furthering the species, and there are lots of reasons not to do that. A community of new bastlefolk would be seen as a threat to some people.”

“What, really?” asked Mizuki. “More than just two people would be?”

Pek nodded. “People have problems with just two as well, but if we were a family, a community, it might be seen differently. Those first babies that Penelope talks about, those thirty-seven, if they had all grown to maturity, it might actually have caused some problems for the cause, especially if they were better than humans in some way.”

“Better?” asked Mizuki. “Like, stronger?”

“Stronger, smarter, faster, with magical powers, that kind of thing,” said Pek. “The dwodo live longer than humans, and some people resent them for that. The feil were decimated by attacks on their sovereign hexes during the Red Ages, and there are still songs about them that declare them to be monstrous in some way or another.”

Mizuki knew exactly what songs he was talking about, though she’d never taken them all that seriously. ‘Feili claws and widened jaws’, the kind of thing that was used to scare people. But the feil were kind of scary, at least in her opinion, from what she knew about them, and the dwodo and their moving mountains were much more quaint and harmless, so long as the moving mountains stayed in the water and didn’t come up on land where they weren’t expected.

“And are you?” asked Mizuki. “Better than a human somehow?”

“We have a magic of our own,” said Pek. “Nothing too good though.”

“Can I see?” asked Mizuki. “I’m a sorc, it’s professional curiosity.” She loved being able to use that line.

Pek frowned. “Just a moment.” He fiddled with his ring, and the disguise fell, leaving his normal appearance, with stones embedded in his face. He took one of these out, leaving an unpleasant wet hole, then fiddled with the ring again, returning him to normal — or not normal, but human. “Here.”

Mizuki took the stone. It was warm to the touch, but not at all wet like she’d expected it to be. She turned it over, feeling its somewhat irregular shape. It was giving off an aetheric scent all by itself, something of binding, which meant that the magic itself might be animation of some sort. There was something else in there too, a minor note, a mood of disconnection that would correspond to connection. Disconnection was hard to work with for a sorc, and Mizuki didn’t have all that much experience with it — there weren’t all that many things that were susceptible to it, with the only notable one being bound entads, which could be temporarily disrupted.

“It’s … some kind of telekinetic rock?” asked Mizuki.

“Set it on the ground,” said Pek.

Mizuki did, and after a moment, the stone sprang to life, cracks that had been invisible widening open to make tiny little legs that splayed out. The faint excess it had been putting off blossomed into a veritable torrent of disturbance, one of the most outsized impacts on the aether that Mizuki had ever seen. The little stone creature moved around as Pek moved his hand, marching forward and backward.

“Super neat,” said Mizuki.

“It doesn’t do anything,” said Pek.

“It’s still neat,” said Mizuki. “I would love a minor power like that.”

“There are entads that do the same,” shrugged Pek. “There’s no practical use for it.”

“Still,” said Mizuki. “It’s neat. Sometimes, when it comes to magic, that’s enough, isn’t it?” Pek nodded slowly. “And it’s unique. You’re the only one in the world that can do it. That’s worth something too, it’s what I love about entads.”

“Not unique,” said Pek softly. “Kali can do it too. She doesn’t, but she can. If she’s still alive.”

“If she’s in trouble, we’ll save her,” said Mizuki. “I’d never bet against Alfric.” She almost said that Alfric was a good detective, but she didn’t actually know whether that was true. He knew a lot about a lot of things, but that didn’t necessarily mean that he was good at figuring things out. All Mizuki really knew about detectives came from detective stories, and she hadn’t read many detective books, which she had little interest in.

Alfric appeared next to the stone and told them that they’d arrived, and in short order, Mizuki was swarmed with dwodo children, which was her first introduction to them. She was surprised by how cute they were, and with their eyes in awkward places, they were even more adorable, reminding her of some of the terrible drawings her younger sisters had done. Mizuki had always liked kids, and she played with the dwodo kids, who wanted to touch her hair — they were bald — and pluck out her eyeballs. The hair wasn’t too much of a problem, but she wanted very much to keep her eyeballs in her head, and stopped bending down for them when one of them accidentally scratched her. Maybe they weren’t trying to pluck out her eyes and only wanted to see and feel these new things, but she still didn’t want her eyes damaged by childrens’ fingers.

But eventually they were following the old guy with seven eyes, which marked him as someone important. Mizuki wasn’t sure how important, but he was a big deal, she was pretty sure, maybe equivalent to a cleric or something. She also had no idea how many people lived on the moving mountain, and so far as she knew, it might be the same population as either Pucklechurch, with around a thousand, or Liberfell, with maybe fifteen thousand. Or more, perhaps, because the moving mountains were supposed to be riddled with tunnels and caves.

As they made their way down the mountain, Mizuki was struck by how much masonry there was. There were reddish stone bricks almost everywhere, paving all of the paths, even the ones that seemed to go to homes. Wood was nowhere to be seen except in the few trees they passed by. They didn’t seem to use wood in the construction of any of their buildings. And these were stone, carved or quarried, making everything look like it was a part of a large castle. She had an urge to take the helmet from Alfric and go up into the sky to see what this place looked like from above, but he seemed slightly annoyed with her, so she did her best to be on good behavior.

They walked for what seemed like a long way, and Mizuki took in the sights. It was much more ordered than Pucklechurch or even Plenarch, and it felt like every inch of the mountain’s back had been planned out, at least designed to look like it had been planned. For ground cover there was clover with tiny leaves and a nice smell, and while there was a fair amount of terraced farmland, there were also so many parks that it seemed a bit ridiculous. It was possible she was wrong about what she was seeing though. She had no idea what the dwodo ate, and was excited to find out, but the things she thought were parks might have been more farmland or something.

They came to a place that felt like a small temple to Mizuki, a domed building with a sextet of chairs set at angles to each other around a stonework design in the middle where the rocks had either been painted or dyed. There was no door, just a doorway, which felt a little weird. The dome had little holes in the top to let in light, and Mizuki was faintly surprised to realize that there weren’t proper lights anywhere to be seen. She supposed that dwodo didn’t really do dungeons as much as humans did, given that they spent most of their lives on their mountains, but surely they’d have been able to trade for lightstones? She didn’t know, and decided to add it to the list of questions she would have for Alfric later on.

The older dwodo sat in one of the chairs and waited for them to get settled. Maybe this was a small meeting room, rather than a temple, but the six chairs were suggestive. Then there was a round of introductions, which went a bit long in Mizuki’s opinion, partly because of the way that their host, Wolin, had introduced himself.

“Wolin, clade of Dowo, born of the Eel Mound, Seven-Eyed Envoy,” had led Alfric to be “Alfric, clade of Overguard, born of the Dondrian Hex, Two-Eyed Adventurer,” and Pek to be “Pek, cladeless, born of a far east dungeon, Two-Eyed Chandler,” which had given both Mizuki and Wolin cause for some silence. Then Mizuki had realized that it was her turn, and she flubbed it a bit, in part because she wasn’t entirely sure what a clade was except that Alfric had used his last name as his clade. It sounds like ‘clan’, and Mizuki wasn’t entirely sure what a clan was either, other than maybe the same as a big family or a gang or something. Alfric talked about chrononaut clans, and had never really explained what a clan was, though Mizuki had also never sought clarification.

“You do not come here on behalf of Plenarch,” said Wolin. Mizuki wasn’t sure which of his eyes to look at, but settled on the center one. She had a thousand questions for him, most of which didn’t involve the disappearance of Kali, and she did her best to focus on the matter at hand, which meant shutting up.

“No,” said Alfric. “The most recent disappearance happened less than twelve hours ago, a girl named Kali, who is the sister to Pek.”

“Help me,” said Wolin. “Twelve hours is … ?”

“Sometime last night,” said Alfric. “Probably not long after sunset, we think. Have you seen her? Or has anyone landed on your mountain in the last half day or so? Reached you by boat?”

Wolin shook his head. “No one at all. I said before that you are the first in two days, since the mountain began its journey south.”

“No one?” Alfric pressed. Wolin shook his head. “Are there visitors right now, people who are maybe traveling with the dwodo, or staying at an inn?”

“There is a dormitory for the foreign two-eyes on the lower level of the mountain,” nodded Wolin. “You are welcome to stay there, but are not allowed to wander in the upper levels, nor within the interior.”

“You’ve been close to Plenarch for almost a month,” said Pek. “Have you had disappearances of your own?”

Wolin was silent for a moment. “We are free to leave,” he finally said. “We do not track each other like those in your lands. But dwodo do not wander like humans do. We wander in different ways.”

“You’d notice if someone was gone though, right?” asked Mizuki. “If someone just suddenly stopped showing up to temple days in my village, and we went to check in and their home was empty —”

“That would be their own affair,” said Wolin. His voice was firm.

Mizuki stared at him. “Seriously? If someone didn’t show up to the knitting circle, no one would go to their house to see whether they were okay? And if no one showed up for a week, you’d just shrug and say hey, it happens?”

“It is our way,” replied Wolin. “If there is a contract it may be different, but there is no contract in most cases.”

Mizuki looked to Alfric to see whether this was as weird as she thought it was. He gave a slight shake of his head, and she shut her lips tight, but it seemed insane to her, and the fact that sometimes people ran into problems was exactly why. If one of the dwodo lived alone and died in their bed, how would anyone find out? If what other people did wasn’t any of your business, and you really believed that with your heart and soul, and your whole village believed that — how did anything function? Mizuki had depended upon the kindness of the other people in the village when her family had moved away. If she’d been living on the moving mountain, apparently she’d have been left to fend for herself unless she’d gone to request aid from other people, and maybe not even then.

“You have nothing like a census,” said Alfric slowly. “Is there some way we can verify the population ourselves?”

Wolin pursed his lips, which made him look curiously human. “I know humans have the concept of privacy.”

“We could ask people,” said Alfric. “Take a survey? Talk to people and see if they’ve noticed anyone missing?”

Wolin nodded slowly. “It would be possible. Most do not speak Inter.”

“I speak enough dwodo to get by,” said Alfric.

Alfric was frankly pretty amazing. Mizuki wondered whether he spoke the feili language as well, and guessed that he did, though she didn’t really understand why that would be. It was good to know more than one language, she thought, and she could more or less speak Kiromo a little, though wouldn’t want to be put to the test. But if you were going to go through the trouble of learning languages, why the feili and dwodo languages? Maybe at some point in his life he’d meant to do something with them, or maybe he’d just been fascinated by them.

“We will not stop you from speaking,” said Wolin.

Alfric nodded. “We won’t be here longer than a day.”

“And was there someone?” asked Mizuki. “Someone who you noticed wasn’t really around anymore, and you decided that it wasn’t any of your business?”

Wolin paused. “The guard from Plenarch came to ask and our response was the same. If someone does not want to be here, they are free to go.”

“Right, but do you have a list of names?” asked Mizuki. “Or dates, at least, to see whether this all lines up? Because people have gone missing in Plenarch, and I get that you might want to protect people from nosy neighbors or whatnot, but surely if they’re getting attacked by a dragon that’s something worth stopping, right?”

Wolin frowned. His hesitance was hard to figure out, and Mizuki started thinking up all kinds of wild theories to explain it. Maybe he was an important guy saving face, or maybe dwodo were just like this.

“Three,” said Wolin. “All in the past week.”

Alfric let out a breath. “We need to know details, then we need to get those details over to the guard in Plenarch. We need to know whether any of them spoke Inter, whether they’d been in Plenarch, what they did — all kinds of things.”

“I cannot say,” replied Wolin. “We do not know if they left or were taken. If they have left, they are owed their anonymity.”

“My sister is missing,” said Pek. “All I want is to find her, to know whether she’s okay.” With more background, Mizuki felt even worse for him. It was bad enough to think of one of her sisters going missing, but if her sisters had been the only other people like her in the entire world, that would have been so much worse.

“Just general stuff would be fine,” said Mizuki. “Keep it as anonymous as you can. We won’t tell anyone else, or go track them down, or snoop around.”

Wolin gazed at her with his seven eyes. They sat on his face oddly, held there without proper eyelids or eyelashes or really any of the necessary muscles to make them look like human eyeballs. The skin on the eyeball-area was maybe stretchy or something, because it would sometimes pinch around an eyeball in place of blinking. It was bizarre to look at, and Mizuki wondered whether the effect was better or worse with a dwodo who had even more eyeballs.

“All spoke Inter,” said Wolin. “All were acquainted with foreign lands. They might have been in Plenarch when we were in range of their boats, or when we were briefly inside the hex to be warped. They could be in Plenarch at the moment.”

“If we had names, we could check with our censusmaster,” said Alfric. Mizuki wanted to ask whether dwodo would show up on the human census, but she supposed that they did. Maybe the census wasn’t divided like that, though she’d just naturally assumed that it was.

“We do not use names in the same way,” said Wolin. “I could not give you names that the census would show. And you said that you would tell no one.”

Alfric gave a sigh of exasperation. “Then we won’t. If we could have the professions anyway? It might be part of a pattern.”

Wolin spent some time blinking in thought. “A mason, a botanist, and a groundskeeper.”

“Thank you,” said Alfric. “We’ll do our best to keep the information to ourselves and not impinge further.”

Wolin nodded. “There are other matters to attend to today,” he said. “You are free to move about the common areas. If you enter into homes without being told you can, you will be expelled.” He stood up and gave them what Mizuki interpreted as a small salute, done with the hand unfolding under his nose, and then the dwodo was on his way.

“I don’t know if that was helpful,” said Pek.

“It was information,” said Alfric.

“We’ll get him on the next time through the day,” said Mizuki. She stood up from her chair and stretched.

“No,” said Alfric. “If I redo the day, I’ll stick to what you told him. We agreed not to snoop or spread the information too far, that was the price he gave for us, and it’s one I intend to abide by.”

Mizuki stared at him. “How are we going to solve the case then?”

“Most likely we’re not,” said Alfric. “We’re just going to hand information over to the authorities in Plenarch and hope that it helps in some way. That the dwodo were also experiencing disappearances … that’s something, and it might be something that they don’t know in Plenarch. The professions are also a little suspect, aren’t they?”

“Skilled trades,” said Pek. “But Kali didn’t have a skilled trade.”

“Most of those who were taken from Plenarch had higher status due to their skills, the stability of a vocation, something like that,” said Alfric. “Kali didn’t have any of that, but it might be meaningful. If someone is stealing people, then … I don’t know. Maybe they’re doing it for their labor?”

“Slavery?” asked Pek.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric.

“We’re really done here?” asked Mizuki. “We’re just … going home?”

“We can go to the dormitory that Wolin mentioned,” said Alfric. “Asking around there would probably be fine, so long as we don’t reveal too much of what we’ve already learned.”

“Let’s go then,” said Pek.

They made their way down the moving mountain, with Alfric occasionally asking directions from whatever dwodo came close by. He rose into the air with the help of the helmet and surveyed the area, identifying a likely building that was near to a dock that was currently folded up.

“So why did you learn dwodo?” asked Mizuki as they continued down.

“They don’t have chrononauts,” said Alfric. “There’s only our small clan, and we’re human, obviously, so if one of the dwodo mounds wants to have our services on demand, they can pay us fairly handsomely in order to have us live there, if they don’t want it remote. And if they do want it remote, I would still want to know the language for the purpose of trade.”

“But knowing you, you wanted to live on one of these mounds,” said Mizuki. “Even though they don’t have dungeons.”

“It’s a different way of life,” said Alfric. “The dwodo mounds usually pick their paths so they pass by different cities, never in one place for too long, eating different foods with every passing month … and they have a different kind of culture, a way of doing things that you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere in human lands. I wouldn’t have wanted to stay on a mound for too long, but I did entertain being employed on one for a few years, which would have helped sharpen my understanding of the language and given me what I thought would be a nicely rounded experience.” He shrugged. “Dungeons are better places to explore though, better places to find new things. If we keep on for long enough, we’re bound to find an entad that allows us to go wherever we want, whenever we want, like what my parents have.”

“Have you ever found something like me in a dungeon?” asked Pek.

Alfric paused in their downward journey. “No,” he said. “Or … if we did, they were dungeon mad. Nothing that was obviously based on the human design. Humanoid, maybe.”

“I don’t think I could ever go into a dungeon,” said Pek.

“Meaning it wouldn’t work?” asked Mizuki. “Or that you’d just, um, have qualms?”

“Knowing I came from there,” said Pek. He raised an eyebrow in her direction. “Whatever the Editors did to determine what’s a person, I count just the same. I can go into dungeons, I count on the census.”

“Any chance that Kali would have gone into a dungeon?” asked Alfric.

“She had just broken up with her boyfriend,” said Pek. “That was all. Girls don’t normally go into dungeons just because of a bad breakup. Do they?”

“Sometimes,” said Mizuki. “Seems a bit dramatic to me though. The census doesn’t cover people who are down in dungeons?”

“How do you not know this?” asked Alfric.

“I dunno,” said Mizuki. “It was just never really that relevant. So a person who goes into a dungeon just … disappears?”

“Yes,” said Alfric.

That gave Mizuki some pause. She had thought … well, she wasn’t sure what she’d thought, but it hadn’t been that. It seemed like a natural consequence of all the things that Alfric had talked about before, the barrier between the dungeons and the real world, but the fact that not even the census would touch you in a dungeon made her feel a bit queasy, and made the dungeons feel all that much more creepy.

The moving mountain was a nice place, and even the slight bit of movement was eventually pretty nice beneath her feet. Alfric had said that some people got sick from it, in the same way that some people got sea sick, but Mizuki had no problem with it. The environment was also pretty nice, with all of the greenery and masonry making for a good walk. In her opinion, big cities could have done well with more of this kind of thing, especially Dondrian, which she felt was lacking in parks. The more they walked though, the more she was struck by how similar all the stonework was.

“Where do all the stones come from?” asked Mizuki after they’d passed the tenth house with the same large reddish stones.

“From the mountain itself,” said Alfric.

“Aren’t they worried about running out?” asked Mizuki.

“They have the opposite problem,” said Alfric. “Left to its own devices, it will grow until it slows down and then stops. They chip off pieces of the mountain to keep it moving, huge chunks every now and then, normally out in an ocean. Only some of it goes into houses and temples and things like that.” He pointed down the mountain. “That’s the dormitory, I think.”

Mizuki had always thought of dormitories as being squat buildings, but the building that Alfric had pointed out was tall and thin, with the stones laid out to make a cylinder. Like many of the buildings they’d passed by, there was something very deliberate about it all, and there were plants growing from almost every balcony, making it look like a vase full of flowers.

“Pretty,” said Mizuki. “They treat their guests well.”

“There are caves and passageways carved into these mountains,” said Alfric. “Those are usually the sacred places, the most coveted. From what I could see, this is the only building above two stories on the mountain, and I don’t really think it’s a compliment.”

“Ah,” said Mizuki.

“I don’t really understand why someone would move here,” said Pek. “To a place where nothing is made for them, where they would be an eternal outsider.”

Alfric pursed his lips and they continued on.

Mizuki understood what Pek was saying. He wasn’t talking about the dwodo and the humans that chose to live on the moving mountain, he was talking about his own situation. Being bastlefolk, living with the humans, that wasn’t the sort of life he would have chosen for himself if he’d ever had the option.

“My grandfather moved his whole family to Inter,” said Mizuki. “They didn’t speak the language too well and took some time to adjust, but Inter is pretty welcoming, and the town adjusted to them, and … sometimes what’s comfortable to people is only comfortable, or it’s comfortable in a bad way. So some people probably came here because they didn’t feel like their home, wherever that was, really suited them. Staying with the humans was the worse option. At least here, if they’re treated like outsiders, it’s for a reason.”

“I suppose,” said Pek.

“That’s universal though, feeling like you don’t belong,” said Mizuki. “Everyone gets it now and then, a feeling like this place just wasn’t made for them.” She had no idea whether that was true, but it was the sort of thing Hannah often said, a particularly clerical outlook that declared everyone to be more alike than they were different, casting all struggles as universal.

Mizuki was worried that Pek would say, ‘Actually, I’m literally not human, and some people struggle to think of me as a person, so my struggle isn’t universal, it’s one that’s loosely shared by only a dozen people in the entire world, and is nothing at all like your own struggles as someone who felt a little out of step’. But he didn’t say any of that, and had a quiet, contemplative look that suggested that he wasn’t thinking it either.

Whatever the case, Mizuki was pretty sure that she knew what kind of people they’d find in the tower: a bunch of weirdos.

Chapter 102 - A Bowl of Tea

Verity was home alone for the third day in a row, and feeling it.

She hadn’t actually received the Full Orchestral Lute in the mail, because as she’d predicted, it was too valuable to transport and far too precious to sit around in a place like Pucklechurch. Instead, she’d received a different entad that created an overlapping space. She had cleared a spot in the living room for the projected sphere, and was able to manipulate the lute only while there. The lute would never leave the overlapped space, but she could hear it and play it, which was enough to practice with it. Thankfully the projection entad didn’t show people, so she didn’t have to talk to her mother, but her mother left plenty of notes now, rather than sending letters.

Verity hated the lute. It was loud enough to fill a concert hall, which meant that it was too loud for their living room, but the only other option was to play outside, and the orchestral lute didn’t sound quite right there either. What she really needed was some time to play the instrument in the environment she was going to perform in, but that would require a trip to Dondrian.

She played to her limits, which were considerable, sometimes in the house, and other times outside, filling the forest with sound. There was an enormous amount of music to relearn, and she knew that it would all have to be perfect. The first set of concerts were sold out, a full theater, but the others were not, and after this weekend, it felt like there would surely be another. The financial viability of these concerts depended upon attendance, and attendance depended upon her performance.

The notes from her mother were showing up every day, usually stressing the importance of a good performance, the virtues of practice, or making plans that couldn’t easily be canceled. Verity had said that she wanted to play the music and then go back home to Pucklechurch, but she would be in Dondrian for two days, and quite a bit of the time when she wasn’t playing would be spent being trotted around like a prize sheep at the fair. Her mother had explained that it was important that their social standing not suffer too much, as the ongoing seizure would require not just material resources, but social and political resources as well. The family business was at stake, and while it was hoped that judges would rule fairly and impartially, judges were imperfect. A pleasant curtsey wasn’t likely to grant lenience for the family, but it could bend a judgment slightly.

There was a part of Verity that was impressed with her mother for having done all this. The Parson family was relatively small, and without a huge amount of influence, but the concert was going to be well-attended, and it was obvious that quite a few strings had been pulled. That the concert was sold out was due to coverage in the papers, along with some advertising, and perhaps the fact that there had been a high profile cancellation that had left those specific dates available. Verity was enormously thankful that she wasn’t in Dondrian, because if the upcoming concerts were the talk of the town, she’d be compelled to talk about them all the time, repeating the same conversations whenever someone stopped by their house. It had happened all the time when she was living in Dondrian — aside from being Chosen of Xuphin, music was the one thing that most people knew about her. Surface-level discussions of music were, at least, preferable to discussion of the philosophy of the infinite.

There was so much temptation to do anything other than play the songs she was supposed to play. Verity had initially been grudgingly writing new songs down in a little book, at the encouragement of Isra, but now it was like a habit, and when her mind came across a turn of phrase or a little tune, it would be written there, then plucked up later during her dedicated song-writing time. With the others gone, it felt like there was nothing but time. She reserved some of that time toward the end of practice to play the lute on her own terms, to stretch it to its magical limits and play with abandon, her own songs, unchained from what other composers had intended for a symphony orchestra.

The start of the song was a blast of trumpets, the kind of thing she’d always wished she could do to wake people up toward the end of a performance, turning the concert hall from silence into full-throated life in an instant. She spun the lyrics as she went, and toward the end, pushed the lute as hard as it would go, until it was giving off an unearthly sustain that no real instrument could, a velocity and energy that bounced through the house and was surely scaring away animals around the house.

She heard the knocking only when she brought the song to a close, and quietly set down the lute, then closed the entad that allowed that small sphere of Dondrian to protrude into Pucklechurch.

Verity had expected that it would be Marsh, or if not him, then perhaps Xy, who still needed to be talked to about the business of relationships.

Instead, it was Cate, the Keeper of Secrets from Plenarch. She had a serene, ethereal smile.

“I hope I’m not interrupting,” she said. “I waited until the song had reached its conclusion.”

“No, I was just finishing,” said Verity. “Can I help you?”

“I was hoping that either Alfric or Isra were in, and that they were ready to entertain an offer on the dragons,” said Cate.

“Oh,” said Verity. “Well … no, they’re off for the moment, and won’t be back until — later, I suppose.” Isra had opinions on Cate, and while Verity had spoken with the woman only briefly before, Verity trusted Isra. If you were home alone and someone came knocking at the door, it might not be the best thing to say that there was no one around, especially when in a house as relatively secluded as Mizuki’s.

“Oh,” said Cate, allowing a frown to grace her face. “And do you know whether they’ve done their duty and spoken to whomever they felt it necessary to speak to?”

“No, I don’t think they have,” said Verity.

Cate frowned. It was hard to measure her age, but she had a timeless air about her. Some of that was from her clothes, which were a bit old fashioned, though not entirely conservative in their styling. They were well-made pieces, with draping white fabric and fine craftsmanship, though a paucity of embellishment. The robe was cinched tight around her thin waist, and it hung almost to the ground, covering her feet.

“Since I’ve come all this way, would it be possible for me to see the dragons?” asked Cate.

“I don’t know,” said Verity. She felt guilty saying no, but if something happened to the dragons, Verity worried that Isra wouldn’t forgive her. Verity was in charge of the dragons since the rest of the party was gone, and had been keeping them inside. The longer Isra was away, the more unruly they became, partly because they couldn’t go flying, and partly because Isra’s influence was fading.

“I’ll pay you,” said Cate, as though just thinking of it. “Fifty rings to feed them some herbs, stroke their scales, and watch them play.”

“Ah,” said Verity. The money was a pittance compared to both the concerts and the sale they’d made in Plenarch, but it was something, a justification for letting Cate in. To have someone pay you for the pleasure of playing with your pet was something difficult to turn down. And Verity was, after all, lonely. “I think that would probably be fine.”

“I came on too strong the first time,” said Cate. “I just hadn’t seen baby dragons before.”

“I understand,” said Verity, though she really didn’t. “Come in, I should at least be a good host. Would you like some tea?”

“Thank you,” said Cate. “I’m not picky, whatever you have on hand.”

Verity led Cate into the house and to the living room, then briefly went into the kitchen and flipped up a burner for the kettle. There was something that felt very domestic about making tea, and it was one of the few things that Verity could make for herself. She thought for a moment as she looked at what they had available, and decided on a proper tea she’d gotten while in Dondrian, something with curled black bits of shredded tea leaves and tiny little dried cloves, along with a miniature blue flower that lent it a slightly floral taste.

When Verity came back into the living room, Cate was surrounded by dragons.

“Oh,” said Verity. “I was practicing, they usually go upstairs for that.”

“They’re so affectionate,” said Cate. She held her hand out, and Lerial pushed her head up into the out-stretched fingers. “Do they not like music?”

“It’s terribly loud,” said Verity. “There’s also not much that I can do about that unless I’m playing outside, which has its own problems. Sorry if you were at the door for long.”

“That’s perfectly fine,” said Cate. “I did manage to catch most of that piece you were playing, and waited until you were finished to knock. I hope that’s alright that I listened in, but I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“It’s perfectly fine,” said Verity, though she felt a flush of embarrassment. The piece was nowhere near done, though it had been coming together in her notebook for days.

“Are you planning to play that at your concert?” asked Cate as she pet Lerial some more. Her attention was focused on the herb dragon, but she asked Verity the question with honest interest.

“No,” said Verity. “Or, I don’t think so. It’s an original, and that’s not what’s on the program.”

“An original?” asked Cate, her voice mild. “Interesting.” She paused for a moment. “You know, I was quite surprised when I heard your name mentioned in casual conversation a few days ago. The concert isn’t quite the talk of the town in Plenarch, but I know a few people who are making the trip.”

“Mostly to show that they can?” asked Verity. “They’re people of means who can go see a concert across the country on a whim?” This was impolite to say, and not a particularly political answer, but it had just slipped out.

“Not how they would put it, I’m sure,” said Cate. “But I suspect that’s part of the allure. I’m going myself, of course.”

“Ah,” said Verity. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to insult.” She looked at the dragons, which were crowding around Cate, brushing up against her legs. Lerial had taken the lead, and had curled up in Cate’s lap. “They’re taking a liking to you.”

“I like to think I would take good care of them, if you could see your way toward selling them to me,” said Cate. She smiled down at Lerial, then looked up at Verity. “That’s the kettle.”

Verity heard it only belatedly, as the whistle of the kettle rose in volume. All three of the dragons raised their heads to look toward the kitchen, and Verity resolved to make a bowl of tea for them as well. It had been a surprise that the dragons liked tea, but on reflection, it had made sense, since their diet consisted largely of copious amounts of herbs. Isra had a special tea blend made for them, one she thought they’d find healthy, and the three dragons would often sit around a bowl of tea together, waiting until it was at the right temperature before drinking.

A few minutes later Verity had brought the dragons their bowl, then brought a cup for Cate and another cup for herself. The dragons, distracted by their bowl of tea, circled around it, occasionally bumping against it to check whether it had cooled down enough.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” said Cate. “Why do you live in Pucklechurch?”

Verity considered that. It was a question that she knew she would be getting a lot of when she was in Dondrian. The real answer was that she’d picked Pucklechurch on impulse while fleeing the stress of being a professional musician with too many social engagements and the death grip her mother had over her life, but the diplomatic answer, the one she planned to give to her mother’s people, was more nuanced.

“I spent quite a bit of my time in the conservatory system in Dondrian,” said Verity. “I worked with a number of exceptional artists and teachers, honing my craft. But at a certain point, I felt I needed some time to myself, to find something unique to my own personal practice. If you know about the concert, then you probably know that I’m a Chosen of Xuphin. I was hoping to find something on my own, to learn and grow in a way that would help exercise muscles that the conservatory was ill-suited for.”

Cate leaned back and looked at the dragons, who were now noisily slurping tea. “You’re going to need to practice your delivery of that.”

“Ah,” said Verity. She hung her head. “Right.”

“It’s three days away,” said Cate. “I’m surprised that you’re not in Dondrian already.”

“I wanted to stay here as much as I could,” said Verity. “To be with my friends, who are now gone. I wasn’t getting as much preparation with them here, I’m the one who said that I should stay, but … you don’t want to hear about this.”

“I do,” said Cate. She raised an eyebrow toward Verity. “I’m a Keeper of Secrets for many reasons, and one of those reasons is that I like to listen. So please, do go on.”

Verity pursed her lips. “Isra, our druid, we’re … she’s my girlfriend. It’s been … I don’t know. I feel like I can’t possibly keep feeling this way about her, because if married couples felt like that, then they wouldn’t act so casually around each other. Just having her in the same room sets my heart to beating faster. But it’s making it hard to focus on anything else, and I keep having this sense like I’m putting off something that I should be doing, that it’s all going to come crashing down on my head.”

“All what?” asked Cate.

“I don’t know,” said Verity with a shrug. “Nothing to do with Isra, that’s all very solid, but with the concerts, with my mother — the truth is, I ran away.” It felt like a relief to have the truth out. She was going to have to lie about it in Dondrian, or at least speak her way around the truth. “I told my parents that I was leaving, but didn’t tell them where I was going, and it took them some time to find me again. And now it’s like I never left. I’m ensnared again.” She shook her head. “Sorry, you really don’t want to hear this, it’s all terribly pedestrian.”

“It does sound like a familiar song, yes,” said Cate. “Perhaps, if you’d permit me, and while I’m here, you’d like to hear my version of the refrain?”

Verity blinked. “Yes, please.”

“I was young, once, and am now older than I look,” said Cate. Her eyes were on the dragons, who were reaching the end of their bowl of tea. “I had duties and responsibilities, and I wanted nothing to do with them. I had my own overbearing mother, who wanted to control me, to raise me in her image, so I could one day take her place. We were a wealthy family, if a small one, with a palatial estate, and it was in some sense an enormous amount to give up, but in another sense, it was … someone else’s life, I suppose. So I ran, without giving her the courtesy of a warning, and I stole from her as I fled, unapologetic. It had been building for quite some time, as I’m sure it was with you, but it happened all at once, with quite a bit of planning on my part, and then that was that. I was out in the world.”

“And … she found you?” asked Verity.

“We live in a world where it’s very hard to hide,” said Cate with a slight smile. “If you want to hide from the world, truly hide, you need powerful magic or to keep moving, and even then, there’s a chance that won’t be enough. She had put what she considered to be an enormous amount of effort into training and educating me, preparing me for my role, and she expended what resources she had to track me down, which was more than enough.”

“I came back willingly,” said Verity. “Their lives would crumble without me. My father would lose his business and my mother would be ejected from high society.”

“I came back kicking and screaming,” said Cate with a grin. “And it was a month before I so much as spoke with my mother. I threatened to burn down our house, as a matter of fact.”

“That, ah,” said Verity. “Seems extreme.”

“Do you feel it though?” asked Cate. “The urge to throw everything in her face?”

“Yes,” said Verity. “I do.”

“I didn’t end up burning the house down, by the way,” said Cate with a smile.

“That’s good,” said Verity with a nod. “And did it work out, in the end?”

“I wish that I could say that it had,” said Cate. “In my opinion, there are only a few ways the story can possibly end. The first, and most common, is that you come to some kind of arrangement, one where you always feel your parents are being a little overbearing, and they always feel that you’re a little ungrateful, or whatever else the issues between you are. You sit in a constant process of negotiation that leaves neither terribly happy, but mutual obligations fulfilled. Less commonly, sometimes people see the light. It’s what you see in stories, where the person who is engaged in wrongdoing sees the error of their ways. And the last, what I did, was simply to cut all contact. To this day my mother, if she’s still alive, doesn’t know where I am.”

“That’s — not what I would prefer,” said Verity.

“But it was the state of affairs for some time, was it not?” replied Cate. “You left without telling her where you were going, and you spent time with no contact between you. Did you not like it that way?”

“I enjoyed it very much,” said Verity. “But what you said about my mother discovering that she was wrong all along, for her to change and become someone she’s not … it sounds so appealing.”

“It’s unlikely to happen,” said Cate. “You’re doing this series of concerts for their financial security?” Verity nodded. “Tell me, what happens when the concerts are over and done with? Do you think that your mother will loosen her grip?”

“My obligation to her will be done,” said Verity. She kept her face firm. “With what she’s set up, it will be quite a significant fund. If they can’t make their lives work with that, then they can go starve.” This was quite the thing to say to someone that Verity barely knew, and she regretted it immediately, because it was the sort of thing that could float through society and follow her around. But Cate seemed trustworthy, and she was Keeper of Secrets.

“And what does your father do?” asked Cate.

“He’s in business,” said Verity. “Nothing all that important or interesting. Right now, he’s defending the company from seizure, but I believe before that he was working on some sort of ectad business, novel applications or something like that.” Her father had never said, and Verity had never asked, but it had been going on since before she left, and so far as she knew, her father had never seen a single ring of profit from any of it. “I’m still not entirely clear on what you do.”

“This and that,” Cate said, brushing the question away. “I deal with problems, especially those of a particularly unique sort, those that require a broad understanding of multiple fields of study or different kinds of magic, and often those realms of knowledge where someone will need to either comb through some very old books, or perhaps consult with experts from all over the nation.”

“I don’t think that clarifies much,” said Verity. She looked down at the bowl of tea, which was nearly empty. The dragons drank fairly slowly, taking their time to lap things up, like cats in that respect. “Are the herb dragons part of it?”

“Part of it?” asked Cate.

“There’s been some speculation on your interest in them,” said Verity. “I was wondering if perhaps you could tell us whether your interest was personal or professional.”

“Purely personal,” said Cate. “If I could have spent provincial money on them, I might not have balked so much at the outrageous asking price. And if it were vital to the health of the province in one way or another, I likely would have said so, unless I was seeking a good price.”

Verity shifted. “It’s just that your level of interest, the amount of time that you’ve devoted to coming here, it’s … unusual.”

“Ah,” said Cate. She seemed completely unperturbed by that. “I’ve found, in life, that money solves fewer problems than you would think, and what’s needed, even for problems that seem like they should be matters of money, what’s really needed is personal attention.”

“And this is a situation like that?” asked Verity, frowning a bit.

“I want the herb dragons,” said Cate. “If I show up often enough, eventually someone will keep me in mind, and I’ll be offered a fair price for the dragons, which I’ll gladly pay. Or perhaps I’ll find some other way to get them, if payment isn’t an option.”

“Meaning?” asked Verity. There was something about the phrasing that made her nervous, and she was suddenly keenly aware that she was home alone. She could shout into the party channel, and Alfric would use the dagger to return to Pucklechurch in a mere instant, and made a plan to do that as soon as there was any actual cause for alarm.

“Money isn’t all that moves people,” said Cate. “In fact, I would say that money is often the thing that moves people the least, once they’re no longer at risk of sleeping in the rain or starving to death. You left Dondrian to come here, where you’d make far, far less money, isn’t that right?”

“Oh,” said Verity, relaxing. “I suppose I see what you’re driving at.”

“Well then,” smiled Cate. “When it comes to these marvelous little dragons of yours, there are things that you would give them up for, but money alone is probably not the motivator. It would be a matter of knowing your party though, which is my other incentive to stop by here and pester you all so often. Do you have an understanding of what moves you?”

“I do,” nodded Verity.

“And would you like to share?” asked Cate.

“I’ve already said, I think,” said Verity. She gave a demure smile. “A peaceful resolution with my mother, as simple and sad as that might be.” And a quiet life in a small town, though that was something that she already had, and was nothing anyone could give her.

“Sad, perhaps, but not simple,” said Cate. She tapped her lip. “Do you suppose that you would ever try your plan again? To put yourself beyond their reach?”

“I don’t know how I would,” said Verity.

“There are ways and means available to me that other people don’t have access to,” said Cate. “If you wanted my help to be hidden, I would lend it.”

“If I’d been given the offer a year ago, I might have taken it,” said Verity. “Now though … I have a nice house here, a partner, and a profession, of sorts.”

“Too much to leave behind,” said Cate with a nod. “I know that well.” She stretched out and then stood up, smiling down at the dragons. “Thank you. I quite enjoyed talking. I take an interest in people from time to time, but you’ve been a delight.”

Verity blushed. “You flatter me.”

“And thank you for the tea as well, and the time with the dragons,” said Cate. She looked down at them. The tea had a calming effect on them, which Isra said was because it gave them warm bellies, and they had clumped up together next to the bowl. Verity was going to have to let them out with a collar on, always a difficult thing when there were three of them, but the herb dragons weren’t yet housebroken. “How much did we agree on?”

“Fifty rings,” said Verity. “Though I feel guilty charging you.”

“Nonsense,” said Cate. She reached into her robes and drew forth a string with rings on it, and set them on the end table without counting them. “I may come again soon, if that’s alright with you. When Isra is back, I’d welcome the chance to see the dragons in flight.”

“I’ll speak with her about it,” said Verity. “And I do think you’d give them a good home, for what that’s worth.”

“Is that part of your consideration?” asked Cate.

Verity nodded. “We’ve talked about it. But I think we would be reluctant to sell the dragons to someone who was only looking to use them for … well, for domestic uses.”

“I see,” said Cate. “Well, then I’ll be sure to give this a fair bit of my attention, and hopefully no one finds it too annoying. And I do look forward to your concert, as much as you might be dreading it. The piece I heard through the door was particularly good, I thought. You should think about playing it.”

“Thank you,” said Verity, though she felt embarrassed by it, and that song was going nowhere near the Ellusifé.

Once Cate was gone, Verity was left to her own devices again. She went scrounging into the chiller, looking for something good. Mizuki had made some food for Verity, but that was all gone, and the chiller wasn’t kept fully stocked. Still, there was enough to make a small plate of cold food, with pickled eggs, smoked cheese, and the last remains of a garlic summer sausage. It was almost reaching the point where she’d have to go into the market and restock everything herself, given how long the trip to Plenarch seemed to be going. Verity wouldn’t have minded doing that, but she knew very little about what was in the kitchen, and had virtually no ability to cook for herself. It seemed like what would happen was that she would buy a bunch of things, paying too much, which would then lock Mizuki into cooking with them, or possibly having things go to rot.

<Sorry to intrude, but is there an estimate on when you’ll be home?> asked Verity.

<We’re preparing now,> said Alfric. <It shouldn’t be more than a half hour.>

<Oh,> said Verity. <You could have said.>

<We know it’s your practice time,> said Alfric. <And that it’s hard to play when someone is talking into your ear.>

<Thank you,> said Verity. <I do appreciate it.>

<I’m eager to see you,> said Isra.

Verity smiled, though the party chat couldn’t see it. <Come home safe.>

The next half hour was spent cleaning, though Verity hadn’t been particularly messy while the others were gone. Dishes were cleaned, clothes were tossed into a hamper, and books were put back on their shelves, or stacked up to be returned to the local library. Verity wasn’t very good at cleaning or picking up, but she thought she’d done a passable job, and then there was still some time left, which she spent twiddling her thumbs, anxious for the others to return.

She didn’t see Alfric land, but she did see him in the backyard, pulling out the stone, and then she saw the rush of people coming out from the stone, all in conversation, their words breaking the silence that had hovered over the house the last few days. It was surprising how much she missed them all, though no particular surprise how much she’d missed Isra.

When Isra came out of the stone, Verity almost didn’t recognize her. It wasn’t just that all her clothes had been replaced, that her headscarf was gone, and her face was different somehow, which Verity eventually realized must be from makeup. There was also something different about the way that Isra was carrying herself, a certain awkward buoyancy rather than her fluid stoicism, and Verity didn’t know what to make of it.

Isra wrapped her in a hug right away, and Verity hugged her back. For a moment they were gripping each other so hard that it felt like they were trying to squeeze the life out of each other. Verity let herself melt, to just feel the skin contact, and when they finally stopped hugging, there was a long kiss.

“I missed you,” said Isra, softly butting her forehead against Verity’s as though they were billy goats.

“I missed you too,” said Verity. “I wish we’d spoken more on party chat.”

“I didn’t want to bother everyone else,” said Isra.

“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you didn’t have smoochy talk over party chat,” said Mizuki.

“What’s smoochy talk?” asked Isra, a bit of her sharpness still there.

“It’s like kissing in public, but with words,” said Mizuki.

“Yes, and none of that, please and thank you,” said Hannah. “But if you’d wanted to talk to each other about your days, you could have done that more, so long as you keep in mind that it’s quite public.”

Isra went to grab a pile of bags and slung them over one shoulder, then took Verity’s hand and brought her upstairs.

“I wanted to show you what I got,” said Isra as she began looking through the bags that she’d set on her bed.

“You look different,” said Verity.

“Yes,” said Isra, glancing back and smiling. She paused for a moment and did a slow turn around. “Do you like it?”

Verity did not like it. It was like someone had taken Isra and sanded down all the things that made her unique, like Isra had gone into a salon and had them style her hair and put makeup on her. In fact, this seemed very likely to be exactly what had happened. Overall it wasn’t a bad job at all, but Isra had looked remarkable and unique, and whatever had been done to her had made her look not all that different from any other girl. The dress in particular was quite pedestrian, the sort of style that married practicality with a flourish of color and sweeping lines, dead common almost anywhere in Inter.

“It’s good,” said Verity, the words coming out almost on their own. She’d seen Isra’s face begin to fall, and couldn’t handle that. “You went to a salon?”

Isra nodded. She held out her hand. “They lacquered my nails.”

Verity got up from where she’d been sitting and took Isra’s proffered hand, examining it. It was well-done, and on closer inspection, Isra had more makeup than Verity normally did. One of the bags had a wide variety of small bottles and cases, so much that it could have been enough for two women.

Verity wanted to say ‘I hope you didn’t do this on my account’, but worried that it would come out sounding either mean or conceited. She had liked the old Isra perfectly well, thank you very much, and wasn’t entirely sure what she felt about this new Isra. But it seemed likely that this wasn’t about Verity at all, that this was instead about Isra, and Verity swallowed her personal preferences. It would have taken an enormous bout of hypocrisy to tell another person to dress a certain way just for the sake of others.

“You look lovely,” said Verity, which was the truth. “Show me everything.”

Chapter 104 - The Pucklechurch Gardening Club

Over the course of her absence, Verity said exactly five sentences in their party chat. These were:

<The concert went fine. I’m going to sleep.>

<The second concert was alright. I’ll be back tomorrow.>

<Coming home in just a bit.>

And then she was back with them, so early in the morning that she arrived before Mizuki was finished making breakfast — and it was rare for Verity to be awake before the end of breakfast.

“You’re back!” said Isra, wrapping Verity in a hug. Verity returned the hug, somewhat limply, as though she’d been so drained of energy that she couldn’t even do something as simple as hug her girlfriend. It took a moment for Isra to relent. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” said Verity. “Sorry, I’m tired.”

“Do you need to sleep?” asked Isra. “We can be quiet while you rest, you must have set out early.”

“I’m tired, but I’m not going to sleep,” said Verity. “I need to keep some semblance of a schedule. Maybe a nap later.” She looked at Isra, finally really looked, and squeezed Isra’s hand. “We need to spend some time together.”

“Yes,” Isra smiled. She was getting better about smiling, she felt. She had practiced in front of a mirror. “I had hoped to hear more from you over the party chat about how it was going.”

“I never really had time,” said Verity. She yawned. “You were fine?”

“I missed you,” Isra repeated. “I worked on the garden, played with the dragons, and did some archery practice.” It had only been two days, but it had felt much longer. “I want to hear all about your trip though.”

“Let me put my things away,” said Verity.

She said hello to the others, who were milling about the kitchen, then trudged up to their room. Isra wasn’t sure whether Verity had intended for them to go up together, but she followed after, not wanting to be apart.

“So?” asked Isra.

Verity laid on the bed, and for a moment seemed as though she was going to fall asleep there. “It was more awful than I had imagined it would be.”

“Oh,” said Isra. “I’m sorry, honey.”

“Honey?” asked Verity, lifting her head slightly.

Isra opened her mouth to explain that this was a pet name, but closed her mouth again, because surely Verity knew that. In the end, Isra simply shrugged.

“I don’t know why I expected that it might be easier, why I thought that I could handle it,” said Verity. “All that build up, all that time spent trying to steel myself, and then I just fell flat on my face.”

“I’m sorry,” Isra said again. “You had practiced so hard, it sounded so good —”

“Oh,” said Verity. “The concerts went fine.” She let out a long sigh. “I said that in party chat, didn’t I?”

“You didn’t say much,” said Isra.

“I got a standing ovation both times,” said Verity. “And a glowing review in the papers. Professionally it was everything my mother had been hoping it would be, which was almost exactly the problem.” She had been staring up at the ceiling, but turned to look at Isra. “She wanted me to stay in Dondrian. Apparently she hadn’t made arrangements for a return trip to Pucklechurch because she ‘just wanted it to be easier on everyone’. I need to be back there in five days, and she has a point, but it’s not what we agreed on.”

“I’m glad you came home,” said Isra. “You shouldn’t be carrying this all on your own.” She slipped into bed next to Verity, curling up under Verity’s arm.

“There’s nothing you can do though,” said Verity. Her voice was soft. “I can tell you all about it, but even if you weren’t a world away … it’s a battle that you can’t fight for me.”

“I could try,” said Isra. “I could send a colony of birds to live in her house, or march a bear to the negotiation table.” She smiled at Verity, and finally, for the first time since she’d come home, Verity smiled back.

They kissed tenderly for a moment, and then with more urgency. It was as though Verity was coming back to life, like a wilted plant that was finally tasting water again. Isra helped to take off Verity’s clothes, and then they spent some time speaking in the language of their bodies, traveling each other’s geography, seeing the mountains and valleys.

When they’d finished, Verity had fallen right asleep. Isra covered her with a blanket and kissed her on the forehead, then went downstairs, to where breakfast was getting cold.

“You know the worst part about breakfast?” asked Mizuki.

“Uh, no?” asked Isra.

“It’s pretty much all foods that are terrible when they get cold, and without much way for them to keep their heat,” answered Mizuki. “Eggs get gross, bacon gets gross — maybe I should start making some veggies for breakfast, since they would keep. Anyway, that’s my way of saying sorry for the stodgy food.” She glanced at doorway. “Is Verity coming, or … ?”

“She’ll sleep,” said Isra. “Sorry if you made too much.” She took a scoop of food from each of the bowls Mizuki had set out, loading up her plate, and then began to eat quickly.

“I’d hoped that she missed my cooking,” said Mizuki. “But I guess sleep calls.”

Mizuki had gone for a full spread, though much of it was gone. There were hard-boiled eggs, pickled vegetables, something Mizuki called ‘egg pancakes’, strips of grilled pork belly, and a wide variety of mushrooms from the forest — all picked by Isra the day before. Hannah had done some baking in the morning, and there were two different kinds of rolls, with a small rack set beside them. The rack was new, a bit of woodworking that Alfric had put together, made to hold their various pots of jams and jellies, along with the butter dish. A second caddy was in the process of being planned, one for tea, but that was apparently some ways off.

“What’s your read on her?” asked Alfric. His plate was clean, but he’d stayed at the table. “What are the odds that we’ll actually get in a dungeon this week?”

“Low,” said Isra. “Sorry.”

“It’s — well, it’s not fine, because that likely means we’ll have to wait until the end of the concert series to do one, but,” Alfric sighed. “I understand. She’s under a lot of stress, both with the music side of things and the personal end. I still wish that we could somehow avoid the disruption.”

“You’ve got your carpentry though, right?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t want to be a carpenter,” said Alfric. “Besides, I’ve been spending too much time on it, I can feel myself getting weaker on the dungeons side of things. I need training and, you know, to actually do some dungeons.”

“If you ask me, it doesn’t help that you’re living the same day twice most days,” said Mizuki. “That means that for you, it’s twice as long, right?”

“Point taken,” Alfric sighed.

“I do wish we could go to one of these concerts,” said Hannah. “We do have the money, don’t we?”

“We do,” said Alfric. “Or I might be able to call in a favor from my parents.”

“Do we want to go?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, I’m all for supporting her, and maybe for another night on the town in Dondrian, but we’ve been hearing all these songs for weeks now, and us being there might be more pressure for Verity.”

“I want to go,” said Isra. “If it’s possible to do it for less than ten thousand rings.”

“That would be really high,” said Alfric. “Besides, normally for a concert the artist will get tickets to comp.”

“Comp?” asked Isra. The word was clearly a shortening of something, but she couldn’t fathom what.

“Complimentary,” said Alfric. “That would mean that we only need to pay for the trip, which, like I said, I might be able to convince my mom or dad to do for us. They do like seeing me.”

“Maybe Emperor can have an extended vacation here?” asked Mizuki.

“This house is getting too full of pets,” said Hannah. “And the dragons are growin’ fast, which is goin’ to be a problem unless we do end up sellin’ them.” She looked to Isra. “And no progress on that front?”

“No,” said Isra. “Sorry, I’ve been busy, and it didn’t feel urgent.”

“Cate really wants them,” said Alfric. “Ideally you could get something done with that today? Otherwise I can take over.”

“I’ll handle it,” said Isra. “But I’m spending today with Verity.”

“Within the next day or two, please?” asked Alfric. “I feel bad that we said we needed a better handle on what they’re worth and then did literally nothing about it. It’s not a good way to do business.”

“I was busy,” Isra repeated with a frown.

“All I’m saying is that I can take point,” said Alfric.

No one asked Isra what she had been busy with, and she couldn’t tell why. The truth was, they’d gone to Plenarch, which would have been the perfect time to speak with some bastlekeepers about dragon pricing and care, but she’d spent her time shopping, buying a new wardrobe, exploring the city, and pretending to be someone else. From the party’s perspective, she could see how this wasn’t the best use of her time, and she really had meant to get the dragon business finished with so they could present Cate with a reasonable price … but it kept being too much drudge work for her to tackle it. Not doing something because you simply didn’t feel like doing it was a terrible excuse, but no one had yet pressed her on it.

Verity came down as Isra was finishing up breakfast, and while the rest of the party was deep in conversation about a topic of no import, which was how many jams and jellies a home should realistically have. Verity sat at the table, then gave out a little yelp and looked beneath it.

“Why is Emperor here?” she asked.

“He’s taking a vacation,” said Mizuki, who seemed to have been saving that response for the right moment.

“For how long?” asked Verity.

“A week or so,” said Mizuki. “Not long, just long enough to get him out of the house and allow him an adventure.”

“I didn’t really want to take him,” said Alfric. “But he showed up at our house because of an entad mishap, and my parents took the opportunity to go on a vacation of their own. Not that one of my siblings couldn’t have watched him while we were gone, but he needs walks and they have ‘busy lives’. We got into arguments about the ‘country air’.” He shook his head.

“Mmm,” said Verity. She took most of what was left of breakfast and ate by stabbing her fork into things and bringing them to her mouth. There was something feral about how she did it. All decorum and grace seemed to have left her.

“Are you okay?” asked Mizuki.

“Mom starved me,” said Verity. “Said I had put on a few pounds, that I needed to fit in the dresses, gave me meals that were too small … I had already used up my energy yelling at her about other things.” She said this around mouthfuls of food.

“Anything you need from us?” asked Alfric.

“A dungeon,” said Verity. “Tomorrow. And maybe another before I leave.”

“Um,” said Alfric. “We can, certainly, but —”

“I want to kill something,” said Verity. She looked up at Alfric. “Is there a way for me to do that? Can I get a lute that will tear someone to shreds?”

“Did you spend your whole time in Dondrian angry?” asked Hannah.

“No,” said Verity, stabbing a bit of pork belly. “No, I spent it feeling harassed and overworked, uncomfortable in my own skin, and it wasn’t until I came home that I felt enraged by it all. So I’d like to go into a dungeon and work off some steam. If I could do that personally rather than empowering others, all the better.”

“You know, when we went to Plenarch we did the whole thing with the bastlefolk,” said Mizuki. “And I kind of think that killing the things in the dungeons is, um …”

“Wrong?” asked Hannah.

“No,” said Mizuki. “Not wrong, but maybe something that you shouldn’t do to blow off steam? Like, I feel like it should be like putting down a dog or something, done with respect and kindness if possible, not with glee that you’re bashing heads in.”

“Fine,” said Verity with a roll of her eyes. “I would still like to do a dungeon. Tomorrow though, because I’m spending today with Isra.”

“We can do that,” Alfric nodded. “Do you have any martial training at all?”

“No,” said Verity. “And I know, I know, you don’t want to be deprived of my lute.”

“Well,” said Alfric. “In theory, you can sing while you fight, but that would be more strenuous for you, and we’d get less from your bardic talents. I’m not averse to it though. And we do have a surplus of bows. I know you’ve been getting in some training with Isra.”

The ‘training’ had mostly been an excuse for them to touch each other, and now that they were dating, no excuse was really needed. Verity hadn’t gained all that much skill with a bow in their time together, though she was better than she’d been. In a dungeon, Isra didn’t think that Verity would do all that well, but if it would make her feel better … that wasn’t what dungeons were for though, and it rankled at Isra a bit. Perhaps Alfric’s opinions had infected her. A dungeon was a place to go in, extract what you could, and then get out with minimal risk and effort.

“It’s you and me today?” asked Isra.

Verity nodded, still chewing on her food. She was eating like a wild animal. It occurred to Isra that this must have been on purpose, an expression of her anger, or rebellion against her mother, but it was unsightly.

“What are we doing?” asked Isra.

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “Being free.”

“I was going to go to the Pucklechurch Gardening Club today,” said Isra. “I thought you might like to come?”

“I — you remember that I was in the Dondrian Gardening Society?” asked Verity. “And that it wasn’t such a good time for me?” Some of her anger had left her, which Isra was grateful for.

“I was invited last temple day,” said Isra. “They only meet for an hour, at third bell. You don’t have to come, but I thought you might enjoy it.” She paused. “There will be cookies?”

“Sure,” said Verity, though there was no enthusiasm.

Isra was fairly sure that the Pucklechurch Gardening Club would be a far cry from the Dondrian Gardening Society, though she had never attended either. The woman who’d approached her at temple day, Ethel, was apparently the chair of the club, and had overheard Isra talking about gardening with Mizuki, particularly some of the Kiromon plants that they were going to use for special meals. Hannah had worked with Mizuki to make some noodles, an endeavor that seemed to be going exceptionally slowly, but once they finally had workable noodles, Mizuki wanted all kinds of roots and green to go with them.

When Verity finally finished her breakfast, they went out into the garden together. Isra pointed out all the work she’d done while Verity had been gone, mostly in making sure that there was support for the climbing plants, along with the removal of some weeds. What they’d produced in the garden was nothing like the natural conditions that these plants would have in the wild.

“It’s interesting,” said Isra. “The best environment for these plants isn’t the natural one. It’s a place without competitors, predators, or adversity. Part of gardening is providing this perfect environment that would never exist.” She touched the struts they’d made for the tomatoes and cucumbers to climb, replacing the rotted and falling apart trellis that had once been there.

“I feel bad for them, in a way,” said Verity.

“Why?” asked Isra.

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “They’re not living, thinking things. It’s a stupid thing to feel.”

“They’re getting everything they need,” said Isra. “Water, nutrients, sunlight, perfect weather, strong roots, support for their vines, pollinators — I don’t understand.”

“Just a feeling,” Verity shrugged. “Of being too perfect.”

“Were you angry with me this morning?” asked Isra.

“What?” asked Verity. “No, why would you think that?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “You were angry when you came downstairs. I thought maybe it was something I did.” Isra felt stupid for saying so, because it felt like there couldn’t possibly be any reason for Verity to be angry with her.

“Oh,” said Verity. “No, it was just the opposite, really. I felt so warm, so loved, and I fell asleep with you in my arms — and then I woke up, and I had time to think, and I realized that I’d been in Dondrian rather than here, and that’s what made me angry. I’d been missing out.”

“Ah,” said Isra.

“Why would I have been mad at you?” asked Verity as she touched the leaves of their growing tomato plant.

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “I saw you coming in very tired, and when you woke up you were angry, and the only difference was that I’d been with you in the meantime.”

“No,” said Verity. “I just got myself angry thinking about my mom.”

“Tell me,” said Isra. “You’ve hardly said anything about your time there.”

“Well,” said Verity. She looked down at the plants. “Can’t we talk about something happier?”

“No,” said Isra. “I want to understand.”

“Fine,” said Verity. She swallowed, then began.

~~~~

“We have too much to do,” said Verity’s mother, from almost the moment that Verity appeared at the terminal. Appearing there was definitely not necessary, given that they were going straight to the house, but Verity’s mother was nothing if not controlling. “You could have dressed yourself better, and taken care of your hair, and — do you understand that people might see us as we move through town? You’re putting on a concert tonight and you look as though you’re just blithely going through your day.”

“Sorry, mother,” said Verity, though she wasn’t particularly sorry. The trip had been early in the morning, and involved holding a brown rabbit in order to get an entad to work. She hadn’t been properly prepared for the sensation, which was like falling, hands first, into a pile of fur, but then she’d been in Dondrian, with her mother standing right there.

“Follow along,” her mother said. “There’s much to do, as I’ve said, we need to make you presentable for tonight, to tour the theater, to go over the music, to make sure that you have everything practiced —”

“I’ve been practicing almost non-stop for the last two weeks,” said Verity.

Her mother stopped and blinked at her. “Not the music, which I should hope you have well in hand. Everything else. Where you’re to go, what you’re to do, how you’re to walk, all those things. You need to know your cues, and you certainly don’t know them. It’s all business that would have been better done in the days leading up to this first concert rather than the day of.” She turned back and kept walking toward the device that would take them to their hex. “And this is to say nothing of all the work we’ll have to do on your appearance, which would be a full day on its own if we were doing it properly. Hair, nails, skincare, makeup, I can tell just from a glance that you haven’t been keeping up your regimes.”

“I need time to practice with the lute,” said Verity.

“You’ve had time,” said Verity’s mother. “I’ve sat in that room and listened.”

“I want to have a handle on the acoustics of the theater,” said Verity.

“We’ll have time,” her mother said. “But that’s quite a ways away. Honestly, I don’t think you understand how much is riding on these first performances, how much pressure I’ve been under to get things sorted in short order.”

The trip home passed with news of Dondrian, none of which Verity particularly cared about. The seizure of her father’s business was apparently the talk of town, but high society had seemed to come around on the matter, perhaps sensing that a successful seizure might embolden workers at other places. While other, more proactive steps were being undertaken like raising wages and creating better working conditions, many of the more wealthy owners were also decrying the seizure for one reason or another. That had, in some sense, elevated Verity’s mother, at least for a time.

When they arrived at the family home, Verity was surprised to see that her father was there.

“You’re home,” said Verity.

“I wouldn’t have missed seeing you for the world, chipmunk,” he said with a wide smile. It had been almost a year since she’d seen him, and he’d aged a lot in that time. His mustache was streaked with gray and his eyes had crow’s feet. He had lost weight, she felt, and was now unhealthily skinny, though she might not have noticed if he hadn’t wrapped her in a close hug.

This was all considerably more warmth than he had shown her when she’d left.

“I missed you so,” he said with a sigh. “We left things so poorly. And now, with you stepping in to provide funding, it’s all — well, frightfully embarrassing, as money matters often are.”

“I’ve had a dozen letters from mother,” said Verity. “None from you.”

“I’ve never been particularly good with the pen,” her father replied, smoothing down his mustache. “I tried, on two occasions, but it all came out wrong.”

“I understand,” said Verity, though she didn’t really. She’d never been particularly close with her father, though more because he was absent than because they didn’t get along. He had always backed up her mother in arguments, especially toward the end, and Verity had always had the sense that they were a team playing against her.

“Come, let me show you what I’ve been working on,” he said, ushering her to follow, though she’d only just gotten in the house.

“She has too much to do, Perry,” Verity’s mother called after him.

“Nonsense, it won’t be more than ten minutes!” he called back. “And people need to know! She’ll need to tell them!”

Verity followed her father and dropped her suitcase beside the stairs to be carried up to her room later. She was momentarily startled when someone — a new girl — picked it up and carried it for her. Their complement of ‘help’ had always been rather small, but apparently they now employed someone to carry up luggage.

“This,” her father said, gesturing to a contraption on the center of their dining room, “is the future.”

Verity looked at it. Most of the machine was metal, a combination of springs and gears, but in the center was dull gray stone, presumably ectad material, which was sitting on top of velvet. The housing for this all was wood, and it would have looked quite handsome if not for the fact that bits and pieces of it were strewn around it, making it look half-finished.

“What is it?” Verity finally asked, since that seemed to be the question that her father wanted.

“It can play music,” he said with a beaming smile that was just a bit too sweaty. “I think I have it working, we’re still hammering out a few issues, which is why I brought it home to work on.”

“You’re doing engineering?” asked Verity.

“We’re a small shop,” he replied. “Five people, not including me. I can just barely keep up with the people I hired.” He began putting a few things back together, slotting things into place, then pushing a rod through. “Just a moment, I didn’t realize you’d be back so soon.”

“It’s fine,” said Verity.

“I’ve told your father that he should be putting his efforts into the seizure,” said Verity’s mother. “Time on the floor with the workers now is a bit like closing the barn doors after all the sheep have left, but it’s something. They’ll be asking him how well he knows his business, how well he knows his workers, all that kind of thing, and it would be best if his efforts were spent preparing as best he can.”

“The interview was yesterday, in fact,” Verity’s father replied, seeming unconcerned.

“You didn’t tell me that,” her mother replied, voice hollow. “And? How did it go?”

He only waved a hand in reply. “This will make us more than fish ever did.” He tinkered with the contraption some more. “There, I think that’s it.”

Verity’s mother was standing by the door with her hands folded over her chest. Her father inserted a strip of metal into the machine, then stood back. A loud tone emitted from it, but nothing more, and after a moment he went forward to stop it.

“This might take a moment to diagnose,” he said.

“It’s been making that sound,” Verity’s mother said with pursed lips.

“We had it going at the workshop,” he replied. “If you could hear it, you would understand why I think the seizure is a blessing in disguise.”

“Your father thinks that we’ll get a windfall from the seizure,” said Verity’s mother. “His barristers are, unfortunately, not my barristers, so I only have what he’s said to go on.”

“I’ve a national patent for this,” her father replied. “The principle is sound, it’s just a matter of getting the material to respond to the pressure, it’s no different from the engineering of a particularly complicated waterstone, the mechanical parts aren’t meant to be troublesome.”

“Come,” said Verity’s mother, standing tall. “If your father gets it working, he can show you later. If you’re asked, and you might be, you’re to speak little of this diversion from the company.”

~~~~

“They fought a lot,” said Verity. “It had never been like that before, but I suppose my father’s business had always been assumed to be nothing of note, and my mother’s business had been me. He never came to my defense, but I could see that he was … I don’t know. Struggling. He wanted this thing of his to work. It was supposed to play music, but he wasn’t able to get it working again before I left.”

“It sounds like you have a lot in common,” said Isra.

“We do?” asked Verity. “I can’t imagine what makes you say that.”

“He ventured out on his own,” said Isra. “Because he didn’t want to live in the shadow of his father.”

“That’s — well, I don’t think it’s very true,” said Verity. “I think he happened on an idea that looked good on paper and then spent time and money he couldn’t afford on it, which has led to him almost certainly losing the business that actually makes money. He’s got a patent, but it’s worth nothing if there’s nothing he can actually produce, if it’s just an idea.”

“Sorry,” said Isra.

“No, don’t be sorry, I just don’t think you’re right about why he decided to go into this business with ectads, and I don’t think we’re at all similar.” She sighed. “There’s a lot more to say, obviously, but I don’t want to get into it at the moment.”

“I want to hear about the performance,” said Isra.

“It was fine,” said Verity with a shrug. “I thought I would faint, or throw up, but once I was up there playing, practice was my guide. I’ve played those songs so many times now that I could practically do them with my eyes closed, even with the acoustics being different and the fact that there were two thousand people watching me.”

“You were worried you would crumple,” said Isra.

“I was,” said Verity with a little laugh. “And it feels silly now, to think that I was so worried.”

“You’re feeling better about the concerts ahead?” asked Isra.

Verity laughed. “No, not at all. I’ve practiced less, and the pressure will still be high, and it will only be after they’re done that I feel like I knew I could do it all along.” Her laughter faded. “You know, I hate my mother for making me do this.”

“I know,” said Isra.

“We didn’t talk much about money, but I got the sense that without these concerts, they’d be sunk,” said Verity. “If the seizure goes through, they’ll need to find some kind of other business, and I get the sense that father’s ectad business will never see a single ring of profit.”

“Then what will they do?” asked Isra. “How will this help them?”

“I’m not sure that it will,” Verity said with a groan. “It will give them money, and then down the line they’ll need more money, and I never should have agreed to do it in the first place.”

“You need to talk about finances with them,” said Isra. “Next time you go.”

Verity looked into Isra’s eyes. “You’re right, naturally, but — it’s so much easier, with my mother, to just do as I’m told. That’s how it’s been since I was little. If I don’t do what I’m told, there will be consequences.”

Isra felt herself frowning and relaxed. “Come, let’s get ready for the gardening club. I want to bring something potted to show them. We have potted wyvern’s breath, don’t we?” She peered over and found just the pot she was thinking of, one that needed to be brought in during the winter, as it couldn’t survive low temperatures.

“I think that will be fine, but it’s not that good a specimen,” said Verity. “It doesn’t really matter though, I doubt they’ll be looking too closely at it.”

Isra kept herself from frowning, but she didn’t think that was true. Ethel had been quite insistent that they would be talking about plants, and if the Gardening Club didn’t talk about plants, then Isra didn’t really see what the point would be. Pucklechurch wasn’t like Dondrian, where people made all kinds of excuses to see each other. At least, she didn’t think it was like that.

They made their way into town at third bell, with Isra carrying the potted wyvern’s breath. She was wearing a red dress with yellow flowers around the hem and down the neckline, and a belt that went around the waist and was delightfully non-functional. On her head was the wide-brimmed hat, good for keeping out the sun, and she’d made sure that there was sun to keep out, just so her outfit would look its best.

The Pucklechurch Gardening Club met in the Angry Plum before the inn was properly open for the day, and as they went in, Isra was pleased to see that other people had brought plants to show off as well. This included a young man with a tree in a pot, which must have taken all his considerable muscles to lift. The chairs had been set out in a ring, and Verity found them a pair that hadn’t been claimed, where they could sit together.

“Excuse me,” said one of the older women, who had shuffled across the room when they came in. “Are you Isra?”

“I am,” said Isra. She remembered to smile. “Can I help you?”

The old woman gave out a little laugh, and her beaded necklace clacked as she did. “Oh, I don’t even know how to go about explaining — I learned that we had a druid in town, and it all snapped into clarity. It was a relief, I tell you.”

Isra waited patiently with an expectant smile, which is what she thought was called for when someone said something cryptic.

“I’m the cloudmaster for the hex,” she said, putting a hand on her chest. “When I started, which was a little more than a decade ago now, I was told that all there really was to it was telling people what I knew. But when I told them what the systems told me, it turned out I was wrong more often than not, and there didn’t seem to be any accounting for it. I went around, talking to all sorts of people, hoping that there was an explanation, but the weather just never seemed to do what I thought it would do, and I felt like a complete failure. People would ask when they should have an outdoor wedding and I would just have to throw up my hands and say that I had no idea. I spoke with other cloudmasters and they said that it was probably an entad, though controlling weather like that was rare, and it really did seem like it was just me that was having problems.”

“Sorry,” Isra mumbled. She didn’t know what else the woman might want. It was a very similar feeling to getting scolded by the beastmaster for taking too many deer.

“Oh, not at all,” the cloudmaster said with a laugh. “It was such a relief to know that it had been you all that time. I’d thought I was just bad at my role, that I was just some nincompoop that couldn’t read the clouds right. To be able to explain that no, there was a druid hiding in the woods all this time, well, that really helped me put it all in perspective.”

“Sorry for the trouble,” said Isra. “I … sort of thought that anyone could control the clouds.”

The old woman laughed again, then saw that Isra was serious, and laughed harder. “Oh you poor dear, you had it worse than I ever did. It’s a conversation for another day, of course, but there’s been quite a bit of chatter on what we’ve done wrong, when it comes to you.”

“I turned out fine,” said Isra, because she wasn’t quite sure what else to say.

“I wanted to talk to you too, about you becoming cloudmaster, if you’d like, but it looks like we’ll be starting soon.” She nodded. “Lovely to finally meet you.”

“You as well,” said Isra. As the old woman doddered off, Isra turned to Verity with a raised eyebrow, and Verity shrugged.

“Welcome, welcome, settle in, we have new faces, and that’s what I like to see,” said Ethel. She wasn’t terribly old, with only a bit of gray in her dark hair, but she held herself with authority in a way that made her seem much older. She was a teacher, she’d said, with her class currently around ten years old. “This is the Pucklechurch Gardening Club, if you’re just now realizing this isn’t where you’re meant to be, now is the time to leave.” She looked around expectantly. “Now, I see plenty of lovely plants, and plenty of lovely newcomers, so I think we’ll go around and do our check-ins. Tell us how your garden is doing, what’s been troubling you, and we’ll see if we can help. And there are cookies on the table over there, courtesy of Margie, along with tea, thanks to Basil. Help yourself, feel free to move about.”

There were two dozen people, more than Isra had been expecting, and they all had their own things to talk about. It was early summer, a time for flowers but not particularly a time for harvesting. Most of what could be taken into the kitchen were leafy greens, and it seemed that most of them had more spinach than they knew what to do with. Tomatoes and potatoes were just getting started, and most of the squashes would take some time to grow and flower, but they talked about why certain things might be doing poorly, and gave some tips to each other about how to help them do better.

It took Isra a bit to realize that they were all guessing. Sometimes someone would respond that carrots needed a lot of water, more than you’d think, and she would wonder why they would say that before remembering that they didn’t know, that gardening for them was a matter of fumbling around and stepping back to see what had worked and what had failed. Plants could be finicky things, dependent on not getting too much sun, or not enough sun, or too much water, or not enough, or not the right kind of water, or the wrong mixture of nutrients, or not enough pruning to keep from growing hard and woody.

Isra had all the answers, and by the time they were halfway around the ring, she was speaking with authority. Sometimes the problem was easy to diagnose and other times it wasn’t, but she knew all of the crops in question. By talking enough, she could figure out what the problems were: strawberries didn’t do well in the same patch too many years in a row, blueberries needed a bit of acid in the soil, the pepper spots on a cabbage were caused by an excess of fertilizer but didn’t affect the flavor — on and on she went, giving out the answers. There were a few hiccups, particularly when people used a name for a plant that Isra wasn’t familiar with, but she was able to dispense wisdom with practiced ease.

“I’m Isra, and this is Verity,” said Isra when it came to them. She had almost let Verity make their introductions, but Isra had been doing most of the speaking. “We live with a friend of ours, and have been putting the garden back in order. There are a lot of Kiromon plants that don’t particularly like the climate. And … I’m a druid, so things are going well.”

“Oh, well that explains it,” said the tall man with his potted tree. “I was wondering where you’d come from.”

“I thought it might be nice to join the club,” she said. “And so far it’s been very nice. This is wyvern’s breath,” said Isra. “I just wanted to show it off a bit. The original plant died due to neglect, as a lot of things in the garden did, but the seeds were still alive, and I was able to grow this back.” She held up the pot. “It’s not much, but it felt good to revive.”

“Well, we welcome you both to the club,” said Ethel. “And I should caution that just because a druid has joined us does not mean that you should go to her with all your gardening problems, not unless you’re willing to pay.” She nodded in Isra’s direction.

“Actually, we have some pets that eat only herbs,” said Isra. “So if you’d like me to come by and take a look at what you have growing, we’ll take payment in bushels of herbs. They’ll eat almost anything. And I can bring them by, if you’d like to see them. They’re like tiny dragons.”

When the circle had finished up, they broke up into smaller groups, and more than a few people flocked to Isra while she was grabbing a frosted cookie and some tea. Their questions, to her delight, were all about plants and gardens, questions that always had easy answers without needing much thought. Verity hung around, but didn’t say all that much, except to offer one or two stories about her greenroom in Dondrian. Isra had never really worked with growthstones before, and Verity had a bit of advice on that front, particularly in terms of areas where the growthstones were sometimes deficient.

The club had to eventually leave the Angry Plum, though a few of them stayed for an early evening meal, and Isra carried their potted wyvern’s breath, smiling as they walked back home.

“I’m surprised you enjoyed that,” said Verity.

“Really?” asked Isra.

“I’m used to you not liking people,” said Verity. “You didn’t used to enjoy talking.”

“I don’t like when things aren’t clear,” said Isra. “What I really hate, I think, is when I’m in a new situation and I don’t know how to act, and everyone seems to expect me to follow some script that I don’t know. But there, I knew all the answers. People were talking about plants, and I know about plants. There was no confusion about what I should be saying, no ambiguous rules that I wasn’t following, nothing like that. It was nice.”

“It made me think about the Gardening Society,” said Verity. “There, they never really talked about plants. I feel like most of those women only did cursory gardening.”

“Did you enjoy it?” asked Isra. “The Club?”

“I suppose I did,” said Verity. “The cookie was good.” She was silent for a moment. “You’ve changed.”

“No,” said Isra. She felt her hackles go up and tried to relax. “I don’t think I have. I’m trying to be different, but not — not different.”

“I felt like it was my place to help you,” said Verity. “To show you the world, to make sure that you didn’t get hurt. And now you’re just handling yourself so well, I feel … I don’t know. Useless.”

Isra slipped her arm into Verity’s. “I’ll always need you.”

“Thank you,” said Verity with a sigh. “Now, let’s brush up on my archery. I don’t want to make a fool of myself in the dungeon.”

“I was hoping that some of the anger had left you,” said Isra.

“No,” said Verity. “Gardening Club just helped remind me how poisonous the society people in Dondrian are. So I’m going to kill a few things in the dungeons and hope that makes me feel better.”

Chapter 103 - The Waiting Game

“But I don’t think I understand,” said Mizuki. “What you’re describing is a caretaker, or a custodian, or something like that.”

“No,” said Hannah. “Because they don’t necessarily do any caretaking at all.”

“Then what do they do?” asked Mizuki.

“Nothing,” said Hannah. “They just own the building.”

“No,” said Mizuki, shaking her head. “They’d have the building seized from them.”

“Well that’s what I’m tryin’ to say,” said Hannah. “The dwodo don’t have seizure, I’m pretty sure.” Hannah was far from an expert on the dwodo. Her religious studies had been mostly silent on them, perhaps because of the various historical wars against them.

“That’s dumb,” said Mizuki. “So you just live somewhere, you pay a bunch of money, they don’t have to fix things or take care of you, it’s just … renting out things you own, forever?”

“To my understandin’,” said Hannah.

“And the dwodo government doesn’t step in?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, when someone has paid three times what a house is worth, that’s obviously not fair.”

“I’m not sayin’ that it’s a fair or just system,” said Hannah. “You asked what the word meant, and I told you, ay?”

“I just think either you’re explaining it wrong, or I’m understanding the explanation wrong, or it’s stupid,” said Mizuki.

“Could be all three,” nodded Hannah.

Mizuki frowned, but didn’t offer anything more on the subject, instead, looking out the window, where Isra was working in the garden. The plants had been steadily growing, and the garden was doing better than it had any right to, at least by Hannah’s account. They were a full two weeks ahead of anything the neighbors had, helped by both perfect weather and Isra’s encouragement. Almost all of the vegetables they ate in the house now came from the garden. There was a bit too much asparagus for Hannah’s liking, but the rest would come in time.

“How do you think Verity is doing in Dondrian?” Mizuki asked.

“Just fine,” said Hannah. “She’s been practicin’, and I couldn’t hear a single flaw in what she played.”

“You’re not an expert though,” said Mizuki. “I mean, I’m not either, but how would we know whether she was making mistakes?”

“It’s a crowd of two thousand,” said Hannah. “How many experts do you think will be among them? A dozen, perhaps? Oh, they’ll have some feel for whether it’s good or not, but they won’t notice the minor things that Verity seems to obsess over.”

“So it doesn’t matter how well she does?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t know,” said Hannah. “My understandin’ of the arts has always been that it’s about who you know and how you get marketed rather than the art itself, so long as it’s above a certain quality. And that might sound like sour grapes, or a cynic’s view, but think about the concert, ay? Two thousand people, a sold out theater, and why? It’s not on the strength of Verity as an artist, it couldn’t be, she’s been missin’ for nine months. Perhaps some people remember hearin’ her a long time ago, and more will come because they think that her bein’ Chosen means that it will be special, but mostly it’s because her mother got some good articles printed in various papers, and because there’s buzz in the air.”

“I guess,” said Mizuki. “I mean, I don’t know how it is in a bigger city like Plenarch, let alone Dondrian. But I thought that you liked her music?”

“I do,” said Hannah. “Nothin’ I’ve said should be taken to mean that I don’t love her, that I don’t believe in her, that I don’t think she’s a revelation when it comes to music, though I do have to say that I don’t know a single thing about music. All I’m sayin’ is that she’s at a high enough level that most of what people come for isn’t the music. At least, that’s my thinkin’ on the matter. Applies to all art, really, there’s loads of great things that no one ends up noticin’, and a rare few that get famous even though they’re not all that good.”

“But Verity is one of those great musicians who everyone also says is great, and it happens to line up?” asked Mizuki.

“I suppose,” said Hannah. “I don’t have a whole general theory on what’s good and what’s not, I just think sometimes people get elevated when the masses can’t tell the difference.”

“I don’t think she’d like you saying any of that,” said Mizuki with a frown.

“No, I s’pose not,” said Hannah. It was clear that Mizuki was more concerned with what it sounded like than the object level of what they were talking about, and Hannah could admit that it didn’t sound like she believed in Verity, though of course that hadn’t been the point at all. Verity would do fine, at least at the playing. Whether she’d do fine with her mother, or whether she’d be fine after, that was more in question.

Mizuki looked over in the direction of the front door, then took a gulp of her tea, which was probably now tepid. “Are you nervous?”

“Nervous?” asked Hannah.

“Vertex,” said Mizuki.

“Oh,” said Hannah. “No, not at all. They have Alfric backing them up, don’t they?”

“I’m not sure it was a good idea for Verity to have her concert on the same day that Vertex is doing a dungeon,” said Mizuki. She set her cup down. “I mean, it feels like we should have a safety net for both of them, right?”

“Not somethin’ that Alfric discussed with Verity,” said Hannah. “Or at least, I don’t think so. And how would that work anyway? If she had some calamitous failure on the night of the concert, it would almost certainly be nerves or some such, and to tell her ‘it was so much a disaster I had to turn back time’ would do nothin’ for her self-confidence and ability to perform.”

“I guess,” said Mizuki. She looked at the door again.

“Are you nervous?” asked Hannah. “About Vertex?”

“No,” said Mizuki. “I mean, it is their first time, and Kell’s never done a dungeon with a group, and yeah, I’m nervous.”

“Marsh will be by when they’re done,” said Hannah. “I’m not worried. And if he doesn’t come by to let us know, then it’s not like they’re dead, right?”

“Cold comfort,” said Mizuki. “I mean, if they die and Alfric undoes it, that would be a strike against the team, right? And if it happens the fake first time, then it’s probably going to happen again the second first time, and then it all just falls apart. Which means that Marsh wouldn’t stick around the area anymore.”

“Ah,” said Hannah. “Though … I do think he might, if I asked.”

“Oh ho,” said Mizuki, whose eyes lit up. “Just a casual fling, was it?”

Hannah waved a hand. “Yes yes, get your kicks in, I was wrong, it’s very funny.”

“It is very funny,” Mizuki grinned. “I’m so looking forward to the wedding.”

“Speakin’ of,” said Hannah. “I stopped by the general store this mornin’ and Bethany seemed a bit nervous about the whole thing.”

“Not surprising,” said Mizuki. “They rushed into it, and even if they hadn’t, I can’t imagine making that kind of commitment to another person. Plus it’s going to be a huge wedding. I hope she’s doing okay.”

“You could talk to her,” said Hannah. “You’re close friends, aren’t you?”

“I guess,” said Mizuki. “Though I think I would need a better pep talk than just saying ‘oh hey that sounds really scary to me, I wouldn’t go through with it’. Plus I’m not really invested in it working out, you know? I mean, why should I care one way or another? I don’t know if they’re a good couple, I haven’t talked to any of the Pedder boys since we had our falling out.”

“It seemed to me that she was hopin’ for someone to talk her into it,” said Hannah. “And I had some clerical advice, but I’m not yet friends with her, more an acquaintance. Support, that’s what she needs.”

“I suppose,” said Mizuki. “And do you have some clerical advice on how to do that?”

“Not in particular,” said Hannah. “I don’t think she’s seekin’ counsel, just wants someone to sit and listen to her, and maybe to say that she’s a good person who things will shake out for.” Hannah had tried to do that, but it wasn’t the sort of relationship they had. Hannah barely knew Bethany, as much as the girl liked to talk.

“Even if they might not shake out?” asked Mizuki.

“You’ve been spendin’ too much time with Alfric,” said Hannah with a laugh.

“Well I just mean … me going to Bethany and lying about how I think her marriage is going to go doesn’t seem like it helps anyone,” said Mizuki.

“So you think it will go poorly?” asked Hannah with a raised eyebrow.

“I don’t know!” said Mizuki, throwing up her hands. “I’ve never been married.”

“Well, just be there and make some sympathetic noises for the poor girl,” said Hannah. “She’d appreciate it.”

“Alright,” said Mizuki. “Will do, unless this winds up being an undone day.” She glanced at the door again. “How long does it take to do a dungeon anyway?”

“I’ve just as much experience as you do, so goin’ off what we’ve done in the past, anywhere from an hour to five days,” said Hannah. “Though an hour is bein’ pretty generous, and would assume that there’s nothin’ too much to take, and that they breeze through the fights, and I’m not sure we’ve ever squeaked in under an hour, because Alfric is too meticulous.” ‘Fussy’ would have been a less polite way of saying it.

“So they might not come in until just before dark,” said Mizuki.

“Or after dark, if they’re being inconsiderate,” shrugged Hannah.

“I don’t know how you can be so calm about this,” said Mizuki. “I mean, you care about Marsh, right?”

“I do,” nodded Hannah. “But I have more acquaintance with death than you do. I’ve given funeral rites a few times. It happens. We die, our souls move on to the Spirit Gates, and then to wherever after.”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki with a sigh. “But it’s not — I mean, you’re still dead.”

Hannah nodded. “Ay.” There wasn’t all that much else to say to that. What happened when a person died was still a mystery. Hannah hadn’t had cause to do a spirit walk, which was usually reserved for only the most important or troubled spirits, but she thought that when the time came, she would do some reflection on what the afterlife might mean. The nearest Spirit Gate was more than five hundred miles away, and the spirit walk would take more than a month. Of course, Hannah wasn’t a proper cleric anymore, so the only way she’d do a spirit walk was if she volunteered, and especially with Alfric around, it wasn’t likely that anyone in Pucklechurch would die a premature death. There was a part of Hannah that was hoping that Mizuki might initiate a dialog on such things, so that Hannah would at least have a use for her learning, but after a moment, it was clear that she’d have no such luck.

“Kell has been comin’ around a lot,” Hannah offered.

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “He’s going to be helping me with the wizard stuff, laying some of the groundwork at least so I can get going on making the cup thing.”

“And have you worked out the logistics of makin’ a commute to Plenarch?” asked Hannah.

“I talked about it with Alfric,” said Mizuki. “And it’s not looking all that simple. In theory, I could leave the dagger there, teleport to it in the morning, then climb into the chest and have it whisk me back to Pucklechurch, but I’d have to wrap the chest in the blanket to reduce its weight, and … I don’t know, it sounds all kinds of complicated, and it would still take a fair bit of time for the chest to race back here at full speed, and no one could use the chest, blanket, or dagger while I was at school.”

“No big loss, so far as I’m concerned,” said Hannah. “Though I think if you took the helm with you, that might be a step too far.”

“But I love the helm,” said Mizuki, pouting. “And alright, fine, that makes sense, it’s just … I don’t know. I’m not sure about being a wizard, and now everyone feels like they’re throwing their weight behind it.”

“Is Alfric?” asked Hannah.

“Well, kind of,” said Mizuki. “He’s not being super supportive, but he’s trying to find a way to make it work, and he hasn’t said that it’s a terrible idea, or made me feel bad about wanting to do it.”

“And I know that Verity probably hasn’t said a word to you, given the pressure she’s under,” said Hannah. Verity had been downright taciturn after their return from Plenarch. “Is it Isra then, that’s givin’ you this encouragement?”

“It’s mostly been Kell,” Mizuki admitted.

This was not at all a surprise. “He’s been overly supportive?” asked Hannah.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “I mean, he’s been regular supportive, I think, it’s just that we’re friends now — or again, I guess — and I know from his perspective this seems like something fun for us to do together?”

“And you don’t think that?” asked Hannah with a raised eyebrow.

“I don’t really like people teaching me things,” said Mizuki. “The teacher and student thing, it’s not for me. Even teaching Isra how to cook, that’s been hard for me, being on the other end.”

“And yet you spend so much time with Alfric, learnin’ all sorts of things from him, and you’ve signed yourself up for wizard college,” said Hannah.

“Yeah,” sighed Mizuki.

“Not too late to back out,” said Hannah, though she meant it more as a question.

“Honestly, I think I’m going to make an awesome wizard,” said Mizuki. “It’s going to be so cool.”

“And if you don’t have the aptitude?” asked Hannah. “Isn’t that the stickin’ point for most people?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” said Mizuki. “It would kind of be a weight off my chest, a way of saying ‘oh hey, I guess that’s not for me, but I gave it a shot’.”

“I think if that’s what you want, maybe it’s not somethin’ to spend too much time on?” asked Hannah.

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “This is sort of like when you make plans with someone, then feel a bit relieved when they cancel on you, because it’s something that got taken off your plate?”

“But in this case, a years-long education,” said Hannah.

“Right,” said Mizuki. “It would be weird if I didn’t feel relieved over such a big thing being gone.” She tensed up, then relaxed. “Marsh is here.”

Hannah looked toward the door and saw that it was true. Marsh and Kell both had come, and Kell gave a brief wave before opening the door.

“You made it!” said Mizuki. “Wait, did you make it?”

“We’re not ghosts, if that’s what you’re asking,” said Kell.

“No, I mean, it’s just the two of you, so maybe one of your other party members had died, or lost an arm or something, and you wanted a reset,” said Mizuki. “But I’m guessing that didn’t happen.”

“No,” said Kell. He sat down on a chair in the living room, and Marsh sat beside Hannah, giving her a squeeze. “It was a fine dungeon run, a good start, I think. Is Alfric in? I wanted to let him know that he doesn’t need to wait on us.”

“Which I could have handled,” said Marsh with a glance at Kell. “Which we could have done through the marble, in fact, if I wasn’t coming over to visit.”

Kell shrugged. “I thought you would want to see our loot.”

“I would love to see your loot,” said Mizuki. “Anything good?”

“Not really,” said Marsh. “Stuff we’ll sell, and a bunch of ectad materials.”

“Hammer,” said Kell, pulling something out of the bag slung around his shoulder. Hannah couldn’t help but notice that it was similar to the heavy bag that Mizuki normally carried around. The hammer itself had a wooden handle and a large metal head, with the back of the hammer’s head having curled bits for removing nails.

“What’s it do?” asked Mizuki.

“So far what we think is that it will remove the nails and glue from anything you tap with it,” said Kell.

“And we do mean remove, since we couldn’t find the nails anywhere,” said Marsh. “Not really what you want.”

“Nah, it’s great,” said Kell. “We’re going to be able to reclaim a whole lot of wood and tile from the dungeons from here on out, it’s a boost to how much we make.”

“I didn’t get into dungeons to strip every last thing,” said Marsh. He looked at Hannah. “No offense.”

“None taken,” said Hannah. “Though we did make a tidy haul, so I thought the labor was quite worth it, in that case.” It was so much money that her mind had immediately turned to what she should buy with it. She’d opened up a bank account rather than taking it out: it was the sort of money that was best spent on something either truly important or incredibly high value.

“I haven’t even bought anything with it,” said Mizuki. “I feel like I should have spent at least half of it while we were in Plenarch. But there’s also not all that much that I really want, and at a certain point money is just … I don’t know. Pointless.”

“In my experience, that’s never been true,” said Marsh. “We’ve made a good bit doing dungeons, but there’s always some new entad, and those can get ridiculously expensive. A mobile home is one of the big ones that’s on my list, and for that, depending on what’s available … you have to have a lot.”

“If I had a house that could move with me, I would never give it up,” said Mizuki.

“That’s the problem, ay,” said Hannah. “An entire house might be a little much to ask.”

“Your party is already most of the way there,” said Kell. “The garden stone, the trunk, and the book together are a mobile operating station. All more entads would get you is convenience.”

“I wouldn’t want to live in the garden stone,” said Mizuki. “And from what the others said, it wasn’t a great experience.”

“But you’d only need to sleep there,” said Kell. “Everything else, you could go out for.”

“You sorely underestimate how much cooking I do,” said Mizuki.

“Can’t bake in the garden stone either, or at least you shouldn’t,” said Hannah.

“For my own tastes, I think I could be fine living in the trunk,” said Kell. “If I could have some way to sleep standing up, anyway, or have some way to sleep curled up without getting cramped.”

“That sounds awful,” said Mizuki. “Like some kind of Red Ages torture. Where would you go to the bathroom?”

“Yeah, that would be a problem,” said Kell. “But I don’t have the chest, so it’s kind of moot, I was just saying that a single very small room with enough space for a bed, hammock, or something like that would be all I’d require.”

Hannah was skeptical. “We spent nearly a week in the garden stone,” she said. “It wore on us all, I think, for various reasons.”

“That’s different though,” said Kell. “You couldn’t leave, not unless you wanted to go into the dungeon. Here, I’m talking about having maybe a small plot of land, spending time out in the world when you don’t need to be home to sleep.”

“Or cook, or bathe, or whatever,” said Mizuki with a frown.

“All stuff you can handle with entads,” said Kell with a shrug.

“Entads for bathing?” asked Mizuki.

“They’re actually pretty common,” said Marsh. “As much as cooking, I think, though they’re more boring, in my opinion. We have three or four, depending on how you count.”

“You know, we still haven’t gotten our knick knacks from your stash,” said Mizuki. “Would one of those count?”

“Nope,” said Marsh. “Actually useful stuff is off limits. And Grig does want you to come by and get that stuff, mostly because we’re putting all of it into storage soon.”

“Will do,” said Mizuki. She stretched out on the couch. “Okay, so tell me about the dungeon.”

Marsh stretched out too, putting an arm around Hannah. “It was a wide layout,” he said. “First room had six doors, which meant that we had to spend some time securing it, and there was a good chance of it going wrong. But from there … we’re stacked on offense, and with two wizards, we have a good ability to deal with practically anything.”

“You’re terrible at telling stories, if that was supposed to be a story,” said Mizuki.

“Josen and I divide up duties, at least for now,” said Kell. “I poke holes in things, he’s more on the wide area side of things. It was mostly single targets through the dungeon though, so I was running low by the end. Josen had built things out so that he could switch over and compensate, and Marsh ended up roasting more than his fair share of things.”

“Kell pulled his weight,” said Marsh. “Don’t think otherwise. Though I did end up burning an entad up, a book, apparently.”

“I’m not sure what we can do differently next time,” said Kell, placing a hand on the back of his neck. “I think it was largely down to the distribution we ran into. I don’t think I could have been more efficient with where and when I was firing, or with my build, though Josen wants to go over it.”

“We found some ectad materials,” said Marsh, moving on quickly from a subject that was bringing a frown to Kell’s face. Marsh was more perceptive than he looked, and though he wasn’t the group’s peacemaker — that would be Grig — he had his hand in lubricating away some of the growing frictions in the party, without necessarily even knowing that was what he was doing. That was Hannah’s read on him, anyway. “Forcestone, which is mostly worthless, but not quite so worthless that we didn’t have to wrangle it into the rope.”

“Which one is forcestone?” asked Mizuki.

“It generates force?” asked Marsh.

“Well I figured from the name, but … I don’t really understand what the point of it is,” said Mizuki.

“There’s not much,” said Kell. “Hence them being pretty worthless. There are problems with storage and problems with how they project force and other problems. You can use them as noisemakers, but it’s just a single solid tone.”

“Why would you want that?” asked Mizuki.

“Tuning instruments,” said Kell with a shrug. “You keep them in a velvet container so they don’t fill your house with sound, then pull them out to get perfect pitch. I think that’s it.”

“Used for some religious rites as well,” said Hannah. “And you can play them, with the right set up, though it’s quite expensive, since you need an ectad for every note. The stones can get quite loud, depending on how they’re built, so you see them sometimes replacin’ an organ or whatever. I think one of the churches in Dondrian has one. Not sure how they work, precisely, but it’s somethin’ we could ask Verity about.”

“Oh, that’s right,” said Marsh. “The concert is tonight. How’s it going?”

“There’s some time yet,” said Hannah. “We haven’t heard anythin’ from her, and I don’t expect we will until late at night. We’re keepin’ the party channel silent for her, so she can focus on the night ahead. Course, this is the first of many, so I s’pose we’ll see.”

Alfric came down the stairs and looked at Marsh and Kell. “Everything go well?”

“As well as could be expected,” said Kell. “Took a few hits, but nothing that Mardin couldn’t handle.”

“What kind of hits?” asked Alfric. He had his arms folded across his chest. Hannah couldn’t tell whether it was mild disapproval or whether he was just focused on talking shop.

“There were these guys, dun-colored skin, four arms and no legs,” said Marsh. “They had bandoliers filled with tiny throwing knives, and threw what had to be hundreds at us, one after the other.” He clucked his tongue. “I got one in the forehead, right where my helm doesn’t cover, and Kell got one in the pit of his elbow. Not the worst injury I’ve ever had, but it was definitely a refreshing reminder that this is dangerous work.”

“I actually got one in the leg too,” said Kell. He leaned forward and lifted up his pant leg to show off a small scar. “Better armor is definitely on the list.”

“Do you want that taken care of?” asked Hannah. “Better not to have scars, they can impede future healin’.”

“It would be appreciated,” said Kell. “It’s not a particularly good scar.”

It didn’t take Hannah long to remove any trace of Kell’s scar. She didn’t particularly like the talk of ‘good scars’, in part because they were almost always asymmetrical. Bethany had kept a scar on her leg from a dungeon run, and Hannah had silently clucked her tongue at that, but she could understand some sentimentality. She’d never had a mark left by trauma that she’d wanted to keep, but she did still have the henling key that they’d taken from that first dungeon, and it was special to her.

“Anything of note from the dungeon?” asked Alfric. “I was working upstairs, but I heard something about ectad materials.”

“Nothing exciting,” said Kell. He pulled the hammer back out of his bag. “This unnails things, and removes glue, which might be helpful for reclaiming wood. But that’s about it. We got a sword we’re never going to use — nine feet long, too long to really do anything with — and Marsh got a whistle.”

“It summons my cat, Darwin,” said Marsh with a smile. He reached into his pocket and pulled the whistle out. “Totally useless, and we probably need to be careful with it, because he got pulled out of our home in Dondrian and needs to make his way back.” He put the whistle to his mouth, then let it drop. “It’s fine if I summon a cat here, right?”

“Where is he now?” asked Hannah.

“Over in Liberfell,” said Marsh. “We got him situated at the hotel. Here, you’ll see.” He blew the whistle, and a giant dog appeared in the middle of the living room.

“Hey, I know this cat,” said Mizuki, coming forward to pet it.

“That’s — is that Emperor?” asked Alfric, looking down at the dog.

“Yup,” said Mizuki, scratching his neck. “Aw, he just wanted to visit us.”

“Huh,” said Marsh, looking at the whistle. “I clearly misunderstood the entad. I swear this summoned Darwin a few times in a row.”

“Who is this dog?” asked Kell. He had stepped well back.

“It’s our family dog,” said Alfric. “From Dondrian. So now there are two animals that need to get back to the city.” He sighed. “I guess I’ll have to send out a guild message and have my dad pick the dog up.”

“Aw, but he can stay with us for a bit, right?” asked Mizuki. She looked up at Alfric. “This poor dog gets no attention at home.”

“I don’t want my parents to reset the day because the dog is missing,” said Alfric.

“I guess I’m going to have to take this to a cleric and get it identified,” said Marsh, frowning and looking at the whistle. “In my defense, I was thinking of Darwin when I blew it.”

“How many people here know Emperor?” asked Kell.

“All of us aside from you,” said Alfric. “So it might be collective knowledge, or … something.”

“Well, it’s doubly useless then,” said Marsh, putting the whistle away.

“It’s niche,” nodded Alfric.

The door to the backyard opened up, and Isra stepped inside. “Why is Emperor here?” she asked. She was wearing a yellow sundress with a broad-brimmed hat, her gardening gloves tucked under one armpit.

“Who is this?” asked Marsh, looking at Hannah. She rolled her eyes, and Marsh looked back at Isra. “Oh, Isra.” She gave him a slight smile. “You look really good, I like the change.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I got some new clothes in Plenarch.”

“It’s nice,” said Marsh. “Not what I’d have expected. Sorry I didn’t recognize you.”

Isra gave him a wide smile. She’d been doing that more, smiling, and it seemed to Hannah that this was quite deliberate. Maybe Isra had been smiling internally this whole time, but she was now making a production of it, showing outwardly what she had been feeling. It had been some time since Hannah had sat down with Isra for a serious talk, and Hannah felt that it was overdue — but she didn’t want to indulge in clerical overreach.

“Do you two want to stay for dinner?” asked Mizuki. “I should have just enough food for you. I picked up an extra chicken breast in case Verity came home early, and then another one for a guest.”

“If you don’t mind,” said Marsh. “Otherwise it would be eating from a restaurant in Liberfell for me, and your cooking is better.”

“You flatter,” said Mizuki with a smile. “Do you like mint?”

“Mint chicken?” asked Marsh. Mizuki nodded. “I … can’t say that I’ve had it.”

“It’s good,” said Kell. “Or at least, it was when I had it in Kiromo, and I assume you’ll make it similar to that. And yes, I’ll stay for dinner, if you’re offering.”

“Wonderful,” said Mizuki. “Verity doesn’t know what she’s missing.”

While Mizuki went to prepare dinner, Hannah went upstairs with Marsh. The pretense was that she wanted to heal his scars, not that they really needed a pretense.

“You laid it on thick with Isra,” said Hannah.

“Too thick?” asked Marsh. “I didn’t recognize her, not at first, I was just playing it up a bit.”

“Why?” asked Hannah.

“She’s trying something new,” said Marsh. “That always feels a bit awkward.” He rubbed his chin. “I didn’t always have this beard. I grew it out with an entad when I was sixteen. I think it looks good on me, makes me look older, but when I first got it, people would just say ‘oh, you have a beard’ and then move on from it, which always made me a bit self-conscious. I’d have killed for a compliment. I just wanted Isra to feel good, that’s all.”

“Well, I do like your beard,” said Hannah. She moved her hand forward to cup his face. “I feel like you’d look naked without it.”

“Naked … in a bad way?” asked Marsh.

“Mmm,” said Hannah. “I s’pose that does need some clarification.” She placed her hand on his chest. “You know, we do have some time before dinner. And in my clerical opinion, you’re in fit shape.”

“Ah,” he said, resting his hand on hers. “The dungeon took a lot out of me. Not physically so much, but — can we just lay here? I know that’s not what you’re with me for —”

“It’s fine,” said Hannah. She sank into him. “You know I do care about you, don’t you?”

“I do,” said Marsh. “I just don’t like to let you down.”

“You haven’t let me down yet,” said Hannah. “Here’s to hopin’ that you don’t start.”

Chapter 105 - The Summer Dungeon

Alfric was eager to be going back into the dungeons, but worried about whether Verity was in a good state for it. She wanted to not be a bard, or to be only half of a bard, and while it would be good for her to have some versatility, that versatility was definitely not what she was there for. Still, they had more than enough bows for her to take one, and her lute would be available inside the trunk if she wanted to switch over. Having a half-bard half-archer seemed like it might not be the worst thing in the world, but it really depended on how much Verity’s efficacy as a bard deteriorated when she was doing something else and not using a lute.

Their target was Moil Meadows, and part of the reason they were heading there was that the flowers that bloomed in early summer were supposed to be one of the great sights of the region. For whatever reason, flowers grew better there, fuller and longer lasting. Isra had wanted to see them, and Alfric was curious himself, though it wasn’t terribly out of the ordinary. There were all asorts of things like that around the world, usually some combination of entads and benign dungeon escapes, or the scars of deeper magics that were now barely known to the world. Alfric was somewhat skeptical that an entire magical profession could be utterly lost, but history ran long, and the past was a dangerous place.

The trip was made with the help of the garden stone and the helmet, which together could bring them anywhere in a handful of moments, the travel so simple and easy that Alfric had contemplated starting up a cargo business. The helmet allowed them to scream through the air at thirty miles an hour, half as slow as a cartier, but still so quick that he needed to keep well clear of trees. Even with armor, hitting one of them would probably kill him. Mizuki felt no such compunctions, and regularly zipped through the trees, going between them with the grace of a starling, and Alfric felt like it was only a matter of time before she got distracted or missed seeing a branch until it was too late. He had done the flying to Moil Meadows, with a bit of negotiation, and landed early in the morning, not too long after they’d taken breakfast.

Alfric had expected the flowers to have spattered the meadows with color, and they had done that, just not in quite the way that he’d expected. There were broad regions to the coloration, yellow at the tops of the mild hills, blue in the valleys, reds by the streams, and pinks around the scraggly trees that dotted the landscape. Orange and purple flowers crowded around rocks, and tiny white flowers bloomed in patches of moss where the ground was sufficiently wet for it. Alfric thought that it looked like a map he’d once seen, one that showed northern Inter in terms of its biomes and agricultural products, and he thought that if only he’d known enough, the patterns of the flowers might have acted as a map of their own.

“This is amazing!” said Mizuki. “How have I never been here?”

“It’s twelve miles of walking,” said Verity.

“I’ve walked twelve miles for less,” said Mizuki. “Helmet, please.” She held out her hand, and Alfric reluctantly took it off and gave it to her.

“Be careful,” he said, but she was in the air before he finished talking. She swooped up and then out over the fields of flowers.

“They’re not natural,” said Isra, whose palm had touched the ground. She rose from being crouched. “I’m not sure what’s causing this.”

“We could try to track down the plantmaster,” said Alfric. “Though I don’t know where they’d be.” He pointed to a pit that had been dug into the meadow, the walls reinforced with flat stones. It didn’t look particularly safe, but people had been running the dungeon, and it hadn’t rained lately, so he thought it was likely acceptable. “That’s our dungeon.”

“I hope there are flowers,” said Isra. “We’d expect clandes, right?”

“Maybe,” said Alfric. “Frankly, after last time, I think our odds of finding something outside expectations have to be much higher.”

“If it’s another theater,” Hannah began.

“We’re better equipped for it,” said Alfric. “The garden stone is better outfitted for the long-term, and we’ve talked to both Kell and Marsh about us being gone. There’s nothing pressing for us to go back to, excepting Verity’s need to practice for the upcoming performance, and if she needs to leave for that, we’ll still have four.”

“I can practice in the dungeon,” said Verity.

“Not with the Full Symphonic Lute,” said Alfric. “I don’t think I could let you stay in there in good conscience.”

“Well, here’s hopin’ that it’s somethin’ interesting, profitable, and not a large project that takes near a week of work,” said Hannah.

“If we find the same theater, we’ll have confirmation that something very odd is happening,” said Alfric. “It’ll probably be enough to draw the attention of someone with expertise in dungeon science.”

“Are you not that?” asked Verity.

Alfric laughed. “I’m a dungeoneer,” he replied. “And not an expert, just someone who knows a lot. There are people Inter employs to study such things.”

“And why haven’t we gotten their attention already?” asked Hannah.

“There aren’t many of them, and they don’t come out for every weird thing that happens in a dungeon,” said Alfric. “I’ve sent letters, and the ones who replied wanted some kind of verification that this is actually happening, that it’s not just a random occurrence.”

“Here’s hoping?” asked Isra.

“Not really,” said Alfric. “Though it would be interesting, it’s not really what we exist as a dungeon party for.” He looked up to the sky and couldn’t see Mizuki. When he looked to the horizon, he spotted her just in time, flying a foot above the flowers with her arms dangling down to brush through them. She had slowed down a bit, but was still going faster than he’d have liked.

“I’m going to take a turn when she’s done,” said Isra. She was back in her Tarbin clothing, which was sensible given they were going into a dungeon. Her hair had been tied back and then covered, and there was no skin showing, which would make her safe from all sorts of attacks. Alfric was glad that they hadn’t had to have a talk about proper dungeon attire: he’d been worried that Isra’s new look would extend too far.

When Mizuki landed, Isra took the helm and rose into the air, moving out over the flowers with considerably less speed and touching down at various points.

“Neat flowers,” said Mizuki. “I love springtime.”

“Are we good to do this?” asked Alfric. “Because in five minutes or so we’re going to need to be able to fight against hostile forces.”

“We’ll be ready,” said Verity.

“I’m ready, I just wanted to stop and look at the flowers first,” said Mizuki. “You know, if we’ve got five minutes, why not?”

“I just want us to not be surprised,” said Alfric. “I feel like we haven’t trained as much as we should have, and it’s been almost two weeks since the last dungeon.”

“We’ll be fine,” said Mizuki. “I’m going to obliterate anything we find in there.”

“Except the valuables,” said Hannah.

“Right,” said Mizuki.

“Because otherwise we’re just goin’ in there and killin’ things for no reason,” said Hannah.

“Right, right,” said Mizuki. “You know, I’m so glad we’re clearing this up now, that would have been quite the blunder.”

Isra touched down gently and handed the helm back to Alfric, who put it back on. He had no confidence in the thimble armor to protect him — it just wasn’t thick or sturdy enough — but the helm would keep his head safe, and that was vital. Flying was a bonus.

From the reports Alfric had read, the Moil Meadows dungeon was nothing special, though it had a slight focus on artisanal crafts and smaller animals than usual. If any of that held, it would be a fairly unremarkable dungeon, but if Verity was having some sort of sway over the dungeons, everything Alfric had read might go out the window.

They prepared themselves, made sure the trunk was ready, and then Alfric went down the stairs to the dungeon mouth, opening it with his key. There was a slight hitch in the lock, which needed oil, and he tried not to take that as a sign.

There was a familiar smell to the tunnel that led into the dungeon proper. There was always a tunnel like that, not quite a part of the dungeon and not quite a part of the real world, a liminal space that separated the two, a barrier that looked mundane but was base magic that had been firmly encoded into the world. The dungeon beyond would be odd and magical, but the tunnel was somehow more mysterious and powerful, in its own way.

His bident was drawn, but there was nothing in the first room of the dungeon, and he breathed a sigh of relief. The room had no ceiling, and there was summer sky overhead, with sunlight obscured by clouds. Where the blue of the sky could be seen, there was something off about the color, and richness to the blue that you never saw in the real world. It was almost like a bird’s egg rather than a sky, and once Alfric had ensured there were no monsters, he looked closely at it, trying to see if there was some trick to it.

Once everyone was through, Alfric set his pack down. The trunk was right there, but the pack had everything that might be vital in an emergency. Once it was down, he had a lot more range of motion, and he felt like he was ready for a fight, though there was always a feeling of trepidation and uncertainty before the actual battle began.

<Party channel only,> said Alfric. <Verity, you’re following Isra’s lead, don’t shoot unless you have a clean line of sight, don’t get close enough that anything can swipe at you.>

<I’m prepared,> said Verity. <And I’ll be singing.>

Alfric nodded. <Mizuki, how’s the weather?>

<Decay,> said Mizuki. <I think because it’s the opposite of flowers? Hard to work with, but with lots of offensive potential. I don’t think I’ve ever used it before. Should be less noisy than fireballs.>

<Ear protection in,> said Alfric. <Armor on, heads down, be prepared for literally anything.>

<You know that’s not helpful, right?> asked Mizuki.

<I’m just trying to get us in the mindset,> said Alfric. <It’s been a bit.>

<Lead on,> said Mizuki.

They weren’t in a proper room, and there was no door. Instead, there were steeply banked rock walls, like a gray canyon. Moss gathered in places along the edges, and water trickled down from above, slow enough that it presented more as damp patches than actual flow.

<Pretty place,> said Mizuki.

<Isra, Mizuki, you’re lookouts for above, Verity, boost perceptions,> said Alfric.

<Pleasant place so far, from what I can see,> said Mizuki.

The first living creature they saw was a mat of fur rising up from the rough stone floor. Before Alfric could even call out, arrows were zipping by him, uncomfortably close, and the creature fell back to the floor before it could rear up to its full height.

<I did it!> said Verity, half in astonishment, half with pride. The creature was bleeding out, its features impossible to identify under the long, curly fur.

<Good work,> said Alfric. <Keep up the song.>

<I am,> said Verity. <I’ve been practicing, I can talk.> Her sentences were a bit shorter, her words more clipped, but she was right, the song was still there, and Alfric could feel it, mostly in the sharpness of his vision.

The bow Verity was using had been dubbed the Triple Shot, not because it fired three arrows, but because every time you used it, it acted as though you’d fired three arrows and then picked the best of the three shots. When you used it, you felt nothing in particular, and they had only managed to suss out that it was a bit more accurate than a normal bow before getting Filera to identify it. It was a good weapon for an inexperienced archer, but there was only so much that such a bow could help. The criteria that bow used depended upon the archer’s wishes, and that was a powerful effect, but it was applied to something comparatively local, and a bit of a waste in Alfric’s opinion.

<Make sure you’re keeping wide of me,> said Alfric. <I’m skeptical of the thimble armor’s ability to withstand an arrow fired at full force.>

They spent some time looking over the furry creature, who had skinny limbs beneath all that fur. Mizuki thought that it was cat-like, but the skeletal structure didn’t seem quite right. There was nothing of value on the corpse, and nothing magical nearby, so they continued down the canyon. Alfric didn’t like that they hadn’t seen any doors yet. Dungeons were sometimes like that, open and without discrete rooms. They could be difficult to handle.

The canyon — it was the only way for Alfric to think about it — split in two, with the too-blue sky hinting at diverging paths ahead. Alfric took the left path, giving the right one a close look. He was worried that something would come in after him.

<There’s something not right in the air,> said Isra. <We shouldn’t stay here longer than a few hours.>

<What is it?> asked Alfric. <We have vent stones, we can put them on.>

<I’m not sure what you would call it,> said Isra. <There’s no smell to it. Dizziness, headaches … maybe we should do the vent stones now.>

They retreated and put the masks on. The fit was poor, but it would help keep them from experiencing any symptoms in the short term. In the long term, it was probably better that they didn’t spend too much time in the dungeon, especially if Isra couldn’t say for certain what the poison in the air was. This was the sort of thing that stopped a dungeon run dead in its tracks.

<Was it always there?> asked Alfric. <Or is it new? Local or global?>

<I don’t know,> said Isra. <I hadn’t noticed it.>

<We’ll be cautious,> said Alfric. <If anyone feels like they’re feeling it, we’ll leave right away and possibly reset the day.>

<Let’s make the most of our time then,> said Hannah.

As much as Alfric didn’t like a dungeon with no doors, he really didn’t like being under a time limit. The dungeon wouldn’t be able to be stripped down, and they were at risk of pushing too hard, taking on too much. He resolved to keep a steady pace and carry on as though he wasn’t thinking about the poison in the air and their exposure to it. They would need to go to Filera immediately after the dungeon was done to get a diagnosis; he’d heard horror stories of dungeoneers taking a dose of poison and shrugging it off only to end up with brittle bones a month later, or a belly that would no longer hold food. There were, unfortunately, certain ailments that a cleric couldn’t cure.

The left path opened up into a larger section of canyon, one with ample room to move around. Four small creatures crouched near a fire, and for a moment Alfric was worried they’d be humanoid, too much of a reminder of the bastlefolk, but the creatures unfolded in inhuman ways and turned toward the party with pure, unthinking menace.

Alfric charged forward, trying to keep the creatures from getting to the rest of the party. He stabbed the first to reach him in its chest and then used the entad’s power, blasting a satisfying hole that spattered blue blood out the creature’s back. Alfric pulled the bident out in time to bring the handle up to block a strike, and then Isra was next to him, appearing from nowhere for only long enough to fire another arrow and leave in an eyeblink. She’d found her mark, dropping the creature that had been trying to get at Alfric.

The other two fell down without any apparent force, and Alfric held for a moment, expecting them to get back up. On closer inspection, something had gone wrong with them, and their skin was separating from their musculature, sliding off like their dead bodies had been sitting out in the sun for days.

<Decay,> said Mizuki. <It’s not perfect. Next time will be better.>

<Better than four dead?> Alfric asked once he’d confirmed that the danger had passed. The battle had lasted only a moment, not more than a handful of seconds really.

<I did the spell at the start,> said Mizuki. <Not sure why it took them so much time to drop dead.>

Alfric looked at the other bodies and saw that they were in a similar state, oozing out blue fluid that was at least partly their blood. Despite the fact that they had been around a fire, they were without clothes or any other markings of intelligent construction. The eyes were black and too far apart, like a fish’s, and the mouths were pinched with the teeth jutting out and overcrowded.

<You said decay,> said Isra, looking down at the bodies. <This isn’t what decay looks like.>

<Yeah,> said Mizuki. <I don’t know. I was trying to rot them, which didn’t work.>

<Rot is caused by tiny living things,> said Hannah. <I don’t think speedin’ that up is somethin’ you could do.>

<Well then I don’t know,> said Mizuki. <Hopefully we can try this on someone else. Sorry, something else.>

<Verity, how’s the arm?> asked Alfric.

<Fine,> she replied. <My shot missed. I didn’t even have time for a second.>

<And the song?> asked Alfric.

<Also fine,> she replied. There was a touch of challenge in her voice. Alfric’s experience with her was that she worked best when given the freedom to do things as she wished, but he hoped that she’d tire of the bow sooner rather than later. If she’d missed with the bow, that meant that she’d missed at least three times on some alternate or potential present.

Beside the fire there were tools, but nothing magical, and it was difficult to figure out what the tools actually were. One was clearly a long-handled spoon of some kind, but the others were mysteries, wooden workings with a few sharp edges and rounded pieces, possibly for shaping or hammering something. There was no evidence that any of them had actually been used for anything, and it was likely that it was just dungeon nonsense. They were too crude to sell as henlings, and Alfric pushed on, still worried about the potential poison in the air.

The ‘canyon’ continued on, narrowing and widening, splitting and sometimes merging. Alfric didn’t like the merges. They were the sort of thing that made it much more likely to get lost, and much harder to keep track of. Still, they went some way without much more than scrub and a bit of sand under their feet, with the same fake sun above their heads. A part of Alfric wanted to use the helm to fly up into the air and take a survey of what was outside the dungeon, but he already knew what he would see there. It would be a flat and empty place, devoid of life and bereft of any purpose or meaning. Some dungeons wrapped back on themselves, but others had hard barriers, and a few just continued on in the flat space outside what was purposeful. He couldn’t quite remember whether he’d told Mizuki any of that, but he was mildly surprised that she hadn’t asked for the helm yet to go see for herself.

The left hand path through the winding and branching canyon brought them to a wide open place with thick blades of grass growing up from the ever-more-common sand on the canyon floor. In the center of the open area there was a log cabin of crude construction that was partially hidden by just how much stuff there was around it. Alfric was scanning for creatures or traps, but he saw bird baths, chairs, lanterns, pumps, a large variety of tools, poles, piles of rope, and half a dozen other things.

<Be wary,> said Alfric.

He moved forward, bident set in front of him. The cabin had windows with crude, bubbled glass, and Alfric did his best to peer inside. When Verity saw him, her song shifted, and he found his pupils dilated as he looked into the dark room. If there was something there, he wasn’t able to see it.

<Isra, fire an arrow through the window, let’s try to flush something out,> said Alfric.

Isra drew back and fired, and one of the windows shattered. They sat in front of the cabin, waiting, but after a full minute had passed, Alfric relaxed.

<Might be uninhabited then,> said Alfric. <You can usually depend on dungeon madness to get them moving.>

<They can still lay in wait with dungeon madness,> said Mizuki.

Alfric was glad she’d said it, because it meant that she’d been listening to him when he’d told her things about the dungeons and how they worked. And it was a good point, though laying in wait for a strategic advantage was quite rare. Most dungeon monsters were so mad that they wouldn’t be able to consider ambush. Alfric had heard a few stories about monsters feigning helplessness and then going in for the kill when dungeoneers got close, but this felt like a myth to him, and so far as he knew, hadn’t ever been fully accepted as anything more than fantasy.

He tested the handle of the door, then slowly pushed it open, looking around the interior of the cabin for obvious or unobvious enemies. Sometimes there were mimics, items that looked normal and benign only to leap up and attack you: the book-bats from their first dungeon had been from that category.

The cabin seemed to be a workshop rather than a living space, one set up for making candles or soaps. There were lots of picked flowers sitting in bins, and a cabinet that was filled with colored bottles. Alfric moved in slowly, stepping to the side to give the artillery the opportunity to fire if anything came to life, but the room was quiet and still.

<Isra, Mizuki, how does it look?> asked Alfric.

<Nothing,> said Isra.

<Smells nice,> said Mizuki. She sniffed a few times. <Hard to smell with the mask on though.>

<Looks like a perfumer’s shop,> said Alfric. <There’s a place in Moil Meadows where they harvest the flowers in the spring and summer, set up near the warp.>

<Hatch,> said Hannah, pointing with her hammer. She’d made her way in and was looking around.

<Mizuki, magic check?> asked Alfric.

<Verity, magic sight boost — thank you.> Mizuki looked around, opening her eyes wider than Alfric really thought they should need to be opened, and made her way around the room, moving things to the side and peering under a work bench. <This bottle and that candle,> she said. <I think that’s it.>

<We’ll take all the henlings, so long as we can do it quickly,> said Alfric. <Some of these things will sell well.>

<Hard for them to sell well when no one knows what they are,> said Hannah. <Those bottles have labels in a language we can’t read without translation, and no one is going to use them to make soap or whatnot without knowin’ if they’re poisonous.>

<Still, we’ll clear it out,> said Alfric. <Hundreds of rings, maybe? Depending on if we can find a buyer.>

<Down the trap door then?> asked Hannah. <Hey, we had a room like that before, didn’t we? A workshop with a hole in the floor?>

<I should let you know I’m getting a bit dizzy,> said Mizuki.

<Shoot,> said Alfric. <Anyone else?>

<I might be imagining it, just thought you should know,> said Mizuki after no one had spoken up.

<I don’t want us staggering out of here,> said Alfric. <We’ll see what’s in the cellar, then take as much as we can, then leave.>

<Reset the day?> asked Isra.

<Depends on what’s down there,> said Alfric. <I think if we get five half-decent entads and the all-clear from the clerics, that should be enough to keep the day. At least, that’s my personal preference.>

<Let’s go then,> said Mizuki. <Before it gets worse.>

When everyone was in position, Alfric flipped up the trap door. Thankfully, it had a ladder going down, and he slowly lowered his lantern down to get a look before descending himself. There were no obvious exits from it, just the ladder down, and Alfric lowered himself slowly, trying to keep a hand free.

The room was filled with weapons and armor, an almost unbelievable amount of them on every wall. If the cabin above was some kind of perfumer’s workshop, then the cellar was … it was hard to say. It didn’t have the look of a place that had been created by a collector, since things weren’t really ‘on display’. It felt more like someone had needed to gather up weapons and armor in secret, a cache created for some unknown fight. Alfric wondered whether there might be any analog out in Moil Meadows, but he doubted it. This was a place where someone had prepared to bring death.

<Wow,> said Mizuki, who’d come down after Alfric. <We need to bring the trunk.>

<Load everything quick,> said Alfric. <Then we’re moving out of here.>

<I think I’m fine,> said Mizuki. <It’s mild.> She looked at the walls. There were dirks, glaives, halberds, cutlasses, a variety of bladed weapons that Alfric thought had a Kiromon look to them, a set of spears, eight bows —

<Blegh, more bows,> said Hannah, who dropped to the floor with all her armored weight.

<Any magic?> asked Alfric. <Enough to make the dungeon worth our while?>

<Um,> said Mizuki. She looked around, muttering under her breath. <Five, I think. That’s a lot for a single room. Better than we’ve ever done, I think.>

<Seven total,> said Alfric. <Verity, Isra, if you come down the trunk should follow.>

<Can it do ladders?> asked Mizuki.

<Yes,> said Alfric. <It can walk up a sheer cliff if it has to.>

Once the whole party was down in the basement, the trunk followed. Its clawed feet gripped tightly to the rungs of the wooden ladder, but left no mark on it. For as fast and frightening as the trunk could be, it was incredibly delicate.

Alfric began loading things into it. There was a complete suit of full plate armor, but it wasn’t magical, and was unlikely to fit, especially since the proportions were wrong for a human, too wide at the foot and too narrow at the shoulders. There were entads that could correct for a problem like that, but they were so expensive you’d usually be better off getting armor that fit without magical intervention. It was all going into the trunk anyway, but Alfric kept his attention on the ones that Mizuki had marked. He wished that he had some way to mark them, and made a note to get some colored string or something like that, which could be attached to the lid of the trunk for easy access in a situation like this.

The mundane weapons were probably not worth that much, but at a few dozen rings each, they were well worth taking. Many shops were inundated with weapons, and weapons existed in abundance in dungeons at far greater rates than they could be found in the world, largely for unclear reasons. Perhaps war had made repeated marks on the world, or perhaps there were sites of mass battles hidden all across the continents. Whatever the case, many of the weapons they were taking, and perhaps the armor too, would be either melted down for the metal or hammered into some new shape, the original workmanship completely obliterated.

As they were packing everything up, Mizuki hefted one of the swords, feeling its weight, and brought it down with a chopping motion. There was a tremendous clatter from the opposite wall, and several things fell down, cut cleanly in half.

<Crap,> said Mizuki.

<No entad testing in the dungeon,> said Alfric. <Is everyone okay?>

<No missin’ fingers here,> said Hannah.

<I think everyone was out of the way,> said Mizuki. She slowly and gently handed the sword over to Alfric. <Sorry.>

With that minor scare done, the rest of the weapons were packed up, perhaps a hundred of them all told, so many that Alfric ran out of the burlap he’d been using to quickly wrap them in.

<Now, upstairs,> said Alfric. It had been perhaps twenty minutes, which was a reasonably good time for the work they’d done, but still made him feel like they were running hard against the clock. He glanced at Mizuki from time to time, making sure that she was still steady on her feet.

By the time they’d loaded up everything from the cabin worth taking, Alfric was feeling a bit off himself, in spite of the mask and the ventstone. He was going to have to find a better solution, he decided, something that could keep him breathing properly, perhaps with a seal around his mouth.

<How is everyone doing?> he asked.

There were murmurs all around. They were feeling it, that was certain, but it seemed rather mild, which had to partly be because of the masks. Seven entads was a decent enough haul, though he itched to push his luck with one more room. After the theater, he’d been hoping for something, some clue as to why that had happened and how they might make it work again. Nothing had been suspect thus far. In fact, it had almost been a boring dungeon, the two fights they’d had over too quickly.

<Are we leaving?> asked Mizuki. <Cutting our losses?>

<Yes, unfortunately so,> said Alfric. <Whether or not we keep the day is going to depend on what the clerics say. Low-grade poison is still poison, and I don’t want us to suffer from exposure.>

<We hardly did anything,> said Verity.

<Sometimes that’s how it is,> said Alfric. <Our hot streak has continued, though this is probably one of our worst payouts to date, depending on the entads. We should get out now and count ourselves lucky that it wasn’t a total bust.>

<And then another dungeon before I get back to Dondrian,> said Verity.

<We need the all-clear from the clerics,> said Alfric. <But yes.>

They left the cabin behind, with the recess behind it unexplored. It would have taken them deeper into the dungeon, and Alfric had a feeling that in another hour, he’d be feeling the effects of the foul air so much that it would impact his performance in a fight. He was dizzy, dizzy enough that there was no question it was a real effect and not just his imagination.

They had gone back through two wider parts of the canyon when they encountered something that they shouldn’t have been able to encounter: a path leading to the right. They had stuck to the left as they’d gone further in, and they hadn’t gone down any of the branches for lack of time.

For a moment, Alfric only stared at the rogue path.

Somehow, unaccountably, they had gotten lost.

Chapter 107 - Testing

“I think it was a creature,” said Isra. “That makes more sense than it being a property of the dungeon itself, doesn’t it?”

“Impossible to know,” said Alfric. “We didn’t capture any creature to test. And dungeons can have odd properties from time to time. There are essentially four categories of known phenomena: animals, plants, entads, and dungeon geography. But it would be exceptional if it was any one of those.”

“Too many exceptional dungeons, if you ask me,” said Hannah.

“I agree,” said Alfric. “But we want exceptional dungeons, don’t we?”

“No,” said Isra. “I think I’d rather have dungeons that are pretty normal, if I understand what a normal dungeon is supposed to be. If we could kill some monsters and then get out … that would be for the best.”

“Enough of this,” said Mizuki. “We’ve got some weapons to test, don’t we?”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” asked Hannah. She didn’t seem like she could have raised her eyebrow higher if she’d tried.

“I’m fine,” said Mizuki. “Honestly, I don’t get what the worry is.”

“Gut wound,” said Hannah, as though she’d been waiting to say it. “They’re notoriously awful and difficult to fix. You’ve had the healin’ of Oeyr, but there’s still a risk.”

“I was stabbed in the stomach,” said Isra. “It wasn’t that bad.”

Hannah sighed. “You’re both spoiled, that’s part of the problem. Clerics can heal most wounds, but we’re not perfect, even workin’ together as we so often have to.”

“Alright, would it be okay to say that I feel fine?” asked Mizuki. “Whatever happened, the clerics patched me up.”

“You were practically delirious from the poison in the air and the battle rush,” said Alfric. “You broke two bones and needed a cleric to remove the fire-damp from your body.”

“I don’t even understand what fire-damp is,” said Mizuki.

“It’s a noxious gas,” said Alfric. “Mostly found in swamps, I think, but also flammable if you have enough of it. I think it might have been why the sky was that color, but Filera couldn’t say off-hand.”

“Are we testing entads or not?” asked Mizuki.

“I’d rather not do it in the house,” said Verity. “Not after Mizuki cut up a bunch of those weapons.”

“We need to get started on dinner,” said Hannah. “I’m fine sittin’ out entad tests though, so go on ahead. And I’d agree that there should be some caution involved, especially since there’s no real point to the tests when Alfric can take them to Filera tomorrow.”

Hannah and Isra moved to the kitchen to work, while Mizuki and Alfric moved outside with the chest. For a moment, Verity was torn, but she followed to the backyard, in part to protect her garden from whatever shenanigans were about to happen.

Mizuki already had the bottle uncorked and was sniffing at it with her nose wrinkled. Most of the entads they’d taken were weapons, and Alfric was taking them out of the chest to set them to the side.

“Don’t drink that,” said Alfric in Mizuki’s direction.

“Why?” asked Mizuki. “It’s really unlikely that it’s poison, right?”

“It’s not that unlikely,” said Alfric.

Mizuki poured a bit of the liquid out onto the flagstones, then held the bottle up to look at it, and then down at the flagstones again. “Do you think I shouldn’t taste it either?” she asked.

“You almost died,” said Verity. “How are you still pressing your luck?”

“There’s not much that I can do with it then,” said Mizuki. “If I can smell it but not taste it or drink it —”

“You probably shouldn’t smell it either,” said Alfric.

“Oh come on,” said Mizuki. She turned to Verity. “I’m surprised you’re out here instead of helping in the kitchen.”

“I don’t know how to cook,” said Verity.

“Yeah, but,” said Mizuki, “you and Isra are usually inseparable.”

Verity shrugged.

“Was the outing everything you hoped?” asked Mizuki.

“Not really, no,” said Verity. “It was too short.”

“Plus the poison,” said Mizuki.

Verity laughed. “I wanted an adventure, and it wasn’t that,” said Verity. She shrugged. “We’ll do another in a few days, before I leave.”

“Er,” said Mizuki. “We will? Because as everyone keeps pointing out, I did almost die.”

“Won’t we?” asked Verity. She looked over at Alfric.

“We can bring it up with the group,” said Alfric. “Personally … I think if we run into bad air again, we need to get out right away.”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “For me, I guess if everyone else is up for it. But we should go poach some entads from Vertex for a bit and maybe get me some, I don’t know, armor or something.”

Alfric looked at her. “We’ll hold off discussion until tomorrow.”

Mizuki sniffed the bottle again. “The smell changed,” she said. She took another sniff. “Changed again. I think I can change the contents based on … smell?” She lifted it up as though to drink from it.

“Mizuki, no,” said Alfric.

“It smells good though,” said Mizuki. She looked at the bottle. “Like grapefruit. Have you ever had a grapefruit?”

“Can I just remind you that you picked up that bottle from what was either a perfumer’s shop or a candlemaker or … something? Meaning that it probably was used for oils or scents or something, maybe.” He was watching her to make sure that she didn’t drink it.

“So what’s your theory on what it does?” asked Mizuki. “You think that it doesn’t change the contents, just the smell of them?”

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “That’s the point. It could be that it’s just changing the smell, or that it’s creating a brand new poison with whatever smell you pick, or it could just be toxic in some other way. All you know is that it’s changing the smell of whatever that is.”

“No,” said Mizuki, holding it up to look at it. “It’s changing color, see-throughness, and that other one.”

“Which one?” asked Verity. The bottle was practically flashing colors.

“Whether it’s thick or not,” said Mizuki. “Starts with a v?”

“Viscosity,” said Alfric. “I swear if you drink that I will reset the day just to stop you from being able to play with it.”

“Aw,” said Mizuki. She set the bottle down. “When did you become no fun?”

“You said I’m never any fun,” said Alfric.

“Right, it obviously predates us meeting, I was just wondering whether it was obvious to your parents when you were a baby, or whether it happened more around puberty.”

“If you’re done with that, there are plenty of weapons to check,” said Alfric. “All we’ll know for now is you can change the contents.”

“You can change the contents by thinking about the smell,” said Mizuki. “That’s a big difference.”

“Set it to the side,” said Alfric. “Here, have a halberd.”

To Verity this seemed like a massive step in the wrong direction when it came to safety, but Mizuki treated it delicately, and seemed to show the weapon a respect that she hadn’t been affording the bottle.

Verity picked up one of the swords, a nice weapon made of jade. It seemed incredibly impractical to her, but she moved away from the others and swung it through the air, trying to test whether it had some special property that could be discovered without a creature to use it against.

She became increasingly bold with her swings, but to no avail, and was on the verge of asking Mizuki whether she was sure that this was an entad when Mizuki went floating by on the halberd.

“Second flying thing!” she called. “Super slow though, and none too comfortable.”

She was sitting side saddle and hooking both her legs around the halberd, which was keeping up a fairly sedate pace as it traveled around the yard.

“Hurts my butt!” she called out, then hopped off and nearly fell. She walked over to Verity. “Do you want to try?”

Verity wasn’t a fan of the helm, and didn’t think that she would be all that much of a fan of the halberd either, but she was starting to get annoyed with the sword, so she set it down gently in the grass and took the halberd from Mizuki.

“I still want to figure out the sword,” said Verity as Mizuki went for the sword.

“Alright, fine,” said Mizuki.

“I think I was close,” said Verity, which wasn’t entirely a lie. She’d felt close, as one often did when solving a riddle, but there was no guarantee that she was close.

The halberd was a joy to ride. All the problems Verity had with the helm weren’t present in the halberd, and while it wasn’t exactly comfortable, Verity eventually found a way to sit where her weight was resting largely on her thighs, with her hands on either side of her. The halberd was sedate where the helm was quick, and there was no risk of ending up ten or twenty feet in the air without much warning. There was also a weightyness to it that Verity quite enjoyed, and a better feeling of control. The one time she’d used the helm, it had felt like she was flinging herself around, always at risk of smashing into the ground or having the helm slip off in mid-air.

Isra had been the only one that had really understood how terrifying the helm was, though she didn’t personally seem to have the same problems with it. Mizuki had said that being flung around was the whole point to it, aside from being able to fly at terrifying speeds. Mizuki enjoyed the feeling of her legs spinning out when she made a hard turn, and felt comfortable with the wobbly feeling of weightlessness.

It was immediately obvious that the halberd wasn’t practical. It could hover along at a fast walking speed, but it was awkward to sit on, and she didn’t think that they would ever end up using it.

“We could put a seat on it,” said Alfric. “Woodworking saves the day again?”

“I suppose,” said Verity. “And I guess we’ll test how much weight it can take, since it might have a good carrying capacity.”

“Might even be able to haul a wardrobe,” said Alfric with a smile. “Are you doing okay?”

“Fine,” said Verity.

“But it wasn’t what you wanted,” said Alfric.

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “I was hoping that I would be able to do what Mizuki does, to blast away every problem standing in front of me, but that’s never particularly been my forte.”

“No,” said Alfric. “It’s not something that a bard would ever be adept at unless there was some kind of cross-disciplinary thing going on. Which is a real possibility, if you want to take a few years to try picking up wizardry, or devote yourself to martial training.”

“Gods no,” laughed Verity. “The prospect of learning to use a bow, really learn it, is only attractive because Isra is my teacher.”

“The halberd is a decent get,” said Alfric. He looked at it. “Depending on how much we can load it down with. That’s always the trick though, what limitations there are.”

“Can I ask a question?” asked Verity.

“Of course,” said Alfric.

“When you went to Plenarch … was there a reason that Isra did her whole makeover?” The question just came out, but it had been on Verity’s mind.

“Uh, I think that’s a question for Isra, but I don’t think there was any particular impetus, no,” said Alfric. “It was sort of my understanding that she was going to get a makeover with you, unless I misheard some dinner conversation.”

“She came back different,” said Verity, though she wasn’t entirely sure that was true.

“That’s the path she’s been on,” said Alfric. “Better etiquette, better integration, all kinds of stuff like that. You’ve noticed that, right?”

“Yeah,” said Verity. “She’s making an effort to be … normal.”

Alfric nodded. “You’d rather she were blazing her own path.”

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “In the dungeon today, she looked like a killer. It was nice. And now she’s back in a sundress with a gracious smile on her face, making small talk. I just don’t understand it, I guess. If I could be like her …”

“You could,” said Alfric. “The only thing stopping you from slamming the door in your mother’s face and howling at the moon is you. You could live in the woods and hunt rabbits for dinner, only talking in grunts and scowling at nice old ladies who are only trying to help. We all get to choose what to do with our lives.”

“That’s a very nice sentiment,” Verity sighed.

“I don’t want to push you,” said Alfric. “But if you have this anger inside you, if you want to crack skulls, then it’s not the skulls in the dungeon that you really want to crack. Killing a dozen creatures in the dungeon was never going to satisfy that feeling. At least, in my opinion.”

“I can’t just throw away my family,” said Verity. “Family means something.”

“I’m not suggesting that you do,” said Alfric. “But when the next ask comes, and we all think that it will … crack skulls?”

Verity nodded. On impulse, she gave Alfric a hug. She wasn’t naturally a touchy person, and she knew that Alfric wasn’t either, but she appreciated the support, and had no other way to show it. Alfric was good at hugging, and they stood there together for a bit until Mizuki nearly cut a tree down with a sword.

“This one is good!” she called. Her hair was glowing golden, much longer than it had been before, and her eyes were like pools of gilded water.

“Don’t actually chop down a tree,” said Alfric.

“Well I didn’t think it would dig in so much,” said Mizuki. She spun the sword around in a way that seemed incredibly unsafe, especially with a weapon that had just cut part of the way through a tree. “This is awesome though. I wish it had bound to me.”

“Does it do anything interesting?” asked Alfric. “Aside from being super sharp and the cosmetics?”

“Cosmetics?” asked Mizuki.

“Your hair and eyes,” said Alfric.

Mizuki lifted a lock of hair to look at. “Oh, interesting, I’ve always wondered what I would look like if I were blonde.”

“It’s glowing,” said Alfric.

“Glowing blonde,” said Mizuki. She squinted at the hair. “Is my hair longer than it was?”

“Yes,” said Alfric. “It looks nice, though if you walk around with glowing golden hair, I’m not sure I can handle that.”

“Well I’m not even sure what activated this,” said Mizuki. “Hitting something, I guess. I think it’ll need to be identified.”

She set the sword down, but that didn’t change her hair or eyes, which was somewhat alarming.

“I think I’m going in,” said Verity. “I’d like to get some practice in before dinner.”

“Can I request that it’s an outdoor performance?” asked Mizuki.

“Because you want to hear?” asked Verity. “Or because you’ll be inside and it will be loud?”

“The latter,” said Mizuki. “I mean I love your music, but it’s really loud.”

“Fair,” shrugged Verity. “Then you’ll have to either wrap up or take the entad testing inside.”

Mizuki looked down at the jade sword.

“I called dibs,” said Verity. “And in this house, we respect dibs.”

“Technically we’re not in the house,” said Mizuki.

“You have until the witching hour,” said Alfric. “Then I’ll have gone to Filera and gotten it looked at.”

Verity nodded, though she wasn’t certain that she was going to do much more with it. With entads, it was entirely possible that there was some secret, obscure method of activation, and that was exactly what clerics of Qymmos were best at uncovering.

After a quick check in the kitchen, where the smell of garlic was quite enticing, Verity grabbed the entad her mother had sent and then walked out into the woods, grabbing the halberd on a whim and floating along. She was headed to the standing stone, some distance out, far enough away that she’d be playing for the forest creatures rather than the house. She decided that there was something nice about the halberd and the way it could float along. Having a weapon made her feel powerful, even if she wouldn’t have the first idea how to effectively use a halberd.

Ever since being shown the clearing, Verity had taken a liking to it. She came out with Isra sometimes, often with a blanket they could lay down on. It felt more secluded than it probably was, and it was part of Mizuki’s sprawling property, which meant that it was an extension of home, in a way.

The entad, once activated, set up a sphere of Dondrian in the middle of the clearing, always the same sphere, a piece of a manor with a chair, table, and the lute set on top of the table. The floor was marble, and the bit of the window that the sphere covered was well-made, with clear, clean glass that surely got a maid’s attention once or twice a day. The theme of the colors was blue, and on this occasion, there was a glass vase on the table with small blue flowers.

There was also a note, which Verity opened with some trepidation.

Verity,

You performed marvelously. With everything we had to get through, all the pressure, all the meetings, I simply didn’t get a chance to say that your ability with the lute has in no way diminished over your time away. I’m proud of you and all the hard work you’ve put in. That’s why it’s such a shame that you’ve been wasting your talents in Pucklechurch. I hope that the concert has helped to give you some perspective on your proper place in this world. Upon your return to Dondrian, there will be all sorts of correspondence for you to read and respond to, though I’ve handled the most urgent of them myself, and of course there are plenty of congratulations, flower arrangements, and other benefits that come from a well-received performance. I throw my own congratulations in as well, along with my love.

Your Guiding Star,

Edil Parson

Verity felt like crumpling the letter up, but set it down instead, because there was no way to remove the letter from that room, and someone would find it later. Instead, she made sure to make clear that it had been read, then picked up the lute and began to play.

The next pair of concerts were to focus around a suite by Marinischoff, capped on either end by pieces from other composers. The first was a shorter work of Perricul, an influence on Marinischoff, while the last was a piece by Fenster, a more modern arrangement that paid homage to Marinischoff.

It was fine. Marinischoff was one of the lesser names of the music world, well-known but not that well-known, which meant that there was still some novelty left to him. The music was unchallenging for a general audience, and in Verity’s opinion wouldn’t stay on anyone’s mind once the concert was over, but it was fine, just fine, the kind of thing that Verity could perform and get some applause for.

The suite was the primary piece of music, and she focused most of her practice on it. The lute, as ever, was draining. She was playing all the parts at once, dozens of them. The lute aided her enough that it took an otherwise impossible task down to one that was merely very difficult and demanding. The percussion in particular required a novel approach on the entad lute, given that they couldn’t be conceptualized as a single instrument.

She wasn’t too terribly far into the suite when she got a call on the party channel. Dinner, it seemed, was ready. Still, she did her best not to falter in her playing as she finished out the movement, and by the end of it, she was adding a bit of her own flair to the piece, which was a sign that she knew it on a deeper level than rote memorization.

Verity took her time going back to the house, floating along on the halberd. She’d have preferred to walk, but then she would have had to have carried the halberd, which was a heavy weapon. Floating felt like it gave her more time to think.

She was going to have to talk to Isra, that was clear. Everyone was saying it, aside from Mizuki, who never offered much in the way of relationship advice, despite having been in the most relationships. Hannah and Alfric both seemed to think that talking would be the cure-all, but Verity just wasn’t sure. Isra’s clothes, for example, seemed like they weren’t a good topic of conversation one way or another, because if Verity expressed disapproval, where was there for the discussion to go? Isra wouldn’t — shouldn’t — change what she wore just because Verity preferred the old look.

The house was filled with the smell of food, and Verity slipped into her seat, only slightly tardy. The meal was garlic pork over rice with all kinds of veggies, a Kiromon dish that Mizuki made with some regularity, but apparently Mizuki had some opinions on what they’d done.

“Why are the carrots like this?” asked Mizuki, holding one of them up. It was a thin slice with a star-shaped edge. Her hair and eyes were still glowing, and there was something ridiculous about how she looked at the carrot when she seemed like she was inhabited by some godly being.

“I thought it would look nice,” said Isra. “Doesn’t it?”

Mizuki frowned. “Carrots aren’t star-shaped,” she said. “What happened to the rest of the carrot then?”

“I fed them to the dragons,” said Isra. “You said that food should look nice?”

“It should look nice, we eat with our eyes,” said Mizuki. She looked down at her food. “But, I don’t know, it’s not natural. It’s the kind of food that’s had things made pretty at the expense of being practical. Food should be pretty and practical.”

“I didn’t mind doing it,” said Isra.

“She’s just grumpy because it wasn’t done her way,” said Hannah.

“It’s like cutting the crusts off a sandwich,” said Mizuki. “Sorry, I’m not being ungrateful, thank you for making dinner, though you really didn’t need to, it’s just … I like being the one to make dinner.”

“What’s wrong with cutting the crusts off sandwiches?” asked Verity.

“It wastes them,” said Mizuki.

“You can save the crusts for something else,” said Verity. “Like stuffing for hens.”

“Technically you can,” said Mizuki. “Or you can feed them to some animal that loves crusts or whatever. But I don’t like it.” She took her first bite of food. “It is good though.”

“Let me know what you’d change,” said Isra. She was eating slowly and delicately, in a way that she wouldn’t have a month ago. In a way it was impressive that she could pick up on so much, so quickly, but Isra had proven very aware of other people.

The food was good, though perhaps not quite up to Mizuki’s standards. The garlic was slightly undercooked for Verity’s tastes, and the vegetables had been cut long, making them difficult to eat in a single bite, which meant that they were difficult to consume with decorum. Verity ate slowly, as she wasn’t terribly hungry, and she let most of the conversation float by her.

“So,” said Alfric once he was finished with his meal. “How are we feeling about a second dungeon?”

“Are we keepin’ the day then?” asked Hannah. “Because Mizuki did lose my entad.”

“I’m greatly in favor of not having this be a reset,” said Alfric. “Not unless Mizuki felt like she didn’t want the memory of that dungeon.” He turned to her. “But you seem fine?”

“Um,” said Mizuki. “I was scared out of my mind when it happened, and then I did almost die. But I don’t really want to talk about it, and I’m fine keeping the day so long as I get some hot chocolate tonight, curl up with a good book, and sleep it off.”

“If I reset, I’d have to do the day over,” said Alfric in Hannah’s direction. “How much was the mapping entad worth? We can pay you out of the community fund, that would be fair.”

“It was a trifle,” said Hannah with a wave of her hand. “Somethin’ that I bought more to buy somethin’ than because it was useful. This was the first time we needed it, and it gave its life. Should be possible to replace it though, especially with all our rings from the theater sale.”

“Then on the question of a second dungeon this week?” asked Alfric. He looked around the table.

“I’m in,” said Verity. It felt weird to be the first to respond.

“Sure,” said Isra.

“Alright, fine,” said Hannah. “Though I’m hopin’ it’s better than this one was.”

Alfric looked at Mizuki.

“Why can’t I be last to answer?” she asked.

“You took the hardest hits and suffered the most,” said Alfric. “I’d understand if you needed time to recover, and I don’t want you to go along with it just because everyone else is.”

“The clerics patched me up,” said Mizuki. “I’m fine.”

“We should have done this as a blind vote,” said Alfric, shaking his head.

“I want to do the dungeon,” said Mizuki. “So are you going to veto?”

“No, I’m not,” said Alfric. “I’ll consult with Vertex and find a day that works, they’re doing three this week. We should also have a post mortem for the dungeon, but that can wait a bit.”

“Anythin’ good from the entads we pulled?” asked Hannah.

“Have you seen my hair?” asked Mizuki. She held it up to show it, as though they otherwise wouldn’t be aware of the golden glow. “Though I do wonder how long it’s going to last.”

“I think the bottle we got is probably good, but we can’t do much more testing on it without getting dangerous,” said Alfric.

“I’m going to test that sword, then practice some more,” said Verity. She pushed away from the table.

“Do you mind company?” asked Isra.

“Not at all,” said Verity.

They went out together after helping to clear the table, and Isra gave Verity a quick kiss once they were under one of the tabbith trees. The smell in the air from the bloom was lovely, and Verity reveled in it for a moment.

“Sorry for being off,” said Verity as she picked up her sword.

“Off?” asked Isra.

“I don’t know,” said Verity. She held out the sword in front of her. “Before everything with the concert series, I felt like we had it all figured out, and now … it’s all up in the air again.”

Isra slipped her arm around Verity’s waist and kissed her on the back of her neck. “We have each other.”

“We do,” said Verity. She was turning the sword over in her hands as Isra kept kissing her from behind. There was a temptation, a strong one, to drop the sword and just go up to their room. “I liked seeing you in your battle gear today.”

Isra withdrew and moved around to look Verity in the face. “You did?”

“Yes,” said Verity. “You looked fierce.”

“I don’t think I like looking fierce,” said Isra. “Fierce like an animal?”

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “No. Fierce like a person, someone who would break fingers and brawl if she had to. Someone who would be willing to set the world on fire to — to protect me.”

“I wouldn’t set the world on fire,” said Isra.

“What’s the most you’d set on fire?” asked Verity.

Isra laughed. “You’re being silly.”

“It’s just a feeling,” said Verity.

“You want me to drown someone for you?” asked Isra.

“What?” asked Verity. She let the sword hang down by her side.

“That feeling,” said Isra. She seemed exasperated. “You want to know that I would do anything for you, even, or especially if it’s transgressive.”

“I — yes,” said Verity. “Or, I don’t know, I don’t expect that, or even want it, but when I imagine it, I like it. I have a fantasy where you threaten my mother with a bow and arrow, and that finally shuts her up.” She had never said that out loud before, that fantasy. It sounded insane, she knew that.

“I don’t think that would silence her,” said Isra. “I think she would talk to the city guards and I would be punished in some way.”

“Probably,” said Verity. “It’s just a fantasy. And it’s a fantasy that’s getting further away every day.”

“It is?” asked Isra.

“You’re changing,” said Verity. With her free hand she gestured at Isra.

Isra looked down. “You think that I couldn’t threaten your mother with a sundress on?”

“I don’t know,” said Verity.

“Do you think makeup makes me less strong?” asked Isra. She stepped closer, and Verity moved the sword to the side, worried that the weapon was still unsheathed. “Is that why you don’t like it?”

“I never said I didn’t like it,” said Verity, though she knew that was an incredibly weak denial.

“I don’t like being aggressive,” said Isra. “I don’t like being closed off.” She was moving closer, until she was so close that her hip pressed against Verity’s. “I want people to see me and think that I’m normal, that I know all the normal things to do, or better, that I know more than them, that I’m more normal than a normal person.” Her face was close and her breath was hot. “I want to know where all the forks go, and when to wear my hair in certain ways, and all kinds of other things that you think are silly or stupid or a waste of everyone’s time. I want to learn how to write letters and how to gossip.” She placed a finger on Verity’s chest, at the place where her blouse opened up, against the bare skin. “But if you want me to put my foot against your mother’s throat, I can do that for you.”

Verity swallowed. “I don’t know why this is working for me.” She could feel the heat in her cheeks.

“You don’t like when I’m ladylike,” said Isra. She leaned forward and kissed Verity on the cheek, but just barely to the side, so the edges of their mouths touched. “I think I understand that better now.” Her hand reached down and touched the sword, taking it from Verity’s grip.

In the moment they were both touching the sword, the magic of the entad finally revealed itself. They both transformed, each taking on a bit of the other, Verity’s skin darkening and Isra’s lightening, their features shifting and hair morphing. Isra grew slightly taller, and Verity grew slightly shorter, until they were exactly the same height.

Isra let go of the sword, but the changes stayed.

“Well, let’s hope that’s not permanent,” said Isra. Her voice was different.

“Huh,” said Verity. She couldn’t help but stare at Isra. “It’s not … horrible.”

“No,” said Isra. She reached up with a hand and cupped Verity’s face, then gave her a tentative and experimental kiss. There was something different about the taste, a sweetness that hadn’t been there before. “Combat applications?”

“None that I can think of,” said Verity. Her breathing was slightly short. “Unless you blend with the monster you hit with the sword?”

“Sounds dangerous,” said Isra. She was still standing close.

“Let’s get some expert opinions,” said Verity with a sigh. “Unless … you wanted to see how far the blending goes?”

“I’m nervous that it’s forever,” said Isra.

“Well,” said Verity. “Let’s save that for later then.”

Mizuki stared at them, open-mouthed, when they came in, then turned to Alfric. “One of them must be evil. How do we decide which one to kill?” she asked. The glow in her hair and eyes still hadn’t left her.

“Funny,” said Verity, laying on the sarcasm as thick as she could.

“That one,” said Mizuki, pointing at her. “She’s the evil one.”

Verity stuck out her tongue. “Very funny. It’s the jade sword, by the way, it happened when we were both touching it at once.”

“Hmm,” said Alfric. “Doesn’t seem terribly useful at first blush.”

“Alfric, I want to try it with you,” said Mizuki. “So I can be part Alfric, and you can be part Mizuki!”

“That sounds awful,” said Alfric. “Besides, I don’t want to be a woman.”

“You wouldn’t be a woman,” said Mizuki. “You’d be a … huh. I mean, now I really want to try it.”

“Any advice?” asked Isra. “We’re hoping it’s temporary.”

“Full-body modifications almost always are,” said Alfric. “As in, it’s a ninety-nine percent chance that it will revert back, and if it doesn’t, it’ll be worth so much that it would almost be worth the inconvenience. This is a strong sign that we should put a stop to entad testing though.”

“If it’s still in place at the witching hour,” said Isra. “Possibly we could revert the day, out of an abundance of caution?”

“I’ll check in with you before you go to sleep,” said Alfric. “Or let me know over the party channel.”

“Wait,” said Hannah, who came in from the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron, apparently in the midst of baking something. “Let me see.”

She held out a hand, palm up, and Isra took it. It was the kind of thing that Hannah did often for diagnostic things, always offering, never laying a hand on someone without them being the one to come forward, and Verity always appreciated it.

“Surface level,” said Hannah. “The insides are all different, it’s just cosmetic. I’d still reset if it’s like that before the witching hour, since no one wants a permanent change, but —”

“No resets if my hair stays like this,” said Mizuki.

“Fine,” said Hannah with a roll of her eyes. “All I’m sayin’ is that the muscles and guts seem to be more or less the same, as much as these two look like twins.”

“You know us by our guts?” asked Verity.

“I symmetricalized Isra,” said Hannah. “I know her internals well enough. And I’ve done healin’ for all of you.”

“Well, we’ll be upstairs while we wait for this to wear off,” said Verity, taking Isra’s hand.

They spent some time together, looking at each other. The magic had made them identical, at least on the surface, with the same voice, and it seemed to have made some decisions when it did the blend. Isra had a freckle near her belly button, which both their bodies now shared, and their eyes were the same, possibly more toward Verity’s than Isra’s, though they were going off what they remembered and what they could see in mirrors.

It took a half hour to wear off, and once it did, Verity was a bit disappointed, while Isra felt relieved. They reported this to the party channel, then spent some time taking turns to look over their features in the hand mirror.

“I don’t necessarily want to be you,” said Verity, speaking into the empty air as though answering a question that hadn’t been asked. “But it was nice, for a moment, to be someone else.”

“I wouldn’t want to be you,” said Isra. “You’re beautiful, but you’re made to carry too much, and … I like myself. I’m a good Isra.”

“Maybe that’s the difference between us,” said Verity.

“There are lots of differences,” said Isra with a raised eyebrow.

“I just sometimes feel like … there’s a gulf between us,” said Verity. “More now than earlier.”

“I feel it too,” said Isra. “But it doesn’t make me sad, I don’t think.”

“No?” asked Verity. That hurt, in ways she had no idea how to express.

“It means that we have time to figure each other out,” said Isra. “We have more of each other to know. I like that.”

“I guess so,” said Verity, though it didn’t give her the feeling of relief she’d wanted. She took comfort in Isra’s arms though, and allowed herself to be cuddled into a state of contentment.

Chapter 106 - Strange Moods

<Hannah, please tell me that you have that mapping entad with you,> said Alfric.

<Ay, I do,> said Hannah. <Not on me, but in the trunk.>

Alfric paused. <Did we test that it worked while inside the trunk?>

<No, I don’t think we did,> said Hannah. <But why wouldn’t it?>

<Extradimensional space,> said Alfric.

<Would that futz with it?> asked Hannah.

<I don’t know,> said Alfric. <Maybe. Take it out, please.>

Hannah went into the chest and pulled the entad out, taking a moment to look at it. <Seems like it recorded a path.> She was frowning. <But … it seems to me that the walls have shifted. The entrance should be off that way.> She pointed in the direction of a wall. The angle was perhaps thirty degrees. <The entad overwrites whatever is there, we took a bad path some two hundred feet back, but it seems to me we should have noticed. Right?> She handed the entad to Alfric, and he looked at the map it was drawing.

As mapping entads went, it was imperfect, and it only showed the surrounding area in nearly real time, with the rest being a record of what had been in those areas when they’d passed through. Alfric could see the discontinuity where they’d diverged from their original path, but there was no way to tell whether that original path was still there at all.

<Mizuki?> asked Alfric.

<What?> she asked.

<If the walls moved, it was probably magic. Did you see anything you didn’t feel like mentioning until now?> It was a long shot, and he could tell from the way she was frowning at him that the answer was no.

<I’d have said,> replied Mizuki. <Though … maybe a weird flavor in the air? Hard to pin down. I’ll think on it.>

<I’m going up to scout,> said Alfric, pointing up at the canyon. <I’ll be down in a minute.>

Alfric rose up into the sky, above the walls of the canyon and into the too-blue sky.

The canyon ended abruptly in flat land that was only slightly rounded at the edges. Alfric kept going up, with no deviation in either direction, and made sure that the rest of the party was clearly visible beneath his feet.

The gaps in the rock stretched out around him, and as he rose higher to get a full look at them, he grew concerned. There was too much of it. The gaps continued on for far too long, out into the distance, and implied that this winding, branching canyon went such a distance that it would imply the equivalent of a thousand rooms. The higher he rose, the more there was to see, until eventually he worried that if he came down, small variations on his position would mean that he’d be facing a monster rather than reuniting with his party.

Dungeons weren’t supposed to do this. They were supposed to be small, half-created worlds, only a thin imagining grown from whatever alchemy the Editors had designed to utilize abundant natural magic. There were plenty of unnaturally large dungeons, those so big that you’d run out of some resource or another before you could find an end, or anything resembling an end. There was some argument about whether the infinidungeons were truly infinite, but if they weren’t infinite, then no one had ever successfully mapped an instance of one out, and that was with entads that could expand senses out to a mile and magic that could move them as fast as the wind. Still, even those were supposed to be relatively static.

<See anything?> asked Mizuki.

<No,> said Alfric. <There’s too much dungeon. It’s not clear where the exit is.>

Alfric descended down, thankful that he hadn’t lost his bearings, and landed lightly next to the party.

<Alright,> he said. <I think we should go into the garden, breathe some air that’s not fouled, and take stock.>

<Agreed,> said Hannah. <Developin’ a bit of a headache here.>

They filed into the garden stone one by one, with Alfric going last because of the time the thimble armor took to retract. The garden stone, unfortunately, didn’t permit metal, which meant that they had to go through the work of taking off their armor, and then Alfric was worried about leaving it all outside. He decided to rise up and leave it on top of the canyon, away from where a wandering monster might go, if they were unlucky enough to find one.

<Alright,> said Mizuki once Alfric was in. <So how do we deal with this?>

<Not sure,> said Alfric. <It’s not supposed to happen.>

<Welp,> said Mizuki. <So we just reset then?>

<It’s always better to try to make it out,> said Alfric. <I can reset at any time, and I will if I think the gas is getting to me, but this is an opportunity to learn, and we’d be giving up our winnings. It’s still early in the day too. There’s plenty of time to escape.>

<Do we know it’s the dungeon doing this?> asked Verity.

<Not necessarily,> said Alfric. <It could be something else.>

<A dungeon creature?> asked Isra. <Or a plant?>

<Maybe,> shrugged Alfric. <Or an entad. Maybe even an entad that we picked up.>

<I’m feeling better already,> said Mizuki.

<We should make tighter seals for the masks,> said Alfric. <They’ve never had a full test, and I didn’t have measurements of everyone’s faces. I think we have materials on hand.> He took a deep breath from the garden air, and while he didn’t feel better, he certainly wasn’t feeling worse.

<If it’s a monster, we can kill it,> said Mizuki while Alfric was getting the spirit gum out.

<If we can find it,> said Alfric.

<It should want to find us, right?> asked Mizuki.

<If it’s a monster, yes,> said Alfric.

<Can’t we call it then?> asked Mizuki.

<If it’s a monster,> Alfric repeated.

<We would have to pull all of them, right?> asked Hannah. <Not sure how we’d do against the entire population of an expanded dungeon, all at once.>

<We don’t know it’s an expanded dungeon,> said Alfric. His hands were busy with the masks. <In theory, when we go in, some portion of the magic that’s stored as potential in a dungeon is used, and everything I know about Moil Meadows says that it shouldn’t have a store of magic necessary to make something this big, not with us as the catalyst.> He couldn’t resist a look at Verity.

<I don’t think this is me,> said Verity. <I was trying to get a place with good lighting and good entads.>

<We got good lighting,> said Mizuki. <And maybe good entads.>

<I wasn’t blaming you,> said Alfric. <This just … is unusual, and you’re one of the Chosen of Xuphin, so —>

<I know very well what I am,> said Verity. <But I certainly didn’t want poisonous air, or to get lost.>

<No one is blaming you,> said Alfric. <If you have some kind of influence over the dungeons, it’s not something that you’ve been able to hone yet.>

<We’re going to get out of here, right?> asked Verity.

<I’ll do everything in my power,> said Alfric. <I think we have two general options. The first is following Hannah’s entad, fighting what we have to and attempting to go to where it thinks the entrance was. The second option is to have a single person zip through on a scouting run as quickly as possible using the helm. Thirty miles per hour should be faster than all but the fastest ten percent, and even among those ten percent, we should be able to win on stamina.>

<You’re volunteering?> asked Mizuki. <Because I could definitely do it. And I have magic.>

<I’m volunteering,> said Alfric. <I have better training.>

<Nah,> said Mizuki. <We need you alive and awake to do the reset. If I die out there, no big deal, but if you get incapacitated, that’s it, we’re toast.>

That gave Alfric pause. <I think I have a need for control that might be clouding my judgment,> he finally said. <But Mizuki, I’m not sure you’re the best choice.>

<I’m the best at flying,> she said. <I take the helm out every day, and even before then, I was flying with magic. I have the most firepower too.>

<You don’t have full plate armor,> said Hannah.

<I could take Alfric’s, the thimble, it’s not bound to him,> said Mizuki.

<Alright, you’ve convinced me,> said Alfric. It had been left outside, and wouldn’t take her that long to don.

<Really?> asked Mizuki. <Because if you wanted to —>

<I don’t have magic,> said Alfric. <If you have to fight a monster, there’s a good chance you can lay waste. Don’t engage unless you absolutely have to.>

<Where will we be when all this is happening?> asked Isra.

<In the stone, I think,> said Alfric. <And the stone will be in the chest, and the chest will be following Mizuki.>

<There’s a chance the problem might be getting worse while we wait here, right?> asked Verity.

<Yes,> said Alfric. <And there’s a chance we’re past the tipping point. If the dungeon is warping, then the entrance might be sealed up behind so much rock we could never get through it, even if we could find it.> It was a sobering thought, and he could see some fear in their faces. <But that’s why you have a chrononaut on the team.>

<Don’t worry,> said Mizuki. <I’ll get us out of this.>

~~~~

Mizuki was second-guessing herself from the moment she stepped out of the garden stone. She had the mask firmly in place, literally glued to her face with a tight seal. At Alfric’s insistence there were two ventstones, which was much more air than she needed, but his theory had been that this way air would be constantly pumping out of the mask, and there’d be no way that bad air would be able to get in.

The thimble took quite a bit of time, and Mizuki didn’t want to wait for it, but she’d promised that she would. She had actually never put on the thimble armor, despite her love of entads, in part because it seemed like a lot of waiting, and she was surprised that it was so easy to move in, as well as being so light. Once Alfric had upgraded to something else, she might ask to take it as her own, since it didn’t feel like the gauntlets would interfere much with spellcasting.

She rose up into the sky to get the lay of the land. It seemed endless, but she knew that it wasn’t, and that helped to tamp down the fear. Besides, if Alfric was right, there weren’t a bunch of extra monsters, it was just more space. The virtually endless canyons would only have a limited number of creatures that wanted to kill her, scattered around in unknown places.

Mizuki used Hannah’s entad and followed the trail from above, flying over canyon walls and looking down below her. The chest followed, going up the sides of the canyon and then back down, seeming none too bothered by how incredibly stupid that method of travel was. Mizuki was worried about the chest, as her friends were in there, but it was practically invincible. Alfric had pointed out that this wouldn’t stop some monster from opening up the chest and hauling out the stone, which wasn’t unbreakable. Maybe he hadn’t realized how scared she was, because it definitely hadn’t boosted her confidence.

Mizuki wasn’t even sure why she’d offered to be the one on the outside. Maybe she had felt like Alfric always took all the risk for himself, and that he didn’t trust her to make good decisions in spite of the fact that she had made pretty much nothing but good decisions in the whole time they’d known each other. Still, the price for learning that Alfric did trust her with important dungeon things was having to go do important dungeon things.

Mizuki wasn’t even entirely sure what she was looking for. The dungeon probably still had an exit, but she wasn’t entirely sure whether it would be in the same form as it had been in before, and looking at things from above was much different from looking at them on the ground. It would have been nice if it was as simple as spotting a hole and knowing that it was the hole to go out through, but she was worried that she’d spot a hole that wasn’t the right hole, and who knew what kind of horrible monster might be hiding out in there?

She was more than halfway to where the entad was pointing when she spotted some monsters down below. They were bulbous, slow-moving things, and there was a temptation to smack them with magic just for the hell of it, but the red fleshy tubes didn’t seem like much of a threat, even if each of them was larger around than the trunk of a particularly old tree. Finding monsters meant something though, she thought, since there shouldn’t be too many of them.

The fleshy tubes began unfolding at the top, opening up like huge flowers, and once that was done, they began belching up little white sacs that wriggled on the ground. Mizuki was fascinated and disgusted in equal measure, but once the sacs split open to reveal white and red creatures, and once those creatures began to spread their wings, she took off.

She was hoping that she wouldn’t have to fight them, in part because she didn’t think the particular flavors of magic in the air would help them, but also because there wasn’t a point to fighting them. Still, the newborns took to the sky on unsteady wings and flooded out of the canyon, up into the air where she was flying.

Mizuki landed for just a moment, and the chest was next to her, since it had been following along with no apparent effort. She opened it quickly and pulled out the sword that had cut through a bunch of metal stuff on the wall, then shot back up into the sky, breezing past the winged creatures that were bearing down on her. They were more wing than anything else, and she was doubtful that their tiny claws would be able to get past the armor, but after the dive bombing incident and all the damage the bat things had done, she wasn’t about to take the risk of getting squarely smacked by them. These were more like birds than bats, with needle-beaks and significant plumage, white at the body and red at the fringes, fast, but no match for the helm’s incredible speed.

Mizuki rose into the air and spun around to face the murder-birds, checked that the chest had followed her and was out of the path of destruction, then swung the blade in front of her.

She had expected a line of force to slice through them, to see bloodied bodies whirling to the ground, but only two seemed to die, right in the middle of the flock, and the rest continued on toward her. She swung again, trying to get as many of them in the sweeping angle as she could, but again, when the cut moved invisibly through the air, it seemed to hit only in one specific spot. Mizuki flew backward and wished that she had something else, but the magic was thin up above the ground, and even if it hadn’t been, the dominant flavor of decay was ineffective. There was something else in the air as well, but she didn’t have the time or desire to ruminate on it, not when the birds were still flying after her.

There wasn’t really a battle between them, not when Mizuki could keep her distance and keep attacking, but she remembered what Alfric had said, and tried to think, as hard as that was when monsters were chasing her. There was more than one way to lose a battle, and if she kept swinging the sword too much, fatigue might set in. There were also more of the things flying than there had been at the start, and as Mizuki looked out over the battlefield, she saw even more coming up from one of the crevices. She wasn’t cutting through them fast enough to make an actual reduction in their numbers.

She circled around in the air, moving at close to the helm’s maximum speed, then dove down quickly into the canyon, where more of the sacs were rolling out of the flesh tubes. She summoned up the magic in the surrounding area and lined up an outpouring of abstract decay that in theory would hit all of them, then shot back up in the air before the birds could descend on her in such a confined space.

The fight was a slog, and though she was using both arms, she found herself getting tired. The invisible cut seemed to only make a vertical line no matter which way it was swung, and it seemed to be quite a bit more powerful if the swing was a vertical cut too. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the best way to cut down the birds, since they spread out and flocked together, and Mizuki had to be aware of her position at all times. Eventually, whether it was because she had blasted the sac-spewing tubes or because they’d simply run out, the flock of birds that had been flapping after her was diminished, and she felt safe letting them come a little bit closer.

That was when a second combatant joined the party.

Mizuki had only been dimly aware of the ground below her during the aerial maneuvers. She saw the trunk from time to time, as it would pop up and then descend back down, stupidly trying to stay close to her. Most of her attention was on the birds though, and so she didn’t quite realize that she was flying over so much of the dungeon. That there were monsters down there, that these monsters could see her, and that some of them might be capable of coming up to fight her, were all conclusions that didn’t reach her mind until a fat brown creature slithered up from the canyon.

It was massive, so big that it had trouble getting out, and its leathery wings were pretty clearly too small for it to actually fly with. It flew nonetheless, and faster than Mizuki could, which meant that in only a few moments her battle with the birds needed to be forgotten so she could deal with it.

The mouth was big enough to swallow a cart, with teeth in a zig-zag, and the long arms with terrifying claws reached for her as it twisted in her direction. She was slower than it, but more maneuverable, and managed to get out of the way of its initial charge with it not doing much more than knocking her with the side of its mouth. She pulled back and it followed, but she was ready, and blasted it in the face with all of the decay she could muster this high up. Whatever the actual effect, it seemed to work slowly, but that just meant trying to dodge out of the way of —

The hit left her reeling and unsure of where she was, with the only saving grace being that she’d been knocked far enough away that she hadn’t been killed during her moment of confusion. Her head was pounding and there was a real possibility that some of the fight had gone by without her even knowing about it.

The beast was bearing down on her, mouth open like it meant to gulp her up, and the armor had been rent at her midsection, where she was bleeding.

Mizuki’s heart was hammering in her chest. She had never been more frightened in her entire life, not even when she’d fallen down into that pit and had to kill a monster in the dark. There were times she could ride the thrill of battle, to let her instincts overtake her and flow freely through it. Sometimes it felt more like excitement than fear, and it was possible to not worry about the emotions that she was feeling, to just let it happen. This new thing was going to kill her though.

She had lost the sword when she’d been hit, and had no idea where it might have gotten off to, which meant all she had at her disposal was magic, and if decay was doing anything to the creature as it moved, it wasn’t doing enough. Worse, it had the remainder of the birds with it.

Mizuki braced herself and dodged the first clawed attack, then zipped to the side when the mouth came down on her. There was a faint hope that the decay would continue to work on him and he would simply fall over dead, but it was a very faint hope. She was going to die if she didn’t do something, but she had no way to kill this thing, not if the decay wasn’t going to work. There was another mood hanging in the air, but it was relatively abstract, and she couldn’t put her finger precisely on what it was.

The creature’s long tail smacked her, its acceleration so extreme that she wasn’t sure she’d have been able to catch it starting to move if she’d been staring right at it. She flew through the air but thankfully didn’t lose consciousness, and that thankful that she had the helm to keep her in the air, because if she’d slammed into a rock at speed, it might have killed her. Her guts felt all out of place though, and she fought back the urge to throw up. Without clerical intervention, she was going to be bruised across her whole body, and she was dimly aware that she was losing blood from the wound on her stomach.

She needed something, and looked to the chest, which had dutifully popped up on the plateau beside her, following her as she was banged around. Alfric’s bident was in the trunk, but she had no idea how to use it. She needed something better, and reached out to that abstract mood as the monster went to close the distance again.

It came to her in a flash of insight, just as the creature was almost on her. The strange mood wasn’t something natural to the dungeon, it was something generated by an unknown process within the dungeon, and the sprawling expansion must have been what she was seeing the counter of. Once she’d grasped that, it was a matter of conceptualizing the opposite, not quite expansion, more iteration on a theme, but the opposite, woven, would be a reduction, a flensing away until there was only a vital core.

The teeth almost touched her. She was very nearly in the mouth of the flying creature, its claws reaching behind her to scoop her up and prevent her escape. Then the creature was ripped apart, exploding into pieces around her. She flew back but wasn’t spared the blood or gore, and watched as the core of the creature, its spine and guts, fell limpy down, pinwheeling against the side of the canyon and splattering everything with red.

Flying didn’t take much effort, but Mizuki was tired and bruised, and there were still the rest of the birds to deal with. She flew away from them, moving slowly, and waited until they were in range to reach out with armored hands and grab one around the neck. She was worried that once she’d done that, it would thrash around and be impossible to kill bare-handed, but to her surprise, the grim work of snapping the creature’s neck wasn’t actually all that difficult.

She repeated the process a dozen times, and finally there was silence.

She was shaking, grimy, bleeding, and aching. It felt as though absolutely nothing of value had been accomplished. The monsters were dead, lots of them, but there was no reward for it, no special entad she’d received, nothing. She looked down at where the armor had already grown back over her stomach wound, wishing that she could see what kind of damage it was, whether they were shallow claw marks or cuts so deep she might be in the process of dying.

The smart thing to do was to go back into the chest, get healing from Hannah, and have Alfric take over trying to look for the exit, but the thimble armor took time to unwrap itself, and while it was doing that, Mizuki pushed on. Two flying enemies felt like more than the average, and she was hoping not to see another. She was also hoping that she’d find the tunnel, if there was still a tunnel, and then make the escape.

She’d lost Hannah’s entad. It had been in a pouch at her hip, tied in, and the pouch was gone. That was two entads down, which was horrible news. Still, the tops of the canyon weren’t as nondescript as they’d been before, not after the protracted battle, and Mizuki was able to find the one where the birds had been coming out of without all that much of a problem. From there, she was able to orient herself and fly in the presumed correct direction, hovering over the gaps in the canyon walls, looking down at all the rooms.

The exit was just sitting there, wide open, and maybe it was her imagination, but she felt there was something faux-innocent about it. It was like the exit was saying ‘oh, had you been looking for little old me?’ when it knew damned well that was exactly what she’d been doing.

She lowered herself to the ground, looked around to make sure it was safe, then opened up the trunk — which had followed all the flight with no problem, racing back and forth through the canyons — and spoke into the party channel.

<Found it,> she said. The words came out slurred, which was a bad sign. <Bail out, I need healing, should be safe.>

Hannah was out first, and her hands were on Mizuki within seconds.

<We need to get you to Pucklechurch,> said Hannah. <Now.>

<I’m fine,> said Mizuki.

<You’re not fine,> said Hannah. <Alfric, move now, leave us behind, we can take the trunk. Now.>

<I lost your entad,> said Mizuki.

But Alfric was already moving, picking Mizuki up like she was nothing and booking it out the exit. Going from the dungeon to the real world so quickly felt shocking. Usually there was more ceremony to it, a checklist that you were supposed to follow and double-checking that nothing was left behind or accidentally taken with.

<I’m fine,> said Mizuki, but her words were partly cut off by their transition to Pucklechurch.

<Of course you are,> said Alfric. His voice was tight. “Emergency healing!” he called out into the temple. “Retract your armor, now.”

Mizuki did as he said, and felt an unpleasant squelching from around her midsection. The armor had been covering up all kinds of damage, and she felt like she should slide it back into place to protect her more, then get some sleep. The sleep did come, but not before she felt hands on her.

She woke up later, feeling fine and not entirely sure where she was. She was in a bed that smelled somewhat of pine, and Alfric was beside her in a chair.

“Feeling okay?” he asked.

“Great, actually,” she replied. She gave him a smile that he didn’t return.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Um, flying creatures which weren’t much of a problem, then a big flying creature that was a problem,” she said. “I killed them all though, then found the entrance.”

“We have a party channel,” he said. “It works through the garden stone.” He didn’t say ‘you have no excuse not to tell us what was going on’, but she could feel it anyhow.

“I was fine,” said Mizuki.

“You broke two bones,” said Alfric. “You were suffering blood loss. You were poisoned and dying.”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. She looked down at herself. The clothes she’d been wearing were gone, replaced with a simple robe. “I’m fine now though. Right?”

“Yes,” said Alfric. “The bones were healed, the blood replaced, the damage to your lungs and heart healed, and the poison removed from your system.”

“How was I poisoned?” asked Mizuki. “I was wearing a mask.”

“You weren’t when I came out,” said Alfric. “I think you must have lost it at some point. And then my guess is that you were hyperventilating, which would have made it a lot worse.”

“What’s hyperventilating?” asked Mizuki.

“Breathing really hard,” said Alfric. “More air gets in, but if there’s poison, that means more poison gets in too.”

“Ah,” said Mizuki. “Sorry. But you know, even if I’d been able to keep up a running commentary, I don’t think there was anything you could have done to help.”

“Still,” said Alfric. He shifted in his chair. It had obviously been some time, since he was freshly showered, still damp, and out of his adventuring clothes. “You did well, probably.”

“Probably?” asked Mizuki.

“I wasn’t out there to see what you were up against,” he said. “But you dealt with whatever was after you.” He swallowed. “It’s hard for me to let someone else take on the danger like that.”

“Well, next time it’s on you,” said Mizuki. She looked down at the bed. “Are we keeping this day or what?”

“Up to you,” said Alfric. “I know it didn’t go too well.”

“You should see the other guy,” said Mizuki. She was wiggling her toes. “Can I go back home?”

“They want you to take it easy,” said Alfric.

“Who’s going to cook then?” asked Mizuki.

“Isra and Hannah will handle it,” said Alfric. “If you’re ready, we can go now. We’ve been waiting on entad testing for you.”

Chapter 108 - The Warehouse

“We’re still working on paring it down,” said Grig. “Obviously there’s a ton of stuff here, and a lot of the certifications have been stripped off, and there are other problems, but just ask and I should be able to tell you whether it’s up for grabs or not. Please no testing.”

“What do you mean certifications stripped off?” asked Mizuki. She was looking at a collection of glassware, all in different colors and designs. The golden glowing hair and eyes had lasted three days before wearing off, and she had said the only reason she didn’t immediately reapply them was that they might be going to the concert before it would wear off again.

“When the Unspeakable Queen left, she took her counterparty with her, and per the terms of the initial agreement, which were generous to us, she had to leave behind all of our collective stuff,” said Grig. “In theory, it was a sweetheart arrangement for us, but either by her directive or her parents or someone on their payroll, all this stuff got dumped off in basically the most inconvenient way possible. Certifications came from clerics of Qymmos, or in some cases, other entads, and most of them were just stripped from the entads that were handed back to us.”

“That’s a jerk move,” said Verity.

“Well, you know,” said Grig. “There’s a reason she’s Unspeakable.”

“So you don’t know what any of these do?” asked Mizuki, pointing at the collection of glassware.

“No, we know some, maybe most, just because we remember them,” said Grig. “Just ask and I’ll see if we know. The others were supposed to be here today, but Josen is off ‘training’ with Kell, Mardin is missing and not responding over the party channel, and Marsh is too busy canoodling with his girlfriend.”

“Har har,” said Marsh, who was in private conversation with Hannah off to one side.

“Seems like a scam,” said Mizuki. “We have to ask about each one? For the good ones, you’ll just say ‘oh I don’t know’, so we get stuck with the bad ones.”

“That was the deal,” said Grig. “It was for the bad ones, the trifles.”

“You know what I mean,” said Mizuki.

“I really don’t,” said Grig. “We’re not trying to rip you off here, these are just —”

“It’s sometimes better to just ignore her,” said Hannah. “She’s havin’ you on.”

Grig looked around at the others. “I want it to be equitable.”

“A likely story,” said Mizuki. She pointed at a small marble. “What’s that one do?”

“Um,” said Grig, moving closer. “Stores memories, I think? You can test it out.”

“I’d thought there would be more,” said Alfric. He seemed none too impressed by what was in the makeshift warehouse.

“Fifty dungeons,” said Grig with a shrug. “Most of the best big money stuff is either being used by the party or off at auction, unless it’s been sold already. There are still, er, three hundred pieces or so, that’s plenty.”

It was, as Isra understood it, supposed to be a quick stop, but she could already tell that it was going to take them the better part of the morning. Part of it was that Mizuki was in a particularly silly mood, part of it was needing to inquire about most of the entads in order to know their functions, and the final part was Marsh and Hannah being in their own little world.

“Something on your mind?” Isra asked Verity.

“Hmm?” asked Verity. “No, nothing much, just the concerts. If I let them be out of my mind, I’m worried that I won’t be able to perform up to standards. It’s an interesting thing, how your mind can keep working on music even when it’s not playing, though I think the same could probably be said for most things. If you thought about cooking every waking hour of the day, you’d be a better cook for it, I’d bet.”

“I’m not sure we should do a dungeon today,” said Isra. “Not if you’re worried about the concerts.”

“We’re doing a dungeon because I’m worried,” said Verity. “I’m treating it as a break from the stress, as a fun thing to do, even if it’s not always a fun thing to do. Besides, we’re dungeoneers.”

“Anything you’re looking for?” asked Isra.

“By definition it would be pretty stupid to look for anything specific,” said Verity.

“I’m looking for a plate that says the name of your food when you load it up,” said Mizuki. She gave Verity a smile, then turned to Grig. “Do you have anything like that?”

“We have a sword that says the name of the body part you’ve struck,” said Grig. “Which is surprisingly close, all things considered.”

“I’ll pass,” said Mizuki. “What do you have in cookware?”

“I’m warning you now, we’re not parting with anything that makes food,” said Grig. “They’re too valuable. But could I interest you in a chef’s knife that will make consistent cuts?”

“Ooo,” said Mizuki. “You definitely could. Do you have a carrot I could borrow to test it?”

“A … carrot?” asked Grig.

“I love this guy,” laughed Mizuki.

The room had been a workshop before, Grig had explained, and they were renting it just in the short term, since it was relatively cheap. They would have to move everything out in about three months, when someone else was due to take possession of the place, but in the meantime, they had somewhere to store all their things. There were shelves all around, and some of the vestiges of the old workshop could be seen, mostly in some hastily covered holes in the floor and areas that were clearly marked out for something or the other.

“I’m also surprised that you don’t have this all in extradimensional space,” said Alfric.

“Oh, well, we do have a few storage entads,” said Grig. He had handed the knife to Mizuki for inspection, apparently not thinking that this was a dangerous thing to do, and she immediately started stabbing the air. “But they all come with their own drawbacks, and the Unspeakable took our best one, which was a little room that rearranged things.”

“A room?” asked Alfric.

“Oh, you’d have loved it,” said Grig. “It was like a little bowl.” He made a shape with his hands. “You accessed it through a tall shield, and had to stoop to get in, but you could throw stuff in there and it would fly up onto the wall, and then once you were in, you could rearrange things just by thinking about where they should go.” He sighed. “Gone now, unfortunately. We could attempt litigation to get it back, but … well, I don’t expect that to work, and it’s not that big of a deal.”

“Sorry,” said Alfric.

“We’ll find a replacement,” said Grig. “Hopefully soon, so we can empty this place out. We were lucky that we could dump it all here. Hey, if you do find a really good storage entad, let me know, we might be able to negotiate something.”

“We have three,” said Alfric. “Though like yours, they’re all limited in their own ways, and I wouldn’t want to have any of them as long-term storage.”

“Is this mirror on offer?” asked Isra, touching it briefly. It was a large one, full length, and she could see herself from head to toe. She looked good, she thought, though she was partially in her dungeoneering gear.

“It’s terrible,” said Grig. “You can travel through it, but it links up with the nearest mirror, which usually isn’t far away, and usually isn’t big enough to get through.”

“Travel entads are usually good,” said Isra, touching the wood frame of the mirror. It was set in a stand, in a way that she hadn’t ever seen before. “On a ship, perhaps?”

“Range is limited to two hexes,” said Grig. “And it’ll link up with any mirror, even a little hand mirror, just based on whatever is close. If you want it, it’s yours, it’s definitely what I would consider a trifle.”

“I’ll keep looking,” said Isra.

“I think I have mine,” said Hannah from across the room. She was holding up a small tube of lipstick, which she’d clearly already applied to her lips. “Watch and be amazed.”

She blew a kiss toward Marsh, and a red mark floated through the air until it struck him on the cheek, where the imprint of her lips remained.

“Wow that’s useless,” said Mizuki.

“How much lipstick is in there?” asked Alfric.

“Infinite,” said Marsh. “It keeps making more.”

“Better used as a crayon than lipstick,” said Grig. “You can mark your path in a dungeon or something. It’s not high quality lipstick.”

“Well, I’m takin’ it,” said Hannah. “Though not so we have a fancy lipstick pencil.”

“Sure,” said Grig. “That’s one down.”

“Nah, I’m taking the knife,” said Mizuki. “That’s two. Though it’s mostly because of the style, it’ll go nicely with the stuff that’s already in the house.”

“Alfric?” asked Grig. He pulled a knife from a nearby shelf. “Can I interest you in a throwing dagger that returns to your hand?” He whipped it at a far wall with a flourish and held out his hand without looking. The small knife returned to his palm with a satisfying smacking sound.

“Throwing knives are horribly overrated,” said Alfric.

“You always said that,” said Grig, grinning. “But this one has a marvelous property, which is that it comes back to you just before it hits something, meaning that you can practice with it all you like and not have to worry about it getting dull.” He grinned and flipped the knife around. “Want to try it?”

“So it’s useless?” asked Isra.

“Useless is in the eye of the beholder,” said Alfric. He threw the knife, hard, toward the wall and held his hand out to catch it when it returned. “Works on people?” he asked.

“Yes, if you mean that it doesn’t actually cut people,” said Grig. “You could throw it at me and it would bounce back to your hand at the moment it was about to hit me.”

Alfric flipped the knife around and looked at Grig.

“Do me!” called Mizuki. She moved off to some distance away and stood with her arms out.

Alfric raised the knife for a throw, then lowered it and narrowed his eyes at her. “Alright, fine.”

He threw the knife as hard as he could, and as soon as it touched Mizuki, she doubled over, crying out in pain. Alfric caught the knife, then calmly walked over to where she was screaming on the floor and nudged her with the toe of his boot.

“You’re getting predictable,” he said.

“Merrr,” said Mizuki, flopping onto her back. “I’m dying, can’t you see?” Alfric’s face didn’t change expression. “It’s such a good gag. You can’t turn down a gag like that when you see one Alfric, I hope that’s the lesson you take from this.”

Alfric went back to Grig and handed over the knife. “I’m looking for something a little more practical.”

“Trifles, remember?” asked Grig.

“There are still useful trifles,” said Alfric. “Minor conveniences, minor boons, things like that.”

“I’m not entirely clear why we’re owed these trifles,” said Isra.

“It was part of the chrononaut contingency deal,” said Alfric. “Mostly thrown in. But hopefully this won’t take all that much longer, because we’re still doing a dungeon later today.”

“Verity and I will go look around,” said Isra. “We won’t be much longer.”

Isra veered over to some other things that were sitting around, these from what seemed like it had been a short-lived labeling project. Given that Vertex had been under their new management for a few weeks now, and that they hadn’t really been running dungeons during most of that time, it seemed to Isra that they could have made much more headway on their inventory issue. Being generous, she supposed they were working on getting new members, and it seemed as though the various individuals that made up Vertex were putting in wildly different amounts of work, with Marsh in particular spending most of his time with Hannah.

“That was cute,” said Verity. “Seeing Hannah blow a kiss.”

Isra wasn’t sure how to respond to that. She was happy that Hannah seemed to have found a good mate, but she didn’t find the display of affection to be particularly cute. She wasn’t sure you were supposed to look at the flirting and courtship of others and think highly of it. It wasn’t particularly something that animals did, looking at the courtships which they weren’t participants in, not in the same way that Verity was implying.

Isra had learned, by this point, that when she was attempting to compare human and animal behavior, that was a sign that she’d gotten badly off track and was floundering in her lack of knowledge.

“Do you wish I did that?” asked Isra.

“Blew me kisses using a magic item?” asked Verity. She laughed. “It’s quite specific.”

Isra didn’t know whether that was an attempt to brush off the question or a sign that her question didn’t make any sense, so she let it lie and tried to focus on reading through the entads.

There were so many things. A brush that changed the colors of things without paint. A bracelet that let you spit your teeth out at high speed. A chemise that let you walk on your hands. A metal pear which could be juggled even if you didn’t know how to juggle. A set of bowls that were so slippery that nothing could stick to them and they could only be held by gripping them tightly in your hands. A fancy pen that disassembled itself. A blanket that piled other blankets on top of it when you were cold. A wide-brimmed hat that made you two feet shorter, with most of the height taken from the legs. A cup that would shatter whenever it was touched and rebuilt itself when someone sang. A clock that indicated the cycles of the moons. A black choker that could adjust the texture of your skin. A lamp that acted as the only light source in twenty feet when it was on. A plate that could hover three inches off the table. A chair that could rotate beneath you, moving at your will. A dagger that vibrated when it got wet.

There was a lot of stuff, and nothing in particular grabbed Isra’s attention. This was in contrast to Mizuki, who changed her mind a dozen times in the course of moving through the warehouse, always finding something new that she thought was the best thing ever. The descriptions of these things came from either the sporadic bits of paper that were tied to them — some overflowing with information, others so sparse they needed interpretation — or from Grig and Marsh explaining what they could.

“We should own an entad shop,” said Mizuki. “Then we could do this all day.”

“Weren’t you dating someone who owned an entad shop?” asked Grig.

“We don’t talk about that,” said Mizuki. “Ugh, now I feel bad.”

“Traditionally it’s a bad idea to move into entad sales,” said Alfric. “At least, when you’re at the end of your career as a dungeoneer. You accumulate all this random junk, you know that you need to sell it, you decide that you don’t want the entad dealer to take a cut, then you open up your own store and it fails within the year.”

“Why?” asked Isra.

“Eh, a combination of things,” said Grig. “You start with this inventory, and a lot of it is like this,” he gestured broadly at the room, “not really very good, and you have an attachment to it, because you, I don’t know, fought a giant slime for it with your best friends a few years ago. And the things you need in order to be an entad seller are a broad knowledge of the market, connections to dungeoneers and other sellers, good ability to sell things to people, and all kinds of other things.” He looked over at Alfric. “We talked about this once, didn’t we?”

“We did,” said Alfric. He turned to Isra. “The only thing that being a dungeoneer gets you is maybe some contacts, maybe some experience selling entads, and a bit of starting inventory. But it’s not enough, not on its own.”

“Then why do they do it?” asked Isra. “These retired dungeoneers.”

“That’s more complicated,” said Alfric.

“Probably when you decide that you’re out of the game, you want to keep a foot in,” said Hannah. “You think ‘welp, I’ve spent my whole life doin’ this thing, I should keep on doin’ it, I can’t give up all this knowledge, don’t know what to do with myself if I’m not a dungeoneer’, and then you run into the problem that there aren’t really all that many things a retired dungeoneer can do that will keep them in the community, doin’ the same things. You can help out with Junior League, I’m sure, or the League itself, but I’d be quite surprised if there were enough jobs for all the dungeoneers who’ve had their fill of the actual dungeons.”

“Isn’t the point of doing all the dungeons that you can just … coast?” asked Verity.

“Sure, sure,” said Hannah. “But then I imagine you’ve been doin’ it for five or ten years or so, or more, and you don’t really understand what it is to stick around in one place, to be a normal person who doesn’t kill monsters, and you want to be a part of the world. You get caught in your patterns and don’t know how to let go.”

“So you start an entad business that fails,” said Alfric. He shrugged.

“There’s a Kesbin sermon,” said Hannah. “Lettin’ go, freein’ yourself from old things, old emotions, old patterns, old memories.”

This appealed to Isra, in a way she thought she wouldn’t have been able to articulate if she’d been put on the spot.

Isra hadn’t been to her house in four days. When she’d returned from Plenarch, she’d brought all her new clothes into the room she sometimes shared with Verity, along with all the makeup and other things. All of her dungeoneering things were likewise at the house. And most of her clothes she’d worn before, those of the Tarbin style, were now reserved for dungeoneering. Since they were going to a dungeon later in the day, Isra was wearing those old clothes, and she was surprised by how restrictive they felt compared to the dresses she’d worn almost every day since Plenarch.

Eventually she would sever that connection entirely. She would keep a few things, and do her best to honor her father and the mother she never met, but the cabin in the woods would be given its funeral, maybe within the next month, and she would move the last of her things out of it, either to Mizuki’s house or some kind of long-term storage. But even storage felt like the wrong thing to do, like it was locking those things away solely for their sentimental value, rather than because she might ever have a use for them. Someday she might have children, but she couldn’t imagine trying to explain to a child all the memories she’d had of her father, and how those memories seemed to still reside in a chair or a table that they’d used when eating meals.

Verity needed to cast off her past too, and Isra wished that she knew how to help with that. Verity had tried to leave, and been successful right up until the point where her family wanted her back. Even without financial ruin, they’d have sent someone like Alfric again, and again, until they had established contact, and from there it seemed likely that Verity wouldn’t be able to withstand the onslaught.

The problem, really, was that Verity did love her mother, at least in some sense of the word. It wasn’t as simple as telling the woman to go pound sand. The problem was, it needed to come to a head at some point, or Verity would be stuck in the same pattern of being miserable while serving her mother’s interests. The concerts were making enormous sums of money, at least so far as Isra could tell, but Isra didn’t for one moment think that it would ever be enough. For those sorts of people, you could simply never have enough money, because the money wasn’t being used for things, not really, it was being used to show off how much money you had.

There was something that Verity found attractive in Isra, something beyond the shared attraction and a certain quietness they both liked to indulge in. Verity liked that Isra was wild. When they were together, Isra had no problem being wild for Verity, turning bestial if that was what Verity most responded to. It was something that Verity liked — yearned for, even — being free from the strictures of polite society. Yet Verity did so little to buck those conventions herself, and Isra didn’t quite understand it, except through the lens of having always done things in a certain way and needing to break the pattern. If there were changes, they were coming slowly, a bit of salty language here and there, or a touch of bad manners, and none of this rebellion was directed where it actually needed to be directed, which was at Verity’s own mother.

Isra tried to have faith that everything would work out, that she and Verity would grow together. It was difficult though, because she worried they would like each other less as they grew. The things they liked about each other seemed to be the things they didn’t like about themselves. If Verity stripped off the veneer of civilization and became a howling wolf of a woman, Isra wasn’t sure that she would still feel the same attraction. She’d fallen in love with Verity, graceful and poised, always with the right thing to say, always demure and charming. There was nothing to say that she wouldn’t love the other Verity, but it wasn’t a guarantee.

“I think I’ll take this one,” said Verity, holding up an hourglass. She had been carrying it around for a bit while she looked for something better.

“I don’t think you told me what that one did,” said Isra.

“It gives a half hour of sleep, once a day, as though you’d napped,” said Verity. “You need to be in bed for it to work, but that’s not a big deal.”

“Will Grig let us have that?” asked Isra.

“He seems annoyed,” said Verity, looking across the room. “My guess is he wants us to get out and will settle for something more than a vaguely defined trifle. What do you have?”

“It’s a scarf,” said Isra. She held it up. It was a thin material, pink silk, and it moved around her hand like a snake twisting itself to stay in place. “It can move around and tie itself to me.” She let it go, and by way of demonstration, it slithered up her arm and to her hair, which it wrapped itself around to tie the curls back in a ponytail. “Quite fetching, I think.”

“It is nice,” Verity admitted.

“What?” asked Isra.

“You don’t want something more practical?” asked Verity.

Isra gave a little laugh. “It’s for me, not for Alfric.”

“True,” Verity smiled.

It took Mizuki the longest of all of them to pick something out, and eventually she settled on the knife that she’d started the whole thing with, which she had been assured would work even if she was cutting as quickly as humanly possible. Alfric eventually settled on a gilded brooch that would affix to his chest and translate all his clothes, armor, tools, and weapons into a cohesive style. Unfortunately, it was always the same style, and that style was, generously, a matter of taste.

“I don’t think it’s hideous,” said Verity. “Just … not you.”

The brooch turned fabric white with gold trim, and turned metal into gold with embossing and engraving of a floral style, with occasional flourishes of animals, so much that it was almost difficult to look at. Isra found the filigree to be a bit much, but it was cohesive, from his boots to his shirt, and even including the weapon at his hip.

“I don’t understand why you’d want it,” said Hannah. “I agree it’s not you.”

“It’s a good look,” said Alfric, looking down at himself. “Like something a prince would wear. Besides, one of the things entads are notorious for is having their style not match, and this way I won’t need to go through the massively expensive process of entad alteration. I do want to see what it looks like with thimble armor, but I don’t want to spend the time right now. We have a dungeon, after all.”

“I think it looks nice,” said Mizuki. She tugged at a bright white sleeve. “Very knight in shining armor.”

“Then we’re all done here?” asked Grig, looking around. “Everyone has what they want, we can close out this chapter of our lives?”

“I think so,” nodded Alfric. “It took less time than I’d thought it would.”

“It took more time than I thought it would, but I guess I wasn’t doing too much else today, aside from some music practice.” He glanced at Verity. “I heard your concert went well, congratulations.”

“How’d you hear?” asked Verity.

“It was in the paper,” said Grig. “The local one, the Liberfell Gazette. I guess because they consider you a local or something. Selling out the Ellusifé is no mean feat.” It was the sort of thing that Verity didn’t like to hear, because she’d had nothing to do with ticket sales. “I, uh, sometimes forget that we’re in nominally the same profession, at roughly the same age, and you’re just —” he raised his hand way above his head. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make it weird, but I just, uh, wonder about it sometimes.”

“If you can find your way to Dondrian, I can get you a ticket,” said Verity. “As a friend.”

“Oh,” said Grig. “That would be wonderful.”

“We hear the songs a lot,” said Mizuki. “So if you wanted to, you could just come by the house.”

“That too,” nodded Verity.

“Well, that would be great,” said Grig. “We could jam together, if — if you do that?”

“I do,” said Verity. “Sometimes.” So far as Isra knew, and so far as she could decipher ‘jam together’, this bordered on being a lie, because the only person that Verity had played with was Clemency, and then only briefly. The replacement bard at the Fig and Gristle had come over only twice, both times briefly, and they’d played together for only one of those times. Still, perhaps Verity was being aspirational. Isra liked that. Verity didn’t ‘jam’ with people, but she wanted to be the sort of person who did.

They left the makeshift warehouse after that, and it had gotten late enough that it was time for lunch. Isra had hoped that they would get noodles, which she’d had before, but Mizuki was keen to go to something called a ‘meat house’, and seemed to have a stronger opinion on it than anyone else.

The Mete Hus was a relatively large place, as restaurants went, dominated by a grill in the middle with heat that could be felt even from far away. A husband and wife couple tended to the grill, flipping over pieces of meat, mopping them with sauces, and piling things onto plates that were taken over to the tables. There were a few pots of things bubbling at different parts of the fire, but the focus seemed to be entirely on the meats, which made sense given the name of the place.

“Just remember that we don’t want to eat too much,” said Alfric. “You don’t want to be fighting while hungry, but you also don’t want to be fighting after stuffing yourself.”

“Meat platter it is,” said Hannah.

“I’m serious,” said Alfric. “We can go for a walk after this, but we’re doing a dungeon in short order, and I’d prefer for everyone to be in fighting shape.”

“I’m not entirely sure what a meat house is,” said Isra. “Other than that they have a lot of meat?”

“They do basically just meat,” said Mizuki. “There’s some rice and beans for sides, a bit of bread with butter if you want it, some roasted veggies, but it’s almost entirely about the meat, which they’re just really, really good at cooking. And this place is supposed to be one of the best, though the only time I went was when I was younger, and I don’t really remember it that well.”

Their waiter came with menus, which were placed down on the table without much further comment, after which he left. It struck Isra as rude, but he didn’t seem to care all that much, and she felt like the only one who was off-put by it. Her experience eating places was incredibly limited.

“How do they have so much variety?” asked Alfric.

“Entad,” said Mizuki. “Not for making things, but for storing them, I think. Since they can store meat indefinitely without it rotting or getting freezer burn, they can have literally anything ready and on hand for cooking.” She was looking down the menu. “I actually might get the platter.”

“To share?” asked Hannah.

“Yeah, I guess,” said Mizuki. “I wish there were a restaurant where I could order one bite of everything on the menu.”

“They have that in Dondrian,” said Verity. “It’s a Chelxic style.”

“And no one told me?” asked Mizuki.

“It’s not my preferred method of eating,” said Verity. “But it does have its advantages.”

“Seems like a pain in the butt to cook,” said Hannah. “Though I suppose I don’t know what goes on in a commercial kitchen.”

“They sell lizzo meat here,” said Isra, looking at the menu. “I wasn’t aware it was edible.”

“Is it poisonous?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Isra. “This isn’t a druid thing, I had thought there was a reason people didn’t eat it, something about the meat that made it … tough.”

“It’s a temperature thing, I think,” said Alfric. “You need it really hot in order to properly cook the meat, more than most kitchens can even get to, but then you need it also to be in a pretty specific range of temperatures.”

“Does it taste great or something?” asked Mizuki.

“Not to my knowledge,” said Alfric. “Though I’ve never had it.”

“Even with all those food entads you have at your house?” asked Hannah.

“I didn’t try every single meat under the sun,” said Alfric with a shrug.

“Welp, we’re splitting the meat platter,” said Mizuki. “It says it’s enough meat for two.”

“I think you’re sayin’ the word ‘meat’ too much,” said Hannah.

“I agree, actually,” said Isra. “I’m much more about the eating than the speaking.”

It took some time for their waiter to come back, carrying a tray with glasses of water for all of them, and they had been ready to order for quite some time. Hannah and Mizuki were splitting the meat platter, Alfric was getting a plate of chicken thighs with some sides, Verity was having blackened fish, and Isra had eventually settled on a selection of pork prepared in different ways.

“I don’t understand why dungeon meat isn’t more popular,” said Isra as she drank some water and waited for the food. Her stomach was rumbling.

“Sure you do,” Mizuki. “Didn’t we talk about this before?”

“It takes time and practice to figure meat out,” said Alfric. “To figure anything out. Even if you pull something almost like a pig out of a dungeon, you’re probably going to have to try a few times to get it right.”

“I swear we talked about this,” said Mizuki.

“Are we never going to eat that bear meat?” asked Isra. “If we’re not, that’s fine, but I want to know.”

“We had a bit,” said Mizuki. “It’s just … not something I know how to cook well, and inflicting cooking experiments on people is, uh, something that I only want to do when I think I have a good idea.”

“If I’d known it would go to waste, I wouldn’t have harvested it,” said Isra. “I’ll have to sell it. That and the goat ribs.”

“We’d need an army to eat all those goat ribs,” said Mizuki.

“I do think there’s something to be said for dungeon meats,” said Alfric. “The problem is selling them, really. But … to really do that, we would want to be selling them ourselves, but then we’d need to open a restaurant, ideally, and I don’t really see that working out without a lot of entad assistance. And we’d be competing against restaurants with their own entads, many of which would be just flatly outclassing us.”

“Grim,” said Mizuki.

“You’re a good cook,” said Alfric. “But you, cooking with dungeon meats, or with dungeon plants too, would be —”

“I don’t want to be a professional,” said Mizuki. “And if we do ever get to the point where we’re like your aunt, where we can just spit out custom meals for everyone, then I think I’ll still cook.”

“Well alright, good,” said Alfric. “Then we’re not running a dungeon meat shop.”

“Do such things exist?” asked Isra.

“In Dondrian, I think,” said Alfric. “But it’s solely for the novelty, and being for the novelty means that there are some hard limits on how big the business can ever get.”

Isra couldn’t help but find that slightly disappointing, but it wasn’t as though she’d actually wanted to open up a dungeon meat shop. Money was much less of a concern now, and she knew that among the things she needed to stop holding onto was the idea that she needed to earn money for a sense of security or some nebulous future. If she wanted to go to Tarbin, she had the money to do that already, and she’d been able to spend freely when buying new clothes and getting a makeover. The plans for making more money from dungeon meat had been borne of desires that didn’t really apply all that much anymore, and which would apply less and less as they did more dungeons.

When the food finally came, Isra was famished, but that helped to make everything taste better. She was, perhaps, in the mood of Kesbin, because she ruminated on that as they all ate their food. Kesbin was the God of Fasting, though she didn’t think there was all that much textual support for the practice within the Keserbin.

“This is so good,” said Mizuki. “I wish I could cook like this.”

“You’re already amazin’,” said Hannah as she used her teeth to pull meat from a bone. “Though I do agree we could send you off for an apprenticeship at this place.”

“It’s the heat,” said Alfric. He had eaten quickly, then slowed down once more than half his food was gone. “Careful control of heat is the hallmark of this sort of thing, and it’s incredibly difficult to get right, mostly because you can’t see or feel the heat.”

“Not without an entad,” said Verity.

“You’re blind,” said Isra. She considered that. “That’s interesting.”

“You’re really not blind when it comes to heat,” said Mizuki. “I mean really not blind. You hold your hand out and you can know how hot a thing is, because you know that from some distance away it’s, you know, some certain temperature. And you can see what the food is doing when it’s cooking, which is literally using your eyeballs. And you know from experience.”

“You don’t think it’s mostly experience?” asked Alfric.

“Did you want some fish?” Verity asked Isra.

“Yes, please,” Isra replied. She put some of her pork onto Verity’s plate without asking, a chunk of belly and a single long rib. The ‘blackened’ fish was apparently not cooked too long, as Isra had assumed, but rather smothered in herbs.

Everything was delicious, though the sides were somewhat lacking, which had been expected. Isra was still learning how to cook, though she could make a few basic meals with some supervision, and she wondered what it would take for her to be able to cook pork like this. Probably an entad, if she was being honest with herself, especially if Mizuki continued to cook the vast majority of their meals.

Eventually the meal was finished, with Alfric helping to finish off the meat platter, which turned out to be far too big for just two people. The food was paid for from the party fund, which had so much money in it that they could have eaten at the meat house twice a day for a year, or something like that.

“We’re still good for the dungeon, right?” asked Alfric.

“GIve me a bit,” said Mizuki. “I was trying my best not to overeat, but it was just so much meat.”

“We should have done noodles,” said Alfric.

“I liked it,” said Verity. “It was a good change of pace.”

They ended up sitting in a park for a bit and playing a game of Alfric’s own design, done with a cheap deck of cards that he had tucked away in the chest. By the third round, Mizuki had her energy back, and they were ready to go.

Personally, Isra might have been fine if they didn’t do the dungeon at all. She wasn’t entirely clear what they were getting from it, aside from more money, which they didn’t really need. There was a chance that they would find some marvelous new entad that would improve their storage situation, or allow them to freely travel to the cities of the world, but it seemed unlikely.

They were going into the dungeon, it seemed, because this was just the sort of thing they did. Isra wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

Chapter 109 - Dung

Riband Lake was north of Liberfell, and they elected to walk rather than sit in the garden stone while someone flew. This was in part to walk off the meal, and in part because it was a nice day, though with Isra around, it was almost always a nice day, save for when the garden needed some rain.

The conversation was light and pleasant, and Hannah ended up telling them all about Cairbre, which she didn’t mention all that often.

“Well, I left when I was still young, and I do have to say that the memory fades a bit.” She sighed. “It’s a cold place, but there’s less of a swing in the temperatures than there is in Pucklechurch. We had colder summers but warmer winters. It’s largely heather and gorse, with winter turnips and gelid potatoes for crops, and more sheep than the rest of the world combined, I’d wager. I wouldn’t say it’s a brutal place to live, but I’ve heard others say that, and I wouldn’t disagree too strongly. It’s rocky in most places, with only some scraggly trees that are holdin’ on for dear life. You can look at them and tell which way the pervailin’ winds blow.”

“You must miss it,” said Mizuki. She was walking along with her balance stick, which she seemed to use at even the slightest provocation.

“I think Cairbre is a good place to be from,” said Hannah. “I’m not so sure I’d ever move back, unless my parents were in ill health, or … I don’t know, some other such thing. I write to them less than I should, and now that we’re people of some means, I really should plan a trip, but I have quite a bit goin’ on in my life at the moment.”

“We could take a structured break,” said Alfric. “Scatter to the six winds, then come back together.”

“No way,” said Mizuki. “I want to go to Cairbre, once we have our own flying ship.”

“There’s no real point in a flying ship,” said Alfric. “They’re too slow compared to either a portal or a ley line.”

“Still. I want to meet Hannah’s family,” said Mizuki. “I haven’t met anyone’s family except Alfric’s, and then for not all that long.”

“You’re never going to meet my family,” said Isra. She said it without much emotion.

“You don’t think you’ve got a grandparent floating around out there?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, you might not, but you should have four of them, they can’t all be dead.”

“They could,” said Isra. “But they don’t know I exist, or if they do … they never contacted me.”

“You went hidin’ when people came by your cabin,” said Hannah. “Though I s’pose you couldn’t have been so good at it that someone would just give up, and I imagine they’d have asked around town. Either way, the mysteries of your life still do need to be resolved.”

“I don’t know that they do,” said Isra. “If I’m happy where I am, why does it matter?”

“I s’pose is doesn’t,” said Hannah. “Who am I to tell someone that they need to delve into family history they don’t care about?” She was a cleric, that was who, but even clerics needed to discriminate in what buried emotions they told people to dig up.

“I didn’t say that I don’t care,” said Isra. “I do care. If I could understand who my father was, if I could know the past … I would want to. But I don’t need to spend my life trying to track them down. I don’t know where I’d start. I don’t even have a name.”

“Wow, what’s that building?” asked Mizuki. They had come around a bend and could finally see Riband Lake, which the hex was named after. Across the water, sitting on the shore like a stately white cat surveying its domain, was a tall building of ornate design with a statue of a small boy in an alcove on the upper level. The building seemed to have been built to be viewed from this particular angle, coming up along the river that led to Liberfell, or perhaps from the road to Traeg’s Knob.

“It’s a tomb,” said Alfric. “A famous dungeoneer died here a few centuries ago, when Liberfell was a tenth the size, and this thing was erected in memoriam.”

“How do I not know that?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. He raised an eyebrow, as though daring her to venture a guess.

“Shouldn’t have too much impact on the dungeon though, should it?” asked Hannah.

“No, it shouldn’t,” said Alfric. “It is built over the dungeon entrance though.”

“Why?” asked Isra.

“Well, this is where he presumably died,” said Alfric. “And I guess they were thinking that dungeoneers would end up seeing this place a lot if they were in the area, though honestly, you could easily miss Riband Lake and not be worse off for it. Enough of the hex is a lake that we might get our first fully flooded dungeon, which would mean that we’d just leave right away and reset the day.”

“But we spent all that time picking entads,” said Mizuki.

“Yes, and now I can just tell Grig what we want and save a trip to Liberfell,” said Alfric.

“Bah,” said Mizuki. “You know that’s not the point of bumbling around the warehouse looking at things.”

“I know,” said Alfric. “But if we keep a drowned dungeon that we bail on, that means one more dungeon in the area that we can never do again.”

“Frankly, it seems as though we’re expandin’ capability to do dungeons faster than we’re runnin’ out of dungeons,” said Hannah. “I’d expect that by the time it becomes an issue we’ll be able to zip across the continent.”

“No,” said Alfric. He continued walking, and they followed after. He was the only one who had studied maps of the area. “We’ve gotten somewhat lucky with travel. And entad chains or synergies, which are already what we’re using, become burdensome. At a certain point we’d be piling in the garden stone for one leg of the trip, piling out to hop through a puddle for another leg, and yes, we’d be saving time, but all the hoops we’d have to jump through would add up. Especially if there are restrictions like the garden stone has, where we need to make special preparations.”

“I don’t think taking off armor is that onerous,” said Verity. “Besides, how many special conditions could there be?”

Alfric laughed for what felt like too long. “They’re entads, Verity. They can be anything, have any strings attached. We could have a travel entad that required us to be wearing metal. We could have one that only works on a sufficiently rainy day. We could have — I mean you get that, right? That we might pick up something that makes us jump through arbitrarily large hoops?”

“I think you mean hoops of arbitrary size,” said Hannah.

“Right,” said Alfric. “Multiple contradictory requirements that would force us to soak up hours of time.”

“What’s the dumbest requirement that we would actually go through with?” asked Mizuki.

“Huh,” said Alfric. “You know, ‘dumb’ isn’t the same as ‘onerous’, and I’d think it would make more sense to talk about how onerous a thing we might use, which would obviously depend on how good it was.”

“You can go anywhere in the world,” said Hannah. “But, you have to stay within one hex of your destination for a week.”

“Arguably usable, depending on the enforcement mechanism,” said Alfric. “Especially if only one person is subject to the penalty.”

“You can go anywhere in the world,” said Mizuki. “But you snap back to where you were if you fart.”

“I don’t understand why they built this thing,” said Isra. She was looking at the building, which stayed in view as they rounded the lake. “Do they come here?”

“They?” asked Hannah.

“The people who built it,” said Isra. “His family.”

“It was built centuries ago,” said Alfric. “If any of his family still lives, my guess is that they forgot about it. But I would also guess that his immediate family, the ones who actually built this place, did come here, at least for a bit.”

“I don’t understand,” said Isra. She seemed insistent on it, as though there was some answer that someone could provide to her. “To spend time and money on a thing like this.”

“It’s somethin’ that people do,” said Hannah. “Death, when it happens, can hit hard. You know that.”

“I do,” said Isra, with solemnity.

“The idea that a person won’t be in this world anymore is difficult,” said Hannah. “They’ll go to the Gates and beyond, but it’s our lot in life for our presence to slowly fade from this world. The things we’ve made will break down, the stories of our life will be forgotten, the memories of us will fade.”

She sighed and looked at the building. It was clean and well-kept, which probably meant magic, unless someone was coming out to do upkeep on the place on a regular basis. But no, they would need scaffolding to clean a place like this, and there was no way that the hex itself was spending the time and money. It was still a creamy white, without any obvious dirt or grime.

“There’s a reason that death is of Kesbin,” Hannah continued. “But some people can’t accept that, and they want a person to last in perpetuity, even if only their name. A statue that will outlast you, that might be found a thousand years down the line, that’s a comfort for some, a way to make an indelible mark on the world, though there are no marks that are truly indelible, try as some people might.”

“It was arrogance,” said Isra. Her eyes were still on the building.

“No,” said Hannah. “Misguided love, I would say, though Alfric said it was centuries ago, and I can’t speak to those people and what they felt. Things were different in the past. We knew less about the world, and it was a more violent place.”

“The dungeons weren’t,” said Alfric. “They’ve always been the same.”

Hannah laughed. “That’s not good history, my friend. The dungeons were much more dangerous. They were dangerous because people didn’t have the trainin’ that they do now. Not just for goin’ into the dungeons, but outside them. Two hundred years ago, let’s say? Clerical integration wasn’t even complete. You couldn’t go into a town like Pucklechurch and expect that it would have six clerics waitin’ for you. Education was worse too, so the people goin’ into dungeons wouldn’t know as much, wouldn’t be trained, wouldn’t be stopped from goin’ into the dungeons if the League deemed them unqualified, because there was no League.”

“The League existed,” said Alfric. “It just wasn’t what it is today. Point taken though, dungeons were different. But it was because of the people, their culture, and their technology, not because of the dungeons themselves.”

“Mmm,” said Mizuki. “Actually that’s still wrong, because dungeons collect ambient magic, and there’s a lot more of that around now than there used to be. So they’re more dangerous.”

“Alright,” sighed Alfric. “Point taken. Though — you know, it’s complicated.”

“We have someone to take care of the dragons if the dungeon runs long, right?” asked Isra. They were approaching the building, which was looming up in front of them. Up close, it was larger than Hannah had thought. The construction of it was deceptive.

“I spoke with Marsh, yes,” said Hannah. “He’ll come by in the evening, and might stick around there, I hope that’s okay. Might sleep in my room, in fact. But he’ll take care of things.”

“Good guy,” said Mizuki.

Hannah laughed. “He took it very much the wrong way though,” said Hannah. “When I said ‘I need you to take care of the dragons if we don’t come back’, he thought I was talkin’ about mortality, not doin’ chores. So he starts in on comfortin’ me, which was nice, but really not necessary.”

“He knows I’m a chrononaut,” said Alfric.

“It’s a fallible power,” said Hannah.

“It is,” said Alfric. “Under very specific conditions that we’re very unlikely to run into.”

“I think he thinks about his own mortality more than I think about mine,” said Hannah. “Or he just privately worries about me goin’ into dungeons to fight things, because he cares about me.”

“Aw,” said Mizuki.

The building clearly did have some kind of magic, because there were no proper doors on the place, and yet the stone floor wasn’t covered with leaves and dirt as one might expect. There wasn’t all that much on the inside, only a set of stairs that went down to the dungeon entrance. It was, by a wide margin, the best dungeon entrance they’d ever seen.

“The stone is special,” said Isra.

“I thought it might be,” said Hannah. “Too clean.”

“This place will last for a very long time, I’ll give them that,” said Alfric. “But it’s neither here nor there. We need to get ready.”

This took some time. Most of their metal was stored in the chest, along with some heavier pieces like Verity’s lute. Alfric needed time for the thimble armor to expand over him, and Hannah needed some time to get her full plate situated. Eventually they would all have heavy armor, which would make the whole process take even longer.

“You’re going with the lute this time?” asked Alfric, looking at Verity. The armor was up to his chest and creeping higher.

“I am,” said Verity. “Let’s call last time an experiment that didn’t work. It didn’t give me what I needed, and didn’t help the team.” She looked around. “Thank you all for indulging me.”

“Mizuki did basically the entire dungeon herself,” said Hannah.

“I was boosting her with a song,” said Verity. “But yes, last dungeon was … well, not a full dungeon. An aberration.”

“Let’s hope this one isn’t flooded,” said Alfric.

Once everything had been doffed, donned, taken out, or put away, they got into position, with Alfric at the front and Hannah just behind him. The initial entry had the potential to be dangerous, and she wanted to make sure that she was there for backup in case they had to take on a fight right away.

There was a moment in the tunnel, as there always was, when there was a total lack of sound. It lasted for only a heartbeat, but Hannah listened for it every time. There was something ineffably strange about it, something that attracted and repulsed her, and she was certain, from talking to Alfric, that it was the moment of transition from the normal world to the world of the dungeon.

Garos had much to say about reflections, as the God of Symmetry, but there was special attention paid to what was sometimes called the ‘critical moment’, the point at which a thing actually reflected. It was the surface of the mirror, the middle gap between tines on a fork, the crease in a piece of paper. There was something that didn’t feel quite symmetrical about the critical moment to Hannah, something that tarnished symmetry in some sense, that made it so symmetrical things didn’t resolve into true symmetry.

When she was little, she had imagined the world she could see in a mirror as its own other world, real and tangible instead of just a reflection of light. The Mirror Hannah lived in the Mirror Room, playing with her Mirror Dolls, and everything was doubled … except for the mirror itself. The molding around the mirror was doubled, but the plane of reflection was not, sitting aside from the entire process of doubling, its own singular self. When she’d gone to the seminary, she’d thought that there might be some resolution to this seeming paradox, but there were only a multitude of thoughts on the matter, nothing definitive.

In the book Hannah was writing about dungeons, there was to be a chapter on the symmetry of the transition, the way in which the dungeon was like a mirror world. The entrance to the dungeon was that point, the vertex, and she still didn’t entirely understand what, if anything, she was going to say about it.

All those thoughts were pushed to the side when she came out into a stone room, where Alfric was already in the process of fighting a beast, even though she’d been right behind him. She dashed forward, flanking it, and tossed her hammer to the side, laying a hand on it and using symmetry to amplify the wounds that Alfric had already given it. There was little time to register much about the creature, other than it was big, red, and scaled, six arms moving in disarray as it tried to pull Alfric’s bident from its chest. When its head whipped back and forth it sprayed blood and spittle everywhere, and Alfric bore down on it, pushing the bident in further and activating it again.

The creature was dead before the last of their party could come in. Mizuki and Isra were carrying the chest, a necessity because it couldn’t cross the threshold on its own. Alfric had told them to wait for a moment before entering, just in case it was flooded: he’d have come right out and stopped them.

<Rough start,> said Alfric. He was breathing hard.

<Injuries?> asked Hannah.

<No,> said Alfric. <Just thrashed around a bit, armor protected me. I’ll need a second, but we need to set up.>

<Wow, the aetheric weather is weird here,> said Mizuki. <Uh. It’s permanence, mostly?>

<Permanence?> asked Alfric. <You had said you were chasing it.>

<Yeah,> said Mizuki. <I’ve only felt it once before, it’s quite distinct. But I need something to combine it with, and I’m not sure I’m going to get that. And it does mean that in terms of magical power, I’m going to be low-impact.>

<We’re not flooded though,> said Alfric. <That’s good.>

The entryway was made of the same stone as the building they had come in through, and was clearly inspired by it. Hannah wondered how often this same motif was presented to dungeoneers, and whether that was the true lasting legacy of the monument to some long-ago adventurer. There were three hallways branching off from it, and lighting that seemed to come from everywhere at once, an ambience that Alfric had said showed up every now and then. The hallways all had turns to them, making it impossible to see what lay ahead, but Alfric was frowning.

<Problem?> asked Hannah.

<This is difficult to defend,> said Alfric. <Not that we leave much at the entrance these days, but it does mean that a wandering monster might block our retreat.>

<The blood is vanishing,> said Mizuki. She was looking down at the floor.

She was right. The creature had sprayed blood in all directions as it wriggled and writhed, and then spread more in its death throes, but the droplets of blood were all gone, and the blood that was leaking from the creature’s wounds was disappearing too.

<It’s a duplicate or near-duplicate of the stone the building is made of,> said Alfric. <That means that it’s probably at least somewhat valuable. Unfortunately, we’re going to have a tough time removing it, because the masonry around here is close-fit and probably unlikely to come apart easily.>

<I might be able to fashion something,> said Mizuki. <A, uh, force knife? Something that can cut without any actual blade.>

<If you can, that would be good,> said Alfric. He shook his head. <We clear the dungeon first though.> He glanced at Isra. <No poison?>

<None,> said Isra. <The air is slightly damp, a bit musty, but I don’t think we’re going to have problems breathing it.>

<Left then,> said Alfric. <Hannah, I know you said that it wasn’t a tool, but could you use the lipstick to mark the walls?>

<Um, the walls are made of the same stone,> said Mizuki. <Pretty sure that the stone would just absorb the lipstick, or whatever it’s doing to the blood.>

<Shoot, right,> said Alfric. He looked down at the ground. <I’d like some way to mark this spot. All three directions look virtually identical, and getting lost isn’t something I’d like to repeat.>

<It’s also eating the corpse,> said Mizuki. She’d crouched down and was looking closely at the body. <Slowly, but it is eating. Check the bottoms of your shoes, everyone.>

They all checked, but there seemed to be none of the wear that they were all worried about. The stone was eating things, which yes, had the side effect of keeping it spotless, but was worrisome.

<Alright, the plan for this dungeon is going to be that we do our best not to stop,> said Alfric. <At least until we get to a place without this stone. We can’t rest in the garden stone, and I don’t want to leave the chest on the stone for too long.> He had checked the chest’s clawed feet, but they seemed unaffected so far. <Let’s get moving.>

They went down the left hallway, with Alfric in the lead and Hannah close behind him. It turned to the right, and they walked a hundred feet toward an open doorway. The musty smell had gotten stronger, and was mixed with something earthy and a bit foul.

<Did someone fart?> asked Mizuki.

<I see brown ahead,> said Alfric.

<Oh joy,> Mizuki replied.

They came to a large room, still made of the same stone, but this time filled with mounds of what very much appeared to be dung. To get that much dung, you’d need to clear out a hundred stables, though the smell was less overpowering than Hannah thought it should be, unpleasant but not smacking them in the nostrils like when a muck room was cleared out.

<They’re alive,> said Alfric. He must have noticed movement just as it happened, because he said it before Hannah could even figure out what ‘they’ might mean.

The piles of dung moved slowly, four of them forming arms and legs as they rose from being lumps in the ground. They were each around ten feet tall, with no identifiable parts aside from the arms, and no legs, just a thick trunk made of more dung. The dung was in pellets, though oversized, each the size of a fist, as though expelled by some enormous animal into this room.

Alfric moved forward with his bident, as he always did, moving into the danger. He somehow managed to make it not feel reckless. The bident sunk easily into the dung, but the explosion it caused was muffled and ineffectual, and the dung golem raised a hand up to smash Alfric. Alfric was too quick, and the dung golem too slow, but as they parted, Hannah had a sinking feeling that the exchange didn’t bode well for their team.

Isra’s arrows pierced straight into one of the dung golems, to no obvious effect, and the result didn’t seem to differ based on where she aimed. For her part, Hannah tried a heavy swing with the hammer, with the weight of magical metal all loaded onto the hammer, but it sunk into the creature and threatened to be swallowed up by it, as useful as slamming a hammer into mud.

They were quickly fighting a retreating battle, the slow-moving dung golems seemingly impervious to their attacks.

<What do we do?> asked Mizuki as they backed down the hallway they’d come from.

<I think it’s affected by the stone,> said Alfric. <So … we just need to outlast them.>

<They’re poop monsters that must weigh a ton,> said Mizuki. <How long is it going to take for the stone to kill them? If it does at all?>

<I don’t know,> said Alfric. He was the rearguard, making sure that everyone was behind him. <I don’t even know if it’s the stone that’s working, or if they’re just leaving a trail.>

<I might try something,> said Isra.

<Something rash?> asked Alfric. He spared a glance back at her.

<I can feel the creatures,> she said. <They’re more like a swarm than like people. Dungeon mad, but not as afflicted as normal, I don’t think. Small minds.>

<You said there’s a risk in trying that,> said Alfric.

<Yes,> said Isra. <A risk of letting the dungeon madness in. Mingling with it.>

But even as she spoke, it was clear she was no longer focusing on the conversation, and instead trying to reach out with her druidic power. The way she’d described it, what made sense to Hannah, was that being a druid was a little bit letting nature into you and a little bit pushing yourself into nature. Dungeon madness was the entire reason that Isra couldn’t just instruct the monsters to lay down their weapons and walk away, and it was entirely possible that this was a horrible idea, but as they retreated, it was also clear that they had no real way to hurt the golems.

The first of the golems, the one that Hannah had struck with her hammer, split apart and collapsed in a lump on the ground, and behind it, the others fell as well, all in quick order.

Isra let out a moan, her voice echoing in the hallway rather than in their party chat. She moaned again, louder, and Hannah turned to look. She was clutching her head.

<Are you okay?> asked Hannah, though the answer was clearly no.

Isra threw up, their lunchtime meal of meats spilling out onto the floor in such a quantity that Hannah was worried there might be some permanent damage to the gut. Isra was hugging the side of the wall, supported by Mizuki. Hannah turned away from them, ready to fight the dung golems, but they were still scattered across the floor.

<What’s the situation?> asked Alfric. He was still standing at the ready for a fight, but it was clear there was no fight to be had.

<Fine,> said Isra. She coughed and spit. <I’d take some water.>

Verity was pulling it from the chest before Isra was even done saying it, and Isra took a long pull from the waterskin, then another, which she swished around in her mouth and spit out onto the dungeon floor.

<Did you just kill those things with a thought?> asked Mizuki.

<No,> said Isra. <Disrupted them. They’re not full creatures, they’re more like a swarm, or an insect colony. I didn’t tell them to die, I told them to stop being together. They’re still alive.> She pointed at the dung that was spread across the floor. <Each of those pellets is a creature of its own.>

<That didn’t seem safe,> said Alfric. <Good work though.>

Isra waved a hand.

<I felt it, for a moment,> said Isra. <The madness.>

Hannah felt something turn in her stomach. That wasn’t a thing you wanted to hear someone say.

<What did it feel like?> asked Alfric.

<Howling,> said Isra. <Terror. Rage. I wanted to … to hurt people.>

What she didn’t say, but what seemed obvious to Hannah, was that Isra wanted to hurt them, her party. She’d described it as lasting only an instant, but an instant could be a long time if you had unwanted thoughts in your head. There were certain things that, once there, couldn’t come out again. Images could be branded on the brain.

<Definitely don’t do that again,> said Alfric. <Can you continue? Or do we need to beat a retreat?>

<Continue,> said Isra. <After I’ve had some chocolate.>

<If you need to talk,> Hannah began.

<I’m fine,> said Isra.

Hannah bit her tongue. It was difficult, when someone obviously did need to process something and didn’t want to talk about it. But people did process things in their own ways, and sometimes that was through silence, or simply forgetting about whatever had upset them, pretending that it hadn’t happened.

<Then let’s get moving,> said Alfric. <Clear the dungeon, get the entads, then we’ll start in on stripping out some of this stone.>

Chapter 111 - Swift Death

Alfric was slightly on edge. Their escape had been cut off when they’d been fighting the huge lizard, and he had done his best, but there had been a real risk that with their retreat blocked off, they would be killed. He was the only one who seemed to be thinking about the close brush with death though. The lizard had been terrifying enough, so large that it was difficult to hurt, and exactly the kind of creature that the bident was weak against. He needed a new weapon, that was clear, and more than that, he wanted something that would allow him to swap between weapons on the fly. The lizard would likely be better handled by the lightning sword, but that would have required going into the trunk for it.

He was also worried about Isra. He didn’t know enough about druids, that was the part of the problem, and while a good party relied on each other to know their own specialties, there was extra burden on him as both the party leader and the chrononaut. Isra feeling sick from having mentally or spiritually touched the dungeon madness wasn’t a problem if it was only a short term affliction, but if it was something that lasted, some cumulative damage …

Hearing loss was one of the risks of dungeoneering that people didn’t often talk about. Hearing loss was cumulative: once you got hearing loss, it stayed with you, and there was no natural recovery, which meant that future hearing loss would impact you more. It was an erosion that you couldn’t really recover from, something to do with tiny hairs in the ear that got trod down on like grass in a field. The roar of a terrible lizard might be loud enough to hurt, and you might think that you had shaken it off, but the damage was still done, and the next time there would be more damage. It wasn’t any individual incident, it was the accumulation of them over time. It was also not the sort of thing that a chrononaut would necessarily reset out of, and not something that clerics could easily fix. It was a concern with fireballs, and one of the reasons they wore hearing protection, especially since blocking your ear canal didn’t interfere with the party channel.

If what had happened to Isra was like hearing damage, something that would impact her in a permanent way, Alfric had no way of knowing. In theory Isra was talking to other druids in her guild and was perfectly capable of making her own judgments on her health and safety, but in practice, Alfric wasn’t sure how much she was getting from her guild. He didn’t want to press her on it and make her feel like she was incapable of handling things, but at the same time, he wanted some assurance that he didn’t think was coming. That she’d then had her arms sliced up and exotic bardic healing applied to her only added onto his concern.

Still, there was nothing that he could do. Pressing her on it had only made her annoyed with him, and probably rightly so. He would push on and do his best. At a certain point, you had to put faith in your team.

<Mizuki, can I take the staff from you?> asked Alfric as they made their way down a hallway. It was quiet, with only the sound of their footsteps and the clacking of the clawed feet of the chest.

<No,> said Mizuki. <I don’t know how to use a bident.>

<Mizuki,> said Alfric.

<Fine,> she said. They stopped for a moment and traded weapons. Alfric looked at the tip of the staff, which was now functionally a spear. He wondered how long the magic would hold for, but he didn’t suspect that Mizuki knew either, given that this was a novel spell.

<Thank you,> said Alfric.

<I’m useless in this dungeon,> said Mizuki.

<You ripped that lizard’s guts out, didn’t you?> asked Hannah.

<Well, yeah,> said Mizuki.

<We should cheer more when Mizuki does things,> said Isra.

<I’m just saying that this dungeon has nuts for magic,> said Mizuki.

<Go Mizuki! Hooray Mizuki!> said Isra. <Killed a lizard and made him cry!>

<That’s not —> Mizuki began.

<She weaves the web with strength and verve / She fights with spunk and keeps her nerve,> sang Verity, with a song that had far more than the usual pep to it. <With fireballs and blasts of cold / Mizuki is so brave and bold!>

<Alright, alright,> said Mizuki. It was hard to tell with her helmet on, but when Alfric glanced back, he thought she was blushing. She sounded like she was blushing.

<We should be —> Alfric began, but before he could finish, the monster in the next room reared its head.

This one was large enough to be a problem, but small enough that retreat back down the hallway wasn’t going to be an option. It was snakelike, though without scales, peach-colored flesh and a dozen tiny limbs, with a head that was weaving back and forth as it made its way to Alfric.

He charged forward, trying to see where the threat would come from. The tiny legs were too small to do much damage, without the muscles necessary to hurt him through his armor, but beasts had tricks, and the most dangerous part of any encounter was the start, where you couldn’t be certain what was waiting for you.

The head of the creature split open, with the skin around the mouth curling back to reveal long fleshy pincers that were each lined with teeth. When the skin was fully retracted, the pincers could open wide enough to engulf a person, and a slimy tongue flicked out from the midst of the pincers. Alfric moved in with the staff, extending it as far as it would go, poking toward the pincers. This was his first time using the weapon that Mizuki had made, other than a few attempts prodding at the floor. He was surprised at how cleanly it seemed to go through flesh, as though it was a lump of butter rapidly melting in a hot pan. The pincers fell off one by one, and the creature screeched and flailed. Alfric pushed forward, driving the spear into its center, and eventually he hit something vital, because the creature slumped to the ground, its little legs giving way.

<Wow,> he said, pulling the ‘spear’ out and looking at it. He glanced at Mizuki. <How long will this last?> He knew it was a bad question, one she wouldn’t be able to answer.

<Um,> she said. <Not sure. Works great on flesh, less well on rock.>

<It’s amazing,> said Alfric.

<Thanks!> said Mizuki. <I’m only a little mad about you stealing it from me.>

The room had at first seemed to be a library, which Alfric found quite exciting, but on closer inspection, what was arranged on the walls were pieces of painted wood rather than books, with ribbing that evoked the look of a book spine. That was a disappointment, especially given that their first dungeon had a room filled with books. On first seeing the false books, he’d been hit with an unexpected feeling of nostalgia. Instead, this was a false library, with nothing of real value to be had. Two doors branched off, both of them with structural damage that on closer inspection was caused by the stone that ate away at things having chewed at the wood. They took the left.

There was something that Alfric liked about being in the lead, beyond just the practical considerations. He liked being the first in, the first to see what lay down unexplored paths. This was as close to being an explorer as it was possible to be in the world they lived in, the closest to setting foot in a virgin forest or landing on an unexplored island. It was undercut a bit by the nature of the dungeon, where nothing quite made sense, where everything had been created minutes or hours ago, where there was no weight of history and no real puzzles to uncover.

The next room was down a long tunnel, which this dungeon seemed to have in abundance. It had the same strange lighting that seemed to come from nowhere, which permeated the dungeon, and that took some of the horror from what Alfric saw ahead of him. There were row upon row of corpses, all of them human, or human enough, stacked up against the walls like firewood. There was something ritualistic about the arrangement, as though they’d been laid to rest, and Alfric knew that was something that had once been done with the dead. There was a term for it, catacomb, but here the bodies were packed so close together that Alfric didn’t believe that was how it had ever actually been practiced. The bodies were old, dusty and weathered, skin sucked in close to the bones and stretched over their faces to display too-wide smiles.

Alfric had trained himself to stomach all sorts of things. If you were committed, you could overcome any fear, inure yourself to any unpleasantness. Still, there was something about a dead body that prevented him from purging his fears. It was a deep, primal thing, to be scared of the dead.

So of course the bodies started moving, either not dead at all, or animated by magic.

<Mizuki, see if you can unwind them, everyone else, close formation.> There were hundreds of them. They were slow-moving, but Alfric had been through a number of battles already, and it was entirely possible to lose a fight just because you ran out of stamina. He watched as more and more of them tumbled out of their alcoves.

Alfric swept the staff back and forth, trying to aim the melting point of it at their heads, which were their most obvious weak point. The staff ate through with less speed than before, for unclear reasons, but it was still capable of killing one of the walking corpses every few seconds. Unfortunately, there were just too many of them, and they were going to crowd around the party and possibly do some damage.

Mizuki stepped up and began snapping her fingers. The bident was gone, probably dropped, but she was determined, eyes intent. The snapping was probably not strictly necessary, but Mizuki had said that for sorcery it was all about getting in the right mood for it, which sometimes meant calling out a name for the spell, elaborate hand motions, or a stance. Here, the snapping was part of her concentration. At least, that’s what he thought.

At first, the snapping seemed to just be adding noise, but after a time, one of the heads exploded in a blue flame that flickered out as the pieces of it gently floated down to the ground. Mizuki kept snapping, focused on the corpses, and Alfric tore his eyes from her to concentrate on getting the ones that she wasn’t killing in an instant. The snapping became more steady and focused, and soon it was one head per snap, a concussive rhythm of explosions, though they were thankfully none too loud. Within moments, the front wave had been killed off, dropping down to the ground, lifeless once more.

Alfric carefully lowered the spear and watched, as there was nothing he could do that would be anywhere near as effective as what she was doing. Every now and then, Isra fired an arrow into the mob, but even with good aim, she could kill one of them with each arrow, and Alfric knew that she’d only be able to get twenty or so arrows downfield before her arm was too overworked, and that was even with a boost from Verity.

It soon became clear that Mizuki was going to be able to kill the entire field of corpses, all by herself. They were slow, stumbling forward, and she was unwinding the magic inside them, popping heads with a steady rhythm. Her face was sweaty, but the beat was staying the same, and Verity’s music had shifted to keep the same rhythm, as though they were doing a performance together. Toward the end, as the last of the corpses were exploding in blue flame, Verity’s voice grew louder, loud enough that it could be clearly heard over the popping of flesh and crackling of flame.

<When shambling come the hundred dead,> sang Verity, voice ringing clear, <Mizuki snaps to pop a head!>

It was timed so that the final beat of the song happened when the last of the corpses died, and to Alfric, that was the impressive part. Verity must have been counting while she was playing, then altered the timing and made lyrics to match the necessary beat, all while not pausing in the middle of it or needing to reset.

<Open up yield,> said Mizuki, who was still tense. <Alfric, bident.>

Alfric went and grabbed it from where it had been dropped on the floor, handing it back to Mizuki, who held it in one hand while the other hand was pressed, palm forward, just above the bident’s tips. She had a look of extreme concentration, then finally sagged like the wind had gone out of her sails.

<Done,> she said. <Don’t touch that.> She held the bident out away from her.

<What is it?> asked Alfric.

<Um,> said Mizuki. <So, those weren’t actually creatures, necessarily, right? They were animated by some kind of magic, or magical creatures, and I could just unwind them, like you told me to? But there were a lot of them to unwind, and the air was getting thick with magic, which I realized halfway through I could use and bake into another piece of magic that would be more permanent.> She looked at the tip of the bident. <I mean, really don’t touch the end of that.>

<What will it do?> asked Alfric.

<I think it will kill a person,> said Mizuki. <Or really, anything living it touches. It should be, um, pure death. I think. I don’t know for sure, there were a lot of moods that went into it, the unwinding was very unclean.>

<So if that touches someone, they die?> asked Isra.

<Seems incredibly dangerous,> said Alfric.

<Ay, dangerous for our enemies,> said Hannah. <We’ll just try not to have an accident, it’ll be fine.>

<I can undo it,> said Mizuki.

<We’ll try it out,> said Alfric. <What’s the worst that could happen?>

They traded weapons again. This time Alfric had the Bident of Death while Mizuki had the Staff of Melting. Both were insanely dangerous, more so than any bladed or piercing weapon could be, especially because they didn’t have training with them, and didn’t even really understand the fundamentals of how they worked.

<So I think with the staff, it’s just some kind of advanced decay or something, which is why it works well on flesh and poorly on stone,> said Mizuki. <I mean, I think that’s the mood that I was packing into it, which was the opposite of the healing that Verity was doing, if that makes sense. For the bident, it was something else, since it wasn’t cast-offs, just unwound constructs, or unwound, um, natural features, I think. I’m not entirely sure.>

<We’re certain this will kill?> asked Alfric.

<Not at all,> said Mizuki.

<I mean, it’s not going to animate something, accidentally give it power?> he asked.

<I don’t think so,> said Mizuki. She was looking around the room. <Um, entads, I think.> She had a jitteriness to her, which Alfric recognized as a combination of fear and battle rush. She had just killed her way through two hundred or so walking corpses.

Some of the corpses had been buried with things, or ‘buried’, since they had simply been there at the moment the dungeon was created. Mizuki moved through and pointed two things out, apparently thinking that it was Alfric’s job to pick them up, and he obliged, because he wasn’t about to try to push that duty off to someone else. There was a necklace with brass and pearls, and among the other jewelry, a ring with an aquamarine setting.

<We’ll decide on whether to dig through the corpses later,> said Alfric, though it was something he was loath to do, in part because of how many of them there were, and how unlikely it would be for them to uncover another entad. It was, of course, possible to find any number of entads in a dungeon, to find hundreds at once, but realistically, two in one room meant that a third was relatively unlikely. Still, the jewelry would make for good henlings to sell.

They pushed on ahead. Alfric felt a bit like he was rushing them, and it was possible that it wasn’t just him being self-critical. Proper procedure was to entirely clear the dungeon, then only loot things once you knew there was relatively little danger. The poison they’d experienced in the previous dungeon was a key example of why that was the best policy. Dungeons could have degenerate monsters in them, or threats that escalated with time, and while there was relatively little risk in grabbing entads they spotted, especially with the chest happily following along, every minute they waited was a minute that something could be getting out of control. The flip side was that some things would die from their own misbegotten biology, and some problems would simply solve themselves, but the balance of policy was toward doing a clear first.

The dungeon was setting him on edge. It had been from even before they stepped foot in it. The monument to a dead adventurer was eerie, and it was even more eerie because it had been so long since that person had died. It amplified the feeling of death, in some way, to know that even if the adventurer had lived, he would have been so long dead that his descendants might not know his name.

The flying snakes came down the hallway toward them, having apparently heard them from far away. Each of them was as thick around as his thigh, though considerably longer, and their tiny wings looked vestigial, reminding him of the dragons in the brief moment before they got to him.

There were three of them, and each dropped dead from a touch of the bident. They only needed to graze it for the magic to take effect, and when it did, they flopped to the ground, lifeless. The worst he got was a slap on the leg as one of the bodies fell from the air.

Alfric stared at the head of the bident. All it had taken was a single touch, and since the magic extended beyond the tips of the bident, it didn’t even take that.

<Whoa,> he said. <How long did you say this would last?>

<I didn’t,> said Mizuki.

<Right. We could run through a few dungeons with a thing like this,> said Alfric. <Hit them all fast, kill the things inside with minimal risk?>

<No,> said Hannah. <We need to loot.>

<Assuming it lasts,> said Alfric.

<It’s not going to,> said Mizuki. <I could try to, um, undo and then reset it, but I would probably just lose it.>

Still, Alfric was energized by the pure power that the bident now represented. At least for the moment, it was like he was a proper dungeoneer, someone at the end of their career rather than the beginning, when ninety percent of the monsters would fall to a single touch of his weapon.

<It wouldn’t have worked on the poop monster,> said Isra.

<No, it wouldn’t have,> said Alfric. They walked through the room, some kind of distillery, though with metal more than wood. The metal tanks might be valuable, but they were the sort of thing that would be trouble, since they were bigger than the mouth of the chest, and made of the wrong material for the garden stone. All that was for later though.

Three more rooms followed in quick succession. They all had monsters of one kind or another, and all of them fell to the bident of death. In a sterile kitchen, a gargantuan snapping turtle with matted hair on its back died to a poke. When they went into an oversized bathroom with a pool in the middle, the black seaweed monster that hefted itself out of the water was jabbed and then keeled over. And finally, when they reached a long garden under red sunlight from above, the three racoons they found there didn’t stand a chance. Admittedly, two of them had been killed by Isra, but the last had raced toward Alfric and met a swift death from the bident.

<Three raccoons, finally,> said Verity.

<Those were not raccoons,> said Isra.

<They looked like raccoons to me,> said Alfric. He looked down at one of the bodies, which was awash with red. <Extra teeth, tiny eyes, longer claws, and with the red light it’s hard to say whether or not the coloration is right, but …>

<Not raccoons,> repeated Isra.

<Three of them though,> said Verity. <I’ll take credit for that one.>

<And that’s the dungeon then?> asked Mizuki. She was awash in red light, which from a certain frame of mind made her look drenched in blood.

<The back half went fast,> said Alfric. He was looking at the bident. <I want this.>

<Sorry,> said Mizuki. <Looking at it, my guess is that it’ll be done by tomorrow, maybe even sooner if you keep using it, though with all the monsters in this place dead, I don’t know.>

<For now, it should be handled carefully,> said Hannah. <Everyone should know where it is at all times. If someone bumps into it, that’s a reset.> Having seen it in action, she was now treating it with much more respect.

<I want to go back to that kitchen,> said Mizuki. <Lots of stuff to grab from it. It looked like a commercial kitchen, didn’t it?>

Alfric set the spear down. <I’m setting the spear here,> he said. <If you move it, call it out.>

<Setting the staff down beside it,> said Mizuki.

<And the song is done,> said Verity. Her lute was slung around so it hung off her back. <I’m really hoping that you don’t need it for later.>

<Oh,> said Alfric. <I was somewhat hoping you could do another progressive to fuel something for Mizuki.>

<I don’t have another progressive in me,> said Verity. <I barely had the rest of the dungeon, to be honest. All that talk about four hours left was, ah, optimistic.>

<Those weren’t hard fights,> said Alfric. <I touched things and they died.>

<Yes, quite optimistic,> said Verity. <For which I feel I should be lauded, given my generally dour demeanor these days.> She smiled at Alfric, raising an eyebrow.

<Totally fine,> said Alfric. Verity could lend an intoxicating strength when she deemed fit, but if she had dropped her song in the middle of a fight … it would have been bad, but likely not catastrophic. They would talk about it in the post mortem, and he was at least happy that she was happy. He looked at the bident. <I might buy a better weapon. A much better weapon.>

<We’ve all got like … a hundred thousand rings, right?> asked Mizuki.

<That’s not enough for a dungeon killer,> said Alfric.

<Lots of plants to take from here,> said Isra, looking around the little garden. <I’m not sure how they’ll survive without red sunlight.>

The colors were something to behold, with cyan and blue leaves to them, and Alfric could see right away that Isra had a point. He wasn’t entirely sure why plants were usually green rather than some other color, but based on this, he thought that maybe it had to do with the color of the sun. If they had no red light to give the plants, that would be a problem.

<We could use lightstones, couldn’t we?> asked Verity. <Those can be changed so they put out different colors.>

<Those are quite a bit more expensive,> said Alfric. <And if these require that, then they’re probably not worth taking, especially if they can never be farmed except under greenhouse conditions.> He looked to Isra.

<I’m not sure,> she replied to the implied question. <That one is a tomato variant with larger seeds and some webbing on the outside, that one is peppers, that whole section is leafy greens — or blues, I suppose — and over there are some berries that would probably kill us if we ate them.>

<Seems a shame to leave them,> said Alfric. <But we have a somewhat larger dungeon to clear out, and plants are a bit of trouble. I would take what seeds you can. We can grow them in your entad bottle and check them later, no need to dig up entire plants.>

Isra seemed disappointed, but she nodded, and they made their way into the large bathroom, working backward down that branch of the dungeon.

<Would you really want a weapon that just kills everything right away?> asked Mizuki.

<Why wouldn’t I?> asked Alfric as they looked around. There were lots of tiles, but no one had much desire to take them, not when so much of the dungeon had the cleaning stone to rip out.

<I’m with Mizuki,> said Hannah. <I thought you liked fighting the beasts.>

<I’m of two minds,> said Alfric. <Sometimes it’s exhilarating, but mostly it’s scary, and the times that it’s terrifying are overcome through training and mental fortitude rather than because I just love it so much. Rushing in like a maniac … I mean, I don’t do that, do I?>

<You rush in,> said Hannah. <I’d never describe you as a maniac.>

<If the dungeons were tame, I would like them less,> said Alfric. <And maybe if we had an entad that killed everything as soon as we stepped foot in the dungeon I would appreciate the whole profession less.>

<This pool room is awful, by the way,> said Mizuki.

<It’s a bathroom,> said Alfric.

<It’s a bathroom with a pool in the middle of it,> said Mizuki. <How is that not a pool room?>

<It’s not really a thing at all,> said Hannah. <I don’t want to get into another one of these endless discussions about whether some idiocy the dungeon cooked up is this sort of thing or that sort of thing. Clearly it’s neither, because the dungeon doesn’t understand sensible room designs.>

<It has a toilet, it’s a bathroom,> said Alfric.

<No,> said Isra. <A kitchen doesn’t become a bathroom just because you put a toilet in it.>

<Are we taking the toilet?> asked Mizuki.

<The pipes will almost certainly not match up to any known standards,> said Alfric. <Or not closely enough that it would fit without serious effort.>

<Well, I’m grabbing the towels,> said Verity. <Everything else we can leave behind, so far as I see it.>

The kitchen took longer, mostly because there was more that was worth taking from it. The kitchen was strangely clean, aside from the body of the giant hairy turtle. All of the pots, pans, knives, plates, and everything else went into the trunk, though some of them had obvious defects, and Mizuki was quite critical of it all.

<Look at this,> she said, holding up a pot. <It’s super narrow down at the bottom. That’s the part that makes contact with the heat! So how is this supposed to work?>

<Dungeons are awful designers sometimes,> said Isra.

<It bugs me,> said Mizuki. She flipped it around and looked at it.

<Looting a dungeon is like cleaning out your house,> said Alfric. <You can’t let yourself get stopped by just any little thing.>

Mizuki nodded. <It’s an entad though.>

<That’s the obvious exception,> said Alfric. <No testing.>

<Aw,> said Mizuki. She slowly lowered the pot into the trunk.

They were making good progress as they went through, stripping out everything they could, and there was a lot of chatter, but at least it didn’t seem to be getting in the way of the work. They had left Liberfell around noon, and Alfric wasn’t too worried about time, but he had also noted the structural damage that the cleaning stone was causing, and worried that there was a possibility of a collapse, which would be terrible given how much work they’d put in. More than that, Alfric was worried that a reset might come with losing lessons. The dungeon had knocked them around, that much was true, but both Verity and Mizuki had done things that were quite good experiences for later.

They made their way back to the entryway, stopping to loot what they could, putting things into the chest or the stone as the situation warranted.

That finally left them with the last grim task, removing the huge quantities of cleaning stone from the dungeon, which Alfric had no idea how they were going to do safely.

Chapter 110 - Slop

The words ‘poop monster’ kept going through Mizuki’s head. The smell was surprisingly not terrible, maybe because it was herbivore poop, or maybe because they were in a self-cleaning dungeon. She was also sure that there was a good joke in there somewhere, but she was having trouble finding it, and the opportunity for it to be a good joke was quickly passing.

She didn’t like the weird stone that seemed to suck up things and leave no trace. So far, it hadn’t tried to eat her boots, but there was a feeling that it might, if she stayed still too long. Isra had thrown up, which was super gross, and the dungeon had absorbed it all in the brief time before they got moving. When they got back to the room of the dungeon that the poop golems had come from, all the poop was gone, though some of the ‘pellets’ were still around, barely moving and no longer a threat.

Laying on the ground was a full suit of entad armor, and Mizuki went over to it, slightly ahead of Alfric.

<We store it in the chest,> said Alfric. <Quickly. Then move on.>

<If it’s good,> Mizuki began.

<No,> said Alfric. <We’re supposed to be cutting through the dungeon. Who knows how long it would take to put on, let alone figure out?>

Mizuki helped to put it into the chest in pieces, though she did try to think special thoughts while she did so, in the hopes that she could think it into slapping into place on her. It had a motif of skulls, and looked evil, but in a cool way. Mizuki could imagine walking down the street with a giant skull on her chest, skulls on her knees and elbows, and more gnarled bits. With glowing hair to boot, she’d be a sight to behold. When she’d met Lola, she’d been impressed by the purple eyes and the overall style, but Lola hadn’t even scratched the surface of what you could do with entads.

They moved through the poop room, down another gray hallway, and Mizuki tried to figure out what she was going to do with the mood of permanency that was floating in the air. A weapon of some kind was obviously on the table, but even if she could craft some kind of blade with an anchor in place, it felt like it might not be quite what the situation called for. Besides that, she wasn’t entirely sure how ‘permanent’ she might be able to make something, and if she made a blade, she sure as anything wasn’t going to be able to make a sheath for it, which would mean that she would have to be extremely careful with it, especially since the blade was likely going to be invisible.

But even if she did make the invisible blade, what was she going to do with it? Hand it off to Alfric, most likely, and then she’d just be sitting there twiddling her thumbs.

There was a reason that the good old fireball was Mizuki’s favorite spell. It was clear and direct, and got things done. It made her useful to the team, and even outside of a dungeon, she could use it to blow up a stump or shatter a rock into pieces that could be carted away.

In a dungeon like this, with very little ambient magic to work with, Mizuki was pretty useless. What she really needed was a powerful entad that could make her into a threat even when her magic wasn’t booming, or better, she needed to hurry up and become a wizard so she could never not be throwing fireballs.

The hallways of stone eventually opened up into a room with a ceiling so high she might have mistaken it for being overcast sky above. The stone had changed, no longer the cleaning kind, or maybe just a different, more jagged version.

The monsters dropped down from the sides of the walls, high up, and for a moment Mizuki was reminded of the rain of bats, but these creatures weren’t committing suicide in the hopes their body could batter the party, they were coming in fast for an attack. They looked like women, naked women, with the exception of their arms, which were long and bladed, no hands, and their legs, which were scaled. There was a name for them, which popped into Mizuki’s head as she tried to scrape together some magic, harpy.

There were three of them in total, surprisingly human-looking, with none of the strange or exaggerated features on their faces that Mizuki had seen in other roughly humanoid monsters. They had long black hair and pale skin, and in fact, the more Mizuki watched them, the more she thought they had a resemblance to Verity.

Mizuki hung back, with Verity, who was playing her lute with too many fingers on each hand and was so focused on the battle that Mizuki was worried about accidentally breaking her concentration.

There was nothing that Mizuki could do. Verity was putting imbalance into the air, quite a bit of it, but most of it must have been to pump up strength and speed for the others, and that didn’t give off the right flavors for Mizuki to do anything.

Isra was moving around the battlefield with her normal insane speed, appearing only for long enough to fire off another arrow before she would zip off somewhere else. The arrows pierced holes in the harpies, then vanished, leaving gaping wounds that leaked frothy pink blood, but didn’t seem to fell the creatures. Alfric was getting hammered, the bladed arms coming down on him like in a frenzy, and it was only his armor that was saving him.

Hannah gave a grunt and was pulled forward, which Mizuki only belatedly realized was because one of the long bladed arms had slipped into her armor at the armpit. Alfric moved over to her and thrust his bident into the harpy, pushing one of the others away from him, and with a solid kick he managed to wrench the blade free from where it had caught Hannah.

Isra appeared in place behind one of the harpies with a blade in her hand and sunk it into the back of the creature’s neck. It collapsed in a heap almost at once, and Isra pulled her bow back out, but not quite in time, because one of the other harpies moved on her, long blades swinging. Isra wore a breastplate, but her arms were covered in only leather and cloth with a few pieces of metal, and she was slashed at the sides in an instant.

Mizuki watched on in horror. There was nothing she could do, and even if she’d been able to cobble something together from the cast-offs of Verity’s song and the permanence that was floating in the air, it was a melee fight, too many people moving too close together to cast a spell that would do any good.

The harpy that Hannah and Alfric had been fighting went down, and they moved to help Isra. Alfric barreled into the harpy, putting her on the ground and then jumping on top of her. Hannah pulled Isra back and was doing whatever quick and immediate healing she could. For just a moment, Alfric was on top of the harpy, bashing its head against the ground as it weakly flailed against him, while Hannah was above Isra, closing the wounds to stem the loss of blood.

<We’re clear!> shouted Alfric. He was sitting on the harpy, his arms limp as he breathed heavily and let his body rest. It had been a long battle, in part because the harpies had taken so much damage without dying.

Verity was continuing on with her song, and for a moment Mizuki just thought that was because she was wrapped up in the singing. Verity liked to finish her songs sometimes, even when the fighting had finished. But no, there was something frantic about her playing, and she was staring at Isra, who was bleeding from her arms in spite of Hannah’s efforts. The stone wasn’t sucking the blood up.

<I’m fine,> said Isra, though she was laying on her back on the dungeon floor.

Hannah turned back to look at Verity. <Keep doing what you’re doing.>

Verity gave no response to that, but she was actively sweating, and from everything Mizuki knew about bardic magic — which admittedly wasn’t much — she was in the midst of a progressive melody that would tear itself apart in relatively short order.

Mizuki had a feeling inside like wolves clawing around. There was nothing for her to do, all her thoughts kept driving at that conclusion, she was useless. It was the worst feeling in the world to watch a friend fight monsters and just sit by not being able to help. Hannah could heal and Verity could sing, and even if Alfric wasn’t doing anything right now, he’d fought ferociously.

The disturbance in the aether was getting intense the longer Verity’s progression went on. It must have been some kind of healing song, because the aether was getting thick with degenerative flavor, mixed in with a bit of slowness.

Mizuki pulled it all in, every scrap she could, and tried to build something with it. The anchoring was the hardest part, and she chose the end of her staff, which felt foolish as soon as she did it, because the staff was an entad and irreplaceable. Still, she pulled in more and more of what Verity was putting out, then thrust it all into a construct, which was how the books said you were supposed to conceptualize a spell. There was a moment of panic, because these constructs tended to be built to explode, but it held, and Mizuki breathed out.

The aether was flooded again almost as soon as Mizuki had cleared it out, but it was all of the same mood and none of the dungeon’s natural permanence.

The song fell apart and Verity let go of her lute, letting it hang around her shoulder by its strap. She rushed over to Isra and knelt down beside her, but Isra was already sitting up.

<I’m fine,> said Isra.

<Hannah?> asked Alfric.

<Verity was doing something,> said Hannah. <I healed as much of the wounds as I could, and Verity’s song handled the rest, I think.>

<Not my lucky dungeon,> said Isra. She coughed, and a lump of blood fell out of her mouth.

<You shouldn’t have done that,> said Verity. <You shouldn’t have stabbed that thing, you’re an archer.>

<They were shrugging off the arrows,> said Isra. She got to her feet and held out a hand, which Verity took.

<Not shrugging them off,> said Alfric. <They were pierced, bleeding, but it was doing almost nothing.>

<Same thing,> said Isra.

Alfric looked like he was going to object, not necessarily to the content, but to something else. Mizuki expected to hear him say that she could have died, but he stayed silent. Maybe he wasn’t saying anything because it had worked, at least in part.

Mizuki looked at the tip of her staff. She could see the magic there, ready for her to unwind if she needed to, but it was holding steady, the permanence apparently holding. She didn’t know exactly what it would do, but she had made a magic item, of sorts. It was a first for her.

<You’re certain she’s okay?> Alfric asked Hannah.

Hannah nodded, then looked at Verity. <I didn’t know bards could do healing songs like that.>

<We work with what’s there,> said Verity. She was standing close to Isra. Their fingers were locked together. <The human body can heal itself. I was just … trying to amplify that.> She looked at Mizuki. <You did something.>

<Huh?> asked Mizuki. <I used some of the cast-offs, the, uh, negative to your positive, I guess.>

<It felt like you were taking away the pressure,> said Verity.

<Oh,> said Mizuki. <Um, maybe. You were making a cloud, I just, uh, removed it for my own thing.> She flipped the staff around and pointed it at the stone, wanting to see if it actually did anything. To her immense surprise, it ate away at the rock. She had thought that it would do something, but she had no idea what. She kept the end well clear of anything and stared at it in wonder.

<Mizuki?> asked Alfric.

<I made a thing,> said Mizuki.

<A thing that will kill us, or a good thing?> asked Hannah.

<A weapon,> said Mizuki. <A spear.>

<Out of the entad?> asked Alfric.

<Yeah,> said Mizuki. <Or, attached to the tip of it, I guess.> She touched it to the ground again, and again, it ate away at the place the end of the staff was held over.

<Frightening,> said Hannah with a raised eyebrow. She turned her attention to Isra. <Now, we should be good to continue on, at least so far as I can tell, though the nature of how Verity healed you is a bit opaque. But if you feel off, whether because of the injuries, or the healin’, or the earlier brush with dungeon madness, you let one of us know.>

<Don’t tough it out,> said Alfric.

<I’m not,> said Isra. She looked at Verity. <I actually feel better than before the fight.>

Alfric sighed. <We’re sticking this out then, as much as it’s feeling like Isra has been put through the wringer too much already.>

<I don’t need your protection,> Isra snapped. <I need to be trusted when I say that I’m fine.>

<Sorry,> said Alfric, though he was clearly taken aback. <I didn’t mean any offense.>

Isra rubbed her arm. Hannah and Verity working together had healed her, but the leather and cloth had been ripped to shreds, seemingly beyond the point of recovery.

They took some time to clean off using some water from the chest — there was too much blood — and Isra changed into a different shirt, then put her breastplate back in place.

<The harpies,> said Hannah, nodding at the creatures. <Do I need to be the one to point out that they look a bit like Verity’s mother?>

Mizuki had been trying not to look at the creatures, but she got a second glance at them. She had never seen Verity’s mother, but if Verity’s mother looked anything like Verity, then yes, the harpies did bear a resemblance. They could just as well have been Verity herself though, if maybe a bit older. It made Mizuki feel a bit embarrassed about their nakedness.

<I think it can go without mention,> said Verity.

<We can talk about it when the dungeon is finished, yes,> said Alfric.

<Or not at all, that would be great too,> said Verity. <Wouldn’t it? If we could just not talk about how I’m somehow manifesting bestial versions of my horrible mother?> She stretched out her fingers, then picked up the lute.

<It might be a coincidence,> said Alfric, though he seemed doubtful, and if he’d been trying to comfort her, he was doing a lousy job.

<Let’s just get going,> said Verity. <I should let you know I only have one more song in me, so let’s make it a long one.>

They searched the room, moving slowly, but there wasn’t all that much to see. It was large, but without much in the way of defining features, which was Mizuki’s least favorite kind of room. She liked places that obviously had some purpose, even if that purpose was just some nonsense that a dungeon had come up with. A room packed with knick-knacks had some actual character to it.

A tunnel led out, and they headed down it, in their standard order, which put Mizuki near the back. She was careful with her staff, which was now a strong weapon, and would probably eat through a body as efficiently as it had eaten through the rocky floor. She didn’t know what she was going to do with it, because it wasn’t like she was going to rush into battle and use it as a spear, but she also didn’t think anyone else wanted to use it. Alfric had a thing about not switching up his weapons in the middle of a dungeon, even if the staff with a bit of extremely high-powered degradation magic on the end of it wasn’t that different from a bident.

At the end of the tunnel Mizuki got her wish. The room was filled with stuff, and seemed at first blush to be a classroom, with bunches of desks taking up most of the space. The sides of the rooms were where most of the clutter was, which included plants, fossils, taxidermied animals, glassware, bookshelves, and all other kinds of things.

Most of the stuff was destroyed by the time she came in, since the room hadn’t been without its monsters. They were little crab-like things, black and shiny, but with more power to jump, each as large as Emperor. The desks were tipped over by their passing and the things on the walls were smashed and shattered, but they didn’t seem all that difficult to fight, because their pincers didn’t open wide enough to crush a limb, which meant that they were left ineffectually beating against the two full-armored party members. Their carapaces gave Alfric some trouble, but Hannah’s hammer came down on them with enough power to crack the shell. The two of them worked together, taking the four crabs one at a time, with Hannah cracking the shells and Alfric leveraging his full weight to drive his bident down into them, then explode them from the inside. This was assisted by Verity, whose effects were readily apparent when Hannah was swinging her warhammer around.

Mizuki held onto her staff, hoping that she wouldn’t spend the entire dungeon being useless.

Once the crabs were dead, they moved into the room, which seemed to be a dead end, and began looking around. Hannah applied healing to Alfric, mostly to deal with the imminent bruises.

<Not a bad battle,> said Hannah.

<We should go on our way back, if Verity only has a single song,> said Alfric. He looked around. <Let’s hope that we didn’t ruin this run by laying waste to the room.>

<Oh, ay, we should have fought the crabs carefully,> said Hannah.

<There, there, there,> said Mizuki, pointing to the entads she could see. Her sight was getting better, even without Verity. The three entads were a glass fish bowl, a scroll case, and a book. A final sweep of the room, with more looking around and trying to see into nooks and crannies, found a final one. <There.> It was a set of blackened steel bracers with intricate scrollwork etched into them.

<Pack them up and let’s go,> said Alfric. <Unless there’s something high value that we can pack now.>

<Wait,> said Mizuki. She reached under one of the smashed desks, doing her best to avoid shattered glass, and picked up a necklace. She held it up. It was silver with red gems in it. <Not magical, but probably quite valuable.>

<Those are cut glass,> said Isra.

<Oh,> said Mizuki. She set them back down. <Well, still, it’s craftsmanship.>

<Quick pack,> said Alfric. <Then we’re out of here. When Verity loses the song, we’re done in the dungeon.>

<That might be four hours from now,> said Verity. <I’ve gotten good at keeping a sedate song going.> There was no strain in her voice. Her hand lazily strummed her lute every now and then. <You’re going to be gassed before I am.>

<Either way,> said Alfric. <We do the serious looting later.>

Mizuki helped to put the entads into the trunk. She set the staff down, and the tip of it ate a hole in the floor, but that was alright, because there was no way they’d actually end up stripping out the whole thing, not if Mizuki had anything to say about it.

Mizuki slapped the bracers on without even really thinking about it. Maybe it was the fact that she’d done almost nothing in the dungeon.

<Whoops,> she said when the bracers clapped into place. There had been a hinge to allow them to open, but it was gone now.

<It’s fine,> said Alfric. <Just try not to cut anyone in half.>

Mizuki was surprised that it was fine, but he was focused on moving through the dungeon at speed, and she supposed it was possible that she would get a talking to later on. If she was being honest, she somewhat missed those talking tos, though she didn’t think that was why she’d slapped the bracers on.

Alfric had taught Mizuki a lot about dungeons, and she’d retained a fair amount of it. They had been running into a problem, especially in the past week, where it sometimes felt like they were retreading things they’d already said before, especially from Alfric’s side. It made Mizuki sad. She had liked when he talked about dungeons, but obviously there was only so much to say about them, and she could tell that he was stretching more when he spoke of them, venturing far afield from vital dungeon knowledge and into realms of speculation, or sometimes dungeon stories, which he didn’t seem to actually enjoy all that much.

“Dungeoneers are fabulists,” he’d said. “I think it comes from the fact that there’s no one to gainsay them. What happens in a dungeon is between you and your party members, and there’s almost never any evidence that you were just making things up. So there are stories about all kinds of things, and it’s hard to say for certain whether or not some of these reports are lies.”

“And you think that I’m a fabulist?” asked Mizuki.

“I think you get excited,” he’d said. “I think you have an active imagination. Most people don’t intend to lie, but their storytelling instinct gets the better of them, and they think of the things they didn’t say at the time but which make them sound better, or they exaggerate what happened, and it builds over time. And then they think there’s no harm in it.”

“Is there?” asked Mizuki.

“Oh, obviously,” said Alfric. “People talk, and they give the wrong impressions of what dungeons are actually like. It’s bad if people feel the need to take things that dungeoneers say with a grain of salt. It’s especially bad for rookies, who actually depend on those reports.”

Mizuki thought about that as they went down the dungeon. Alfric liked things to be vital and true, which didn’t leave a lot of room for other stuff. He had a sense of humor, a good one, but he didn’t lean into it as much as she would have liked. She was afraid that the time would come when they wouldn’t really be friends anymore, because they had exhausted their supply of vital and true conversation, and Alfric didn’t have much interest in small talk, and even less in gossip. What would happen when they both knew all the same things?

In the entryway to the dungeon, the monster they’d killed was completely gone. Mizuki didn’t like that. One of the very few things that she liked about being in a dungeon was that it was more or less a static place, unchanging, unmoving, and when you cleared a room, it stayed cleared. The assumption had been violated in the last dungeon, and it was being violated again here, with things disappearing when their backs were turned. It was just the stone that ate things up, clearly, but there was still something unsettling about it.

All thoughts left Mizuki’s head once they went into the next room. The monster reared its head and let out a beastial roar, then charged right at them. It was huge, dwarfing them, like some kind of horrible lizard with too-short arms and a too-large mouth. It walked on two legs, like a chicken. Alfric set himself in place to meet the charge with his bident held forward, then seemed to think better of it.

<Scatter!> he called.

Mizuki had been expecting the other call, retreat, and for a moment she was befuddled. Scatter meant something different though: it meant that they should split up and try their best to keep the creature surrounded. It was a risky play, and Mizuki wasn’t entirely sure why they were doing it, or whether they could even bring the beast down. Up close it was huge, and by Mizuki’s best guess, it weighed twenty thousand pounds. She wanted to flee down the hallway and hope that it was too big to fit, but when she looked back, there was a black wall intersecting the middle of the hall.

They scattered. The big problem with this ‘pattern’ was that it meant the attacker could focus on a single person and kill them, and the way to combat that was to keep the creature surrounded so that it was always getting attacked from behind.

The monster picked Mizuki. She screamed at the top of her lungs and dodged to the side as it tried to snap at her. The claws were on such little arms that they were a non-issue, but the mouth was so big that it could have swallowed her whole, and a headbutt could have smashed her against the floor. The long tail was whipping around, and smashed into Hannah. Teeth missed Mizuki by inches.

She held the staff out, waving it in the lizard’s face, and to her surprise, the staff actually ate through its jaw, melting away the flesh like it was candle wax. The creature roared in her face, loud enough to shake her bones, then turned around to snap at Alfric, who was up in the air with his bident, trying to get through the thick hide on the creature’s back.

Mizuki darted forward, wary of the whipping tail. She held the staff in front of her, like it would protect her, though she was certain that it wouldn’t. It wasn’t a shield, it was a flesh eater, and it would just as easily eat her flesh if it got knocked into her. She found herself wishing that she’d made it longer and more blade-like, since it only stuck out six inches or so from the end of the staff.

She got under the tail easily enough, and immediately worried that she’d get battered by it, or that the creature’s thick legs would come stomping down on her. Wincing at the danger of it all, she raised the staff up in the air, prodding at the creature’s belly. The staff cut through and blood started to drip down, and when Mizuki moved the staff, the hole she was opening widened, growing larger until the monster’s guts were spilling out onto the ground. The smell was atrocious and Mizuki was sure this was the least dignified face she’d ever made, but the monster roared and staggered.

She realized that she needed to get clear of it a little too late, and ended up getting caught by the tail as it went down. Her shoulder hurt, but it hadn’t been dislocated, she didn’t think, and she got to her feet, carefully picking her staff back up. She checked her body over twice, worried that the tip of the staff had gotten her and she just hadn’t noticed.

<Status?> asked Alfric.

<Fixin’ my bruises,> said Hannah. <Armor doesn’t help too much when you get smacked by a few hundred pounds of tail.>

<Unhurt,> said Isra.

<Fine,> said Verity.

<Covered in blood,> said Mizuki. <Really need a shower. Otherwise fine.>

<I hurt my arm,> said Alfric. <Healing would be appreciated.>

<In a mo’,> said Hannah. She had assumed a symmetrical stance, the better to help with healing herself.

<Why did we scatter?> asked Isra.

<Um,> said Alfric. He looked back at the hallway. <There was something back there. Some kind of obstruction or field the lizard was creating, I think. It’s gone now.>

<I need better arrows,> said Isra. <This is the second fight where penetration has been an issue.>

<Keep it in mind for next time we go shopping,> said Alfric. <But arrows make finicky entads.>

<Why?> asked Isra.

<Required powers,> Mizuki answered for Alfric. <Let’s say you have an entad arrow. You can fire it and that’s all good, right? But in battle, you want to fire more than one, and so either you have to go run and get your magic arrow in the middle of battle, which sucks, or the arrow needs to have some kind of thing where it will return to you. So if you want an arrow that blows a fireball-sized hole in something, it has to have two powers, not one.>

<Good summary,> said Alfric. <Very possible, but somewhat rare.>

<A fireball arrow I would have to retrieve wouldn’t be terrible,> said Isra. <I could use it once per battle.>

<We’re moving on once the healing is done, unless there’s a need to stop,> said Alfric. He spent a moment looking at Hannah, who was still in a prayer position, then went over to Mizuki and put a hand on her shoulder. <Very good work.>

It was said over the party channel, but there was still something intimate about it, and Mizuki felt a warm glow.

When Hannah was done with her “bruises” she moved on to Alfric, and placed a hand against his chest to fix him. <Minor for you, but we’re both buildin’ up some damage that I can’t quite deal with.>

<Four fights,> said Alfric. <We should be at least halfway through.> He glanced at Verity.

<I’m good,> said Verity. <Hannah’s going to run out before I do.> But Mizuki was able to notice that Verity’s strumming of her lute was getting a bit faster and less nonchalant.

<All we need to do is not get hit,> said Hannah. She smiled, but Mizuki didn’t feel like it was all that funny.

Chapter 112 - Stones and Tones

Removing the stone turned out to be a bit of a problem, though mostly because there was nowhere to put it. It wouldn’t eat entads, but it would eat anything else that wasn’t held or worn by a person. In fact, they had discovered some structural instability that the stone had been causing, and even before their excavation efforts had properly begun, a part of the dungeon had cracked and collapsed thanks to what was being slowly eaten away, out of sight.

“I don’t understand this,” said Mizuki. “If this is how this stone works, then how does the whole building above the dungeon entrance not sink straight into the ground?”

“Unclear,” said Alfric.

“There’s something the stone doesn’t react with,” said Isra. “A layer under the stone.”

“Wait, you know that for a fact?” asked Alfric.

“Yes,” said Isra. “I guess I just didn’t think about me being the only one who could know that.”

“Well what was it?” asked Alfric.

“Some kind of metal alloy,” said Isra with a shrug. “It’s hard to say.”

“But nothin’ we could replicate with what we have on hand,” said Hannah.

They had been using the modified staff to cut out pieces of stone that were of a size to be moved, taken by going in at a corner of the entryway. A brief test of putting them in the garden stone had shown that they would eat through the soil beneath the flowers, and eventually some feet down to the ‘base’ of the garden stone’s world. It didn’t eat the flowers themselves so long as they were living, but the foliage wasn’t quite thick enough that it wouldn’t be able to dig down. That was a last resort, mostly because of the difficulty of transporting the stone in and out, especially if they were going to have to dig several feet down to get the stones back out.

The problem with placing them in the chest was that everything else would need to be emptied out first, which no one particularly wanted to do, especially since the chest had been full of things before they’d come into the dungeon. If the stones were resting on top of something, they would eat through it, which meant they needed to be at the bottom.

“Wait,” said Verity. “What about that entad blanket? We can just put that down as a layer, and since it’s an entad, it won’t get eaten.”

“That works for one end, I guess,” said Alfric, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Please tell me we brought the blanket?” asked Verity. “Pretty please?”

“We did,” said Alfric. “It’s party bound, there was no reason not to. But we’ll still have to move things out of the way. And I was hoping that we could use the blanket as part of a procedure for moving the stones.”

“We also need to figure out how we’re goin’ to store them once we’re home,” said Hannah. “If they’d burrow down into the ground, or through floorboards, that’s an issue.”

“We just place them on top of the blanket, right?” asked Mizuki. “Easy.”

They had defaulted to using their voices outside the party channel, which was a minor breach of protocol. It had happened because Verity wanted a side conversation with Isra, and while that was going on, there had been a second side conversation, and then it had simply continued. There wasn’t really any risk to it, though Verity had the idea in her head that it was mildly annoying to Alfric, and wondered whether she should say something.

“We need to place them on the blanket when they go into the chest,” said Alfric. “That means we won’t have the blanket to lay them on when we take them out. Besides, we’d have to stack them all on the blanket’s footprint, and I was hoping to cart out more stone than that.”

“How much stone are we talking about?” asked Verity.

“Well,” said Alfric. He rubbed his head. “Figure that we’re shooting for fifty pounds or so, that would be, um, half a cubic foot each. That will be our standard brick, light enough that I can lift a whole lot of them, heavy enough that they’re a nicely sized chunk. So then, the limit is probably how many of those I can load before getting exhausted, even with breaks, which … let’s say two hundred of them in total?”

“You’re not the only one with muscles,” said Hannah. She had begun shedding her armor, the better to do manual labor, and Alfric’s thimble armor was already in retreat. Verity was eager to get out of her own armor, but she had no illusions about being helpful with moving giant chunks of stone. Fifty pounds seemed like a lot, especially when dropping it could easily shear off some toes.

“Let’s say,” Alfric looked around. “Four hundred in total?”

“You think you’re doing half the work?” asked Mizuki.

“How much do you weigh?” asked Alfric.

“Including armor?” asked Mizuki.

“Why would you include armor?” asked Alfric.

“I just — okay, well I haven’t weighed myself, but probably like … a hundred and ten pounds?” She looked down at herself.

“A fifty pound block is about half your bodyweight,” said Alfric. “You’re just not going to be able to do it that many times.”

“So we make the blocks smaller,” said Mizuki.

“The problem would still be there,” said Isra. “Four hundred seems like plenty, if we have nowhere to put them.”

“The form-shifting wand?” asked Mizuki. “That would require almost no effort at all.”

“It would change their properties,” said Alfric, rubbing his head and staring at the wall. “Maybe at the end? But even then, I think it would be better to have a pristine product, even if there wasn’t as much of it. Maybe at the end, stacked on top? But if they shift too much, they might end up eating each other, which wouldn’t be good.”

Verity slowly began to tune out the logistics talk, though she was mildly surprised that Isra was taking part. It was part of the ‘new’ Isra, she supposed, though in this case not unwelcome.

“It’s a shame we can’t talk the stones out of the wall,” Verity finally said, after they’d gone around one too many times. She had meant it as a comment on the continued discourse, but as soon as she said it, the idea was there, and she turned to Isra … who slowly shook her head.

“Yes, point taken,” said Alfric. “Better to just start and see where we’re at ten minutes from now. We’re going to want plenty of breaks built in.”

The cutting had been done by first scoring it into a grid, then coming in from the side and chopping everything up into bricks. Four hundred bricks had sounded like an enormous amount to Verity, but it was only four ten by ten grids, which seemed like hardly anything at all.

They took the stones down one by one, with Alfric going first. They were lowered into the chest, with the layer of blanket below. Verity was particularly proud of remembering the blanket before anyone else did, especially since she was a little bit mentally fatigued from all the bardic work. This would have been the perfect moment for a song of strength, but the progressive had done a number on her, especially since it had been extended with Mizuki’s help. If bardic magic was a muscle, as she’d been so often told, then it was a muscle that needed a rest.

When it came time for Mizuki to lift a stone out of the wall, they got an unexpected surprise.

“I’m a god!” she shouted, lifting it over her head.

“For the sake of all that’s holy, don’t lift it over your head,” said Alfric.

Mizuki set the stone down in the chest, where it sank to make room for another. “It’s the bracers,” she said, looking down at them with a grin. “I am a god.”

“You’re not a god,” said Hannah. “Bein’ able to lift heavy stuff — I know you’re playin’ around, but please tell me you know you’re not a god.”

“I know, I know,” said Mizuki. She was smiling at the bracers. “But I can lift things like a god. See? This is why you should always test things when you’re in a dungeon instead of waiting for the next day.”

“Alright, let me give a brief test of your knowledge,” said Alfric. He had his arms crossed and was frowning at her. “Why should we not hoist things over our head using an entad whose function we don’t know?”

“You know I love when you play teacher,” said Mizuki. She grinned at him. “But fine, because, I don’t know, there might be some horrible drawback, or it might be limited and run out at any moment, which would end with me being crushed, or other things, I guess.”

“Does it make you strong?” asked Hannah. “And if it does, how have you not noticed it until now?”

“It’s not strength,” said Isra. “Strength would still require proper posture, and she was swinging the block around like it weighed nothing.”

“Like it was made of air, yeah,” said Mizuki.

“So you’re even less of a god,” said Hannah.

“Feh,” said Mizuki. She turned to look at Alfric. “So do you want me shoveling bricks into the chest or not?”

“I do,” said Alfric. “But carefully.”

Mizuki went quickly, thinking that there might be some time component to the bracers, but after she’d done twenty of them in rapid succession, the real limitation became apparent.

“I don’t feel so good,” said Mizuki. She slumped down against the wall, and Hannah rushed over to her.

“You’re freezing,” she said. “Seems like you could’ve said somethin’ earlier.”

“I get cold sometimes,” said Mizuki. She looked down at the bracers. “I’ve been betrayed.”

“Take them off,” said Alfric.

“Can’t,” said Mizuki. “They locked in place and I don’t know how to undo it.” She took a deep breath. Her lips looked blue.

“Not much I can do about this,” said Hannah, frowning. “I think she’ll be fine, but … might be her temperature is lowerin’, and if it’s happenin’ as a response to what she’s been doin’, then it might dip down low enough to do damage.”

“Time for drastic measures then,” said Alfric.

“Sounds bad,” said Mizuki. She was shivering and her voice was weak. It wasn’t clear how cold she could get from having used the bracers twenty times in rapid succession, but Hannah seemed worried.

The drastic measures, as it turned out, meant grabbing the merging sword. When Alfric had rearranged to get the blanket, he’d taken other entads out too, perhaps hoping to make a second barrier for the stones. He hesitated for a moment, looking at who the best option was, then apparently decided that it was himself.

They both changed, each becoming like the other until they could have been twins. Mizuki was almost instantly better, and Alfric was almost instantly worse, as each had half the affliction. In terms of form, they had dark brown skin, mid-length curly hair, and a level of androgyny that Verity hadn’t seen before. Their clothes didn’t fit right: Mizuki was straining hers, and it sounded like some of it had ripped, while Alfric’s were baggy.

“So much better,” said Mizuki. She was resting her head against the back wall.

“So much worse,” said Alfric. Hannah went over to him and laid a hand on him.

“I think you’ll be fine,” she said. “If worse comes to worst, we can use the sword again, spread the damage out another level.”

“I think it’s retreating,” said Mizuki. She looked down. The bracers were still around her wrists, slightly larger, having grown when her forearms grew. “Okay, so … no more using these?”

“It’s not a bad drawback, if you know it’s coming,” said Alfric. He was shivering, as was Mizuki, with both of them sharing the coldness, if not the magical affliction that had caused it.

“Seems to be a terrible drawback, if you don’t know the price you’re payin’,” said Hannah.

“We’ll have to figure out safe levels,” said Alfric.

Mizuki stood up. “Well, I’m feeling better now.”

“And I need a break,” said Alfric. He sighed and looked down at his body with its baggy clothes. “Not how I planned to spend my time.”

“I hope we get home soon,” said Mizuki. “Kell would freak. Though I do need to get out of these clothes, which are pinching me in all the wrong places.” She began stripping out of her clothes, and Alfric turned away. “You know, there’s no harm in looking, we’ve got the same body.”

“I’m fine not looking at a freakish hybrid of us,” said Alfric.

“If we’re done with this business, there’s still stone to move,” said Hannah. “And if Alfric is going to be half as strong, I’ll be doin’ my share now, plus a little extra to make up for the delay.”

She began moving ‘bricks’ into the chest, one by one, and Verity’s eyes went to Mizuki, who was getting into the garden stone to retrieve a fresh set of clothes. The mixture of the two of them was odd. Verity had always thought that Mizuki was cute, and had always thought that Alfric was a fine man, if not personally appealing to her, but the two of them merged together was like something from a horror story, uncanny and off-putting. Verity had found the mix of her and Isra to be quite pleasant, actually, exotic and alluring. This was something else though. The ill-fitting clothes definitely didn’t help. Verity was polite enough not to say anything, though Alfric clearly agreed, and tried to be polite enough not to stare.

“Surprised you didn’t hand the sword to me,” Hannah said to Alfric after a grunt of effort to drop another brick in the chest.

“It was a calculation,” said Alfric. “I’m bigger than you, which means that I’ve got more mass, which means that a blend would have more mass, which in theory means that I’d be bringing more heat to the equation.” His voice had changed, growing higher, though his cadence and speech patterns had stayed the same.

“It’s bad healing,” said Hannah. “It’ll probably sell for a fair amount, I would think, but we should sell, and use that money to supplement, especially if dungeons are goin’ to be so dangerous.” She took a breath, then went to work moving the next brick.

The Alfric-Mizuki hybrid looked at Verity. “No progress on controlling the roll of the dice?”

“No,” said Verity. “We’ll have to test entads, but nothing I was consciously focused on manifested. Things I was subconsciously focused on … my mother, death, the tomb around the dungeon entrance, all that sort of thing, I suppose I might have influenced, or I might not have, and we’ve no way to know, especially if I’m the only one in the entire world who this happens to.”

“I think we need to be more systemic about it,” said Alfric. “And … possibly see if the dungeons are different when you’re not under so much stress.”

In Verity’s opinion, the stress was probably a part of it. Stress made her body feel different, and marinated her mind in a particular feeling that always had some element of things being pushed out of the way. When the stress was pounding down on her, as with these concerts, all other thoughts were sidelined, put out of mind, squashed while they were just a tickle of an idea.

Mizuki came out of the stone wearing baggy clothes in the same style as Alfric.

“You took my clothes?” asked Alfric.

“Mine wouldn’t fit,” said Mizuki. “Obviously. Hey, we should spar like this, we’d be evenly matched for once.”

“I would absolutely crush you,” said Alfric.

“We’re savin’ our strength for the blocks,” said Hannah, who had continued moving them.

“Fine, then after we get home,” said Mizuki.

“We’ll be back to normal by then,” said Alfric. “And no offense, but I don’t want this body for any longer than I have to have it.”

“Why would I be offended?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, I don’t want to be in it longer than I need to be, at least once we’ve done all the fun stuff.”

“I think Isra and I rather enjoyed having hybrid bodies,” said Verity.

“We did,” nodded Isra.

“Well, I didn’t mean like that,” said Mizuki. She glanced at Alfric. “Thanks for saving my life, by the way.”

“I don’t think your life was in all that much danger,” said Hannah. “Though hypothermia is outside my ability to fix, at least at the moment.” She was slightly out of breath and wiped her hands on her pants. “I’m done for the moment, ‘til my breath comes back.”

“But someday?” asked Mizuki, who was sitting on a chair she’d brought out of the garden stone. “I mean, I don’t see how you’d do that with symmetry, and I do try to listen.”

“False mirror technique,” said Hannah. “You use two people, sat across from each other, then reflect the healthy person onto the ill one. And for all the reasons that you know about, if you’ve been listenin’ to me, it takes someone with experience and a depth of connection to Garos that I don’t have, not yet.”

“I’ll take my turn,” said Isra. She sized up the blocks, which were sitting within the wall, on top of each other, having already been cut up by Mizuki’s melting staff. Verity was worried, but Isra handled it easily enough. She got through ten in total before sitting down to rest a bit.

Verity hadn’t thought that she’d be handling the bricks of stone all that much, but having seen Isra do it, it didn’t seem so difficult. She took her turn as though it were a perfectly natural thing to do. When sliding the block to the edge though, she became convinced that it was going to crush her, and only resisted the urge to jump out of the way by the same instincts that helped her not deteriorate into a mess when she was doing a performance. She caught the block as it slid down into her arms, then managed to move it over and slide it into place with the others in the chest.

Isra clapped, and Verity blushed, and then, because it would have felt pathetic to only do one, she did another, and then another after that, making it to six until she felt like there was a serious risk of dropping one or snapping a tendon in her arm.

They took turns taking down blocks, until eventually Alfric and Mizuki switched back to their usual selves. Alfric seemed relieved, and Mizuki was in clothes that were many sizes too large for her, and the work continued apace, with the blocks removed from their slots in the wall and placed into slots in the chest.

A discordant note and rumble came through the dungeon again, and they all turned to look at it.

“The dungeon is falling apart,” said Alfric. He looked down at the stone they were all standing on.

“There’s a chance that this collapses and kills us all, right?” asked Hannah. “Just for clarity here.”

“Yes,” said Alfric. “Technically.”

“We go fast then,” said Mizuki. She rolled up her oversized sleeves. “Real fast.”

“Not you,” said Hannah. “The bracers?”

“Oh,” said Mizuki, looking down. “Right.”

They did push themselves, and the work, which had been somewhat sedate up until that point, became frantic. Verity hadn’t been keeping count of how many blocks they’d been putting into the chest, and was surprised when Alfric declared they’d reached their goal of four hundred. Relatively few of those had been Verity’s, but brute strength had never been her domain.

“I think we should go out,” said Alfric. He was panting, having done most of the work — though he was much stronger and taller than any of them. “I’m going to be sore tomorrow.”

They used the bathroom before they left, peeing in random corners with only a thin veneer of privacy. It was something that Verity had instinctively rebelled against the first time it had been discussed, but now she found something nicely transgressive about it, as though she were thumbing her nose at propriety. Her mother would have been mortified.

The very last wrinkle was the chest, which couldn’t be moved out of the dungeon on its own. Normally this wasn’t a problem, but everyone was tired and sore, and working together, they could hardly lift it. Verity was entrusted with the Bident of Death, which she held well clear of her or anyone else. It gave her the creeps. Eventually the chest was out though, and Verity stepped through the tunnel that led back to the real world, happy to be done. There was something about a dungeon that was quite like a song, she thought, particularly the way it vanished when it was over, an experience more than a permanent thing.

“Fresh air,” said Isra, taking in a deep breath. It was late in the day, though the summer sun hadn’t yet begun to set. The air was warmer than in the dungeon, and the omnipresent lighting was gone, which was an adjustment for the eyes.

“Fresh air for just a moment,” said Alfric. “We’ll have everyone pile into the garden stone and then I’ll fly home.”

“Not the dagger?” asked Mizuki.

“It’s a difference of maybe twenty minutes,” said Alfric. “I want to keep the dagger on standby in case we need it later.”

Verity sighed, but did as was asked of her, stepping briefly on Alfric’s foot, then ending up in the familiar garden again. It was a nice garden, and there were plenty of improvements to it, but it wasn’t where she wanted to be at the moment. Isra stepped in after and gave Verity a kiss on the cheek, smiling.

“Glad to be done,” Isra said as they walked away to make room for the others. They had their own permanent tent set up in the garden stone, though the trip wouldn’t take long. “I felt like it wasn’t the dungeon for me.”

“You had it rough,” said Verity. She reached out and took Isra’s hand, which she squeezed.

“I don’t mean that,” said Isra. “I was just … ineffective.”

Verity laughed. “From Mizuki, I understand it, that’s her, but don’t tell me you’re feeling the same way.”

“I was,” said Isra. “Am.” They reached their tent and Isra stepped inside, laying down on the blankets there. Verity readily joined her. They were both in need of a shower, or better, a long bath, ideally together in the large tub. “I’m very serious about wanting new arrows. Mizuki complained that she was worthless, then killed hundreds of walking corpses all by herself and invented a weapon that could kill with a touch. I shot those bladed women and it did practically nothing, and had to be saved by Hannah, and by you, and there was no redemption to be had at the end.”

“Do you want me to cheer for you?” asked Verity.

Isra gave a disgruntled noise. “I don’t want to be mocked.”

“Were you mocking Mizuki when you cheered for her?” asked Verity.

“No,” said Isra. “Though I did think it was funny to cheer.”

“Well, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a solicited compliment,” said Verity. Isra had been laying on her stomach, and Verity’s hand was under her shirt, rubbing her back. “If you need nice things said about you, I understand that.” Isra had a particularly muscular back, though Verity was no expert. Isra seemed receptive to the touching, and Verity traced the muscles alongside either side of Isra’s spine.

“And if you had to say good things about my dungeoneering?” asked Isra. She turned back slightly to take a glance at Verity.

Verity thought for a moment. It wasn’t a matter of giving true and honest compliments, it was a matter of giving the right compliments. There was something deceptive about saying what another person wanted to hear, and it was something that Verity had training from her mother for.

“There’s a steadiness and intensity to you when you go into the dungeon,” said Verity. “Your speed is impressive even without that bow, and with it, the arrows fly through the air like driving rain, peppering the beasts before ripping out of them and leaving fountains of blood. It doesn’t work on everything, no, but against the things it does work on you’re better than Alfric, capable of killing a score of them before I can even get to the second verse. You move like the wind, you aim like you have the eyes of a hawk, you step on silent feet with the quiet of a moth’s wing-beat. I can sing a song, if you’d like?”

“No,” said Isra. She flipped over, dislodging Verity’s hand. “You know, that actually did make me feel better.”

“Compliments generally do,” said Verity. “I meant every word of it. Though when I think of you, it’s not where my focus usually is.” She leaned forward and gave Isra a slow kiss, their lips parting only reluctantly.

“You’ll be practicing when we get home?” asked Isra.

“I need to clean up first,” said Verity. “And then, yes, I’ll be practicing into the night.”

Isra reached out and pulled Verity close so they could lay together. “Did the dungeon make you feel better?” she asked.

“Moving blocks, not so much,” said Verity. “But being a bard, supporting my team, playing away as raw fuel for Mizuki’s creations … just us being together. This is what I want with my whole life, to be here, like this.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. “Even though I’m changing?”

There was silence, like a falling cup before it hit the ground, an anticipatory silence. “You’re a statue I saw through the window,” said Verity. “I loved it and held it precious, the statue, but I was seeing it only from one angle, and then one day I stepped outside and realized that there were other angles, and it was disorienting, for a bit, to see this thing I loved had other facets, entire features I’d been ignorant of.” It was a diplomatic way of putting it, and a bit flowery, but she hoped that it got her point of view across.

“I don’t think I’m like that,” said Isra. Her voice was soft. “I think I really am changing, or trying to change. A statue is like that tomb we were in. The whole point is for it to stay the same.”

“It’s a bad metaphor,” said Verity. “Can you give me a moment to think of a better one?”

“I’m like an egg in a nest, valued for being rounded and hard,” said Isra. “And then I hatch, and I’m wet and slimy.”

“That’s a horrible metaphor,” said Verity with a laugh. “You’re like a field that I had only seen in times of winter, now resplendent with chartreuse flowers following the rains of spring. And of course we’re going opposite directions, you and I.”

“We are,” said Isra. She shifted beneath Verity, extracting a hand to stroke Verity’s hair. “I’m glad you said that. Sometimes it feels like in another year, I’ll be living the life of a high society debutante, and you’ll be living as a wild woman in the woods.”

“Except,” said Verity. “If that were to happen … I don’t particularly like high society debutantes. And I don’t imagine that you particularly like wild women.”

“I don’t think either of us will go that far, not really,” said Isra. “There’s too much for you to learn about the woods, and you’re not a druid.”

Verity found that outrageously funny. “Isra, the number of things you would need to learn to pass in my mother’s circles — the number of books you’d need to read, rules you’d need to learn, hidden references that would fly right over your head — you’re doing well, very well, I don’t mean to take away from your successes, especially your performance at the Gardening Club, but — you understand that I have a whole life of training?”

“Do you think that I would do worse among the society ladies than you would do in the woods?” asked Isra. She seemed more curious than offended, though there was a trace of indignation.

“You know, I don’t know,” said Verity. “Most likely if we went as we are now, I would die. So by that metric, yes, you’d do better.”

“Hmm,” said Isra. “You know, I don’t want to fit in with the society ladies. Though I do want to move smoothly through the human world.”

“You should stop calling it ‘the human world’, for a start,” said Verity, smiling.

“I don’t want people to think that I’m odd,” said Isra.

“I know,” said Verity. She pulled Isra close, giving her a half-hug. “But you also don’t want to feel like you’re hiding your oddness too much, like you’re playing a part or holding up a mask.”

“No,” said Isra. “No, I don’t want to feel like I’m walking a tightrope, or like I’m the only one who hasn’t been given the script.”

Some time passed as they lay together in the tent. They had been having these sorts of conversations more often, and Verity thought that she was starting to get a handle on them. Isra was changing, and Verity wanted to be there for it, supportive and understanding. But Verity was changing also, had been changing ever since she’d come to Pucklechurch, and the concerts were, in her mind, the death throes of her old life. There was something funny in the way that she and Isra had seen each other. There was a song in there somewhere, about a fish who envied a bird, and a bird who envied a fish, but it wasn’t clear how such a song would end, not if they changed places with each other as they both seemed to want.

Isra fell asleep, but the nap lasted only five minutes or so before Mizuki called out that they were home. Verity disentangled herself from Isra, who seemed like she was content to sleep a bit longer. There was food to eat, and there were songs to practice, and time in Pucklechurch to enjoy before the next concert.

Chapter 114 - Plating

The Pedder farm was a sprawling green place, and the smell of hogs floated in the air. It wasn’t as bad as Hannah had expected, being sweet and musky, though there was an undercurrent of grassy smell that wasn’t quite pleasant. The pigs were far away though, traveling as a herd, their snuffling and grunting a distant cacophony, and there were a number of fences separating them and their stable from the rest of the farm. Hannah would have liked to be in among the pigs, just for a bit, and wondered whether there might be time for that later on.

Most of the work was being done in the open air, at long tables that had been set out for that purpose. There were already nearly a dozen people at work, most of them related to either the Pedder side or the Sharpe side.

The wedding had started as a large affair and only grown in size as the weeks went on. The Pedders were relatively well off, at least for Pucklechurch, and the first of their boys were getting married, so it was ‘only natural’ that there be a celebration so large that it would blot out the sun. Bethany had pretty clearly been swept up in things, and Hannah was there, an outsider, mostly because it was clear the girl needed help. The whole thing had, naturally, been taken over by a variety of family members, but in this case it seemed like a good thing, since there would otherwise have been far too much for the girl to handle all on her own.

“Five hundred people,” said Bethany. She seemed vaguely stunned. “That’s half the population of Pucklechurch.”

“Seems like that’s going to annoy the half that wasn’t invited,” said Mizuki, which Hannah felt wasn’t particularly helpful.

“It’s not going to be half the town,” said Bethany. “We have people coming in from all over. The Angry Plum will be full, the Fig and Gristle will be full, both our houses will be full, all the vacancies at the temple will be full, and then we’re also bringing in a hotel for the week.”

“An entad hotel?” asked Mizuki, brightening considerably. “How much would it cost for me to stay there?”

“It’s going to be packed,” said Bethany. She grimaced. “Sorry.”

“Bah, no worries,” said Mizuki. “I’ll cozy up with some of your cousins or something and get them to give me a tour.”

“I’m happy you’re here,” said Bethany. She wrapped Mizuki in a hug. “Thank you.”

“You’d do the same for me,” said Mizuki.

“Is that … a possibility?” asked Bethany. “You and Alfric? Or Vertex?”

“No,” said Mizuki, waving that away. “I’m not dating all of Vertex. Or Alfric, for that matter.” This was said with what Hannah considered to be a bit of forced humor, as though Mizuki found the idea of partnering with Alfric funny. “But this day is about you, not me, let’s not get off track.”

“No, this day, right now, isn’t about me at all,” said Bethany. “It’s about putting in work. Do you think you can make a centerpiece?”

“I have never been more sure of anything in my life,” said Mizuki.

“Good,” said Bethany. She moved across the open space. “Then I’m going to put the two of you over here with my aunt Pia, and she’ll be in charge of you.”

“Oh, okay,” said Mizuki. She sat down at the table they’d been put at, and Hannah joined her.

“The one in the middle is the model we’re working from,” said the older woman, who was focused on her task. The ‘model’ was a glass vase with a variety of natural materials in it, including smooth stones from one of the Proten Lakes at the bottom, moss, and then some driftwood sticks that come up out of it. When Mizuki looked closely, she could see that there were pine cones and dried leaves as well. “If you’re thinking that they’re ugly, that’s because we’re not clipping the flowers for them until the night before. Today is just to get the bulk of the work out of the way.”

“So we’re to be stuffin’ things in a jar then, ay?” asked Hannah. “I s’pose I don’t mind doin’ that.”

“Does this really need three people?” asked Mizuki. She looked over to where the bride-to-be was talking with other people.

“Six to a table,” said Pia. “Five hundred guests. It’s madness, but that means eighty-three centerpieces, plus a few more for safety.”

Mizuki was watching the woman while Hannah was grabbing one of the vases and looking at the materials, which had been stacked up close by. They were going to run out of stones, Hannah guessed. The pile of sticks was enormous though.

“Where do you even get eighty-some vases?” asked Mizuki. She reluctantly took one and then began packing it.

“Shops,” replied Pia. “In this case, all made by entads. Eighty centerpieces, eighty tables, eighty tablecloths, two hundred and forty plates — because each person needs three plates, one for salad, one for dinner, one for dessert, though those will be temporary — and the list keeps going on.”

“That sounds outrageously expensive,” said Mizuki. “I mean, I knew the Pedders had money, but for all these people, that’s, um.”

“They’re entads,” said Pia with a dismissive wave of her hand. She’d completed another centerpiece while they talked. “All it takes is a rental agreement, though the vases are ours to keep. It is expensive, mind you, but not as much as you’d think. But then, Pa Pedder is footing the bill, and he dotes on his grandsons.”

Hannah looked at her arrangement and decided that it was satisfactory. The wedding was going to be a big production, but at least that was going to be in the church, which was set up to accommodate a very large number of people. The reception was going to be something else entirely, since all those people would need to eat, and once they were done eating, they would want to dance and drink. Five hundred was, simply put, too many people, but the Pedders were apparently intent on figuring out a way to make everything work. There were just about a billion things to think about, in Hannah’s estimation, and she was somewhat grateful that she had only a single task in front of her.

“By that accent, are you from Cairbre?” asked Pia as they continued the work.

“Ay,” said Hannah. “Though I spent a fair bit of my time in Plenarch, at the seminary there, and haven’t seen the hills in quite some time.”

“My first husband was from Cairbre,” said Pia. “I’ve visited twice.”

“Did he propose in the usual Cairbre way?” asked Hannah.

“That he did,” Pia replied, nodding. “We were in a group with friends, young as could be, and we were making each other laugh, and just like that there was a twinkle in his eyes. He asked me to marry him as we were saying our goodbyes. That was thirty-some years ago.”

“What happened to him?” asked Mizuki.

“He went sailing one day and never came back,” she said. It was with the soft, sad way that older people said things sometimes when they were thinking back to horrible things that had only mostly faded. She wasn’t that old, in her fifties, perhaps, but she carried her age more than most.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked,” said Mizuki. She did seem to feel some regret, which Hannah found unusual. Mizuki was the sort of person who would apologize and then try to move on as quickly as possible, hoping that the slight or impropriety was forgotten.

“No, no, you’re right to, I brought it up,” said Pia with a sigh. “And it might have been I’d have been able to tell you a less sad story, like the one about my second husband, who I caught in bed with one of our local clerics.” She let out a little laugh. “Now that I didn’t find funny at the time, but looking back, I can see some of the humor. But it had been a bumpy road, and he hadn’t been the love of my life.”

“I don’t think I’d ever find that funny,” said Mizuki. She made a face. “Not that I haven’t had my own romantic troubles.”

“And how old are you, dear?” asked Pia with a little laugh. When Mizuki didn’t immediately answer, she asked, “Fifteen?”

“Twenty-two, thank you very much,” said Mizuki. She stuck out her tongue, which didn’t do much for proving her maturity.

“Oh, so you’re a part of their cohort then, Jo and Beth?” asked Pia.

“I went to school with them,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “I was close friends with all the Pedder boys for a while.”

“Wait,” said Pia. “Are you … Mizuki?”

Mizuki gave Pia a wide-eyed stare, and Pia cackled. “I’ve heard about you, and your little ‘misadventure’ with the boys. You weren’t kidding when you said you’d had your own romantic troubles.”

Hannah coughed into her fist. “That was some time ago, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t mean to embarrass you,” said Pia. “It’s all water under the bridge, Nance said that you were a sweet girl who was only perhaps a bit indecisive about boys.”

“Nance said that?” asked Mizuki. She looked down. “Aw.”

Hannah’s understanding of the families of Pucklechurch wasn’t complete, but she was fairly sure that Nance was the mother of the three boys, who were all close in age. It was somewhat of a surprise that she’d think fondly of Mizuki, but Hannah looked around the farm, and thought about that for a moment. Before their falling out, Mizuki had likely spent a lot of time here, especially after her family had left for Kiromo. It was natural that for a time, this would be like a second family to her, especially if the mother took a liking to Mizuki.

“You’re doing fine work,” said Pia, nodding in Mizuki’s direction.

“And this?” asked Hannah, pushing her most recent creation forward.

“Too symmetrical,” said Pia. “But it’ll do.”

“I don’t think we had a proper introduction, though I don’t blame Bethany with all she had goin’ on,” said Hannah. “This is Mizuki Yono,” she almost added a quip about ‘fabled heartbreaker’ but decided that was probably too soft a spot to be poking, “And I’m Hannah Carthaigh. I happen to be a cleric of Garos.”

“Ah, well, in that case I’d suppose that Beth put you here for a reason,” said Pia. “Though I do worry that they’ll look too different from each other.”

“The flowers will be the stars of the show,” said Hannah. “But say, what’s going to happen to all these vases when the wedding is over? Does all this get dumped out?”

“They’ll be gifts to take home,” said Pia. “That’s the plan, anyway. The hope is that people will have a vase to remember the event by, though I should imagine that they won’t have trouble remembering something so incredibly oversized.”

“I think it’ll be nice,” said Mizuki. “This is going to eclipse basically every other festival or party we have in Pucklechurch. I don’t know how they’ll top it for the Podd and Link.”

“They likely won’t,” said Pia. “I think now that it’s in full swing, everyone is realizing what a massive undertaking this is going to be, and there’s some regret hanging in the air. They’re going through with it, bless them, but I think the experience will be enough for one lifetime. If this becomes a tradition, I’m not sure they’ll get so much help.” More people had filtered in as they worked. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go into the house for some private business.”

She got up from the table and went to the house, and as she moved, Hannah thought again that she was just a woman who carried herself in an old way, rather than an old woman.

“It’s weird to be here,” said Mizuki, looking around. “I’d forgotten the smell of hogs.”

“Do you think they feel the same?” asked Hannah. “That it’s odd for you to be here?”

“The hogs?” Mizuki asked. She laughed. “No, I know what you mean. I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “Maybe. Bethany thinks that we should put it all in the past, which I get, but it’s hard to do, because … I don’t know. At the time it felt like they all just decided that it was my fault.”

“And what did happen, if we’ve sixty more of these to go and time to spare?” asked Hannah.

“It’s not that interesting,” said Mizuki. “There was a gang of us, me, the Pedder boys, and Neil — Horner?” Hannah shook her head. “Well, you’ll probably meet him. Anyway, it was all nice fun until we started flirting, and then things got serious, and the boys were fighting each other, and trying to force me into making a choice one way or another, and there were issues of what I’d now call disclosure.”

“When you say ‘we’ were flirting,” said Hannah.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Um, I was just flirting, a lot, with, I guess, all of them. Though it was a two way street, really. I used to be very flirty.”

“Ah,” said Hannah. “And now you’re … you would say not flirty?”

“Well,” said Mizuki. She pursed her lips and adjusted the angle of a piece of wood. “It’s different.”

“Oh, ay,” said Hannah. Alfric might have been younger than Mizuki by a good margin, possibly even when accounting for his undone days, but he was more mature than the Pedder boys had ever been, and there was no risk of hurt feelings from competing interests, at least so far as Hannah could see. There was Kell, perhaps, who was a ‘good friend’ to Mizuki, but Mizuki had shown next to no interest in the poor boy, except as a friend, and when Hannah had seen the two of them together, there was nothing like flirting from Mizuki. That was rare for her.

“Alfric said he would stop by,” said Mizuki, unprompted. “Mostly to see how we’re doing.”

“His disclosure this morning seemed brief, didn’t it?” asked Hannah.

“I guess,” said Mizuki. “Sometimes it’s a formality. I know he doesn’t like it.”

“He talks about it a lot, for someone who doesn’t like it,” said Hannah.

“It’s serious to him,” said Mizuki. “I think he thinks that without it, we would turn on him or something. Which is ridiculous.”

“How’s it going?” asked Bethany, who had stopped by from doing her rounds.

“We’ll need other work before too long,” said Hannah, though they weren’t even halfway through. “Our fearless leader has left us, I’m afraid.” She gestured vaguely at Pia’s seat.

“I’ll go into the house and check,” said Bethany. “With all these people together under one roof, there’s been a lot of catching up and chattering.” She sighed. “And lots of gossip that needs to go around.”

“‘Oh, that Mizuki’,” said Mizuki.

“I think so far as the boys go, it’s all water under the bridge,” said Bethany. She bit her lip. “The problem, I think, is that it was years ago now, and, well, at the time, aunts, uncles, and cousins heard about it, and they have long memories. So to the extent that anyone knew about you, it was just about that one thing, and then they never heard the, ‘oh yeah, we kind of understand that it was mostly one of those dumb things that happens’ part later.”

Mizuki pushed her vase forward. “You know, maybe I should go.”

“Stay,” said Bethany. Her voice was firm. “You’re basically my best friend right now.”

“Alright,” said Mizuki. “I wasn’t actually going to go, I know you need as many hands as you can get.”

“You’re the best,” said Bethany. She gave Mizuki a squeeze and then moved over to Hannah. “Also, I was talking to Lemmel the other day, and was wondering whether you could take his place at the ceremony?”

Hannah raised an eyebrow. “He’s the town’s cleric, not me,” she said. “If there’s been some disagreement —”

“Oh, no, no,” said Bethany. “Nothing like that. It’s just that a family friend is a cleric of Bixoztl, and the cleric of Kesbin is also a man, so we’d be unbalanced on genders, and traditionally, if you’re going to have six clerics — well, you know.”

“Lemmel put you up to this, did he?” asked Hannah.

“Sorry,” said Bethany, wincing. “And I know it’s last minute, but you won’t have to do much, and —”

“I’d be honored to help strengthen the marital bond,” said Hannah. “Shouldn’t take me much to get ready, and I’ll be there, so long as you let me know when and where I need to be.”

“Thank you so much,” said Bethany. “I think it’ll be lovely.”

Once Bethany had floated off, Mizuki gave Hannah an inquisitive look. “I’m surprised you agreed to that.”

“Oh, she’s not a friend, but she’s close enough, and this is how you make friends,” said Hannah. “And I know that Lemmel has his own reasons, aside from wanting the clerics flanking the bride and groom to match up.”

“He wants you back?” asked Mizuki.

“I think he knows I’m not comin’ back,” said Hannah. “But he wants me to be a part of the religion, always has been. It was a point of contention, back when we were colleagues — and I was a bit his apprentice, though not in title.”

“And you’re not a part of the religion?” asked Mizuki.

“Just my usual disagreements,” said Hannah. “And I’m sure that Lemmel and I have had a conversation on the fact that marriage isn’t a part of the holy texts, none of them.”

“Wait,” said Mizuki. “It’s not?”

“Oh, there’s all sorts of things in the Garam Ashar, and large sections devoted to other people and how we relate to them, though in the usual cryptic way of a holy book,” said Hannah. “There is not, however, a mention of marriage, and it wasn’t always a cleric who performed marriage in the old days, and certainly a marriage didn’t have the modern form, where there are clerics of all six gods to give blessings and lend strength. There’s a disconnect, the kind I’m not fond of, built up cruft. Lemmel knows that, of course.”

“But he wants you to … convert?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t know what, exactly, he hopes,” said Hannah. “But at a guess, he thinks it would be better for me to have some reckoning with the church on such matters.”

“He’s right though, right?” asked Mizuki.

“That there’s a reckoning to be had, or that I need one?” asked Hannah.

“I don’t know,” shrugged Mizuki. She got up from her seat and gathered up more moss, which she placed in a pile on the table. “I mean, you were in the church when I met you — met you for dungeoneering, not the other time —”

“When you threw a fireball in the church?” asked Hannah.

“I think when we first met, you talked about the church stuff a lot,” said Mizuki. “It bothered you, I could tell. And the thing is, it still bothers you?”

“It does, a bit,” said Hannah. “I’m in tune with Garos. I care about the way we relate to him. And some of that relation is just made up human stuff. But I will do my part in the wedding.”

“Well, I guess that’s good,” said Mizuki with a frown. “You mostly just sit there?”

“You’ve been to a wedding, right?” asked Hannah.

“I have,” said Mizuki. “But a lot of our cohort got married young, or I wasn’t invited, and it’s been awhile.”

“It is mostly just standin’ there — not sittin’ — with one cleric in particular chosen as their speaker, though I will have to say some ceremonial words, just a sentence from the Garam Ashar,” said Hannah. “‘May your relationship be equitable.’”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “But it’s not about marriage, that line?”

“Well,” said Hannah. She was somewhat surprised that Mizuki was asking. Usually theology wasn’t something that got brought up all that much, and Hannah knew her own enthusiasm for the subject wasn’t shared by the others, not at the same level. “The idea is that relationships should be equitable, all of them, whether it’s your wife, your customers, your children, anything.”

“Children though?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, I don’t have kids, but … does that work out?”

“There are debates about what ‘equitable’ means in different contexts,” said Hannah. She found herself enjoying the conversation. It felt like seminary again, though Mizuki didn’t have the foundational knowledge necessary for a truly in-depth talk on equitability. “I’ve heard people, mostly in books, say that it’s impossible to ethically raise a child.”

Mizuki laughed. “That’s crazy.”

“A bit, yes,” said Hannah. “Some people on the academic side of things get too much in their own heads, too consumed with the books they’re readin’ and writin’, and the common people see it as a waste of time and money, though we’re in the time of permanent plenty. The argument is that control of a child is unethical, because we shouldn’t control others, but not controllin’ a child is also unethical, because without control that child won’t grow up to be a functional adult.” She shrugged. “It’s interestin’, but not pragmatic.”

“Seems like Alfric would hate it,” said Mizuki.

Hannah nodded, and privately noted that it hadn’t taken long for the conversation to move from having children to what Alfric thought. “For someone who seems to be a good friend, I don’t see Bethany come by the house too often.”

“Oh, I’m not sure we’re that kind of friends,” said Mizuki. “We always talk when I go to the general store, or on temple days, or when we see each other around, but I don’t know, I think we’re friends because the girls she was closest with either joined the mommy club or moved away. And I know that in a year or so she’s pretty likely to join the mommy club too, so … you know.”

“I don’t, really,” said Hannah. “We didn’t have a mommy club in the seminary, if I understand you right. It’s a group of, ah, mommies?”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. She sighed. “They have kids, and then they’re wrapped up in their kids, and then once the kids are a little older they only want to hang out with other people who have kids, so their kids can play together. It’s probably the same for the boys who become dads, but I don’t know about that, I don’t really have male friends anymore.” She looked up at the clouds. “You know, I have friends from school who have three-year-olds? Which is crazy to me. I’ve got a friend — a former friend, I guess, because we don’t talk — who’s got four kids already. I dated her boyfriend for a bit, before they got together. That could have been me.”

“And you think that’ll be Bethany’s fate?” asked Hannah.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “Probably. I’m not sure she wants kids, and some people don’t, I guess, but if she’s not making a horrible mistake, which she might be, then yeah, it’s kind of that stage of our life when you should think about starting a family.”

“And you’re the same age,” said Hannah.

“I — yeah,” said Mizuki. She finished up with her vase, and moved on to another. “Part of it is that I don’t have any family here, no mother or father to help me out in the early years, not much extended family, things that, if I were to have children, I would want.”

“And no partner,” said Hannah.

Mizuki looked at her. “That too. And we’re doing the dungeoneering thing for who knows how long, so it might be as much as a decade before I settle down, I guess. But then I’d be having children in my thirties, and they’d be grown up when I was in my fifties, and — it’s way too far off, really. I’ll be a wizard by then, probably.” She plunked a few stones into a vase with more force than was necessary.

“Nothin’ to say that you couldn’t be a dungeoneer and have children,” said Hannah. “Alfric’s parents seemed to do alright. As a dungeoneer, unless you’re goin’ hard, it’s one or two dungeons a week, and that means you’re out of the house for less time than most other professions. If I were a proper cleric, I’d have to have someone watch the kid, and through the first year or two, probably just have them with me all the time. But if you’re worried about the child, then it seems almost like delvin’ dungeons is the best position to be in, at least from where I’m sittin’.”

“And are you, ah?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Hannah. “No, no, this is the time in my life I’ve decided will be for freedom and irresponsibility, at least for another year or two. And if we make stupid amounts of money in that time, all the better.”

“You think you’ll be out of the dungeons in a year?” asked Mizuki. She leaned forward. “I mean, that’s —”

“I didn’t say that,” said Hannah. “But if I’m still doin’ dungeons with you lot in a year, then I’ll consider my wild days to be over, and start thinkin’ about the rest of my life, which is on hold for now.”

“With Marsh?” asked Mizuki.

“If we’re still together in a year, then I’ll think about what a future would look like,” said Hannah. She blushed easily when it came to that subject. From what she was feeling now, there was a good chance she’d be with Marsh in another year. “Though as I’ve said, I think there’s a balance to be had, and there’s no reason that you have to give up your entire life for a child, just … a bit of it. Most, maybe, which is what gives me pause. And I should point out I’m in the same boat as you, without havin’ much in the way of support.”

“I guess we all are, aside from Alfric,” said Mizuki. She finished another vase and pushed it forward. “Do you think Pia is ever coming back?”

“Nah,” said Hannah. “She probably saw that we were handlin’ it just fine.”

Mizuki stood up from her chair. “I think there’s some magic going on over there, I’m going to check it out.”

Hannah sighed. “We were handlin’ it.” But she got up from her seat all the same, and went to follow Mizuki, because the vases could, in fact, wait.

The ‘magic’ in question was being done by a short woman in a leather vest, who was tapping a small wand against a plate, which caused another plate to appear on top of it. She kept doing this, tap, tap, tap, and the stacks of plates kept appearing, which were each carted off when the stack was ten high.

“This is crazy,” said Mizuki.

“It’s an entad,” said Hannah. “It’s not that crazy.”

“How’s it work?” asked Mizuki. She had sidled up to the woman who was tapping the wand.

“You tap, it makes,” said the woman. She was in her thirties, or thereabouts, if Hannah’s eye for age was any good, with a bit of Chelxic ancestry. Her dark hair and braided pigtails were a bit unusual, and something about her aesthetic made Hannah think that this might be a follower of Garos. “Do you want to give my arm a rest?”

“I do!” Mizuki exclaimed. She took the wand with gusto, and began tapping on the plate, quickly making a stack so high that they had to stop and separate it into two stacks so it could be taken away and put in a pile with the others.

“You travel around doin’ this?” asked Hannah.

“Oh yes,” the woman nodded. “For five years now, mostly large events like this. The wand only works on food items, and makes the replicas for about a week before they turn to sand, so I go to whoever will hire me and help make everything they need for whatever event it is.” She shrugged. “It’s a living.”

“This is great,” said Mizuki, who was still tapping plates.

“Well, I’ll take that back,” said the woman, sliding forward to grab the wand from Mizuki. “You’re not keeping a good count.”

“A count?” asked Mizuki. She stayed close to the woman.

“Five hundred plates,” said the woman. “Plus an extra twenty or so, in case there’s breakage. Then all that again for salad plates and dessert plates.”

“But you can make as many as you want, right?” asked Mizuki.

“Yes, and that would take more time,” the woman replied. “Which I don’t want to spend here, if I can help it. I’ve got another appointment later today that I don’t want to miss.” She was tapping away at a steady beat, with the plates being taken away when they were stacked. It was the motion borne of practice, the almost unthinking way that an artisan could do things they’d done thousands of times before.

“Should we be helping with this?” Mizuki asked one of the women moving plates into what was presumably a better spot for them.

“We’ve got it, you’re fine,” the girl — who bore a resemblance to Bethany — replied.

“So,” said Mizuki, turning toward the woman who was tapping plates. “The entad isn’t bound, couldn’t you just sell it?”

“Sell it?” she asked. She let out a little laugh. “I bought it.”

“So this is just what you do?” asked Mizuki.

“Why?” the woman asked. “Seems like not such a great life, from your expression? I get to travel, I have lots of free time, I get to meet nosy girls who inquire about my business, all sorts of things.”

“Nosy?” asked Mizuki, placing a hand on her chest. “Me? Nosy? Me? I plan to keep getting more aghast at the mere suggestion until you agree that it’s preposterous.”

“Clearly I’m mistaken,” the woman laughed. There was a twinkle in her eye as she looked at Mizuki.

“No, you were more or less right,” said Hannah. “She can’t help herself. But we’ve got to get back to makin’ centerpieces, else we’ll be here all day.”

They returned to their stations, and managed to keep up a good pace of it, especially after Pia had finally returned. She made her excuses, but Hannah understood how it was. For something like this, there was a sense that while the work did need to get done, it didn’t need to get done in too much of a hurry, and all the labor was unpaid anyhow.

There was an enormous amount of work that needed to be done, given the absurd scale of the wedding. It wasn’t long after the centerpieces were finally done (sans flowers) that the whole group was called together to go ‘walk the field’ and see whether there was anything left out, to direct the Pedder boys to pick up muck where it was found, to stomp down mounds and fill in divots, and generally get one of the spare fields ready for hosting. The wedding would take place at the church, but the reception was where the bulk of the work needed to be done, and they had volunteered themselves for it.

Hannah found herself enjoying the work though, and it was good to spend time with Mizuki, as much as the girl seemed a bit directionless.

Chapter 113 - Weird Pot

They held off on entad testing for a day, in part because of Mizuki’s bracers, which she felt was an overreaction.

“They weren’t cursed or anything,” she said. “They just had a drawback that wasn’t obvious fast enough.”

“I think this is the third time we’ve had entad testing go awry,” said Alfric. “The ring that turned me to stone, the sword that cut through weapons, and now the bracers that chilled you to the bone.”

“All those turned out fine,” said Hannah. “We lost nothin’ from doin’ it ourselves.”

“Right,” said Alfric. “But if someone were to, say, die while we were testing entads, then I would have to reset the day and do that dungeon over, which would include a fair amount of boring physical labor that I just don’t want to do.”

“Once again it comes down to Alfric’s laziness,” said Isra. She grinned at him. “Pity.” She was sitting on the couch, entwined with Verity, and it didn’t seem like they were taking entad testing all that seriously, not that Mizuki was exactly serious about it.

“Yes, we all wish that Alfric had a better work ethic,” said Hannah. She smiled at him, and he reached over and gave her a light punch on the shoulder. “That’s the one thing I always say when introducing him.”

“Hilarious,” said Alfric.

“And you didn’t redo the day already?” asked Mizuki. “You aren’t going to spoil any of this?”

“I didn’t redo the day, no,” said Alfric. “You know I tell you in the morning every time anyway, especially since we hang out on the undone days.”

“He’s a dishonest sort, Alfric,” said Isra. “A shifty character.” She smiled at him, but he was stone-faced.

“That one I don’t find funny,” he said.

“Aw,” said Isra. She had a glass of wine, which she swirled around. “You know I don’t mean anything by it. It’s only funny because you’re the most honest person I know, even when no one is asking you to be.”

“He’s had one too many people think that he was a scoundrel,” said Mizuki. “Because of the chrononaut stuff.”

“I guess I knew that,” said Isra. “Sorry.” She did seem contrite about the whole thing, but drank more of her wine and settled back in with Verity.

“No, it’s fine, I just … don’t enjoy that kind of ribbing.” He shrugged, brushing it off, as was his way. Mizuki thought it would probably bother him for longer than he’d want to admit.

“If you need tips on ribbing, let me know,” said Mizuki. “I’m kind of an expert.”

Alfric had turned to the table where their goodies had been set out. “Armor will take a bit to get on,” said Alfric. “Mizuki, you wanted to test that?”

“I did,” she said. “And I’ll be in my room, thank you very much, I know you were hoping for a peep.”

“I wasn’t —” Alfric began.

Mizuki turned to Isra. “See? Like that.”

“Alfric doesn’t want to have sex with me though,” said Isra. “So it wouldn’t be as funny.”

“Er,” said Mizuki, suddenly feeling flustered. She glanced at Alfric. “I mean that’s not —”

“Go get the armor on,” said Alfric. “And I’ll ensure these clowns don’t drink too much wine while you’re away. We mostly do this for your sake anyway.”

“I love entad testing,” said Isra. She drank deep from her glass of wine. “So long as the wine keeps flowing.”

Mizuki picked the armor up, and Emperor, who was still staying with them, hopped up from the couch to follow her.

The armor was heavy, and there was a lot of it, mostly with a motif of skulls, especially as caps on the joints, and taking up most of the breastplate. There were also skulls in miniature along the gauntlets and greaves, and in other places, almost like they were hidden for someone to find. It was a large, clunky thing, but as soon as she’d put on the first piece, the rest resized for her, which helped with the clunkiness. It wasn’t full plate, not really, but if it ended up being hers, she would have far, far better protection. Unfortunately, if it was good, there was a decent chance that it would go to Alfric, since he was the one on the front lines most of the time, and Hannah was already sorted away with shifting armor that was bound to her.

The Chilling Bracers of Strength had been removed the day prior after a consultation with Filera, though Hannah had scoffed and said that if they really needed to remove them, all it would take is a quick amputation of Mizuki’s hands, followed by a quick and easy reattachment. It turned out that all you needed to do was run a finger along a specific line to make the hinge reappear, and Hannah seemed mildly disappointed that her amputation plan wasn’t going to be brought to fruition.

With the armor in place, Mizuki looked in the mirror. She was less fearsome than she thought, but that was mostly because it didn’t come with a helmet, and her head ruined the whole skull and death look that the armor seemed to be almost desperately projecting. Mizuki was not a fearsome woman, she knew that, though she did command fearsome powers. She spent some time looking in the mirror, turning this way and that, but it wasn’t until she smiled at herself that she discovered a piece of the armor’s nature: the skulls smiled with her, their mouths moving in sync with her own.

“What do you think?” Mizuki asked Emperor. She turned and showed off for him, striking a pose, mouth open so the skulls looked like they were going to shout.

Emperor barked once in response, then kept laying on her bed as though waiting for her to do a better trick.

She spent some time playing with the teeth, making them chomp, then leaned forward so the huge skull set in the breastplate had its teeth around a corner of her dresser drawer. She chomped down, and wood splintered, which was very gratifying but would need to be fixed by Hannah.

Before she went downstairs, she used the sword to make her hair and eyes glow, and that was a much better look, properly intimidating, as much as her head still didn’t quite match the skull armor.

She came downstairs, with Emperor following after her.

“Very nice,” said Alfric. “And I see you did the hair as well. Looks like it does change size to fit, which isn’t guaranteed.”

“You were up there a bit,” said Hannah. “We’re already almost through a bottle of wine.”

“There’s a reason we waited until after dinner,” said Verity. “It was so we could do this with wine and not feel like we’re total lushes.”

“You said you had practice,” said Alfric.

“Yes, but also the wine thing,” said Verity, as Mizuki moved to the center of the room.

“So what have you tried already?” asked Alfric, turning to Mizuki.

“Everything!” Mizuki threw her head back and gave her most evil laugh. The mouths of all the skulls moved with her, clacking as the metal slid back and forth.

“Huh,” said Hannah. “Well that’s terrifying. Can they actually bite things?”

“I’ve got a drawer in dire need of repair that says yes,” said Mizuki.

“Is that it though?” asked Alfric. He was looking the armor up and down. He was the only one standing, and he moved around her, seeing how it fit in a way that made her feel slightly warm.

“It’s all I have so far,” said Mizuki. She was watching him as he did his inspection. She wore clothes beneath the armor, and would probably have some kind of gambeson if she took it into the field. Still, the attention on her felt good, even if it was platonic. “Isn’t that enough that it can bite monsters when they get close?”

“It’s not enough, no,” said Alfric. “The thimble armor covers more, so I wouldn’t prefer this to that, and for anyone else … I just don’t see it. Eating monsters is a niche ability.”

“What happens when you eat things?” asked Verity.

“What?” asked Mizuki.

“The thing Alfric was talking about earlier,” said Verity. “Where sometimes there’s a second step. And ‘form suggests function’. So … you eat the thing, then you get some kind of, I don’t know,” she waved her wine glass. “Some bonus.”

“I’d like to test its strength,” said Alfric. He picked up a sword and held it out toward Mizuki. She backed up, instinctually. “I’m not going to run you through,” he said. “I’m going to tap you and see what happens.”

“Seems like a good way to die,” said Hannah.

“If it does kill me, then yes, it probably would be a good way to die, because it would likely be pretty fast.” He paused, thinking about that. Mizuki didn’t think it was true. There were lots of slow ways an entad could kill a person. “It’s very unlikely though.”

“Here, let me try biting the tip of the sword,” said Mizuki. She stepped forward until the tip of the sword was inside the mouth of the breastplate’s skull, then bit down. The tip of the sword snapped off, and Mizuki looked down on the ground, searching for it.

“Open up,” said Alfric.

Mizuki opened her mouth, and Alfric looked inside the center skull. “Nope,” he said. “Huh. Where did the tip go?”

“Eaten,” said Verity. “I have correctly predicted the entad.”

“Huzzah!” said Isra. They clinked their glasses together.

“Did it eat the drawer you ruined?” asked Hannah.

“Um, not sure,” said Mizuki.

“Was there a piece of wood left on the ground?” asked Hannah.

“Here, we can test it again,” said Alfric. He prodded the sword toward Mizuki, she stepped into it, doing her best to chomp the remaining tip off of it. They all heard the snap of metal, and Mizuki heard the snap of her teeth. This time Alfric was looking closely, and it was clear that the tip of the sword had completely disappeared. “Huh,” he said. “We’ll probably have to take it to Filera.”

“Aw,” said Mizuki. “I’m sure we can figure it out.”

“Well, there are limits to what we can test,” said Alfric. “I guess I’d just be careful about what you chomp with it.”

“Obviously,” said Mizuki. She ran her index finger over her teeth. “Doesn’t feel great to clack the teeth like that.”

“Do you want to get changed, or continue as you are?” asked Alfric.

“As I am, I think,” said Mizuki.

“Try not to chomp up the furniture,” said Verity. “The elbow skulls especially seem like they’d rip up a couch.”

“It’s my furniture,” said Mizuki. She looked at the chair she’d been about to sit in, then the sharp teeth on the skulls at her elbows. “But you’re right, actually, maybe I’ll go change. Don’t do testing without me, and don’t drink too much wine.”

Mizuki trekked back up the stairs, and Emperor followed after her, though he’d just gotten settled into his spot on the couch.

“You’re just following me because I feed you, aren’t you?” asked Mizuki.

According to Alfric, Emperor ate ‘whatever’, which Mizuki had been a little skeptical of. She hadn’t had dogs in the house when she was growing up, but from what she knew of them, many ate anything they could, then ralphed it up on the kitchen floor later. She had been slow to feed him exotic foods, but by the time he’d spent his third day with them, she was feeding him whatever scraps he was interested in, which seemed to be all of them. He had carrot tops and pork trimmings, one of Hannah’s rolls, a bowl of herbal tea that was meant for the dragons, a few pieces of pasta, a tomato … among his other magical properties, like his extremely long age, he seemed to have a love of food and an iron stomach.

“I’m going to miss you when you’re gone,” said Mizuki. “But you’ve got another week, since we’re not going to the concert.” They were going to the one after the coming one, largely because of Bethany’s wedding. At least a part of why Verity was downing wine was that she was seeing her mother the next day.

Emperor had hopped up on her bed and was sitting there staring at her with his forelegs crossed, the very picture of a highly engaged listener.

“I know that Verity could take you, but this is all a prelude to us dog-napping you,” said Mizuki. “Or getting you to speak and having you say that you’d rather live with us.”

Emperor let out a short bark.

“I’m only kidding,” said Mizuki. She was back in her skivvies, and needed to decide on what to wear. Her wardrobe was feeling inadequate, of late, though it had swollen by half again with the addition of all her new dungeoneering clothes, and someday she was going to figure out wizardly fashion, which might necessitate the annexation of more drawer space. The room she slept in had once belonged to her parents, and it had taken her years to think of it as her room, but she still kept to one section of the dresser.

She had put on a dress, not her usual style, and looked at her eyes in the mirror, glowing pools of golden light that she rather liked, except that they caused a bit of a fuss. She would be back to normal in time for the wedding.

“Alright!” she said as she came back down. “I’m ready.”

“We didn’t listen about the wine,” said Verity. She had a full glass in hand.

“I tried,” said Hannah. “I think they decided that it was a wine night.”

“I’m gone tomorrow,” said Verity. “I’m hoping that if I get drunk now, I can forget about the concert.”

“Hopefully that’s a joke,” said Hannah, who had been having quite a bit of wine herself.

“Alright,” said Alfric. “It’ll be nightfall before we’re done at this rate, and I do want to get this done so I can prioritize with Filera tomorrow.”

He had arranged the entads from the dungeon on the table, lining them up for perusal. There were six of them in total, since they more or less knew what the armor and the bracers did: a glass fish bowl, a scroll case, a leather-bound book, a necklace with brass and pearls, a ring with an aquamarine setting, and the oddly shaped pot.

“Give me the book,” said Verity. She had somehow grown more entangled with Isra while Mizuki was upstairs.

“Here,” said Alfric, tossing it to her.

In mid flight, the book arrested its motion, then sailed backward into Alfric’s hand.

“That doesn’t count for mine,” said Verity.

“Wait,” said Alfric. He had opened the book to look inside. “The writing is in Inter. Chapter One: The Returning Book. But there are more chapters here.”

“Alright, alright, hand it over,” said Verity. “Without tossing it.”

“Seems like a boring entad, if it tells you all about itself,” said Isra.

“Yes,” agreed Verity. “But some of these do seem fun. Chapter Twenty-Three: The Book That Was on Fire.” She turned the book over in her hands. It was very clearly not at all on fire.

“Well,” said Hannah. “I s’pose it’s the book that was on fire, not the book that is on fire.”

“How many are there?” asked Mizuki, craning her neck to try to see as Verity went back to the table of contents.

“Twenty-eight,” said Verity. “Huh.” She had started reading it. “This actually has a proper story.”

“In Inter?” asked Alfric as her eyes scanned the page.

“Yes, though there are a few missteps,” said Verity.

“Well, I’ll give you some time with it,” said Alfric. “But we should move on, because I do want us all to get our rest in, and at the rate we’re going, we’re not going to be done until midnight.”

“Necklace for me then,” said Hannah. Alfric grabbed it from the table and handed it to her, and she immediately put it on. “Better vision,” she said. She took a sip of wine. “Ah, heightened senses all around. Though … I think my hearing has gone, come to think of it.”

“Testing,” said Mizuki. She moved from where she was sitting and got in front of Hannah. “Testing!”

“Just a moment, I think there’s something else,” said Hannah. “Say something?” She was staring off into the middle distance.

“Testing!” Mizuki shouted.

Hannah clapped her hands to her ears, scowling. “Well, the good news is that I changed it so I was blind instead of deaf, the bad news is that you screamed in my face when I had enhanced hearing.”

“Sorry,” said Mizuki. “Hey, does it work for the party channel?” <Testing.>

“Try again, I wasn’t ready,” said Hannah.

<Testing,> said Alfric.

“Party channel still works,” said Hannah. “So it’s a better form of hearing protection in the dungeon.” She briefly touched the necklace. “We’ll want to see how durable it is though. Scratch test, I s’pose.”

“Sorry again for yelling,” said Mizuki.

“Bah,” said Hannah. “I’ll scream at you later to make us even.”

“I’ll take the other jewelry,” said Isra. She turned to Verity. “Put a ring around my finger, would you?”

Verity giggled and reached forward to swipe the ring from the table, which she was just barely able to reach, and only by growing another finger from her hand. She passed the ring over to Isra, who looked it over for a moment, examining the markings, which Mizuki had already done. The metal was something like white gold, shiny with zinc or nickel in it, and the stone in the center was a deep and vibrant blue.

Isra slipped it on her finger and turned into water, which immediately splashed down on the couch and got Verity soaking wet. Isra was gone, or possibly reduced to a puddle, and Verity stood up to shake the water off.

“See?” asked Alfric. “This is why entad testing is something you need to do in undone days.”

“Calm down, she’s reforming,” said Verity.

Mizuki had felt pure, wordless panic at the disintegration — which was definitely not the right word, but the only proper word for someone turning into water was ‘hydration’, and that definitely wasn’t right either — and as the water started to gather back together, the panic went away in a rush of relief.

“It’s a complement to our ring that turns you into stone,” said Verity. “Maybe eventually we’ll collect one for each of the classical elements.”

Mizuki wanted to ask which ones those were, because the ones she was thinking of wouldn’t have included stone. All the attention was on Isra as she came back into shape, with the water on the floor pooling toward her. None of her clothes had stuck around, save for the ring, which was still on her finger. After thirty seconds or so, she was back in one piece, quite watery but recognizably human, if not recognizably Isra. There were even bubbles in the water where Mizuki suspected there were pockets of air within the human body. The lungs were quite visible.

The water form opened its mouth to speak, but nothing came out, so she stalked across the room and got a pencil and a piece of paper, where she wrote out a message.

“‘Testing in tub’,” Alfric read. “Shouldn’t you take the ring off to see whether you can go back to normal?”

Isra wrote more, then handed a sheet of paper to Alfric and went up the stairs, sloshing as she walked. She was, thankfully, not leaving any wet spots on the carpet or floor.

“‘Duration’,” Alfric read. “Valid point, I guess, it might only last for a limited time, or have a limited number of charges, or something like that.” He looked at the note again. “You know, I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen anything that Isra has written before.”

Verity snorted. “Her handwriting is about what you’d expect from someone who had a number of books but no formal education except what her father could provide, and not much access to pens, pencils, paper, or anything to write about aside from maybe a journal, which she didn’t have. Her handwriting is remarkable for where she comes from.” She took another sip. “I wouldn’t be doing half as well. And possibly don’t mention her handwriting to her.”

“I wasn’t going to,” said Alfric. He looked down at the paper. “I just … had never seen it before.”

“I’m going upstairs to help out,” said Verity. She stretched out, then picked up Isra’s wine glass, so she was carrying two of them. “I don’t think either of us is terribly invested in entad testing tonight, so you can continue on without us, at least until we finish.”

“Nuts,” said Mizuki once they were gone. She turned to Alfric. “So the question is, do I go upstairs to watch and see how she does in the tub, or stay down here with the shiny new entads?”

“Sounds like you’ve made up your mind,” said Hannah.

“True,” said Mizuki. She slid the glass fish bowl off the table and turned it over in her hands, then tentatively stuck the tips of her fingers inside it. She was thinking about that cauldron they’d gotten, and the way it would absolutely destroy anything placed within it. When nothing seemed to happen, she plunged her hand in, and felt it get wet, though there was no water. She moved her hand around a bit, feeling the slowness of movement through water, then took her hand out and looked at it. “It’s full of invisible or fake water or something,” she said. “Lame.”

“Let me see,” said Alfric.

“Wait,” said Mizuki. “This one is mine, and I’m worried you’re going to figure out something cool.”

“Then you’re taking your turn out of order,” said Alfric. “You did the armor, remember?”

Mizuki opened her mouth to object, then closed it and handed the fish bowl to Alfric. The worst part was that no one wanted to give her credit for being a mature adult and not arguing. While he was looking at the bowl, Mizuki picked the book up from the couch, where Verity had left it behind. She paid special attention to the table of contents, which seemed to list out all of the powers the book might possibly have, but there was no clear way to activate any of them. Chapter 6: The Bouncing Book, seemed like it might have some promise, but when Mizuki tried to bounce the book against the table, it just flopped down.

Alfric, meanwhile, was pouring a bit of wine into the bowl. It was behaving as though it was in water, diffusing and swirling around. He dipped his finger in and swirled it around, then extracted his finger and sucked the wine off.

“Wait, is that useful?” asked Mizuki. “Because I could totally have thought of that.”

“I don’t know that it’s useful,” said Alfric. He picked up the fish bowl and sloshed it around for a bit, then tipped it out into his wine glass, where the wine returned, undiluted. “It’s interesting though. This is my favorite kind of entad, the kind with no clear-cut use but a lot of possibilities.”

Mizuki stared at it for a moment. “So the wine was … not diluted?”

“It was falsely diluted, I think,” said Alfric. “Diluted by water within the context of the fish bowl, but you saw that when I poured the wine out the apparent water went nowhere.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki.

“I’m not sure I would agree that it’s interesting,” said Hannah. She had her own glass of wine, and had apparently been getting hot, since she’d unbuttoned the top few buttons of her shirt. “Might make a good art piece, if you like looking at things that look like they’re floatin’ in air.”

Alfric looked up at Mizuki. “Can I borrow some oil from the kitchen?”

“Sure,” she said. “Because oil floats on water?”

“Yes,” he nodded. He was smiling, mostly to himself, in a way that Mizuki found fetching. “We can get to the bottom of this.”

“I’ll go grab it,” she said, lifting herself up off the couch. Emperor followed her, and was rewarded with a treat once she was in the kitchen.

When she got back, Alfric was tipping the bowl upside down and then putting his fingers in, a process which apparently warranted quite a bit of repetition.

“Here’s your oil,” she said.

“I don’t understand this,” said Alfric. He set the bowl on the table, then dipped his fingers in, likely feeling the water and stirring it around. Then he dumped the bowl out — but it was empty, of course, so there was no effect — and set it on the table again, before dipping his fingers in. “It refills.”

“With fake water,” said Mizuki.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “Except it can also pour, as we saw with the wine. It’s going to have enormous edge cases, I can tell, and Filera hates those.”

“We probably don’t need to have her take a look at it,” said Hannah. She was tying her hair back in a ponytail. “Not goin’ to be much use, right?”

“Right,” said Alfric. He took the bottle of oil from Mizuki, and slowly poured a few drops into the bowl. They floated on the surface, with the absent water buoying them. “Fascinating.”

“Well, I might be out,” said Hannah, standing up. “Marsh wanted to meet for drinks at the Fig and Gristle.”

“Aw, you’re out too?” asked Mizuki. “But this is tradition.”

“It’s a very new tradition, and it’ll survive a disruption,” said Hannah. “Besides, Verity is probably taking a bath in Isra as we speak, so if you want this to be culture buildin’ for the party, you’ll need to get those two in line.”

“Are you fine if we test the rest without you?” asked Alfric. “I did want to get it done today.”

“That’s fine, ay,” said Hannah. “I do enjoy it, and it’s a good tradition, but I also think the two of you take the most joy from it, though both for your own reasons.”

“Have fun with Marsh,” said Mizuki.

“Oh, I will,” said Hannah. “There’s a good chance we’re comin’ back here, though we won’t be chattin’, and there’s also a chance that I go home with him instead, so don’t wait up for me, or reset on my account.”

Once Hannah had left, Mizuki and Alfric were left alone, with only Emperor for company.

“Alright,” said Mizuki. “We’ve successfully cut the dead weight from this operation.” She rubbed her hands together. “It’s open season.”

Alfric was peering at the fish bowl. He tapped his fingers against the side. “What secrets do you possess?”

“Is that your way of saying you’re stuck on the fish bowl?” asked Mizuki.

“Yes,” said Alfric. He was holding his gaze on the curve of glass. “I’m enraptured. Do you think we have a fish somewhere?”

“There used to be a pond out back, but grandpa took the fish when he left.” said Mizuki.

“Shame,” said Alfric. He looked around the living room, trying to find something he could dip into the bowl.

“Well, if you’re doing that, then I’m doing something new,” said Mizuki. She looked at the table, where the pile of entads was rapidly dwindling. It had been so much work for so little, in the end, especially since they hadn’t found any good replacements, aside from maybe the skull armor. There was only a scroll case and a pot left, and Mizuki didn’t have high hopes for either of them. She picked the scroll case, because the shape of the pot still offended her.

It was leather, though it had metal pieces to it, some which seemed to be for ornamentation, some which seemed like they were structural. It was a fine piece, as scroll cases went, though Mizuki only knew the first thing about scroll cases, which was that they were cases for scrolls. She wasn’t even sure that she’d ever seen a scroll case before, or a scroll. The metal was something yellow and shiny, and looked like gold to her, though Alfric had said that dungeons were incapable of making ‘true’ gold.

When Mizuki opened up the case, she was mildly disappointed to see that there was nothing inside, though she wasn’t sure what she had expected. She looked around for something to put inside, and absent-mindedly petted Emperor while she did so. Eventually she picked one of the few remaining grapes up off the snack plate and put it in the scroll case, then closed the scroll case and counted to ten. When she opened it back up, the grape was still there.

“Aw,” she said. She tried other things, somewhat slowly, but she felt like what she really needed was a proper scroll to put inside.

Alfric, unfortunately, figured out the weirdly shaped pot all on his own, with no help from Mizuki. It could ‘recompose’ things that had been damaged, for example by a cut, and there was no reason whatsoever that the entad should be pot-shaped. A cut up grape, placed inside, would reassemble itself into proper grape shape, and Alfric seemed excited about it, because it was a new and unique magic, as all entads were. Mizuki liked his unabashed and unashamed excitement about the entads, which was a side of him that she only rarely got to see. Alfric was a man who liked facts and figures, and relating concepts to other people in a somewhat dry way, but there was a light in his eyes when he was entad testing.

“It still doesn’t make sense that it’s a pot,” said Mizuki, giving the pot a critical eye. “I’ve pretty much never put things in a pot and wanted them to come back together. And the shape is offensive.”

“Yes,” said Alfric. “I think we’re going to need an entad storeroom, like the Vertex has, but once we have one, we can keep this out of your sight. Or under a cloth, maybe, would that work for you?” He grinned at her.

“Hmm, maybe it should have its own room, one with a lock,” said Mizuki. She took another drink of wine. “Or we could dig a little burial pit for it in the backyard.”

“Oh yes,” said Alfric. “‘We’ could dig a pit. You’re trying to rope me into more work, aren’t you?” He came to sit down on the couch next to her, his various testing apparently done.

“I know you like to have something to do,” said Mizuki. “Besides, I can think of worse things than you, in the backyard, shirtless, digging a hole for an ugly, worthless pot.”

“You’d be at your customary spot in the window then?” asked Alfric. He gave her a nudge, and she nudged him back.

“I already apologized for that,” said Mizuki. She’d felt awkward and creepy about it, but she’d talked about him being shirtless, and had invited the mention of it.

“It’s fine,” shrugged Alfric. He smiled at her again, in a way that more effectively communicated it was fine than any words could do. “Do we need to talk about the body merging thing?”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. She swirled the remaining wine in her glass. “Nope.”

Alfric leaned back. “Alright, good. Or you could talk to Hannah.”

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “Hannah is great, but I hate the structured cleric stuff. It always feels so fake to me.”

“Real emotional understanding should be spontaneous,” said Alfric. “Is that it?”

“I guess,” said Mizuki.

“Certainly preferable, I think,” said Alfric. “But not always realistic.”

“I thought it was interesting, the body merging thing,” said Mizuki. “Absolutely no way would I have wanted to keep it, but for an hour or so, sure, and I do wish we’d gotten to play around a bit more.”

“And when you say play around,” said Alfric. “You mean … ?”

“No, no,” said Mizuki. “Just … it was a new body, I wanted to run and jump and swing a sword. I wanted to fly through the air and taste different magic and all kinds of other things, which I didn’t really get to do. I know you weren’t a fan, but for me it was a new frontier, you know?”

“I guess I understand,” said Alfric. He was frowning a bit.

“Like, I grew a full foot, I had so much more strength, it was neat,” said Mizuki. “It’s like if I could turn into a dragon, right? I would love to turn into a dragon, or a cat, or whatever, just for the experience of it.”

“Do you … think that I’m two feet taller than you?” asked Alfric.

“What?” asked Mizuki. “Oh … no, I don’t know, whatever the math is, I was taller, that’s all I’m saying. If I just had that, an entad that made me taller or shorter, I would be a different height every day.”

“Ah,” said Alfric. “I guess I do see.” He paused for a moment, then drank more of his wine. “Well, what do you want to do with the rest of the night? Seems like it’s just you and me.”

“One second,” said Isra. Mizuki turned and saw her coming down the stairs. Her hair was damp and she was wrapped in a robe, with the rest of her clothes apparently having been shed. She was no longer made of water, so that was something. “Verity and I will present our findings tomorrow, but it seems pretty useful for a fisherman, a sailor, or someone who does underwater dungeons.” She placed the ring back on the table. “It came off just fine. Verity and I will be retreating to our room for the evening, like the polite young ladies we are.”

“She’s going to have a difficult time tomorrow if she’s hung over,” said Alfric. “Tell her to drink some water.”

“I’ll take care of her,” said Isra. She left as quickly as she’d come, bare feet padding back up the stairs.

“Where were we?” asked Alfric.

“The rest of the night,” said Mizuki. She looked at the stairs again. It was nice for Isra and Verity that they had paired off, but it did make the house a bit more lonely sometimes. And with Hannah gone, it was just her and Alfric, which … well, they decidedly weren’t paired off, as much as he was attractive and competent and charming, and as much as those thoughts seemed to go through her head, and for all that his jokes often felt like flirting. “I think I’m going to go get some reading in.”

“Yeah?” asked Alfric, raising an eyebrow. He looked at some of the debris on the table from the plate of snacks. “I guess I’ll clean up then.”

“No, we’ll clean up together,” said Mizuki.

“You know I love work,” said Alfric. He was in a good mood, perhaps because they’d done two dungeons that week, or maybe because of entad testing, or possibly just that he’d had enough wine to loosen him up.

“Well, I secretly hate you,” said Mizuki. She got to her feet and patted Emperor on the head. He raised up slightly, as though he was unsure whether they were going somewhere. “So I’ve made it my life’s mission to deprive you of work.” She looked at the table. “And here’s where I would pick up a bunch of wine glasses in a hurry and abscond with them at full speed to the kitchen, but I actually do think that would be dangerous.”

“Safety talk,” said Alfric. “See, that’s how I know you don’t secretly hate me.”

Once the dishes were done, Mizuki went up to her room, and did try to get some reading done, from an introductory book on wizardry that Kell had loaned her, but it was hard to focus. She was feeling lonely, which she was perfectly well aware was a ridiculous thing to feel when you were in a house full of people you’d spent most of the day with.

Perhaps the wedding was weighing on her mind. Bethany was getting married to Jo Pedder in just a few days, and it was bringing back up some memories. For some stupid reason, maybe because they were friends, Mizuki had agreed to help Bethany with some of the things that needed to be done for the wedding.

Chapter 115 - Autem Mort

There was a part of Isra that felt good when Verity was gone, and she didn’t particularly like that part of her. It was a feeling that was hard to put into words, but she had been getting better about putting abstract things into words lately, and practice made perfect. When Verity was gone, it felt like there was suddenly much more time, more world to explore, and while Isra loved Verity, deeply, she also loved the sense of, well … freedom, she supposed. It wracked her with guilt though, to think of Verity being gone as ‘freedom’, but it was the sensation that came through her, if she was understanding her own emotions correctly.

The two days that Verity was gone had blown by. Isra had a talk with Bethany about the upcoming wedding, which was approaching with all the grace of a pig in heat. Isra was going to do everything in her power to make the wedding as good as she possibly could, and Bethany seemed both surprised and delighted. There were limits on how much the animals would listen to Isra — how much she could control them —, especially a large creature, but she was fairly confident that she could have Bethany ride into the temple on the back of a bear, and have an enormous flock of birds to finish the ceremony.

“I’m almost on the verge of being able to get the birds to sing,” Isra had said. “But I don’t think it’s there, and I don’t want to risk it.” With a flock it was a din of squawking, and she’d managed to get a group of just five birds singing something only a little pleasant for just a bit. If you liked the noise of birds chattering at full volume, that was just fine, but most people didn’t like that, including Isra.

“I think it’s going to be wonderful,” Bethany had replied. “And thank you so much for keeping the weather clear, we’re going to be outside for the reception, and it’ll be a disaster if it rains.”

It was fun to be around all those people at the Pedder farm, and Isra had even gone in to look at the hogs for a bit, which had resulted in her telling the Pedders that a few of their hogs had problems that were worth looking into. She hadn’t said which hogs, or how to fix them, until she’d secured payment, but once that matter was out of the way, she had pointed a few things out. An outbreak of fleas could be prevented with the application of citrus, a chronically upset stomach could be alleviated with some yogurt, and a third could fix some urinary problems with a diet of cranberries. It was all small stuff, but they had been suitably impressed, and that had been worth more than the money. She’d given them a good deal, if she understood such pricing right.

The two days that Verity was gone passed quickly. Isra had been enjoying temple days, and this particular time, it had been a sermon from a cleric of Kesbin that was visiting for the wedding, a rather prominent cleric, if what Hannah said was anything to go by. The cleric of Kesbin was a small man, maybe four and a half feet tall, but he spoke with a sonorous voice, loud enough that he could be heard even toward the back of the temple. The sermon wasn’t one of what Hannah called the ‘stock sermons’, which for Kesbin were usually about death or austerity, but instead a twisting narrative about cutting yourself free from the constraints that are holding you back.

Kesbin wasn’t one of Isra’s favorites, largely based on what she had read in the holy book when she was growing up, but the sermon was comforting in a way she hadn’t expected. She came to understand that there was a framing of her journey where Kesbin — or the ideals of Kesbin as espoused by his clerics — played a central part. Growing, for Isra, meant stripping away everything that she didn’t like about her life, leaving things behind, not just the cabin in the woods, not just the life she was supposed to have lived with her father, but her entire way of interacting with people.

They talked about the sermon over the course of a late brunch, which this time was something called biscuits and gravy. Isra had thought she’d misheard or misunderstood, but no, it was several biscuits in a bowl with a sausage gravy poured over them, exactly as the name suggested. It was good though, with sage and other spices, creamy gravy with light biscuits, and there were all the usual suspects on the side, bacon and eggs, toast and jam, so much food that Isra ended up eating too much. She loved brunch.

“Seemed a bit untimely, with the wedding comin’ up, and with him bein’ one of the clerics,” Hannah had said. “And I agree, it’s the worthwhile part of Kesbin, lettin’ go of attachments that aren’t so good for you, but when you give a sermon, you’re always thinkin’ about context, ay?” Hannah liked to hold forth on religious matters, especially secret aspects to being a cleric. Isra quite enjoyed it. Expertise wasn’t something you got to see every day. It was like getting to peek behind the curtain at an opera.

“Context … meaning the wedding?” asked Mizuki. She had been busy buttering her toast.

“Just so,” said Hannah. “When you give a sermon, even a stock sermon, you think about who you’re givin’ it to, what they might be goin’ through, and so on. If there’s some big hullabaloo about somethin’, and your sermon can be taken as commentary, then it will be taken as commentary, whether you like it or not. That’s juxtaposition, it’s very important, and I wish that Verity were here, because she’d understand it from a readin’ perspective.”

“I almost never see her reading,” said Isra.

“Well, no,” said Hannah. “For her, readin’ is an expectation, a duty, since it’s one of the ‘womanly arts’ or whatever it was she called them. Pickin’ apart a book for its themes or motifs, teasin’ at structure, relatin’ it to other works, that’s what she was trained in, and we have that in common, though the focus of my learnin’ was, naturally, serious study of the gods. Still, I think she’d appreciate the idea that context is of vital importance.”

“So you’re saying that this was a deliberate choice?” asked Alfric.

“No,” said Hannah. “I’m sayin’ that if it wasn’t a deliberate choice, then it was ill-considered. And it might have many meanings, ay, because it could have communicated that the marriage was a poor match, or it could have been a way of sayin’ that when you come into a marriage you leave things behind. But I took the bad meanin’ from it, mostly down to tone.”

The evening was spent with Vertex, ‘helping’ to ‘test’ some of their new entads from a successful dungeon run, which led into a nice time chatting by the fireplace as the night grew chilly. Isra was called upon to demonstrate her druidic powers, to much amazement, which was a feeling that she was really starting to enjoy. The cat, Mr. Tabbins, was quite compliant once he’d been given a special treat of cheese, and did a number of increasingly impressive tricks for the captivated audience.

Then the next morning, Verity was back.

The concert hadn’t been quite the success that the first one had been. There were fewer seats filled, in spite of the glowing reviews, and while there were still more than enough people to make it a quite profitable venture, there had been something foul hanging in the air at the Parson house. There had been a few minor mistakes during the performance, things that only professionals would be able to pick up on, but Verity’s mother had heard about them from confederates, and they had become a topic of discussion during that final night Verity was staying there.

“She was horrible about it,” said Verity. “I tried to be understanding, but she was so mean, as though digging her claws into me was the way that she was going to make everything better. And she was fighting with my father, largely about the issue of his business, in a way that echoed through the house, enough that I could hear it from down the hallway. He was screaming at her, and she was screaming at him, and there was just nothing that I could do about it even if I wanted to, because they were both right and both wrong.” She shook her head. She seemed on the verge of tears. “Then mother came to me, and … I think it was the worst fight we’ve ever had, worse than before I left.”

“How so?” asked Isra.

~~~~

“The next concert needs to be perfect,” Verity’s mother said. She was fresh off a fight with Verity’s father, and something had shattered, possibly from being thrown, though it had been difficult to hear. It wasn’t clear which of them would have done it, since both were shouting. “I need you to spend time practicing, not going out into dungeons where you might be killed. You have a duty to this family, you were raised by us to be a proper girl, and this insolence you’re displaying, the lack of care and respect you give to this family, cannot stand.”

“I’m my own person,” said Verity. Her lips were drawn into a thin line. “I’m doing these concerts, aren’t I?”

“I can keep track of how often you practice, you know,” her mother replied. There was a sheen of sweat on her brow and a few hairs were still out of place. Normally she was perfectly put together, but the fight with Verity’s father had knocked more than just a few hairs loose. “We can see when you play the lute, and we know that you’re not putting time or effort into practice, not like you should.”

“I am,” said Verity. “And if I weren’t, that would be entirely within my right.” She was feeling a mix of fear and anger. The sound of something shattering was still with her, and she worried that it might happen here. Her mother had never been violent, but her father hadn’t either, and one of them had been responsible for the sound of broken glass. “You do not own me, you do not control me, I’m performing for these enormous crowds as a favor to you, because I really do think that this family is worth something.” That feeling was leaving her though, and as she said it, she could see the lie.

“I need you to perform,” her mother replied. “To do better than you did tonight. Attendance was worse this time, and it’ll be worse the time after that given your lack of care and effort tonight, and —”

“You should count yourself lucky that I’m doing it at all,” said Verity. She grit her teeth. “From now on, I’m not staying here. I’ll get a hotel in the city, that I pay for myself. We don’t need to speak to each other.” It came out angrier than she’d wanted it to. The words had been planned, brewing, marinating, for at least a month.

“You cannot treat me this way,” Verity’s mother said. She drew herself up even straighter, like a boar rearing up for a charge. “I am your mother.”

“That means nothing to me,” said Verity. It was a barb, meant to be cruel, and it wasn’t even true. Perhaps the family wasn’t worth trying to save, but it was still her family, and she did still care.

“Do you understand what will happen to you if you leave us destitute?” her mother asked. She was leaning forward. “I will have no reason to stay in Dondrian, no money to stay in Dondrian. So I would come to you, and live in Pucklechurch with you, and if you don’t like me, then you should think about how much more you would see me.” She leaned forward, teeth bared. “I would have the time to help you work on yourself.”

Verity screamed, a single sterling note, and the bardic magic flowed out.

Her mother screamed and clutched her head, stumbling back and then fleeing out the door. Bardic magic worked on what was there, amplifying it, multiplying it, and Verity had picked her targets with the aim to inflict real damage. The fear and sadness inside her mother had been spiked, possibly up beyond what she had ever felt before, twisting like a knife. This, Verity hadn’t planned, but she had been angry, and in the moment, had given it her full force, like a slap across the face.

Her mother didn’t come back.

~~~~

“In the morning, it was like it had never happened,” said Verity. “She took me to the warp point, where my transport was waiting, and we barely spoke more than a few words to each other. No apologies, no recriminations, no litigation of what had happened. I felt incredibly guilty, and I suspect she did too, but it’s hard to say.”

“Will you do what you said?” asked Isra. “Stay in a hotel, stop speaking with her?”

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “Yes. If I can manage. What she said though, that she would stay in Pucklechurch out of pure spite, made me feel like there’s no possible way that we could ever reconcile.” She let out a shaky breath, and for a moment it seemed like she would be fine, but then the dam broke, and she started crying.

“Shh, it’s going to be okay,” said Isra. She had learned, from Verity, that sometimes people just wanted to hear something good. “We’ll get through this, we’ll leave if we have to.”

When Verity had finished crying, she pulled back and wiped her nose and face with a handkerchief. “I had never done that before, used bardic magic against someone.”

“It’s good to know that it works,” said Isra.

Verity shook her head. “I’m never doing it again.” She sniffed.

“I don’t think it was a terrible thing to do,” said Isra. She kissed Verity on the nose. “You were angry with her. It’s good you showed that anger.”

“It was like hitting her,” said Verity. She shook her head.

“Sometimes, some people need to be hit,” said Isra. “You shouldn’t feel bad about it.”

“You can’t do that,” said Verity. “You can’t just punch someone because they were making you angry.”

“Why not?” asked Isra.

Verity looked at her. “Are you asking because you don’t know?”

“I …,” said Isra, at a loss for words. She wasn’t exactly sure why she’d asked, whether it was rhetorical or not. “If someone was treating me like your mother treats you, I would think about whether hurting her might make her stop. She uses propriety as a shield.”

“There was nothing proper about that fight,” said Verity. “Sorry, it’s just … I feel wretched about what I did, and I don’t want to be told that it was just and right. It wasn’t.”

Isra didn’t fully understand, and tried to be okay with that. There were, in life, things that didn’t make sense, like biscuits and gravy, and her way thus far had been to wait until the mystery would some day resolve itself, or to ask questions that would illuminate something that everyone else took for granted. But here, the guilt that Verity obviously felt seemed misplaced, and Isra had no idea what, if anything, she was supposed to do about it.

They had spent the rest of the day together, and largely talked about how they’d passed the days while they worked on the garden, which was now late enough into the season to be bearing some actual produce. Isra talked about the wedding, and what she was planning to do for it. They were all pitching in, one way or another. Isra had expected that Verity would offer to play something, though the music was already secured for both the ceremony and the reception, but she said nothing about it.

Two days passed with the quiet rhythms of the house staying about as they had been. The blocks they’d taken from the dungeon were sold in Liberfell, which took very little time, as they were unloaded by a merchant with a telekinetic entad. Isra went shopping with Verity, and that did seem to cheer Verity up, mostly because fashion was an area of expertise for her. By the time they were returning home, Verity’s mood seemed to have lifted, and over dinner, she seemed genuinely happy.

Then the next day was the wedding, and Alfric woke them all early.

~~~~

“Alright,” he said as Verity was still yawning. “This is my second time through the day. The wedding is just after lunch, so we’ve got some time, but there are things that need to get done, and we’re the ones that are going to do them.”

“Why us?” asked Verity, having finished her yawn.

Alfric smiled. “You all volunteered,” he said.

“If I ever find the girl who roped me into this, I’ll give her a piece of my mind,” said Verity.

“You don’t want to help?” asked Isra. “Bethany is a friend to the party. She runs our wardrobe.”

“I don’t want to help in the morning,” said Verity. She looked at Alfric. “But I will, obviously. I just don’t want to. I want to go back to sleep.”

“I’ve scheduled a nap for you, plus you have your napping entad,” said Alfric, nodding. “And there should be coffees all around, the water is heating up now.”

“Lovely,” said Verity. “How can we help?”

“Mizuki, flowers,” said Alfric, turning to her. “The florist was delayed thanks to a ley line problem, which meant that Isra had to help with scrounging up flowers from the countryside, and it wasn’t quite what Bethany wanted. One of our jobs will be to fly far to the north, put the flowers into the garden stone, then fly back. It should be about four hours round trip.”

“Four hours in the air by myself?” asked Mizuki. “Deal.”

“Hannah, clerical intervention,” said Alfric. “It turns out that the cleric of Kesbin has designs on the bride, and while he won’t make a scene, it’s something that you can politely let him know isn’t going to happen. He made his attempt in an undone day, and it didn’t work out. Bethany doesn’t want a confession from him, doesn’t want to know about a confession, and he agreed that he’d rather the whole thing just didn’t happen.”

“Wait, but we get to know?” asked Mizuki. “I’m not sure that seems fair.”

“It was one of my conditions,” said Alfric. “No secrets from the party. So yes, this is the kind of thing that you shouldn’t gossip about.” He turned to Isra. “No bear. It was a bad idea. The birds worked out well though. We’re going to go with a moose instead, I believe that was part of your original plan.”

“The reason I wanted a bear instead of a moose was that a moose would be harder to find,” said Isra. She crossed her arms. “I suppose I volunteered to find a moose and bring it back to Pucklechurch?”

“You did,” smiled Alfric. “You looked at a map and said that there was a lake some miles to the south that might have one. I’ve already got word out to Xy, and she’ll cart you to the right area.”

Isra felt a bit uncomfortable about that, given their recent history. Xy hadn’t actually come between Isra and Verity, not in a real, tangible way, but Isra had been left with a sense of threat, the odor of a rival in the air. “I can get you a moose, or at least try. They have a large range. And if I can’t?”

“Then we’ve got backup plans,” said Alfric. “In the worst case scenario, there’s no animal involved, which would be fine.”

“None of this seems like it was worth undoin’ the day, ay?” asked Hannah. “Unless the bear mauled someone.”

“It pooped in the temple,” said Alfric. “And it also made some people nervous, a few children were crying. Bethany had liked the idea, but so long as we’re changing things, this was one of the things that needed changing.”

“So why’s the day been undone?” asked Hannah.

“There was a fight,” said Alfric. “A portion of the Pedder clan wasn’t invited, apparently, and they crashed the wedding, which resulted in a brawl among the tables. We had clerics there for healing, but it was the closest I’ve ever seen to an actual act of war. Also, the pigs were over-salted.”

“Not the pigs!” said Mizuki.

“I’ve already dealt with that though,” said Alfric. “I made it to the Pedder farm just after the witching hour, when they were getting ready to put the pigs in the pit, and talked to them. They had accidentally added twice the salt they meant to.”

“Sounds like this wedding was cursed,” said Mizuki. “Are you sure we should be messing with it?”

“Look, if all this work can’t save the wedding from being a disappointment, then it doesn’t deserve to be saved,” said Alfric. “But there’s work for us to put in, and you all agreed to do it. Obviously you can back out, but I don’t expect you to. Once it’s done, we can sit back, relax, and enjoy the festivities.”

“There’s nothing for me to do?” asked Verity.

“You’re with me,” said Alfric. “We’re going to talk to the errant Pedders, partly as muscle, partly so I can explain things. We’re leaving soon, with Pa Pedder and the boys. If the fight breaks out there, that’s okay, we can get everyone patched up and be back in time, we just don’t want it at the reception.”

“So you’re taking me to a fight,” said Verity. “And I agreed to that?”

“There are other things we need to do along the way,” said Alfric. “You did offer.”

“I suppose I must have,” said Verity with a frown. “But this is all we’re getting for disclosure? You spent the day with us.”

“I did,” said Alfric. “There’s not all that much to talk about. We had a calm morning, went to the ceremony, then the reception, then home. Ate some salty pork, drank, danced, watched the fight break out, watched the life of the party be snuffed out, and then planned for how we would fix it all.”

“Who’d I dance with?” asked Mizuki.

“Me, mostly,” said Alfric with a nonchalant shrug. “The youngest of the Pedder boys danced with you, and I think you exchanged words, but you didn’t offer up anything, and I didn’t ask.”

“But we had fun?” asked Verity.

“The whole party was a bust,” said Alfric. “So in part, we’re doing this for ourselves. But we’re also doing it for approximately five hundred people who want to have a good time.” He looked at Verity. “We should get going soon.”

“Alright,” said Verity. She leaned over and kissed Isra on the cheek. “I’m grabbing my coffee first though.”

Everyone filtered off to do their own things, and Isra was left alone in the kitchen, eating a cold breakfast of ham and pickled eggs. She did like the idea that their party was going to single-handedly save a disastrous wedding, but she didn’t particularly like that they were splitting up to do it.

Xy came by the house not long after Isra had finished her cup of coffee.

“Xy,” said Xy, holding out her hand. “I’m not sure we’ve really met?”

“Isra,” said Isra, taking the hand. “So … how are we doing this?”

“Here,” said Xy. She held up a fist-sized gem, green with hard edges, like an emerald. It was capped on either point with metal, and at the top was a chain. “You’re going to get inside this.”

“Entad?” asked Isra, raising an eyebrow.

“Yes,” said Xy. “You’ll be totally safe, it’s actually pretty cool. We’ll zip along, you’ll capture the moose, then we’ll come right back, and it’ll all be hunky-dory.”

“You can transport a moose?” asked Isra.

“Before this morning I couldn’t,” said Xy. “But the Pedders have an entad for animal transport, moving hogs and stuff, so it should be fine. Now, I looked at a map and we’re going way to the south, about forty miles?”

Isra hesitated. “I’m not sure how easy it will be to find a moose. I’m only going off what I know. They do come up near Pucklechurch now and then, but their range is more southern.”

“Well, we’ll figure it out,” smiled Xy. “Are you ready? We’ll still be able to talk as we go.”

“Talk?” asked Isra.

“If you want,” said Xy. She looked Isra over. “Do you look different from the last time I saw you?”

“I don’t know when the last time you saw me was,” said Isra. She was standing back, still in the doorway. “But yes, I probably do look different.”

“Suits you, whatever you did. Also, can I go pee real quick?” asked Xy. “Always better to run on an empty bladder.”

“Sure,” said Isra, opening the door. “It’s upstairs, to the left.”

Xy stepped into the house, making no pretense of not being curious, and stopped dead when she saw the three dragons, who were all tussling with each other in the living room, as they sometimes did.

“Herb dragons,” Isra explained. “We took them out of a dungeon when they were just eggs.”

Isra reached out with her mind, pushing a bit of herself into Lerial, the largest of the dragons. Almost at once, she disengaged from the play-fighting and hopped up onto the couch, then went over to sniff at Xy. Isra watched Xy through the dragon’s eyes, smelling through the dragon’s nose, and when Xy reached out a hand, nipped at her finger with the dragon’s mouth.

Xy was pretty. One side of her head had the hair cut short, like a freshly reaped field of wheat, and the boyish way she dressed, with overalls and heavy boots, had its own particular appeal. Her smile was infectious, her eyes bright and expressive. Isra could see the appeal.

“I would love to play with one of these when we come back,” said Xy. “If that would be okay?”

“If you want to,” said Isra. “There’s also a dog.”

“A dog?” laughed Xy.

On cue, Emperor came down the stairs, and Xy instinctively backed away from him before taking him in. It was harder for Isra to get in Emperor’s head, maybe because he was so smart, or possibly because he was resisting her in a way that most animals couldn’t. Even when she tried her older methods, talking to him as though he was a person, he had an instinct to rebuff her, and she had mostly stopped trying. Still, Emperor was a smart dog, and had four hundred years of training, so he held out his paw for Xy to shake.

“Amazing,” she said. “He’s huge.”

“He’s a dungeon dog,” said Isra. “Not ours, we’re just keeping him for a bit.”

“He’s a good boy,” said Xy, patting his head and then scratching him behind the ears. “But I really do need to pee, and then we need to get going so we’re not late for the wedding, sorry for taking time with your pets.”

It was another few minutes before they were ready to go, and by that time, Isra had warmed to Xy, if only a little bit. The idea that she was a competitor, an animal that might disrupt the mating process, was starting to fade away. Mostly she seemed like a happy, pleasant girl with a lot of energy and enthusiasm for life.

The gem was entered by encircling it with your fingers, and once she was inside, Isra was looking out on the world from within it. She was like a figurine trapped in green amber, though there was no tint from the outside. Her positioning was strangely still, the floor not tilting as the crystal swung at Xy’s hip, and for a moment it was unsettling, but once Isra closed her eyes, the nauseous feeling went away.

“Alright, we’re ready,” said Xy. She was out of the house and looking down the road. “Some people get sick, but if you do, just close your eyes.” There was something almost scratchy about her voice, but it did come through to the crystal just fine, even if other sounds didn’t.

“I already did,” said Isra. “I can see through the animals though.”

“Oh, right, druid,” said Xy. “I forgot that you have a bunch of special powers.”

Isra watched from a crow’s eyes as Xy took off down the road. She was fast, faster than even the flying helm, whose speed sometimes felt ludicrous. It was almost so fast that Isra couldn’t find something to watch her with fast enough, since by the time she had located a bird in the right area, Xy would already have almost passed.

“It’s so fast,” said Isra.

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Xy laughed. “On an open road, pointed directly at a ley line, I can get up to ninety miles an hour.”

“What happens if you crash?” asked Isra.

“We don’t,” replied Xy. “Once I’m up to speed it’s all instinct, and instinct is never wrong.”

This was perhaps meant to be reassuring, but in Isra’s experience, instinct could be wrong quite often. She saw it with animals all the time, especially the smaller, jumpier ones that would dart away at the slightest sound. Instincts could save an animal’s life, but they were wrong quite often. It was entirely possible that a cartier had different instincts, something that would never fail to save them as they whipped past fields and towns, but this was magic, not true instinct. As fast as she was going, if Xy ran into a tree, her body would be shattered and broken — but apparently that never happened, and if it could happen, then people would probably not work as cartiers.

“I’ve heard you’ve been traveling a lot,” said Xy. “Over to Plenarch, up to Dondrian?”

“And to Liberfell,” said Isra.

“To me that’s hardly travel,” said Xy. Now that she was moving, her voice was different, caught by the wind and given a rhythm by the thumping of her feet against the ground. “Ten minutes or so from here to there. But I was going to ask how you like it, being in different places. From what people’ve said about you, you spent your whole life in the woods near Pucklechurch.”

Isra thought about that, especially about the phrase ‘people have said’, wondering which people, and why they might be talking about her. She knew why though, she was a druid, and she’d made a splash at the Gardening Club, she’d been talking to people, she’d demonstrated her powers when there was a dungeon escape — it would be weird if they weren’t talking about this mysterious girl from the woods with power over animals and plants, especially when she’d been showing off. But a part of her was still worried that she was being weird in a bad way, and that people were saying bad things, privately scoffing at her naivety.

“Plenarch was good,” said Isra. “Dondrian was a bit overwhelming. It’s hard to know a city from just one visit.” She hadn’t actually thought that she would be talking with Xy all that much.

“Oh, I agree on that,” said Xy. “And a city isn’t just one place, it’s a bunch of places all together, a bunch of neighborhoods and districts and things. I love to travel though, you always get to see new things, new people, new foods — I wish that it were easier for other people. But you’re dungeoneers, you’ll get a lot of travel in.”

“We will,” Isra agreed. “I want to see the jungles.”

“Jungles are great,” said Xy. “Deserts too. A year ago I did the cartier grand tour, went all around the world over the course of about two months.”

“Wow,” said Isra. “You run over water?”

“You can run over water,” said Xy. “But you need to be going at least seventy miles an hour, and that’s not always possible, especially with a headwind, so if you’re crossing the ocean and the winds change, you slow down, your feet start sinking into the water, and then that slows you down more, and eventually you’re swimming, which doesn’t work for cartiers. Then you have to warp and hope that someone has a warp point set up in the ocean, or you’re going to die.”

“That happens?” asked Isra.

“You’ve gotta be pretty dumb to run across the ocean without a plan,” said Xy. “I’ve done it, but it was pretty dumb.”

“Then why do it?” asked Isra.

“Just to be free,” said Xy. “Feel the wind in my hair as I raced across salty water, watched some fish below me … I don’t know, you just do, you know? I loved it. I was off by myself, between nations, no one for miles, and there was a point where I was sure I was the only one in the entire hex. Go anywhere, do anything — ugh, it was great. Super stupid though.”

“You’d do it again?” asked Isra.

“Run across the ocean?” asked Xy. “Yeah, sure, I’d just be smarter. And now I’ve got an entad to take me home, so I wouldn’t drown.”

“That takes the fun out of it,” said Isra.

“Yeah,” laughed Xy. “You get it.”

For a time, Isra was silent, watching the run through the eyes of birds but not offering much in the way of conversation. Sometimes she would try to hold onto an animal’s vision for as long as possible, watching as the leaves settled in Xy’s wake, but she could only do that for a few minutes at most. The trees must have been zipping by Xy so fast they were a blur, but Isra didn’t open her eyes to look out of the crystal, worried that it would make her sick.

“So, you and Verity?” asked Xy as she sped over a lake. Isra was watching from the eyes of fishes, looking up to see the splashing steps and rippling footprints.

“Yes,” said Isra.

“Hope I didn’t make things awkward,” said Xy.

“No,” said Isra, though that didn’t feel entirely honest, and she felt a twinge of guilt.

Isra could see the attraction that Verity had felt, and in fact, felt a bit of it herself. Xy was comfortable in her own skin, divorced from society in a way that was easy to envy, confident and sure-footed. It was, in some sense, what had attracted Verity to Isra, though that wasn’t who Isra was anymore, and probably wasn’t who Isra had ever been. She hadn’t been fearless and confident, she’d been stand-offish because she knew that she didn’t know the right words, stoic because it was easier not to show her confusion.

They talked more, but about less serious things, like the animals of the world, and some of the exotic things that Xy had seen in her time traveling. There were odd animals in the world, some of them benign dungeon escapes, some of them more likely natural, odd plants that had been allowed to grow and take over, a type of desert moss that carpeted a specific desert in Tarbin, a cherry tree that grew a hundred feet tall in Kiromo, enough details to fill Isra with a secondhand wanderlust. Isra offered what she could, but she could only match the breadth of Xy’s experience by her personal depth of knowledge about the area around Pucklechurch. Xy was a good listener though, and responded with enthusiasm.

They arrived at the lake as Isra was explaining about the local ‘naked’ hares, which would shed their fur when a predator came too close. She came out of the crystal, feeling momentarily unsteady on her feet, and Xy helped to steady her.

The lake was a wide one, though it couldn’t hope to rival the Proten Lakes, and Isra spread her essence out wide, in a way that she once would have called ‘looking hard’. She looked through the eyes of birds, sending them high into the air to get a good view, and was starting to despair before she saw a moose moving through the shallow water on the banks of the lake, pondweed in his antlers.

“There,” Isra said, pointing across the way.

“So, what, do I need to run you over there?” asked Xy.

“No,” said Isra. “The moose will swim.”

As they watched, it made its way through the water, splashing about. Isra was digging deeper into its mind. It was odd how helpful it was to know how druid powers functioned, how giving different names to the processes could help her grow her ability.

“Come along,” she said as the moose drew near. It was feeling some fear at the sight of them, though more wariness than outright terror. They were smaller than it was by a good margin, and if it had wanted to, it could stomp them to death. Isra was confident that it would listen to her instructions though, and she did her best to get him to understand that they were friendly. “We’re not going to hurt you, we’re friends, we just want to take you for a little trip. You’ll get plenty of treats, fruits and flowers, and then we’ll bring you right back here.”

“Does it help to talk to him?” asked Xy.

“Yes,” said Isra as the moose drew near. “He doesn’t understand the words, but can sense what I want from him.” It was more complicated than that, but the metaphor was still alluring, and it was what Isra had the most practice with.

“So it’s like being in bed with a foreign girl,” said Xy. She gave Isra a grin.

“Does that … work?” asked Isra, her mind momentarily off the moose. “You get someone in bed without sharing a language?”

Xy laughed. “Eyes on the moose, please.”

“He’s fine,” said Isra as the moose came up to them, striding out of the water. He shook his fur, getting only partially dry, and it occurred to Isra that they would need to give this moose a bath and a brush to get him looking nice for the wedding. He seemed compliant enough though, now that he was close enough, and Isra pressed her hand against his muzzle, trying her best to feel a connection that a year ago, she would have mistaken for something else.

“You make overtures,” said Xy. “Find a pretty girl with a Garos pin, lay your hand on hers, pull her up to the dance floor, talk with expressions and put on a big smile to show you’re having a good time. Language is nice, but I’ve found that it’s secondary, most of the time. You can travel through a country where you don’t speak a single word, it’s not all that hard. Helps if you have a phrase book though.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. She looked up at the moose. She was worried that it was too tall, but they needed something big if Bethany was going to ride it. The antlers were nice and fuzzy, but the moose had a slight limp from a broken bone that had never set right, and a few of the moose’s teeth were rotten. “We’re going to get you some help, that’s another part of your payment.”

“Payment … to a moose?” asked Xy.

“It’s rude to take him from this place,” said Isra. “So we offer payment for his service.”

“Druid thing, then?” asked Xy.

“I suppose,” said Isra. “It feels right to help those who help you.”

“I won’t argue with that,” said Xy. “I was offered some food and a good party, along with my usual, if I helped out today. I guess the moose deserves some fair wages too. Can I put him in the conch?” She was already reaching into her travel bag, and pulled out a shell.

“Go ahead,” said Isra.

Xy pressed the conch against the moose’s nose, and he disappeared, momentarily leaving four gaps in the water where his hooves had been.

“The Pedders told me that the animals actually like it, though I don’t know how they’d know,” said Xy.

“I can’t sense it,” said Isra.

“Well, are you ready to head back?” asked Xy. “I think we’ve got a lot of time left, but there’s a moose to clean.” She smiled at Isra, then narrowed her eyes a bit, as though thinking about a tough problem. “You and Verity are exclusive?”

“Yes,” said Isra. She swallowed. “We should get back.”

“Of course,” said Xy. “We’ve got a moose to prepare for a wedding.”

Chapter 116 - Wedding Bells pt. 1

Verity was skeptical about going to confront the Other Pedders. They had crashed a party, yes, and there had been some kind of large brawl with upwards of three dozen participants, but she didn’t quite understand how Alfric intended to resolve it peacefully by going with a gang of hog farmers to confront the wedding crashers. They weren’t bringing a cleric along either, and Alfric was the only uninterested third party aside from Verity herself. Conflict resolution was not, so far as she knew, his strong suit.

They had nine people with them, including Alfric and Verity. It was Jo Pedder (the groom), his brothers, a few of their friends, and the Pedder family patriarch. Alfric had said that it was a gang of twelve that had come to the wedding, almost all of them Other Pedders, distant cousins to the groom. Alfric thought that when they went to the Other Pedders’ farm just north of the hex border, there would probably be fewer, which would help avoid things going south. Few people wanted to pick a fight when they were badly outnumbered.

Verity had seen the Pedder boys around, and Mizuki had pointed them out on temple days once or twice. They were all cast from the same mold, well-muscled men with coiffed auburn hair, thin noses, and full lips. She wouldn’t have said that any of them were conventionally attractive, but it was hard for her to tell, with men. Mizuki, at least, had at one point been quite taken with ‘the boys’. They were wearing their work clothes, not the formal wear that they would get into later, and that, more than anything, led Verity to believe that Alfric was the only one hoping that a fight could be avoided. That was, if Alfric was hoping to avoid a fight.

The Pedders were angry, and Verity listened, trying to get some sense of what the dispute actually was between these branches of a large family tree. The topic at hand was mostly the current offense, crashing a party, but the reason that these Other Pedders hadn’t been invited to the huge wedding seemed largely to be a result of a decades-long feud between them, and not inviting them was a slight, especially given how large the wedding was. The slight was, to hear Jo tell it, entirely deserved.

The farm was a large one, with a house that might have bordered on being a mansion if it had better styling. Certainly it must have had a dozen bedrooms or so, but in spite of its size, it was fairly rustic, with clapboard siding and simple shingles on the roof. As they came down the walk, Verity saw people appearing in the windows, and before their group reached the house, people were already spilling out of it.

“Let me do the talking, at least at first,” said Alfric. “I need to let them know what I know.”

“Fine,” said Jo. He cracked his knuckles.

“We’re going to try talking first,” said Alfric. If the impending violence bothered him, he wasn’t showing it at all.

An old man with white hair and a sunken face came out from the house, pushing aside some of the men who had come out before him. He wore dirty overalls, but the others treated him with deference, and Verity had to imagine that he was the counterpart to the man they called Pa Pedder. He had to be at least in his eighties.

“What are you pissfarts doing on my farm?” the old man asked.

“I’m Alfric Overguard,” said Alfric. He was twenty feet from the front porch of the house. His voice rang out like a bell, clear and confident. “I’m a chrononaut. On a prior version of today, you went to disrupt the reception of Jo’s wedding, and there was a brawl between the two sides of the Pedder family. I wanted to make sure that doesn’t happen tonight.”

“Five hundred people,” the old man said. He pointed a gnarled finger at Pa Pedder. “And you think that you can get away with that kind of snub?” More men had come out onto the porch, and they certainly looked ready for a fight, though it was still early in the morning, just after breakfast.

“It’s our right to invite who we like,” said Pa Pedder. “If you don’t act like family, you don’t expect to be treated like family.”

“How are those hogs treating you?” the old man asked. “You’re sitting on a silver spoon and pretending you ain’t.”

“This house,” said Pa Pedder, gesturing at the enormous building. Verity had no idea whether all these men were part of a multi-family living situation, or whether some of them were farmhands. “Filled with your spawn, poor as ever.” That seemed to answer that question.

The two sides had started moving closer to each other. Verity kept counting the numbers, and it seemed like her side was outmatched. She wasn’t going to actually fight, and Pa Pedder was at least in his sixties, if not older, so he was probably out as well. Looking at the opposition, there were at least a dozen of them, and they were unrolling their sleeves and removing jewelry, clearly preparing for a fight.

“We can still solve this without violence,” said Alfric. He was still the furthest one forward. “I’m here to try to mediate. If we can come to some kind of agreement on what a resolution looks like —”

“I don’t even have any idea who you are,” said the old man on the porch. “You’re a chrononaut? Hired by them, more like, once they got wind we were coming.”

“No one hired me,” said Alfric. “I’m just here to make sure that the reception goes smoothly, and I’m hoping that we can do that by talking it out.”

“We’ve already done this once,” said Jo, stepping forward to stand next to Alfric. “We put you in the ground.”

One of the men on the porch stepped down and came closer to Jo and Alfric, and Alfric held out a hand. “Seriously,” said Alfric. “We did put you in the ground. You got your arm broken. Todd, right?”

Todd hesitated. “Bullsnot,” he said. He looked at Jo. Their resemblance was undeniable, though the man, Todd, seemed a bit larger. “I’ll break your face right now.”

“You try it,” said Jo.

Todd was the first to act, rushing forward to punch Jo, and it didn’t connect, but that was the signal for the two sides to rush at each other, throwing down in the dusty area in front of the porch.

Verity began her song, which she’d been waiting on. She hadn’t brought her lute, but she had her voice, and clapped a hand against her thigh, which was more than enough to get the magic flowing. She put half of it into Alfric, amplifying his strength and verve with the combined power of the party, and she watched as he grabbed Todd’s arm. Alfric’s elbow swung down on the outstretched arm and bent it the wrong way with a snap of bone, and Alfric pushed the man away, looking for someone else.

It was very quickly difficult to tell who was who, especially given that they all bore something of a resemblance to each other, Alfric excepted. Verity sang a song of strength and modulated it with the rhythm and flow of the fight, giving strength to her side when they were on the offensive, then trying to make their opponents as weak as kittens when the tide shifted. It was difficult work, and the effect wasn’t as strong as she would have liked, but it was still force multiplication, which Alfric had always said was a bard’s job. Verity tried to think of the strength like a lever that she could switch off and on, making all the fighters weak or strong as she pleased, and soon she had gotten into a rhythm with it.

Her work didn’t go unnoticed for long, and one of the men came toward her, fists clenched and murder in his eyes. She kept up playing with a stoic expression, because that was what she’d been trained for. Alfric grabbed him by the back of his shirt, yanked him to the ground, and then punched him hard in the stomach. By the time he had started throwing up, Alfric was on to the next person.

Many of the fighters ended up in the dirt, some of them from a heavy hit, others wrestling down there, getting covered with dirt and sweat as they tried to get each other into locks or holds. Alfric stayed on his feet, throwing haymakers and lifting people up and tossing them to the side, using their own weight against them. People started giving him a wide berth, but he would race at them, too fast to be stopped, and usually land a hit that left them gasping for breath. He grabbed someone who was on top of Jo and punched them in the kidney, then threw them to the side and helped Jo to his feet.

The fight didn’t last long. In Verity’s limited experience, no fight did. Fighters got gassed and needed a break, and even if it was possible for them to pace themselves, there were only so many times you could get hit before tiring out. Some of the ones who’d been knocked to the ground stayed there, groaning or trying to catch their breath. Eventually, it was just Alfric and Jo, and Jo was unsteady on his feet, up only because Alfric kept pulling him up.

“Are we done here?” asked Jo. He was barely able to stand. “Or do we need to say it louder for the people in the back?” He was bleeding from his nose, bad enough that it was dripping down his chin.

“Go,” said the white-haired man, still up on the porch.

Alfric hefted Jo up, then they both vanished.

Verity felt anxious as they walked back down the road. Some of the boys needed support, and so there were limping pairs. She didn’t really understand what was to stop someone from coming after them now that Alfric was gone, but maybe Alfric had a better grasp of the psychology at play. The whole thing had seemed brutal, and while she liked brutality, it was also soaked in a machismo that she didn’t fully grasp.

Dueling was the closest thing they had in Dondrian, but that was more formalized, and never between large groups like this. People had grievances, and they settled them through violence, which wasn’t a terribly big deal so long as there was a cleric nearby or available through the warp, and so long as the guards weren’t cracking down on it. She hadn’t witnessed too many duels in her life, not street duels, anyway, but it seemed to her that some people needed something to do with a boiling rage that they were feeling, and sometimes a good fight really did seem to get it out of their system.

“Are you okay?” asked one of the Pedder boys. Verity had been introduced to them quickly, and wasn’t entirely sure that she could tell them apart. She thought this one was Fernard, who everyone called Fern.

“Fine,” said Verity. “I used to go watch bare-knuckle fights on occasion, in Dondrian.”

“And this was like that?” asked Fern. He was bleeding by his ear, and was cradling one hand.

Verity laughed. “No offense, but Alfric was the only one with anything like proper training. I’m sure that wasn’t your first fight, but professional it was not.”

“Well,” he said, looking at the carvings that marked the hex border. “If anyone asks, I was moving around like a tiger, alright?”

“Okay,” smiled Verity.

They all did the warp together, then moved over to the temple, which was nearby, so that the clerics could render healing. Verity came with, having nothing better to do. She was looking forward to her scheduled nap, but wanted to see how Alfric was doing.

“I’m fine,” he said. He was sitting on a bench in the main temple area. “I’ll need healing, but I wanted to keep the clerics open for the others when they came.”

“I was surprised that you used the dagger,” said Verity.

“Jo got it bad,” said Alfric. “I was worried he would collapse. Better for him not to take the hit to his ego or standing, not on his wedding day.”

He had scratched on his face, and was clearly going to be nursing a few bruises if the clerics didn’t get to him. Verity sat down beside him on the wooden bench. “Did you think that was going to end in a fight?” she asked.

“I was pretty sure it would,” said Alfric. “I’d already seen it play out once. Sometimes people are spoiling for a fight.” He shrugged.

“Were you spoiling for a fight?” asked Verity.

Alfric looked at her. “It’s not that different from dueling,” he said.

“I was thinking that,” said Verity. “But I also find dueling to be fairly stupid.”

“Are you okay?” asked Alfric. He was watching her closely, intent in a way that threatened to raise her hackles. But this was Alfric, and as much as he could take down men and monsters alike with enormous violence, he was only looking out for her.

“Did Isra tell you about my encounter with my mother?” asked Verity.

“No,” said Alfric. “I only know that you had a fight, since that’s all you told me. Was there more?”

“I shouted at her,” said Verity. “I used bardic magic, putting in as much negativity as I could. It was bad. Worse than if I had struck her, I think.”

“Ah,” said Alfric. “And you’re drawing a line between this and that?” He gestured with his fingers, making a little arc in the air.

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “I’m considering it. I’d have liked that entire brawl better if they had come to us, if there had been no provocation. It would be more defensible, more righteous. Instead, we went to them.”

“True,” said Alfric. He shrugged, then winced at the motion. “It’s just a fight. It’s normal, more or less. No one was actually hurt, not that I saw, or they were hurt but not in any way that a cleric wouldn’t be able to handle.”

“I felt awful for doing that to my mother,” said Verity. “I still do. I wish that it could have been like this, where you boys just fight, and it makes things okay somehow.”

“This solved nothing,” said Alfric. “It’ll contribute to the feud, even. But it will help the wedding to go off without a hitch.”

“I suppose,” said Verity.

“Hopefully,” said Alfric. “Fingers crossed.”

“Did it feel good, to fight?” asked Verity. She had never taken much damage to her body. Alfric’s knuckles were raw, scraped and bloodied.

“Yes,” said Alfric, straight and to the point. “I’ve said before that fighting a person isn’t really at all like fighting a dungeon monster, but it gets the heart pumping in the same way. I think having you along for extra power probably wasn’t strictly within the rules of engagement, but we were there to send a message.” He wiped a bit of blood from the corner of his mouth.

“Ah yes,” smiled Verity. “The ‘rules of engagement’ for a farmyard brawl.”

“There are informal rules,” said Alfric. “No one really wants to hurt anyone else, so you avoid the head, you stay off those who are down, you don’t use weapons, or entads, and arguably not magic.”

“I saw you punch someone in the face,” said Verity. “Last I checked, that was a part of the head.”

“I had an opportunity,” said Alfric. “Also I was outnumbered.”

“And you don’t think anyone is going to get in trouble for the fight?” asked Verity.

“It’s like a duel in Dondrian, I think, under the discretion of the guard,” said Alfric. “I don’t know the local custom.”

“Local custom is to call the men who do this sort of thing idiots,” said Filera, who had moved over to the bench where Alfric was sitting. “Do you mind if I diagnose you?”

“Be my guest,” said Alfric, holding out a hand.

She didn’t take the offered hand, instead touching him on the side of the face. “What I’m looking for is brain damage, which would explain why you involved yourself in a brawl.”

“Funny,” said Alfric. He waited patiently, not moving, a statuary look that he often had when Hannah was checking him over.

“If you’re asking about local laws, which you should do before committing crimes, this is the sort of thing that’s frowned upon,” said Filera. “But for the most part, no one will come after you, not unless it was unprovoked or there was some serious damage to person or property.” She brought her hand down from Alfric’s face. “You’re fine, but you’ll need Oeyr unless you want to be a walking bruise for the rest of the day.”

“Thanks,” said Alfric. “I was just trying to prevent an altercation.”

“So you brought a group of angry men with you?” asked Filera. She rolled her eyes. “You can admit that you wanted a scrap.”

“I actually already had a scrap, in an undone day,” said Alfric.

“So you wanted two?” asked Filera.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “I think if we’d gone in with mediators, it might have been easier, but this way, there’s no harm, and … I think it’ll make things better, overall.”

“Better?” asked Verity. “How?”

“You’ll say that it’s dumb, and it is dumb, but those guys went out and had a fight together, and I think there’s some camaraderie in that,” said Alfric.

“You’re right,” said Filera. “That is stupid. I believe you’re up for healing now.” She nodded to Hannah, who was coming over with a frown on her face.

“Don’t I patch you up enough when we’re in the dungeons?” asked Hannah. She clucked her tongue. “You boys.”

“I take no blame for my gender,” said Alfric. “Besides, I know you’re good in a scrap.”

“And was I scrappin’? No, I was not,” she said.

“How did the other matter go?” asked Alfric.

“Well enough,” said Hannah. “Not a thing to talk about in public, but well enough.” <Switching to party channel in the interests of privacy, I s’pose. I talked to the cleric of Kesbin, Li, and he seemed suitably abashed. Apparently he’d been writin’ letters back and forth with Bethany for some time, and the marriage caught him off guard, which I suppose Alfric must already know.>

<Aw, I think that’s sweet,> said Mizuki. <You have to try, right?>

<Absolutely not,> said Hannah. <Under no circumstances do you need to confess your love to someone on their wedding day.>

<Unless you’re the one marrying them,> said Verity.

Hannah was quite aggressive in her look of scorn. <There’s no reason that he couldn’t have done his confession earlier.>

<This was his last chance,> said Mizuki. <I just think it’s kind of romantic, that’s all. And if Bethany was thinking that she was making a mistake, if she just needed an out —>

<Well, she wasn’t thinkin’ that, was she?> asked Hannah. <Because Alfric already saw how it played out. Ay?>

<It’s not a good way to conduct interpersonal relationships,> said Alfric. <I agree with that.>

<You’re all no fun,> said Mizuki.

<Nothin’ fun about it,> said Hannah.

<Are you almost ready to pick up the flowers?> asked Alfric.

<Screaming through the air as we speak,> said Mizuki. <And then I’ll be back with a few hours to spare. Did you beat up some people?>

<He crushed them,> said Verity.

<Nice,> said Mizuki. <Is there any problem that violence can’t solve?>

~~~~

The party sat together for the wedding, in a place of no particular prominence. They were all wearing their temple best, which for Mizuki meant a long cream-colored dress with pink flowers embroidered so they looked like they’d been splashed onto her. Her hair had been done up with Hannah’s help, a nicely symmetrical style with two buns resting beside each other at the back of her head, and she was wearing makeup, which she normally skipped. She was feeling good, overall, though she had a little tightness in her chest when she looked to the front of the temple and saw Jo.

Jo was wearing a long-sleeved dolman, red silk and cotton with so much ornamental trim that in other circumstances it might look pompous. Whatever kind of trouble he had gotten in that morning, he was now all cleaned up, and she didn’t have a problem admitting that she saw the appeal. There was, maybe, some world in which he’d be waiting up there for her, and while she didn’t wish that was how it had shaken out, a touch of sorrow had landed on her heart, soft as a butterfly.

The temple had been rearranged for the event, and almost all of the benches were in use. Garlands of red flowers hung on them, which Mizuki had gone through quite a bit of flying to get, and there were more flowers surrounding the altar that the ceremony would be performed in front of.

Bethany came in on a giant moose, which had been cleaned, groomed, and fed. It was only able to fit through the main doors of the temple, and then only just, with Bethany having to briefly duck beneath the frame of the door. She wore a crown of flowers and a white dress with panels of two-toned green, and enough trim around the low neckline to look of a kind with Jo’s extravagance. Mizuki had offered her the sword that made eyes and hair glow, but Bethany hadn’t thought that it would fit in with their color scheme, which was largely reds and greens.

Mizuki tuned out a lot of the ceremony once Bethany had been helped down off her moose and it had started in earnest. They had picked Xuphin for their select god, a very traditional choice, which meant that Pann, the seven-foot-tall cleric, was giving the brief sermon about the marriage compact. In theory, you could choose any of the gods as your select god, but Mizuki had never heard of anyone picking Kesbin.

<Hey Hannah, what does a wedding with Kesbin look like?> she asked. It took a moment for her to remember that Hannah was not, in fact, sitting with them, and was instead up at the front of the temple with the rest of the clerics. <Oh, sorry.> Hannah had a serene, pleased look on her face, but she was looking at Mizuki in a way that felt somewhat like it held murderous intent. You were supposed to be able to talk during temple sermons, so long as you did it through the party channel, and kept it short, but maybe the rules were different for weddings.

Mizuki’s eyes went to the clerics up at the ceremony, and settled on the cleric of Kesbin. He was a short man, almost certainly having shortened himself in glory to his god, much in the same way Hannah had symmetricalized herself. He was young and attractive, freckled and clean-shaven. If he was experiencing any inner turmoil, he was doing a good job of hiding it. It was bad for anyone to have an unrequited crush, but it was especially bad for a cleric of Kesbin, since they were supposed to have pretty extensive training in letting go of things that weren’t good for you, or that could never come to be. She didn’t pay too much attention to sermons, but she’d paid enough mind to understand that. She hoped that he would be okay. Kesbin was God of Secrets and Silence, so she would have thought that a cleric would have that bit figured out. Then again, she also would have thought that he wouldn’t have fallen for someone unattainable.

She glanced at Alfric. He cleaned up nicely, she had to give him that. According to Verity, he’d been in quite the fight in the morning, though he had demurred and said that it was all down to the strength and fortitude of the Pedder boys. Mizuki found that somewhat unlikely. There was no trace of Alfric’s role in the fight aside from the way he’d winced when he sat down. Clerical healing couldn’t quite get everything, and she knew that sometimes in cases of ‘exuberant activity’ the clerics went a bit light on their touch, mostly in order to dissuade people from racing back out into danger.

Mizuki returned her attention to the front of the temple, where her mind was supposed to be. The sermon was reaching its end, and the knife had come out, held between the bride and groom. This had always been Mizuki’s least favorite part of a wedding, and she wondered how far they would go with it. The last wedding she’d been to had been just a pinprick, not even visible from the back rows, but given the extravagance of this wedding she suspected they’d go further.

When Pann was done talking, the bride and groom exchanged their own words. You were allowed to use stock expressions, if you didn’t feel good about speaking in front of a crowd, but the two of them had prepared short meditations on love and companionship, and the importance of the marriage union. There was nothing particularly profound about it, but Mizuki felt herself moved anyhow, maybe because she knew them both.

Jo took the dagger and cut Bethany across the palm, then she did the same for him, and they joined their hands together, grip tight, before kissing. Hannah came forward and healed them both, the blood pact over in only a moment, and without much in the way of complaint or wincing from either of them. It was a sharing of pain, a mingling of life, and a promise that they would see each other through good times and bad, and it felt too personal to Mizuki, like she was looking in on something private.

Then the clerics came forward, one by one, to say their own lines, to give blessings and power to the bond.

Mizuki had kissed Jo in the barn, pressed him down into the hay and laid her lips on his, like she was drinking him in. There had been a lot of flirting that got them there, and she’d only meant it as more flirtation, a teasing kiss, the weight of her body on him suggestive instead of a promise. That was how it had felt to her, anyway. To him, she realized only far too late, it had felt like they were boyfriend and girlfriend.

And now he was up by the altar, getting married, and though she hadn’t spoken with him except in passing, it was growing clear to her that he really had moved on, and maybe didn’t bear her any ill will anymore.

There was applause when the ceremony was over, and the bride and groom went down the center aisle together, hand in hand. A flock of white birds emerged from where they’d been waiting in one of the clerical alcoves and made a circle around the inside dome, then went racing out the door, all at once, just ahead of the couple. It was a lot, but they were starting their marriage in an ostentatious way, and it seemed to suit them.

Chapter 117 - Wedding Bells pt. 2

Hannah was keeping her eye on the cleric of Kesbin. She’d explained the matter to him, and he’d seemed properly crushed, but if he was the sort to give a confession of love to a bride on her wedding day, then perhaps he was also the sort to make a confession even after he’d been told that it was hopeless. Kesbin was in some way the odd god out, and his clerics had always been puzzling to her. That she and her party were the only ones who knew about his designs made her especially wary.

It was tempting to think of the situation in terms of Kesbin, but in that framing, it didn’t make sense. Kesbin was the God of Nothing. His clerics weren’t required to be celibate, but as a general rule, they were. They eschewed material possessions and emotional attachments. The stereotype of a Kesbin cleric was someone small, unassuming, simple, and somewhat boring. This was the opposite of that, and while she could understand forming an attraction that you’d never meant to form, Li should have been one of the people most suited to quietly dealing with it. If it had been too much for him to deal with, then he should have gone to one of his superiors or colleagues to talk with them. That he hadn’t done that spoke poorly of his character, devotion, and intelligence. Hannah was, therefore, keeping an eye on him.

Marsh had been her plus one, naturally, though there were so many people at the wedding and reception that it seemed like it might have been better to have a come-one-come-all approach. It was her first time seeing Marsh dressed up, and he did not, unfortunately, clean up all that well. He looked more like a wild animal had been stuffed into a double-pleated suit with gold buttons, and was now walking around with a sense of vague discomfort, like his collar itched and he wasn’t allowed to scratch it. Still, he had a special braid in his beard and had taken pains to tame his hair, which was something. Hannah was at that point where she was finding Marsh attractive even when he wasn’t doing anything in particular.

“I overdressed,” said Marsh, looking around. He was seated at a table with the rest of the party, the only interloper among them.

“Ay,” said Hannah. “There are five hundred people, hard to enforce a dress code on that many, and we’re currently in an unused pig sty.”

“Better overdressed than underdressed,” said Alfric. He took a drink of water. “You can usually dress down, lose layers, something like that.”

“Doesn’t work for women,” said Verity.

“If they wear dresses and nothin’ else,” said Hannah. “Nothin’ to stop you from pants and a jacket, some kind of vest, a scarf, that sort of thing.”

“Propriety,” said Verity.

“Yes, well,” said Hannah. “I s’pose.” She looked over at the cleric’s table, which was close to where the bride and groom were sitting. “Might be I should try to make room over there.”

“And leave me alone?” asked Marsh.

Hannah sighed and squeezed his hand. “You know the party well enough.”

“He does,” said Alfric. He took another drink of water.

“I think it’ll be fine,” said Mizuki.

“No one has told me what this is about,” said Marsh. He was craning his neck to try to see what Hannah was looking at, and she gave him a gentle tug on his collar to pull his attention back to the table.

“Well, that’s because Alfric didn’t carve out an exception for you,” said Hannah. “So I may tell you later, once the moment has passed, but I do take keepin’ things in confidence seriously, as a cleric should.”

“When’s food?” asked Mizuki. She was also craning her neck, but in the direction of the food line.

“You’re the one who said we should come here early,” said Alfric.

“Yeah, because I was hoping for food,” she replied.

“They’re coming up the way now,” said Isra. She took a sip of wine. There was an enormous volume of wine for the reception, crates stacked up to one side of the meadow, near the pit the pigs were being pulled out of. The table’s first bottle of wine was already almost empty, which probably wasn’t a good idea on empty stomachs. “A little bird told me.”

When the bride and groom came, there was a round of applause for them, and Jo dipped Bethany down for a showy kiss. She pulled him into her, and they almost tipped, but when they came back up they were both smiling, which was a bit of a relief after everything Bethany had said in the lead up. She hadn’t had doubts, exactly, but they’d rushed into the marriage, and it seemed like they were both aware of that.

Once the bride and groom were seated, there was more waiting. The food was being served in a buffet style, which somewhat took away from the fanciness of having courses, and their table was one of the last to be allowed to go. It was a salad, never Hannah’s favorite, but it had a nice blend of cucumbers and onions to go with the leafy greens, and a vinaigrette that was pleasantly tart and salty.

“I want pork,” said Mizuki. She was picking at her salad, and seemed to be eating it in protest, only out of sheer hunger.

“Is the food the main thing then?” asked Verity.

“For me, yes,” said Mizuki. “I mean I’m happy for them or whatever, but food and dance, that’s the big thing.” She pointed at the center of the table. “Did you see that? I’m pretty sure that’s a centerpiece that I made. Plus flowers I delivered.” The flowers were exotic, long-stemmed red ones with wide, yawning mouths.

“We’re all very impressed,” said Isra, who had guided an enormous moose into and out of the temple.

“The salad was good,” said Alfric. He looked over at Mizuki’s plate. “Are you not going to finish that?”

“Depends on how long until we get the delicious pork,” said Mizuki. “But fine, since you’re giving me those puppy dog eyes, you can have it. You promise me the pork’s not over-salted?”

“I caught it in time,” said Alfric. “Just barely. They got up early in the morning to put the pigs in, and if the witching hour had been just a bit later, there’d have been nothing I could do.”

“How do you end up with double the salt anyway?” asked Hannah.

“They were doing six pigs,” said Alfric. “The spice mix needed to be made in bulk. But apparently somewhere along the way there was a miscommunication, or maybe some unresolved disagreement, because the spice mix was supposed to have been made without salt, and the salt added later, but it was made with salt. And that meant double the salt they’d meant to put in.”

“Wow, that’s a great story,” said Mizuki. “An anecdote for the ages.” She laughed at her own joke.

“If a dungeoneer has to resort to stories about salty pork, something has gone wrong,” said Alfric. “It is interesting though, especially because it wasn’t immediately apparent what had happened. And we didn’t have that long to figure it out before the day was over, which was a big worry. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever had to work against the clock like that.”

“We’re up!” said Mizuki. She was first to rise from the table, and Hannah followed, with Marsh, as they went to the long line where people were getting food.

The pigs were the stars of the show, obviously, but there was food in ridiculous abundance, even considering that they were feeding around five hundred people. There were herby mashed potatoes with sage and thyme, roasted vegetables with a honey glaze, toasted buns studded with seeds, and a large bowl of cooked cabbage with onions, which was apparently a Sharpe family staple. Hannah tried to be circumspect in what she took, but Mizuki, who was just ahead, loaded up her plate, particularly with different portions of the pig, including an apparently-coveted ear.

When they returned to their seats, the table was momentarily silent, as people dug in. Someone had secured a second bottle of wine, and that was being passed around.

The food was delicious, which Hannah was mildly surprised by. The Pedders had roasted a pig for the town when the dungeon escape happened — coincidentally, the day of the proposal that led to this wedding — and it had been delectable, but she had expected that the side dishes would be more of an afterthought. Instead, someone had taken a lot of care when making fifty gallons of mashed potatoes, and the ratios had worked out in their favor, which wasn’t always the case with food made in bulk. Of course, there was also a band which had started playing during the first course, and it was customary to heighten a sense of flavor, which might have been working for the food.

“Nostalgic,” said Mizuki after she’d taken a bite of pig’s ear.

“You’ve had this a lot?” asked Alfric.

“Sure,” said Mizuki. “This is all Nance’s stuff, her mashed potatoes, her gravy. When my parents were gone, I used to come here once a week or so, by invitation, I think because she was worried that otherwise I would starve.”

Hannah looked to the front table, mostly to look for Nance, who she still only vaguely knew. Instead, she saw Li, the cleric of Kesbin, getting up from his seat, and she pushed her plate away to go to him, with her mouth still full of food. For a moment, as she made her way through the tables full of eating and chattering people, she thought that he was going straight up the wedding table, where Bethany and Jo were eating together, but instead he went out toward the open meadow. She followed him anyhow. She was the only one who’d talked to him about what he was feeling and what he had planned.

“How’s it going?” she asked once she’d caught up with him.

He had a glass in his hand, one for water rather than wine, though it was very clearly filled with a white wine. He didn’t seem drunk, or even tipsy, but clerics of Kesbin weren’t supposed to drink anything but water, and with as small as he was, she didn’t expect him to be anything but a lightweight. He had a shaved head and simple appearance, but there was sorrow etched on his face.

“I won’t say anything to her,” said Li. “If I didn’t do it before the wedding, then I won’t do it now.”

“Well, I just want to make sure that you’re solid,” said Hannah. “Or if you’re not solid, that you’ll get on your way there, in time.”

He was silent for a bit, his eyes on the hogs, which weren’t all that far away from where they were standing. “I don’t know that I will.”

“I hope I’m not discountin’ how you feel,” said Hannah. “But if you can fall in love over an exchange of letters, it seems to me that this likely isn’t a once in a lifetime occurrence. That there are other fish in the sea is almost certainly not what you want hear, but it might be necessary for someone to say to you.”

“We’re about the same age,” said Li. “I’m a bit older, I think. Right? I’m twenty-three.”

“Twenty,” said Hannah.

“I’ve been with the church for four years, plus all my time in the seminary. I know all the things that I would say to someone in my position,” he replied with a sigh. “And I do appreciate you talking to me, and the discretion you and your chrononaut friend have shown.”

“Can I help?” asked Hannah. It was, in her opinion, a bad question. Most people would say that they didn’t need help, even when they did, and people didn’t always know whether help was what they needed. But it was necessary, sometimes, to get someone to take stock of their own situation.

“When I heard that she was getting married, I panicked,” said Li. “Since this morning, and through the ceremony, I’ve been thinking about it, and I think that it wasn’t just about love. It wasn’t a crisis of love. It was a crisis of faith, or not faith, but purpose.”

Hannah nodded. She let him talk.

Li held up the glass. “Do you see this?” He looked at the flat bottom of it, and the rounded edges. “It’s almost perfect. A vessel meant to be filled with water, meant to be drunk from, meant to be washed. There’s no feature of it that’s without purpose. That’s what attracted me so much to Kesbin in the first place. There is an idea, prominent within the church, of winnowing things down until they’re at their most essential. You strip everything away until it’s pure purpose. And you don’t just do that to things, you do that to people too, and you don’t just do it to bodies, you do it to emotions and thoughts as well.” He looked at the glass in his hand. “It’s one thing to make a glass like this, which is built for purpose, or to say ‘if you do it, do it well’, but it’s another to say that we should diminish. Make a smaller cup, have a smaller body, temper your tastes. And then there’s the cut, inevitably. You go from eating a small dessert to eating none at all. A small glass of wine to just water.”

Hannah waited while he talked. He seemed to need to talk. When he was finally finished though, she was ready.

“We are not called to always move in step with our god,” said Hannah. “That way lies madness. Nor are we called to move in step with our church. It is enough that you feel devotion, that you understand Kesbin. Your miracles are proof enough of a good relationship with your god.”

Li let out a breath, then held up his glass. As Hannah watched, the wine within it slowly evaporated to nothing. He stared at it, puzzled, as though he hadn’t expected the miracle to work.

“Maybe what you say is true, that apostasy is permissible for a cleric,” he said. “But it’s not pure. If you say that you don’t walk in step with Garos, where does it end? What does it mean to say that you’re a devotee if you admit that the central tenets are untenable?”

“The tenets by whose measure?” asked Hannah. “I can’t say that I ever studied Kesbin too deeply, but how much of the things that trouble you are a matter of the church, and how much are a matter of your relationship with your god?”

“I — I don’t know,” he said.

“It’s a question that you can only answer yourself,” said Hannah. “And there may be things that you never see eye-to-eye with other clerics on, but as clerics, we’re not called to go past what we see as vital to our connection.” She hesitated. “At least, that wasn’t the orthodoxy that I was taught.”

“You might be right,” said Li. The sun poked out from behind the clouds, just enough for shafts of light to hit the meadow. That one of those shafts of light fell on the bride and groom couldn’t possibly have been a coincidence. Isra seemed to have a bad sense of timing though. “It hurts.”

“The loss of love, or the loss of faith?” asked Hannah.

“Both,” he said. “More the loss of faith, if I’m being honest. Knowing that my life up to this point might have been wasted, purposeless. That I might not actually be cut out to be a cleric at all.”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “Did you know that I’m not a proper cleric at the Pucklechurch temple?”

“Clerics talk,” he said with a wan smile.

“I had disagreements with the church about what it means to be a cleric, what parts of the book should be emphasized, what the essential connection is about, all that,” said Hannah. “I’m sure they’ve said, my leavin’ couldn’t have gone undiscussed.”

“No,” he replied.

“Well, I don’t think that’s quite what you’re goin’ through, but you’re a cleric of Kesbin, and if there’s somethin’ that you’ve been trained in, it’s lettin’ go of what you don’t need,” said Hannah. She gently took the glass from him and held it up to the light. “You think your purpose is to be a cleric, ay, and that may well be true, but you’re the one who decides what parts of bein’ a cleric hold purpose, and what parts can be cast aside.”

“You turned your back on the church,” he said. “I don’t know that I can do that.”

“Well, ay,” said Hannah. “The church will be somethin’ you need to keep in mind. Might be that they would get on your case about havin’ a husband or a wife, might be that they don’t like a glass of wine at night, or a whoop of excitement when a friend wins a race, or all sorts of other things. But the worst they can do is try to stick you in some forgotten corner of their church, and if that’s not what you like, then you can leave.”

She didn’t mention how painful that might be, to leave the church, or be cast aside. The pain was still there, with her, a rejection by the like-minded, but with time, she hoped that it would fade away to nothing. If she hadn’t been trying to give him counsel, it was the sort of thing she might have talked to a visiting cleric of Kesbin about.

Li regarded her. “I’ll have to consider it.”

“Oh, ay,” said Hannah. “No one figures important things out in a day, not the vital stuff. Now, there’s to be some dancin’, once the dessert is done, if we haven’t missed it already. I happen to know some girls who’d love to help you have a good time here tonight.”

~~~~

Alfric kept away from the wine. He wanted to be on high alert, just in case the Other Pedders came down the road, looking to get their comeuppance again. Fighting while drunk or even tipsy put you at an enormous disadvantage, save perhaps for the issue of courage. Isra was also on the lookout, with far superior senses, but she didn’t seem to feel the same sense of duty or urgency.

Dessert was a custard cake, done in layers, with a frosting and fruits on top. It was sweeter than Alfric normally preferred, but was apparently traditional in this part of the world. Overall, he’d been a bit shocked by how similar a Pucklechurch wedding was to Dondrian wedding, but Hannah, once she returned from talking to the Kesbin cleric, had the answer.

“It dates back to when the churches stopped their wars,” said Hannah. “The modern ceremony, now centuries old, was a bit of a compromise, a way of integratin’ the faiths together. For a lot of people, early on, the only time they’d see a cleric that wasn’t one of their ‘home’ clerics was at a weddin’, unless there was some need for healin’, which at those times meant you’d get a sermon.”

“That’s kind of how it is now though,” said Mizuki. “Getting a sermon for healing?”

“Well, ay, if you mean that clerics want to talk about clerical things while they do their work,” said Hannah. “Not the same, but I see what you mean, and that’s right enough. But in those days, when everyone was doin’ this big push for integration, it was a lot different. It took real, solid work to get people to stop hatin’ each other. Havin’ clerics up there to bless a weddin’ helped. Took some mystification out of things. But as I understand it, back then if you were a cleric of Garos in Xuphin country, you’d be livin’ in their church, under their protection, more a vassal than an equal.”

“I guess I’m glad we’re not in those days anymore,” said Alfric. “Don’t the other clerics get jealous when they’re not chosen for a wedding?”

“Och, no,” said Hannah. “No one believes that opinions on the clerics are neutral. People have their favorites, and groups have their favorites too. Some of the clerics get more use than others, for a start, and some of them are more human in their appeal. No, what clerics care about, generally, is makin’ sure that things are equitable, and that’s a more difficult and fraught thing.”

“Verity, Alfric, can I get your opinion on this dessert?” asked Mizuki.

“Why us?” asked Verity.

“I don’t know, I assume you do something different in Dondrian,” said Mizuki. “You’d never find this kind of thing in Kiromo, I don’t think.”

“It’s good,” said Verity. She’d already eaten most of hers, which was unusual, given she was normally a slow eater. “A bit sweet, I guess, and I keep expecting some spice that never really comes.”

“There’d be cinnamon or vanilla or … something,” Alfric agreed. “Cardamom, anise, something like that.”

Mizuki turned to Alfric. “We’re still good to go to Dondrian for this upcoming concert?”

“So far as I know, yes,” said Alfric. “We need to return Emperor one way or the other.”

“I’ll probably be staying with you,” said Verity. “Given what happened between me and my mother. I haven’t gotten a letter from her yet, but I imagine it’s coming.” She took a swallow of wine and shivered. “I’m ready to dance.”

“We’ve got some time yet,” said Alfric. “At least, if chrononaut weddings are anything to go by. I’ve been to quite a few of those.”

“Oooo,” said Mizuki. “Do tell.”

“Not much to tell, really,” said Alfric. “They’re smaller and more expensive, usually with a bit more magic to them, some catering, but still the same clerics and a service that’s more or less the same. There’s some reference to the pact, if it’s a pacted couple, which it almost always is.”

“Boo,” said Mizuki. “I was hoping that you had weird things. Like time things.”

“No,” said Alfric. “I mean, there are almost always people at the celebration that have been through it before, so there are never kinks that need to be ironed out, but that’s not all that weird. And there’s some disclosure too, I guess, but nothing out of the ordinary.”

“What’s a Tarbin wedding like?” asked Isra.

“If you’re asking me, I don’t know,” said Alfric. “Your father never said?”

“No,” said Isra. The word hung over the table for a moment. “Nevermind, I’ll try to find out later.”

“Come,” said Verity. She placed her hand on Isra’s. “I can see they’re getting ready to dance, and I want to be first on the floor.”

They made their way over to where parquet wood had spread out over the grass, almost certainly a result of magic. The bride and groom were getting ready, that much was true, and the band was wrapping up their song. All the plates were being cleared from the tables by helpers, and Alfric resisted the urge to join in helping, because he had, after all, done enough already.

“You said we danced together?” Mizuki asked Alfric. He nodded. “Would doing that again be a bother?” There was something about the way she was looking at him, a soft vulnerability, as though she was worried that he’d turn her down.

“I’d be delighted,” said Alfric. Once they were up, he took her hand and led her to the dance floor.

The first dance was reserved for the bride and groom, with everyone looking on, but for the second dance, everyone was invited. Alfric had, for some reason, expected to see some traditional dancing, but there was nothing of the sort, only a sort of disorganized mash of people moving about of their own accord. Later in the night there would be line dancing, which Mizuki had taught him the basics of a week before, and which he was relatively proficient at following the undone day.

They swayed to the rhythm, with Mizuki’s hands around the back of his neck, and his on her waist. It was barely dancing, really, at least not by the standards that Alfric was used to, and there was no expectation of form or style to it. He’d found it a bit awkward the first time around, but he had some confidence now, and she pressed herself against him, eventually resting her head against his chest as they swayed, like they were having an extended hug.

The undone days with Mizuki were becoming a bit fraught. Their innocent flirting had been fun, and it was still fun, but there was an undercurrent of seriousness to it, and there had been a few times when it had seemed like something might happen between them. He had been diligent in reporting what happened in undone days, but it wasn’t always clear whether or not he should tell her about things that hadn’t happened.

‘We were looking at each other while I was trying to glue something in place. You were holding the plank for me, and I moved close to you, and our faces were briefly aligned. I felt like you were going to kiss me, or I was going to kiss you, and then it didn’t happen.’ That was the sort of thing that he could have reported but almost never did, in part because it was so insubstantial. The one time he’d tried to talk to her about it, she had laughed and teased him, and he worried that it would only make her more bold and shatter the fragile balance between them.

“How was the flower delivery?” asked Alfric. The top of her head didn’t quite come up to his chin, and she was comfortably resting against him.

“Shhh,” said Mizuki. “No talk, only dance.”

So they danced there together, mostly silent, while the wordless music played on. It did feel good, and Alfric tried to let himself feel good, washing away all the other thoughts. That was easier when he’d had a glass of wine, but he was stone cold sober, and it was hard to stop those thoughts from washing in.

Alfric’s only experience with women, at least in a romantic capacity, had been with Lola. They had thought that they would be married someday, only ‘someday’ wasn’t a dreamy far-off future, it was a concrete anchor point in the future, a certainty. It would have been easy to frame it as something he’d never actually wanted, as something that had been placed on his shoulders by his parents … but he had liked the idea of a pact, before it had all gone wrong. He had been in love with Lola, and saw her as his future wife. Being at the wedding was dredging up some old feelings of connection, now frayed and tattered in the wind.

The song was over too soon, and Mizuki pulled away from him, leaving him feeling cold in the absence of her warmth.

The dancing wasn’t over though, it was just moving to something different, and Alfric found himself getting into line with the rest of the people on the dance floor. He had done this on the undone day as well, and while line dancing wasn’t something that he unexpectedly loved, he could understand the appeal. There were rote patterns and complex choreography, done in time with other people, and it reminded him of morning calisthenics or the drills that he’d run when learning to use a spear or sword. He enjoyed everyone moving as one, and the dance was better the second time through, now that he didn’t have to think so hard about what he was doing. He let himself move with the crowd, and this dance, too, went by in a hurry.

There was still no sign of the Other Pedders, and Alfric went back to their table to have a drink. The table had, as often happened at these things, been colonized by interlopers, in this case Xy, who was in a close conversation with both Isra and Verity.

“How’d the moose return go?” asked Alfric.

“Great!” said Xy. “The food alone was probably worth it. Actually, the confused look on the moose’s face was probably worth it. I kept imagining how it must have been from his perspective. If it happened to a person, it would be like being hypnotized into coming over, finding yourself in an alien world, being given a bath — which you’d never had before —, some healing for an injury you’ve had since forever, then dressed up and paraded in front of these strange creatures, and then finally dumped back home like nothing had happened.” She leaned back in her chair — formerly Mizuki’s chair — and stretched out.

“They don’t really think like that,” said Isra. “They don’t have the capacity to be intrigued, not any more than they can be intrigued by a strange-looking stick.”

“Well, that’s a shame,” said Xy. “I still like to think about it, and imagine how I would handle being plucked up and put into a new world.”

“And of course nothing like that will ever happen to that moose again,” said Verity. “If he could conceive of it, he’d spend the rest of his life thinking that it might happen again, and of course it won’t.”

“Well, I’m glad it worked out,” said Alfric.

“The trick was to get him to poop outside the temple first,” said Isra. “I should have done that with the bear.”

“I’m not sure that’s the right lesson,” said Alfric. He filled his glass of wine and drank from it. He wasn’t planning to have too much, but a glass and a half tended to put him in a more relaxed mood. Unless the Other Pedders showed up late, there was nothing for him to do with the rest of his day, aside from having a good time at the wedding.

Hours were spent alternating dancing and sitting back down at the table to talk to someone. Mizuki was a frequent dance partner, but he danced with Verity a few times, mostly because she knew the same formal dances as he did, and they could move around the dance floor together with a flair and style that reminded them both of Dondrian, in a good way, he hoped. Once they’d done that, Alfric’s proverbial dance card was full, and he took a number of women out to waltz, or sometimes to just teach them the steps.

When the sun began to go down, small lights were brought to each of the tables and placed within the vases that served as centerpieces, which were then wrapped with paper to make the light diffuse. It was a beautiful night, made better by the pleasant weather and the lack of insects, both of which they owed to Isra. The dance floor had magical lighting that was only revealed once the sun had set; skin glowed under the influence of unseen magic, meaning that the dancers produced light of their own. They looked a bit like ghosts to Alfric as they twirled around, ethereal in the chill night.

The children and their parents eventually left, and then it was just adults, with more dancing and partying. The dancing lines became less synchronized, more raucous, until eventually there was no point in dancing anymore, not in the sense of something that was structured. Instead, people moved their bodies to the beat of the music, chaotic and out of tune.

The sun had fully set when Verity produced her lute as if from nowhere and went to sit with the band. This wasn’t something that had happened on the undone day, and Alfric watched with interest. The band began to play, and Verity along with them, producing so much sound that she had to push her voice to be heard over it. So far as Alfric knew, this was Verity’s first time playing one of her own songs before a large crowd, more than just the patrons of the Fig and Gristle. It was quite ribald, enough to send up titters from the crowd, and by the end, both the bride and groom had a blush on their face. Alfric was halfway convinced that the entire reason Verity had decided to do a song was to rhyme ‘Pedder’ with ‘bed her’.

It was late at night when they all agreed to go home. Alfric hadn’t gotten more than a bit buzzed, but Mizuki was sloshed, and he helped support her on the long walk home. It was extremely late, well after midnight if he was reading the moons right, so late that he doubted he’d be able to get up in time for the witching hour. Still, the day had been a complete success, and Alfric felt no small amount of pride in that.

He helped Mizuki up to her room, where she immediately collapsed onto her bed. Emperor climbed up there with her, and she gave him some lazy pets.

“I’m never getting married,” she said. The walk and the cold air had sobered her somewhat. The slur in her speech was still there, but much fainter than it had been.

“No?” asked Alfric. “When did you decide this?”

“On the walk home,” said Mizuki. “Seems like a lot of work, marriage.”

“Don’t invite five hundred people?” asked Alfric.

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “The other stuff. The whole forever thing.”

“Ah,” said Alfric. He felt mildly uncomfortable being in her room like this when she seemed like she was minutes away from falling asleep. It felt like he was intruding in a private place. She came into his room often, especially on undone days, but he hardly ever stepped foot in the house’s master bedroom.

“I screw things up,” said Mizuki. She lifted her head and looked at him. “I don’t know if you knew that?”

“I don’t think that’s true,” said Alfric.

“Well,” said Mizuki. She flopped her head back down. “It’s true. Did you see that Fern talked to me again, same as yesterday?”

“The undone day,” Alfric corrected. The night had grown chilly, and he was awkwardly standing at the door. He wondered whether he should move in and sit in the chair beside the bed, or on the bed with her, but stayed where he was. “You didn’t tell me what he was talking about.”

“Oh, just saying that he wished it had been different,” said Mizuki. “I don’t know why I’d have hid that from you.”

“It wasn’t that you hid it, it’s that I didn’t feel like it was my place to ask,” said Alfric.

“It was the way he said it,” said Mizuki. “Like I was his first love and he was still heartbroken about it. Like he was never going to get over his first love, but he’d tried to make peace with it? And all I had done was kiss him under the apple tree, and it felt like such a small thing at the time, I guess, like I was being fun and cute and whatever. I didn’t know I was his first love until they started fighting.” It was her third time repeating the phrase ‘first love’, which Alfric attributed to drunkenness. “That’s me. Just doing things, because whatever.”

She was still for a long moment, and Alfric couldn’t see whether her eyes were open or not.

“You’re a good friend,” said Mizuki. “Good night.”

“Good night,” said Alfric.

“Help get me out of this dress?” she asked.

Alfric hesitated.

Mizuki let out a laugh. “I’m kidding.” She let out a breath. She was nearly face down on the bed. “See, this is why I love you, you’re so easy to tease.”

“Goodnight, Zuki,” said Alfric.

“Night Alf,” said Mizuki. She laughed to herself, then just lay there, unmoving.

Alfric was left wondering whether, if he hadn’t hesitated, she would have pushed him further, if he’d have helped her undress and then she’d have laid there in her underthings, asking him for more help. That seemed to be her way. To his mind, it was all fun and innocent flirting, until the point when it wasn’t.

He held for a moment at the door, then turned away and went to bed.

Chapter 119 - The Brave Knight Gave

Verity wouldn’t have said that she was happy with the concerts, but she had definitely grown a bit more relaxed. The first one had been the worst, largely because she was being pulled around from place to place. She’d had her legs waxed, her eyebrows trimmed, been shoved into a dress, had her hair pulled into shape, her makeup done, all kinds of things that made her feel as though her body wasn’t her own. All that was still going on, but this time she knew what to expect, and she was doing it on her own, without her mother, which made it feel better somehow, as though she’d deliberately elected to do all this. In a way, she had, and she kept that in mind. It was easy to be angry with her mother, to resent the intrusion, but it was much harder for Verity to be angry with something she’d chosen for herself. And when she was on her own, she was her own advocate, making her own decisions about what was good and what wasn’t, how she should look for the concert, what image she wanted to present.

There had been, in some sense, more pressure when the party had been there. She cared more about those four people than about any of the two thousand some others in the theater, and it didn’t seem to matter that they collectively knew next to nothing about music, nor that they had heard her practicing these same songs six hours a day for an entire week. She was glad that they’d come, but their presence had added something to the performance that was a bit unwelcome.

The second performance of the same concert should, in theory, have been the easier of the two, but the songs were of such a high level, and the lute so demanding, that having successfully performed the pieces for an audience once didn’t result in much reduction in the stress of it all.

Verity had heard from career musicians who worked in the pits at plays or operas that after enough times playing the same song, you began to enter into a dissociative state, where your body went through the motions all on its own, as if you were both instruments, a machine like her father was still seeking to make, one which played what it was told to play, music as if from nowhere. Verity had never experienced that, but it was what she craved, flawless execution that came from rote memorization, rather than the bundle of nervous energy that sometimes seemed to have her holding onto the thread of the song with only a weak grasp.

Backstage, she couldn’t stop tapping her feet. She could hear the crowd of two thousand people, possibly more, all of them talking amongst themselves to make a din of conversation. She couldn’t hear the sounds of their clothes rustling or the way they moved in their seats, but she imagined that she could. All those small noises, multiplied by a thousand, could create a roar. The backstage itself was rather noisy, as there were what felt like far too many people moving around. There were half a dozen of them, which seemed like half a dozen more than there needed to be, but she didn’t know the first thing about how a theater was actually run. There was someone, somewhere, in charge of the bright lights that shone down on her, and there were ushers to get people to and from their seats, and all sorts of others. She didn’t know what the people backstage were for though. There was no curtain that needed to be pulled, no one to introduce her, nothing like that, but there were still half a dozen of these people, moving to and fro.

When it was time, the lights in the theater dimmed, all except the ones that were shining on the stage, and Verity walked out to applause. She put on her best beaming smile, walked with a clacking of heels on the stage floor, back straight, and took her seat, front and center. She sat there for a moment, smiling out at the audience, careful to not let that smile dip, as the applause spent some time rolling on. Outwardly, she was a happy, gracious performer, and she waited for the people to stop clapping, keeping that smile in place and focused on a point toward the center of the theater.

When the applause stopped, she touched a diadem around her neck, its chain and stone so thin that they would be invisible from all but the front row. The acoustics of the Ellusifé were phenomenal, but there was no way that her voice would reach to the back without assistance.

“Thank you all for joining me here tonight,” said Verity. Her voice was smooth and practiced. She’d said this all out loud at the house, rehearsing it until it felt genuine and off-the-cuff. “I tend to prefer the music to speak for itself, but tonight I’ll be performing one of my favorites, and I wanted to make sure that it had a proper introduction. Julia Celémen was one of the jewels of the Auserian music scene, both a composer and a music historian, and her works find their importance not just in their own beauty, but in the way they so deeply reflect the past. This first piece is Celémen’s Winter on the Water, her take on the Frozen Fleet of the late Red Ages, when forty ships were frozen in ice, unable to move, halting their attack on what is now Dondrian.”

She touched the diadem again, quieting it so no one would hear her swallow or breathe, then got into proper position, with posture perfect, and began to play.

Celémen was not, in fact, one of Verity’s favorites. There was probably some way of introducing the piece that would feel more authentic to Verity’s own feelings, but it had been easier to just lie to the crowd. They didn’t need to know that Verity found Celémen to be too technically demanding for her own good, or that the songs had been made into classics more by the weight of Celémen’s relationships with her theater friends and a brief dalliance with Dondrian’s then-mayor. The actual history of the musician-historian was one of nepotism, and the gimmick of the collected body of work was a weak one. There were all kinds of things to draw on through history, but the marriage of history and music was, as Celémen had done it, sub-par.

Verity focused on the music, of course. She was playing many instruments at once through the magic of the lute, instruments that she had only a passing knowledge of how to handle without the entad’s heavy magic. There was no written music to guide her, only her memory of the pieces, which she’d done her best to burn into her brain. It was harder that way, to play without sheet music, but it was one of the demands of professional performance. She found it idiotic, personally, but the driving philosophy was that the only things present on the stage should be the musician and her instrument.

She was halfway through the song when she spotted her mother sitting in the front row. With the lights focused on the stage and the theater seats in darkness, it was hard to see anything. There was no time to process what it meant for her mother to be sitting there. The song was too demanding, so as Verity had learned to do, she pushed all other thoughts to the side and played on.

They hadn’t spoken to each other since their fight, save for a simple letter her mother had sent with instructions for how to travel. Verity had sent back a letter saying that she would be finding other accommodations for the remaining concerts. Once Verity had arrived in Dondrian and seen that her mother wasn’t waiting there, it had seemed like that would be that.

Verity tried to keep her emotions in check. That was something she tended to be good at. Still, the anger seemed to be rising all on its own, without much rumination to drive it, and by the time Verity had finished the three pieces by Celémen, she was practically boiling with it. Perhaps it was the helplessness of it, the way that she had no way to respond to this provocation — and it was a provocation, that she was sure of. Her mother had not come for the purposes of moral support, and certainly hadn’t come because she actually wanted to hear the music. No, this was a statement of some kind, one of those opaque gestures that people of her ilk were always engaging in.

Verity delivered the second talk of the evening, this one about a different musician, Puwa Kigo, from Kiromo, and when she was finished with the polished presentation, she immediately forgot every word of it. It was prattle, her mother’s words coming out of her mouth, and she hated it.

She stayed angry through the entirety of Kigo’s long three-movement concerto. Her play wasn’t as tight as it had been at the beginning, and she was certain that whatever trained musician her mother kept on hand would be whispering in her ear about it. There was nothing that a normal person would find fault with though. Verity had been molded into a consummate professional, which was just about the only thing she could say in favor of her mother’s parenting style.

By the time the concerto was finished, Verity had come to a decision, one that was made without all that much real thought given that she played the whole way through without much for a break. The concert had no intermission, no chance to refresh. The decision she made wasn’t entirely rash, it was something she’d been contemplating for weeks now, perhaps even longer.

“I was supposed to end this evening with a short, sweet song by Beruchald, but I’m afraid I’ve been bitten by a desire for something a bit offbeat, and you’ve been a lovely audience so far, so I’m hoping that you’ll indulge me. In my off time, I’m a dungeoneer, and the songs I play for my party are quite a bit different from any of what I’ve played so far. I’d like to share one of them with you, and hopefully I’ll put this lute through its paces.”

It began with the trumpets, and Verity hoped that it was the jolt to the system that she’d written it as.

There once was a knight loyal to his king,
He was good and brave and kind,
For the lance of his lord he would give everything,
Wherever the path may wind.

And the brave knight gave of his shield that day,
And the brave knight gave of his shield,
With his head bowed down before that crown,
The brave knight gave of his shield.

And lo he traveled the twisting ways,
His sword sang its verdant song,
The monsters died to the righteous blade,
Lamenting he took so long.

And the brave knight gave of his sword that day,
And the brave knight gave of his sword,
With his head bowed down before the crown,
The brave knight gave of his sword.

With saddle set and lance in hand,
He rode out o’er the hills,
To-ward his work, he does not shirk,
To do as his good lord wills,

His horse ran on with a singular song,
Its hoofbeats true and sweet,
A beast so brave,
From birth to grave,
Thumping his steady beat.

And the brave knight gave of his steed that day,
And the brave knight gave of his steed,
With his head bowed down before the crown,
The brave knight gave of his steed.

And the brave knight gave of his life that day,
And the brave knight gave of his life,
With his head bowed down before the crown,
The brave knight gave of his life.

Into the sun never went the knight,
He feared not death nor doom,
To give of himself was his right, that was right,
To give even to the tomb.

He wished for a life he could call his own,
For a child he might watch to grow,
For a woman or man to be by his side,
While his lord would never know.

And the brave knight gave to the grave that day,
And the brave knight gave to the grave,
With his head bowed down before the crown,
The brave knight gave to the grave.

She had meant not to look at her mother through the entire piece, but at the song’s midway point, when the lute was producing unearthly sounds that no real instrument could produce, Verity snuck a peak. Her mother’s face was set, a very slight frown the only sign of what she was thinking, and Verity couldn’t help but smile. It was her mother who had pushed her, who had put her up on stage, and now the chickens were coming home to roost.

Verity hadn’t expected the end of the song to be met with applause. She’d expected confused silence, or perhaps a murmur of conversation about what they’d just heard. If she’d thought that people would applaud the piece, she might have expected it to be a brief smattering out of politeness. Instead, it was deafening, more than anything she’d gotten before. She stood and bowed, a real smile on her face this time, and she touched the diadem to mute the happy sounds she was worried she might make.

Once she was safely backstage, she took the diadem off and handed it to one of the stagehands, who had a box to lock it within, and the lute was taken by a different stagehand, who carefully packed it up so it could go back to its owner. Verity stretched out, as she’d been sitting for quite some time, then took a glass of water that was waiting for her and swallowed it down in short order. She was done with her obligation, at least for a week, and there was something refreshing about that. She had also felt good about the song, in part because of the applause she’d gotten.

Verity’s stated opinion, when it came to the audience, was that she didn’t care for them. She liked to pretend that she made music for music’s sake, that it was about art and beauty, and what appealed to her — but when the theater lit up with applause, the lie was laid bare, because it really did feel like the crowd was washing away her anxiety, rewarding her for the hours of practice, encouraging her to keep going. There was something different about a theater of people listening to her play, and something better about their response as compared to a tavern of people clapping when her set was done. A part of Verity really did like the adulations, if only there weren’t such a risk that she’d be dismissed as untalented.

Verity was still shaking off the stress of the performance when her mother appeared backstage.

“Mother,” said Verity. “How did you like the performance?” She was feeling bold, still high off the reaction of the audience. It felt like there was nothing her mother could say that would bring her down.

“That last song,” said Edil. “It was about me?”

“Good lyrics can apply to many situations,” said Verity. She folded her arms.

“You wrote that song yourself?” asked Edil. Her hands were clenched into fists, knuckles white.

“I did,” said Verity.

“What a waste of your time and talent,” said Edil. She shook her head. “It was so common, so base, a tavern song without meaning or import. It might be one thing to coach it in different language, to attempt elevating something simple, but these were just daft lyrics presented as though it was what you’d prefer to be playing the entire time. You skipped Beruchald for gods’ sake.”

Verity could feel her cheeks flushed. “I don’t believe I asked for your opinion.”

“Do you understand how it reflects on me?” asked Edil. “How it reflects on you?”

“I do,” said Verity. “And if it reflects on me, then at least it’s a true reflection of who I am.”

“Who you ‘are’?” asked Edil. “You’re eighteen, practically still a child. You don’t know who you are, and you’re throwing away the life I’ve helped build for you. You write this song about a knight who gives of himself for his king, and what have you actually given? All I’ve asked of you is to pay back what —”

“No,” said Verity. She was on the verge of using her bardic powers again, she could feel it like an itch. “No, I’m making money for you hand over fist, I know it’s hundreds of thousands of rings, maybe as much as a million, all to go toward making up for father’s dereliction of duty. Do you understand my life right now? I live in a house with my friends, I eat simple meals, and I’m happy there. That you can’t be happy without the material wealth you need to show off to your friends would be reason enough for me to keep my distance, but you’re not happy, and you never have been.” She was speaking fast, the words flowing out. Her heart was hammering in her chest. “I’m not doing the rest of the concerts. You can starve on the streets for all I care.”

Edil’s face was flushed. “You —”

“Fuck off,” said Verity.

Verity stormed off, though she didn’t really have anywhere to go. She had a dressing room, but she wasn’t going to go there, because it had only one entrance, and her mother could conceivably just wait outside.

Instead, having fulfilled her duty to the audience, Verity warped away, to the center of Dondrian’s largest hex. She slid down the slide, trying not to cry, and disembarked, walking toward the nearest corner where she could be by herself.

The song had been about her mother, which had been so clear that it couldn’t be missed even by someone who wasn’t inclined to see meaning in music. Verity hadn’t fully meant to play it for a crowd, but she’d been writing her songs down, and she had tested the limits of the lute and its ability to do new and interesting sounds. She had worked on the song, and she’d been thinking about her mother, and how she would inevitably be asked to divest herself of everything important to her. It was how it had been at home. The knight in the song was loyal and brave though, and that was something that she’d never been. She’d run away from home, for a start, and then when she’d seen her mother again, had been a coward about the money troubles, agreeing to a concert that she really didn’t want to do.

She sat and cried for a bit, back up against a wall. The proper thing to do would be to talk with the party, but she just wanted a moment to herself.

When she’d collected herself, she got up from the floor and shook out her limbs, then took a deep breath.

<Concert is over,> said Verity. <I’m heading back. The trip isn’t until the morning, but I’d really like to get home quickly.>

<Did it go okay?> asked Hannah.

<Fine,> said Verity. <My mom showed up. We had a fight. Also, I played one of my own songs, which I hadn’t been planning to do.> She had felt like people liked it, but it was always hard to tell in the moment, and sometimes opinion took a bit to shake out.

<Come find us then,> said Hannah. <Unless you want to talk over the channel. We’re at Alfric’s, in for a bit of a quiet night after havin’ been out on the town.>

<Let me know if you need a pick up,> said Mizuki. <I’ve got the helm, and they seem cool with people flying around in the city, not like lame Plenarch.>

Verity took another deep breath. <I’ll be fine,> she said. <I hate the helm.>

<You don’t sound okay,> said Isra.

<I’m okay,> said Verity. <I just want to lay in bed for a few days. I want to not touch a lute.>

<Er, but you have two concerts left, don’t you?> asked Mizuki.

<I canceled them,> said Verity. <My mother can hang herself in shame.> It was vitriol she didn’t quite feel, but it felt good to be mean.

<Where are you right now?> asked Hannah. <We can come to you.>

<I don’t need it,> said Verity. <I’ll walk. I’ll be fine.>

<Just tell us where you are and we’ll be there in a flash,> said Hannah.

Verity found this unaccountably irritating, until she realized that it was just what her mother would have done. Hannah was like that sometimes, a little too pushy, a little too nosy, and too much of a cleric to be a close friend. Harsh words were almost out of Verity’s mouth, but she took a moment to reconsider, and was grateful that she did. Hannah, at least, meant well, even if the overall approach sometimes rankled.

<I really don’t want to have to say that I’m fine again,> said Verity. <Please?>

<Alright,> said Hannah. <I’ll lay off, you take care though.>

<I will,> said Verity.

The party channel was silent after that, and Verity felt bad about it. They were only trying to help, after all. She didn’t want help though, she didn’t want to explain what had happened or try to recreate the conversation, or do all those other things that she would be expected to do. They would ask about the performance, and the song, and about her mother, and yes, they might accept her saying that she didn’t want to talk about it, but they would still want to know, and she’d have to tell them eventually. What she wanted was to lay in Isra’s arms and cry for a bit, and then somehow get back to Pucklechurch, where she could lay in her room for a few days.

Verity had spent eight months at the Fig and Gristle, and done pretty much nothing. It had been great. A part of her wanted to go back to that life. She liked dungeons well enough, and would rather do dungeons than do sets, but if she were given the option to do nothing at all, to have endless days of honey and fruit with Isra, that was what she would have picked with no question in her mind.

Verity did like music. In an imaginary world where she had absolutely nothing in the way of obligations, she would have still wanted to make up silly songs, and she’d have still practiced a bit each day in order to stay sharp. As she walked back to Alfric’s house, she even began to hum to herself, composing a little funeral dirge for her relationship with her mother.

By the time she was back to Alfric’s house, she was feeling better, and she was mildly surprised that no one asked any questions when she came in, though she got more than a few raised eyebrows. It was late in the day, well past dark, and her party was sitting around the Overguard living room, with Emperor and a few of Alfric’s siblings there.

“Did you need me to reset the day?” asked Alfric in a low voice. “I could give you forewarning.”

“No,” said Verity. “Thank you.”

Alfric nodded.

A silence hung over the gathering for a moment, then Mizuki began talking, and Verity’s problems were, for a moment, set to the side. She drank a full glass of wine and began to feel a bit better, and the feeling grew when Isra cuddled with her. Verity didn’t want to talk about the concert, but she did want to have her hair stroked. She was horribly overdressed and out of place among the others, but she tried not to let that bother her. She listened much more than she talked — one of Alfric’s older brothers had apparently taken up a job as a sailor — and settled in, trying not to feel sorrow or anger or anything else unpleasant. What she really wanted was some of whatever Alfric’s aunt had smoked, something that would mellow her out and let her temporarily forget.

Isra and Verity were sharing a room, though the bed didn’t feel quite big enough for the both of them. Once they had washed up and were alone, Verity expected that Isra would ask about the concert. That never happened though, so as they lay together, Verity found herself talking, unprompted.

“I do hate her,” said Verity. “But I hate her because I can see something good in her. I can imagine a way in which she wasn’t awful, if she was exacting but fair, if she was doing it out of love rather than sheer narcissism. I do like that I’m a very good lute player, that I have this skill at a young age that will stay with me through my life. I like that I was taught certain things, that I know more than the average girl my age. I like the person I am, and a part of that is because of my mother. And … she did care for me. Does, maybe.”

“I don’t think you should speak to her again,” said Isra.

“I — I don’t know,” said Verity. “It depends on how it happens.”

Isra was silent, and the silence seemed to stretch out so long that it felt like maybe their conversation was simply done.

“Do you think you’ll be happy once this is done?” asked Isra.

“Once what is done?” asked Verity.

“This,” said Isra. “Everything with your family. Do you think that there will come a time when it’s passed by, when you don’t think about it anymore? And do you think you’ll be happy then?”

“I don’t know,” said Verity. It felt like an odd question. “Maybe.”

“I’m worried this is just how it’s going to be,” said Isra. “I’m worried that you’ll find some way to be unhappy, even if your mother were to die tomorrow.”

Verity pulled back. Her skin felt cool where they’d been pressed together. “What are you saying?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. She shook her head. “Let’s just go to sleep.”

“I’m not constantly unhappy,” said Verity. She narrowed her eyes. “That’s not my natural condition.”

“I didn’t say that,” said Isra. “It’s just difficult, sometimes, to try to help you and not have anything I say work. I’m tired of it.”

Verity stared at her. “I’ve had a bad day and you’re telling me that you’re tired of me having bad days?”

“I said we should go to sleep,” said Isra.

“I’m going to get my own guest room,” said Verity.

“Don’t be like that,” said Isra. She folded her arms. “I just — I don’t think it’s supposed to be like this. I don’t know about how people are, I don’t know anything, but you’ve been doing these concerts for a month now. Your mother’s been back in your life for longer than that. It’s been weighing on you, which means that it’s been weighing on me, and — I didn’t even get to know my mother. I’m an orphan. It hurts, sometimes, that you seem to forget that.”

“I didn’t,” said Verity, but she’d been going to say ‘I didn’t think of that’, which seemed like a horrible thing to admit out loud. Whether or not she said it though, it was true. It did sometimes slip her mind. That Isra was an orphan, not some free spirit who had decided of her own volition to go live with the animals in the woods … well, Verity had preferred not to think about it.

“I can be the one to move,” said Isra. She got up from the bed and gathered her clothes. “We’ll talk about this later, I guess.”

Verity felt her heart sink. “Stay,” she said. “We can talk about it.”

“I’m tired,” said Isra. “We can talk about it in the morning.”

Verity felt like there was something that she should have said, something that could have made Isra still be with her. She was worried that a night apart would lead to two nights apart, and that all the warmth and comfort of their relationship would be sapped away as they slept. But if there had been magic words that would have healed things, Verity wasn’t able to find them.

With Isra gone, the room felt unexpectedly cold, though Verity was certain that it was nearly optimal for human comfort. She had trouble getting to sleep, and kept going over her relationship with Isra, trying to tease at where it had gone wrong. Her dreams were of songs, and regrets.

Chapter 118 - That Sort of Thing

The return trip to Dondrian was done without the Overguards, and there was a part of Mizuki that felt a little hurt by that. She knew that self-sufficiency was something they prized, and that they didn’t want to be ferrying teenagers to and from the other side of the continent, but it seemed unfriendly in a way that she didn’t like. The Overguards had six children though, so maybe it was just that if they allowed trips to happen, the obligations would spiral out of control until they were spending most of their time doing ‘favors’ for people.

It wasn’t an enormous inconvenience though, since Verity was going to Dondrian anyway. The party had the dagger, which could transport them across unlimited distances, so long as someone was cut with it, and so long as the transportation would only need to be done once a day. Unfortunately, not long before they were set to leave, Alfric reported that in an undone day he’d finally taken the dagger to Filera, and she had told him that it did not, in fact, have unlimited range. Instead, it could only go twenty hexes along the shortest path, and Dondrian was quite a bit beyond that.

The solution, then, was to stuff everyone into the trunk and hope that it would follow Verity all the way to Dondrian at its ludicrous speed.

“You know, the garden stone seemed really good when we got it,” said Mizuki. She sat in one of their wooden chairs, with Emperor at her feet. The dog had taken a liking to her, and the feeling was mutual. She was going to be sad to see him go. “But we end up spending a lot of time here, and none of the improvements have really made it feel like home.”

“Sorry,” said Alfric. He was doing his best to carve something with a stone knife, which was going poorly. He’d already cut himself once and needed Hannah to fix it.

“That’s not on you,” she said with a wave of her hand. “All the improvements have been great.” She looked around the garden stone, which now had a few wooden structures, most of them fairly bare bones. Getting things into and out of the stone was a bit of a hassle, and it didn’t allow metal, which had made some of the woodworking pretty tedious. Mizuki knew that because she’d worked with Alfric on a lot of the dry fitting they’d done before moving pieces of lumber in. “But it’s still not a place that I would voluntarily spend four hours, not without a big city to explore at the end of it.”

“We’ve already been there once,” said Hannah. She was reading a book she must not have been too engrossed in. The chairs sat around a center table, where there were some snacks that Mizuki had prepared, mostly cured meats and smoked cheeses, and some fresh vegetables from the garden, which was now producing a fair amount for them. “How much more is there to see?”

“Uh, it’s a huge city,” said Mizuki. “I saw maybe five streets worth of it? And only the main hex. There are all kinds of places I still need to check out, little shops to go investigate, things to see, that kind of stuff.”

“I saw a lot,” said Isra. “But I was looking through the bird’s eyes.” She was petting Marsc, as they’d elected to bring the herb dragons along with them. There were entire bales of herbs ready for them, some of them foraged rather than taken from the backyard garden, which was thinning like the hair of a middle-aged man, at least where herbs were concerned.

“If your parents aren’t okay picking us up, will they be okay with us staying there?” asked Mizuki.

“Yes, and I checked ahead of time just to be sure,” said Alfric.

“I don’t want to be in your mom’s bad graces,” said Mizuki.

“You won’t be,” said Alfric. “She likes you.”

“Even though we don’t do enough dungeons?” asked Isra.

“I don’t think she cares about that too much,” said Alfric. “We’re moving up, that’s what matters, though even that I don’t think she cares too much about. What she wants is a self-sufficient child who can make his own way in the world, and I think I’ve proven I can handle myself.”

“I’m strangely excited about the concert,” said Mizuki.

“Why strangely?” asked Isra.

“Well, I don’t know, Verity’s been practicing something like six hours a day, I’ve heard each of those songs probably a hundred times,” said Mizuki. “You would think that I’d be tired of it, right?”

“There’s no novelty to it, no,” said Hannah. Her eyes were on her book, but she was clearly not reading. “But there’s something nice about that, like your favorite meal that you’ve eaten a hundred times before.”

“To be clear, none of us have the songs from tonight’s concert as favorites, right?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, it’s fine music, and I think I appreciate it more after having heard it so much, but it’s not a favorite, not the sort of thing that I would ask a tavern bard to play.”

“Most tavern bards couldn’t,” said Isra.

“Verity was a tavern bard,” said Mizuki. She crossed her arms.

Isra rolled her eyes, then flashed Mizuki a smile. “She’s the most overqualified tavern bard in history, and I think we all know it.”

“Oh, speaking of,” said Hannah. “It seems that Clemency, Verity’s replacement at the Fig and Gristle, got engaged to Micah.”

“Micah, that guy who was pining after you?” asked Mizuki. “The apprentice blacksmith? Sorry that didn’t work out for you.” She giggled.

“You laugh, but it was a bit of weight off my shoulders,” said Hannah. “I kept seein’ the poor boy around, and the way he’d look at me, I could tell he was still wonderin’ whether there might be a way to make it work. That was even after Marsh and I were arm-in-arm for temple day.”

“They’re doing the Cairbre thing?” asked Mizuki. “Marriage first, then build up a relationship after?”

“Seems so,” said Hannah. “Though I imagine that it’ll be a smaller affair than the monstrosity of a weddin’ we just went to. A handful of people, maybe not even that, considering that she’s been in town for all of a month, and he’s a transplant himself.”

“I don’t know if I’d want to do another wedding, even if I were invited,” said Mizuki.

“Which you won’t be,” said Hannah. “But if you were, I would expect you to go.”

“Verity is the only one that’s close to Clem,” said Mizuki.

“If you were invited, it would be because the girl doesn’t have any friends,” said Hannah. “I’d expect you to do your duty.”

“Could I still grumble about it?” asked Mizuki.

“Of course,” said Hannah. “Just not within earshot.”

“So many rules,” said Mizuki with a groan. She looked over at Alfric. “I can see why you prefer the good old days.”

“Not quite the same,” said Alfric. “I have no problem with fulfilling my social obligations.”

“Bah,” said Mizuki. She turned back to Hannah. “Do you think we need to do something about Clemency?”

“How do you mean?” asked Hannah.

“Well, like you said, if she’s got no friends, do we need to … be friends?” Mizuki frowned. “When my family left for Kiromo I was all alone.”

“So you go from not wantin’ to attend her weddin’, to deliberately tryin’ to be her friend?” asked Hannah with a laugh.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “I mean, I don’t want to be her friend, but if she’s got no other friends, then —”

“You’d do the right thing,” said Alfric.

“I don’t know if it’s the ‘right’ thing,” said Mizuki. “But there’s a difference between a wedding that I don’t really want to go to and a girl who’s super lonely because no one took time out of their day to look after her.”

Isra looked up from the herb dragon she had in her lap. “I don’t think I would be her friend.”

“Why not?” asked Mizuki.

Isra shrugged. “It can be a lot of work to take care of someone. Being a friend means more than just spending time together.”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “Bein’ a shoulder to cry on, helpin’ them out when they’re sick, there are real costs to bein’ a friend to someone, though they’re costs we’re more’n willin’ to pay for people we care about. But if you don’t care about someone, if you’re just there because you feel it’s a good thing, it’s somethin’ you need to take into consideration.”

“Being a friend isn’t a transaction like that though,” said Mizuki. “It’s not like Alfric’s dumb entad bidding system.”

“While I’ll agree—” Alfric began.

“I mean, I’m just saying, if any of you were sick, I would help out, and not because I thought that was the cost of doing business or whatever, because I care about you,” said Mizuki. “I like helping friends. It makes me feel good. If you’re talking about fake friends, then yes, it would be work, and I don’t know, I guess you’re saying that you’d fake it until it felt real somehow?”

“Somethin’ like that,” said Hannah.

“And if it wasn’t?” asked Isra. “If you never felt like you were friends?”

“Then you’d have given it a shot,” said Hannah. She shrugged. “Sometimes it doesn’t work out.”

They busied themselves with their own matters for a bit, which for Mizuki meant trying to read through a wizard book she’d been mailed by Rayedhcraft. It was the sort of thing she felt vaguely guilty about, since it seemed like she should have had to pay for it, but Kell said that it was pretty standard, a way to help people move past some of the entry-level stuff without needing direct instruction.

The book was, to put it bluntly, boring. Mizuki thought maybe that was their way of trying to scare people off, and the reason they had sent it in the mail was to make her second guess her choice. Still, she slogged through it, reading passages three times to make sure they stuck in her head. Some of it was needlessly dense and filled with jargon, and it under-explained things that it apparently thought were obvious.

‘The transom of the well must be malginated in most cases when becondution is expected,’ Mizuki would read, and then she would have to look in the glossary, or flip back a few pages in order to try to make sense of the sentence. The ‘well’ was the thing that stored mana, the ‘transom’ was a rigid reinforcing structure, ‘becondution’ was when the well was emptied of mana (but that also seemed to have some other importance), and ‘malginated’ or ‘malgination’ had something to do with changing the immaterial substance that a wizard worked with, in a way that didn’t seem very obvious to Mizuki. She kept looking through the book, trying to find some clear comparison of the terms, but the glossary only said that ‘malgination’ was one of the fundamental properties of the material, and offered only comparisons to other words that Mizuki didn’t know. Normally Mizuki’s approach to words she didn’t know was to let them wash over her like waves crashing against a shore, but you couldn’t do that with a technical work.

She tried to cope by taking lots of notes, but her paper was filling up pretty rapidly, and she wasn’t entirely sure her notes were right. If Kell had been in their party, she would have seen if he was available and bugged him about it, in the hopes that he could explain ‘malginated’ to her, but in point of fact, he wasn’t in their party.

She was thankful that Emperor was along with them in the garden stone, as he seemed to like being a good foot rest, and when there was something she didn’t understand, she could reach down and scratch him behind the ears, which let her pretend that she was taking a break for some actual reason besides just frustration.

They arrived in Dondrian after four hours in the garden stone, which wasn’t all that bad given that they hadn’t had to pay a single ring for any of it. Verity was there to greet them — the chest had been running to her, after all — and she seemed to be in a good mood, which was mildly surprising.

“No sign of my mother,” said Verity. She had a grin on her face. “No letter from her either. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, but so far, so good.”

“Be careful,” said Isra. “She might be waiting to strike.”

“I know, I know,” said Verity. “But I feel like if this is the response, then I actually did accomplish something.”

“I’d agree on the caution,” said Hannah.

“Bah,” said Verity. She let a frown settle on her face. “Fine.” She turned to Alfric. “It’s the first time through today?”

“Yes,” he replied. “I’m hoping that you don’t have much trouble, Vertex has a dungeon today, Marsh has a check-in with Hannah later.”

“The playing will be fine, I think,” said Verity. The levity vanished. “I feel a knot in the pit of my stomach about it, but I put in the effort, and if it’s the same as last time, that will have to do.” She turned her head to the side, cracking her neck. “And if mother has something to say about it, I think I have a better idea how to handle it.”

“With violence?” asked Isra.

“No,” said Verity, looking alarmed. “No, no, I’ll just tell her, like I should have done from the start. I’ll be firm but polite, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll be firm and rude.”

“Easy,” said Mizuki, though she felt incredibly skeptical. Verity’s mother still had a hold on Verity, and Mizuki could practically see the old woman’s hand wrapped around the base of Verity’s braid. Verity had years of training in being her mother’s puppet, and that wasn’t something that could just be shaken off in a fortnight.

“I think we should go to my house now,” said Alfric. “We’ve got a lot of time before the concert, and we need to get Emperor back where he belongs after his extended vacation.”

“Aw,” said Mizuki. She leaned down and gave the dog a hug. “I’m going to miss you, little guy.”

“He’s practically the same size as you,” said Alfric.

“You’re just jealous that you don’t get kisses,” said Mizuki. She put her face next to the dog’s and made a kissing noise, and was given the penalty of a slobbery lick, which she wiped off with her sleeve.

They eventually did get going, though Isra elected to stay with Verity. The plan was for them to be in the city for two days and return home by the same method when Verity was returned to Pucklechurch. They were only going to the concert on the first night, not the second, which meant that Mizuki had something like a day and a half in the city. That didn’t seem like quite enough to her. After their first trip to Dondrian for the opera, she’d been able to see enough of the city to get some ideas about what else she might like to see, and overly pushy tax assessors aside, she had really liked her taste of city life.

It was strange how much Alfric’s house felt like home to her. Emperor bounded up the front steps and Mizuki followed after him as he made his way to the kitchen. He sat in front of the food bowl there and looked at her as though she hadn’t fed him the entire time he’d been staying at her house. Mizuki looked around the kitchen for something to feed him, but she wasn’t entirely sure why the house had a kitchen, given that they used entads to create almost all of their food for them. When Alfric came in, he went right to one of the cupboards and opened it up, then set a piece of bright red venison loin into the bowl for Emperor.

“I didn’t realize he got such good meat here,” said Mizuki. “He’s been deprived.”

“He has,” said Alfric. He looked down at the dog. “Poor boy.” Alfric seemed to employ sarcasm most often when it came to the family dog.

“Well, I think I’m going to drop my clothes and things off in one of the guest rooms, then I’ll be off,” said Mizuki. “What time are we meeting back here?”

“Fifth bell,” said Alfric. “What are you going to be doing in the city?”

“Well, I have lots of money, so I was going to see if I could find a shop where I could spend it,” said Mizuki. She’d been quite responsible with the money, and it was starting to itch.

“Prices are a bit better around Pucklechurch,” said Alfric. “Unless you’re buying an entad, in which case it depends on what you want.”

“Oh, I’m not looking for anything in particular,” said Mizuki. “I’ll probably just wander around and come back with a bag of things that I don’t need.”

Alfric frowned at her. “That’s one way to do it, I guess.”

“I suppose you have some kind of budget and itinerary?” asked Mizuki.

“I do,” said Alfric. “I also looked through Rolaj’s book last time we were in Liberfell and talked to him about the best places to go shopping in Dondrian. He’s far away from here, but he’s heard things through the grapevine.”

“That does sound nice,” said Mizuki. She was sorely tempted to abandon her plans and go with him. “You’ll have to let me know.”

“You could come with me,” said Alfric. He raised an eyebrow in her direction.

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “I’ve got a city to explore, and we’re only here for two days.” And more time alone with Alfric felt, in some way, like she was putting herself in a position to make a mistake. She shouldn’t have said the thing about kisses.

“Mizuki!” said Alfric’s mom, Ria, as she came into the kitchen. She opened her arms wide, and Mizuki found herself mildly embarrassed to be wrapped in a hug.

“Hey,” said Mizuki.

“I’m sorry to have to say this,” said Ria as she let go, “But there’s some disclosure that must be done.”

“Mom?” asked Alfric. “You had a reset?”

“Nothing to be concerned about,” said Ria. “It was a recreational reset, I have lots of days to go around.” She turned back to Mizuki. “You and I had a lovely conversation about marriage and its pitfalls. I wish that we could have it again, but obviously it would be different the second time around, and I’ve found that in cases like this, sometimes what results is more of an unwanted lecture from a chrononaut than a proper conversation between equals.” She looked over at Alfric. “Could we have some privacy for a moment?”

“Sure,” said Alfric, though he didn’t look particularly comfortable with it.

Once he was gone, Ria turned back to Mizuki. “Oh, nothing objectionable, it’s just that you and I had a private conversation, and it would be rude to share it with Alfric.”

“Okay,” said Mizuki. It was hard not to feel intimidated. Ria was quite possibly one of the most powerful people on the entire planet, the most proficient dungeoneer of the last century, maybe more. She could be armed and ready for combat in the space of a heartbeat, and was probably loaded down with so many defenses that she couldn’t be taken by surprise. She looked like a friendly, smiling mom in a purple chiffon dress, but there was a lot more to her.

“You talked a lot about your grandfather, who you were apparently pretty close with, and your mother and father,” said Ria. “Sorry, this is always difficult, and one of the reasons I try to avoid the need for disclosure.” She shook her head. “It was late at night, after everyone else had gone to bed. You were by the fireplace, with Emperor, who you’ve grown quite fond of. You were talking about the wedding you had all been to, and that turned to talk about marriage, and you said that you didn’t really understand how your parents had done it, or how Harmon and I did it, how we got through all those years without ruining it.”

Mizuki frowned. It was frustrating, hearing it secondhand like this, but she thought there was probably no way that it wouldn’t be. Most of what Alfric told her about undone days was dry and boring, and he’d said that it was hard to report back on a conversation, mostly because summarizing was difficult work. She hadn’t quite believed him until he’d made her do it as a test, and she had grudgingly accepted that he wasn’t bad at it, it was just a hard thing to do. Now, talking to Ria, she was realizing how true that was. Or maybe being bad at telling people about conversations ran in the family.

“The answer that I gave to you, which I want to give you now, is that we screw up all the time,” said Ria. She was giving Mizuki a soft, motherly smile, of the sort that Mizuki hadn’t gotten a lot of lately. “What matters is what you do once you screw up. It’s admitting to your mistakes, trying to grow as a couple, giving the other person some leeway when they’re the one who made the mistake, all kinds of things. No successful marriage you’ve ever seen has been the result of two people with a steady cart, it’s two people who were willing to pull up their sleeves and work things out.”

“I was talking about marriage?” asked Mizuki.

“You were talking about how you didn’t think it was for you,” said Ria. She shrugged. “You seemed sad about it.”

“Ah,” said Mizuki. “That does sound about right. Well, thanks for telling me, and thanks for the advice. Anything else I should know?”

“No,” said Ria, shaking her head. “So far as I know, you had a good time in the city, a good time at the concert, and just needed to vent a bit. But I know your family is far away from you, and if you need someone to be there for you, you just let me know, alright?”

“Um, alright,” said Mizuki. “Thanks. Was I —” she hesitated. “Was that all I said?”

“Just about,” said Ria. “Why?”

“No reason,” said Mizuki. “Just curious. Alfric does the disclosure thing with me a lot, and he’s pretty thorough, I think. This wasn’t too different, I’d just — you know, there are things that are on my mind, and I’d wondered whether we had talked about them, maybe.”

“No,” said Ria. “Or if we did, they didn’t leave an impression on me.”

“Maybe tonight then,” said Mizuki. She felt incredibly awkward. “I like the idea of talking with you.”

“Can I tell you a secret?” asked Ria.

“Um, sure,” said Mizuki.

Ria leaned in and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I like you better than any other friend of Alfric’s he’s ever brought home.”

Mizuki took some time to put her things away in one of the guest rooms, this time picking cotton white for herself. The house was, as ever, a highly magical place, and a part of her thought that if she had just three days in Dondrian, she would be best off spending all her time just moving through the rooms and discovering their secrets. Still, she had plans for her day, and she had resolved not to waste her time, as she so often did.

Mizuki’s first stop was a section of town with a relatively small number of Kiromon transplants, just enough of them to have a single street filled with traditional Kiromon businesses. There was a part of Mizuki that had expected it would have a feeling of home, but it was immediately clear that this was a different sort of culture, not at all like what the Kiromon exiles in Liberfell and Pucklechurch had created for themselves.

Kiromo, like Inter and Tarbin, was a country that had been formed from other countries. Unlike Inter, Kiromo had not had a relatively smooth integration of its three component countries. Instead, there had been long periods of political strife and horrifying complicated problems with the administration of the country, including something called a ‘salamander’ that Mizuki didn’t entirely understand, except that it wasn’t a literal salamander. Things were better in Kiromo now, especially with the new Emperor, but a place like this was a reflection of earlier struggles, and most of the people weren’t from the same part of Kiromo that Mizuki was.

Mizuki tried not to stare, but the faces were a bit rounder and a bit flatter, and they were of a stockier build. It hadn’t been what Mizuki expected. If anything she felt like more of an outsider, because in the rest of the city she was a citizen of Inter, and here she was different.

She didn’t let that stop her though.

“Ooo, what’s this?” asked Mizuki as she stepped up to a cart of street food.

“Alga tümchi,” a woman in a loose wrap replied. “Only five rings. There’s a bench to eat at.” She gestured to a small place that could seat, at most, eight people across a few tables. A couple were already eating soup there. The alga tümchi was a salad of some kind, and the cart had almost a dozen different containers with tongs to pluck things out. It was a bed of leafy greens, which then got layered with all kinds of carrots, onions, bits of meat, and a few miscellaneous nuts.

“Can I have two?” asked Mizuki.

The woman nodded and began preparing the bowls. Mizuki regretted asking for two as the process went on. She’d thought that it was a salad, and that she’d need two for a proper lunch, but there was a surprising amount of food for five rings each, and the bowls were somewhat overfilled, piled high.

“Is this like kide hirin?” asked Mizuki.

The woman paused only briefly, but then kept going with a scoff. “Kiromo dugt Tümchi.”

“Um,” said Mizuki. “I didn’t really catch that.”

“It means Kiromo isn’t the same as Tümchi,” said the woman with a cluck of her tongue. She held out her hand, and Mizuki stared at it for a moment before realizing it was a request for payment. It took a moment of fumbling in her bag, but Mizuki laid out the rings. “Similar, not the same.”

“Okay,” said Mizuki. “Sorry, I don’t really know what Tümchi is, or if I’m saying it right.”

“It’s a small island, a northern part of Kiromo now,” said the woman. She handed the bowls over to Mizuki. “A hundred and fifty years ago, my ancestors fled the encroaching empire.” She nodded to the two salads, which Mizuki had in hand. “Similar customs, similar food. Not the same.”

Mizuki took the food over to one of the small tables and began eating, first trying the Anyspoon, then switching to a fork when that proved a bit difficult. She was very aware of the woman with her stall. There wasn’t all that much foot traffic, so Mizuki just sat there eating her two salads, feeling like there were some eyes on the back of her head.

Mizuki looked around the area and wondered whether this whole area was filled with people who were four or five generations past some horrible thing happening in Tümchi. She was basically two generations past some horrible thing happening in Kiromo, and she wouldn’t have been able to say all that much about it, just a handful of sentences, maybe. Her grandfather had left because the Emperor was a bad one, and her grandfather had returned when the Emperor was a good one, and that was more or less that. She knew that she’d seen a map of the islands that made up Kiromo, and her grandfather had explained things for her once upon a time, but she’d been ten years old, and the relative positions of these different people hadn’t really stuck in her head.

It was all so much easier when she didn’t really have to worry about that kind of thing. She knew Pucklechurch, and she could visit other cities, or make journeys out into the countryside for dungeon runs, but she didn’t need to know. And with cooking, she never really cared whether something was like it had originally been done in Kiromo. There were certain flavors and scents, and certain dishes, but as she ate the salad she wondered whether it was authentic, whether it had been passed down from mother to daughter through the ages. She was halfway through the second salad when she thought about mistakes, and what to do about them.

“Hey, is this really how they make it in, um, Tümchi?” asked Mizuki. She hoped she was saying that right.

The woman stared at her for a moment. A few other customers had come by, but it was pretty clearly off-hours. “I don’t know,” the woman said. “I’ve never been to Tümchi.”

“Have you had kide hirin?” asked Mizuki. “Because I’ve had it, but it was what my mom made down in Pucklechurch — which is near Liberfell?” The woman kept shaking her head. “Well, it’s next to the Proten Lakes, kind of, in Greater Plenarch.”

“Ah,” the woman said.

“I don’t know what kide hirin is like in Kiromo,” said Mizuki. “So I’d guess that it’s ‘Kiromo dugt Pucklechurch’.” She smiled, and the woman gave a tentative smile back.

“Old tensions,” the woman said with a sigh. She turned to help a customer, and Mizuki returned to her salad. She had thought that would be the end of it, but the woman came to sit down next to Mizuki. “Sorry.”

“Oh, no worries,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “I don’t know anything about anything, I didn’t mean to step on your toes. See, with kide hirin, it’s basically whatever veggies and meat you have, sometimes with some fruit, and pickling no more than one ingredient because of the balance of flavors and stuff like that. Oh, and also you add oil sometimes, I guess. So I was just wondering, I guess, whether this was the same, if there’s something special about the meats you pick, or the veggies, or anything like that.”

“I look and see what’s on sale at the market,” the woman replied. “Never fruit, never sauce, unless it’s nulda, which is fish sauce, vinegar, and oil, with some chiles.”

“Interesting,” said Mizuki, and she meant it. “It’s really good, though I shouldn’t have gotten two bowls.”

They talked a bit more about foods, and what they liked in what was nominally a salad, and at the end of it, Mizuki felt better about her big mouth.

Her time in the city passed quickly, so quickly, in fact, that she was almost late to get dressed for the concert. She was scolded by Alfric and tried to play it off as though she was just being loose with the rules as always, but she did feel a bit embarrassed about it. There was a part of her that wanted to talk to Ria and see whether she could borrow a dress and some quick makeup, but Ria was nowhere to be seen, and if Mizuki had done it in the undone day, she thought it was something Ria should have mentioned.

Mizuki hadn’t known what to expect from the concert, but there were an absurd number of people there, all for Verity. Unlike at the opera, their party didn’t have a cushy box with food service, and the place was so packed that Mizuki felt mildly uncomfortable. She liked people, but there were just so many of them that it felt oppressive. Then the music started, and Mizuki let herself get lost in it, which was a necessity, because talking during the performance was utterly prohibited, and talking into the party channel would have been incredibly rude given who the performer was.

The performance was lovely, and there was something different about hearing it in a proper theater rather than out in the woods or from another room in the house. All the music was a bit over Mizuki’s head, though Verity had only tried to explain the importance and artistry of the pieces a single time, which had felt a bit half-hearted.

When the concert was over, they were allowed backstage, and there were hugs for Verity, which she seemed quite thankful for. Alfric had brought flowers, which he’d kept sitting on his lap through the whole concert. Mizuki had been hoping to meet the fabled Edil Parson, but Verity’s awful mother was nowhere to be seen, much to Verity’s relief. It had seemed like the whole thing might ultimately blow over, that the concerts would be ‘enough’, and with the concert done, the five of them had a night on the town together, with as much drinking and dancing as they could fit in without compromising Verity’s ability to perform the next day.

It wasn’t until the next night’s concert that things with Edil really came to a head.

Chapter 120 - The New Normal, pt 1

It was more or less exactly what Alfric had feared. If Verity and Isra had not actually broken up, they were, at least, on the rocks. After their return from Dondrian, the feeling of it had infested the household, and the two of them weren’t talking to each other except in brief sentences. It wasn’t angry, or even really curt, just like they had mutually decided to only exchange a handful of words each day. There wasn’t an extra bedroom in the house, so by some kind of twisted agreement between the two of them, Verity was living in the woods and Isra was in the bedroom they’d been sharing. Alfric wasn’t entirely sure how or why this arrangement had been made, and it seemed insane to him, because of all the things that could be said about Verity, no one would have said that she was suited to the woods.

Verity did come by the house, where she still nominally lived, in part because she didn’t know how to cook for herself. She would show up for lunch famished, then spend time reading in the living room, or tending to the garden, or playing her lute, then after dinner, retreat back to her forest home.

Isra was hardly any better. She was trying too hard to be sociable, and Alfric worried that it wasn’t healthy. Isra joined practically every club there was in Pucklechurch, all over the course of a week, and volunteered her time helping out at the school to pick up the slack for a teacher that had just gone into labor. After her first day helping with the six-year-olds, she had declared that she didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, not seeming to realize that her magical powers were helping her along. She could watch the kids using bird helpers, and of course the children were fantastically entertained by the coterie of animals that came out of the woods. There was a frantic energy to the way that Isra was filling up her life with other things, and Alfric thought that sooner or later it was all going to come crumbling down.

“Okay,” said Mizuki. “What are we going to do about the girl situation?” She was sitting on his bed as he worked on composing a message to his guild. He wanted advice, and was trying to get it without divulging too much in the way of personal information. It was difficult work, made somewhat more difficult by the fact that Mizuki was there and trying to talk to him.

“Nothing,” said Alfric. “It’s not our place.”

“But I mean, they’re all broken up now, right?” asked Mizuki. “So are you thinking that we just let it blow over?”

“I don’t know if they are broken up,” said Alfric. “I asked Isra and her mood plummeted like a stone. She just said that they hadn’t really talked about it.”

“That’s so dumb,” said Mizuki. “It makes sense to not know if you’ve started dating someone, but to not know whether you’ve stopped?”

That gave Alfric pause. “Does it make sense to not know whether you’re dating someone?”

“Sure, happens all the time,” said Mizuki. “To lots of people.”

“Well, the longer it goes on, the more likely it is to be permanent,” said Alfric.

“Do we, like, want them to be together?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t think what we want is really relevant,” said Alfric. “I think, as their friends, what we want is for them to be happy, and hopefully they can find a way of being happy where we all stay friends.”

“I mean, that’s not a risk, is it?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “I have experienced exactly one breakup, which lost me all my friends.”

“Well, I guess I have a lot of experience,” said Mizuki. “And yeah, not being friends anymore seems like something that happens.” She was swinging her feet, which didn’t quite touch the floor. “But I don’t know how we’d make that work, as a dungeoneering party.”

“We likely wouldn’t,” said Alfric.

Mizuki stared at him for a moment. “But what would that mean?”

“It would mean we’d have to find a new fifth,” said Alfric with a sigh. It had been almost a week since the falling out, and it seemed like Mizuki was just now coming to realize that this spelled trouble for their collective future.

“Well how would that even work?” asked Mizuki. “I mean — it wouldn’t, right? It took Vertex a couple of weeks to find someone, and I feel like they got pretty lucky to have Kell.”

“We’re definitely not at that point,” said Alfric. “And it is possible for people to work together without them being friends. I have an uncle whose party can’t stand each other, but they’re professionals when they’re in a dungeon. Outside it, they don’t really talk, and they’re certainly not friends.”

“That sounds awful,” said Mizuki. “Stuck in a dungeon for weeks at a time with people you don’t care for?”

Alfric had no reply to that. Vertex had gone fifty dungeons or so together while not being quite friends, and with Lola there. It did sound awful, and he had a much better understanding of the awfulness now than he’d had when he’d set out for Pucklechurch. It was the sort of thing you learned along the way, he supposed, but it was also the sort of thing that could get you stuck on in the process of learning.

“Most parties are very long term,” said Alfric. “You find your group and then you stick together, for better or worse, tied together by all kinds of things. You divvy up the entads that are won by blood, you have business interests together, community funds, you’ve hit all the same dungeons … it’s a lot to walk away from. And the people who do walk away are either damaged goods or painted with the same large brush. From what I’ve heard, it’s horrible.”

“It sounds horrible,” said Mizuki. “And I don’t think that’s a good way to talk about people. ‘Damaged goods’.”

“You know what I mean,” said Alfric. “A lot of people who got kicked out of a group got kicked out for a reason.”

“Like you got kicked out of a group?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Alfric. “But I spent a long time trying to find a group, and I found the skepticism understandable. They would ask me questions about why I got kicked out, and I would explain things to them, and … it was exactly the kind of story that I would expect to hear someone tell. There’s always another side to the story, and when your side is weighed so heavily in your own favor, people wonder. I knew that. It was frustrating, but I knew it. All I needed was for someone to give me a chance, but I really, really understand why they didn’t.”

“I hope we don’t have to deal with a new person,” said Mizuki. “I like Verity and Isra.”

“Yeah,” said Alfric. “It would hurt to lose either, and hurt double to lose both.”

“We should get them back together,” said Mizuki.

“That’s a terrible idea, but it’s so terrible that I want to hear your thoughts on how to do that,” said Alfric. He grinned at her, and she flashed a smile back.

“Alright,” she said. She stood up and put her hands in front of her, which she was presumably using to represent the two girls. “Idea one, we lock them in a room together. Now, I know what you’re thinking, we probably don’t need anymore ideas after that one, why has this amazing girl made a numbered list if we’re fine to stop at one? But this is something that I’ve learned from you: contingency planning.”

Alfric laughed. “You know, locking them in a room together might just end in disaster.”

“Yeah, but at least they’d talk,” said Mizuki. “How long could they realistically go without talking about their feelings? Five days?”

“We’re talking about two people who didn’t talk to each other when it was just a bit of mutual attraction,” said Alfric. “They could go until they both die of old age.” There was a brief moment when Alfric realized that what he’d said about mutual attraction could, in theory, apply to him and Mizuki, and he was worried that they would have to talk about it, but she moved on quickly. The same thought had obviously occurred to her though.

“Option two, we do a dungeon,” said Mizuki. “See, I think you’ll like this one, because we’re a dungeoneering party.”

“Ostensibly,” said Alfric.

“Well, we get them in a dungeon together, that’s kind of like locking them in a room,” said Mizuki. “And then they save each others’ lives, and they fall back in love.”

“I’m not sure that’s even the issue,” said Alfric. “I mean, I think they might still love each other, if it ever got that deep. There are certainly enough looks passing between them. But if the nature of their fight — their break — isn’t clear, then I don’t know if we could come up with any plan that would work.”

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “We just come up with enough plans, then do them all.”

“That’s not a terrible strategy,” said Alfric. “I mean, in the abstract, as it relates to the set of all plans. For this particular thing, yes, it’s a terrible idea.”

“Three,” said Mizuki, apparently not deterred. “We plan another trip. Right now, they’re apart, right, free to do their own things? But if we all went somewhere together, they would have to spend some time together.”

“I feel like these first three are all variations on trapping them in a room,” said Alfric. He grinned. “Trap them in a room, or trap them in a dungeon, or trap them in a foreign land.”

“Okay, so if you’re so smart, why don’t you come up with something?” asked Mizuki.

“I mean, it’s a bad idea all around,” said Alfric. “I’m criticizing the execution, but it’s the whole concept that’s bad. What we should really be doing is making ourselves available to talk with them, one on one, so we can figure out what happened, and so they can process it. Maybe Hannah is already doing that.”

“Alright, new plan,” said Mizuki. “What we do is we trap ourselves with them so they have to talk to us, and maybe that will help them work things out.”

“I do think that’s a legitimately good idea,” said Alfric. “Find time to be with them one on one, and hope that they start talking? Except Isra has busied herself, and Verity is off in the woods.”

“Alright, but what’s the trap going to be?” asked Mizuki. “No matter which way we go, we need a trap.”

It was increasingly clear that Mizuki was in a silly mood, and had come up to Alfric’s room because she wanted someone to be silly with. Alfric hesitated for a moment, then mentally set the guild message aside.

“Here’s what I’m thinking,” he said. “We dig a big hole.”

“Yes,” said Mizuki. There was a particular way her smiles always reached her eyes. “Love it.”

“Step two, we get stuck in the hole with them, one on one,” said Alfric. “Or stick them in together.”

“At which point they warp out,” said Mizuki.

“Ah, see, that’s step three,” said Alfric. “We’re waiting for them at the warp, where we’ve used my woodworking skill to build a room. They’ll have warped into the second trap. It’s genius.”

“We’ll have to do it away from Pucklechurch then,” said Mizuki, trying and failing to give him a serious frown.

“Nah, once we explain things to the mayor, he’ll surely agree,” said Alfric. “Small price to pay, giving up the hex’s warp for the certainty that we could get our two girls back together.”

Mizuki grinned. “Alright, you start drawing up plans for the enclosure, I’ll start digging the pit. Do you think Verity will get suspicious when I use her shovel?”

Alfric snapped his fingers and pointed at Mizuki. “Nonchalant whistle. She falls for it every time.”

Mizuki giggled. It was incredibly gratifying. “Alright, I’m going to go work on my plans, I’ll leave you to it. Thanks for, ah, you know.”

“We’ll get through it,” said Alfric.

“Yeah, I know,” said Mizuki. She turned and left, and Alfric watched her go.

It took a moment for him to get his bearings back and return to the guild message he’d set aside. He looked at what he’d written there, then deleted it all and started over.

The intraparty romance I’ve mentioned before has led to what looks like a breakup. We currently have one member living outside the shared house, though she comes in for meals and is here for much of the day. We haven’t done a dungeon since this rough patch, and I was hoping that someone might have some advice on how to navigate the situation. How does a team move on from something like that? What’s the best approach to keep things professional when we’re doing dungeons?

He read it over a few times, as he always did with guild messages, and then sent it off. It wouldn’t reach anyone until the next day, and then he wouldn’t get responses back until the day after that, but there was a chance someone would have some actionable insight. In the meantime, he would be as much of a friend to both of them as he could be.

When he came downstairs, he found that Verity had made her way over to the house, and he didn’t think it was a coincidence that Isra had already left for parts unknown. The party channel hadn’t seen much use for either of them, and that meant that no one else really wanted to use it either, since it risked disturbing calm waters.

“I am keeping it clean,” Verity was saying. She was at the table, putting together a sandwich. The rest of them had an early lunch, but Mizuki had left things out.

“Well, can I come with you?” asked Mizuki. “I’ve never seen the place, and if you’re going to be staying there long-term, I want to see it.”

“You think that I’m not keeping it clean?” asked Verity.

“Puh-leez,” said Mizuki. “I saw your room at the Fig and Gristle, and I’ve definitely seen your room here. Cleaning is the last thing you like to do.”

“I actually agree with Mizuki on this one,” said Alfric.

“I’m doing fine out in the woods,” said Verity. “Isra needs the socialization more than I do, it makes sense. And I’m keeping the place clean, because I’m not under any delusion that I live there.”

“Well, can I see it?” asked Mizuki. “Not to double-check your cleanliness, obviously, I just want to see the place. And you’re voluntarily living there, so …”

“It’s Isra’s house,” said Verity. “I’m only living there because … we agreed that it would be better if we didn’t sleep in the same room anymore.”

“You don’t owe us an explanation about that,” said Mizuki. “Though it wouldn’t hurt, obviously.”

“We’re just … working things out, I think,” said Verity. She looked down at her food. “And it might be that when we’ve worked them out, there won’t be an ‘us’ anymore.” She looked hollow, or if not hollow, then like she might fill with tears.

“There better be an ‘us’ though,” said Mizuki, gesturing at the three of them, and probably meaning the whole party. “Alfric would be gutted if we needed to find a new fifth.”

“We’re not at that point,” said Alfric, stepping forward slightly.

“Isra and I are fine to go into a dungeon together,” said Verity. Her voice was somewhat lacking in warmth, as if it shouldn’t have been in question. Alfric considered that for a moment, and realized that Verity prided herself on professionalism, canceled concerts aside. The concert hadn’t been entirely canceled, at least from what Alfric had heard from Dondrian: instead, a different esteemed musician was taking her place at the last minute with a different program, all of which was less likely to be successful, and had probably cost Verity’s family a lot.

<Dungeon check!> Mizuki called into the party channel. <I personally, am in for a dungeon today, it’s just after lunch, that’s still enough time.>

<I’m in too,> said Alfric, almost immediately.

<Yes, I could do it,> said Isra.

<Sure,> said Verity.

They all waited for a beat, but there was no response from Hannah.

<Hannah?> asked Mizuki.

<Busy,> was Hannah’s one-word response, which came out slightly breathy.

“Welp,” said Mizuki. “I guess she’s with Marsh.”

“She might be moving something heavy,” said Alfric. Mizuki rolled her eyes at him. “What? She could be.”

“I think everyone knows that’s not what she’s doing,” said Mizuki.

“Well, we need to wait for her,” said Verity. She was eating her sandwich with her elbows on the table, being unladylike, even by the very loose standards of the house. Alfric wondered whether it was deliberate.

“If all four of us are up for it, I imagine that we’ll be going,” said Alfric. “I don’t think she would say no. We’ll wait until she gets back to us, but I’ll try to get everything prepped, and maybe change.”

“I need to think about dinner,” said Mizuki. “Ideally we’ll get home in time so it’s not a problem, but maybe I can do some prep work that sits in the chiller.”

“I can help,” said Verity. She set the sandwich down and stood up.

“No,” said Mizuki. “Appreciate it, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in the kitchen.”

Verity frowned. “I can help. I can chop something up for you?”

“Um,” said Mizuki. “I guess. With the new knife from Vertex, I guess you don’t even really need knife skills.” She looked mildly uncomfortable. “Sure. Finish your food first though.”

“Are you going to need anything from the cabin?” asked Alfric.

“No,” said Verity. “My dungeon gear is still here.”

“Then I’ll get things going,” said Alfric.

He didn’t like doing things this way. Dungeons weren’t meant to be a spur of the moment thing. You weren’t supposed to wake up in the morning and think ‘ah, feels like we should do a dungeon today’. Rather, you were supposed to schedule them in some way, ideally a week ahead of time in order to make sure that schedules were clear, and a true dungeoneering party would have a defined day of the week — ideally two or three days of the week — that everyone knew were going to be dungeon days. Of course, you needed to be flexible when it came to dungeons, because there were administrative things to deal with, and sometimes matters of recuperation, and a dungeon could take as long as a week if there were a lot of things you needed to get out. He decided that he would bring it up at the post mortem if the dungeon went well.

Preparation had become a bit more complicated. The chest meant that they didn’t need to bring in packs as such, though Alfric kept a small one that wouldn’t affect his combat ability too much, mostly filled with things that he might need at a moment’s notice without opening up the chest and having to dig for it. For the chest itself, which was parked in his room most of the time it wasn’t following someone around, they had made a number of modifications to it over time, the biggest being a foldable ladder to better allow people to climb into it. When the ladder was folded up, there was no cavity within the chest, just whatever was in there pushed near the top. A second addition had been a pack that Alfric had a seamstress make for him. This was largely just a set of straps hooked to a long sheet of thick fabric with a lot of pockets. It was hooked to the lid of the chest so that when the chest opened, there would be an array of easily grabbable things.

He checked everything over while they waited for word from Hannah. He had gotten a new set of armor while they were in Dondrian, and had been itching to try it out in actual combat. The thimble armor had gone to Isra, as Mizuki was now equipped with the skull armor. Of them all, Verity was the only one with only a breastplate and a helm, though she stayed back in most dungeons, and was the least in need of protection.

Alfric dressed himself in a gambeson, a thick quilted piece outfit that would sit below the armor. He put on heavy socks with a padded bottom that would cushion his feet as he moved around. When that was finished, he held his hands to the sides and watched as the plates of metal rose from where they were stacked and slotted themselves into place around him. They had an odd look to them, like iron that had spots of rust, but closer inspection had shown that they were small blooms of brown flowers, smooth and cold to the touch. They didn’t fit together like plate armor did, instead feeling more like over-large scales. At his hips they flared out, almost like a skirt, and they sat heavily on his arms. When he’d shown Mizuki, she’d compared him to a fish, and the plates destroyed any semblance of a silhouette, obscuring the actual form of his body. At the head, in particular, was a pyramid-shape, and completely obscured his vision except for a small slit to see out of.

Alfric hadn’t gotten the armor because it assembled itself around him though. If that was all it could do, then it would only be slightly better than mundane full plate. No, the armor had something of a living quality to it, responding to his wishes as though it were trained. At a thought, the plates of armor could bloom open around his head, allowing him to see. If he wanted a shield, he had only to think it, putting up his forearm and having the plates rearrange themselves in an interlocking pattern. The maximum position of the plates, once they were active, was about two feet away from him. There were just about a hundred uses for the armor, including as a weapon, but it had been nearly a week, and there’d been no opportunity.

<Alright, alright, I’m fine for a dungeon today,> Hannah eventually said. <Be home in a bit.>

<So what were you busy with?> asked Mizuki.

<I’d be careful with what words you speak to your healer, little one,> said Hannah.

<Nah, I never get hit anyway,> said Mizuki.

<Oh, I think you could easily see your way to gettin’ hit,> said Hannah. <Quite easily indeed.>

Mizuki giggled into voice chat.

By the time Alfric came back downstairs, Mizuki had packed up her armor and Isra had returned from wherever she’d been off to. There was a part of Alfric that still expected her to be the reserved girl in the headscarf, but she let her curly hair hang down these days, and wore light dresses that breathed in the summer heat. There were times he could still see echoes of awkwardness and uncertainty in her, moments when she held back, and times when she was clearly missing some big and obvious piece of the world, but all this was becoming more rare.

“Where are we going this time?” she asked as she stretched out. She hadn’t gotten dressed yet, and was eating from the plate of cut vegetables that had been left out from lunch.

“Latchet Point,” said Alfric. “Deep into the woods.”

“Can I fly?” asked Isra. “I was thinking it would be better.” She glanced toward the door.

“Sure,” said Alfric. “It’s not a long flight, minutes, maybe, and you’ll be able to find the dungeon entrance better than any of us would. I’ll mark it out on a map for you.”

“Great,” said Isra. “I need to go get my bow and start armoring up.” She turned and left.

“Is this going to, you know, work?” Mizuki asked Alfric. “I mean, with the two of them? Because it feels like Isra is flying so that she won’t have to hang out with Verity.”

“Yeah,” Alfric agreed. He let out a breath. “It’s a test of how we work as a dungeon party in these new circumstances.”

“I hate tests,” said Mizuki.

After another half hour had passed, everyone was ready to go. As had become tradition, they all stepped into the garden stone, save Isra, who was their transportation. The first time into the garden stone had been awkward, but now it was so routine that they hardly thought about it. Alfric was practically aching to get newer transportation for them, something they could all ride together without the hassle of the garden stone or the discomfort of the chest. Still, that was something for the future, as the current situation was perfectly adequate in strictly practical terms.

“Do you like practicing in the woods?” Mizuki asked Verity. “Is it better than at home?”

“A bit, yes,” said Verity. “It’s quiet in a way that I appreciate. When I’m at your house, there are often people moving around, making noise, talking as I play — all not what I want when practicing.” She shrugged. “I don’t need to practice much, now that there’s no looming concert.”

“I still think you should have done a dungeon songs concert,” said Mizuki. “I mean, people liked the knight song, and you have a whole bunch of those written, right?”

“I do,” Verity admitted. “But changing the concert series in midstream would be, ah … not the proper thing to do.”

“Not proper?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, you don’t care about that, right? And you already did that one song, replacing Berchew. Which people loved!”

“It was novel,” said Verity. “To make it into a full concert … it wouldn’t be novel. People would realize that it’s not a fusion of rural folk music and high-class conservatory training, it’s just rural folk music, whatever comes into my head, worked on with all the skill of a cat trying to open a door.”

“Aw, don’t make fun of Tabbins,” said Mizuki.

The trip wasn’t long though, and the conversation didn’t get too far before they arrived. They all came out into the towering woods of Latchet Point. The trees were tall, old growth, never harvested for wood for the simple reason that this particular variety of tree would dull the blades of the strongest axes four times before they could make it through. The human expansion into this particular region had always been fairly lackluster anyhow, but aside from the four roads that stretched out from the warp point, the entire hex was virtually abandoned. They hadn’t landed at the warp though, instead Isra had flown them to the dungeon entrance, which sat in a gap in the trees that was too small to be called a clearing.

“So,” asked Hannah, hands on her hips. “What fresh horrors do we expect in this one?”

Chapter 122 - Brief Bars

Isra woke up alone. The room had gone chilly in the night, which often happened in Pucklechurch, even in midsummer. Beneath her blanket, all was well, and there was a temptation to hide there until the sun had warmed the room, but she threw off her covers anyhow and went into the closet, looking for something to wear. She had not just her new wardrobe, but more than half of Verity’s things as well, since Verity had thought that she’d be sleeping at the cabin only for a short while. It had been almost a week and showed no signs of stopping though, and Isra wondered whether Verity would end up simply living there, even though she wasn’t suited to the woods.

Dressing was harder without Verity. Isra had sometimes just stayed in the room until Verity woke up late, so they could get dressed together, because Verity was always helpful with navigating the ins and outs of fashion. Fashion had many rules, and while Verity couldn’t always articulate why those rules existed — many of them were made up, it seemed — she could at least define what they were, and help Isra to avoid the most serious missteps. Certain shoes went with certain dresses, and certain colors went with each other, and there were something called ‘accessories’, which was a name for more or less anything that you wore that wasn’t clothing. More than once, Isra had asked for advice and Verity had come over to redo almost everything, from the shade of her lipstick to the shoes she’d be wearing.

Black and brown weren’t supposed to go together, except in certain circumstances. A simple blouse would need to be paired with a vibrant skirt or a printed pattern. Skin could be shown, but only so much, and the idea that most people went with was to tease rather than flaunt, though that varied.

The irritating thing had been that Verity was, most often, entirely right. The changes she’d suggested really did make Isra look better. What Isra found most annoying was that she couldn’t just figure it out on her own, even having been told a handful of the rules. She was, apparently, a quick learner — people had told her that about many things, even when druidism wasn’t guiding her along — but in fashion it felt like she was still fumbling around in the dark. No one had said anything, and Verity had said that they wouldn’t say anything, and that was almost worse, because it meant that they might notice and then stay silent. When it came to fashion, you could put something together, look in the mirror, and end up looking wrong anyway, without even knowing that you were wrong.

And of course Verity had never helped with prim efficiency, not once they were partnered. There had been touching, the undoing of buttons, the slide of a zipper, hands touching hips and waist, or legs when explaining where a hem should lay for such and such purpose. As instruction, it was perhaps lacking, but as entertainment, it was nearly unparalleled, and Isra missed that too.

Their conversation after the concert had gone poorly. Isra blamed herself for that. There was a time and a place to talk about those feelings, and it hadn’t been right after Verity had gone through another moment with her mother. Isra had tried to disengage, to go to sleep with everything that had been brewing left unsaid, but Verity had pushed, and it had spilled out. And from there, it had mostly been silence between them. They were avoiding each other, and after a brief, awkward conversation about their living arrangements, when Isra had said she’d move back into the cabin, Verity had offered instead.

Isra was laced with regrets, but she was also convinced that there was something real she’d been feeling, and it wasn’t as though a reunion would make those thoughts go away. She loved Verity, deeply, but she worried that wasn’t enough. Hannah had said that, more than once, that it wasn’t enough to love.

Isra spent the morning in the garden after eating a small breakfast sandwich that Mizuki had prepared. Mizuki had declared it the Day of Three Sandwiches, and seemed to think that she could make all three distinct enough for it to work, which she seemed quite pleased about. Isra didn’t understand it, but she thought it was one of those things that most people wouldn’t understand. At least there would be sandwiches along the way.

Isra and Verity both worked on the garden, and in the week that had followed the concert and their return, it had been something of a way of interacting with each other, at least from Isra’s perspective. Isra did most of her work in the morning, before Verity came home, and Verity worked through the day, while Isra was busying herself around town. There wasn’t actually that much to do in the garden, not with all the work they’d already put in, but Isra knew the place like the back of her hand, and always noted what Verity had done, whether it was a new trellis for the tomatoes or an attempt to make sure the spinach wouldn’t bolt. Isra had left most of the harvesting to Verity, and noted which of the strawberries Verity had missed. She assumed that Verity was doing the same, and in that way, they were still friends.

“Hi Isra,” said Alfric as Isra was telling the bugs to stay away. His voice was soft, like he was trying to sneak up on a deer. “Just so you know, after lunch I’ll be doing disclosure. I wanted to wait until everyone was here, so we could do it as a group.”

Isra looked at him. He looked apologetic, but there was something else, not like he was wincing, but like he was preparing to wince.

“What happened?” asked Isra.

“The short version is that we tried to do a dungeon and it went bad,” said Alfric. “The long version, I’ll give at lunch.”

“Okay,” said Isra. She wanted more, but it was clear that Alfric was waiting for the right moment, and so she went back to the plants, willing them to grow bigger and better. There was a knot of tension in her stomach though, and it was hard to concentrate on anything, so she soon went back inside to wait.

Verity came right around the time lunch was being prepared. Isra saw her coming through the eyes of a few birds, though she was careful not to let the birds stare, and she hoped that Verity would be none the wiser. It was something they’d joked about before, but now the spying felt less like a joke. She hoped that Verity was doing alright out in the cabin, and all the reports from animals had been that things were going well.

“Verity, I need to do some disclosure, but I’d like to wait until after everyone has had some food,” said Alfric.

“Uh oh,” said Verity. She stared at him. “How bad?”

“We did a dungeon, and we didn’t all make it,” he said. “There’s also something that I’d like to talk with you about after I’m done with the others, alright?”

“Yeah,” said Verity. “That’s, uh. Fine.”

Because Isra was in the living room, Verity went into the dining room. It was how they were doing it, each of them in a different place from the other, if for some reason they ended up in the house together. Isra was doing her part to maintain some distance. She hoped that it was for the best. She didn’t want to lose the relationship, she just wanted it to be better, and some space seemed like it would help with that. And if they weren’t going to be girlfriends, then they should at least still be friends, colleagues, and maybe roommates. It seemed like that was for the future though.

They all ate together, mostly in silence. No one had all that much of an appetite. Isra wasn’t sure what was really accomplished by having them eat first, and she wondered whether that was deliberate on Alfric’s part. Whatever she was picturing in her head though, she was sure that it must be worse.

“Alright,” said Alfric once everyone was done eating. “Let me tell you how the dungeon went.”

Isra was wrong. It wasn’t actually that bad, not as Alfric had told it. She was the one who had died, which was a bit of a relief. If she had let someone down, or gotten in the way of Mizuki’s spells, or not listened to Alfric, or forgotten something they’d drilled on, it might have been different. Instead, it seemed like it was just chance, and all Alfric’s gravity seemed a bit unwarranted.

“Why are the dungeons so bad?” asked Verity, once Alfric had delivered a largely uninterrupted report.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “We don’t have enough to say that they’re above what we’d expect from variance, but it’s something I’ve talked to my guild about. They seem to agree that we’ve faced a bit worse than we might have expected. It takes some time for guild conversations to happen, but from the reports I put in for last week’s dungeons … yes, we might be getting bad variance, or there might be something else in play.”

“It’s me,” said Verity. She looked at Alfric. “That’s the conclusion, right?”

“Wait,” said Mizuki, holding up a hand. “Haven’t we had good variance? Like, a lot of money from the growstones, the theater, all that other stuff?”

“That’s not going to be worth anything if we die,” said Verity. She looked over at Isra, just for a moment. Their eyes met, then slipped away, like raindrops rolling off a leaf.

“No one died for real,” said Alfric. “It was all like a bad dream.” He really didn’t seem like he meant it though, or if he did mean it, then it was a bad dream that was sticking with him.

“I know that,” said Verity. She let out a sigh. “But if it’s me?”

“You said there was a large rift in the forest,” said Hannah, arching an eyebrow.

“I’m not sure that’s anything,” said Alfric.

Mizuki looked around. “I don’t get it.”

“The rift might be about us,” said Isra.

“Alfric, you said you had something more for me?” asked Verity. She wasn’t meeting Alfric’s eyes.

“Yes,” he replied. “I wanted to keep it confidential.”

“Can we do that now?” asked Verity. “I want to know what it is.”

Alfric paused, looking around the table. “Sure,” he said. “We can talk up in your room?” Verity nodded.

They left, and there was some silence.

“I wonder whether it was the Day of Three Sandwiches in the undone day,” said Mizuki. “Alfric didn’t mention it.”

“Well, ay,” said Hannah. “Probably didn’t think that it was worth the breath, to be honest.”

“Ouch,” said Mizuki.

“I don’t mean it like that, I just think this is hard on him, not just because he had to live through it, but because he’s our leader and feels like he let us down,” said Hannah. “Now, I don’t think that’s true, not as he’s described it to us, and I trust the man, but it’s what he feels, and that’s why such an august event as Three Sandwich Day wasn’t of concern to him.”

“Day of Three Sandwiches,” said Mizuki. She crossed her arms.

Isra was tempted to turn her attention elsewhere. She wanted to know what Verity had done or said that required a private talk. It would have been easy to send a nearby squirrel up the side of the house to sit by the window and listen in, or even to have Tabbins get up off his spot on the couch to saunter upstairs. Isra resisted the urge. They had gone up there for privacy, after all, and while she sometimes watched people when they didn’t know they were being watched, that felt manifestly different from watching people when they’d taken some pains not to have eyes on them.

“How are you?” asked Hannah.

“Fine,” said Isra with a shrug. “We know that this happens.”

“We knew it could happen, which isn’t the same,” said Hannah.

“It’s what Alfric’s chrononaut power is for,” said Isra. “He could tell me that I died in a dungeon a hundred times and I don’t think I would care, except that I would try to do better next time. We were all fighting for our lives, as he tells it.” She shrugged again. “Is that weird, to not care?”

“No,” said Mizuki. “I mean, it makes me sad that we don’t have a perfect record, but I mostly care about Alfric.”

“Ay,” said Hannah.

“Normally he’s so confident,” said Mizuki. She glanced at the stairs. “And, you know, I don’t want to die because of personal stuff.” She looked at Isra. “The whole relationship that Alfric warned you not to get into.”

Isra frowned and stayed quiet.

“No, I mean, it was fine when you guys were going at it, when you were peas in a pod, cuddled on the couch together, but now the party channel is quiet all day, you’re hardly ever in the same room, we don’t really know what’s going on except that it was probably you having a problem with her, we’re not doing dungeons and the dungeon we did do we failed —”

“Enough,” said Hannah.

“Well I’m just trying to explain how it feels,” said Mizuki, turning to Hannah. “You understand that, right? And you’re the one who says that people should talk about their things.”

“It’s neither time nor place,” said Hannah. “Wait a day, maybe two.” She looked at Isra. “No need to have everything cascade at once, there’s a thing that can happen where too much silence means it’s like a dam breaking, and I want no one to get flooded.”

“Sorry,” said Mizuki. She looked at Isra. “Sorry. I wasn’t — I was just trying to explain how I’m feeling.”

“It’s fine,” said Isra, though it really wasn’t. That they were putting a burden on Mizuki was something that Isra hadn’t even really considered, and being told their personal problems were impacting everyone else was exactly what she didn’t want to hear.

“Alfric will need our support,” said Hannah, changing the subject with an abruptness that Isra quite appreciated. “It’s not been half a day since he saw us fail. It would be odd if he just said that it was variance and moved on like nothin’ happened. Odd, or maybe just good trainin’, but I don’t know how you train for that.”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “Is there something we could, I don’t know, do?”

“No,” said Hannah. “Besides, we did some work to help in the undone day, after the dungeon was done. He talked with me privately about it before this, mostly to get some advice.”

“Hmph,” said Mizuki. “Well I don’t know why I didn’t get a private talk for some advice.” She was still ruffled.

“You know I’m trained, right?” asked Hannah. “Not for this, exactly, but for situations that bear some similarities.”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “It’s just … I want a private talk too, if everyone is getting one.”

Alfric and Verity came down the stairs not long after that, and Verity returned to her seat, where she immediately began picking at her sandwich. Alfric stayed standing.

“Mizuki, can I talk with you?” asked Alfric.

“Ah crap,” said Mizuki.

“I’m personally done here,” said Alfric to the others. “Unless there’s something that we need to discuss as a group?” There was silence from around the room. “I’d like to schedule a dungeon, properly schedule it, for two days from now. I think there are a few actionable lessons, and I want to have some time to get moving on those things. We can talk about it more later, I wanted to give everyone some time to think their own thoughts. I’ve already had time to process, I want you all to have that too. Nothing else for the rest of the day.” He glanced at Hannah, and she nodded.

“But I’m still in trouble?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Alfric. “Just some disclosure I wanted to talk with you about.”

“Alright,” said Mizuki. She seemed skeptical. They went upstairs together. There was a stretch of silence at the table.

“Well,” said Hannah, coughing into her fist. “I’m off too, I s’pose. Not sure there’s much that I need to process, as it were, though I was told earlier, as Alfric said.” She looked first at Isra, then at Verity. “I’ll be back later in the day, if either of you want to talk in a professional capacity, or just to a friend.”

“Thank you,” said Isra.

“It’s appreciated,” said Verity.

“And I can talk now, if either of you would like, either separately or together,” said Hannah.

Isra looked at Verity. For a moment, it seemed like they might. They hesitated at the precipice, together, or not together, but on either side of the rift.

“I need to think about what Alfric said,” Verity replied. She seemed apologetic. She looked at Isra, then back at Hannah. “And I need to think about my role in the dungeons.”

“Of course,” said Hannah. “I’ll find you later, if you don’t find me.”

Verity nodded and rose from the table, then quietly walked out of the room.

Hannah turned to Isra. “I want to talk to you.”

“You do?” asked Isra.

Hannah nodded. “Maybe not right now, maybe later on, but I’ve asked you both about what happened, and neither of you wanted to give me a straight answer —” she held up a hand, “And that’s fine, I understand, every cleric gets to know the feelin’ of a person not wantin’ to talk to them about somethin’ that should be talked about, and maybe it’s me, but —”

“It’s not you,” said Isra. “I like you.”

“Well,” said Hannah. She seemed temporarily disarmed by that.

“You’re like a sister to me,” said Isra.

“Ay,” said Hannah. She seemed taken aback, as though this was news to her.

“You explained about the birds and the bees for me,” said Isra. “Not the actual birds and bees, the metaphor, for sex.”

“I’m glad that I could help you,” said Hannah. “And thank you for the kind words. But what I was goin’ to say was that talkin’ to someone might do you good.” She cleared her throat, more for effect than because it was necessary. “If you’re tryin’ to be a new you, one who’s outgoing, who moves through society like a fish through water, then it would do you good to have these other skills. As I said, not now, I don’t want a cascade of all the unspoken things, but you should steel yourself for it, because it will need to happen.”

“I … don’t want to say anything bad about Verity,” said Isra. “And it’s personal.” She folded her arms. “Private.”

“And you don’t want to talk to her either,” said Hannah. “Because you’d worry you’d hurt her feelings?”

“I already hurt her feelings,” said Isra. She frowned. “Are you trying to trick me into talking?”

Hannah raised her hands and leaned back in her chair. “Tryin’ to help someone by trickin’ them isn’t going to work, ay? And it’s a bad idea for other reasons too, mind you.”

“Okay,” said Isra, but the frown was still on her face. She didn’t like it there. Frowns were unpretty, stern things, and she’d decided that she didn’t like them. She hadn’t realized how much she frowned until someone had said something, and from that point on she was always conscious of it. She’d tried her best to retrain her face to smile instead, to be friendly and approachable, even when she felt wary and out of place.

“If you don’t want to talk, no one can force you, and no one wants to trick you,” said Hannah. “But it’s good to talk, if only because sometimes we have some ideas about the world, or about other people, that just aren’t true.” She sighed and got up. “As you’ve said, I’ve been some help to you in the past, but if you feel you want or need to handle this one on your own, I’ll step aside so you don’t feel pressured to speak with me. I don’t want to risk our friendship because I couldn’t stop myself from bein’ too much of a cleric.”

“Sorry,” said Isra. “I just … it is personal.” The word didn’t feel quite right. It was bigger than that. Their friendship was a burrow that needed to be hidden from predators. It was a stash of food that needed to be jealously guarded for the winter.

“Ay,” nodded Hannah. “I understand. It’s hard to talk about in a way that talkin’ about whether other people can see through birds isn’t.”

Isra gave a weak smile, and watched briefly as Hannah took her leave. That meant that Isra was all alone at the table. She rose, slowly, and tried to decide what she was going to do with herself. There was some temptation to go into town and visit the school, or talk with some people, and if she hadn’t gotten the news, that was what she might have done. Isra was fairly sure that Bethany was pregnant, but she’d stopped herself at the last moment from saying anything about it, because it was something she might have picked up from the plants and animals. Isra had then almost asked at the dinner table how people knew whether they were pregnant, and how people went about handling that whole business, but she hadn’t found the right time to bring it up, and worried that it would be enough of a misstep that she’d feel the hot shame of embarrassment, even within the party.

Isra found herself going outside and spreading her senses. She wasn’t looking for Verity, but she also wasn’t not looking for Verity either. Eventually, having stretched to the limits of her ability, she saw Verity a half mile away, walking toward the cabin.

Isra followed after.

She wasn’t sure what she was planning. If Verity returned to the cabin, Isra imagined that she might knock on the door, and then might come in, and they might kiss together, and it would be just like how it was. Or they might talk, and something other than hurt might come from it. Or Isra might just stay outside, wondering what Verity was doing inside the cabin. There was a temptation to spy, naturally, but Isra kept thinking about how she’d feel if someone was watching her.

Watching someone as they walked through the woods was different. There was no reason to expect that you were private in the woods, and the animals were watching anyhow. All Isra was doing was watching through them. She was, however, being careful not to stare or follow, or at least not more than an animal would already do. It was normal for animals to look at people as they walked, worried about a potential predator. It was also normal for them to follow people, if they thought those people had food, or they were curious, or they wanted to make sure the person left their territory.

Isra walked as she watched.

Verity was in a poor mood, that much was obvious from the heaviness of her footfalls, but it wasn’t a normal sort of poor mood. No, Verity had her brow furrowed in concentration, as she did when she was playing a difficult piece of music — a frown that was always eliminated for actual public performance. Verity was in a thinking sort of poor mood, almost certainly because of what had happened during the dungeon, or whatever Alfric had wanted to talk to her about.

Isra knew that if anyone was watching her, they’d think she was a fool. She was creeping through the woods, following after her girlfriend, if they were still girlfriends. Isra tried to walk with her back straight and head held high, so it would seem less like she was a cat stalking a mouse, but there wasn’t really a point to that. She knew there was no one around to see her skulking. Still, she wanted to look good and dignified for the animals that turned their heads toward her.

When Verity reached the cabin, Isra slowed herself. There was something about the way that Verity had gone in, a lack of hesitance, that made some strange emotion bubble inside of her. She wasn’t angry, exactly, but it was a close cousin to that. She’d been completely fine with Verity spending time in the cabin, but actually seeing it made her stomach twist into knots. Isra sat still, cooling herself, as she kept eyes on her home — her former home.

It was about territory, she decided. She knew it was different for humans, but in animals, invasion of territory got the hackles up. To have a predator prowling around your area was one thing, but to have a competitor doing the same was another, and of all the fights between animals that Isra had seen, there was something of a different character to those of the same species. That, it seemed, was what she was feeling, as though Verity was trying to steal her nest or pee up against a tree in the heart of her domain. It was a surprising emotion, and one that she couldn’t have imagined. She hadn’t felt that it would be a big deal for Verity to be in the old home, but clearly it was.

Eventually, the wild emotions calmed and calcified into a hard lump of discomfort. She didn’t know how she would explain any of this. It was the sort of thing that didn’t have an explanation, that was just a thing of emotion, and to say it out loud would be to sound crazy to the people who heard it. Verity had offered to live in the cabin, and Isra had accepted, not thinking too much of it. There was no reason that it should make Isra feel so awful, especially not when she had said that it would be fine.

Seeing it shouldn’t have been different from knowing about it. And yet it was, somehow.

Isra waited, three hundred yards away, cloaking her scent, making sure that she was behind a tree. She was spying, plain and simple, but didn’t go so far as to look inside the house. That, somehow, felt a step too far. Verity had noted Isra watching through birds before, and had seemed to enjoy it, to see it as flirtation, but this was different, uninvited in a way that felt different, at least to Isra’s muddled thoughts.

Just as Isra was about to leave well enough alone, Verity came out from the cabin. She had stripped down to just a thin shirt and a short skirt, cool clothes on a warm day, and she held the neck of her lute in one hand. There was a chair just outside the cabin, one taken by Isra from a dungeon, where furniture could be easily had. Verity sat herself down in the chair, gently tuned the lute, strummed it once, then began to sing:

The falling girl

She stopped, cleared her throat, and started again:

A fall from grace
To a pleasant town
A scenic place
To lighten my frown

She stopped the song, tapped her fingers against the wood of the lute, then tried once more, the tune completely different.

My first love, my only girl
I thought we had some time to twirl
To dance and sing, to stay a while
Something something faded smile

Verity let out a low moan and hung her head, then swore. When she started up again, the song was fast and with pep, having a jauntiness and energy that hadn’t been there before.

I saw her die in dungeon deep
And then I took a fatal leap
But when the day reset for me
I found myself like wet debris
My love was living, bright and hot
But love me, she, I fear, did not

That, at least, explained why Alfric had a conversation with her. It made Isra’s stomach clench to hear it. Of course it wasn’t real, and Verity’s stated feelings on the undone days was that they didn’t really matter and shouldn’t be worried too much about, but it still caused a cascade of emotions in Isra. And it wasn’t that Isra didn’t feel any love, it was that the love seemed to strain at them both in different ways. Before Verity’s mother, it had felt perfect.

Verity sang on, stopping at various points to restart or rephrase. She was spilling her feelings out into the open air, and Isra sat there, listening to it all. It lasted for well over an hour. The sun moved across the sky. The clouds crawled along above them.

Isra felt the need to say something, and might have, if she weren’t three hundred yards away. She wanted Verity to look up at one of the birds and say, ‘I know you’ve been watching. Maybe it’s time we finally had that talk.’ But Verity never did look at the birds, or the squirrels, or any other animals. Eventually, she picked up the lute and went back into the house.

Isra hesitated. She needed to come clean about the spying. She shouldn’t have stayed and listened, not when Verity was singing important things to the wide woods, thinking that they would only fall on the unappreciative ears of animals. Isra had a frustrating lack of words though, an inability to get across what she was feeling inside. If she went up to the cabin, and knocked on the door, she felt like the conversation would go sour, as it had before.

One of the things they had said, at the wedding, was that they would support each other through everything. That had felt right, to Isra, that a true partner would support you through anything, and that you would in turn support them. She wasn’t sure why it had felt so off with Verity. Maybe it was because the wounds felt like they were self-inflicted, like Verity had been taking none of the good advice on how to handle her mother. The stress of the concerts, the anxiety that had come before every trip to Dondrian, the tears that seemed to flow … it had all seemed so avoidable, at least to Isra. She hadn’t understood. She still didn’t, really.

Isra walked through the forest, back to the house. She was lost in her own thoughts, and arrived there before she knew it.

It took Hannah some time to come back, and when she did, Isra was ready.

“Alright,” said Isra. “I’d like to talk.”

Chapter 121 - The New Normal, pt 2

“There will probably be lots of birds,” said Alfric. “A surprising number, really. Something like eighty percent of all recorded monsters had some kind of bird-like appearance, even if they weren’t strictly feathered or flying. Interior will be something like ninety percent natural, maybe more, or that’s the expectation from the logs I read. We’re expecting fewer and more naturalistic entads, and more ectad materials. But again, that’s general.”

“Be ready for anything!” Mizuki chirped. She looked at Alfric. “Right?”

“Right,” he said. He looked at Isra. “If we have fliers, you’re our best defense.” He turned to Mizuki. “And you’re potentially our second-best defense, depending on what kind of magic is in there.”

“Okay,” said Mizuki, though she looked doubtful. The variability of the dungeons was getting to her, Alfric knew. It was something they’d talked about a few times. It was entirely possible for them to go into a dungeon and have Mizuki unable to provide much of anything unless their other casters were using their abilities — and that was often too late, since Hannah didn’t do much healing in the middle of combat.

Alfric approached the dungeon portal with due reverence. It was locked, and he had the key, but it was the same key, the kind that opened only those dungeons in relatively unpopulated areas, where magic tended to be thin. He was itching to try a harder dungeon with the group, maybe Liberfell or Tarchwood, but with things as they were, he didn’t want to push anyone. Latchet Point was, in fact, supposed to be one of the easier dungeons in the entire area, and he’d selected it because he wanted something that wouldn’t need the absolute pinnacle of teamwork.

Alfric went first, bident held in front of him. He had wanted a better spear from Dondrian, but had set budgetary rules for himself, and the spear he’d been admiring would have required him to take out a loan. Still, the armor itself could serve as a weapon, if the conditions were right.

Once he was through the transitory zone, Alfric was greeted by warm and pleasant sunlight, or something like it, which filtered down through tall trees all around him. He waited, not moving more than five feet from the entrance, and kept his eyes peeled for creatures. The open room was large, reminding him of the dungeon they’d done with the tall pillars, that time he’d been turned into stone, and he idly wondered whether the others would think the same. There didn’t seem to be any monsters though, and it wasn’t long before the others had entered the dungeon too.

<This is like that dungeon where you got turned into stone,> said Mizuki as she looked around.

<Yeah, I was thinking that,> said Alfric. He reached into the trunk and pulled out some colored lights, which he put on either side of the dungeon entrance, so they’d be able to find it when they wanted to leave. The edge of the room was a vertical span of wood, which slightly curved, and terminated at a thicket of branches above, roughly the same height as the canopy.

<Lots of wood mood,> said Mizuki. <Not the best, not without mixing in some force. Verity, if you can, a song for strength would be great, like we’ve done before? Something to give me some force to work with.>

In response, Verity strummed her lute with her many-fingered hand, starting in on a light and pleasant song about petals falling in late spring. Alfric had been worried that her songs would be of a mood, but it was a lifting tune, one of hope.

Alfric nodded. <Let’s move on ahead and scout the room.>

These large rooms were trouble, mostly because the threats could come from anywhere. This one was a forest, so much like the one they’d left that once they were a ways into it, it was almost as though they weren’t in a dungeon at all. The ground cover was sparse, just short grasses and small ferns among the decaying plant matter, which made it easier to move through. Alfric marked trees with chalk as they walked, though the sun was at enough of an angle that he wasn’t too worried about finding his way back. Even in a dungeon with something like a sun, there was rarely a day-night cycle. He was keeping his eye on the sun though, just in case.

The shriek of the birds could be heard before the flapping of their wings. The tall trees made it hard to pinpoint their direction, but Alfric had heard them coming, and was facing the right direction for them. Isra had lifted her bow and nocked an arrow, ready to fire. From the sounds, it was a cluster of less than ten rather than a flock, something large and threatening, and Alfric hoped that it wouldn’t be another dive-bombing situation again.

The first of the birds swooped in with talons outstretched, moving so fast that Alfric didn’t have much time to take it in. The plumage was colorful, yellow at the leading edge and blue toward the back, with a black beak and feet that were difficult to see. The size was hard to judge until it was close, and then when it was close, he realized that it was bigger than he was. Isra got it with an arrow, but it raked its talons across Alfric’s helm and knocked him to the ground. He got to his feet at once and turned around to track it, but it had been pierced through the skull and tumbled to the ground in a burst of feathers. By the time Alfric turned around, the rest of them were coming, their shrieks almost deafening, following one after the other in a bone-shaking harmony.

Alfric was in front of the others, guarding them as best he could, and raised his bident into the air, trying to catch one of the birds as they tried to slash him with their talons as they passed. He got one, briefly, and the force of its movement wrenched the bident from his hands, leaving him momentarily unarmed. One of the birds landed in front of him and began pecking at him with its oversized beak, and it was like being smacked in the chest with a sledgehammer, heavy bruising blows that his armor couldn’t fully dissipate.

Alfric moved forward rather than back, only a moment’s thought spared for his team, who were on their own. He shifted the plates of his armor, losing protection around his arms to form the plates into pointed weapons. They were dull, but with enough force, a dull weapon would be good enough. He slammed his plate-covered fists together against the side of the bird’s head, edge on, using the full weight of his muscles, and the sloppy attack caught the bird in one eye. It wasn’t enough to break the skull, but Alfric had the bird’s head held, and used the plates like a vise, their force adding to his. The bird kicked him, using its sharp talons against the heavy metal on his stomach, almost hard enough to take the wind out of him. He held tight to the bird’s head and pressed with all his might, begging the armor for more power, until finally the skull creaked and groaned, then gave way. The bird collapsed to the ground, and Alfric spun around to look at his team.

Blood was seeping from between the gaps in Hannah’s armor, and the thimble armor that Isra wore had gashes ripped through it. Alfric hadn’t been able to count the birds as they came in, but at least three were still standing. Verity was the only one not actively fighting one, but she was on the ground, strumming the lute with hair pasted to her face by blood and sweat. Alfric raced for Mizuki, who he was most worried about — she had little combat experience — but before he got there, the bird tried to kick her in the chest. She caught the foot in the open mouth of the skull on her armor, and chomped down hard, shearing the leg off at the backwards knee. The bird hopped back, bleeding, then lost its balance and collapsed, beating its wings against the ground. Mizuki was on it in a moment, skulls opened wide.

Alfric tackled one of the birds from the side, taking it off Isra. He rolled with the bird, wrapping his armor around it and trying to squeeze hard and pin it in place. As he did that, he found his strength doubled, Verity’s work, and the flesh of the bird gave way to the dull edges of the plate armor. The bird wriggled beneath him, threatening to break free, bucking and twisting, but just as Alfric thought he might not be able to hold it pinned, the bident came down from above, piercing through the bird’s head, which then popped with a muffled explosion. It was Isra who’d used the bident, and she helped Alfric to his feet.

He turned to where Hannah had been, and was just in time to see her land a solid blow against the last of the birds. It was slow to rise, and Mizuki blasted a hole through its torso before it could find its footing.

For a brief second there was silence save for Verity’s song, which she’d kept up through being knocked to the ground and the frantic bout of combat, and then Alfric remembered his training.

<Status on injuries,> he said. <Hannah —>

<Ay,> she said. <Triage.> She held out a hand to Mizuki, who shook her head, then to Isra, who gratefully took it.

Alfric himself felt unsteady on his feet, and his chest ached. He thought it very possible that he’d broken a few ribs, which wasn’t too big of a deal, and worried more that he had some kind of internal injury that was beyond Hannah’s ability to fix.

It took some time for them to get as patched up as they could be, and no one really seemed to feel like talking. The enormous birds had been a difficult and frantic fight that they very easily might not have made it out of, and there was no loot to show for it. As a start to the dungeon, it was inauspicious. Mizuki should have been happier that her skull armor had actually worked in its first real combat test, but she seemed a bit dazed.

<Let’s get going,> said Alfric. This was probably the part of a dungeon where he should have given a pep talk, but none of his prepared pep talks seemed like they fit, not so close to the start of the dungeon.

They trudged on through the woods, and Alfric left more chalk marks on the trees. He was on higher guard. The first fight of a dungeon was often the most dangerous by virtue of it being the one that happened before your head was really out of the real world and back into delving, and he hoped that everything after would go better. He hadn’t seen enough of how everyone had reacted to know whether mistakes had been made on their end, and now wasn’t the time to ask.

They saw the gap in the woods before they saw the chasm. It was at least a hundred feet across, a sheer drop, and they couldn’t see the bottom, which was saying something, given there was full sunlight. They could see, on the opposite side, the way that soil transitioned into clay and later rock. It was unstable, too. Bits kept falling off into the place where the light didn’t reach.

<Whoa,> said Mizuki. She went closer to the edge than she should have and leaned over to look down. <Ugh.> She stepped back.

<There’s more of this room to explore,> said Alfric. <We’ll go other directions before we attempt a crossing.> Mizuki had the helm of flight, owing mostly to the skull armor lacking a helm, but it would be a process to get them over, and make retreat much more difficult.

<A huge rift,> said Hannah, staring at the gap between the sides.

They hadn’t yet moved on when they heard a bellow from across the way. It was large, slug-like, dripping mucous and pounding its pseudopods against the ground, but it seemed as incapable of crossing the gap as they were.

<We’ll deal with you later, pal,> said Mizuki.

Isra was the first to hear the other sounds. It was a full flock of birds this time, a swarm in the sky, racing through the woods, from the direction of the bellowing slug, possibly called by it. A cascade of monsters wasn’t unheard of. Once Isra called out the flock, they got into a more defensible formation, with Verity toward the back, and Alfric braced himself. A large flock of small creatures wasn’t something they were really prepared for, not with Mizuki being lacking in offensive capabilities this time around. There was a part of Alfric that wanted to call for a retreat, but it seemed likely the birds were faster than them. They could get in the chest and have someone race to the exit with the helm, but that would take more time, and as these thoughts were running through Alfric’s head, the birds appeared.

They were black, with long tails, and there were hundreds of them. The only reason not to panic was that they were small, but Alfric knew from experience that tiny creatures could be a problem.

<Verity, to me!> he called.

Verity moved in close as Alfric opened the plates up around him. He was just barely able to fit her in with him, the plates covering them both. The plates were no longer overlapping around his body and instead interlocking around them both. It effectively removed both of them from the fight, but Verity was the only one of them who wasn’t in full plate or its equivalent, and the small beaks would have torn her to shreds and taken her out of the battle anyway. She was still singing her song, though she was pressed against him and unable to play the lute.

The rain of birds started with a solid plink against the armor, moving it only slightly, the sound echoing for a bit before Alfric held out his hand and called for the plates to still. The second came soon after the first, and then they were beating against the armor like heavy rain. Alfric hoped that they were dying in the process, but it was impossible to tell, not without leaving a gap in the plates. Alfric tried to treat it as a storm to be weathered, but he was worried about how everyone else was doing out there. His own contribution against a flock was largely insignificant, and he tried to fight down the urge to go out there.

The sound of birds slamming against the armor began to die down, and there were other sounds that followed, some of them a plinking as birds tried to get into the shell, a few sharp blasts that Alfric thought was probably Mizuki cobbling together some spells, and the clamor of people moving around in a disordered way.

“I need to help,” Alfric said to Verity, partly by way of apology. Before she could respond, he stepped out from the armor, leaving through a brief parting of the plates, as easily as stepping through curtains hanging in a doorway.

He was beset at once by small birds, each no larger than a handspan, and they were weak, tiny things, though still capable of nipping a pea-sized bit of flesh from a person, as they proved to him almost right away. He slapped at them as though they were flies, and found that their bones were thin enough that they died in a single hit, which gave him the resolve to continue on. He was being bitten, but they were more concerned with biting him than avoiding his wrath, and Alfric smashed them over and over as his wounds wept blood.

The flock thinned over time, and every dead bird meant that there was less damage taken in killing the next one. Still, there was a limit to how much a person could bleed and still be well, and Alfric knew that he was nearing that point. The others were doing their part, though Hannah’s armor seemed to make her impervious, and Mizuki had taken to the skies, zipping in and out of the trees as the tiny birds followed her, occasionally releasing a sharp blast of magic behind her. She stopped all at once and covered her face with her hand, letting the birds run into her, chomping down on them with the skulls where they tried to beat against her.

Alfric hadn’t been watching Isra when she fell, he only saw her standing one moment and then on the ground the next. The thimble armor was too weak to protect her, the beaks of the birds sharp enough to rend it. He rushed over to her, trying to shoo the birds away, but they were dungeon mad, and focused only on the killing. He didn’t know how long she’d been down, but the thimble armor had been ripped, and her face was uncovered, now with wounds all over it from the pecks of dozens of birds.

<Healing!> Alfric called, and Hannah was over in a moment, even as the birds were still trying to kill both of them.

Hannah swore when she laid hands on Isra, and Alfric turned his attention away, back toward the birds. With another sharp crack, the last of the birds following Mizuki died, and she immediately landed and began bashing more of the birds, smashing some off Hannah. There were only a few of them left, and between the two of them —

<Verity, healing!> Hannah called.

Alfric looked to where Isra was laying. There were too many holes in her face, a grotesque pocking of flesh. He felt his stomach lurch.

<Is she going to be okay?> asked Mizuki.

Verity was playing a progressive, the same she’d used on Isra before, a bard’s version of a healing miracle. Nothing seemed to be happening though. The wounds weren’t sealing. The blood, in fact, had stopped flowing from the wounds. The thimble armor had started to retract, seemingly of its own volition.

Hannah sank back and let out a breath. <She didn’t make it.>

Verity burst forward from the plate armor, tossing her lute to the side, the song ended before it could reach its conclusion. She shrieked when she saw Isra laying there, then rushed to the body and cradled it, as though a hug could somehow bring Isra back to life.

Alfric felt a cold chill in the pit of his stomach.

<Alright,> said Alfric. <It’s alright. She’s not really dead.> He let out a shaky breath. <I’ll reset the day, she’ll be fine.>

Verity was crying, and Mizuki was too.

<Do it now,> said Verity. <End it now!>

<That’s not protocol,> said Alfric. <You wait until late in the day, in case there are things that you need to change. I can still go to Filera and get items identified —>

<That’s not something that anyone wants to hear,> said Hannah.

<I know,> said Alfric. <But you’re all going to forget this, and I’m not, so when I get up this morning and come downstairs, I want to have had some time to process this and what it means. I want there to be hours between when it happened and when I have to report on it. Okay?>

<I’m gonna be sick,> said Mizuki, and she promptly threw up. The skulls on her armor opened wide and threw up too, disgorging all of the things she’d used them to eat, including a corner of a drawer from her room, the leg of a large bird, and the corpses of all the small birds the armor had managed to bite.

<We’ll go,> said Alfric after a moment to stare at the mess. <Back to Pucklechurch. I’ll reset around nightfall.>

<Kill me,> said Verity. Her face was set.

<Verity,> Alfric began.

<It’s all pointless now, I don’t want to be a part of this, I don’t want to feel like this,> said Verity. <I love her. I don’t want to know she’s dead, even if she’s not. You’re resetting. I’m not going to remember it.>

<Protocol,> Alfric began.

Verity rose to her feet, letting Isra’s head rest against the ground. By the time Alfric realized what she was going to do, she was already in motion. He was faster than her, but he’d been too slow to react, and the cliff was too close to them. She disappeared over the edge before he could catch up, and it was quite some effort to stop himself. She screamed, into the open air rather than the party channel, and then there was silence, not even so much as a thump.

Alfric screamed down the pit, outside the party channel, the first thing that the dungeon would have heard from him aside from the fighting. Verity was gone, as dead as Isra, which meant not really dead at all, because the day would be erased. Still, it hit in his gut. He’d have to disclose it. He’d have to think about it, and find the right words, and maybe give a lecture on why no one should ever do that, even if they were confident the day would be reset, and it was nothing that he’d want to do.

<She’s never dealt with anythin’ like this,> said Hannah.

<I haven’t either,> said Alfric. He slumped. <This is our first failure as a dungeoneering party.>

<How could she just do that?> asked Mizuki. She was looking at the cliff. She looked at Alfric. <Has she done that before?>

<No,> said Alfric. <I’d have disclosed it.>

<To us too?> asked Mizuki.

<Yes,> said Alfric. <Come on, let’s go, there’s no point spending another minute in this dungeon. There’s still half a day left ahead of us, there’s no reason to waste it.>

They left Isra’s body where it was, and there was no talk of going down the pit to see Verity’s ultimate fate. If Isra had actually died, died for real, they’d have taken the body and done the proper rites, helping to send her spirit off along its way to the Spirit Gates, but they left her there instead. Protocol, as Alfric had said a few times, was to pretend that the day wasn’t going to reset, even if you knew that it was. That helped to avoid the accumulation of downstream effects on the day, so you knew that what you saw happen the first time around was what would likely happen the second time. Beyond that, it set you up so that if the day wasn’t reset, for whatever reason, you wouldn’t have to live with ill-considered actions. Actions like, for example, jumping off a cliff.

The death — deaths — were sitting heavily on Alfric’s mind. He hadn’t really seen death before, not of people. His life had been untouched by it. This wasn’t death, not true death, but it was just about as close to true death as you could see without it sticking. The lifeless body and pecked-at face would stay in his mind for a long time, he knew. He had training, quite a bit of it, inoculation against the trauma and horror of being killed himself, against the pain and suffering, against all sorts of things, but he wasn’t superhuman, and the weight slowly settled on his shoulders.

They left the dungeon, with Alfric and Hannah carrying the chest across the border. Once they were out, Alfric let the plate armor unfold and leave him, stacking up inside the opened chest. It had done well, for its first outing, and he felt like he knew it better for next time, but that was about as much positive as he could say about that particular dungeon run. He had wanted an easy dungeon. That was why they’d gone to Latchet Point in the first place. Now he was going to have to report the failure, and he was worried about the impact it was going to have on both team morale, and their willingness to do another dungeon.

Very briefly the thought of not telling them went through his head. He rejected it, of course, but the thought was there, intrusive and present, wanting to be argued against rather than snuffed out without further examination.

“So … does this just become a normal undone day now?” asked Mizuki.

“Seems so,” said Hannah, when Alfric didn’t answer. “Alfric, are you alright? Do you need to talk about it?”

“Uh,” he said. “Just thinking. And yes, it’s a normal undone day, try to go about your business as best you can. Neither of them are really gone. I’ll be resetting at sundown, well ahead of the witching hour, using the extra hours for, I don’t know, thinking about things. How to word the disclosure, I guess. Especially when it comes to Verity.”

“How can we help?” asked Hannah.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. He took a deep breath of the loamy forest air. “You probably can’t. Mostly I’m worried that what she did — that if I tell her about it, that will normalize it, make it so she’s more likely to do it next time, if there is a next time after this.”

“I think it was an understandable reaction,” said Hannah. “Given the circumstances, anyhow. She knows that she’s not going to remember the day anyhow, she knows that there would be half a day of dazed emotional pain ahead of her —”

“I can’t have people killing themselves in undone days,” said Alfric. “I can’t. Not just because it can screw things up for information flow, because it affects me to see these bad things happen to my friends. She should know that.”

“It was selfish,” said Hannah. She nodded. “I don’t think she realized that, but it’s somethin’ to talk about with her. I’m not sure what all you should say to her, to make sure it doesn’t happen again, but she’s not in a great place right now, especially as it regards our druid.”

“Are you saying to cut her slack?” asked Mizuki.

“Nah,” said Hannah. “Just tryin’ to understand where she’s comin’ from, to reflect on what it was like for her, so I can figure out what the right words would be. She said she loved Isra, but I don’t know if that was just emotions runnin’ hot, or if she really felt it at that depth. They’re both terrible about how they feel, for their own reasons, and I try not to mind it, but —” She shook her head. “Alfric, I don’t know if your ethics allow it, but I’d like if you talked with me in private when you redo the day, before you talk with the others. I do want to help, but I’m not sure that my thoughts right now are what you want. I feel like complainin’ more than you probably feel like listenin’ to me.”

“It’s fine,” said Alfric. “And yes, I’ll talk to you first.”

“Once we get back home, I’m goin’ to speak with Marsh, try to get my head on straight,” said Hannah. “But assumin’ that we’re havin’ a ‘normal’ day, and not really mentionin’ the deaths to anyone so as not to cause alarm, I’ll be home for dinner. We can talk then, when we’ve both gathered our thoughts a bit.”

Alfric sighed. “Alright, well I guess there’s no sense not using the dagger, hop into the chest and we’ll get out of here.”

Moments later, Alfric was in the temple. Hannah and Mizuki were taking the trunk, which would trundle toward him at several hundred miles an hour as soon as the lid was closed.

“Dungeon day?” asked Filera. She had probably seen from his clothing, though the armor had been stowed.

“Yeah,” said Alfric. “A pretty short one. We’ll talk about it later, sorry, I’m short on time right now.”

It was a lie, from a certain point of view, but Alfric couldn’t bring himself to care. He left her chamber with shoulders slumped and was halfway out of the temple when the chest caught up with him, kicking up dust behind it. He opened the lid, and the two remaining members of his party got out. It made him feel awful not to have Isra and Verity there.

“I’m goin’ to see Marsh, I think,” said Hannah. “I’ll be home for supper, maybe with him in tow.”

“We’ll have extra food,” said Mizuki. She looked a little guilty as she said it, as though she didn’t like to be thinking about the practical considerations.

“Actually, if you could make sure that he comes with, that would be good,” said Alfric. “Lola told them about catastrophic undone days with some regularity. I want to know what not to do.” He hadn’t meant it as a joke, but Mizuki gave a weak chuckle.

After saying goodbye to Hannah, Alfric and Mizuki went back to her house together, mostly in silence until the large house was in view.

“You know,” said Mizuki. “To my way of thinking, when we know the day is going to be undone, you become the most important person in the world. Because none of this is going to keep on, right? It’s all just going to be in your head. We all become memories for you. It’s weird, to have everything, the realm of six gods, distilled down to a single person.”

“You’ve never mentioned that,” said Alfric.

“Oh, I didn’t mean that it was just how I thought of things,” said Mizuki. “It’s something that occurred to me now, while we were walking.”

“Ah,” said Alfric.

“But maybe pass it on to me, I guess?” asked Mizuki.

“Sure,” said Alfric. “I imagine there’s some more palatable way of phrasing it than ‘in undone days, I’m the most important person in the world’.”

“I’ve really never had that thought before?” asked Mizuki. Her hands were behind her back, folded together.

“No,” said Alfric. “Or if you did, you never shared it with me.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “And we’ve had something like a dozen undone days together.”

“More than that,” said Alfric.

“I guess this is the first time an undone day has been sprung on me,” said Mizuki. “Even for the wedding, you had mentioned that it was a possibility. Here, it’s just … ‘alright, we’re not keeping this day, all that stuff is going away’.” She looked up at the sky. “Looks like rain. Weird.”

“Weird?” asked Alfric.

“Yeah,” she said. “If Isra were still around, she’d make sure that it wasn’t raining until we got inside, at the very least.”

“Ah,” said Alfric.

“So,” said Mizuki. “What do you want to do tonight? You’re the most important guy in the world, what do you need?” They pushed into the house, taking off their boots and then making their way to the living room without a word of conversation about what came next. Their gear was slowly strewn about as they shed what they’d taken into the dungeon. Eventually, they were left in more or less normal clothes, though Alfric only had thin material on beneath the gambeson.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric, doing his best to answer honestly. “I want to mourn, I think. What I should be doing is preparing. I don’t know how I’m going to break the news.”

“I hate seeing you like this,” said Mizuki. “All … down.”

“You’re not affected?” asked Alfric. “Seeing them die? Especially Verity. That was awful.”

“I am,” said Mizuki. “But I’m not the most important person in the world, am I? I’m going to forget all this, and there’s comfort in that, you know? So I’m focused on you.”

“Thanks,” said Alfric.

“And you let me know if that focus isn’t doing it for you,” said Mizuki. “I’d give the most important man in the world his space, if that’s what he wanted.”

“I’m worried about how this affects the team,” said Alfric. “I’m worried that it changes how we see each other, especially coming now. We finally had to use the safety net. I worry that people will think it’s because of Isra or Verity, or that they’ll think that it was because of each other, when really, things were going more or less okay on that front. Lots of worries, really.”

“Hmm,” said Mizuki. She was looking at him. “I wish I could say I’ll help, but I feel like when you tell me tomorrow — today again, whatever — I’ll probably be thinking ‘oh, we all died while Isra and Verity are on the outs? That tracks’.”

“Yeah,” said Alfric. He closed his eyes and let out a low groan.

“And we won’t have this morning, huh?” asked Mizuki. “I thought that was a nice bit of, I don’t know. Fun.”

“It was,” said Alfric. “But that’s the kind of thing that happens in undone days anyway.”

“Like that?” asked Mizuki.

“More or less,” said Alfric.

“Huh,” said Mizuki. She sat for a moment. “You do a bad job of describing it then.”

“I do?” asked Alfric.

She propped her bare feet up on the table. “Well I mean, you say that we spent time together, but it’s always so dry, it’s topics of conversation and stuff like that, not the jokes,” said Mizuki.

“Jokes are of the moment,” said Alfric. “If I tried to explain them after the fact, you’d find them boring. They wouldn’t be funny, which is a crucial element of most jokes, I’m told.”

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “I just mean, I guess, not even the content, or that there were jokes, but you don’t talk about how your eyes light up, or your goofy laugh, or stuff like that. The way you kept waiting for me to leave the room until you gave up and decided to be fun. That kind of thing.”

“I don’t know how I would package that up,” said Alfric. “It’s hard, with those things.”

“Yeah, I guess,” said Mizuki. She bit her lip. “I used to like getting updates on undone days, but I think I didn’t realize how much time it actually is, how much gets said in a day, what we do and see.”

“And you still won’t realize it,” said Alfric. “Even if I try to explain to you.”

“Can you try?” asked Mizuki.

“Sure,” said Alfric.

“Sorry, I said you were the most important man in the world right now, and we were talking about me,” said Mizuki. “You’re still feeling bad, and yeah, I agree, you probably want to be calm and cool about it when you’re talking to us tomorrow morning. Let’s go over it then, a rehearsal.”

“I don’t really want to do that right now,” said Alfric. “I just want to … I don’t know.”

Mizuki smiled at him. “Did I mention that I would be playing all the parts in the rehearsal? You’d get to hear my Hannah impression.”

“Your Hannah impression is awful,” said Alfric. He leaned forward. “But yes, let’s hear your impressions of our friends.”

And for a time, Alfric was able to forget.

He waited until sunset to reset, after a long conversation with Marsh and Hannah, the four of them together in the dining room over a few bottles of wine. Alfric hadn’t personally been willing to risk the lack of control that came with alcohol. Marsh had talked about how it felt, to hear that you’d died horribly in a dungeon, and Alfric thought about that, and how best to handle it. Hannah had some experience with funerals, last rites, and talking to the friends and family of those who had passed, and she talked to Alfric about it, handing on what she could, and imploring him to talk to her first, which he agreed to.

Then it was time for him to reset, and in the space of a blink he was up in his bed. He tried to go back to sleep, found himself restless, and eventually he crept down the stairs and opened the door to Isra’s room, just a crack, so he could confirm that she was fine. He’d have done the same for Verity, but she was in the cabin, far away. A part of him wanted to wake her up using the party channel, just to hear her voice, but that would be a step too far. They were alive. The magic had never failed, and it never played tricks. No, what he had to deal with was his anxiety about the loss, and his worries about what would have to come next.

Chapter 123 - The Sea and the Breeze

Mi-zu-ki and Ver-ity!
When they’re to-gether there’s lots of glee!
Stick a-round and you will see!
Today might be the day they climb a tree!

“Wow,” said Verity. “That was something.”

“I worked on it all last night,” said Mizuki. She beamed at Verity.

“Can I — I mean, you’re joking, right?” asked Verity. “I’m going to feel bad if you’re not, but —”

“Yes, yes, it’s a joke,” said Mizuki.

Verity took a breath. “Because if you wanted help writing songs —”

“It’s bad on purpose,” said Mizuki. “And therefore beyond criticism.”

“Ah,” said Verity. “You know, I should try that sometime. Next time there’s a major concert in Dondrian I’ve been forced into, I’ll give it a shot.”

“Okay, so how would you do it, if you had to do a song about us, for real?” asked Mizuki. “We are, after all, the original pair.” By this she meant they were the first two to be recruited by Alfric. “Which is why I’m glad we’re doing this.”

“That, I don’t know,” said Verity. “Give me some time to think. Maybe a compare and contrast, or casting us as two opposite things, the breeze and a sea, or something like that.” She hummed slightly to herself, a tune coming as if from nowhere. “I’ll work on it later, hard to do that and talk.”

They were Having A Day together, which meant a trip to Liberfell, a walk, a picnic, and a bit of shopping to ‘get Mizuki some fashionable clothes’. Mizuki didn’t particularly think she needed fashionable clothes — her clothes suited her well, and had felt fashionable enough —, but it was something for them to do together. They were going for a walk through a park together, along a trail that Mizuki had gone on with Isra before. The chest trundled after them, five feet behind, and when they needed to take a break, it made a convenient bench.

“So, Isra was spying on you with some birds, she said,” remarked Mizuki. It had been three days since then.

They had been scheduled for a dungeon the day before, but in the morning Alfric had called it off, because they’d apparently failed again. He seemed shaken by it. It had been a total party wipe that time, with no time for him to process before he woke up in bed, having not actually been bisected by a lancing beam of fire — or having undone it, if you wanted to be technical about it. Worse, they’d gone through seven rooms of a difficult dungeon before that point, all of which seemed to be weighing on Alfric.

Mizuki had wanted to spend time with him, to comfort him, to let him tell her about all the stuff he was feeling rather than the mechanics of the dungeon, what abilities the monsters had, the party formation, drills, response patterns, and all that other stuff he liked to go on about. Instead, Alfric had scheduled himself a trip to Plenarch, and Mizuki, for lack of something productive, had invited Verity to go to Liberfell. Mizuki did not like the cabin arrangement, as much as Verity had declared herself to be a solitary creature.

“She did spy, yes,” said Verity. “To be honest, I felt relieved.”

Mizuki made a face. “Not how I’d feel.”

“I’d thought that it was just over,” said Verity. “And it turns out that it’s not, not completely. She still cares. She still wants to be friends. We can stop avoiding each other.”

“Yeah, but now we’ve got to be looking over our shoulders,” said Mizuki. “Now we can’t trust birds. I used to like birds.”

Verity shrugged. “I’d made peace with the idea that she might be watching, at least when I went out. I guess I don’t feel the same way. I do care for her, immensely, which might color my view.” She sighed. “And like I said, I was mostly happy that it wasn’t as dire as I’d thought.”

“You still sit on opposite sides of the table,” said Mizuki. “Never on the same couch.” Mizuki hadn’t noticed that herself, it was Alfric who’d remarked on it, but once he’d said something, it was hard to unsee. They were at least in the same room together, but they were usually across from each other.

“Well,” said Verity. “Yes. Because if we were together, it might feel like, oh, I don’t know. Like it was old times.” She didn’t elaborate. Mizuki wondered if it was the right place to ask a question.

“I get it,” Mizuki said instead. She had kept her distance from more than a few people in her time.

“I’m sorry about the dungeons, by the way,” said Verity as she stepped over the root of a tree. It was right on the path, and had been rubbed shiny from the no doubt hundreds of people who had stepped on it over the years.

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “Don’t be. I mean, it might not even be you. Who knows why dungeons are the way they are?”

“It probably is me,” said Verity. “I’ve been trying to be happier, more at peace, but that’s a struggle. It’s especially a struggle when I think I might infect the next dungeon with something.”

“I talk with Vertex a lot,” said Mizuki. “They don’t seem like they have a cakewalk of it.”

“Mmm,” said Verity. “I guess I haven’t talked to other dungeoneers or read dungeon reports, so I don’t know for certain.”

“Nah, no one but Alfric reads dungeon reports,” said Mizuki. “I just know about them because Alfric talks about them a lot.”

“You’re good friends,” said Verity. Her voice was studiously neutral.

“Well, yeah,” said Mizuki. “I think we just vibe really well.” She paused. “You know, I spend a lot of undone days with him, which maybe helped him learn how to navigate me.”

“In what sense?” asked Verity. “Do you … need navigating?”

There was something about the way she said ‘in what sense’ that struck Mizuki. A normal person would have just said ‘what do you mean’. Maybe that wasn’t true, or it was Mizuki picking up on things that weren’t there.

“Yeah, I need navigating sometimes,” said Mizuki. She shrugged. “I am a river with many rapids.”

“Hmm,” said Verity. She was quiet for what felt like a while, and Mizuki kept her mouth shut, not wanting to interrupt. She knew she had a way of filling the air with noise. “I don’t think anything rhymes with ‘rapids’.”

“That’s what you were thinking about?” asked Mizuki.

“I thought it was a good line,” said Verity. “Now, not every line has to rhyme, but it’s what I like in a song. There’s a feeling of knowing what’s coming.” She lifted her chin and sang.

I am a river with many rapids
A flowing stream of cerulean dreams
Won’t you raft down me
with paddles out-stretched
And mind the danger
of death

It was a short and sweet song, with a wandering melody, and Mizuki actually quite liked it.

“I’ve always admired your voice,” said Mizuki. “And your lyrics.”

“Thank you,” said Verity. “That one was horrible.”

“I mean, if I’m the river, then the song is saying, um,” said Mizuki. “That I want people to paddle down me, meaning partner with me or whatever, but they need to be careful, and might die?”

“Something like that,” said Verity. “But it wasn’t about you, it was about what the metaphor evokes. And I think it’s likely true for myself.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “I guess I don’t even know what your rapids are.”

“Oh, lots of things, I think,” said Verity. “A tendency toward melancholy, a bit of completely unnecessary self-sacrifice, a compressing of emotion until it becomes crystalized into a weapon of sharp edges … I could likely go on, but I’ve lately come to the realization that I wasn’t raised correctly, and I think that’s the source of most of my problems. You know, for a time I felt like I was doing pretty well, but then my mother came back into the picture and laid bare that I might actually have some growing to do.”

“Did she?” asked Mizuki. “You think if your mom hadn’t come back, you’d still be having problems?”

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “I think part of the problem with Isra was that she started changing, and I didn’t like that change.”

“Why?” asked Mizuki.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Verity. “Why does a person like anything?”

“Heard,” said Mizuki, nodding.

They were almost out of the woods, which would bring them to the park. Mizuki had made a lunch for them, and the walk — hike, if they were being generous — had built up an appetite. Mizuki had acquired some of those little stacking tin pots, and while Verity was setting out a blanket, Mizuki was making sure that the ectad plates had kept everything warm or hot, as the conditions required. They had rice, pork, roasted veggies taken right from the garden, a cold soup, and some chilled fruit.

“So why are we doing this?” asked Verity as she sat down. “Not that I mind.”

“I dunno,” said Mizuki. “I was thinking about how maybe you’ve been making the dungeons worse than they need to be, and I was thinking that maybe it would help to, I don’t know, have your friend be more of a friend. Because we are friends, but the number of times we’ve ever done something together, just the two of us, has been, um … not a lot.”

“So you’re soothing me out of self-interest?” asked Verity.

“I’m —” Mizuki began.

“That was a joke,” said Verity. “Sorry. It was a mean one. A high society one, maybe.”

“It’s true though,” said Mizuki. She set all the tins down on the blanket and then handed Verity a set of silverware. They had little metal plates, and both began piling them up. “If we weren’t dying in the dungeons, I would probably never have thought to do this.”

“It’s true, that’s why it’s mean, and that’s why you’d make that kind of joke,” said Verity. “It would be better if it flowed like velvet though. I was never terribly good at the barbs.”

“That’s a good thing,” said Mizuki. “But no, seriously, I was thinking to myself, if Verity’s not spending time with Isra, then who’s she spending time with? I like Hannah, but she’s wrapped up with Marsh, and if you try to talk to her, sometimes you get the cleric treatment.”

“She does that to you too?” asked Verity.

“Yeah, but I kind of like it in a way I feel like you don’t,” said Mizuki.

“I do kind of like it,” said Verity.

“Huh,” said Mizuki. She hadn’t expected that. If it was true, then that didn’t explain how little time Verity seemed to spend taking Hannah’s counsel. Maybe it was like when Mizuki got the cleric treatment: she would agree with the thrust of it, but not want to follow through, which made her feel bad. “Well, and then your other option would be Alfric, and he’s great, but I feel like you’re both too Dondrian to have fun together.”

“And what does that mean?” asked Verity with a happy little laugh.

“You know,” said Mizuki. “You’re rich, you’re trained, you’ve got rules and stuff, there’s decorum. I feel like if we left the two of you in a room, it would be polite, inoffensive conversation, as one does when one is with a peer of one’s own standing.”

“Yeesh,” said Verity, which might have been because of the snooty accent Mizuki was putting on. “I’ve been in Pucklechurch a year, I can hang with the locals.”

“Well then the point stands, because he’s not a local,” said Mizuki.

“And you get along well with him,” said Verity. She had one eyebrow very slightly raised.

“Hey now,” said Mizuki. “You keep that eyebrow down.”

Verity grinned and raised the eyebrow higher, until eventually she was leering at Mizuki.

“Look, is Alfric handsome?” asked Mizuki as Verity ate. “Yes. Is he capable? Also yes. Does his family own an awesome dog? I mean, you’ve seen it, why am I asking you?”

“Lots of good points,” said Verity.

“Honestly, it’s almost all good points, with Alfric,” said Mizuki. “But does he make me weak in the knees?”

“Does he?” asked Verity.

“It’s not that simple,” said Mizuki. She felt like she’d been trapped by her own question. She ate some food, as though she could ignore following up, but Verity was also eating, and it really did feel to Mizuki like she was the one who was supposed to be talking. “Sometimes, I guess? He’s training shirtless in the backyard and my brain is like ‘hey big boy, why don’t you get your reps in up here?’ But I don’t wake up in the morning thinking about him, I don’t have sleepless nights tossing and turning, none of the usual stuff.”

“That’s the usual stuff?” asked Verity as she popped a grape into her mouth.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “Yeah?”

“When you’re interested in someone, they consume your thoughts like that?” asked Verity.

“Yeah, I guess,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “Definitely not like that with Alfric though. Just occasionally it’ll be like ‘sure would be nice to’ and then you can fill in the blanks. But I guess also even if I were, you know, consumed with this obsessive crush, which I’m not, I also would just keep it to myself. Which is what I’m doing now.”

“Yourself, and me, and who else?” asked Verity.

“Kell,” Mizuki admitted. “Plus a letter to my oldest younger sister. Which was mostly about other things.”

“Do you think he’s not interested, or do you think it would go sour?” asked Verity.

“Both,” said Mizuki. “And not to circle this back on you, but I think you and Isra having a falling out was very informative. And I think I would do less well than you’re doing?”

“I feel like I’m doing awfully,” said Verity. “So thank you for the kind words.”

“I think you’re doing okay,” said Mizuki.

“I’m still going to take that as a compliment,” Verity smiled.

“I think this break up, or just break, really could have threatened to tear the party apart,” said Mizuki. “I mean I care about the party a lot, I have no idea what I would do if it all just evaporated, and it seems like it could just evaporate. That’s what keeps me up at night.” It was at least part of why she’d asked Verity out.

Verity reached over and placed her hand on Mizuki’s. “I’m sorry. I think when Isra and I got together, we weren’t thinking too far in the future.”

Mizuki patted her hand back, then withdrew it. “See, I think if it had been rock solid, it would have been fine, and maybe it felt rock solid. If you were just a happy married couple — or if it had been going that direction — then, you know, we’d have all been happy for you and stuff.”

“So you’re saying that we shouldn’t get back together until it’s for life?” asked Verity. She let out a breath. “I don’t know about that.”

“I mean, isn’t the plan that you get back together?” asked Mizuki.

“I have no idea,” sighed Verity. “Maybe.”

“Is that going to work, if Isra comes home with some girl on her arm?” asked Mizuki. “Or guy?”

Verity’s mouth became a frown. “I don’t know. I’d feel devastated, I think. Even just imagining it.” She shuddered. “Isra, inviting some strange man into our house, to sit and eat dinner with us like Marsh does, watching her hold hands with him —” She turned away.

“Yeah, see, this is the kind of thing that’s making the dungeons go crazy,” said Mizuki. “At least, in my opinion. That’s the kind of thing that, I don’t know if it’s better to talk about —”

“It’s not,” said Verity. There was a trace of bitterness in her voice. “Now there are thoughts in my head, and it’s going to take them days to leave.”

“Sorry,” said Mizuki. “But I mean … Isra is trying to find herself, it’s something that she might do, right? You were her first ever partner. She knows basically nothing about the world, ‘fast learner’ or not.”

“But,” said Verity. “We both grew up sheltered? She was my first proper girlfriend too. I feel like she gets so much slack. And me, people think that I should somehow know better, that I should be the mature one.”

“People meaning?” asked Mizuki.

“Hannah and Alfric,” said Verity. “I talked to Clemency the other day, not really about Isra, but the topic came up, and — you’ve probably heard it, how people say that she had a tough life, how she was basically on her own for five years, and before that had a father who knew the woods but wasn’t all that forthright about the world. She just thought everyone else was weird about their druid powers. And it’s true. It’s all true. But then I feel like people see that, and then they don’t see that I was more or less forced into spending the better part of my childhood with a lute in my hands, maneuvered by a mother that never loved me, sheltered in my own way. I don’t think that our situations are equivalent, but … the way Alfric talks to me, it’s like he expects me to be a fully functional adult who knows what she’s doing, and when he talks about Isra, it’s like she’s a child who has just wandered out of the woods.”

It was the most that Verity had ever said, and Mizuki was struck by just how much the politeness and reserve had slipped.

“It’s just how you look,” said Mizuki. “People see you with good posture and this calm expression and they think ‘oh man, that girl has it all together’. It’s because they haven’t seen how you keep your room.”

Verity rolled her eyes, but there was a smile there too. “You know, maybe you have a point. I could walk with a slouch and people would have lower expectations.”

“I’m four years older than you and people cut me a ton of slack,” said Mizuki. “They just say ‘oh, that’s Mizuki, of course she’s terrible’.”

Verity laughed. “You’re not that bad, it just seems to be the boys.”

“No, it’s money too, and housekeeping, and a bunch of other stuff,” said Mizuki. “Magic too.”

“Well I’ve never thought you’re a screw up,” said Verity. “Not like I am.”

“Eh, that’s too harsh,” said Mizuki. “I’d say that you need to figure some things out, but who doesn’t?”

“I ran away from a successful career as a musician in Dondrain,” said Verity. “Then came back for three concerts and canceled the last three. The magnitude of that is just … hard to think about sometimes.”

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “The visibility, that’s what it is, not the, you know, gravity? It’s not what you did, it’s that people were watching. Think of it like this, there’s an apprentice butcher, right, he’s been learning the cuts, putting in the work, is actually really good, but when he’s ready to take the reins, he says ‘actually, I just don’t want to do this for the rest of my life’. And then he goes and becomes a traveling merchant or something, I don’t know. The point being, you wouldn’t think that guy was a screw up, right?”

“Huh,” said Verity. “It was the thousand eyes on me, rather than the content of the decisions.”

“Right,” said Mizuki. “Or maybe not right, I don’t know what I’m talking about. But abandoning something that made you feel bad is noble, not something to be ashamed of.”

“Well, that’s sweet of you to say,” said Verity.

“I’m quite sweet,” said Mizuki. “Speaking of, did you want dessert?” They had eaten most of the food, leaving behind just enough to be a snack later on.

“Do we have dessert?” asked Verity, perking up.

“We have, in a special little decanter, a sweetened, spiced, milk drink,” said Mizuki. “With chocolate lumps.”

“And what are those?” asked Verity.

“Little bits of chocolate,” said Mizuki. “Half-melted, I think, if I did it right, sort of like the pulp in a citrus juice.”

“And you’ve never made this before?” asked Verity.

“I made a tester,” said Mizuki. “With some of the chocolate I brought back from Dondrian. It was good, and I’m hoping this one is good too.”

The chest made for the perfect picnic basket, really, especially since it could carry so much, and they drank from fancy fluted glasses that Mizuki had brought along because they felt, to her, like high society things. She had only in the last month learned that different glasses were used for different things for a purpose, but had done some taste-testing and found the difference so small she questioned whether it was actually there. Fluted glasses for milk were fine.

“This is amazing,” said Verity after a sip. “Do you think that I could learn how to make this?”

“Of course,” said Mizuki. “I can teach you tonight, if you think it’s good.”

“I don’t know about the chocolate chunks,” said Verity. “But the flavors are to die for.”

When they were finished, they packed up, then got on to the second part of their trip together, which Mizuki was looking forward to much less than the hike. There were a few clothing stores in Liberfell, but only one of them with nicer things, and that was where they went first.

It took some time, with a combination of Verity picking things out for Mizuki to try and Mizuki picking out her own things. What she really wanted, now that she had some money in her pocket, was a new dress she could have as her ‘temple best’.

“It should be, I don’t know,” said Mizuki, looking at herself in a full-length mirror. She touched her chest. “Flattering.”

“Halterneck or shift,” said Verity. “A halterneck leaves the back exposed, and you’ve got a nice back, while a shift … a shift isn’t flattering, really, but it’s not flattering on anyone, and with a small chest, you look disproportionately good.”

“I don’t know what those things are,” said Mizuki.

“A halterneck has a strap that goes around the neck,” said Verity. “Like this one.” She held a dress up. “A shift is where the fabric falls in something like a column, sometimes with darts beneath the bust to give it some shape. If you form fit and nip it at the waist instead, then it’s a sheath dress. Which I think you’d also look good in.”

“I see,” said Mizuki. She didn’t really see. It felt like she was reading from her wizard book again.

“Needlework is one of the ‘womanly arts’,” said Verity. “Useless stuff that I was taught because oh, I don’t know, it’s expected. If I’d made a mistake and confused a slip dress from a sheath dress, it would have reflected poorly on my mother.”

“Needlework includes fashion stuff?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, I can patch things up, and I could probably sew a dress if I had to. I did it once, when I was fourteen, took a few days and looked terrible.”

“The type of ‘needlework’ I was expected to learn had almost nothing to do with actual needles,” said Verity. “I can stitch, but most of it was knowing fabrics, knowing cuts, knowing body shape and how to deal with it, seeing the fashions come and go over the seasons, things like that. And most of that is to show off. I never took to it like gardening though.”

“We should have someone in the group who makes clothes,” said Mizuki. “We’ve basically got all the bases covered, you and Isra for forage, gardening, and hunting, Hannah for baking, me for cooking, Alfric for … dungeons. Or woodworking, I guess, but I’m not sure how serious he is about that, it feels like what he does to channel dungeon energy. If we had clothes covered we’d be on our way to a fully self-sufficient house.”

“This is true,” said Verity. “It would take a lot of practice for me to get something that I was happy with.”

“Perfectionism, that’s your problem,” said Mizuki. “I would for sure take a good-enough dress from you.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” said Verity. “I wish there were a workroom in the house, it’s the only thing I think it’s lacking.”

“I feel like we’re going to find some entad solution,” said Mizuki. “Alfric’s family has loads of doors.”

It took some time, but eventually they settled on two new dresses for Mizuki, which weren’t all that expensive given the wealth they’d been building up. One dress was a new ‘temple best’ for Mizuki, ‘boat neck’ with a cut that Verity thought was reminiscent of the culottes that Mizuki wore a lot. The idea, as Verity had expressed it, was that it would look like Mizuki was wearing the same thing as usual, just more dressed up, and thus preserve her ‘personal style’.

The other dress was a bit more of a lark, and Mizuki didn’t know when she’d end up wearing it. It was halterneck, exposing quite a bit of Mizuki’s shoulders and back, so much so that she’d bought a scarf to go with it. She had felt a bit awkward in it, like a gremlin, until Verity had given her a brief posture lesson. With a straight back, elongated neck, and her head held high, Mizuki actually looked really good, rather than like someone who regularly stomped through the marsh.

Verity bought nothing. She had a collection of dresses already and seemed to want no more of them. Mizuki didn’t press it, but a part of her felt like Verity would have been better off getting a fresh outfit that wasn’t something her mother had picked for her. It didn’t feel like the time or place to mention it though.

They took the trunk back to Pucklechurch, climbing in and then closing it, only to open it up at the house, where Hannah was working on her book. They hadn’t quite known whether they’d get Hannah or Isra — the chest would run on its little clawed feet to whoever was closer — and Verity seemed relieved that it was Hannah.

“There’s a package at the door,” said Hannah. “For Verity, from her father.”

Verity deflated only slightly, then caught herself and kept a serene expression. She seemed to do it without really thinking about it. That was just normal for her, hiding her true emotions, which Mizuki found sad. It was the kind of thing that had been trained.

Mizuki was always happy to get a delivery. Most mail went to the local post office, rather than coming right to the house, with exceptions for things with priority, and those were a rarity until Verity had moved in. There was something somewhat less special about getting packages for Verity, but Mizuki had gotten used to the slight disappointment that almost anything that came to their doorstep was for Verity. The one time it hadn’t been, it had been left there directly by Alfric’s mom, which Mizuki was secretly hoping would happen again soon. It was a secret hope that she’d shared with Alfric, Hannah, Isra, and Verity.

“There’s a letter,” said Verity as she stared at the package, making no move to pick up the package or the letter that was tied in place on top of it.

“Father is better than mother though, right?” asked Mizuki. The package was the size of a bread box. She leaned over to look at the neat penmanship.

“Can I ask something very cowardly?” asked Verity.

“Absolutely,” said Mizuki. “But I might make Alfric do it.”

“No, it’s — I want you to read the letter,” said Verity. “Maybe you could just give me the gist of it. Break the news more gently than my father would.”

“Oh, that I could do,” said Mizuki. She paused. “If only I knew how to read.”

Verity laughed at that, and Mizuki smiled, then picked up the letter. Neither of them had touched the package itself. A quick trip into the house for the letter opener later, and Mizuki was reading the remarkably precise handwriting.

Dearest Daughter,

We haven’t spoken much since all this business began, for which I blame myself. You were always your mother’s domain, in so many ways, and I left you to her, which it seems might not have worked out for the best for any of us. I cannot say that I would have done anything better in her place, only that my deficiencies would likely have shone through in different ways.

Your mother does love you. She can be harsh and exacting, not just with you, but with everyone in her life. She fails, often, at showing her love, but it truly is there. I’ve spent much of my little free time this past week speaking with her, and to hear her tell it, she was always worried that if she showed you all the love she felt for you, it would spoil you rotten. While your mother feels love for the both of us in our small family, she has never been good at showing it, perhaps because of her own less than ideal upbringing, raised largely by servants. She told me of the fights you’ve had, obviously, but I would like to hear your side of the story before I weigh in on the matter. I do wish you’d spoken to me before you left Dondrian last, but as I’ve said, you have been your mother’s domain for so long, and the fight was apparently so bad, that I understand it.

If you’re following custom, you’ll have opened this letter before the package, but I know you’re not such a big believer in custom these days. What’s inside is the product of my life’s work. The machine that I spent so long building with my team finally works, and it worked well enough that I was able to use it, on stage, at the fourth concert you weren’t able to attend. We had captured only one of the songs from the third concert, the final one, which is as I’d have wanted it, because your song was the crown of that concert, and filled me with no small amount of pride.

The device will play the song. It has played the song, for a theater with more than a thousand people. The response was fairly good, muted, I think, by the fact that people thought that it was the work of an entad. After it was finished though, I had dozens of inquiries, and the shop now has its first proper order, for a hundred of the devices, though we have little capacity to actually accomplish that as yet.

I’ll be settling the seizure only partly contested, and near an agreement with the workers even now. My nose is bloodied from that whole business, I have to say, but the ectad device will have nothing of the same problems, and promises to make us far more than we had ever made from the business of fish.

This does not quite mean that you’re off the hook in terms of family obligations. For the device to make music, a song must be captured, after which it can be played a few dozen times for each ectad disc. Now, I could certainly hire someone, but I already have one of the most proficient and accomplished young lutists as my daughter, and one who is familiar with a wide range of difficult classical pieces, as well as her own songs — assuming that The Brave Knight Gave was not the first you’ve written, and won’t be the last. You should consider this an offer of employment, taking no more than a few days of your time each month. For your efforts I would pay you a flat fee, as much as I hope to give to other artists, in time. Your mother offered you little for your concert performances, as I understand it, and while that made sense in a time of dire straits, it makes no sense now, when good fortune is on the horizon.

Let me know as soon as you can. Until I hear from you, I’ll assume that you’d prefer to be kept at a remove from your mother.

I love you with all my heart,
Your father

“Um,” said Mizuki after she’d read through. “So, the upshot is that he loves you and sent you a gift to try to get you to do some music for him. He talks about your mom some, which I don’t think you’d want to read. There’s sort of an apology, if you squint.”

“Ah,” said Verity. “That … doesn’t sound too bad?”

“I guess,” said Mizuki. “I mean, sure.” She was worried that she was describing it wrong. If her own father had written her a letter like that, she would have felt a bit sour about it. It would have felt like he was taking a side in the fight, the wrong side. How hard was it to tell your teenage daughter her mother was overbearing and that you were getting a separation? But she had never met Verity’s father, so Mizuki kept her mouth shut.

They brought the package into the house and set it on the dining room table. It was the work of a few seconds to get the thing unwrapped, and then a full half hour before they had it working. The instructions were confusing, and Mizuki suggested that they report on that when they sent a letter back. The ‘disc’ that apparently made the whole thing make music screeched when it was removed from its velvet container, and didn’t stop until it had been properly positioned against a hammer on a hinge that shut it up. For a bit they were worried that the device had been damaged in transit, or that they had screwed something up when trying to get it to work, but then with a blast of trumpets it was working, playing Verity’s song.

“Wow,” said Verity once the song was finished.

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “It sounded like you were right here playing.”

“I don’t know how I feel about this,” said Verity. She was looking at the device. “How do we get this to play again?”

That took another ten minutes, and they listened to the song again.

“There are imperfections,” said Verity. “Some from when I was actually playing it, but others that I don’t think were. Nothing like a missed note, but it’s … off. Inferior.” She let out a breath. “Which is a relief, really.”

“Are you going to do it, do you think?” asked Mizuki. “Go get your songs captured for your dad?”

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “I think I might. It feels odd that people could listen to my music whenever they wanted to. It would feel odd even if it were the music of the masters. A performance frozen in time … that does sound like something an entad should do, but if they’re able to produce these machines, enough of them that they could send this prototype here, enough that people could have them in their homes, I don’t know what to think.”

“Seems good to me,” said Mizuki. “I like your songs.”

“Thank you,” said Verity.

“And then if you left, I could still hear them,” said Mizuki.

“Oh,” said Verity. She looked over at Mizuki. “Well, you should know I’m not leaving.”

Mizuki smiled. “Not even if I become a powerful wizard that puts your bardic magic to shame?”

“No,” said Verity, shaking her head and grinning. “Not even then.”

“And … not if things with Isra don’t eventually paper over?” asked Mizuki. She hadn’t wanted to ask, but it had felt like the natural question. It was most of the reason for their trip.

“No,” said Verity, as seriousness settled on her shoulders. “No, when we leave Pucklechurch, I hope that it will be as a team, all together.”

Chapter 125 - Putting Up

They had three undone dungeons in a row.

Verity was feeling awful about it, and there was no other way to feel.

“It seems you shouldn’t feel awful about it,” said Hannah. “Because that makes the next dungeon all the harder, doesn’t it, if they are affected by all the stress you’re feelin’.”

“I can’t just change how I feel,” said Verity. “That’s not a thing that people can do.”

They were sitting in Hannah’s bedroom, with Verity laying on the bed and Hannah sitting in a chair by her desk. Verity felt mildly uncomfortable laying down there, but Hannah had said that it might help to talk to the ceiling instead of having to track another person’s face and mood, and Verity did seem to find it helpful.

“It’s somethin’ done with difficulty,” said Hannah. “But I can tell you with certainty that changin’ how we feel about things absolutely can be accomplished.”

“How?” asked Verity. It came out slightly angry and a bit indignant. She held up a hand, took a breath, and tried again. “How?” This time it came out better, as a serious question.

“Exactly like that,” said Hannah. “We feel somethin’, we pause, we reorient, we cool, and then we plow on ahead.”

“That sounds far easier said than done,” said Verity. “Am I to feel this tension in my chest over the dungeon deaths, guilt over the fact that I caused it, hopelessness because I can’t control it, and to then say ‘oh, well, time to be happy instead’?”

“Yes,” said Hannah. The answer came readily.

“And you think that this can be taught?” asked Verity. “Because I do want the dungeons to go well, and I do want to be … happy.”

“I think it’s a hard skill to master, happiness,” said Hannah. “And I don’t like to say it, but it’s a skill you’ll likely have to put to use through the whole rest of your life. You’ve got that disposition, I think, toward rumination, toward anxiety, and I put some of that down on your mother’s shoulders.”

“Okay,” said Verity. “So … you know all the things that I’ve been thinking about, that have been weighing on me. I’ve tried my best to be clear, so that clerical consultation can actually work.” That’s what this was, though from a friend, in her bedroom, and quite different from what Verity normally thought of. “How do I actually do it?”

Hannah straightened her back. “It’s the rumination first of all, for you, I think,” said Hannah. “You spend time thinkin’ about your mother, which makes the problem seem bigger, which makes the blows land harder. Sometimes, seems to me, you think yourself into a rut like that. You think of the worst thing your mother could say to you, and it’s as though she said it. You think about the things she’s said to you, and that lets them grow outsized in your mind. Imagine your mind is a garden, and you’re plantin’ seeds in it. What thoughts are you watering? What are you lettin’ grow?”

“So,” said Verity after giving this a moment’s thought. “You’re saying it’s just a matter of stopping myself? Trying to divert the thoughts, when they come?”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “That’s the startin’ point, anyhow.”

“You keep talking about my mother,” said Verity. “She’s … not really someone I’m concerned with anymore. She got told off, ties have been severed, and it’s a done deal.”

Hannah rolled her eyes, which was a very unclerical thing to do. “That sort of thing sticks,” said Hannah. “You don’t just tell someone off and then have that not impact you. Come now, you worry about it, I know you well enough to know that, even if you’re not talkin’ about it.”

“I — only a bit,” said Verity.

“There’s other stuff goin’ on, I know,” said Hannah. “I just don’t want you sayin’ that somethin’ is fine just because you feel like it should be fine, not here.” She probably wasn’t talking about her bedroom. “What you’re presentin’ to the outside world, that’s somethin’, but what’s goin’ on inside, that’s what we want to get at, where I want to help you. And the outside is a reflection of the inside, so it is said, so we help both halves that way.”

“You think I should just not think about my mother,” said Verity. “Or about the dungeons, or about Isra, or about the screaming machine, or anything else. You think that will help me be less … me?”

“Ay, well,” said Hannah. “To tell someone not to think of somethin’ is a lost cause. I just don’t want you to imagine the worst all the time. Recognize when that’s what you’re doin’, recognize when you’re makin’ up a conversation in your head, and when you have that recognition, take some time to be deliberate in your thinkin’ and either move on to some other thoughts, or make an effort to break down all the built up stuff. We can do an example, if you’d like, if that would make it easier to understand.”

“Alright,” said Verity.

“Would you like to pick?” asked Hannah. “I wouldn’t want to presume, and if you’d not like to talk about your mother anymore, I can respect that.”

“The dungeons,” said Verity. “The fear that there’s something in me causing these problems.”

“Well, let’s start with you talkin’ about the fear then,” said Hannah. “What runs through your head at night, keepin’ you up? Death?”

“No,” said Verity. “Not death, just …” She trailed off.

“I’d prefer you be honest,” said Hannah. “I’m actin’ as a cleric here, there’s no need to hold back. There’s nothin’ — nothin’ — you could say that would make me love you less.”

Verity felt a burning sense of self-worth from the word ‘love’. It was insane how good it felt to be told that she was loved. The feeling flowed through her like honey, treacle-thick and warm. What was the point in all this talking if being assured she was loved felt so good? Why not just have Hannah creep into her cabin every morning and murmur in her ear, ‘you are loved’? It felt embarrassing to have such a reaction to the words, but the reaction was there. Verity had momentarily forgotten the question.

“I worry that we won’t be able to do dungeons,” said Verity. “And if we can’t do dungeons, then we’re not a dungeoneering party, and if we’re not that, then I’m just a bard without a steady gig, without a house, without friends. When I was at the Fig and Gristle, I felt like I belonged, like I could have sat and done that for years, and then I started to feel that way about this house, and this team, and now …” She trailed off again. Hannah waited. “It’s not about Isra.”

“Do you think it might be more correct to say it’s not only about Isra?” asked Hannah.

“That’s fair,” said Verity. “It’s a bit about her. Knowing that she would slip away, that we wouldn’t even be friends anymore, that we might meet by chance a decade later and wonder at what might have been. For her to feel a vague sense of disappointment about the dungeon party that fell apart, or for her to think, when she uses the bow, of how she got it with bitterness or —”

“Just a moment,” said Hannah. “Do you think you’re being realistic?”

“I — I don’t know,” said Verity. “I don’t think it’s unrealistic. It’s the sort of thing that I’ve heard about. My mother — I don’t want to talk about my mother — but my mother would talk about minor slights from five years ago. If someone had actually wronged her, she’d carry it to the grave.”

“And you think that Isra is like that?” asked Hannah.

“I don’t,” said Verity. “No, I don’t. I think she’ll remember me, five years from now, ten years, and I hope that it will be fondly, but I don’t know, do I?”

“We could ask her,” said Hannah. “Or you could ask her. Do you think that she would say that you’re a disappointment? Do you think that any of us would?”

“Alfric might,” said Verity.

“Did he say that he was?” asked Hannah.

She shifted on the bed. “I think you know that he didn’t. But he wouldn’t, would he? He would keep it to himself.”

“He blames himself for the dungeons,” said Hannah. “As far as you or whatever force you’re exerting on the dungeons, he feels some excitement at the prospect that it might be brought to heel. He hadn’t picked you because you were Chosen of Xuphin, but you had best believe that Alfric Overguard would love his name to be a footnote in some revolutionary new way of doin’ dungeons.”

“If you say so,” said Verity.

“I’ve talked to him about it. And as for your own satisfaction, well, you ask him, and tell him to be honest with you, which I don’t think you need to tell that boy,” said Hannah. “Let him know you’re worried, he’ll comfort you. I think mostly he hasn’t already done that because you’ve made it clear that you don’t want to talk about it.”

“I guess,” said Verity. She stared up at the ceiling. “I think I might be done here.”

“So soon?” asked Hannah. “I was hopin’ to break down the idea that we’d leave just because the goin’ is tough. I think there’s a root of somethin’ there that needs to be pulled out.”

“I’m just,” said Verity. She shook her head. “Buzzing.” She gestured at her head. “I know it’s not sensible.”

“Well, that’s fine,” said Hannah. “You want to be done, we can be done. But I do want to help to stop the buzz. There’s precious few things that can reach inside a person’s head to stop a thing like that, and talkin’ is the only one we have available.”

“Alright,” said Verity. “Just a bit more?”

Hannah nodded. “You’re not worried you’ll die in the dungeons, you’re worried that you’ll lose the party somehow. That’s a good step, to understand where the bad feelin’ is comin’ from. So we step back, and we ask questions, like whether what we’re worried about is realistic, like whether there’s somethin’ we can do to reorient, like whether there are steps we can take to assure ourselves that no, the world won’t come crumblin’ down. You can work to soften the blow for yourself. We could make a plan for what do to if the next dungeon is a failure, we could talk, in these post mortems Alfric has been givin’, about how we feel. All that stuff we can do, probably should do, if it’s trouble for you to not. But the biggest thing I want you to take away, I hope, is that maybe it’s just a thing you think on too much.”

“Alright,” said Verity. “I guess.”

“It’s a lot,” said Hannah. “Do you want to step through? I’ve the sense that you’re eager to go, and if this takes some time, that’s fine.”

“You’ve told me how to do what I want to do,” said Verity. “No rumination. Now I need to practice for eight hours a day. That’s how you get good at something.”

Hannah laughed. “You let me know how it goes, what was easy, what was hard. We’ve a dungeon scheduled for tomorrow, which is soon, but I want you to talk about what you feel, whatever the outcome.”

“I’ll try,” said Verity.

“Good, now get up, you’re on my bed,” said Hannah.

Verity got up, and got an unexpected hug from Hannah. Hannah hugged like a bear, wrapping muscular arms around Verity. It was comfortable and snug, like being rolled up in a blanket, and when it was over, Verity felt suddenly cold.

“Thank you for doin’ this,” said Hannah. “And I hope it’ll help. You just keep in mind what I’ve said about where your focus is, where you’re seein’ the worst possible doom.”

“I will,” said Verity.

She made her way from Hannah’s room and down into the living room. She really didn’t have anything lined up for the rest of the day, and knew that she would feel restless. Restlessness would lead to sitting in her room, thinking too many thoughts, and if Hannah was right, that was at the core of her problems. Verity wasn’t sure what she was supposed to divert her thoughts to, when they turned sour, and almost went back up to ask Hannah. She had limits though, and one of those limits was being told what to think. She would simply think happy things. With enough determination and practice, it was bound to come easily, and with time, Verity would be an expert.

Isra was working in the garden, and for a moment, Verity just watched her. The work was druid’s work, done with eyes closed and senses outstretched, compelling the plants to grow firm and tall, to put down deep roots, to spread out wide flowers, commanding bees to come in and pollinate, pests to stay away, diverting resources.

The time when Isra would speak directly to the plants and animals had passed. It made Verity sad, in a way. She had liked the way that Isra would coo to the plants or whisper to the birds, the way she gave a firm word to Tabbins to stop him from scratching at the couch. Now she only did it when she wanted to be certain, and though they hadn’t discussed it, Verity had the distinct impression that Isra thought talking to the wildlife was a crutch. Isra was, after all, in a guild of other druids, and while messages within a guild were slow, they did seem to be helping her understand what it meant to be a druid.

Verity slowly rose from the couch and moved toward the back door. She opened it slowly and stepped out, then went out to stand near Isra.

“Can I help?” asked Verity. It was a stupid question. The garden didn’t really need them, and even the work that Isra was doing wasn’t going to make a huge difference. They had a ridiculous abundance of crops already.

“There are vegetables to pick,” said Isra. “We have more than we’ll know what to do with.”

So they picked vegetables together, heaping them up into a handful of baskets brought in from the house. There were cucumbers, beans, tomatoes, peppers, squash, leafy greens, and others, all in abundance, and the raspberry canes were fruiting too, though they got picked clean often enough that there was just a handful for each of them. The garden had been well and truly brought back to life, more than any gardener could have hoped for, especially given most of their work had been done later into spring.

It was good to spend time with Isra, even if it was largely wordless, or filled only with innocuous garden chatter where they talked about the ripeness of the plants, the strength of the roots, the fertility of the soil, and how hot the summer had been.

It was hard to pretend that they hadn’t slept together. That, for Verity, was the most difficult thing. There had been, once, a comfortable familiarity between the two of them, and if they were to be friends, that familiarity would have to be relearned in a different way, like teaching yourself to hold a different instrument. When Isra was eating her handful of berries, there was juice left on her fingertips staining them red, and Verity nearly leaned over to take those fingers into her mouth before remembering that no, those times were behind them. They were friends, only friends, as much as they knew each other’s bodies, as much as the scent of Isra brought back intoxicating memories, as much as Verity felt like it would be so easy for both of them to slip back into the way things were.

It was good that they were mostly wordless, or Verity might have stumbled over her words.

When they were finished, they brought the food into the house, what felt like piles of it, and laid everything out in the kitchen. Mizuki was there, and she stared at the bounty.

“Well, I guess it’s that time of year that we start putting things up,” she said with a sigh.

Verity looked to the ceiling and frowned. “Putting things up?” she asked.

Mizuki laughed. “Oh, that’s right, I forgot, you rich people wouldn’t put food up, would you? You’d just have endless chillers and greenhouses and entads and all kinds of other things.”

Verity frowned at Mizuki. “I just don’t know the term.”

“To put things up,” said Mizuki. “To bottle them, can them, put them in crocks, all so we have something to eat in winter.”

“Ah,” said Verity. “Well, no, I’ve never done that.” She felt somewhat abashed. “We had a cook to handle most of the food. And yes, we had a greenroom, but that was — it was different.”

Mizuki shook her head. “Well I didn’t mean anything by it, it’s just the sort of thing that of course you don’t know. But that’s good, it means that you’ve got something to learn, and I’ve got something to teach. Now, I’ve got a bunch of crocks down in the basement, including a crock full of vinegar, so I think we should get cracking on this. Cucumbers get made into pickles, leafy greens get made into sobyu, tomatoes get diced and heated and then submerged beneath a layer of oil, honestly there’s a ton of work that needs to be done with all of this, so it’s good that I have the day free. I will say that neither of you is going to abandon me here to do this.”

“I was going to see the children at the school,” said Isra. “I’ve been getting along with them.”

“You can see them four hours from now,” said Mizuki. “All this stuff is ripe, it’s been picked, and it needs to get put up now. Waiting a day will mean that in the winter, when we’re actually eating it, it won’t taste nearly as fresh, not that it ever tastes fresh.”

Isra sighed and looked at the window. “I suppose you need your helper.”

“I need two helpers,” said Mizuki. “I’m not going to be dragging crocks up from the basement on my own. In fact, where’s Alfric? Moving crocks seems like Alfric work.”

What followed was, for Verity, an education. The ‘crocks’ were large earthenware vessels, most of them with a special lip that could be filled with water to create an airtight seal, and with weights inside to keep food below the level of the liquid. The goal of everything they were doing was to prevent spoilage, it seemed, from the vinegar that was added to the crocks, to the salt that was poured in, to the cooking that they did on certain foods. It was a long process, and they sampled from the foods liberally as they went. Herbs were brought in from the garden to complement each of the foods, as apparently the flavors would soak in over the long months that the crocks would sit and bubble.

“This is so much work,” said Verity. “I don’t mean that as a complaint, I had just never realized how much was involved in it. I was so insulated from it all.”

“Insulated?” asked Alfric.

“We just never did this when I was growing up,” said Verity.

“It’s part of the rhythm of the seasons,” said Mizuki. She looked at Isra. “You did this too, right?”

“My father taught me, yes,” she said. “Otherwise we’d have eaten nothing but meat in the winters.”

“See, that’s the thing,” said Alfric. He looked at Verity. “We don’t have proper winters in Dondrian. The growing season lasts all year. People do put things up, but it’s not a matter of starvation if they don’t, so no one makes a big deal about it.”

“Ah,” said Verity. That made her feel quite foolish, and she could feel herself blushing.

Isra started giggling, and excused herself for a moment, but the giggling could still be heard from the other room.

Verity followed, somewhat despite herself. “I didn’t think it was that funny.”

“I’ve just never been on the other end of it,” said Isra. Her smile was bright. “You did things one way your whole life and thought that was just how it was done, and when Mizuki said it was because you were rich you just accepted it, and Alfric had to remind you that seasons weren’t really something that happened in Dondrian — it was funny. How have all of you not spent the entire time we’re together laughing at me?”

“We laugh in private!” Mizuki called from the kitchen.

“We don’t laugh in private,” said Verity. She shrugged. “I think we were more concerned for you.”

“Well, that’s sweet, but I can laugh about it now, and you should too,” said Isra.

“Laugh?” asked Verity. “About not knowing about putting things up? No no, it’s too soon.” She grinned, and Isra grinned back.

Verity thought, in that moment, that one of them might mention that things had been distant between them, that it was good to talk and smile with each other again. But before Verity could say anything — she didn’t know what she would have said — Isra moved back into the kitchen. As she passed, she gave Verity a squeeze of the arm, and as with the hug from Hannah, it felt like it had an exaggerated warmth and affection. It was affectionate, a wordless gesture, the heat of her palm and fingers, the pressure of her grip. Verity sat, there, stunned for a moment, then began working on a song, because that was all she knew how to do with her energy.

The touch of your hand,
Placed on my arm,
The warmth of your skin,
Your grace and your charm

They weren’t quite done putting things up, but Verity went to her bag and pulled out the small notebook that she’d taken to carrying around. She jotted the lines down, then some more, and before she knew it, Mizuki had come looking for her.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Fine,” said Verity. Her face was flushed. It was a love song, and she placed her hand over it.

“Uh huh,” said Mizuki. “Alright, well you’ve been gone fifteen minutes, so … most of the work is just moving the crocks back into the basement, but Alfric is going to be doing most of the heavy lifting because I don’t think I could lift a ten gallon crock. And I also think we’re going to have to pick up some more crocks from somewhere, because there’s too much dang food coming in from this garden. Not that we’re going to be able to eat it all anyway, so the crocks would be full by this time next summer.”

“Is that something you need help with?” asked Verity. She folded up her notebook.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “Too much food isn’t a problem I’ve had all that much before.”

“I could eat more,” said Verity. “An extra bite every meal and we’ll have the whole thing taken care of.”

“You’re in a better mood today?” asked Mizuki.

“I am,” said Verity. “I talked with Hannah.” She stood from where she’d been sitting with her notebook and slipped it into the bag. She was praying that Mizuki wouldn’t needle her about it, because some of the lyrics were quite private.

“Do,” said Mizuki, taking the word slowly, “You think we’re good for the dungeon tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “I’m not really in control.”

“Right, right,” said Mizuki. “Is there anything that I can do in order to make it easy on you?”

“Um,” said Verity. “I was going to say that the pressure and questions and even the awareness that you’re watching me don’t help anything, but — I think if we don’t talk about it then I’m going to worry about it, so — you know what, just a hug, tell me I’m good, tell me that you’re not going to be mad at me if Alfric comes down the stairs tomorrow morning and says that we failed.”

“Aw,” said Mizuki. “Aw.” She moved forward with surprising speed and hugged Verity. It was Verity’s second hug of the day, or third, if she counted Isra squeezing her arm. Mizuki was small and slender, less able to properly envelop a person, but she made up for that with energy and enthusiasm, and there was something nice about the smallness. They held the hug for a moment. Mizuki smelled strongly of garlic and vinegar, a result of all the pickling she’d done, but it was nice all the same. “You’re a good girl. We love you. No one is going to be mad at you.” Her lips were close to Verity’s collarbone, the words felt in the bones.

It was a bizarre feeling, to simply ask for support and get it in return. That had never been how it was when she was growing up. It had taken her far too long, but she was realizing that the people in this house actually did care about her, and they cared in a way that she’d never experienced before. If she asked for affirmation, she wouldn’t be chided or made to feel small, she wouldn’t be dismissed.

When the hug was concluded, Mizuki drifted off to oversee the moving of the crocks, and Verity was once again left to her own devices.

She spent two hours straight practicing, and by then they were getting ready for a late dinner. Having already spent an inordinate amount of time putting things up, dinner was a relatively lazy affair by Mizuki’s standards, with two of the ‘dishes’ being leftovers from what they’d put into the crock earlier in the day. For meat, they had honey-glazed chicken with a nice crisp to it, and Verity would never have dreamed of complaining, but Mizuki seemed intent on talking about the meal.

“This kind of laziness is traditional, by the way,” she said. “It’s not sobyu until it’s fermented, but you save some of the unfermented stuff and with all the spices and sauces that go into it, it’s still a pretty good semi-salad. Sliced cucumbers with onion, garlic, other stuff, vinegar? Also kind of a salad. Lots of ferments, before they ferment, are basically salads, so we spent a lot of today making salads, if you think about it. Hopefully the chicken makes up for the lack of effort on all the other stuff, which was an effort, just not, ah, really how it’s supposed to be eaten.”

“You could have skipped the chicken entirely and it would still be great,” said Alfric.

“There’s somethin’ about fresh veggies,” said Hannah.

“We’re not even halfway through the summer,” said Isra. “There’s going to be a lot more. We can probably eat out of the garden for the entire rest of the year.”

“Well, good,” said Mizuki. “But we should think about using the bounty to feed the community. We could volunteer for temple day food? We wouldn’t have meat, but —”

“I think, somehow, I might be able to get some meat,” said Isra. She smiled.

“Right,” said Mizuki. “Why do I buy meat?”

“I actually don’t know,” said Isra. “I could start raising some chickens, if that would help, or buy a piglet from the Pedders.”

“An adorable pig pet?” asked Mizuki. “I don’t think I could kill one that we’d raised.”

“We actually do need to talk about the herb dragons,” said Alfric. He looked at Isra. “Have you settled on a price you think would be fair?”

“I have spoken to three bastlekeepers,” said Isra. “The dragons are still small enough to make good pets, but there’s some question about whether they’re going to grow much larger, which wouldn’t make them as attractive. They also eat a lot, though that might be because they’re growing. Perrin thinks ten thousand rings for the set, if we don’t want to keep them ourselves, but it would almost certainly be to someone who wanted to breed them. As pets, maybe as little as a thousand each.”

“I don’t know whether that seems high or low,” said Mizuki. “Low, I guess?”

“If we want to keep them, we’re going to need to start stockpiling herbs in the stone garden right now,” said Isra.

“Growthstones could work in the winter,” said Verity. “But we don’t have a greenhouse, I would worry about temperature and sunlight, and … it would probably be best to just sell them.”

“I’m taking them to a field after we do the dungeon tomorrow,” said Isra. “There’s a large field of garlic mustard that they can gorge themselves on. But in the winter … I don’t think they’re meant to be indoors, or out in the cold. It’s hard to tell whether they hibernate, but I’m thinking not.”

“I’m going to miss them,” said Mizuki, and that seemed to be that, because as a collective they moved on without someone saying that the dragons should stay long term.

Verity was going to miss them, but more because of sentimental attachment to them than because they were good pets. Isra influenced them, and set them out flying at certain times of day, but they weren’t cuddly like cats, nor faithful like dogs. It was good to watch them eating their herbs — they were cute — but they couldn’t stay around forever.

After dinner they went their separate ways, and Verity found herself in the living room, staring at the fireplace, which didn’t have a fire in it. She had a book beside her, an epistolary romance, but she wasn’t reading from it, even though she was at one of the good parts.

“Are you doing okay?” asked Alfric as he sat down next to her.

“Hrm?” she asked. “Oh, fine. Just thinking about thinking.”

“Ah,” said Alfric, as though what she’d said had made any sense.

“You wanted to make sure that I was good to go for the dungeon?” asked Verity.

“If you’re not, I would want to know that,” said Alfric. “But no, I wanted to see if there was anything I could do for you. Mizuki said that I should.”

“Mmm,” said Verity. She wished she had some wine, but she had no one to drink with. “I feel like the dungeons being as bad as they are is all my fault. I feel like there’s an enormous burden on you that we can’t ever repay, and aren’t even really trying to repay. I’m sorry for being selfish the first time, sorry for not being the best teammate, sorry for so many things that it’s hard to think of them all.”

Alfric looked at her. “That’s nice to hear, but … I’ve been disappointed with you exactly twice in the time we’ve known each other, and I’ve always understood. I never felt like you needed to twist yourself up over it. People make mistakes. People need to learn and grow. When we find an area we’re weak, that’s when we shore up. And sometimes we’re just different people, who will clash because of those differences, and that’s no one’s fault, it’s just how it is.”

Verity considered this. “Twice?” she asked. “Once would have been when you watched me jump off a cliff, but the second would be … agreeing to go play for my mother? Or something else?”

“Er,” said Alfric. “Dating Isra.”

“Oh,” said Verity. “I can see where that would have been quite annoying for you, especially with how things turned out. I’m sorry.”

“We’re getting past it,” said Alfric. “As a party, I mean. I was worried that we would collapse and I would be back to trying to build a team from scratch. Personally … I understand it better now, I think, how it felt like you couldn’t keep yourself distant — what felt like distant — purely out of a sense of professionalism, especially for a career where you don’t feel like a professional. I’m not sure I’d realized how much the connection meant to you.”

“We never really talked about it, did we?” asked Verity.

“Not really,” said Alfric. “And we should have. Once I knew it was happening, we should have sat and actually discussed what it meant as a party.”

Verity laughed. “That would have been terrible, frankly,” she said. “I can’t imagine that Hannah would have let you. Mizuki might have liked to watch the disaster unfold.”

“Well, maybe not the best idea,” said Alfric. “And I’m happy you and Isra seem to be getting along again?”

“I think we can make it, as friends,” said Verity. It hurt to say though. A part of Verity’s mind went back to the hand on her arm, the way that it had felt meaningful and portentous, almost an invitation into bed. It wasn’t that, obviously, that would have been ridiculous after they both agreed that they needed some time and space, it would be extra ridiculous the night before a dungeon … but Verity had felt it all the same. Whatever Hannah had said, there were some feelings that you didn’t need to voice.

“I hope you do,” said Alfric. “And as for the next dungeon … don’t worry about it. I can handle it, if it’s a failure again. We’re not burning resources. We’re not strapped for cash. We’ll have a nice breakfast in the morning, a quiet trip to the dungeon, and from there we’ll see. I want to be ready to retreat, if we need to, but the bad run has to end sometime. If it doesn’t end tomorrow, then we’ll keep plugging away, closing up the gaps that I can see, hoping for good variance. I don’t want you to put this all on your own shoulders, alright?”

“Alright,” said Verity, nodding. She felt, just a bit, as though he was talking too much, saying too much, trying to sooth her more than he was trying to communicate information. Usually Alfric was straight to the point. She shook it off though, and eventually headed back home, to the cabin.

Sleep came slowly, and Verity’s thoughts turned sour as she went over everything that had happened during the day. She caught herself though, as it happened, and did her best to turn her thoughts away. She imagined a field in high summer, filled with flowers of crimson and gold, walking idly down a dirt path as she hummed to herself. Conversations, those that she ran over in her head, seemed to be the biggest problem, the place where she would imagine people saying hurtful things or reacting poorly to her own words.

She imagined herself alone though, and that helped. She imagined worlds, and fell asleep within them.

Chapter 124 - Bulrushes

Kell moved swiftly through the bulrushes, naked from the waist up. His clothes had been set in a neat pile, away from the murky water, all but his briefs, which he had decided he would allow to get wet. There was, after all, a risk that someone could come across him, and it was worth the cost of wet underthings to not be totally exposed. He thought he’d have a hard time explaining himself no matter what, but it would be made more difficult if he was nude. The only other thing on his person was his long staff, almost six feet long, and the magic that surrounded it. The sun was still setting, and had in fact disappeared over the horizon, but light was still smeared across the sky, giving the swamp an unearthly feeling.

He and the other children had loved the boggy areas of the swamp when he was a child, and visited them often. There was a surfeit of dead trees standing like withered statues in the peat and loam, and the children told stories among themselves about the ghosts that lived there, and the bog’s silent victims that had been sucked down into the muck and mire. There was a smell to the bogs, that of perpetual decay, and one time Kell had found a skeleton with damp orange fur still hanging to it, almost certainly a fox, though in his imagination, something more. It was a place of moss and ferns, slime and mushrooms, a wonderful playground. He could imagine it as nature’s solemn tomb.

It was surprising how hard the memories hit him. They had a weight and inertia that couldn’t be denied, and he could feel them threatening to suck him under. Half-buried thoughts bubbled up when he looked at small red mushrooms, as though his mind were a bog of its own, spitting up things that had been buried in fetid muck.

The memories weren’t why Kell was there, pushing his way past the plants, sinking down to half-calf in dank water. He was following will-o-wisps.

The staff was made of a special wood, from a tree that grew with exaggerated slowness in the alpine provinces of Inter. It had, at one point, been a sapling that had taken thirty years to grow: youngerwood. Magic glommed to it easily, and it was virtually indestructible, as few weapons could cut it and fire wouldn’t touch it. They said that by the time a youngerwood had grown for a hundred years, it was still small enough that two hands wrapped around it would meet at the fingertips, and it would be virtually impossible to destroy. That might be the ultimate fate of the world some day: covered by indestructible trees. It had been a parting gift when he’d left Kiromo, and despite the fact that it was nearly impossible to harm, it had taken him a week to feel like this valuable thing could really be carried around.

He had modified his constructs only a little for will-o-wisp hunting, since he had a dungeon the next day and would need to undo what he’d done. There was a chamber to hold the wisp, made from cold mana, and if he was successful, it would sit on top of the staff for as long as it took to bring it to Mizuki.

She had talked about chasing the wisps more than once. Kell could picture it in his head, and it had a sort of mystical quality that he enjoyed thinking about, especially since it was done at this time of day, when the light was fading away like a fire that had been left unattended.

Some wizards wore enchanted spectacles to help them see magic, or a monocle, or a looking glass, but Kell had anchored the construct directly to his skull. The bulk of the magic floated in front of his eyes, changing how he saw the world without the uncomfortability of glass held in front of his face. It helped him to more clearly see the wisps, which left distinctive trails, rendered in green by the magic he’d cooked up. He surged on after them. All he wanted was to capture one, which was the first thing that had gone through his head when he’d caught sight of them.

The wisps moved faster as he drew closer. They were sedate little things, colored orbs moving as though floating on the wind, but they had a sense of him, and spread out away as he approached. Their laziness left them once he was in full pursuit, and eventually they scattered so that he was forced to follow only one. They were a dungeon escape, he thought, or had been once, before they spread across the land.

The lone one he’d been tracking was doing its best to avoid him, but he was dogged in his pursuit. Unfortunately, it seemed to be faster than him, and it was growing dark. What he was worried about most was that it might go dim or dark, or disappear into a hollow. You didn’t see the will-o-wisps during the day, he didn’t think, and they must go somewhere. The wisp grew faster the nearer he got, avoiding him as though his motion were giving it fuel.

Eventually he trapped it by using a fair amount of his magic, putting up fires in front of it, driving it toward him. He was sure that Josen would have chided him, but when Kell set his mind to something, it was hard to dissuade him.

He was quite wet when he got back to his clothes, not just because he’d splashed through the water, but because it was a soggy sort of day, and the bulrushes had wiped their water against him. His clothes were safe and dry beneath a tree, but he was wet enough that putting them on would mean he’d be damp the rest of the way to Mizuki’s.

Instead, he held his staff in front of him with both hands and called upon a spell of elemental repulsion, parametrized carefully so he could use it on himself. The water blasted off of him, leaving a brief ghost of vapor in the air behind him, and Kell pushed the staff into the soft ground so he could get dressed, quite pleased with himself.

Being cool was, in Kell’s opinion, supremely underrated. For whatever reason, people just didn’t take the time to look amazing when they were doing things. It was a part of what he appreciated most about Mizuki — she would drop from the sky after one of her flights and strike a pose as she drove into the ground. It took some time and effort to pull that kind of thing off, and Mizuki put in the time and effort, in the same way that Kell did. It didn’t matter to Kell that no one had actually seen him blow the water off of himself in such a dramatic way, it was the principle of the thing, the flourish and flair that people seemed content not to have in their lives.

As Kell walked back to the path and then toward Mizuki’s house, he looked at the captured will-o-wisp. It was stuck to the end of the staff, more or less pinned there, and he altered the construct a bit so it could bobble around within the field he’d made for it. The confinement was a drain on his magic, and would be for as long as he maintained it, but he would have plenty of reserves left by the time he released it back into the world.

When he got to the house, he heard a clanking from the backyard, where lights had been set up. He maneuvered his way around the house, rather than knocking on the door, and found Mizuki back there throwing rocks at Alfric.

Alfric was in his plate armor, a piece of kit he’d gotten a week and a half before, from Dondrian, and this was Kell’s first time actually seeing it. It looked goofy, which Kell hadn’t expected, and that was in part because it didn’t conform to the body very well. Instead, Alfric looked a bit like a pinecone, with the individual plates overlapping each other. It seemed like it would be impossible to move in, but magic seemed to be handling most of the difficulties, shifting the plates around in order to allow him to pivot and lurch.

Mizuki wound up and then pitched a rock directly at Alfric. One of the plates detached from his chest and came up to stop the rock. That was the clanking sound that Kell had heard. Once the rock was diverted, the plate settled back in place, floating down like a petal.

“Testing?” asked Kell.

“No,” said Alfric. The plates around his head parted to show his face. “Practicing.”

“Kell!” said Mizuki, turning to look at him. “Wanna help chuck rocks at Alfric?”

“I’m getting tired,” said Alfric.

“You told me that’s when the best training happens,” said Mizuki.

“We can do a round,” said Alfric. “Let me pick up the rocks, let’s say five each? It’ll be good to try against two targets at once. Usually a dungeon doesn’t give you a single projectile you know is coming.”

Kell set his staff to one side and helped to gather rocks, then stood beside Mizuki. He was having those moments less often, but it still struck him every now and then how short she was. He remembered when they’d been little, and she’d seemed like a giant.

Kell turned his attention to Alfric. He didn’t know Alfric all that well, and knew him better through the accounts that other people had given of him, namely Mizuki and Vertex. To hear Vertex tell it, he was a nerd, obsessed with dungeons and with them as core to his identity, an object of endless study and stoic enthusiasm, from which no conversation could be diverted. They had very little idea how it was possible he was getting along with the four girls. To hear Mizuki tell it, he was genuinely funny, caring, considerate, and smelled nice. She seemed to find him endlessly interesting in the way that he found dungeons interesting, and there was always something new to talk about.

Alfric had never been anything but polite to Kell, and it was hard not to feel like that was a personal slight. Their only interactions were ones of politeness, perfunctory questions about how life was going, a goodbye, a request to pass some food at dinner, things like that. They’d never shared a joke, or an interesting conversation, let alone something personal. Even in group settings, they seemed like they didn’t interact. Kell had been invited over for dinner a few times now, and he never ended up talking with Alfric.

Their one extended conversation had been when Alfric had advised Kell not to join Vertex, and Kell had gone to join Vertex anyhow, which had more or less worked out. There wasn’t anything like tension between the two of them. There was just … nothing.

Mizuki threw her stone and Kell threw his right after. He’d been trying to time it right so that his throw was faster and they’d reach at the same moment, making them harder to block, but Alfric threw out seven plates at once, arranged like a flower with a single plate in the center, and the rocks plunked off.

“Cheater!” Mizuki called.

“I just wanted to make sure it worked,” said Alfric. “That’s the first and better defense against multiple attacks.”

“Still smells like cheating,” said Mizuki. She sniffed. “It smells desperate.”

“I’m pretty sure two isn’t a problem,” said Alfric. “Are you ready to throw for real?”

Mizuki threw a rock at him overhand, not well-prepared at all, and if she’d been hoping to catch him off-guard, she was disappointed. A plate came forward and slapped the rock down into the dirt.

“You’re controlling that?” asked Kell. “Deliberately?”

“Yes,” said Alfric. “I don’t need line of sight to the plate, but I need to be able to see what’s coming. If I can’t react, the only defense is as normal armor.”

That was the kind of conversation they had together, direct and to the point.

Kell palmed a second rock, so he had two in his fist. He looked over at Mizuki. “Ready?”

Mizuki threw first, and Kell threw second, both rocks at once. He wasn’t sure whether he’d been hoping that he’d hit Alfric, but there was no such luck, since three plates came up to block the rocks, plunk plunk plunk. It was hard to know how much of that was the armor and how much was Alfric, but by reputation, he expected that it was Alfric. Even to people who didn’t particularly like him, like Josen, Alfric was known as someone who would put his nose to the grindstone and make himself competent at things. It was hard to say how much training he’d done on this so far, but Kell could easily imagine him putting in two weeks on it.

“Alright,” said Mizuki as she gathered up the remaining stones. “Here comes the barrage!”

She threw them as fast as she could, one after the other, and Alfric seemed almost bored as he knocked them down. The last of the stones, though, was knocked up into the air, then caught by Alfric as it came down. The plates dropped away from him and he was left there, hand out-stretched, holding the stone, as the plates organized themselves in a pile. It did, in fact, look cool. It was hard for Kell to appreciate it though. There was something in the futility of throwing rocks at someone who would always deflect them that rankled.

“Alright, looks like you’ve acquired stone immunity,” said Mizuki. “You’ll protect me, right?”

“So long as you pull your weight,” said Alfric with a smile. He seemed to often have a smile for her.

“If I had another stone, you’d be in trouble,” said Mizuki. She gave him a faux pout, then looked at Kell. “You would not believe how mean this guy is to me, especially when I’m helping him train.”

“You asked me if you could throw rocks at me,” said Alfric.

“He said bad things about my cooking,” Mizuki explained.

“I said I didn’t like raisins with chicken,” said Alfric. “After being directly asked.”

“It’s part of the dish!” said Mizuki, turning back to him. “A Tarbin classic! A little sweetness to go with the savory, what’s not to love?”

“We didn’t really eat that food when we were growing up,” said Alfric. “Where’d you get the recipe from?”

“A book,” said Mizuki. She folded her arms and looked at Kell. “Anyway, what’s up? Our rock throwing is done, do you want to hang out? Or some leftover chicken? I can pick the raisins out.”

“I already ate,” said Kell. “I didn’t want to intrude on your dinner.” This was only partly true. He’d held off on coming for other reasons.

“Nonsense,” said Mizuki. “I always make more than we need, you know that.”

“I’ll be going in,” said Alfric. He gathered up the plates and was carrying them under a single arm. “Shutter the lights before you come in.”

“Fine, fine,” said Mizuki. She spent some time watching him go though, and only when he was out of sight did she turn back to Kell. “So, what’s new?”

“I captured a will-o-wisp,” said Kell, holding up his staff. He was surprised that she hadn’t noticed. She moved in close, peering at it, then looking at the magic around his staff.

“They don’t do well in captivity,” said Mizuki. “You should probably let it go?”

“I will,” said Kell. “I just wanted to show you.”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. Her face was quite close to the creature. “I’ve never seen one up close. Usually I’m on their trail, soaking up their magic as best I can.”

“I’ll let it go now,” said Kell. He undid the magic, and they watched the will-o-wisp speed away. It got only ten feet before it slowed and began its characteristic drifting instead, seemingly unperturbed by its temporary capture.

Mizuki shivered.

“Cold?” Kell asked. He didn’t have a pack with him, or anything to offer. Her shoulders were bare, and with the sun down, it was starting to get chilly.

“That wasn’t a cold shiver, it was an — I don’t know, a shiver you get when you see something wonderful and fleeting. You know, I went to the zoo in Dondrian, and they let you feed this huge, long-necked creature, and as it was happening I knew that I would never forget it. It had this black tongue and pulled the lettuce from my hand with so much force I was actually afraid. I was just feeling some of that, that sense of having a Moment.” She shivered again. “That one was because I was cold. Inside now, let’s get these lights closed and warm up.”

Once the lights were closed, they moved inside, as though chased by the chill breeze of nightfall. Kell had his staff, and wasn’t sure how he was getting home, since the slingshot was a pain to use in the dark. With Verity living in the woods, there was a chance that he would be able to ask for her bed for the night, but he knew that might be awkward, not just because he’d taken Verity’s place, but because he’d be sleeping in the same room as Isra.

“Alright,” said Mizuki as she went into the dining room. She pointed at a contraption sitting on the table there. “Check this out.”

Kell looked at it. “Okay?” he asked.

“I don’t actually think it’s got a name yet,” said Mizuki. “But we’ve been calling it a screamy machine.”

“I … see,” said Kell.

“It screams,” Mizuki explained. “Here, listen.” She pressed a lever on the side of it, and trumpets immediately started up, quick enough and loud enough to make Kell jump.

He listened to the song the whole way through, not making a noise, and Mizuki looked at him expectantly the entire time. It was a good song, and he tried his best to enjoy it, but standing there while someone watched him listen was unnerving and made it hard to concentrate.

“So … what is this?” asked Kell, looking at the machine. There were a number of parts within it, and it seemed as if some kind of fine-grained modulation was going on within the machine to produce the sound. The disc inside it was elemetal though, and from the faint magic on it, Kell thought it was forcestone.

“Oh, I’ve got no idea,” said Mizuki. “There’s the disc, which screams, and I guess it contains the song somehow? Which wasn’t how I thought they were supposed to work, but whatever. And apparently the machine can be used with other discs, though we don’t have any, can’t make any, and would need to talk to Verity’s dad about them.”

“And it’s not an entad?” asked Kell. “Wow.”

“I’m not sure it’s such a big deal,” said Mizuki.

“It’s like a book,” said Kell. “But for music.” He was feeling that same shiver she’d talked about, as though he was seeing something unique and magical, something profound.

“I mean, I guess,” said Mizuki. She looked at the machine. “It’s bigger than a bread box and plays exactly one song. This doesn’t seem revolutionary to me.”

“You can’t imagine not paying a band to play for a party?” asked Kell.

“When have I ever hired a band?” asked Mizuki. “When have you ever hired a band?”

“Tavern music then,” said Kell.

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “I don’t think people would sit and listen to songs without bardic effect. Besides, you’d still need someone changing out discs.”

“So you wanted to show me something that you didn’t think was very impressive?” asked Kell.

“Yup!” said Mizuki. “Also, I probably shouldn’t have played it just now. Everyone is getting sick of the song, since we’ve all heard it about a dozen times already, and that’s a bit much.” She looked him over. “It’s not like you to come over so late. What’s up?”

“Nothing,” said Kell with a shrug. “Just restless.” Being with Mizuki wasn’t making him less restless though. It was why he had decided not to come. But the house he shared with Vertex had been particularly boring, and carousing with Grig hadn’t felt like it would suit him.

“Well there’s not a lot going on here,” said Mizuki. “The herb dragons have been let out for the night, Emperor hasn’t made his grand return, and Verity is still off in the woods, not that she’s what you come over for. Glass of wine and a bit of chatter, now that I can offer you.”

“Sure,” said Kell. “That’s more than I’d be doing if I was on my own.”

They made their way down into the basement, where the wine cellar was. Only a quarter of the slots were filled, and it was Kell’s understanding that the house was going through wine at such a fast rate that they were very quickly going to run into supply issues. Mizuki kept hoping for an entad, but so far, there’d been nothing. They’d gotten a perfumer’s bottle from one of the dungeons, which could fill itself with a new liquid depending on what scent you thought of, but it was limited in activations, didn’t clean itself properly, and was rather difficult to use, since sometimes you got a liquid that only smelled like wine.

Mizuki selected a bottle without any real care, came up to the kitchen and prepared a plate of cheese, meats, and crackers, then settled down in the living room before groaning.

“I wanted a fire,” she said, looking forlorn, as though the fireplace was a million miles away and she was homesick for it.

“And now you’re all comfy,” nodded Kell. “On it.”

“You’re so nice,” said Mizuki. She poured a glass of wine for herself, then a glass for him. “It’s that time in Kiromo that made you nice, I imagine?”

“No,” said Kell as he got logs from the stack next to the fireplace and began building up the fire. “Kiromo’s not a nice place.”

“I thought you liked it?” asked Mizuki.

“That doesn’t mean that I didn’t like it,” said Kell. He stepped back from the fireplace and conjured forth a ball of fire, which he made float down into the nest of wood he’d made for it. When he released the flame, there was a flash of light, and the fire was going all at once.

“Show off,” said Mizuki, but she seemed pleased by the display.

“Kiromo is a hard place,” said Kell. “It’s rigid in a way that Pucklechurch — Inter — isn’t. Here, you just do whatever you want, but there, everyone goes along with the rules, which there are so many of that they feel like they might suffocate you. It’s worse as a foreigner, because you don’t grow up knowing anything, and they cut you some slack, but they resent you for it.”

“I thought you liked Kiromo,” said Mizuki. “Wasn’t that the upshot, the last time we talked?”

“I’m just trying to get across how it is,” said Kell. “I’m probably doing a bad job.”

In Kiromo, so long as you followed the rules, there wasn’t much trouble. It could be good, actually, to get along like that. Everyone had their place. When Kell had been a wizard there, he had learned all the wizard things, and once he got over how the rules could chafe, it was sort of like a dance, where you could flow along because you knew how it was supposed to go. Kiromo was a place of hierarchies that weren’t found in much of Inter society. And no, it wasn’t a nice place, but some of the rules were nice, and that was different, but it somehow ended up the same. In Pucklechurch, Mizuki offered food and wine because she cared, but in Kiromo, it was part of the ritual of a visit, and there were certain foods and drinks kept on hand just for when a guest came over. There was something nice about the certainty of it, but it never felt like a host was being nice, only like they were doing something that was expected of them. The nets of obligation and expectation were tight in Kiromo.

It was hard to explain though, so Kell didn’t.

“If we could ever actually finish a dungeon, we could start rolling the dice and hoping to get a travel entad,” said Mizuki. “Something to cross continents.” She shook her head.

“How’s Alfric doing?” asked Kell. He was asking mostly because it was the last thing that Mizuki had talked about. He did care about Alfric, in the abstract, but Alfric was, at best, an acquaintance.

“How in the world would I know?” asked Mizuki. She got up a bit from her seat, wine glass in hand, and looked around the room, then toward the hallways. “He’s probably in bed, which means probably out of earshot, but I don’t just have to worry about how sound travels in the house, but also whether there are birds listening to me.” She looked over at one of the chairs, where the cat was curled up. “Or the cat. Tabbins! Get!”

The housecat flicked an ear.

“Well, I guess I’ll just live with it,” said Mizuki. “I can’t spend every single moment second-guessing animals.”

“Isra never said she spied on you, right?” asked Kell.

“I dunno,” said Mizuki. “No. But there’s spying and then there’s spying, and she definitely did do the first one.”

“Which is … ?” asked Kell.

“Looking at me when I was in a ‘public setting’,” said Mizuki. She swallowed down more wine. “Like if I’m at the market and negotiating a good price —”

“Which you’re terrible at,” said Kell. He took some wine of his own. He’d drank a lot while in the Kiromon military, but more or less stopped when he’d returned to Pucklechurch. He was afraid he was becoming a lightweight.

“Hush,” said Mizuki. “But, true. If I’m at the market talking to someone, I don’t feel like that conversation is a private one, really, at least not unless I’m leaning in and keeping my voice low, but it would be different if I had someone standing over my shoulder, because then I would know that I was speaking to two people. And it might have been like that, with birds.”

“I suppose,” said Kell. “It depends.”

Mizuki drank some more wine. “I had a boy spy on me while I was getting changed,” she said. “Maybe it just feels like that.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard this story,” said Kell. “Recently?”

“Eh, it’s not a good story, and no, not at all recent,” said Mizuki. “I was up in my room, getting changed, bare-chested,” she placed her hands on her chest and lifted them up, as though Kell needed a demonstration, “and then I looked out the window and saw this boy looking up at me. We were kind of dating, but not so much that it was okay. I opened the window and lobbed some magic at him, and that was just about the end of that.”

“Was this Karl?” asked Kell. “That’s not at all how he tells it.”

“Welp, I guess I’m going to have to track him down then, and help him remember properly,” said Mizuki. “I’m sure he says that it’s an accident?”

“He says that he never saw anything,” said Kell. “Just that he was outside your house, trying to find a way up to the second floor without waking up your parents, and you yelled at him and then almost blew his head off.”

Mizuki snorted. “You can see how flat the aether is here, barely enough to singe someone. But no, it was the feeling of being alone and then suddenly having someone intrude on that — to have someone intrude without me knowing about it, not until well after it had happened. I don’t actually know how long he was watching, only that he was watching. And the funny thing is, I might not have minded, if I had seen him there before I got undressed. It might have been something I’d have done for him.” She took a drink of her wine, a gulp more than a sip. “Probably too flirty, I guess.”

Kell had found that Mizuki talked about old boyfriends, or flirtations, or flings, with some regularity. It seemed to him that she had stories in endless supply of boys who she’d had a few dates with, or sometimes kissed, and a few where she’d felt her heart thumping and thought it was serious before it all fell apart in short order.

The way that Mizuki talked about all these boys — what must have been a substantial fraction of boys her age in Pucklechurch, including a few years up and down — didn’t do much to dampen Kell’s own ardor. That was a problem, because she’d made it as clear as she could without saying it outright that she had no romantic interest in him. He’d never said that he was interested in her either, in part because the wordless advances had been so thoroughly rebuffed. He had let his hand fall on hers and seen her pull away, sat down close to her and watched her get up within half a minute, had drawn close only to have her move away. She talked about Alfric in ways that made his stomach do flips.

Kell had decided, weeks ago, since joining Vertex, that they would be friends and nothing more. For whatever reason, she had no interest in him, and he didn’t think there was anything that could kindle that interest. When he’d returned to Pucklechurch, it had been a non-event for her. She barely remembered him, for as much as she had dominated his memories of childhood.

He could recognize that there were ways in which the friendship wasn’t good for him. He had tried to make peace with the idea that she had no interest in him, that she didn’t feel the same spark that he felt. There was a part of him that wanted to ask, that wanted to make a move that was unambiguous — but it was clear that she was already negotiating around his affection, turning aside the incidental touches that might be construed as flirtatious, changing the subject away from affairs of the heart, moving as though she were an expert swordswoman who could parry his advances with practiced ease. The only question for Kell was how much of that was deliberate on her part. He thought that she was ignorant that it was happening, moving without much calculation.

Calculation was decidedly not Mizuki’s strong suit, which was one of the things he liked most about her. And she was, by her own admission and the testimony of a number of people who knew her well, a flirt. Why she should feel no compulsion to flirt with him, why he was somehow unmemorable and unsuitable, was a painful question that seemed to have no good answer.

He had written off the possibility, and told himself that he wanted to be a friend and nothing more, but he saw the way her lips parted when she was about to smile, and watched the way she dropped out of the sky when she was flying, and a part of him refused to believe that it was friendship and nothing else.

There was something about it that twisted his stomach. It was like what Mizuki had said about being watched from the window. The same act could be different, depending on whether it was desired, invited. Somehow the fact that Mizuki didn’t want him in that way made every look he gave her turn, by strange alchemy, into something twisted and gross. Kept personal, it was no problem, but it was something he knew he’d have to keep from her, and that rankled too. It was why he had told himself he wasn’t going to visit.

“Alright,” said Mizuki after a few glasses of wine were warming both their bellies and the fire had filled the living room with a bit of warm heat. “Tell me about Kiromo girls.”

“Girls?” asked Kell.

“Girls,” said Mizuki. “I was talking to Verity and she was saying that before Isra she’d never had a real partner, and for me — well, you know for me — and it feels like for Alfric it was the same, just the great and terrible Lola. And you talk about Kiromo like it’s a foreign place, so I was wondering how it was there. With the girls.”

She was tipsy, not drunk, but loosened enough that her words were coming fast. Kell wasn’t feeling it as much, only a light vibration that seemed to go through his brain. Wine always felt like it made him fluid and chilled, but he knew enough from watching other people to know that this was an illusion the wine cast, a false confidence and verve. The wine wouldn’t keep you from stumbling over your words, it would make it so you didn’t notice the stumble when it happened.

“Two girlfriends for me,” he said, holding up his fingers. “Both serious.” He shrugged. “It’s the same as anything else in Kiromo, more structure to it, more rules. Spring and autumn are for girls to confess, summer and winter are for boys. People talk if you do it out of season.” He set his glass down. “You do your confession, and if that goes well, then a date, which always includes a meal, then you settle into — they’ve got a word for it, asebo, which means a sort of early partnering, less serious, where you’re getting to know each other, and a later partnering, kinguo, where it’s more serious. More phases, overall, a kind of mapped out lifecycle of a relationship leading up to marriage. You’re expected to live together for a bit, to make sure that you’re a proper match.”

“Bah,” said Mizuki. “I want to know about the girls, not the other stuff. If I wanted to read a book, I’d read a book.”

Kell picked his glass back up. “Kimizi was the first one,” said Kell. “She confessed to me on the final day of spring. That’s a traditional thing there, your last chance before the change of the season. There are lots of confessions. And she was traditional in a lot of ways — I know you don’t want the world atlas treatment, but it’s important stuff if you want to know what ‘Kiromo girls’ are like.”

“Mmm,” said Mizuki. “My sisters are Kiromo girls now.”

“Yeah,” said Kell. “Probably not traditional though, unless they’re taking pains to fit in.”

“So this girl, Kimi,” said Mizuki. “First love? Or nah.”

“Uh, no,” said Kell. “There were three girls before her, at the mage college. Three serious ones, anyway.”

Mizuki squinted at him. “All this time and I’m just now learning this? I thought you were some kind of Kesbinite.”

“No,” said Kell. “No, not at all.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “And none of them went the distance?”

“Er, how do you mean?” asked Kell. He was wondering, briefly, whether she was asking whether he was a virgin, which seemed too casually intimate a question for her to pose to him. It was an important thing in Kiromo, less so in Inter, and he tried to calibrate properly.

“Just, you know,” said Mizuki. She shrugged. “You’re obviously not married.”

“Oh,” said Kell. “Well, no, nothing that ended in marriage, no, obviously.”

“Right, but the why, that’s the interesting thing, at least to me,” said Mizuki. “Why did it fall apart, how weren’t you a match, other question words.”

“With Kimi, it was that she seemed more invested in doing the right thing at the right time,” said Kell. “I don’t know how to word it. It was like she had a plan for how it would go for me, and when I didn’t like that plan, she’d get cross, and I was always having to figure out what I’d done, or worse, what she expected.”

“Thousands of things to know, and you didn’t know them,” Mizuki nodded.

“Not thousands,” said Kell. “But dozens, maybe. The thing was, it wasn’t horrible. I liked her. She was really good at conversation, which you might not expect from how I’m talking about her, but she was. It was just all the other stuff.”

“Why’d she want a foreigner?” asked Mizuki. “Seems dumb.”

“I don’t know,” said Kell. “Maybe she didn’t decide to like me, she just did. I don’t think we ever really talked about it.” He had learned, by that point, that asking someone what they liked about you could easily come off as vaguely desperate.

“And the second?” asked Mizuki.

“Kind of the opposite,” said Kell. “Kind of. Suki was, ah, rebellious. Hated her parents, hated Kiromo, got with me because, I guess, she saw something in it.” He paused. “I liked her, I think it just wasn’t what she wanted. That’s kind of been the story, with girls, being not really what they wanted. We get together because I’m close enough, then it turns out that close enough isn’t enough.”

“Wait, no,” said Mizuki. She blinked at him with slow, wine-heavy eyelids. “But what about what you want?”

Kell laughed. “I’ve got no idea. I think after mage college, I wanted a partner, someone to go through life with. That was always how it was talked about, and finding that has been — I don’t know. Hard. I came back to Pucklechurch and more than half of the people in my age range were partnered up. No girls — or guys, for that matter.” There was one obvious exception sitting in the room with him.

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “Sucks.” She drank more wine. “But dungeoneering is good for meeting people, especially people who haven’t settled down yet. Most of them don’t want to be dungeoneering while they’ve got a family, they move around enough that it’s hard to keep attachments, that kind of thing, so partners aren’t as easy to keep. Dungeoneers marry late in life, usually, unless they can make it work some other way. So you’ve got time, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’ve got time, and I’m older than you. But … are you lonely? Is this something that’s actually a thing for you?”

“I don’t know,” said Kell. He didn’t, really. He was surrounded by people, most of the time. He’d had lots of friends at the mage college, lots of accolades when in the Kiromon military, plenty of fast friends. There was less of that in Pucklechurch. “I feel like five years could pass in the blink of an eye and I would still be where I am now.”

“Except you’d have five years of dungeon profits,” said Mizuki. “And more than that, five years of dungeon entads. Enough that you wouldn’t have to work much, probably. I mean I’ve heard people go crazy without work, so you wouldn’t want to go crazy, but maybe a hobby that becomes a side job or something.”

“Yeah,” said Kell. His mind had rooted itself though, and the aching sense of isolation was taking over. It wasn’t loneliness, he would never have called it that, it was a feeling that he was apart from everyone else in the world, a mote floating in a sunbeam. He had his party, though they were slow friends, and he had Mizuki, but there was little else. He had left Pucklechurch, then left the college, then left Kiromo, and now was a creature of nowhere. He was climbing the side of a cliff and could quickly become untethered. He had come untethered, for a bit, when he’d done the solo dungeons.

“I think I’m going to go,” said Kell. He stood suddenly and his head swam. He’d had too much wine, and the conversation had been too deep. He almost forgot to pick up his staff.

“You can stay the night here, on the couch,” said Mizuki. “It’s dark out.”

“I’m a wizard,” said Kell. He tapped his staff on the ground and altered the magical mechanisms that clung to the staff, causing light to spill from the tip. “And I’m off.”

“I’m serious,” said Mizuki. She seemed slightly more alert. “The couch is yours.”

“Nah,” he said. “I’ll get some night air, clear my head.”

“Hope I helped,” said Mizuki. There was something soft and perfect and hopeful about her voice and the way she looked at him. Kell cast the warp before he could say something he’d regret.

The trip back to Liberfell was going to be a pain, he knew. He was still using the slingshot and amulet, which he strongly felt were due for a replacement. He looked up at the stars, aligned himself toward Liberfell, then fired the amulet off before resting up against a pillar of the warp point’s enclosure.

His mind was on Mizuki again. Maybe it was the wine that had done it. He tried to move his mind to his staff, to undo the alterations he’d made to catch the will-o-wisp, but he was too unfocused for that. It was a stupid thing to do while drunk, though he wasn’t quite drunk, only in a particular mood that drink often brought on. There were some people that grew gregarious with alcohol, but Kell had a tendency toward longing and melancholy. He should have refused the wine when it was offered.

Kell had sought clerical advice, mostly in Liberfell rather than Pucklechurch so that nothing would be said or insinuated to people he cared about. Going to see a number of clerics was, sometimes, cause for gossip, even if the clerics themselves were good about keeping confidence. If a couple went to see Xuphin together, people might whisper that they were trying for a child and wanted a blessing, while a young man or woman seeking the counsel of Garos would have the usual whispers. In Pucklechurch, Kell had talked only with Lin, the cleric of Oeyr, but elsewhere he had gone first to Xuphin, then to Kesbin, then finally to Bixzotl, mostly for a change of pace. Their advice had been conflicting, and Kell was left to pick and choose.

He was certain that Mizuki had not a trace of romantic interest in him, and also certain that he felt her pull like he’d felt it from no one else.

The cleric of Kesbin had said that it was probably better to stop spending time with Mizuki — that these feelings would fade, given the time and allowance to fade. But if Kell kept going back to her, he was giving the cup a chance to refill, and while he did that, the water would sit heavy on his mind. But Kell had almost no one else, and making friends when everyone was so ensconced in their lives was difficult. He went to temple days and hoped that he would find something for him there, but it had been all for nothing. The groups of friends were too difficult to crack into, there was no one who shared his line of work, and his time in both Plenarch and Kiromo had marked him.

He teleported to the amulet and found himself in ankle-deep water. It had managed to land right in the river that ran along Liberfell, though thankfully not in the rapids or the deeper part where he’d have been over his head. He scooped up the amulet and did the warp again, this time to the center of the Liberfell hex, and blasted the water away from him once he was clear of the building. It was less cool the second time.

Vertex had a house in Liberfell now, serving as their base of operations. The place was run by a young widow, Lena, not all that much older than they were, and she made them meals when they weren’t doing dungeons, as well as taking care of all the housework. For that, they paid her a somewhat handsome sum, and there had been talk of her becoming a part of a potential counterparty. She had been widowed two years prior and seemed to itch to get out of the house — she listened intently to what they said about dungeons. They’d been with her only briefly, two weeks, but already it felt like she was a part of the team.

Kell had thought about courting her, but every time he thought of Lena, it was in comparison to Mizuki, and he had enough experience with women to know that wasn’t healthy and would doom any possible romance from the start. Still, he was drunk enough that it was seeming like a good idea, as though her hair and limbs could wrap around him and give him comfort, somehow.

He stopped before the house. There was a figure there. That raised Kell’s hackles, and for a moment he was thinking of summoning his armor to him, his dancing sword, and a handful of other entads that he could call to him in a flash.

But when she stepped forward, it was a tall woman in a long cloak that was drawn around her, obscuring her figure. She was a face above an expanse of cloth, nothing more.

“Kell?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I don’t think that I’ve had the pleasure.”

“My name is Cate Peregrin,” she replied. “I’m the Seeker of Secrets for the Greater Plenarch province, among other things.”

Kell nodded. “And you wanted to see me outside normal business hours?”

“I wanted to see you,” she said. “And I had heard that this was your home.”

“I see,” said Kell. He shifted. “It’s been a long day.”

“I have an opportunity that I’d like to discuss with you,” said Cate. She slipped a hand out from her cloak. In it was a black orb, which seemed to have bits of gray swimming beneath its surface. “First though, if you’re willing, I would like your discretion assured.”

Kell hesitated. The black orb was an entad, he could tell by the magic around it. There was also something untrustworthy in this woman who’d appeared outside his door so late at night, just as he was getting back. But it was something new and interesting, and she had a flair for the dramatic that he couldn’t help but appreciate. And after all, what did he have to lose?

Kell reached forward and touched the orb.

The next day, he wouldn’t remember any of it, not the orb, not the introduction, and not what had been said between them once his fingers had touched the black surface. There would only be, somewhere inside him, a sense of contentment and resolve.

Chapter 126 - Dungeon Dreams

Alfric’s family understood failing a dungeon.

It wasn’t supposed to happen often. That would be a sign that you were being sloppy, unprepared, or leaning too much on the ability to undo. But it did happen, especially at the higher elevations, or in the dungeons that packed more of a punch for other reasons. There were some dungeons throughout the world that were exceptionally dangerous because of what hex they were in. Even a normal dungeon could trip someone up sometimes though. Usually it was cause for some good-natured ribbing or commiseration over the guild channels. You did what you could to learn, then you moved on.

When Alfric had his first undone dungeon, there had been lots of support from his extended family. It had started a chain of guild messages where relatives shared their first dungeon failures. His mother and father had both chimed in, and he’d found that reassuring, even though he knew the stories. His mother’s first failure was because of a poison they hadn’t recognized until it was too late — delivered by the claws of a tiny crablike beast. His father’s first failure was an ill-considered run at a partially submerged dungeon where they’d forged on ahead even though they didn’t have the equipment for it. Some of the dungeon failures were admittedly stupid, like his uncle, who had wedged himself into a crevice and been unable to extricate himself, or his second cousin, who had gone solo against a monster that his party was skittish on. There were more than a dozen of these stories in response to that first dungeon report, and it had done a lot to assuage Alfric.

After the second failed dungeon, at Posy Point, there were fewer responses. People had already shared their stories, and failing a second dungeon immediately after failing a first was less understandable, more embarrassing. The cause of the failure had been different — Alfric had been killed in an instant by a searing beam of fire — which at least let a few of his relatives share their stories of times when dungeons had been absolute dung. There were the selden dungeons, places with horrible monsters and almost no loot, and there were monsters that came with such viciousness, strength, or unique attacks that there was almost nothing that could be done against them. It was rare, one in a thousand or something ridiculous like that, but it did happen, and people tried to tell Alfric that it was something that you had to deal with. Extreme variance, even from a relatively low elevation and low magic dungeon, could happen.

And then they’d failed a third dungeon, and it felt like all the sympathy had dried up. The family wasn’t seeing it as a learning experience, they were seeing it as a problem. There were attempts to diagnose the problem and attempts to fix it, sometimes without the diagnosis step, and the thread grew long as the days went on, suggesting various ‘fixes’. It was one of the worst experiences that Alfric had ever had with the family guild, largely because it just kept going. People he had only met a few times would chime in, thinking that they knew the specifics of his situation, when they had clearly not read his other reports, and in one case, clearly had not read the rest of the very thread they were replying to.

The third failure had been mostly Mizuki’s fault, though he hadn’t put it like that to her. They had been at Herbury Meadows, to the east of Pucklechurch, a place filled with summer flowers and including a corner of Lake Gornorian. They’d gotten a fairly wet dungeon, with at least one room flooded to the knee with water, but somewhat sedate monsters, at least right up until the end. The problem was that Mizuki had quite a bit of explosive power, and had been using it with abandon, and the reason for that seemed to be that she was worried that someone would get poisoned, or instantly killed by a beam of light, or some other thing. She was being aggressive because she was worried about a dungeon failure, and that had led her to release a fireball too close to Alfric. It had killed one of the three monsters they were in the middle of fighting, but left him stunned and throwing up, rattled hard.

He’d been out of the action for long enough that Hannah had to try tanking the hits, and unfortunately, Hannah just hadn’t been up to the task. Verity had been the one to die, and Hannah had lost an arm, with Mizuki falling to one of the beasts as Alfric tried to fight it off. He’d limped out of the dungeon with Isra and Hannah, then reset without waiting until later, mostly because of the head wound.

He had talked with them about it, dissecting what had happened, why it had happened, and what they could do better. He had spent some of their money, and had the others spend their money, to close some of the gaps in their defenses. He wasn’t sure that it was worthwhile. The problem wasn’t really their defenses, it was that they were walking into fights that were above their level, and had been for quite some time. Early on some of it might have been variance, but they’d done eleven dungeons including the undone ones, and if it was variance, then it was far on the upper end. They just shouldn’t have been fighting several thousand pound monsters, not for another year or two.

He tried to tell himself that the rewards they’d accrued thus far couldn’t be argued with. Other dungeoneering teams came out of a dungeon with a thousand rings to show for it, and once everything was said and done, it was likely that the Settlers had pulled over a million rings worth of entads, ectads, henlings, and bastles. It might even have been more. For eight completed dungeons, that was fantastic.

He also tried to tell himself that they were on the verge of cracking it wide open. The Ellusifé must have meant something, though Alfric had by this point talked with several dozen people and they couldn’t point him at the meaning. He’d spoken to five different clerics of Xuphin, including the archbishop of Xuphin in Plenarch, and they had almost nothing in the way of actionable advice, though they’d given him more than his fair share of aphorisms and philosophy. He’d gotten in touch with a supposed expert on dungeons in Lambria, the nearest province to the north, and over a very long conversation that had lasted for most of the day, he had been left with a conclusion of ‘dungeon generation isn’t random, but we can’t really predict it, and honestly the dungeon reports are pretty worthless too’. That had been both disheartening and unhelpful.

He had eventually sent a letter to the Holy City of Qym where a group of wortiers were attempting to create the ultimate dungeon codex, capable of categorizing and synthesizing entries on dungeon phenomena from hundreds of millions of dungeon reports, historical and contemporary. He had gotten a letter back, more than a week after he sent it, informing him that the project wasn’t taking requests at that time, and would likely not be completed for another decade. That one had been a long shot, admittedly.

He’d been halfway hoping that with all these people he’d spoken with, he would be able to find someone willing to take the group on as a research project of some kind, but the best he’d gotten was a promise from the woman in Lambria that an assistant or student of some sort would come to Pucklechurch within the next two months if Alfric was still around, and might spend some time trying to research the issue.

The three failures had been in Latchet Point, Posy Point, and Herbury Meadows. Alfric had been torn on where they should try next, and whether they should return to one of those places as their ‘next’ dungeon. There were pros and cons to both, but in the end he’d decided on Herbury Meadows again, largely because it had been nice until it wasn’t. All they needed to do was overcome the odds once, and then he thought the team would be back on track. The last dungeon failure hadn’t even really been caused by the dungeon, it had been caused by the party’s reaction to the other failures — mostly Mizuki’s, though he was trying hard not to hold it against her.

They set out relatively early in the morning after a brief breakfast. Herbury Meadows was two hexes away, which necessitated that someone fly there, but that was only a brief trip. Alfric did it himself. He knew the way, after all.

Verity had better armor, a long robe with a hood that wouldn’t impede her movements or playing. It looked nothing like plate armor, but looks could be deceiving with entads, and in this case, it was capable of stopping most quick and heavy attacks. Beyond that, she had a layered translucent golden shell around her from a different entad, one with twenty-five layers when it was fully charged, and while this was still bad against a swarm, it would have saved her a fair bit of trouble from the birds. The shell was spherical, and needed some room, and also prevented her from using a weapon, but she didn’t use a weapon in the first place.

Alfric had paid for the entads with his own money, but when he’d tried to give them to her, she’d insisted that their cost should come from her share of their winnings. They’d had a negotiation over it, with both of them trying to be more charitable than the other, but eventually Verity had insisted one too many times, and Alfric had taken her money. She had claimed not to care too much about money anyway, which he was slightly skeptical of, even if he’d never seen her press too hard about creature comforts.

Isra was the other one who needed something, in part because the thimble armor was too thin and soft a metal. For her, he’d gotten an amulet that could make her slippery for brief bursts, magically empowered so that everything would slide off her, including claws and swords. They had tested it in the backyard, and Alfric had made sure that his sword glanced off her and his bident couldn’t pierce her. It was for emergencies, something to throw up in case she got caught out after moving through slowed time. Unlike Verity, Isra had been the one to request something like it in the first place, and she’d put up her own money without any mention of it coming from party funds. He had also equipped her with a proper sword, though she’d grumbled about it, as her bow was her weapon of choice.

There was a temptation to spend nearly all their money on new entads and bits of gear. That would have been a fool’s errand though, and something that had driven more than one dungeoneering party into oblivion. To spend all your earnings on doing things that would get you more earnings could leave you in a position where you broke your back for essentially nothing. Some tried to justify it by saying that they could resell their entads, typically the most valuable pieces of gear, but that was a bit of a crapshoot. Mostly, the dungeons would provide, and things that would have cost thousands of rings could be had for free if you only spent long enough at it. They had good travel entads, good storage, and almost all of it had come to them through the dungeons themselves.

They had made some minor alterations, many of them through the trial and error of the dungeons, some of them through practicing together. Hannah’s warhammer had not, in Alfric’s opinion, been cutting it, and she’d gotten something more like a pick. The liquid metal of her armor was, most of the time, sticking on her body rather than moving into the head, so it was decided that she would make her heavy swings with something designed for it. Alfric had tried to get her to switch over to a spear or other polearm, but that had resulted in a long discussion that had gone nowhere.

It was a lot of preparation, and a fourth failure might be coming. Alfric had steeled himself for it. He had reassured himself that the deaths weren’t real, that the things he’d seen were just like premonitions rather than actual events he’d lived through. Chrononauts had different coping strategies, and he hadn’t found one that worked right for him, not for this.

Herbury Meadows was filled with flowers, most of them outside the tiny town at the warp. ‘Town’ was probably overgenerous, as it was a collection of ten buildings, only one of which was a business. The largest settlement in the hex — though still quite small — was to the southeast, at the outflow of a river, where boats from the lake could dock. The flowers were largely purple and yellow, coneflowers and goldenrod, though in other seasons there would be streaks of red and orange, at least according to Mizuki.

“Lots of apiaries around,” said Mizuki. “Renowned for their honey. Hey, we should pick up some honey while we’re here. They have butterfly honey.”

“Butterfly honey?” asked Hannah.

“From butterflies,” said Mizuki.

“Butterflies don’t make honey,” said Hannah.

“Honey butterflies do,” said Mizuki. “They’ve got hives and stuff or something, I don’t know.” She shrugged.

“Sorry, but we had this conversation before,” said Alfric. “And then you said that the butterflies deposited their honey in specially built jars.”

“Ouch,” said Mizuki. “Caught out by the chrononaut. But I don’t think it should surprise anyone that I don’t know how butterfly honey is made.”

They hadn’t run into any insect swarms last time, thankfully, but they had come across a room with two dozen honey pots in it, which Alfric had been sorely disappointed to lose. You couldn’t trust dungeon food, but with Isra, most of the potential problems could be avoided.

“We should get going,” said Alfric. He didn’t say ‘we should get this over with’ or ‘we should see what’s going to get us this time’ or ‘please, please be careful, but not overly careful, and don’t overcompensate, and Verity just try to generate us something good’. He thought those things though, privately, and tried to hold himself up as the leader of the group.

The dungeon entrance was well-maintained and surrounded with different flowers, as though someone had tried to pretty it up and make it seem less like a decaying maw of monsters and death, as some of the dungeon entrances seemed to be. Alfric had visited Laver Marsh and a single look at the entrance had made him not want to go in.

They made sure that everything was ready to go, then Alfric, as usual, went first. He said a prayer to Xuphin, that they would find treasures, then a prayer to Kesbin, that the monsters would be weak.

After the tunnel, there was a small room with cream-colored walls and no monsters, for which Alfric was grateful. He called the all clear as Isra and Hannah dropped the chest, which scurried after them.

<So far so good, right?> asked Mizuki.

They were all on edge. There was no helping it. Alfric didn’t know if he had it the worst of them, but he wouldn’t have been surprised. They hadn’t seen each other die, they’d only heard his cold, clinical descriptions of what had happened to them. He was keeping it together, he was maintaining his professionalism, but he needed a win. If he didn’t get one, he would pick himself up, dust himself off, and try again, that was what an Overguard did, but he would be torn and frayed by it, and might need to take a break.

The thrum came suddenly, loud enough to make him wince. It swept through them, and they clapped their hands to their ears, but it was over after five seconds, leaving the dungeon silent once more.

<What was that?> asked Verity.

<Unknown,> Alfric replied. <Earplugs in.>

The earplugs were wax, formed to their ears earlier, and they all put them in, then waited for the sound to happen again. The party channel bypassed normal hearing, meaning that their communication wouldn’t be impacted.

They waited.

The sound came through again after five minutes, vibrating everything around them, and it could still be heard through the wax plugging up their ears, if much more dimly. Sound could conduct itself through bone, and Alfric wondered whether that was happening. He could feel the sound. It passed quickly though, and then there was silence.

<I think this is fine,> said Alfric. <It’s not loud enough to damage our hearing, I don’t think.>

<But what’s making the sound?> asked Hannah.

<That’s a question,> said Alfric with a shrug. <Possibly a monster, possibly just an environmental effect.>

<It’s sound,> said Verity. She had a hard look in her eyes. <Something linked to me.>

<Possibly,> said Alfric. <We should get moving.>

The only exit from the room was a wooden door, and Alfric opened it slowly. Beyond was a hallway, and they moved down it. There was no light but his lantern and the lanterns of others, which he didn’t particularly like. It would make them stick out, and also meant that they might be hampered in a fight.

<Er, lots of fireball fodder here,> said Mizuki.

<Be careful with it,> said Alfric. They had talked about it already. She knew.

The hallway had a single door leading off to the right, then opened up fifty feet beyond that into what was clearly a larger room. If at all possible, Alfric wanted to handle the right room first, but the open end of the hallway was a worry, and the right room had a door. There was no particular standard procedure for this, and it was something he’d heard people argue about before. What you didn’t want was to go past a door and then get pincered. You could get pincered either way, of course, and get caught fighting a battle on two fronts, but Alfric thought it marginally safer to take the door and hope that nothing rushed them from where the dungeon opened up.

He did, however, wait until the thrumming sound had passed, and tried to mark the time to see if it was getting faster or slower. The volume, at least, seemed to be about the same.

The door creaked open, pushing in, and Alfric braced himself for a monster, his bident held in front of him, his armor practically vibrating with his pent up desire to throw it up and protect himself.

The room was filled with crafted wooden things, and as his lantern cast its light, he saw that there was nothing obviously monstrous in nature. His eyes were skipping from shape to shape, trying to find the claws, the fleshy bits, the hair, anything, and so it took him a moment to realize, once he was done jumping at shadows, what the wooden things were.

They were lutes.

There were dozens of the things, hung up on the walls, laid across benches, and a few of them in the process of being strung or put together. The place almost had the look of a workshop, but Alfric didn’t think that someone who actually made lutes would have such an abundance of them. There were more than a hundred of them.

<Wow,> said Mizuki as she came into the room. <Lutes, huh? What a weird coincidence.>

Verity stared at the surplus of lutes. They came in all shapes and sizes, most with marks of a dungeon’s sense of design. Some were fat-bellied and others had necks so long that you’d need a second person to play them. The number of strings ranged from one, which hardly seemed like a lute at all, to eighteen, which was so many that even a many-fingered hand would have trouble with it. The woods came in every color, and Alfric suspected that many of them had been stained or dyed, unless there really was a tree that had bright blue wood. It was possible, in a dungeon.

<So, are we going to loot this place or what?> asked Verity.

<That’s terrible,> said Hannah with a laugh.

<Mizuki said that if we were going into my deepest nightmares I should have fun with it,> said Verity.

<Is this a nightmare?> asked Isra. She was bringing up the rear, and closed the door behind them after the chest had come in, which was proper procedure when you were worried about a pincer. He’d been shocked by the lutes and forgotten to tell her, and it was a relief that she had done it without being told.

<It’s complicated,> said Verity. She looked at the abundant supply of musical instruments. <I cannot imagine ever giving up the lute, but for a lot of my life it’s been a weight around my neck. Practice is constant.> She looked at Alfric. <Proper principles say we should get out of here, not linger.>

<Yes,> Alfric nodded. <Mizuki, magic?>

<Er,> said Mizuki. She was looking around. <This can’t possibly be right, but I think it’s all of them.>

Alfric looked around the room. He wished that he could see magic. You could get a piece of glass from a wizard, enchanted to allow it, but those were expensive, and not worth it if you had a sorc. <There are a hundred lutes here.>

<Yep,> said Mizuki. <All magical.>

<We should take them then,> said Alfric. He was feeling cautious though. To take more than a dozen entads from a dungeon of this elevation was a rarity. To take a hundred wasn’t unprecedented, but it was the sort of thing that only happened at higher elevations and in more dangerous territory, with dungeons that took weeks or more to clear.

<How do you tell if an entad is linked?> asked Mizuki. She was looking at the lutes. <I mean, can you, without testing?>

<Links are rare,> said Alfric. <A hundred being linked would be … not unprecedented, I don’t think, but very notable. Especially at this elevation.>

<Welp,> said Mizuki. <That was my only contribution.>

<It was a good one,> said Alfric. Sometimes entads could come in parts, especially common for those with a communication effect. A hundred, and all lutes, would be extremely odd.

The sound came, and they cupped their hands over their ears, in those cases where their armor allowed it. Alfric had the plates down, and pressed his hands against his ears. It was bearable without doing that, thanks to the wax, but still not pleasant for the five seconds the sound went on.

<Does it matter?> asked Isra. She’d moved further into the room. <We’re going to pack these away and do the rest of the dungeon, right?>

<Would we?> asked Hannah. <Three failures under our belts, with a potential haul like this, would we really not just leave the way we came and hope that the monsters understood we didn’t want to stick around?>

Alfric felt that like ice in his chest, in part because he’d been thinking the same thing. If they got a hundred entads at the very start of the dungeon, it felt like they were compelled to leave right away.

But that felt like it would be a failure, in a sense. They would come out rich, certainly, with plenty of lutes to show for it, but they wouldn’t really have done a dungeon. They’d have taken the windfall where they could and punted to another day.

<We’ll take the lutes and leave,> said Alfric. That was the responsible thing to do, even if it hurt.

<Well,> said Mizuki. <If there are a hundred lutes here, then what might the rest of the dungeon have for us? Maybe we could walk out with two hundred lutes. Maybe the problem is under control and Verity is, I don’t know, responsible for this?>

<How could I be anything but responsible for this?> asked Verity. <It must be me. Mustn’t it?>

<Of course it’s you,> said Hannah. <But in our favor this time, no offense.>

<None taken,> said Verity. <It’s a relief.> She looked around the room. <If … somewhat smacking of narcissism?>

<Does it?> asked Alfric. He looked around. <I’m not sure I track that.>

<Nevermind,> said Verity. <Let’s get the haul, then leave.>

<What about what I said?> asked Mizuki. <That we might find another hundred somewhere else? Besides, it’s been forever since we’ve done a dungeon, I got myself all hyped up for it, and now we’re just going to go?>

<Yes,> said Alfric. <I think anyone with dungeon experience would say the same. There are some things that there’s no sense risking your neck for.>

<But we were already risking our necks,> said Mizuki. <I mean, right?>

<It’s the chrono thing,> said Hannah.

<We should decide,> said Alfric.

<I don’t have a song running,> said Verity. <We’re not in any rush.>

The sound came again, even through the door, though it was a touch quieter.

<We can take a vote,> said Alfric once the thrum had passed.

<I want to find out what that is,> said Mizuki.

<All in favor of picking up the lutes and leaving?> asked Alfric. <The other option is picking up the lutes and then doing the rest of the dungeon.>

<I say leave,> said Hannah. <Spooky sound is one thing, but if we’ve got a haul we don’t want to reset on, then that’s another.>

<Leave,> said Verity, looking at the lutes. <What are we going to do with them all?>

<Leave,> said Alfric.

<Leave,> said Isra.

<Then fine, leave,> said Mizuki. <I don’t want to be the odd one out, but I do want to do the dungeon, and there’s fireball potential, and we’re never going to do this hex again. And there might be another hundred lutes in the next room.>

Alfric knew, in his heart of hearts, that they were leaving because of the failures. It was sensible to leave, but if they’d been normal dungeoneers without chrononaut backup, they’d surely have done the whole dungeon anyway. A full clear was the ideal, and when you didn’t do a full clear, it wasn’t because the first half — first room, in this case — was wonderful, it was because you came across something you didn’t think you could handle. They were kicking the stone down the road, and all the mounting pressure was just going to increase. It had been almost three weeks since the rest of the party had experienced a dungeon, which meant that they were getting out of practice, even with the drills they occasionally ran.

They put the lutes into the chest. Alfric was mildly concerned that one of them would react negatively to their touch, and for that reason, they did the lutes one at a time. It happened seven times that they found the lute’s power by touching it, but the effects were minor each time: two sensory powers, three physical alterations, one bit of telekinesis, and one time the lute vanished and was never seen nor heard from again.

It took them a bit to do it, mostly because they were going slowly and trying to avoid accidents. The first time they’d gotten a ‘live’ lute was a bit of a shock, but after that they settled a bit, and Alfric had to remind them not to get too complacent.

Every five minutes, almost like clockwork, there was another sound. The interval was more or less constant, as was the volume, and they could almost get used to it, though Alfric could feel his body start to involuntarily brace as the time came near.

<Alright,> Alfric said once the room was virtually bare. There were only a few supplies left, and nothing worth taking. <We’re leaving.>

He went to the door and opened it, bident ready, just in case.

It wasn’t the hallway that they’d been in before. Instead it was a small room with red walls, not much larger than the one they’d left. There was a table and some chairs, made of walnut, and a single book set next to a vase of flowers. Two doors led out of the room, one a thick door of brass, the other a modest sliding door of wood.

<Status?> asked Verity, who was bringing up the rear.

<This isn’t the way we came,> said Alfric.

<There’s no reason it shouldn’t be,> said Isra.

<Have we been poisoned again?> asked Mizuki. <Because I really hated that dungeon.>

<No, this is something else,> said Alfric. <And we need to hope that there’s a reason it happened, because if there isn’t, we might be in trouble.>

Chapter 127 - Dungeon Dreams II

Alfric moved slowly to the room’s brass door. They were well and truly lost in the dungeon, which wasn’t a good thing to be, especially not so quickly in. This was worse than the shifting of the earlier dungeon, where they’d been poisoned, and the periodic thrum took on an ominous quality now that they were trapped. Still, there were doors, ways out, paths that might lead them further away or closer to the exit. What would have been worse was nothing to try, if there had been no clear route by which an attempt at escape might be had.

He wondered whether this, too, was Verity.

It might represent her feeling lost in her life, or her disconnection from her parents, or it might have just been random. The thrum that washed through the dungeon was definitely her, or if it wasn’t, then an enormous coincidence. The hundred lutes were her, or — no, definitely her.

They’d come into the dungeon early in the morning, which meant that they had time. That was the one thing on their side.

<We make our way through the rooms,> he said. <Just like normal.> He was painfully aware that it wasn’t normal, and that they hadn’t done a dungeon in a long time. The party hadn’t rushed back into the dungeons after the failures, which meant the party had a long lag between when they’d fought.

<Brass or wood?> asked Mizuki.

Alfric had been moving toward the large brass door rather than the smaller sliding wooden one. He stopped and considered.

<Wood is less defensible,> said Hannah. <Should something try to come through, at our backs.>

<Brass is larger,> said Alfric. <More likely to be a big room, which is more likely to have exits, which gets us closer to the end.>

<Your call,> Hannah nodded.

Alfric could feel that he’d changed. He’d lost confidence. The answer of which door to pick should have been obvious, or not obvious, but at least the arguments should have sprung clear and fully formed from his mind. He should have made a decision. He took in a breath and tried to focus himself. He thought about what his mother had said, which was that training was something you carried with you, a tool that never left your side, and if you had it, then you could use it even when your mind was failing you in other ways. He let out the breath.

<Isra, we’re going to use the bucket of mice,> he said. It wasn’t the time to creep along, it was time to use contingencies.

She nodded, slowly.

The bucket of mice wasn’t an actual bucket, that was just what Mizuki had called it. Instead, it was a wooden box held in the garden stone which had a number of cubbies in it for the mice to sit in. Isra could control them with relative ease, given their small size, and better, she could see through their eyes.

It took time to get the mice out. They transferred the box into the trunk, where it fit somewhat snuggly, by design. It was on top of the lutes, and Alfric once again had cause to thank the trunk’s ability to stop things from crushing each other.

<One mouse in each room,> said Alfric. <Keep them stationed. Some of them we’re using for scouting.>

Isra frowned. <We’re doing this?>

<I think so, yes,> said Alfric. <We have a windfall, we’re trapped in here, and I want to have a handle on this shifting dungeon. Give them a small bit of food, make sure they’re comfortable.>

Isra nodded. She opened the box and took a mouse out, then set him on the ground with a bit of food. A second and third mouse were held in her hand. They were small brown field mice, skittish little things, captured from a meadow earlier that morning, before breakfast. Isra hadn’t liked this contingency, and hadn’t been able to articulate why, but she had agreed to it.

<Both at once, or together?> she asked.

<One just inside the wooden door,> said Alfric. <We’re only opening it a crack, will confirm that there’s nothing, then have it sit there. Second one goes through the brass door, in the same way, but that one we’ll send running.>

<They’re not going to like the sound,> said Isra. She had wanted the mice to live. She was comfortable with killing, even with killing animals that she had touched with her druidic powers, but there was something in the nature of this that gave her pause. It gave Alfric pause too.

<You’ll be able to compensate?> he asked.

<Yes,> she replied.

They waited as the mice did their work, particularly the right mouse, which was scouting ahead. It was dark, and the mice had no light to move by, but Alfric was hoping they could make their way anyway. Animals had better night vision, but dungeons could be brutally dark.

Alfric waited. He tried to keep his eyes from Isra, who was, at the moment, the only one actually doing anything.

She swore, a sharp Kiromon curse she must have picked up from Mizuki, and shook her head. <It’s dead,> she said. <Attacked. Something big and fast.>

<Should they be attacking a mouse?> asked Mizuki.

<It’s one of the things I talked about in the guild,> said Isra. <The consensus was that they wouldn’t attack an animal unless I had a piece of myself in it. It’s not clear why.> Her dark skin was looking more pale than usual.

<Are you okay?> asked Alfric.

<I didn’t like that,> said Isra.

<No scouting then,> said Alfric. <We need to get moving anyway, we don’t want to be in —>

The thrum happened again, cutting him off. He hadn’t forgotten about it, exactly, but he hadn’t been tensed for it. He covered his ears, as they all did. It was five seconds, and then he went back to talking.

<We don’t want to be in this dungeon too long,> he finished.

<Does it make sense to keep them in these rooms?> asked Isra. <The mice?>

Alfric chewed his lip as he thought about that. <You can sense how far away they are. In theory, that means if the rooms and hallways are shifting, you’ll be able to tell that you have a weaker connection, right?>

<Yes,> said Isra. She still seemed uncomfortable. <How would we get the mice back?>

<You’d call them,> said Alfric.

<If the dungeon keeps shifting?> asked Isra.

<Then we wouldn’t get them back,> said Alfric. He didn’t like to say it, but it needed to be admitted up front. The death of a single mouse had affected her more than he had thought it would, for as proficient of a hunter and trapper she was.

<Okay,> said Isra. She nodded. <One in each room, until we run out.>

There were ten of the mice in total, which was more than they had thought they would need. Really, they hadn’t thought they would need any of them. The hope had been that they would release the mice back into the meadow they’d been taken from that morning, having given them treats for their service. One was already gone.

<So we kill the thing that killed the mouse, right?> asked Mizuki. She was looking at the brass door. <Fireball time?>

<Yeah,> said Alfric. <Fireball time.> He looked at Isra. She was subdued, and he wished that he could help, but they were also stuck in the dungeon until they could find the entrance again, and he needed her to be sharp and ready. He didn’t have the words though. He watched Verity squeeze Isra’s arm, and Isra nodded. He hoped that was enough.

When he pushed through the brass door though, Isra stopped him.

<It’s different,> she said. She pointed down to where the wall met the floor. <There was wooden trim there.>

Alfric nodded. <Shifting rooms. Everyone stays together, whatever we do. We’ll have the party channel. If we get split up, hang tight until we can talk it over.>

<Split up?> asked Mizuki. <I’m not good solo.>

<You’re not good solo?> asked Verity.

<Does she think that healers are good solo?> asked Hannah.

<You’re like the best solo,> said Mizuki. <You’ve got armor, a giant weapon, self-healing, offensive magic, what’s not to love?>

<Focus,> said Alfric.

<Fine, sorry,> said Mizuki with a wave of her hand. <It’s just you also want me to be loose and not worried, you said, because I almost killed you last time.>

<Focus and also relax,> said Alfric. He took a breath and tried, again, to steady himself.

<We could just stay here,> said Hannah. <Close doors, open doors, see if we happen to be right next to the entrance. No knowin’ how long it would take, but we might be able to get out that way.>

<Or we might be moving further away from the entrance,> said Alfric. <We don’t know how big this place is.>

<Fifteen rooms, on the high end, should be,> said Hannah.

<If the number of rooms matches the number of entads,> said Alfric. <That would be one hundred and fifty.> This was a horribly rough approximation, an attempt to make sense of the dungeon. <We close doors, we open doors, we could be trapped here for ages. And if we’re still here when we’re anywhere approaching the witching hour, it has to be a reset.>

<You think that’s realistic?> asked Hannah. <A hundred fifty rooms?>

<Yes,> said Alfric. <Which yes, would mean so many fights we’d only get through them all — I don’t know.>

<If they were easy?> asked Verity. She had a mild expression, which was good. He didn’t want her to feel as though this was all her fault.

<We should get moving,> said Alfric. He was keenly aware that they were saying they would start and then stopping again. He blamed himself, but they were in an uncertain situation.

The brass door led down a hallway with thick brick walls and a stone floor. It, too, was dark, illuminated by the lantern disc that was hanging around his neck. Alfric kept his eyes ahead, to the room at the hallway’s end. He was able to see two pale green reflections of his light far before the beast came running towards them.

It was small, as the beasts went, the size of a goat, with an oversized head and eyes that were each the size of a ripe orange. The head lolled as it charged at them on thick hooves, and it gave a high, piercing screech. It had no horns or antlers, and not even really a flat, thick skull like Alfric would have expected. Instead, it opened its mouth wide, showing teeth that weren’t particularly sharp, as though it was planning to do a charging bite.

Alfric had his armor ready to spring into action and his bident held in front of him. He was worried about what the catch was, but there was no catch. The creature cleanly impaled itself on his bident, its screech brought to a sudden end by the bident going into one of its lungs. Alfric held it there for a moment. It couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds. He detonated the bident and the creature died in an instant.

Alfric withdrew the bident and looked back down the hallway. Where there was one, there could be two. He moved forward, stepping over the creature’s body, until he was in the room. There were no other creatures in there, nor any doors. There was a dresser, with a jar of honey sitting on top of it, and a vase with fresh flowers. A counter ran across one side of the room, like something that you’d find in a general store, but the shelves beneath it just had little glass sculptures of indistinct things, if they weren’t just meant to be abstract bits and bobs of glass.

<Clear,> said Alfric.

<That thing was dumb,> said Mizuki.

<Yeah,> said Alfric. <From my understanding of things, at our elevation, most of them should be like that.>

<What was its game plan?> asked Mizuki. <Bite you? You’re wearing an absurd amount of armor.>

<Dungeon madness,> said Alfric. <It can make things easy. They see you, they charge, you kill them. It’s one of the ways that it can work.>

<No magic,> said Mizuki, looking around. <Though I guess we should check the dresser.>

Alfric looked back the way they came while Mizuki was piling clothes into the chest. The door was still open.

<Incoming thrum,> he said. He was watching the other room, or at least what he could see of it. He slid the armor down so it wasn’t covering his head, then clamped his hands over his ears and replaced the armor. It wasn’t necessary, the thrum wasn’t that loud, but it was more comfortable. Alfric was very aware that they might be caught out by the sound at some point and need to tough it out in the middle of combat, and he was trying to prepare himself for that eventuality. He was also aware that they might be hearing the sound another hundred times. The interval was regular, and each one represented time slipping away.

<Nothing magical,> said Mizuki. <Also most of those wouldn’t fit a human unless she had a double torso. Which I don’t think is a thing.>

<Still useful to take,> said Aflric.

<I know, I know,> said Mizuki. <Alterations or rags or whatever. I put them in the chest, didn’t I?>

<Sorry,> said Alfric.

<You were watchin’ the end, ay?> asked Hannah. She’d come to stand next to him.

<Yes,> said Alfric. <I didn’t see it change, but … I don’t know. It might have. We’ll see when we go back.>

When everything was back, they headed the way they’d come, stepping around the big-eyed hoofed creature and their chest, which had followed them. The big brass door to the other room was still open, and the same table and chairs were still there. Beyond them was a door back to the room that had contained the lutes and was now stripped bare. It hadn’t moved.

<Is the mouse still there?> asked Alfric, pointing at the wooden door, the way they hadn’t gone.

Isra had a deep frown. <It’s hard to tell. No, I don’t think so. It might be further.>

<Alright,> said Alfric. <We can check. I’m hoping that the sound is connected to the shifts. That would give us some leverage. We should move on, we have time before the next one.>

<Leverage how?> asked Mizuki.

<If there are rules, we can work within the rules,> said Alfric. <Through the wooden door now, while we’ve still got time.> He looked into the lute room. <And I think we keep doors open. I’m not sure that will make a difference, but the relationship between these rooms has been stable.> He wasn’t sure that was the best way to think about it, and it seemed like the kind of analogy that might come back to bite him if he was using a framing that only imperfectly worked.

Mostly he was worried about escaping with the loot.

They moved through the wooden door, and no, there was no mouse waiting for them, it was elsewhere in the dungeon, still alive, according to Isra.

There was no hallway. Instead it was a winding cave passage, narrow in places but wide in others. It went for some time, winding back and forth. There was something about caves that Alfric particularly liked, in part because they brought back fond childhood memories of spelunking with his father. Together they had gone into a few large cave systems, which was supposed to have been good practice for dungeons. It had been good time together, sometimes with his youngest sister, who had also been a dungeon fiend, and was apparently tearing up the Junior League.

They were in the stretch of cave for two more thrums, making their way slowly, wary of ambush. At one point the passage narrowed, and Alfric worried that it would be too narrow, but he was able to get through by having the armor move away from him, and no one else had any problems. The cave seemed natural, save for the floor, where the steeper bits had steps cut into them with a chisel. It hadn’t been an actual chisel, given that the dungeon hadn’t existed an hour ago, but there were chisel marks.

The long tunnel ended in a door, and it hadn’t been long since the last thrum, so Alfric called out to the team and pushed through.

The attack happened so fast that Afric didn’t have time to react. A beam of fire was striking his armor and he had a horrible flashback to his unfortunate death two dungeons ago. He almost moved, but the rest of the party was behind him, and he had better armor than any of them. He instead pushed ahead, calling out, shifting plates around to cover the front of him, overlapping them. He ran, into the beam, and it cut out as he approached. His eyes had been seared by it, but he was realizing that he had suffered no injury. His bident stabbed forward as he blinked away the spots, into the brown flesh of the thing that had fired on him, and he felt the prongs of it connect. He unleashed the explosion, and felt the bident slip out. It was a small creature of some kind, with many legs, scrambling around the room to get away from him or prepare another shot, if it could do that, but it was limping, bleeding, and Alfric turned, still trying to blink his vision back to normalcy.

He was hit by another beam from the side, and his armor seemed to stop it. In fact, that first beam hadn’t seemed to hurt him at all, hadn’t melted straight through his armor like he’d thought that it might. He squinted, trying to see as little of the beam as he could, and he raced to the creature that it was coming from. It was the eye, he thought, a large watery cyclops eye in the middle of a furry face, another creature with hooves, these ones cloven. It leapt away from him when he came close and the beam moved elsewhere in the room.

<Fireball!> called Mizuki, and Alfric closed his eyes, seeing the afterimage of the beams. He was thankful for the earplugs, which saved him from the worst of the blast. The explosion had pushed him with a wall of air, but gently, and he was still on his feet.

A third beam of fire lanced through the air and struck Alfric, and he shifted his plates again, trying not to look at it. Now that he was focused more on the battle than the fear of death, he could feel a blush of heat, like the side of a mug of tea that needed to cool down. The light was the big thing, but he’d yet to see any of the usual weapons on these creatures. He also didn’t know how many of them there were, but if armor could protect against them, then the situation was far less dire than it had first seemed.

<Clear!> called Hannah, who must have had a better view of the situation than Alfric did. He took a breath, blinking again, and waited for his vision to come back to him.

<Medic,> said Mizuki, and Alfric looked at her, fearing the worst. She was burned on the face, but seemed more annoyed than actually injured.

<Status check,> said Alfric, looking around. Everyone was standing, which was a good sign. <Half blind.>

<Fine,> said Isra.

<Song ongoing,> said Verity after a moment.

<I think I nearly got a beam to the face,> said Mizuki. <I’m covered in armor and it got the one spot where there’s just the tiniest bit of uncovered flesh. Also I’m pretty sure that my hair got burnt.>

<Fine here,> said Hannah as Mizuki moved toward her hand, letting it hold her face. <Got three or four of the beams on me, but no real burns from it, for which I’ll thank my gambeson.>

<Good,> said Alfric. His sight was slowly returning. He could see that there had been seven of the creatures in total, which meant that each of them had probably only fired a single one of their fire beams. The one he’d speared through with the bident was the most injured of all of them, and two had pretty obviously been taken out by Mizuki, but the bulk of them had died with a single hole through them, which seemed to be the work of Isra. <Good work.>

The room was fairly small, especially for having contained so many of the monster. Each was only the size of a baby deer, but they had pranced around. The room itself was a wreck, and had burnt lines across it, though thankfully no fire had started.

Looking closer at the monsters, they had undersized mouths, and the more Alfric looked the corpses over, the less they seemed like they had ever been a threat. In fact, even with seven of them, it seemed like a pretty normal fight for a party of their elevation. If they had gone in with less powerful equipment, they’d have taken some licks, but you expected to take some licks, and that was why you brought a cleric. There’d been only one injury from the room, two if he counted his vision, but that was returning to normal, or at least normal enough that he could see.

<My hair is going to look so stupid,> said Mizuki. <This is awful.>

<I already fixed it,> said Hannah. <And you’re fine.>

<We need to keep moving,> said Alfric.

The thrum hit them, unexpectedly. Alfric had lost track of time, but he thought it was still about right. The fight hadn’t lasted long, and then he’d looked around. He wished that he had a pocket watch. It would have been a sound investment.

When the thrum was done, they searched the room. It was incredibly clear that they weren’t doing a full clear, that it might actually be impossible to do that given whatever was going on with the dungeon. That in mind, it made more sense to search rooms right when they were done rather than waiting until the end to haul things out. With the chest, it was possible that should have been their strategy anyhow, but some things were large logistical or labor challenges, and Alfric preferred to save his brain power and strength. With the circumstances as they were, they would simply be avoiding those situations when they came up. This room had no entads but a few henlings, and furniture that was too awkwardly made to be worth taking as anything but firewood.

The door to the next room was singed, and Alfric braced himself before entering, but as soon as he was through, he saw something familiar — not the exit, as he’d hoped, but a small mouse.

<Come here,> said Isra when Alfric pointed it out. She knelt down and held out her hand, and the mouse scurried over. She put it into the chest, with the others, and seemed to feel better about the whole situation.

<Stay alert,> said Alfric. He moved down the hallway, past where the mouse had been. It was clear they would have to talk about the ‘bucket of mice’ strategy, but that would have to come later.

There was light coming from ahead, and Alfric moved toward it, with his own lantern light leading the way. It was a fire, he could see from the flickering as he rounded a bend, a fire that was letting smoke up into a moonless, starless sky. Fires could be deadly if they had no way to vent, and it was considered one of the more serious of the standard dungeon problems. That was because of the smoke, rather than the fire itself. As soon as he saw, he closed his lantern and told the others to move quietly.

There were creatures around the fire, three of them, humanoids holding sticks out over the flame. It was as though they were cooking something, but there was nothing on the ends of the sticks, and Alfric thought it likely that it was just the odd sort of behavior that you saw in dungeon creatures. He didn’t like going up against humanoids, but it had to be done. They were dressed in long cloaks with feathers, bulky things that they were shrouded in, and they had long jaws that sat beneath equally long noses. They chattered, noises that Alfric hoped were nonsense.

<Mizuki,> said Alfric. <A single fireball to end this. Big as you can.>

She stepped forward in her skull armor and looked at the three humanoids. It was impossible to tell their age or gender, given how much was obscured by their feathered cloaks. One seemed smaller than the others, maybe the female of the group, or a child. Mizuki stared at them for a bit, so long that Alfric started to grow uncomfortable. The party had moved into position unnoticed, but there was no telling whether they were going to stay that way. Stealth wasn’t one of the party’s strong suits, it was only possible here because the light of the fire would be so bright up close that people on the outskirts couldn’t be seen.

<Thrum incoming,> said Alfric. That was just his sense of the timing, which might have been exacerbated by Mizuki’s stillness.

<I’ll do it after,> she said.

<Alright,> said Alfric.

It was the second bout of qualms this dungeon, with the first being from Isra. He understood it, truly he did, but it was the sort of thing that was best to agree on ahead of time. They had talked about the bucket of mice strategy, and they had talked about humanoids in the dungeons. The time to balk was then, not when right in the middle of life or death situations.

The thrum came, and just before it, the three humanoids set their sticks down and covered their ears, as though expecting it, like it was part of their routine, nevermind that they didn’t have a routine, they had only been created an hour ago. And if they hadn’t been, how would they sleep with such a noise? Still, that action, putting their hands to their ears in anticipation, spoke to something in them. It humanized them.

Whatever Mizuki was feeling, Alfric was sure that she was feeling it more deeply with her hands to her ears, just as these creatures were doing.

As soon as the thrum was done, she fireballed them. It came without warning and Alfric barely closed his eyes in time, but when he opened them, there was utter devastation. The cloaks seemed to have been blown apart, leaving half-naked creatures dead around the fire, which had been scattered. Embers had been blown around the small chamber. Feathers were on fire.

<Those weren’t cloaks,> said Mizuki. <They were birds.>

<Birds?> asked Alfric. <Bird people?>

<No,> said Mizuki. <It was hard to tell, but I saw a part of the cloak shift around, like it was preening. I think they each had a flock on their back.>

<Oh,> said Alfric.

He moved forward, wary that something would jump out at him, though with dungeon madness, most of the monsters would have charged them after an explosion like that. He opened his lantern back up, letting its white light join the orange of the dwindling fire, and looked at the corpses.

Mizuki had been right. He could see it from the feathered corpses, but also from the backs of the humanoids, where there were red marks from the birds’ claws all up and down their backs in nice, ordered rows. They weren’t wounds, exactly, but the birds had hooked into the flesh. Alfric felt a chill down his spine.

<If they had taken off, we’d have had a hard time,> he said.

<You’re welcome,> said Mizuki. She seemed pleased with herself. <There’s something to the thrum, a bit of magic, enough to amplify a bit. I don’t really think we can use that unless we’re waiting, but whatever. Isra, you’re double welcome.>

<Because now I won’t get pecked to death?> asked Isra.

<Exactly,> said Mizuki.

It occurred to Alfric that his reading of Mizuki’s hesitation had been wrong, and that the humanizing way they’d covered their ears hadn’t been what she was thinking at all. It hadn’t been her that had a case of qualms, it had been him.

The bodies had nothing on them but the loincloths. There were two doors leading out of the room, one of red and the other blue, though the colors of both were subdued. Before anything else, Alfric grabbed a small hand shovel from its storage spot in the lid of the truck and dug up some earth to smother the fire.

<I should go up,> said Mizuki, looking at the starless sky. The only reason Alfric thought it was sky was that when he turned his lantern up toward it he could see rocky walls and no end in sight.

<No,> said Alfric. <I don’t want you getting away from the party.>

<The shift is only during the thrum,> said Mizuki. <And it’s only when doors are closed.>

<We think,> said Alfric. They could test it, and maybe should have. That wasn’t normally a thing you had to do. They had twelve hours to finish before Alfric would snuff the day out, and he was worried about using more of their time, especially because confirming wouldn’t change much. <Besides, what would you be trying to do?>

<Find the exit, duh,> said Mizuki. <If this goes up to some area above the dungeon, then it could connect to some other area of the dungeon, without the need to go do more rooms. I might learn something.>

<Wait until the next thrum, then go, stay in contact, make sure that you can see our light,> said Alfric, rattling off conditions as he thought of them. He was the leader of the party, by agreement, but he worried that Mizuki in particular was a bad one to push. She had some recklessness to her, which was one of the things that made him worried about her having the helm.

<Will do, next thrum,> said Mizuki.

They waited, and chattered, but the chatter died off as the thrum approached and they braced for it. It really wasn’t that loud, just loud enough to be a major irritation, to drown out anything else, to interrupt thoughts, and Alfric found himself surprised by just how much it grated on him. The sound was a novel thing for a dungeon to have, or at least relatively so, but it made him want to get out of the dungeon all that much faster.

<Going,> said Mizuki. She lifted up until she was visible only by the lantern she was carrying with her. Alfric kept his eyes on her.

“Are you doin’ okay?” Hannah asked. She’d come up beside him. He looked at her, and saw that Isra and Verity were held back in their own private conversation.

“Better to use the party channel,” Alfric said. “But — yes, I’m fine. I’m handling it. I want to get out of this dungeon as soon as we can. I want everyone to be safe and fine. It’s claustrophobic here.”

“That’s how dungeons are,” said Hannah. “I’m not sure I see what you mean.”

“This sense of —” Alfric began.

<I see two glows, I think, mostly black though,> said Mizuki. <Creepily black. Blugh. Coming back down, since I’d guess you don’t want me to investigate.>

<No, come down please,> said Alfric. He turned to Hannah. “In a normal dungeon, you can get back out. You leave a path for yourself, you’re aware of that path, you know how to travel it, it’s — part of how things are done.”

Mizuki landed next to him, gently for once, not risking a broken bone just to look cool.

<Secret conversations?> asked Mizuki.

<Just talking about feelings,> said Alfric.

<Ah,> she said. <Do you need some privacy for that, or … ?>

<No,> said Alfric. <I was just saying how I feel trapped here, which probably makes sense, because we are trapped here. And if I’m right that there are more rooms than normal, then — how far away were the rooms? The lights that you saw?>

<Far, I think, hard to tell with no sense of scale,> said Mizuki. <Um, a hundred yards? More? One further than the other.>

<If those are the bounds, then we might be in here for more than a day, and we can’t be in here for more than a day, because I want to be able to undo, just in case we can’t get out,> said Alfric.

<Then let’s hop to it,> said Hannah. <Let’s blow through these rooms like a savage wind, ay?>

Alfric nodded. <Alright.>

Chapter 128 - Dungeon Dreams III

They worked their way through the rooms, trying their best to go fast. The thrum that filled the area was a constant, and they grew good at anticipating it. Sometimes someone would call it out before it was going to happen, usually Isra but sometimes Alfric, and they would all just stop and cover their ears in near-unison.

<We could take a break in the garden stone,> said Mizuki. <It would be really nice to have a rest from the drone. Extremely nice.>

<We’ve done ten rooms,> said Alfric. <That’s almost an entire dungeon, but from what you saw from above, we might have as many as a hundred left.> That was a worst case scenario, but with the distances Mizuki had spotted, he was worried that it was plausible. It would make this dungeon ten times the size of a normal one for their elevation.

He didn’t know what that would mean in terms of how dungeons worked. Their average elevation was four, and the percentage rule meant that they were supposed to be draining four percent of the dungeon’s stored magical energy. If the dungeon was ten times bigger, it was possible they were draining thirty percent of the energy instead. They would almost have to be, to justify that number of entads. So far they hadn’t found another, but the hundred lutes, all clumped together, would still be a haul so large and strange that it would be cause for interest and alarm, even more than the theater had been.

<Monsters have been weak,> said Mizuki. <Right?>

<Yeah,> said Alfric. <But that’s how it was before, fine until it wasn’t. These are more like the things we should have been fighting all along.>

<Three raccoons,> said Mizuki with a nod.

<We’re higher elevation now,> said Alfric. <Verity is five, the rest of us are four.>

<So double three raccoons?> asked Mizuki.

<Six raccoons,> said Hannah.

<Wow,> said Mizuki, looking at Hannah. <Wow.>

<Just bein’ precise,> said Hannah. <Also it doesn’t work like that, there’s a graph you’ve gotta follow.>

Isra put her hands to her ears, and the rest of them followed suit. It was possible to keep talking, but they stayed quiet until the thrum had passed.

<Break is over,> said Alfric. He turned to Hannah. <Healing check?>

<I’ve done hardly anythin’ at all,> she said with a shrug. <Let’s call it five sixths.>

He turned. <Verity?> he asked.

<Still on the same song,> she said. <I’ve worked the thrum into it.>

<Good,> said Alfric, though he didn’t really understand what that meant. <Then we keep going.>

Alfric was using an old dungeoneer’s trick and making a map using the guild messaging system. Because you could hold a message unsent, you could put in vital information and refer to it later by opening the mental interface, then just not send it so that you could avoid bothering people with things they didn’t need to know. The only real benefit over using pencil and paper was that you didn’t need to stop and shrug off armor or fish them out of a pocket.

They’d hit a few dead ends already, necessitating a backtrack, and the doors they’d left open — torn from their hinges, in most cases — seemed to be unchanging with every passing thrum. They’d stopped to test again only once, and had confirmed that a closed door would lead to a different place, which had been a bit of a relief.

Alfric moved at the front, as always, bident at the ready. He was worried that they were getting complacent. Just because they’d had six easy fights in a row didn’t mean that they would have another six, or another twenty. He could feel himself getting complacent as the fear and stress slowly waned. He killed a large bird the size of a breadbox as it uselessly slammed its stinger against his plate armor and could almost taste the growing confidence.

All this had already happened before, in their third failed dungeon. That one had also been in Herbury Meadows. That one had also been relatively sedate. There had been no constant thrumming, no shifting around of rooms, and then right at the end, or what might have been the end, they’d run into a group of monsters so brutally difficult that two of them had died.

It would have been nice to think that this was an oversized dungeon with weak monsters that would end up more of a test of attrition than brute power, but there was no reason that it should be like that, at least as far as Alfric could see. Nice ‘easy’ monsters could live in the same dungeons as incredibly difficult ones.

The series of doors — more doors than a normal dungeon — led them to a large room with a well in the center. Two humanoids in flowing cloaks stood next to the well, peering down into it. They were lit by a chandelier from above, which cast its candlelight on the wide stone floor. The bricks were arranged around the well in concentric circles, aligned imperfectly so that moss grew in the cracks between them.

Mizuki opened with a fireball. It was a wet dungeon, and fireballs were in ready supply. To Alfric’s dismay, it killed neither of them, and they picked themselves up with supernatural speed, their black cloaks billowing behind them as they ran toward the party. Isra put two arrows through each of them in the blink of an eye, and it seemed to do nothing, and then one of them was on Alfric while the other was met by Hannah as Verity’s song picked up its tempo and strength.

Alfric brought it to the ground, where they wrestled as it beat against his armor, and he pushed the plates up against it, trying his best to pin it in place. Teeth and claws were the most important things to worry about, because they could do more damage than the simple punches or kicks ever could. The monster seemed mostly to focus on its punches, and it took Alfric a moment to realize how incredibly weak these were. The creature was fast and durable, but it hit no harder than a six-year-old child, and as many blows as it made against Alfric’s chest, it had nothing in the way of weight or power.

It did, however, take quite a bit of work to actually kill it. The skull was thick and strong, and the limbs were almost impossible to snap, as much work as Alfric put into it. The joints were easier, and after some work, he had ruined them completely, wrenching the elbows and knees backward.

<Dagger,> said Isra.

Alfric pulled back and took the dagger from her. It was better for this sort of work than a sword was. He was still on top of the creature, and it was still trying to hit him, but its limbs were useless to it. He pushed the dagger into its chest, and it had no response, so he withdrew the dagger, which had only a glistening of pink fluid on it. He pushed it in again at a different spot, then again. It took some heft and some leverage each time, but eventually the creature slowed and then stopped moving. There was no real blood, just the pink sheen to the dagger.

Hannah had focused on the head, and managed to make a hole in it with her pick, though that had only really weakened it. She was getting more leverage on it, with the tip of the pick inserted, and eventually with a loud crack the head came open and the creature fell limp.

Alfric sat there, breathing hard, then called that they were clear.

<How were we supposed to have killed those if they were strong?> asked Mizuki. <What was that?>

<I’ll take weak but durable over powerful but fragile,> said Alfric.

<And what, they just shrug off giant explosions?> asked Mizuki.

<It happens,> said Alfric.

<Well it shouldn’t,> said Mizuki with a pronounced frown.

<Room doesn’t have any exits,> said Isra. She was often first to look around, because she needed less recovery.

<Are we takin’ that chandelier?> asked Hannah, pointing up.

<No,> said Alfric. <Nowhere to put it unless we take it apart in pieces, and it’s just cut glass and metal. We should head back after a check for magic.>

He was getting antsy about time, even though it was still fairly early in the morning.

<Nothing magical,> said Mizuki after a quick flight around the room. She used the helm of flight at even the slightest provocation, taking to the air and moving at its full thirty miles an hour as though she was built for it.

<Check down the well,> said Alfric.

She frowned a bit, then moved over to it. It wasn’t the kind with a crossbar to pull a bucket up with, it was instead open, with water down below. It was at least twenty feet of water, dark, blue, and unexpectedly clear. Alfric moved to it with her.

<Maybe,> she said, looking down into the depths. <Hard to tell.>

<I’m going to take the water-form ring. I’ll go down and search,> he said.

The entad stone with the brilliant blue gem was kept among Hannah’s things, in a pouch that she could access by shifting her liquid metal armor, not because she had any intention of going into watery places, but because it had a side effect of halting severe injury or poisoning. That was the sort of thing that he was grateful to Filera for, because there was almost no way that they’d have found it out on their own. It was somewhat poor, as injury-stabilization went, but it was far better than nothing. Hannah in particular didn’t think much of it, mostly because she thought immediate healing was a better strategy under most circumstances.

Alfric stripped off the plate armor, then his gambeson, mostly because it was impossible to take the ring off without getting quite wet. He climbed up to the rim of the well, looking down, then slipped on the ring.

He’d tried it on before, in an undone day, but it was still a shock to be transformed into water, especially with how cold it was. His body was still there, in a sense, just turned into water, and it had its own rules while using the entad. He slipped down through the well water, reaching the bottom in seconds, then spread out and tried to find whatever Mizuki had seen in the silt, if anything. It didn’t take terribly long to touch the metal, and once he had, he grabbed it, moving it into his watery body. It was hard, with his senses, to really know what was himself and what was well water, but he surged up quickly and got himself to the top of the well. There was more to climb though, and he couldn’t with watery hands, so he took the ring off, holding the sword in one hand.

<Helm!> he called.

Mizuki threw it down and Alfric managed to catch it, not as it fell, but as it sank through the water. Once it was on, he flew up out of the well and landed on the flagstones, moss touching his bare feet, dripping water onto the ground. He was soaked, but there was a change of underwear in the garden stone — a few, actually.

<I’ll change, then we backtrack,> he said. <I’ll be fast.>

He caught the way that Mizuki was looking at his bare chest, and went into the garden stone to get dry. They had a stack of towels there, plenty of water to get clean of blood and dirt, and what functioned as a makeshift bathroom, if needed, which he’d built himself. Normally for that kind of thing though, you’d just go in the dungeon itself.

He was back out in under two minutes, just in time for another thrum of the dungeon, which nearly caught him unaware. Then he was back in his gambeson and boots, which took a bit of time, and his plate armor assembled itself around him, which took just a few seconds.

<Are we testing the sword?> asked Mizuki. She was holding it, and he suspected that she had already tested it while he was in the garden stone, though there was no physical evidence. <It extends, both ways.>

<What do you mean both ways?> asked Alfric.

<The handle,> said Mizuki. <And the blade.>

The blade was gently curved and quite thin, though he thought it probably had some strength to it. When he’d held it, it had been light too, which was important, and balanced well, which was another mark in its favor. If it could only extend the blade or handle, it was probably worth only a hundred rings or so, but given that it had taken some effort to pick up, he was hoping for more. This wasn’t how dungeons worked though. Great things could be sitting on a table, and trash could be painstakingly extracted from dangerous situations.

<Here,> he said, taking it from her. He shortened the blade then extended the handle. There were limits to entads, always limits, but this one was permissive, and he was able to make the straight handle long enough, the blade short enough. It was a spear with a razor sharp point to it, the curve only slightly pointed. The balance was good. <I’m not using it now though, we’ll put it with the others and test later.> He retracted the blade entirely, so there was nothing sticking out. As just a small handle, it was only a mild weight. He second guessed himself. <I’ll hold on to it, just in case. No testing, of anything, until we’re done with the day. I don’t want to go through this dungeon and then have to reset because someone died trying to figure out an entad.> He didn’t add that it was contingent on them actually getting out of the dungeon.

They backtracked to the nearest door, with Alfric updating the notes within the guild message that would never be sent. The chest marched on after them, usually following Verity, who was the last to leave its range.

He heard the buzzing before he saw the swarm. They were bees, or something like bees, each the size of a fist, twenty of them all told, and he glanced back at Verity’s glowing bubble shield he’d gotten for her, which she had spread out around her. He had been worried about a swarm, though they hadn’t had one last time. Herbury Meadows had lots of flowers, especially at this time of year, and that meant pollinators.

Alfric had plans.

He rushed toward the bees and started his own sort of buzzing. The plates of his armor overlapped, and he’d found that if he concentrated on it, he could make them open and close. Mizuki had compared his look to that of a pinecone, in the ways that the plates overlapped each other, and what he was doing was opening and closing them, as fast as he could. The armor had a force of its own, and could grip things if it had them between two plates, or crush them. The plates clanked as they spread and contracted around him, pushing against his body some, but more against each other.

The bees came at him, swarming, trying to get in between the plates, when they managed it, the plates slammed down, crushing them. He could feel it when it happened, a bee getting caught in the armor, and he pressed harder until they gave way.

<Fireswell!> Mizuki yelled, which meant something with more flame than explosion. Alfric covered himself just in time, lowering the plates back down.

The bees were still around, but they were dropping fast, and he crushed another that was trying to get through the gap he had made for it. A fist-sized creature was good for this, large enough that he could feel them, so smashing them between the plates would actually work. He was protected from the stingers by the thick quilting beneath the armor, not that they were ever against it for long enough to sting him.

He saw one of the bees make its way to Verity, be repelled by the barrier, and then get lanced through with one of Isra’s arrows.

The fight went well, very well. He hadn’t been sure about the strategy, and wouldn’t have tried it with something that had a sharper or longer stinger, but they had run straight into the slamming plates, killed before they could do much more than prod at the cloth armor he wore beneath it. It was superior in almost every way to trying to use the bident or a sword.

When the last of the bees was killed, Alfric checked himself over. He was most worried about a stinger he’d somehow missed, but nothing had penetrated, and he was feeling fine.

<I can’t believe that worked,> said Hannah, after everyone had confirmed they were fine.

<We tested it,> said Alfric.

<It was a solution in search of a problem,> said Hannah, shaking her head. <I think next time won’t go so well, but I hope I’m wrong.>

<No exits,> said Isra.

<No loot,> said Mizuki. <After that sword I was hoping that we’d get something a bit more for our trouble.>

<Wait, if we’ve got no exits, that means we’re down to one path,> said Hannah. <Are we guaranteed to have an exit?>

<No,> said Alfric. <But we cross that bridge when we come to it.>

As good as the fight had gone, with hardly a scratch on any of them, it was disconcerting that their progress was getting them almost nothing. It was Alfric’s hope that there was a limited number of rooms, and that they would be able to clear enough of them that they would find the entrance, but there was no guarantee that would actually happen, either because they ran out of time or because the number of rooms wasn’t actually limited. There were infinidungeons, so vast and deep that no one had found an end to them, whether there was one or not.

Hannah was right. They had only a single door left.

Alfric waited until after the thrum had passed. He was almost getting used to it. He pushed his way through the cedar door and found himself bathed in light. It wasn’t bright enough to blind, but it was strong enough that he had to blink several times to adjust to it. He’d been worried that something would come at him while he was having trouble seeing, but there was no repeat of the incident with the laser eyes. When he had adjusted, he was confused by what he saw. There was sky ahead, and it was daylight.

Beyond that was a section of meadow, one of the large rooms that they’d seen, and thick-bellied creatures crawling on all fours in among the grasses and flowers. It was the sky that drew his attention though, the clouds and blue sky, and he frowned at it. You weren’t supposed to pay that much attention to the sky, it was irrelevant in a dungeon, but two different rooms with different skies made very little sense. He didn’t think that it was unprecedented, but it was the third unusual thing they’d seen in this dungeon, with the first two being the thrum and the shifting rooms. Maybe he should have counted the room with a hundred entad lutes as well.

<Fireball, then we engage,> said Alfric, turning his eyes down to the creatures. They looked large and slow, but he was worried, because largeness had historically been a problem, and he knew that creatures that looked slow could move with incredible speed under the right circumstances.

<Fireball, coming up,> said Mizuki. There was a quaver to her voice, maybe because of the second sky. He hoped that it was a second sky, rather than night turning to day, because that, for a chrononaut, would be extremely ominous.

This particular fireball was delivered at long range, a lancing beam that zipped through the air, nearly silent, before impacting the side of one of the beasts with a deafening explosion. There were three of the creatures, and all were caught in the blast. One of them died instantly, keeling over on its small legs, while the other two were wounded in the head and hindquarters. Alfric rushed forward, trying his best to put himself between the monsters and the party, but very aware that if these things were a thousand pounds each — entirely possible given their size — he would be nearly incapable of stopping them. Given the dungeons they’d run into, he’d been brushing up on best practices for fighting large creatures like this, and most of what people suggested, aside from running away, was to use the creature’s size against it.

Alfric moved to the side as the first of them charged. The charge had weight to it, heft, and would be difficult to stop. True to form, the creature had trouble tracking him against all its weight, especially because its belly was nearly dragging across the meadow as it ran, and he plunged his bident into its flank as it passed him. He released the magical charge almost at once and withdrew his weapon so that it wouldn’t be yanked from his hand, but he still got wrenched to the side. The beast keeled over, screeching, and tumbled. Alfric moved on it and pierced its rump with his bident, releasing another charge, which seemed enough to kill it.

The other beast was moving toward, and two arrows appeared in its eyes almost simultaneously. Isra was standing in front of its charge, appearing at the same moment the arrows did, but before Alfric could give a shout, she was gone again, having fired off her bow. The beast was blinded, and bucked, but it charged on, off-course, and slammed head first into a wall, where it went still.

<Clear,> Alfric called after a moment.

<I’d worried about that one,> said Hannah.

<It could have gone bad,> Alfric agreed.

<Are we still on a hot streak?> asked Mizuki. <Was that hard and we were just good, or was it another easy one?>

<Let’s say hard and we were good,> said Alfric. <We need to keep being good.> He looked at Isra. <Nice shooting.>

She nodded. <They were large eyes.>

Up close, now that he had a moment to think, Alfric decided that these creatures most closely resembled oversized hogs, or possibly boars, though Isra was right, their eyes were far too large. They also had whiplike tails at the back, more scales than skin, and the bellies were too big, but boar was the term the party ended up settling on.

<No exit,> said Verity once they’d looked around the room. <What does that mean?>

<You still have the song going?> asked Alfric.

<Yes,> said Verity. <I haven’t been adding much to the fights, they’ve been over too quickly.> She spoke somewhat differently while she had one of her ‘slow’ songs going, a bit faster and with less frills.

<Keep it up,> said Alfric. <We might have another nine tenths of a dungeon to do.>

<What does that mean though?> asked Mizuki. She looked up at the sky. <And what does that mean?>

<It’s a dungeon, it doesn’t need to mean anything,> said Alfric.

<Can I fly up there though?> asked Mizuki. <Is it … can there be two skies?>

<I’ve never heard of it, but there’s nothing that prevents space from twisting around in a dungeon,> said Alfric. <It doesn’t seem important to me.>

<But we’ve got all dead ends,> said Mizuki. <We need to go up.>

<No,> said Alfric. <We can close a door and wait for the thrum to come. Going up would mean that everyone would need to pile into the garden stone or the chest, and I don’t want to risk that. Last time we did, it was a disaster.>

<I crushed it though,> said Mizuki.

<You did,> said Alfric. <I don’t want to have to complete a dungeon by having you do three or four dangerous maneuvers in a row.>

<Fine,> said Mizuki. Normally she would have pushed back more, but this time she didn’t.

<So we close the door?> asked Isra, looking toward where they’d come in.

<Not that one,> said Hannah. <We need to backtrack.>

<We do?> asked Alfric.

<Need is a strong word,> said Hannah. <But the doors have been of different sizes, and my guess is that they don’t match up. Just a hunch that the doors are connecting to similar doors somehow, but if we’re down to hunches, seems like a walk back through the dungeon is something we can stomach.>

Alfric slowly nodded. He hadn’t really thought about the doors, but she was right that they were of different sizes, and it did seem odd that they hadn’t come across any doors that were grossly inappropriate for the room that they were going into. The boundaries between the rooms themselves were only somewhat atypical for a dungeon, with the styles changing more abruptly, but there was still some logic to it, with brick looking like it had been set into hewn stone. They hadn’t tested it much, mostly because of the thrum whose rhythm made them feel like something ominous was waiting around the corner.

If they were going to try to find a nicely matching door, then there was one good candidate, which was the door they’d originally gone through. Though it was only roughly fifteen rooms, Alfric was thankful that he had a map, because the idiosyncrasies of dungeons made them difficult to navigate, especially as they got larger. He’d marked walls with chalk, but it was best to have two systems, especially if the shifts ever tripped them up.

<Alright, so the boars were because of the Pedders,> said Mizuki as they walked.

<Nah,> said Hannah. <And why would they be? Verity barely even knows them.>

<I think it’s a fool’s game,> said Verity.

<Right, but the lutes cannot possibly be a coincidence, right?> asked Mizuki. <I mean, they can’t, that would be impossible.>

<Ay, but it also can’t be true that everythin’ has some meanin’ to it,> said Hannah. <Those goats with lasers, ay? What do you think those were?>

<Well, I don’t want to say,> said Mizuki. The skull armor opened and closed its mouths as she talked.

<You don’t?> asked Hannah. <But you’ve some idea?>

Mizuki was silent for a moment.

<It’s fine if she doesn’t want to say,> said Alfric. <I think trying to pick apart meaning will inevitably mean turning an eyeglass on Verity to a level that would very quickly become unseemly.>

<Was that it?> asked Verity. <Some unseemly idea about goats?>

<It’s nothing,> said Mizuki. She was walking alongside Alfric and biting the inside of her cheek. <Forget I said anything.>

<Now I want to know,> said Verity.

<It was the eyes,> said Mizuki. <I kind of thought they were, you know, having eyes on you.>

<Eyes on you?> asked Verity. <Like an audience?>

<Seems a stretch,> said Hannah.

<She meant my eyes,> said Isra.

<Och,> said Hannah. <Well now that’s even more of a stretch.>

<I didn’t want to say anything,> huffed Mizuki. <It’s just what came into my head after that fight.>

<I do think that’s a stretch,> said Alfric. <And a reason that I don’t want to try analyzing the dungeons in that kind of way. It gets personal, fast. Try to make sense of the shifting rooms, or the doubled sky, or the entad distribution that seemed entirely lopsided toward that first room, and toward lutes.>

<Alright, alright,> said Mizuki. <Maybe I should have just said that I felt like the hogs reminded me of the Pedders.>

<Definitely should have, yes,> said Verity. <Not that I mind it. But next time, you could say something good about me, like ‘oh Verity, that meadow must have been because you’re such a good gardener’.>

<Song still up?> asked Alfric.

<Yes, yes,> said Verity.

They stopped for the thrum, ears covered, then continued on.

<Am I the only one thinking about what if life were just like this?> asked Mizuki.

<Like what?> asked Alfric.

<Like if the real world just had a thrum that went off every five minutes, loud enough to be unpleasant, not loud enough that it would burst eardrums, just every five minutes forever,> she said.

<Lack of sleep would kill people,> said Hannah.

<No,> said Alfric. <We’d get giant earmuffs, put in wax, and mostly live deaf.>

<Or we’d deafen ourselves to not bother with it,> said Hannah. <Ay.>

<We can feel this one in our bones,> said Mizuki. <Or I can. I don’t know if the earmuffs would really matter, when you were trying to get to sleep.>

<Sounds horrible,> said Isra. <Think of the animals.>

<I was about to say,> said Alfric. <We could retreat to entad spaces, but I don’t know if the animals would survive in the long term.>

<I think people can adapt,> said Verity. <Think about how many horrible things we learn to live with.>

They walked in silence for a bit after that. Alfric was thinking about what Verity had said. He thought that she had probably meant her horrible mother. His own thoughts had gone in different directions though. They had gone to Lola, who was out of his life for good, but at the time had been a constant presence. He was also thinking about the dungeons themselves, and how you learned to live with the bad parts of them, how he was learning to live with dying in them. There were all kinds of things that were tense or unpleasant, and what could you do but learn to live with them? To endure? He thought that Verity was probably right. People would just go on. They would sleep through the thrum, somehow, they would just put in wax and cover their ears, and not even really talk about the thrum that much.

The thrum happened again right as they reached the lute room. All the open doors had stayed open, and all the rooms had been as they’d left them. Ten minutes wasn’t a bad time, but any time sucked away was something he wanted to avoid.

<Now the question,> said Hannah. <Which side of the door are we on?>

<Does it matter?> asked Mizuki.

<It might,> said Alfric, looking at the door. They were outside the lute room. When he’d gone through the door, he hadn’t thought much of it.

<Wait,> said Mizuki. <I don’t know if I really get this theory.>

<Small openings connect to small openings,> said Hannah. <Large ones to large ones. When this dungeon started, probably all of the rooms had connections, like in a normal dungeon, but when they shifted, the small were still connecting to small, and the large to large. So, if we want to go back to the start, then we should close a door most like the door we know is by the entrance.>

<Okay,> said Mizuki with a shrug. <I’ll take your word for it.>

<It’s only a theory,> said Alfric. <Also, I think I should clarify that in a normal dungeon you do sometimes get rooms that aren’t accessible. They’re just not usually counted as being part of a full clear, since you have no way of knowing about them, and can’t get through to them except by breaking through a wall.>

<Huh,> said Hannah. <That does throw a bit of a wrench in the works.>

<I think we should be inside the lute room,> said Isra. <The door swung a certain way. That might matter.>

<In we go then,> said Alfric.

They filed into the lute room, and he closed the door behind them after the chest had followed them.

<Now we wait,> he said.

<We just had a thrum,> said Mizuki. <Which needs a better name, by the way, when Verity is singing about our deeds.>

<I like ‘thrum’,> said Verity. <It’s got something. Plus there are good rhymes, which is always a plus.>

<You should sing about our deeds more,> said Isra. <I don’t think you’ve ever serenaded us with one, not after that first time.>

<The first time was special, and the song was special,> said Verity. <It was in the moment. If I had to think up a song after every single dungeon, I think I would start to hate both myself and this party.>

<Did you write that song down somewhere?> asked Mizuki. <I remember liking it.>

<It’s lost and gone,> said Verity.

<No, actually,> said Alfric. <We got the book that transcribes things from that first dungeon, and the full song is in there. Most of your songs are in that book, actually.>

<Ah,> said Verity. <Well that’s embarrassing.>

<It’s one of the reasons I never mentioned it,> he said with a shrug.

<Do we still have that book?> asked Mizuki. <After the Lola thing?>

<We do,> said Alfric. <It’s up in my room, if you need it, but the fact that it doesn’t pick up party chat makes it pretty worthless. I had wanted to bring it with us when we did dungeons so I could get an accurate picture of them as told through conversation, maybe with some running commentary on features, which would have made the dungeon reports easier.>

<You’re a real fool sometimes,> said Hannah. <If it could listen in on party chats, it would be a tool of the state, of spies, or at least trade.>

<Right,> said Alfric. <Still.>

It took some time for the thrum to come, and when it did, they were less casual about it. In theory, the dungeon would shift, and their door would lead somewhere else, leaving everything they’d already explored behind. He was hoping that they’d find the entrance, of course, but he was also hoping that they wouldn’t be undoing all their work so far.

Once the thrum had passed, he pushed the door open slowly.

It wasn’t the passageway that they’d first come in though, but it also wasn’t the room that they’d entered from. It was a third place, one with copious amounts of glass, looking like terrariums or miniature greenhouses, all of them scattered around at awkward angles.

The snakes came quickly, thick and red with tiny little limbs that made them more like stunted salamanders. Alfric was caught off guard, and the bident wasn’t the best weapon against something that slithered over the floor, but he ended up stomping on them, crushing their heads and severing their midsections. They all ran to him, heedless of the danger, and one of them tried to bite him but got only a metal plate instead of flesh.

<Snakes,> said Alfric when it was done. <Clear.> He was the only one who had done anything, killing six snakes on his own.

The room, thankfully, had two more doors, which meant that they had options. Mizuki checked for entads and found none, and they had a brief debate over whether to take the glass tanks, then decided against it, given their relatively poor condition. The debate then turned to the doors.

<We could go back,> said Hannah. <Try another shift.>

<It would take five minutes,> said Alfric. <And if the fights are like that,> he gestured to the snakes, <then I think we don’t have all that much to worry about with new rooms. We’d clear more.>

<We’ve gotten almost nothing though,> said Mizuki. <I mean, just that sword, right?>

<True,> replied Alfric. <I’d rather press on, try to expand quickly, get to the exit soon. We can do a room every handful of minutes if we go fast.>

<Lead on,> nodded Hannah, whether or not she agreed with his thinking.

~~~~

They passed through more rooms with more weak fights, but even the weak fights introduced elements of attrition. Every minor wound that Hannah had to heal meant that there’d be a little less for later, and every time Isra fired her arrows stressed the muscles in her arm. Alfric, for his part, was already feeling a sense of fatigue, and it was exacerbated by the periodic thrum.

Ten rooms passed, then another ten.

<Is the thrum getting louder?> asked Mizuki.

<No,> said Verity.

<How can you tell?> asked Mizuki.

<I’m a musician,> said Verity.

<How much time has passed?> asked Hannah.

<Three hours,> said Alfric.

<That’s it?> asked Mizuki. <We’re at like forty rooms in this place.>

<It’s good time, but if there are one hundred and fifty rooms, which is within expectations, then we’re possibly only a third through,> said Alfric. <Not even.>

<We’ll need lunch soon,> said Isra.

That made Alfric tense. He didn’t like working against this deadline, which they should have been able to entirely avoid by leaving early in the morning. The dungeon shouldn’t have been so long, and even if the fights themselves were relatively easy, there were too many of them. He was getting stiff and sore. They would have to take lunch, if only to give him more of a chance to recover.

<One or two more,> said Alfric. <Then we can break.>

They’d been finding almost nothing in the rooms. They’d gotten two more entads along the way, but only two, a small crock and a bolt of fabric. They’d taken henlings, but it was the stuff that got sold for little more than scrap, with only one or two pieces that they actually wanted, or were worth something. It was wearing on them, he could tell, the way they were doing these rooms just to try to leave with what they’d already found.

Alfric pushed open a door and saw a wide open room. There was yet another sky above it, this one with a sunset hue, pinks, oranges, and reds. It was at least two hundred feet across, a monster of a room, but there was almost nothing in it, just a large boulder in the room’s center and some oversized pieces of metal sitting along one wall. There were also doors along the rim of the room, so many of them that it almost made Alfric dizzy. There was one every ten feet, and by a quick estimate, Alfric thought there might be as many as sixty. He desperately hoped that they were false doors, or doors that somehow led to each other, because it implied a scope he didn’t know how they were supposed to handle.

<Isra, Mizuki, check that boulder,> said Alfric, pointing at it. It had raised his hackles, mostly because it was right in the center of a large room, and large enough that if they had to fight it, he thought it would be trouble.

<Looks fine,> said Mizuki.

<I’m not sure,> said Isra. <Maybe.>

<Those metal things are something,> said Mizuki, pointing at the far wall, beyond where the boulder was. <Entads.> If she was right, they were huge.

<If that’s a monster, I don’t want to fight it,> said Alfric. He hadn’t crossed the doorway yet. <Isra, send in a mouse?>

She looked at him for a moment with a cool, impassive face, and it reminded him so much of their early time together that he almost relented and told her not to do it. Keeping emotion from her face was a skill that Isra had learned, a skill she’d been unlearning, but it was here again.

<Fine,> she said.

They took another of the mice from their container. The plan to put one in every room hadn’t been viable, not in the slightest, but they had spread a few through the dungeon, all with a stockpile of food, and Isra had been using her weak tracking to try to see whether she could sense them. By this method, they had put an upper limit on the scope of the dungeon: it was no more than a mile from the furthest mouse. This wasn’t precise or encouraging, but it was something.

The mouse scampered off once Isra had whispered in its ear. She didn’t need to talk to them, but she was doing it anyway, and Alfric worried that he was pushing her too hard.

When the mouse was ten feet away from the boulder, the boulder lifted up off the ground. Slimy tentacles spilled out from beneath it and one of them whipped toward the mouse so fast that there was nothing that could possibly be done about it, and Isra gave a gasp of horror.

<Retreat,> called Alfric.

They moved backward through the room, away from the open door. Alfric had half a thought about closing the door, but he didn’t want to draw attention to himself, and the door had nothing like a latch. By the time the monster had started moving in their direction, it was too late.

The creature moved with surprising speed, given that it was dragging a boulder behind it. If the boulder was a part of the creature, then it was one of the largest that they had ever seen. That size inhibited it though, and when it reached the door, the boulder slammed against the door frame, so hard that the dungeon shook. Alfric was bringing up the rear, in the best defensive position, but the chest was following just behind him, which meant that it was in the line of fire. A tentacle shot out from the monster, which was trapped in the doorway, and snagged the chest in its wet grasp, pulling it back.

<The chest!> he shouted.

He didn’t have time to think about it. That chest, which had been trundling along after them this entire dungeon, contained all one hundred lutes. If the chest were destroyed or even just captured, the dungeon would be for nothing. Worse than nothing, if they lost the chest. These thoughts did not go through his head, because there was no time for them. Instead, there was only horror and realization, wordless and formless, and he raced back toward the monster, knowing that it had to be killed.

Alfric flew forward, and a fireball from Mizuki narrowly avoided his head. He wanted to scream as it impacted the creature, the creature that still had their chest wrapped in a tentacle, but the chest was spared and the creature was not. Three tentacles flopped to the ground, not removed from the creature, but still quite dead, and the chest was still wrapped up in a different bit of flesh.

Arrows flew past Alfric, striking the tentacle monster, and seemed to do nothing at all. Alfric gripped his bident, then looked at it. It was worthless against this sort of thing, but he had a new weapon, one which he’d put on his hip, its blade and handle both fully retracted. What a tentacle monster called for wasn’t a bident, it was something that could slice. He didn’t really have time for those thoughts, it was just his training, the idea that poking this creature would do almost nothing.

He threw the bident to one side, called for a progressive melody from Verity, then drew the sword. He was tempted to make it into a spear again, but the handle extended slower than the blade, and time was of the essence. He raced forward, toward the danger, plate armor moving in sympathy with him, sword growing absurdly long. He needed the long, sweeping strikes, and had to hope that it would be enough against the tentacles, but he had some hope, given that Mizuki had taken out a few of them.

He slashed through the grasping flesh as soon as he was close enough, and watched in amazement as the cut went cleanly through the tentacles, barely even slowing. The cut pieces fell to the ground and wriggled. He’d extended the blade to be almost as long as he was tall, which was ridiculous, really, but against something this large you needed every bit of reach you could get.

The chest was in the monster’s grasp, wrapped up and pulled toward a mouth that sat in the center of all the tentacles. Alfric moved forward and slashed through the air, once and then twice, opening up huge gouges of flesh and causing more of the tentacles to fall to the ground. Again, it was like cutting through warm butter, just the barest trace of resistance. He sliced again, a third time, this time aiming squarely at the mouth, and he watched it split open, separated.

The creature fell, and Alfric looked in amazement at the sword in his hand.

The chest came trotting over moments later, as though nothing had happened. As soon as the creature had died, the chest had slipped free of the tentacles once more. It took Alfric a moment to see the damage, and when he saw it, his heart skipped a beat. The chest was missing an entire corner, with the lid and two sides having been cut straight through. It wasn’t a large piece to be missing, but it was gone, and he could see straight inside the chest. With a sense of trepidation, he opened the chest, only to find that everything was exactly where he’d left it. It was still working, which was good, but the chest was supposed to be nearly indestructible, and the sword had cut almost straight through it.

The strength faded from Alfric, and he looked over at Verity. She was slightly slumped, and her lute had fallen from her hands to hang around her neck once more, looking for all the world like a millstone.

<This stupid dungeon,> said Mizuki. <I liked it when it was just piddly little fights, if we have to go against something like that again, I’m going to — to — I’m going to write a sternly worded letter.>

<To who?> asked Hannah. <The Adventurer’s League?>

<I have yet to figure that out,> said Mizuki. <But they’ll get a page full of colorful language.>

Isra was comforting Verity, with a low conversation that Alfric couldn’t hear. The two of them were getting along better, which was good. He was hoping that the dungeon was helping with that, as he’d half hoped that it would. In the undone dungeons, they had seemed on better terms, at least to him, making progress toward an equitable platonic friendship. He hoped it wouldn’t be undone this time.

<And what did we get for it?> asked Mizuki. <We got our chest back.>

<With a nick, it seems,> said Hannah.

<Hopefully nothing you can’t fix,> said Alfric.

<Now?> asked Hannah, raising an eyebrow. She was trying to conserve her power as much as possible, he knew.

<Thrum coming,> said Isra. Her hands were to her ears.

Alfric spread his armor and put his hands to his ears too, waiting for it to come and go. He marked the time, another five minute increment had come and gone, and he waited for the sound to move through his body, to feel it bone deep again.

The thrum didn’t come. They all waited, thinking that they had mistimed it, but slowly, one by one, they began to lower their hands from their ears.

Alfric looked at the monster. It was big, larger than anything through the whole dungeon by several orders of magnitude. It had been sitting in a place of prominence, surrounded by many doors. And when it had died, the thrums had died with it.

The thrums had accompanied the shifts. The shifts had already left them in a dungeon of dead ends once before.

Alfric prayed to each of the six gods that there was still a way out.

Chapter 129 - Dungeon Dreams IV

They ate in the garden stone, which had been placed in the big circular area with all the doors. It was a lunch that Mizuki had packed for them, a warm goulash in an earthenware crock, ladled out into little bowls with a wooden spoon. Alfric took his and tried not to eat too fast, though he was feeling nervous. In the back of his mind was the thrum, which was gone now. His body still seemed attuned to it, and at different moments his hands would start to go to his ears or his body would tense, as though anticipating it. The thrum didn’t come though, and wouldn’t have in the garden stone anyway.

“We’re going to be able to get out of here, right?” asked Mizuki. She was picking at the goulash.

“We are,” said Alfric.

She looked up at him, frowning. “You’re a terrible liar.”

“Well what’s he to say?” asked Hannah. “That no one can know for sure, and it’s entirely possible that we’re trapped here, and the whole thing scrapped?”

“I just wanted some assurance,” said Mizuki with a small shrug.

“I’m bad at being assuring when I don’t think there’s cause for confidence,” said Alfric. “Sorry.”

“Well I think we’re going to make it,” said Verity. “We’re low on resources, relative to what seems to be left, but we just need to plow on through. Alfric has a neat new sword, we don’t need to worry about the thrumming or the shifting, and we’re a plucky team of adventurers.” She smiled at the group.

“I think we’ve got problems when Verity’s trying to cheer people up,” said Mizuki.

“I’m a bard, we do cheer people up,” said Verity. “And if you’d like, I can weave some lightening of the spirits into the next song.”

“We need to keep it for combat,” said Alfric. “Sorry.”

“In a way, isn’t morale the most significant part of combat?” asked Verity, raising an eyebrow.

“And why are you in such high spirits, ay?” asked Hannah. “Not that it’s somethin’ I’d complain about, but the circumstances don’t seem to call for it, and you’re down a progressive melody, which means you must be feelin’ it.”

“I don’t know,” said Verity. She’d finished her serving and placed the wooden bowl on the center table. She always claimed that bardic magic increased her appetite. “I think that we’ve been doing well, even with the octopus … thing.” She had a look that Alfric had seen from her before, as though she was lost, trying to find a piece of song or descriptive phrase. “I’ve always compared dungeons to a kind of performance, and we’re gliding through this one.” She shrugged.

That wasn’t even remotely how Alfric was feeling, but maybe it was because he was so aware of the time, and the fact that they might not make it out before he would be compelled to reset. It was something that they’d have to have a discussion about in another few hours. He was hoping that they could make it through another forty rooms in that time, which didn’t seem too absurd unless they ran into something like the octopus again.

Isra was uncharacteristically quiet. She was eating her goulash at a steady pace, not really looking at anyone. Alfric wanted to say something to her, but he didn’t know what to say. Two of the mice had died, and it didn’t seem like a few of the others would be reclaimed. The way that they had talked about it earlier in the day had been like they were taking these mice on an adventure, and he could sympathize with the way she was feeling. She had been resistant to bringing animals into the dungeons from the very start.

“Alright,” said Mizuki. “I think that the octopus creature with the stone on his back represents Verity’s ability to handle a lot of things at once.”

Verity gave a little laugh. “I was worried about where you were going with that.”

“The rock on its back represents the way she carries the team,” said Alfric.

“Har,” said Verity, but she was smiling, and blushing, just a bit.

“The octopus represents tenacity, obviously,” said Hannah.

Verity smiled again, and there was an expectation in the air that was focused firmly on Isra. She looked up at them, as though only just realizing that they’d been talking, and Alfric opened his mouth to rescue her from having to say that she wasn’t listening.

“Like an octopus, Verity is a very good wrestler,” said Isra with some deliberate slowness.

There was silence for a bit.

“Um,” said Mizuki. “I have so many questions.”

“Is Verity a good wrestler?” asked Alfric.

Isra nodded. “We’ve wrestled together.”

“Before we were dating,” Verity added quickly.

“Why?” asked Mizuki. “I mean I guess if I was wrestling a boy I would know why I was doing that, and why he was doing that, so I guess I’ve filled in the blanks, nevermind.”

“It was innocent,” said Verity, in an awkward, rushing way. She glanced at Isra just for a moment.

Mizuki rolled her eyes.

“But is an octopus a good wrestler?” asked Hannah. “Seems to me that its tentacles would give it a good grip, but a good grip isn’t the major thing when you wrestle, it’s leverage. Hard to see an octopus bein’ able to pin someone.”

“I’ve never wrestled an octopus,” said Isra with a shrug. “I’ve actually only seen them a few times, during trips to Liberfell.”

“Where are octopuses in Liberfell?” asked Mizuki.

“In the river,” said Isra. She held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “This big.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before.”

“I don’t know if they’re good wrestlers either,” said Isra with a shrug.

Alfric coughed. “If everyone has eaten as much as they’re going to eat, we should get moving,” he said. “Mizuki, the goulash was good, thank you.”

When they came out of the garden stone, they were in the large open room again, where the chest was waiting for them. Sixty doors were arranged in a ring around them, which in theory meant at least sixty rooms. Alfric corrected himself: there were fifty-nine doors, because they’d come in through one of them, the one that the octopus had crashed its boulder into. It was so many doors he almost thought he’d be sick, but there was a way to handle it, which was one door at a time.

First, there was some business that they’d put off until after lunch: the pile of metal that Mizuki had said was an entad.

As far as entads went, it was enormous, with each of the pieces being almost ten feet long, hinged in the middle. There were six in total, shaped and contoured, as thick as tree trunks, though hollow, which meant it was possible that the five of them together could move one. Thankfully the thicker bottoms of them were just barely narrow enough to fit into the chest, but it was going to take some doing, and getting them out would probably take a crane of some kind. There was a pattern to the metal, an embellishment, which made it look almost like the surface was covered in lizard scales.

In the end, it was the helm of flight that helped the most. Alfric had ropes, obviously, and was able to hook them up to Mizuki, making a harness around her. That meant that she could pull directly up, straining against the ropes, while everyone else tried to move a single end of a single jointed tube. Once it was up, it was just a matter of maneuvering it into the chest, which was easier said than done. If they’d had the time, Alfric would have dug a hole for the chest so they could slide the big tubes over and drop them in, but instead they ended up needing to angle the chest and the tube, in a way that needed to be delicate while also handling an entad that weighed hundreds of pounds.

Then they had to do that five more times.

Alfric wasn’t sure that it was worth it. It was entirely possible he’d get them out, have Filera look at them, and she would say that they were worthless. Maybe they made things that they touched blue, or the hollow could be made to produce a bag full of grain. Alfric had hope though, because larger entads were supposed to be better. He was a bit skeptical of that, and thought maybe larger entads were better because if a large entad wasn’t good it would get junked rather than sitting on a shelf, leaving only good survivors, but he was hoping that was an academic point. He thought he might have read it in a book on entads somewhere.

It took them at least half an hour, though without the thrums, it was much harder to time.

<I’ll bet these are awesome,> said Mizuki. <Some kind of giant stilts, maybe?>

<We need to get going,> said Alfric, which was becoming his usual refrain. <If this is what puts us behind schedule … I don’t know.>

<We’ll make it,> said Hannah. <You’ve got that sword now. The shift has stopped.>

The shift having stopped didn’t make him feel any better. From what they knew of the shifts, it was entirely possible that the final shift had locked them into a configuration that didn’t connect them to the exit, something they’d already experienced once. If that happened, it would take them multiple hours to exhaust every door and figure that out, and then they would be left trying to break through walls and find the rest of the dungeon. Alfric was fairly confident that the new sword could slice through wood with ease, but cutting through load-bearing material seemed like a bad idea, and it would be hard to tell what might cause a collapse.

Still, they had hours of time left, and options. Fifty-nine options, in fact.

Alfric pushed open the first door, sword drawn and in polearm form with a footlong blade, and saw a group of furry bear-sized monsters in what looked to be a kitchen. They noticed him, and began to move.

<Fireball,> he called, ducking for cover.

<Kitchen stuff though,> said Mizuki, but even as she said it, the fireball raced forward.

The sound of the explosion was muffled, confined mostly to the room, and it came with a horrible clanking of metal and shattering of glassware and ceramics. There were yelps from the creature, painfully high, and while Alfric had hoped that they were all dead, one of them came racing out. It stunk of singed fur, and there didn’t seem to be more to it than fur, but Alfric brought his polearm down on it, slicing it, then turned to the room, looking for more. None came.

He looked down at the creature, then at the footlong blade at the tip of the long shaft. He had expected almost no resistance, as with the octopus, but the blade had felt practically blunt. He’d compensated, but it hadn’t been what he’d thought.

<Clear,> he said after he’d stepped into the kitchen. The fireball had killed almost everything except that last one, and he had put mortally wounded creatures out of their misery. He did it twice, and there was again that same problem. The blade was sharp enough for the job, but when he’d fought the giant octopus, it had sliced through the chest like it was almost nothing. There was a catch somewhere, and he didn’t like that.

<This poor kitchen,> said Mizuki as she came in.

<We need to keep moving,> said Alfric.

<Let me mourn the plates, at least,> said Mizuki.

<It was the right call, incidentally,> said Alfric. <I had been thinking about the creatures, not the loot. Sorry.>

<I didn’t want to go against what you’d said,> replied Mizuki. <It’s fine.>

There were things to take, and because the room had been over in a hurry, Alfric allowed it. Mostly it was a few plates that hadn’t been blown up by the fireball. Then they were moving on.

Alfric didn’t like having an untested weapon. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it was untested in a way that meant he was leaving some functionality on the table, but this one was untested in a way that seemed like it might cause some interference. Testing entads in a dungeon was bad enough, but testing one ‘live’ was worse.

He kept using it anyway. He didn’t really know why. There was something about the new weapon that made him feel more secure, as though he’d acquired a special toy and didn’t want to let it go. It was childish. He made a few cuts against the bodies, to confirm that it was sharp enough for use, then continued on with the polearm.

The next room had humanoid creatures, stringy ones that were seven feet tall and with wrists as thin as broom handles. A fireball greeted them, and three quick arrows took down the rest, without Alfric having to do all that much.

<Small rooms,> said Mizuki. <Less to work with, and I’m trying to suck from too far away.>

<Phrasing,> said Hannah.

They moved on, through the next door. They hadn’t seen any space-warping in the dungeon, multiple skies aside, and Alfric felt better going in a consistent direction.

The octopus had been an aberration. The creatures in the rooms were mostly weak. The rewards in the rooms were weak, maybe even weaker than expected given their elevation and the level of the threat. It was easy to imagine that this might have been how their first dungeon could have been, or every dungeon after that. It was easy to see how people could think dungeons were easy, and even more easy to see how they would give up after having gotten a few weak entads and a bit of junk.

The polearm wasn’t weak, exactly, but it underwhelmed. There was a chance that he’d used a once-a-month ability, or that it needed something big and powerful, or that the sharpness went on a cycle, or depended on specific conditions, or … a thousand things. There was every chance that it was a dud. He really should have stopped using it, but time was ticking down, and it felt like a liferaft, a signifier of things that would be lost if the dungeon was undone. It wasn’t actually worse than the bident, anyhow. He resisted the urge to fiddle with it, at least.

They went through a dozen rooms and eight different fights, though many of them were over before they started. There were natural rooms like caves or canyons, and manmade rooms that looked like they might belong in someone’s house. They had to backtrack, more than once, and eventually they reached a dock under the same dark sky they’d first seen. Fish people with extra flippers on their backs had jumped from the water, and it had been one of the fights that had stressed them, depleting stamina and Hannah’s healing, though nothing terribly severe. The waters were illuminated with their lanterns, and Alfric looked out at them. The dock was simple wood, probably of a sort that could be found anywhere along the big lake. He could, thankfully, see the edges of the room, which meant that this wasn’t an actual lake, just a piece of one.

<Going in?> asked Hannah.

<No,> said Alfric. <We can’t check every single body of water. We’re going to run out of time.>

<Then let’s get back so that doesn’t happen,> said Mizuki. <Come on, go go!>

There was something heartening about that, though Alfric was well aware that their pace was going to be dictated more by their bodies than their hustle. In fact, they’d been in the dungeon for nearly five hours by his reckoning, and most of that time had been moving and fighting, with only a few stops to gather up loot. Most of those small breaks had been to catch a breath more than anything. He could feel himself slower and more sluggish than he’d been at the start. Professional dungeoneering teams on a multi-day dungeon usually didn’t try to push too hard for fear that someone would get sloppy.

They kept reaching dead ends and coming back to the giant circular room where they’d found the octopus. It was maddening, in a way. What they needed to find was just one single room, but it could have been anywhere, down any branch of the dungeon.

<How’s the guild message coming?> asked Mizuki.

<It’s a graph of nodes,> said Alfric. <And the answer is poorly, trying to make a map is really not what this is designed for.>

<Write a letter to the Editor,> said Hannah. Alfric had never heard the expression, but he imagined that it was equivalent to saying that he should go give a sermon to the trees.

The map had grown less and less useful as the number of rooms increased. He wished that he’d put the whole thing to paper instead. They’d consulted it only twice thus far, both times to double-check that they remembered the way, and only one of those two times had the map prevented them from making a mistake.

Twenty rooms came and went. It took another hour. It was fantastic time, three minutes per room, and toward the end of it, Alfric was sweating hard. The only reason they’d stopped was because Isra had gotten a long slash along her forearm that had gone almost straight through the thimble armor. He was glad for the rest though.

<Why didn’t you use the amulet?> asked Alfric.

<I’m saving it for a larger creature,> she said. <You think not?>

<I don’t know, just curious, not judging,> said Alfric. <I’m hoping the octopus was the worst we’ll see.>

<The small wounds are adding up,> said Hannah. <If you get a break, I can still heal it, but we’re approachin’ my limits.>

<Sorry,> said Alfric. He’d been injured twice, both times when something had gotten up into his armor. The fact that the plates didn’t interlock was a problem, mostly when there was something with a lot of vectors of attack.

<Don’t be sorry, just don’t get hit,> said Hannah. <There’s a good chance that we reach the end this way.>

She meant the end of their dungeon run. That was sobering. Eventually she would have more and more trouble with the healing, and then they’d be stacking up wounds for real, and there was only so far you could make it into a dungeon while wounded. Wounds begat wounds, when you were favoring one leg and holding your stomach.

<We should talk about the Overguard Maneuver,> said Mizuki. <This really seems like a time for it.>

<No,> said Alfric. She had been asking whether she might get to see it in action ever since his mother had made an offhand mention of it.

<Please?> asked Mizuki.

<Still no, thanks for the manners though,> said Alfric. As strategies went, it was reckless, the kind of thing that could clear a dungeon incredibly fast, if you survived. He’d thought that it was cool, when he’d heard about it, but the more he learned about dungeons, the more disdain he felt for it.

An hour passed, and then a second. They cleared through half of the doors in the circular room. Quite a few of the paths had joined up, and a few of the doors went to the same room, but that wasn’t terribly heartening. Things went mostly the same, and they fell into a rhythm with it, rushing rooms one after the other. Alfric was following the left-hand rule, which made tracking where they were easier, and eventually he gave up on the guild message, getting out pencil and paper instead while he tried to get his breath back.

They took more hits, though Alfric tried his best to stay out front. They found four more entads, though nothing whose function was immediately obvious, and nothing that he wanted to spend the time or risk on. The dungeon was chipping them down and giving them almost nothing in return, and the chest was filling up with relatively useless junk. They had started doing something that was really not a good idea to do, which was throwing almost everything they thought they could salvage into the chest. Given the first-in, last-out way the chest worked, it was going to be an insane amount of work to get it all out and sorted, especially with those giant metal tubes right there in the middle of it.

<I actually was serious about the Overguard Maneuver,> said Mizuki. <I want to legitimately talk about it. We’ve got only a few hours left until you want to call it quits, right?>

<No, Mizuki,> said Alfric.

<If you’re going to reset anyway, then why not?> she asked.

<It’s stupid,> said Alfric. <And it’s not really designed for this. We also don’t have the tools, really.>

She had the look of someone who wanted to keep pressing on with the argument, but they were moving through the dungeons, and maybe there was something in his fatigue that made her hold her tongue.

The injury happened three rooms later.

Alfric pushed open a door, slightly out of breath, and stood to the side as Mizuki sent a weak fireball in. Sorcs were supposed to be able to go almost forever, but he had the sense that she was flagging, more from the fatigue of moving than because of anything going on with the magic.

When that was done, and Isra had shot off her arrows, Alfric went in. It was a grotto, their third of this dungeon, with thigh-deep water, and it seemed as though the water had spared the monsters some of the pain of the explosion. There were five in all, with another two dead in the water, and they had been injured, but Alfric could tell that this was going to be a difficult fight. One big sign of that was that one of Isra’s arrows was stuck into one of the monster’s chest, and it was still coming for him. They were each as large as him, not quite bipedal but capable of going up on two legs, a horrible combination of alligator and gorilla, long snapping jaws and muscular arms.

Alfric stabbed one in the chest, pushing against the side of the spear to turn the hole into a gash and lead on toward the other. With a polearm, the idea was to keep the enemy at bay, but with the numbers against him, it was clear that was going to be a problem. He slashed a monster across the chest, then choked up on the spear, holding it close to the sharp end and extending the blade as he did so.

They grabbed at him, and he slashed another, using the weapon more as a sword, shortening the shaft. It didn’t respond instantly, not like he’d have liked, and the creatures drew closer to him, even as he saw arrows appear in their flesh. He moved to retreat, cautious of putting them too close to the others, but Hannah was in the water, swinging her warpick. She clonked one in the head, and it fell, but her weapon was stuck for a moment.

The blade was doing better than it had been before, sharper and more alive, and Alfric tried to remember his bladework, which wasn’t what he’d kept up his training in. He caught one in the neck and slid the sword free, but he was surrounded now, and one of them had caught his arm. He moved the plates, trying to shake it free, but its arms were wrapped around him, and no movement of the plates could shake it. They were brutally strong beasts, their grip impossible to overcome, and with a swift motion, the one with a grip on him snapped his sword arm.

Alfric howled in pain. He was blinded by it, in spite of his training. He’d had breaks before, but this one was brutal, a full fracture right in the middle of his forearm, both bones. With that much pain, with the creature still tearing to rip his arm off, wiggling the bones, it was impossible to stay aware of himself, and so Alfric didn’t.

When he came to, the creatures were dead and Hannah was healing him, muttering to herself. He didn’t think that he’d gone unconscious, but it was hard to say. His throat was sore from screaming.

<How bad?> he asked. His body felt raw, as though it had been pummeled by the pain.

<Not so bad,> she said, voice light and calm in that overly-clerical way. <We’re clear, armor down so I can see your face.>

Alfric allowed the armor to slip down, and Hannah swore.

<Is he going to be okay?> asked Mizuki.

<When I said not bad, I meant from the perspective of a heal,> said Hannah. She was looking at his eyes, which Alfric expected were bloodshot. <I was able to line everythin’ up while you were out, get the bones back together so that it wasn’t such a stretch to heal. Not a compound, we can be thankful for that, nothin’ full shattered.>

<I lost blood,> said Alfric.

Hannah nodded. <Not so much I think you’re not fit to fight, but it took some time for us to kill the last of them, some seconds I don’t think we wanted to spend while your arm was like that.>

<Okay,> said Alfric. His arm was in her grip, the armor still on it. <Am I good to move it?>

<Ay,> said Hannah.

Alfric moved it, testing the motion, then climbed up out of the water, to his feet. He’d been dragged over to the sloped earth of the room’s entrance, and by the wetness on his face and the way his gambeson was soaked, he must have been beneath the water for at least a little bit of it.

<Okay,> said Alfric, half to himself. The room had two more exits. He didn’t move toward them.

<I’m frayed,> said Hannah. <We’re all frayed, and I include you in that. Verity’s been playin’ more than she’s ever played continuously, Isra’s shot so many arrows that her arm’d have fallen off if I hadn’t been keepin’ her fresh, and Mizuki … well, Mizuki is fine.>

<I’m tired and hungry and I want to go home,> said Mizuki.

<We’re runnin’ low,> said Hannah. <That’s all I’m sayin’. It’s too much dungeon.>

<Alright,> said Alfric. <It’s time to get stupid.> He looked at the party. <We’re going to try the Overguard Maneuver.>

<Yes!> said Mizuki with a wide smile.

<And what, precisely, is the Overguard Maneuver?> asked Verity.

Alfric explained it. They talked about it. They agreed that under normal circumstances, it was pretty stupid, and that under these very specific circumstances, it was worth a shot.

Twenty minutes later, Alfric was wearing all the armor. There had been some argument about whether it should be him or Mizuki, but he had insisted, and she had eventually relented. She was fresher, and smaller, and better with the helm, and could throw fireballs, but he was more durable, more combat capable, and actually knew what he was doing.

Alfric wore the thimble armor as the base layer and the plate on top of that. They didn’t quite fit right together, and his mobility was hampered, but it was as much armor as he could have on him. He had also taken the robes from Verity and the amulet from Isra, which meant that the threat vectors that would actually work against him were pitifully small. He had the sword in one hand, retracted, and the other hand was largely free, though he planned to use it as a shield. He was wearing the helm, to allow him to fly, because it was the fastest method of travel they had available.

<This is so dumb,> said Mizuki. <I love it.>

<Tell me again what you want for music,> said Verity. A steely calm had washed over her.

<Endurance above everything else, but also mental quickness,> said Alfric. <If I call for it, progressive strength, dropping the endurance. You’ll be in the stone, blind, so be listening for my cues.>

<I don’t know if I can handle a progressive,> said Verity. <But I’ll try.>

They filed into the garden stone, one by one, and Mizuki gave him a hug and a kiss on the center chest plate. When they were gone, he carefully placed the garden stone within the chest and tested that it was following him. The corner was still missing, but they’d gotten the missing part from the octopus and placed it within a pocket of the lid’s storage. Hannah had insisted on waiting to repair it until they were well out of the dungeon, and given how little healing she now had left, that seemed to have been the right call.

Alfric looked at the nearest closed door and steeled himself. It was stupid, but it was possible that it was also necessary, at least in this case.

The Overguard Maneuver had been an invention of Alfric’s great-grandfather, who was an extremely enthusiastic dungeoneer and also an idiot. The general idea was that dungeons took time and effort, and fighting the monsters was the worst part of it by a thousand miles. Because at least half of what you were looking for were easily spottable goods or magically identifiable entads, killing the monsters and then doing a thorough bout of resource extraction was a sucker’s game. Instead, Alfric’s great-grandfather had figured, it made the most sense to not fight the monsters any more than you had to, run through all the rooms, grab anything that stood out, and then leave before anyone had time to react. If you didn’t have the speed necessary for that, then at least you would save time by fighting all of the monsters at once.

Alfric burst through the door and didn’t spend time or attention looking at the thirty-pound rats that were crawling across the floor of a wine cellar. His attention was instead focused on the location of the next door on his left. As soon as he spotted it, he was zipping along, counting on his armors to protect him, bashing into the door. He barely felt it, and reoriented himself again, looking past the humanoid reptiles with their bulldog heads, and toward the next door. They came at him, running on stork legs, and he blew past them, clipping one and sending it tumbling, then broke through that next door as well.

It was fun. Alfric was actually surprised by just how enjoyable it was. This wasn’t how dungeons were supposed to be done, it was dangerous and stupid, but as he sailed over the heads of irate avian tortoises, he felt the smile on his face grow.

He made it five rooms before he reached a dead end, and once he’d confirmed that there were no more doors, he did the more dangerous part, which was turning back to face the collection of monsters that was coming after him. They were already at the door he’d just come through, spilling in, with such variety that it was nauseating, gazelle legs and fish fins, a swan’s neck with a shark’s mouth, and one small ooze that slid quickly across the ground.

He went at them with his sword, handle held in one hand, blade nine feet long, and sliced through them with just a hitch or two when he hit bone. Mizuki had discovered the problem with the sword while he’d been out, and it was something he regretted not cottoning onto himself: the sword got sharper the longer the blade was.

At nine feet long, its full length, it was godly sharp, but also incredibly unwieldy, especially when he was worried about slicing straight through structural supports. He swung anyway, quick flashing slashes to clear the doorway, and then he was through as the bodies fell apart, off to the next door on the left.

Doors splintered apart when he hit them, though he did occasionally have to slice through a metal door. The sword trailed behind him, and he had to be careful not to let it touch the chest, which was also running behind him, stepping its way through monster blood. It had gotten filthy in a hurry, but that wasn’t all that unusual with the gunk and dreck of a dungeon. When Alfric needed to bring his sword around to slice something, it was so long that he was usually forced to cut through a wall to maneuver it, which did offer resistance, even with the blade maximized.

He tried to keep track of the rooms as he went through them, but that was a fool’s errand with so much he was trying to do at once. In every room he was looking for the next door, trying not to mind the monsters too much, sometimes swiping at them but other times leaving that for if he had to go after them on the way back.

The monsters accumulated as a ravening horde behind him as he swept through rooms, and the way he cut through their assembled army of grotesque creatures did nothing to stop the ones he missed. They came with clubbed feet and segmented waists, spindly insectile legs, hooked beaks, and useless arms that ended in two-toed hooves. He bashed through doors to escape them, and was introduced to more creatures, which soon joined their fellows. The odd bodies and strange locomotions he might have been able to handle, but sometimes when he looked back, he’d see a gout of flame or a sintering beam of light. There were exotic attacks among them, and the thing that worried him most, given his history with the dungeon, was the idea that he might be blinded. Layer upon layer of armor wouldn’t save him if that happened.

He found a rich vein of rooms, one that seemed to go on for a very long time, almost thirty rooms in total, and then he ran straight into a dead end, requiring him to double back. Most of the rooms only had one door, and he was far down a chain of those.

The monsters killed each other, not on purpose, but because of their natures. A flaming creature on wobbly legs incinerated others who got too close, and a mottled snake let out bursts of electric juice that spattered on the others and caused them to tense up and die. Alfric killed the snake from nine feet away with a precise swipe of the sword. It was precise only in the sense that it got the snake: he had cut through the door frame, the walls, the ground, and three other creatures that were dying to the snake’s strange venom.

The chest trundled along, not seeming to mind the chaos, and Alfric did his best to hurry as he flew toward the next leftmost door.

<Still alive out there?> asked Hannah.

<Busy,> said Alfric as he wrenched a brass door to the side with his poor range of motion. He should have cut through it, as that mostly just required the motion of his wrist.

He got hit with the slime right after that, and felt the constriction of his armor before he even really understood what was happening. His armor had locked itself, and the telekinesis effect on the plates seemed to do nothing to help unstick them. His sword was trapped in the position it had been in, slightly extended, and as he tested it, he could feel that only his left leg and arm were free to move.

Alfric still had the helm though, and used it to spin toward the creature, using his entire body to make a single slash of the sword. It toppled, and Alfric tried to orient himself, which was a sickening process given that his head was trapped instead of the armor that surrounded him. He had to move his entire body to align the slit of the armor and find the next door.

The helm moved Alfric, who was mostly immobile, and his sword cut its way through the walls as he flew, because he couldn’t much move it. After five rooms of this, he took a moment, only seconds, to transfer the sword from his immobile right hand to his still free left hand, and from there he had a better time, but his view of the world was narrow, and he had never been able to train his non-dominant hand to be quite as good as his dominant hand.

A tall six-legged goose was leading the charge among the monsters following him, and he bashed through another door rather than trying to fight the creature. That brought him to a place he really hadn’t wanted to see again: the circular room with its sixty doors. He had made a long loop, and if there was no space-warping, that meant he’d just spent a long, harrowing time going in what was essentially a giant circle.

The goose quacked, and Alfric bashed through another door. Mobility was coming back, slowly, but he was still a flying brick more than an actual fighter. His swings were wild and uncontrolled, which wasn’t what you wanted with a nine-foot-long sword that could cut through almost anything. He spun, found a door, hoped that it was the right one, and flung himself at it. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that maybe the immobilization was helping him, because the concentric metal shells of armor were protecting him even more from the feeling of knocking the doors from their hinges.

He turned in the air, looking for the next door, and found it. It was open. There was a moment of rising panic, because that meant he’d made a loop or a mistake, until he realized that he hadn’t doubled back or anything at all like that. It was the same table and chairs that he’d seen when they’d exited the lute room for the second time, which meant that he’d joined up the segments of the dungeon. There was a bit of relief at that, but it didn’t get him closer to finding the exit, so he spun back the way he’d come, cutting a line through the wall, and flew to find the next door.

He was mostly trying not to fight the monsters, instead depending on the helm’s speed to fly on past them. The layers meant that he was nearly invulnerable, save for the slot he was seeing out of, and he bumped them once or twice, no worse for the wear but feeling the crunching of them as he did.

There were three separate swarms after him, two of insects and one of birds, and one of the birds got lucky as he doubled back, slamming into him just so, lodging its narrow beak in the small slot that he was seeing out of. The tip of the beak was half an inch from his eyeball, and he could only just barely move the plate enough to crush it, but that left a bit of beak to fall down inside his armor, near his mouth. Similarly, when he flew through the swarms after a deadend, he would sometimes splash right through the insects and hear them pelt against his armor, adding to the muck and blood that was there.

He took a moment to inartfully cut down the mob, swinging his sword left handed, turning his entire body to change where he was looking. The sword was a marvel, but there were creatures it was ineffective against, and the more of the dungeon he saw, the more of them there were. A lizzo-shaped ooze was following him, faster than he would have liked, always five rooms behind him. He’d sliced through it more than once, feeling no resistance but doing no damage to it either. The swarms persisted, though he reduced their numbers each time he plowed through them at speed and more of their bodies splattered against his armor. He heard an explosion in the distance and grimaced at the thought. His eyes kept going to the chest, where the garden stone contained his companions, and every time he had to double back, he thought to himself ‘don’t cut the chest, don’t let the monsters get the chest’. Doubling back was always the most dangerous moment, when he had to come face to face with whatever he’d stirred up most recently.

He flew through a narrow, half-height door, barely fitting, wincing at the idea that he might have to go back through it, then five rooms later that was exactly what he had to do. When he reached door on the return, the ooze was sliding through, almost casually, and Alfric slashed with his sword, trying to kill the monsters that had begun to fill the room. Some of them were beating against his armor, almost unfelt, but at the back of his mind was every horror story that he’d ever heard about what a dungeon could throw at you. A rusting touch, ethereal fingers that could go through metal, a piercing shriek that could burst your eardrums, the heat, the cold, on and on. It was so hard to know what any of these things did until they were on him, and most of them had only teeth and claws, if that, but the aberrations didn’t stick out until they were actually doing whatever it was they did. Then the ooze was through, and Alfric moved around it, flying as fast as he could, through the tiny door, pushing limbs and bodies out of the way with his bulk of metal.

He felt them against him, clawing at him, these unknown and unseen creatures, and a thick spike of fear lanced through him. Something large gripped him by the leg, and Alfric tried to kick or spin free, but it held him tight. With every second that passed, more of them were on him, more hands and claws and pincers against the armor, and he was getting pulled back by the weight of them. He activated the amulet of Isra’s with a thought and slipped out like a bar of soap, shooting away so quickly that he almost slammed face-first into a wall.

He burst through another door, and another, doors of wood and a few of metal. Something with claws leapt onto his back and he slammed himself against a pillar to crush it. He was dripping blood and viscera, gunk and mud, so encased in metal that he didn’t really know what was outside him, viewing the world through his little slit.

He’d lost track of the rooms, and of where he was, and there’d been so many of them that it couldn’t help but feel like he had been there before. The only thing he knew was that a closed door meant somewhere he’d not yet gone, so he barreled into them, smashing them with the full weight of his metal and flesh. He ignored the things he passed, even a large red one towering ten feet tall that bellowed at him, even an odd one with white and black spots, even the strangely almost human faces.

That was how he almost missed it. He came out of a door, looked left, saw, down a hallway, a room that led to a long open tunnel, then looked right and saw more doors. He’d been seeking doors at a frantic pace for so long that he almost went to them, as though he was an idiot sailor drawn to a siren — and then he realized that he’d seen this hallway before, and that the tunnel he’d spotted was the thing he’d spent the entire time searching for.

He raced for it, making a nauseous spin to align his view with the chest one final time.

<Going out, hang on,> he said.

He could feel but not see something on his left leg and kicked it away as hard as he could. He caught a glimpse of it, furry, scrambling, and dark. He landed himself right in front of the exit, then turned to the chest and hopped over it, putting it between himself and the tunnel. He got down and pushed using his back, as hard as he could, with the full weight of the helm’s power adding to it. It still wasn’t an easy thing, like pushing a full cart by himself.

The monsters came, spilling out into the hallway, some of them slamming against the wall before reorienting themselves. They were the fastest of them, those that could almost keep pace with the armor, largely skinny creatures with wiry strength and sleek bodies. Alfric held out the sword toward them, having surprised himself by holding onto it through all this, and waved it in front of him, its nine-foot length swishing through the air. Most of them ran into it, their bodies falling apart with only token resistance, but a few small ones went under and gripped onto him. Animals the size of squirrels gripped his immobilized plate, and there was nothing he could do unless he wanted to swing the incredibly sharp sword at his own legs. He tried to stay calm and keep pushing, but he had no idea where the tunnel exit would actually end up being, only that he was close to it.

The world grew darker for just a second, his lanterns not penetrating it. He’d never come out of a tunnel backward before, and it was startling to see nothingness as he looked back at the border.

As soon as he realized that he was out, he turned and rose, taking off into the night sky, up out of the entrance. He dropped the sword just beyond the collar, hoping that he hadn’t cut it, and focused his attention on the riders that had gotten on him, the small creatures that he hadn’t managed to cut through. The work was frantic, mostly for fear of what they might do to him if left unchecked, in part because of the combat thrill that had yet to leave his body.

<We’re out,> he said, voice shaky.

When he thought he’d gotten them all, he dropped to the ground, to where the party was emerging. The chest was a sorry sight, not because it had suffered much damage, but because it had been running behind Alfric the entire time, cheerfully stepping through mud, blood, and whatever other fluids had been spilled in the wake of the mad dash.

<That worked?> asked Mizuki.

Alfric nodded, slowly. It was nighttime, but the three moons were out in full and the sky was clear, giving them the half-god’s light, almost as bright as daybreak. His hands were shaky, and he could feel the energy draining out of him. The bruises and bumps were making themselves known, as though they’d been politely waiting for a moment to interject. He could hear the slow trickle and drip of the horrible mixture of things on his armor.

He let out a laugh that came on as though from nowhere. <My mom is going to be so proud.>

Chapter 130 - Commiseration/Celebration Brunch

Mizuki was feeling great. The curse, such as it was, had been lifted, they had more lutes than they would ever need, an awesome sword had bound itself to her, and Alfric was in such a good mood that it made her realize just how stressed and anxious and down he’d been. The morning after the Endless Dungeon they had all celebrated with a huge brunch spread, and Mizuki hadn’t even had to do any of the cooking, which was a bit of a relief. Instead, Alfric had arranged something special ahead of time, prepared by Marta, who did things like that occasionally when she wasn’t busy selling meat at the market or helping her husband with the butchery. They ate at her house, at a table in her solarium.

“So what would have happened if we’d failed?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, hypothetically?”

“Failure brunch!” said Alfric with a smile. “One half commiseration, one half congratulating ourselves for trying.”

“You make that sound so much less grim that it would be,” said Verity with a laugh. “I can very much imagine us sitting around a brunch table, with the full spread, as glum as blobfish.”

“Badgers are actually the saddest animals,” said Isra. She gave Verity a grin.

“Glum as badgers then, sorry,” Verity smiled.

They had apparently patched things up, which was good, and they were sitting next to each other, which was as things should be. For a week or two it had seemed like they were just never going to talk to each other again, but the dungeon and some time seemed to have helped them.

Mizuki did wonder whether they were flirting though. She tried to put herself in their shoes and couldn’t, and then tried to imagine that one of them was a boy, and if one of them was a boy, then it all seemed like flirting to her, but she was probably mixed up about how that worked. Laughing and joking with someone was different than flirting, she thought, though the more she thought about it she realized that she just had no idea what flirting actually was. It was an easy thing to get twisted up in your own head.

She had never dated someone twice, or had an on-again off-again thing. Some people would return to the same boyfriend a half dozen times, always trying to make it work out, as though something could be had from the failures. Maybe that was right, because Thomma and Clarc had gotten married after the sixth time, and they were still together four years later, with two children.

She wondered what it was like. She thought that maybe it could be boring, because you would know how things would go with them, their quirks and their moves. Rolaj had a way of placing his hand on her, with his fingers on her back and his thumb against the bottom of her rib cage. He’d done that three times, and she had come to expect it when they had a date, or when she would see him at his shop. She liked the assertiveness and familiarity of it. She wondered, on a second attempt of making it work, whether she would find it familiar and good, or boring and bad, or something else. It was hard to know.

Brunch was an entire spread. There were three kinds of meats, some of them slow-cooked, others grilled, and there were all kinds of sides as well, and different kinds of breads with jams and jellies that they didn’t have at home. It was all at Marta’s place, but there must have been other helpers, and Mizuki found herself looking at the kitchen more than once, wanting to see who it was. There was smoked pork belly and fatty venison, eggs that had been mixed with goat cheese and fluffed up, with caramelized onions in them. Potatoes had been done two ways, roasted with herbs and as something that was basically a crispy mashed potato cake. She was going to have to get the recipe for that one, because it seemed as though you’d need too much binder for it to taste good, except it did. There were a few token vegetables that seemed to mostly exist to add some green to the color palette. Mizuki approved of that. There were fruits as well, mostly the seasonal favorites like strawberries and raspberries. It was so much that they would say that they couldn’t possibly eat it all, but then would almost certainly clear the table.

“We have the world’s longest entad testing session ahead of us,” said Mizuki between bites. “Also, I have no idea what we’re doing with a hundred lutes.”

“Selling them,” said Alfric.

“Not all, surely?” asked Verity.

“First order of business,” Alfric began.

“Are we talkin’ shop at the table then?” asked Hannah. “We’re celebratin’, that’s not a time to discuss all the work we’ve managed to make for ourselves.”

“Working is how Alfric celebrates,” said Mizuki. She gave him a wide grin. “Look at him salivating over the thought of how we’re going to get those metal things out of the chest.”

“I actually think that’s going to be pretty easy,” said Alfric. “But yes, we can hold off on talking shop, I do think we can just bask in the victory and the absurd amount of winnings.”

Verity looked at Isra. “Do you want me to write a song about it?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Isra. “Yes, of course, I really do, but I don’t want you to hate doing it, if you think that you will.”

“I felt there was something there last night,” said Verity. “No music or lyrics, but something compelled me.”

“I’m actually not sure people will believe it,” said Hannah. “When I try to figure out how I’ll describe it to people, it sounds like dungeon fabulism.”

“Which is?” asked Mizuki.

“Dungeon stories, ay?” asked Hannah, raising an eyebrow.

Alfric nodded. “Five people go into a dungeon,” said Alfric. “They’re the only ones that ever experience it. The only way to ever confirm what they’ve seen is through their personal accounts, entad recordings, or what they bring out. Sometimes it grows in the telling.”

“So it’s like fishing,” said Mizuki. “People talking about the one that got away.”

“The one that got away?” asked Isra.

“You know,” said Mizuki, though she thought it very likely that Isra didn’t know. “People tell stories about fishing, about how the line snapped, or the hook came out, or whatever, and because they’re the only one to have ever seen the fish, they can make it as big as they want. And even sometimes if they do catch the fish.”

“The … line?” asked Isra.

It took some time to explain fishing to Isra. She had only ever done fishing using traps, which was how she’d learned from her father, and she talked about a weir she’d made when she was fifteen, which was apparently just a bunch of relatively flat stones laid across a river so that all the water was channeled through one specific spot. She’d set it up so that the fish and eels of the river would get caught there, and it had been a lot of work, but she had felt a lot of pride when it had actually worked.

“Hooks seem barbaric,” said Isra when she’d finished.

“Is there a reason that you don’t just … command the fish onto shore?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “It always felt cruel to tell a creature to die for me. And they would rebel. There are deep animal instincts. I’ve done it, but,” she shook her head. “It feels better to acknowledge them, to have an understanding that they don’t want to be killed. It’s like they’re dying on their own terms. And if a piece of me is in them, when they die, maybe that’s why it feels so …” She shook her head again, and ate a muffin to fill her mouth and not have to talk.

Mizuki wanted to ask about the mice that had died in the dungeon, but it was obviously a sore spot, and it felt like it was a sore spot between Alfric and Isra.

“So you think that people won’t believe us?” asked Mizuki. “We do have a hundred lutes.”

“We can’t show off the lutes to people every time we tell the story,” said Alfric. “And there are other elements that, yes, I think people might raise an eyebrow at. When you hear a dungeon story, you think to yourself ‘how much is this embellished, how much does it fit in with what I know about dungeons’, and all kinds of other things, and I think that maybe people will dismiss some of it. But we’re not really in it for the accolades or the acknowledgement, so I’m not sure it matters.”

“You’re not in it for the accolades,” said Hannah. “Myself, I’m tryin’ to write a book on dungeons, and I do think a long, unusual dungeon like that, with the Overguard Maneuver to end it, might make it seem like I’m aimin’ to entertain more than to dissect.”

“So entertain!” said Mizuki with a laugh. “Would it be so awful if people read a book about the symmetry of dungeons or whatever and had fun with it?”

“It’s not what I’m goin’ for,” said Hannah. “Not a lot of laughs in it either, ay?”

“See, but why not?” asked Mizuki. “Crack a joke every now and then, I know I’d read loads of clerical texts if they had jokes in them.” She worried, sometimes, that she didn’t really understand Hannah, and after how swimmingly her date with Verity had gone, decided to set something up.

“Clergy jokes are awful,” said Hannah with a smile. Mizuki also worried that the lack of understanding didn’t go both ways.

“Example, please,” said Verity.

“I’d tell you a Xuphin joke, but we’d be here all day,” said Hannah. She was grinning. “I’d tell you a Bixzotl joke, but I’d hate to have to repeat it. I’d tell you a Qymmos joke, but there are a lot of different sorts. I’d tell you an Oeyr joke, but those are better if they come up organically. I’d tell you a Kesbin joke, but none are coming to mind.”

This got some chuckles. Mizuki wouldn’t have said that any of them were funny, per se, but there was something a little humorous in them.

“Wait,” said Isra. “What about Garos?”

“I’d tell you a joke about Garos, but then you’d have to tell one back to me,” said Hannah. “That’s the usual anyway.” She waved her hand. “It’s not funny.”

“Well none of them were funny,” said Mizuki.

“Ay, that’s what I’m sayin’,” said Hannah. “The Garos jokes are the worst, honestly. I heard a lot of them in seminary, and more once I got out. There’s somethin’ so corny about it all that it practically feels like blasphemy.”

“A little blasphemy never killed anyone,” said Mizuki. “Did it?”

“Used to be that it would get you arrested, but no, it was always people bein’ people, never the gods themselves,” said Hannah. “There are some things I think I’d like about the old days, but that’s not one of them.”

They ate for a bit, then ate some more, and just when Mizuki had thought that maybe she’d had a bit too much food, Marta had come out with hot tea cakes to cap off the meal. Mizuki had three of them.

“Question,” said Mizuki. “Is there a way that we can do this every week? Or after every dungeon?”

“Yes,” said Alfric. His reply was mild. “It’s an extravagance, but money’s not really a concern, and if this were coming from the party budget, we wouldn’t really feel it.”

“Is it not coming from the party budget?” asked Verity, frowning a bit.

“Er, no,” said Alfric. He looked around at them. “I paid for it all, just to do something nice.”

“Which means that we all need to do something nice?” asked Isra.

“No, no,” said Alfric. “I had just felt a bit — like the dungeons were going to keep rolling us. I wanted to be able to have something nice.”

“I’m already thinking of my nice thing,” said Isra, folding her arms across her chest. “I understand these games now.”

“I think this was lovely, and I can’t wait to see how Isra outdoes it,” said Hannah. She pushed her chair out and slapped her thighs. “We’re meetin’ at the house for entad testin’ later in the day?”

“Well, no,” said Alfric. “The lutes are stuck beneath the metal pieces, and those we need to move. There’s also a lot of work to do removing everything from the chest, especially all the goods we picked up along the way. I think it’s probably a lot of work. The lutes won’t be until tomorrow, at the earliest.”

“Ah,” said Hannah, looking less eager. “And you want this done today?”

Alfric shrugged, which surprised Mizuki. “Doesn’t have to be. It’ll all keep. Taking a day off when we’ve had so many of those in a row seems a bit odd, but we’re not in any rush to get back into another dungeon, which is a conversation we should save for later, maybe after the post mortem — which will also keep.”

“It’s a relief to hear you say so,” said Hannah with a nod.

“I wanted to test entads though,” said Mizuki, pouting at Alfric.

“If Hannah is alright with it, we can do some minor work without her,” said Alfric. “We have all the junk in the chest that’s above what we’ll need to remove, we can take that out, sort it, then do a brief bout of entad testing with what we grabbed in the second half of the dungeon. I think there are six in total.”

“I was actually thinkin’ that I might be with Marsh today,” said Hannah. “As in, the whole day?”

“He could come do entad testing?” asked Mizuki.

“I might just bow out, if it can be done without me,” said Hannah. “We’ll have a hundred lutes to get through.” She looked contrite. “Sorry.”

“You’ve got it that bad for him?” asked Mizuki.

She’d thought that Hannah would roll her eyes, but instead she just bit her lip. “I fear I do.”

“Interesting,” said Verity. “I think this is the first time I’ve heard you say that you actually like him.”

Hannah did roll her eyes at that. “I’ve said I like him plenty, don’t get it twisted up. I’ve said, in fact, that it’s serious.” A blush had spread beneath her symmetrical freckles.

“You know, if I had a cute boyfriend, I would never shut up about it,” said Mizuki. “Especially if it were serious. You can talk to us about boy stuff! I like talking about boys!”

“Yes,” said Alfric. “Please, talk to us about boy stuff.” He could do a good stone face, when he wanted to, and Mizuki found it hilarious.

“But I actually do want to know,” said Mizuki. She pointed an accusatory finger at Hannah. “You do this cleric thing where you pry a lot and then don’t want to share.”

“I share plenty,” said Hannah with a wave of her hand. “But there’s also nothin’ to share. It’s goin’ well.” Her blush betrayed her. Mizuki thought that it was going quite a bit better than just ‘well’. It made her happy, but also a little sad, because Hannah was two years younger and finding love when she hadn’t expected it. Mizuki was practically old and still floundering through a dry spell.

“I was going to help with the kids for the second half of the day,” said Isra. ‘The kids’ were a class who was down a teacher. They were five or six, and seemed to adore Isra.

“Yes, we should get going,” said Alfric. “I’ll talk to Marta and we’ll head out. Mizuki and I can clean out the chest.”

“Tell her it was lovely,” said Verity, smoothing her skirt. “I assume you need more hands for emptying the chest?”

Alfric glanced at Mizuki.

“I think we’re good,” said Mizuki. “There’s nothing heavy at the top, I don’t think. You’re welcome, obviously, if you’ve got nothing else going on, but … you know. We’re fine.”

Verity nodded. “Then Isra, is it alright if I come with you to the school? I thought that the children might want to hear a performance.”

“Oh,” said Isra, who seemed surprised. “That … would be very nice, yes. Do you like children?”

“I guess we’ll find out,” said Verity with a smile.

That meant that it was going to be Mizuki and Alfric together for the rest of the day, and while there would be, yes, work, the brunch meant she’d already gotten out of making breakfast and lunch. Having nothing better to do, she followed Alfric, feeling a bit like she was glomming onto him. He had kind words for Marta, and she had kind words for him.

“I’m so glad that Mizuki has fallen in with the right crowd this time,” said Marta, with a wink in Mizuki’s direction.

“Thank you again for the brunch, we might do it some other time, though I’ll give you plenty of notice,” said Alfric.

“Oh, not at all, it’s good to make a big meal every now and then,” she said. She gripped him on the arm, smiling. “And we’ve got to support the young people when they go on their adventures.”

When they left, Alfric was smiling.

“Mood lifted?” she asked. “I mean, with the dungeon done, the curse gone?”

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “Yeah.”

They were walking down the street together, back to her house. The chest was following behind them, since they’d been the last ones to go. It would stay put, if you told it to, but there hadn’t been much reason to do that. Alfric was walking slowly, which Mizuki appreciated, because she’d mentioned that she sometimes had a hard time keeping up with him. In fact, she had mentioned it two weeks ago, and it had never been a problem since. That was one of the great things about Alfric. He adapted to other people, and didn’t let something be a problem twice.

“Of course it’s not actually gone, the ‘curse’,” said Alfric. “If we have to do that again … I don’t want to do it again.”

“Because it was horrible, or because you don’t think we would win?” asked Mizuki.

“The latter,” said Alfric. “And I’m pretty sure it will be different, so whatever preparation we do probably won’t help much.”

“I was thinking we leave the dagger by the door,” said Mizuki.

“Yeah,” said Alfric. “Getting back to the entrance is, as it turns out, actually very important if you don’t know where the entrance even is. It means more of a trip back, and a long lag time before we get medical attention if the worst happens, but I think in general it’s a good idea.”

“You already had that thought?” asked Mizuki. “You didn’t seem impressed.”

“Yeah, I’d considered it,” said Alfric. He gave her a shy smile. “I think if someone comes to you with an idea it’s sort of rude to say ‘actually I already thought of that’.”

“I assume you’ve already thought of everything,” said Mizuki. “At least, when it comes to dungeons.”

“Nah,” he said. “You were the one who suggested the Overguard Maneuver.”

“And you didn’t think of that?” asked Mizuki.

Alfric laughed. “I think you don’t understand the sheer disdain I feel for the Overguard Maneuver, even the modifications of it.” He looked up in thought for a moment. “Less now, though.”

“And was mom proud?” asked Mizuki.

“How would she know?” asked Alfric.

“I don’t know, guild message, chrononaut stuff?” asked Mizuki.

“I haven’t sent the dungeon report yet,” said Alfric. “I might not, honestly, it’s not expected that you put out one for every single dungeon, and they take some time to write. I’ll let them know it wasn’t a fourth failure, at least.”

“I think they’d want to know about this one,” said Mizuki. “But I guess you can just have a wortier copy your official dungeon report and send it that way?”

“I’m not sure there will be an official report either,” said Alfric.

“What?” she asked. “Why not?”

“It’s just so different,” said Alfric. “How would it help anyone to read it?”

“I mean, most people don’t read dungeon reports anyway, right?” asked Mizuki.

“That’s not a great argument for me to write one,” said Alfric.

“Yeah, but you always used to,” said Mizuki. “It seemed like half your time you spent at that little desk up in your room, or at the dining room table.” She looked him up and down. “I liked it.”

“You did?” he asked.

“Yeah, studious Alfric wanting to tell people all about dungeons,” she said. She giggled. “It’s just so … I don’t know. I see you in combat sometimes and it’s almost scary the way you move, like the thing you’ve trained your entire life for is killing, and you do it without thought or hesitation, natural as breathing. And then you get all excited about these different elements of the dungeon, and how we’re going to deal with logistical problems. You light up with this energy. I watch you writing up dungeon reports and you’re deep in concentration, and you smile to yourself sometimes when you finish a section.”

That was too much. She knew that. It made it feel like she was in awe of him, which she wasn’t, or like she had been spending all her time watching him, which she hadn’t. She probably could have said the same sort of stuff about any of the others, since she was around them so much, and felt like she picked up on things better than other people, though was maybe a bit worse at talking about it, or actually doing anything with it.

“You do that same thing,” said Alfric after a moment. “When you’re cooking.”

“What thing?” asked Mizuki, momentarily confused.

“The whole energy thing,” said Alfric. “A look of concentration, a smile when something is going right, like that.”

“Ah,” said Mizuki. She had never once thought about how she looked when she was cooking.

“When you’re cooking chicken in a pan and flip it over,” said Alfric. “There’s a golden crust on it, which gets revealed, and you smile to yourself, this ‘I have done good!’ kind of smile.” He shrugged. “I’m in the kitchen with you a lot.”

“Yeah, I guess you are,” said Mizuki. She was quiet for a moment. She wondered whether this was flirting, but it seemed more likely that it was just friends saying what they liked about each other. “Same thing when I’m using sorcery?”

Alfric laughed, a giggling, unbidden laugh of the sort that he didn’t make often. “No, not at all, you look like a crazy person. I don’t think I’ve ever once seen you throw a fireball and not look like you were absolutely thrilled at the prospect of exploding something. Even when you’re concentrating, or when you’re afraid, or whatever else you’re feeling, there’s this scary sense that you really do think that the explosion is the ultimate solution to all problems and you would happily employ it at every given chance.”

“Explosions are neat,” said Mizuki, crossing her arms. “Admit that, please.”

“Explosions are neat,” said Alfric.

“I need to get better at all the other stuff,” said Mizuki. “Like, all of it, so I’m not so miserable when the aether doesn’t work out. That dungeon was all fireballs, just a matter of shaping it. I don’t think I can lean on it.”

“And you’re still planning on doing the wizard thing?” asked Alfric.

“One week from now, yeah,” said Mizuki. “I’m hoping that we have a lute that helps with the commute.” She paused for a moment. “A commute lute. Commlute.”

“I think commlute will be what we call the one that communicates, right?” asked Alfric.

Mizuki laughed. “We’re going to have to run those lute jokes into the ground.”

“Mostly I’m hoping that they’re good,” said Alfric.

“That they have some utility,” said Mizuki. “Some lutility, you might say.”

“This is going to be awful,” said Alfric. “Do you think it’s against the spirit of the thing to prepare?”

“Prepare?” asked Mizuki.

“I mean … write out a list of options,” said Alfric. “Jokes.”

Mizuki cackled. “That is so you. A list of jokes?”

“We already have the commute lute,” said Alfric. “The way I see it, we have a hundred lutes, we can make some guesses about what at least a few of them will do, and we can have a whole avalanche of jokes ready to go.”

“That is so lame!” said Mizuki. They came up on the house, moved into one after the other, and there was something she loved about the familiar way he came into the house, like it was his house too — which it was, since he’d been living there for months.

“Look, the way I see it, we’re just leveling the playing field, right?” asked Alfric. “Verity is a nationally recognized lyricist, if you squint. She’s going to bowl us over, given half the chance.”

“So we kneecap her,” laughed Mizuki. “With our glorious list of puns.”

“A lute that makes you stronger? The brute lute,” said Alfric. He had moved into the living room, and was opening the chest to look inside. “A lute that deadens sound? The mute lute.”

“A lute that moves you?” asked Mizuki. “You might be thinking that’s a commute lute, but you’d be wrong, it’s actually a route lute.”

“We do need to be writing these down,” said Alfric. “We’ll forget otherwise.” He had grabbed pencil and paper from the inside lid and was actually, literally jotting down what they’d said, as though it wasn’t a joke.

“Wow,” said Mizuki. “Every day I’m a little bit more impressed with the famed adventurer Alfric Overguard.”

“You joke, but I think we are on our way to fame, if only because we’ve had a few absurdly weird dungeons,” said Alfric. He set the pencil and paper to the side. “Alright, ready to go through all this stuff?”

“Absolutely,” said Mizuki. “Let’s sort some junk.”

It took them far, far more time than Mizuki had thought it would. They’d done a lot of rooms, and toward the end of it, they’d just been putting stuff into the chest, not even really thinking about it, just throwing in what they could in two or three minutes before moving on to the next door. Mizuki’s own criteria had been whether or not it could actually fit in the chest, and whether it was shiny. She’d felt like an exhausted magpie.

They disgorged as much as they could, pushing the seating and tables in the living room to the sides to give them more space. Piles formed, though they weren’t entirely consistent with each other, and Qymmos would have been angered if he was looking down at them. One pile was for clothes, another for implements, one for valuables, a place for furniture, and a special position in front of the fireplace for entads.

“So what happens to the stuff that no one wants?” asked Mizuki. “I guess I never thought that much about what happens with junk — real junk, that can’t be repurposed or whatever.”

“It goes back to the dungeon,” said Alfric. “If you’re an established party, they’ll pay you for it and give you an entad. When you’re done with the dungeon, you dump out all the collected trash. Vertex does it, actually. It doesn’t pay well, but it is a public service.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “Is that where the muck from the muck room ends up?” Mizuki hated the muck room. It was where all the water in the house drained to. Every now and then, it needed to be emptied, and she always paid for someone else to do it, even when she was short on money.

Alfric shook his head. “That stuff gets heat-treated and then used for fertilizer, usually,” he said. “Though I guess that’s how it’s done in Dondrian, it might be different here.”

“Gross,” said Mizuki.

When they were finished, Mizuki wasn’t sure that they’d done much more than make a mess. They had excavated from the chest until they got down to the metal struts, which was where they stopped, because Alfric was right, those would have to be removed in some other way. The piles felt enormous, though she supposed all they needed for the fabric was a giant bag to stuff it all in so it could be given away. Only one in three pieces would fit a human.

“I don’t understand why clothing comes out like it does,” said Mizuki. “Extra sleeves, or too few sleeves, or with incredibly long torsos, or torsos so short you’d be exposing your belly.”

“That’s a real style,” said Alfric. “Exposing the midriff? Common in Dondrian.”

“What, like …” Mizuki gestured on her body, one hand beneath her chest, the other a few inches below her belly button. “I don’t think I saw that.”

“Summers can get hot, especially outside the city proper,” said Alfric with a shrug. “Much more common at the beaches, or close to them, you hardly see it in the city.”

“And do you think this is like that?” asked Mizuki. “Or just dungeons being weird?”

“Definitely dungeons being weird,” said Alfric. “It’s one of those things where a lot of people think the Editors had tried to make the dungeons into places with a lot of useful things, and just failed. Some things come out fine most of the time, other things almost always come out a bit wonky and need some work to salvage.”

“Forks,” said Mizuki. “It’s always one too many tines, or one too few, or they’re too long, or too short, and it’s like one in ten that are just normal.”

“Yeah,” said Alfric. “I don’t think we’ve ever had a major miss on an entad, but they do happen, especially with armor. Less with weapons, I’m not sure why. You’d think that they’d end up poorly balanced, but,” he shrugged.

“Editors spent more time on it?” asked Mizuki.

“No one really knows,” said Alfric. “I think there have been some attempts at looking at a truly insane number of similar objects from dungeons to find a pattern, but given local conditions and the party itself will have an effect on what comes out, it’s really difficult.”

Mizuki looked at the entads they’d pulled out. They had six of them. For the number of rooms they’d gone through in the “back half” of the dungeon, after the octopus, it was an absolute pittance. There was a dagger with a weirdly forked tip, a single gauntlet without a match, a bottle whose neck had a loop, a thin silver needle, a quill made from an oversized feather, and an oak door that had barely fit into the chest. The door hadn’t been in its frame when they’d found it, it had been sitting up against a wall, as though someone had meant to install it and then never gotten around to it.

“So, technically they never said that we needed to wait on entad testing, right?” asked Mizuki.

“Technically, no,” said Alfric. She looked at him, worried that she was going to see a disapproving look. “And we are going to be testing approximately a hundred lutes.”

“Nice,” said Mizuki. “Nice.”

“Dibs on the door,” said Alfric.

Mizuki opened her mouth to object, then looked at the other items. “Gauntlet,” she finally said.

Alfric lifted the door up and moved it to a doorway, while Mizuki picked up the gauntlet. It was one of those entads that resized to the wearer: when they’d first picked it up in the dungeon, the gauntlet’s fingers had shortened considerably and one of them had disappeared, leaving only the normal amount. She had felt a powerful urge to put it on, maybe over her armor, but she hadn’t wanted to put more stress on Alfric, and slowing down a dungeon rush with entad testing would definitely have caused a fight.

Mizuki moved the gauntlet from hand to hand, and watched as it reformed itself. The fingers changed their lengths to suit the hand that was holding it, and the metal thumb disappeared while a new thumb emerged from the side of the hand. It seemed like a lot of magic, just for the sake of convenience. That kind of alteration was beyond the powers of sorcs or wizards, at least so far as she knew.

She put the gauntlet on her right hand. It fit better than any piece of clothing had ever fit her in her entire life. It was snug and tight like a second skin, and it didn’t seem to matter that the interior was some variety of leather or that the scaled metal should have been inhibiting the movements of her fingers. There were perks that came with entads sometimes, little things that made them superior to anything else you could wear, though sadly not all entads had them, and not always to the same extent.

The gauntlet practically hummed with power. She could see the magic of it. It wanted to be used. It was practically begging her to spread her fingers wide and point it at something, or to make a fist and let out a big blast of … something. Sometimes entads just flat out told you what they did, offering guidance on the power inside them, but this one didn’t go that far, and Mizuki was somewhat grateful, because then she’d have had to skip over the fun part.

“I’m going outside to blast something,” Mizuki called. Alfric had gone somewhere, taking the door with him, but she thought she’d have heard something over the party channel if his disappearance had been magical. Sure enough, he was somewhere else in the house, and called back a distracted ‘yeah’.

Mizuki got on her shoes and walked out past the garden, wondering what she should blast. She decided against one of the trees, which took ages to grow, and went looking for a likely rock. What she found was mostly a nice sort of moss-coated rock though, and she settled for a fallen branch, which she propped up. She took aim at it, holding her gauntleted right hand with her free left hand, then realized how close she was to it and backed up a bit.

The energy came out through the palm of the gauntlet, whose fingertips were glowing green. A beam of concentrated green light moved through the air with a thrum of awesome power, then stopped, with steam or mist or smoke coming up from the gauntlet’s center.

Mizuki looked at the branch. It was entirely unharmed. She looked down at the gauntlet, which was still smoking slightly, and it was smoke. She could smell it. She looked at the branch again, and realized that it had turned green in one spot. On closer inspection, as Mizuki got near, it was a bright green, almost obnoxious.

Mizuki blasted the branch again, then a rock, then a patch of dirt, and finally her fingers, which she realized was probably a bad idea the moment after she’d done it. It turned all those things green, and yes, that included her pinky and ring fingers on her left hand. She tried shaping the energy that came from the gauntlet, tried altering it, tried all kinds of things, but it was always the beam of green light, and it always seemed to make things green. She tried different hand shapes too, fingers apart, in a fist, pointing, and it didn’t seem to matter.

Mizuki was annoyed. She felt like there was a trick or a catch to it. It was so cool when it felt like it was charging up to something, and the wisp of acrid smoke afterward was what she’d always felt like a fireball should leave behind. The gauntlet really did seem like it just made things green though.

She tromped back to the house to see if Alfric was having equally bad luck, but he was in the living room, staring at the door with a frown.

“No luck?” she asked.

“Not yet,” said Alfric. “If we didn’t have Filera, my next step would be to build a door frame for it, because it doesn’t quite fit in any of the frames in your house.” He pointed to the side of it. “It came with its own hinges, and I pounded in some nails to put it in the closest frame that fit — which Hannah will have to fix — but it didn’t do anything. It’s got some kind of secret.”

“Might be something not door related,” said Mizuki. She took off the gauntlet and set it down with the others. “The gauntlet makes things green.”

“Green?” asked Alfric. He finally looked at her, then pointed at her hand. “You used it on yourself.”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. She held up her green fingers in a little salute. “The price we pay for entad testing.”

Alfric laughed. “Well, we’ve got four left. Let’s see if we’ve got better luck.”

Chapter 131 - A Herd of Children

Verity had never really been around children, even when she was a child herself. She didn’t have any brothers or sisters, though she didn’t really know why that was the case, and neither of her parents had come from very large families, which meant that she hadn’t spent all that much time with cousins either. The closest she’d come to attending a proper school had been the conservatory, but she’d been old enough to feel like her own person by that point. Before that, she’d mostly just had private tutors and nannies.

Pucklechurch’s school was small, like everything was in the little town aside from the church. There were roughly fifteen students in each class, with their own room, teacher, and helper. The way things were set up, each teacher would be with the class for their entire education unless they moved away or went to get more education elsewhere. The room, then, would be the home to those students for a significant part of their lives.

Mrs. Colfield had gone into labor not too long ago, leaving her helper, Miss White, as the sole instructor of the five and six year olds. Miss White had put out a call for people to come help for the duration of Mrs. Colfield’s maternity leave, which might be as much as four months, if she wanted it. More likely it would be back in less than two, with the baby wrapped up and carried next to her chest, growing up as a part of the classroom until around three or four years old, when he would go join one of the other classes.

Isra and Verity came into the classroom together, and the children immediately erupted into cheers. A little girl with pigtails was the first to wrap Isra in a hug, but a lot of them piled in around her, either trying to hug her at the same time, or being more polite and waiting their turn. A boy with jet black hair stood back slightly and looked Verity up and down.

“Hello,” she said to him.

“Bob,” he said. His eyes went to her lute, which she had strapped around her back.

“I’m Verity Parson,” said Verity, placing a hand on her chest. “It’s nice to meet you.”

He turned and walked away, apparently having lost interest.

Verity waited expectantly for introductions, either from Miss White or Isra, but no introductions seemed to be forthcoming, and the children had circled Isra to take her to show their creations.

“Verity, was it?” asked Miss White. Verity wasn’t sure why she was surprised, but Miss White was young, maybe even her own age. She had the characteristic wide nose that marked Chelxic heritage, and her skin was a darker shade, though she was also sun-beaten in a way that called to mind a farmer.

“Yes,” nodded Verity. “I hope you don’t mind. I thought that if you were looking for help, I might be able to give a bit of a reprieve.”

“It’s extremely welcome,” said Miss White. She looked over at Isra. “She’s so good with them.”

Verity watched. Isra was good with them, which had somehow been unexpected. In Verity’s mind, the children liked her because of the animals, but there were no animals around, and the children were happily chattering, showing her various things that they’d found outdoors, or craft projects that they’d made, or in at least one case, recounting a story from a book they were holding. The child looked up after every word or two, to make sure that Isra was still listening. Isra was happy and enthusiastic with these children, smiling and bright, coming alive in a way that stirred something in Verity. There was a song somewhere in there.

“I was thinking that I would play a song,” said Verity. “If that would be alright?”

Miss White nodded. “We have story time in not too long, and sometimes there’s a song then. Were you planning to use bardic magic?”

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “Would that be alright?”

“Just try not to rile them up,” said Miss White. There was an awareness to her, a way that she was watching the children as they flocked around Isra, as though she was keeping every single one of the fifteen children in her head at once. Verity couldn’t help but compare it to a conductor watching an orchestra, but she thought the metaphor was probably not that good, because conductors didn’t typically need to rush over to talk one of the performers through a crying fit.

The black-haired boy came over to Verity and stood next to her, watching her. She thought his name was probably Bob, but that seemed like a funny name for a child, and he had only said it, ‘Bob’, so possibly he’d meant something else. Verity crouched down, taking a knee, so she was on his level.

“Hello. Bob, was it?” she asked.

He nodded. “Are you a wizard?” he asked.

“Um, no,” said Verity. “That is, not really. I’m a bard.”

“What’s that thing?” he asked, pointing at the lute.

“This,” said Verity, swinging it around to show him. “Is a lute. It’s a special entad lute that lets you play a lot of layered music at once, so when you pluck one string it’s like plucking a lot of strings.” She took the lute from her strap and held it out. “Do you want to pluck it?”

He plucked a string, then did a clumsy strum of it while she held it. He had a look of concentration on his face, like he was going to figure out lutes in the space of a few minutes.

“Here,” said Verity. She found a chair and sat in it, then held the lute in its proper position. “When you place your fingers here,” she pressed down. “You change how the lute sounds.” She demonstrated for him, a D, then a G. “And if you just strum your lute while you change the notes, that’s really all there is to music.”

Bob was watching her with hard eyes, as though he didn’t believe her. Miss White was mediating an argument, and Isra was sitting on the floor, braiding a girl’s hair while others waited their turn and played with her.

“You can play songs?” asked Bob.

“I can,” nodded Verity. “I think I’m going to play one in a little bit, for the class.”

“Can you play one now?” asked Bob.

Verity considered that. “I can, yes. What would you like a song about?”

“What songs do you know?” asked Bob.

“Um,” said Verity, considering that. “I know hundreds of songs, or I can make one up, if you’d prefer.” She drummed her fingers against the lute. “Give me a topic?”

“A topic?” asked Bob.

“What should the song be about?” asked Verity.

He had seemed like a serious boy, in a way that appealed to Verity, like a small, uncertain person, but after a moment of thinking he broke out into giggles and looked at her with a soft smile. “Farts,” he said, almost at a whisper. His eyes had lit up.

Verity considered this and strummed the lute once, finding a melody and devising some couplets.

My melodies are works of art,
But can’t compare to when I fart.

My girlfriend calls me ‘pretty lass’,
But makes a face when I pass gas.

I’m very smart, they don’t dispute,
But I displease them when I toot.

I charm the children of the class,
They giggle as I pass my gas.

When someone looks at my caboose,
I smile at them and let one loose.

My group of friends I’ve often thinned,
Because I love to break some wind.

When dungeons feel so grim and bleak,
I give out a one-cheek squeak.

I feel the pressure near my rump,
And then I give a mighty trump.

And when I’ve eaten too much corn,
I need to blow my bottom horn.

It went on rather longer than she had intended, and toward the end of it, she had gathered an entire collection of giggling kids. It was a very different crowd from the ones she normally played to, and it was fun to let the song hang for a moment of anticipation so they could get excited for the second half of the couplet. By the second half of the song, they were trying to anticipate the lyrics, poorly, and there was more laughter from them whenever Verity came in.

She finished the song with a flourish, and the children looked at her expectantly, so she started a new song, this one not at all about farts, but rather comparing the children to crops. She would strum the lute and ask them their names, then try desperately to find a rhyme, which sometimes required cheating with a slant rhyme or just switching their name to some other place within the lyric so it didn’t need to be rhymed at all.

The second song led to a third, and then to a fourth, and Verity realized that she could end up singing for them for the entire day. For the fifth song she sang about two rival princesses that ended up falling in love, and for this one, she wove magic into it, excitement and wonder. She wasn’t sure whether bardic magic was strong on children, but there was a way she could see it washing across their faces that didn’t happen with adults. Perhaps children were simply less restrained in showing their emotions.

When she finished, she gently put her lute away. “Now, I enjoyed singing songs for you, and will do it again sometime, if you’re all good.”

“Thank you,” said Miss White. “Class, please give a round of applause for Miss Parson.”

It was one of the smallest, cutest rounds of applause that Verity had ever gotten, with tiny hands enthusiastically slapping together. It was just about the furthest thing from a concert in Dondrian as you could possibly get.

There wasn’t that much of school hours left, so Verity and Isra got to sit with the children for snack time, which was sliced tomatoes with salt and black pepper, along with slices of bread with yellow butter. The children gobbled it and Miss White tried to keep them from making too big of a mess, but the mess seemed expected, because there was an entire stack of napkins and a washbasin with a stepladder propped up next to it. Verity watched the children as they went about their business. They were small, but they had learned to wait in lines and take turns mostly without a fuss.

When the children left, some of them with older brothers or sisters, others walking on their own, Verity was given hugs, and promises were extracted from her: she would come back, she would sing more songs, and she would let them braid her hair.

“You didn’t use the animals at all,” said Verity, once the children had left and it was just Isra and Miss White.

“No,” said Isra. “They like animals, but I’ve shown them off one too many times, and it’s hard to control an animal when there are so many small hands trying to touch them.”

“Help to clean up?” asked Miss White.

They did. The room was surprisingly clean, Verity had thought, though the small tables needed to be wiped down, the chairs needed to be put up, and there was still some putting away. Verity had helped to clean up the tavern more than once, when Cynthia was short-handed, and it was no different than that. Tomato juice and bread crumbs had spilled onto the floor, and these were mopped up and cleaned in the small sink. It was the sort of thing that Verity wouldn’t have dreamed of doing a year ago, even when she had thought about children of her own. That had been a different life, and if there ever had been partnership, and children, they’d have been raised largely by maids.

“I do think the fart song was a bit much,” said Miss White. “But I appreciate the help, and the children loved it.”

“It was our pleasure,” said Isra.

They made some arrangements for later, and Verity stood off to one side, not wanting to commit to that, not until she knew how Isra was feeling about them having been together. They hadn’t really talked, because the children were always wanting their attention. The time had flown by.

They walked home together — or to Isra’s home, or Mizuki’s home, or whatever it actually was. It felt like old times.

“We never really talked about children,” said Verity.

Isra gave a little laugh. “Add it to the list.”

They walked together again for just a little bit, silent.

“What list?” asked Verity.

“The list of things we didn’t talk about,” said Isra.

“Ah,” said Verity.

There was silence again. “And that we still haven’t talked about,” said Isra. She hardly wore her headscarf anymore, only really on temple days, and her curls bounced free as they walked. The new look, which wasn’t even all that new anymore, had taken time to get used to, and there was still something that Verity missed about the old Isra.

“Do we need to talk?” asked Verity.

Isra pursed her lips. Her eyes were on the road. “Do you like children?”

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “They get in your space more than I’m comfortable with. They’re very … touchy. But they are cute. I wanted to say ‘in a few years’, but …” She had no idea what to follow that with. It would require a serious relationship of some kind, the sort that she’d never been in before, except with Isra. She couldn’t conceive of getting into a relationship like that while still in Pucklechurch, mostly because the options were so limited.

“We’re both single children,” said Isra.

“Only children,” said Verity.

“Right,” nodded Isra. “Thank you.”

“It’s no problem,” said Verity. There was another pause in their conversation. At least they were talking again. “You had said you wanted to be a mother, some time back. I had never really — we should have talked about it then, maybe.”

“Maybe,” shrugged Isra. “Incidentally, I think then I said I’d seen a herd of children, which is the wrong way of saying it, but also, I realized that what I’d actually seen was a teacher with her — herd does feel like the right word, when there are so many. Flock? I had somehow got it in my head that these fifteen or so children all belonged to this one woman, as though she’d had a litter or something.”

Verity nodded. “Understandable.”

“Is it?” asked Isra with a little laugh. “You’re so nice about it, but it is ridiculous.”

“No, no,” said Verity. “You saw these women from time to time with fifteen or so children, and you had never gone to school or really known that much about it, so —” a laugh escaped her, “So you just thought that this was a woman who,” another laugh, “who had a lot of children, fifteen of them all at once, just a whole litter of children, and you,” she bit her lip, “you accept that as one of those things that,” she shook her head and couldn’t help herself from laughing. It was funnier because she was trying to be serious. Isra seemed to take it in good cheer though. “I mean, you know that women only have two nipples, right? Even for a sow, that would be a lot.”

“They could feed in shifts,” said Isra. “Look, I can’t say that it made a whole lot of sense, but I did figure it out on my own. I think at the time I was just hoping that I would have one of the smaller litters, because it did seem like a bit much.”

“Well, I think you’ll make a fine mother,” said Verity. It made her feel warm to say it.

“And you don’t think the same of yourself?” asked Isra.

“I don’t know,” said Verity. There were complicated feelings lurking below the surface, and she didn’t want to prod at them at just that moment. She had enjoyed being with the children, and with Isra, and didn’t want to dredge up anything unpleasant.

“I think you’d make a great mother,” said Isra. “So long as you had someone to counterbalance you.”

“Counterbalance?” asked Verity.

“Someone less serious,” said Isra. “Less prone to melancholy?”

“I sang a song about farts,” said Verity, rolling her eyes.

Isra gave her a light punch on the shoulder. “You know exactly what I mean. Serious, studious Verity, that’s the sort of thing where, for a child, I think that maybe it wouldn’t be as good.”

“Hrm,” said Verity. She kicked a small rock on the path, sending it into the woods.

“My own father was like that,” said Isra. “Not cold, but always easier to relate to when we were doing things together. Hunting, trapping, gardening, housework, teaching me to read, it was all easier for him than the other things. I’ve been talking about it with Hannah.”

“Ah,” said Verity. “And you think that’s the sort of mother I would be.” It made her feel slightly uncomfortable, though she didn’t disagree.

“I don’t know,” said Isra. She shook her head, and Verity watched the bounce of the brown curls. “We’re eighteen years old, we’re not static creatures that will never change. At least, according to Hannah. Maybe she doesn’t know.”

“I’ve been talking to her too,” said Verity. “She does think people can change, and I suppose the clerics would know. Most of what she says isn’t about changing though, it’s about … finding that balance inside of yourself, or creating it.”

Isra nodded. “Can I say that I’m glad we’re not a couple? Is that rude?”

“It is rude, a bit,” said Verity. And it did hurt, but she felt it too. “I hope we’re both better off for it.”

“You could move back into the house,” said Isra. “It would make things easier.”

“I might,” said Verity. “I worry it would be too … familiar.”

They reached the house. Verity had been anxious that Isra would ask a question about mating, and how they both felt about that, and she wasn’t sure that she had any good answer to it. She missed it, obviously, and if Isra had propositioned her, she would almost certainly have said yes, but there had been a growing feeling, especially after the last dungeon, that she needed to understand herself better.

Isra didn’t ask though, so they were spared the conversation.

When they came into the house, the living room was a disaster, piled up with dungeon things. The couch had been pushed to one side, and Mizuki was draped over it, flopped down. Her head was in Alfric’s lap, and he was stroking her hair.

“Don’t touch the needle,” said Mizuki. She gestured toward a small silver needle laying on the floor. “Makes you drunk.”

Alfric let out a sigh. “Just tipsy,” he said.

“Unless you get poked twice,” said Mizuki. She harumphed. “I’m not making dinner, hope brunch was enough.”

“I’ll cook,” said Isra with a glance at the kitchen. “Why would you prick yourself with a needle?”

“Testing,” said Mizuki, not moving from Alfric’s lap. “Glorious testing.”

“Are your fingers green?” asked Verity.

“Testing, I said,” replied Mizuki.

“Why would you poke yourself with the needle twice?” asked Isra.

“Oh no,” said Mizuki. “They don’t seem to understand the word ‘testing’ anymore. Do you think that’s what the quill did? Because you wrote down ‘test’, and —”

“Shh,” said Alfric, still stroking her hair. She quieted. It wasn’t clear to Verity how much of a joke any of that had been.

“We could put the needle on a stick,” said Mizuki. Her words were exaggerated and slow. “So it’s a tiny spear. Drunk monsters.”

“I’ll figure out dinner then,” said Isra. She turned to Verity. “Are you staying?”

“I think so, yes,” she replied. “I need to practice though.”

Isra nodded, and they went their separate ways.

It was, Verity reflected, possibly the last time she would ever play the lute she’d gotten from Grig. Among the hundred lutes they’d pulled from the dungeon there was surely something better, though she had no idea what her dream lute would look like. With the finger flute, she would be able to play all kinds of exotic arrangements of strings with relative ease, and as she thought of that, she realized that she hadn’t shown her extra fingers off to the children. There was always next time, she supposed, if there was a next time.

She sang a song about children, pushing herself on the complexity and taking in pieces from old symphonies to play with. It was good practice, more than the simple things she could improvise, and it felt good to push against her limits like that, stretching the fingers to places they hadn’t been in a bit too long. She thought up new lyrics, and wrote them down in her little book, which was getting quite full of songs. It would be better to get a book with its own lines for the music, and she thought that she might do that once this one was full. Between her songs, Hannah’s religious meditations, and Alfric’s dungeon reports, there would be three extremely different reflections on the dungeons.

She did write down the fart song, or at least what she remembered of it. Alfric had told her that she should take the book that scribed their words around with her, so she could copy lyrics from it verbatim, and she was starting to agree.

A half hour later, dinner was ready. There was no sign of Hannah, but they didn’t ask in the party channel, in part because she might be occupied with other matters. Mizuki had only sobered up a bit, though slumped in front of her food, and Alfric seemed somewhat tipsy still. He ate slowly and with little coordination.

“It’s very good,” said Verity, after she’d taken her first bite. Isra had made a somewhat simple meal of chicken, potatoes, and asparagus.

“It’s wonderful,” said Mizuki. “I hate cooking.” She had only taken a single bite.

“You don’t hate cooking,” said Alfric. “You’re just drunk.”

“We’re sure that this isn’t some other poison?” asked Verity. “Because if you’ve poisoned yourselves —”

“Nah,” said Alfric. “I know this feeling. And it’s clearing, slowly, for both of us.”

“I can confirm, actually,” said Isra. “Did you just forget about that?”

Alfric blinked, slowly. “Right.”

“It’s alcohol,” said Isra.

“Drunk monsters!” said Mizuki.

“We’ll get you to bed early,” said Isra. “You can sleep it off.”

“You know, I actually like the taste of wine?” asked Mizuki. “And to get poked? And just feel like this? Not really a fan of it.” She had hardly eaten anything and was picking at it with the Anyspoon, which really wasn’t the right utensil. “I think I’m off wine.”

“Now now,” said Verity. “Let’s not make any drastic decisions.”

“If I have a hangover I’m going to kill that needle,” said Mizuki.

Verity ate, and then when she was finished, helped Mizuki up to her room. It was sometimes amazing just how small and light Mizuki was, for all the raw power at her fingertips. As they went up the stairs, Verity was doing most of the work, and she sang a small song to boost her own strength. When they got to Mizuki’s room, she flopped down into bed.

“Too early for bed,” said Mizuki. “I’m fine.” Her expressions were slow and exaggerated.

“Just rest,” said Verity. “I’ll get you some water. You’ll be fine in … how many glasses do you think it was?”

“Felt like four,” said Mizuki. “Almost all at once. Huge glasses. Five.”

“Right,” said Verity. “We’ll get you taken care of, you’ll be in fine spirits.”

“I’m hungry,” said Mizuki. “I need to get started on dinner.”

“Isra made dinner, you ate almost nothing,” said Verity. “I can bring your plate up.”

“It was a joke,” said Mizuki. She let out a barking laugh. “Gods.”

“Did you want that plate?” asked Verity.

“Yes, please,” said Mizuki. She let out a sigh and seemed like she was going to move, but didn’t.

Verity got a glass of water from the tank in the kitchen, then picked up Mizuki’s plate. Alfric had eaten his full meal and was laid out on the couch, and Isra was talking to him. She gave Verity a quick nod, then turned back to Alfric, who seemed to be going on about potential uses for the silver needle. He was loose, not drunk, but he never had terribly much wine, and it was nice of Isra to stay with him while he shook it off. Verity expected that he’d be back to normal in another hour.

When she got back upstairs, Mizuki had fallen asleep, so Verity rubbed her back, gently, and laid both the plate and the glass of water on the side table. There had been precious few times in her life when she’d taken care of someone, and it felt good. Taking care of the children, for all that she’d done anything, had felt good too. Her mind kept going back to the idea of motherhood, and what that would be like.

“Keep rubbin’,” said Mizuki, who was apparently not entirely out.

“My mother always said that I would understand her better when I had a child of my own,” said Verity.

“I’m twenty-two,” said Mizuki.

“Hush,” said Verity. “You don’t know what you’re saying.” She made to pull away.

“Nope, keep rubbin’,” said Mizuki. Her face was half against the sheets.

“A part of me thinks that she was right,” said Verity. “I actually am very good at playing the lute, and I doubt that I’d be nearly so good if I hadn’t spent so very much of my childhood on it, if my mother hadn’t set me in place and forced me through it. I can’t imagine doing that to a child though, not one who hates it. Perhaps I’m soft. Maybe I’ll understand when I have children.”

“Maybe one of the lutes,” said Mizuki.

“Hrm?” asked Verity.

“To help you get pregnant,” said Mizuki.

“Ah,” said Verity. “That … would be the kind of entad testing that could go very wrong.”

“Feed me,” said Mizuki.

“I’m not doing that,” said Verity.

“Come on,” moaned Mizuki. “Just some chicken in my mouth.” She opened her mouth, the corner of which was half-pressed against the sheets, and she stuck out a pink tongue.

“I’m going downstairs,” said Verity. “Sit up, drink some water, get some rest, you’ll be right as rain in not too long.”

“I’ll remember this,” said Mizuki. “Next time you’re drunk. No chicken in your mouth, missy.” She let out a sigh.

There was a knock on the door, and Verity got up from the bed. She thought that if Mizuki was going to puke, it would have happened already, and that she was capable of teasing and joking was a sign that she was sobering up, though she really should have had some water.

When Verity came down the steps, Isra was already at the door, which was already open.

It was Cate, the Seeker of Secrets from Plenarch, again.

“Twenty thousand rings each,” Isra said. Verity desperately hoped that this wasn’t the start of their conversation.

“Done,” said Cate. “I’m to understand that Alfric has an account at a bank in Plenarch, and will transfer the money there. We can wait for me to take possession until you have some confirmation, which will take quite some time, or we can have me take possession now, with my assurance. Obviously I would prefer the latter.”

“They’re larger,” said Isra. “Can you feed them? Keep them?”

“I can,” nodded Cate.

“They fly,” said Isra. “You can keep them contained?”

“Yes,” said Cate.

“But also make sure that they fly free?” asked Isra.

“I’m well-equipped to hire a druid, if there’s need,” said Cate. “I solemnly promise that I’ll take good care of them.”

“Are we sure about this?” asked Verity, hoping that she wasn’t imposing.

“It was discussed,” said Isra, glancing back. Her demeanor remained frosty. “I was charged with finding a good price.”

“And I have not attempted negotiation,” said Cate. “Sixty thousand in total, for the three of them. They’ll be kept together, obviously, if they like each others’ company.”

“They do,” said Isra.

Cate reached inside her long robes and pulled forth a small box made of birch wood, which couldn’t possibly have fit in there and still kept her austere silhouette. She placed the box upon the ground and opened it up. Inside was a swirl of white mist.

“They’ll fit through here?” asked Cate, gesturing at the box’s dimensions.

“Barely,” said Isra. “They have grown.” She stared at the box for a moment. “They’re in the bathtub upstairs. They pile in there, because they like how the cool enamel feels. I’ll bring them down.”

That this was done without going upstairs herself went without saying, and the three dragons were soon making their way down the stairs, nails clacking against the wooden steps. They had grown, becoming less cute in the process. They weren’t quite adults, but the eyes were smaller relative to their heads, and they had the sleek look of predators — though they still ate herbs, and Isra thought they always would. Verity thought of them as being three large cats, though they now towered over Tabbins, who was himself an oversized and overweight cat, and one who would still scurry away from them.

<I’m selling the herb dragons to Cate,> said Isra into the party channel.

<Oh,> said Mizuki, but that was all.

<Tell her to take good care of them,> said Alfric.

<Already done,> said Isra.

<I’d hoped to see them off,> said Hannah. <But at least we’ll have our bathtub back.>

It felt like there should have been more ceremony to it, but the dragons slipped down into the open box, one by one, consumed by the mist. Their orderliness about it was Isra’s doing. They were careful never to call it mind control, but in moments like this, it was hard not to think of it as that.

“Very well,” said Cate, once all three had slipped in. She closed the box. “I can stay for a bit, if you’d like to talk.”

“Are they safe, in there?” asked Isra.

“Incredibly so,” said Cate. She lifted the box and slipped it into her robe, where it seemed to disappear.

“We don’t need to talk,” said Isra. She glanced at Verity, then back at Cate. “I think it’s better if you just go.”

Cate nodded. “Thank you for your business then. I’d say that it was a pleasure, but it’s been one of the more protracted bits of waiting I’ve had to do recently, so I’ll only say that I’m pleased it’s settled.”

“The money, sixty thousand rings, through the banks,” said Isra. Her voice was stern.

“I’m a woman of my word,” nodded Cate. “And I’ll take my leave, unless you dig up another treasure or monster.”

Verity tried to be pleasant about it, but there was some bitterness in the air as Cate departed, and when it was over, Isra went into the dining room to sit at the table.

“I didn’t like that,” said Isra when Verity came in.

“We didn’t need to,” said Verity.

“They were going to grow more,” said Isra. “Two years to full maturity. We would have had trouble with them in the winter. They were eating too many herbs, bales of them, which we’d need grazing land for, or all of the growthstones, which were meant for funds. Without me, they would have been a problem. They were a problem, because we kept needing to have someone come over to watch them when we went off for a dungeon. And we did agree.”

“It needed to be done,” Verity nodded.

“We didn’t tell her their names,” said Isra.

“I think she knew, from one time when she came over,” said Verity. “She’s been incredibly persistent.”

“I thought she would negotiate more,” said Isra. “Or say that the price was too high.”

“Regrets?” asked Verity. She wondered if the price really had been too high. Isra might have set it there, hoping that Cate would walk.

Isra frowned. “No regrets.” She was silent for a moment. “I never had pets. I had animals that I knew, that I had relationships with, but they weren’t pets. I wasn’t responsible for them. I liked having the dragons. They were cute.”

“When they would lap up their tea,” nodded Verity.

“When they’d have a new herb for the first time, the way they’d sniff at it,” said Isra.

“Wrestling in front of the fireplace,” said Verity.

“Sleeping in the bathtub,” said Isra.

“That was considerably less cute when I needed to take a bath,” said Verity.

“You should have been born a druid,” said Isra. “That’s where your life went wrong.”

Verity laughed, but it was something to consider.

There was a knock on the door. Isra and Verity looked at each other, then went to answer it together. Of course they thought that it would be Cate, back on some business, maybe to return the herb dragons, which could be a bit unruly when they didn’t have Isra influencing them. It was too soon though, and instead of Cate, it was Mizuki’s wizard friend, Kell.

“Is Mizuki home?” he asked. There was hope written on his face.

“Home, but quite drunk,” said Verity. “I don’t think she’s in a fit state for company.”

“Drunk?” asked Kell. He looked up at the position of the sun, which had yet to set.

“Entad testing,” Verity explained, which she somehow thought was riotously funny.

“Ah,” said Kell. “Can you tell her that I stopped by? Are you all busy tomorrow?”

“We’ll tell her,” said Verity. “Our dungeon was a success, by the way.”

“I know,” said Kell. “Marsh said. I wanted to give my congratulations.”

“Thank you,” said Verity, but after a moment she realized that he meant he wanted to give his congratulations to Mizuki. “I’ll tell her you came.”

“Thanks,” nodded Kell. He knocked against the door frame, frowning for a moment, then looking up. “Can you tell her that I need to see her? Just some life choices that I need to make. It can wait a day or two.”

“I could run and get her,” said Verity. “Or have you go on up. She’s really not in a good state though.” That was the proper thing to say, when someone was indisposed.

“It’s fine,” said Kell, sighing slightly. “I shouldn’t have come unannounced, I know better.” He looked behind him, down the path that led away from the house. “Sorry, I won’t take up more of your time, I just wanted to hear about the dungeon firsthand, and — I’ll have it from her later.”

“If you need someone to talk to, I’m available,” said Isra.

Kell looked at her. “I — I appreciate the offer. I’ll be off though, and leave the two of you alone.”

For a moment he looked like he wanted to stay, but then he gave them a bow and trotted off down the path, taking his slingshot from his pocket as he left.

“I wish he’d come in to talk,” said Isra.

“Why?” asked Verity. It felt callous as soon as she had said it, but she resisted the urge to claw it back with honeyed words.

“I don’t know,” said Isra. She shrugged. “Just a feeling. Maybe it’s dealing with the children, but I feel like I have advice to give and help to offer. He needs more than just Mizuki and Vertex as his friends. I wish that when I had been alone, someone would have seen that and invited me into their home.”

“I’m glad we’re friends again,” said Verity. “Not that we ever weren’t, but — you know.”

“I do,” nodded Isra. For a moment it felt like they might hug, but then it didn’t happen, maybe because it would have brought up too many feelings to have their bodies pressed against each other. Instead, Isra looked toward the house. “Maybe we should do some work in the living room, or I’m worried that we’ll never get it back.”

“Alright,” nodded Verity. “Let’s get things ready for lute testing.”

Chapter 132 - Lutes

Hannah was obsessive by nature.

That was common among clerics, for the obvious reason that when the obsession was focused on a god it was easier to be ‘with’ them all the time, spending hour upon hour in prayer and study, deepening the connection, exploring the borders, and talking with others. It was hard to become an established cleric if you didn’t have a desire to live, breathe, and eat like one, and the first year in seminary was where most people washed out, since the schedule was grueling and the worship monotonous if you didn’t have the ability to throw your entire self at it.

Garos wasn’t Hannah’s only obsession though, not by a mile. She’d been obsessed with baking when she was in the seminary, enough that she’d been pulled aside and talked to about it, and she kept being drawn to the kitchen, time after time, especially when there was a new recipe to try, or ingredient to figure out, or some kind of occasion that demanded something special. The obsession with baking had waned, eventually, and she baked no more than four or five times a week now, but at her peak, it had been multiple times a day, one loaf of bread after the other, limited mostly by oven space. She’d imagined opening up a bakery, if being a cleric proved not to work for her.

Dungeons had been another obsession, especially in that first month, but the pace wasn’t fast enough to sustain her, and she chewed through all the meat on that bone so quickly that it didn’t seem like there was anything left. She’d put some of her energy into the book, which was at the intersection of two obsessions, but even that hadn’t been enough. She’d read dungeon reports, talked to other dungeoneers, and so on, but Alfric was the only one who had any real interest, and talking to him about dungeons was just about the worst thing you could talk to him about. There was just so little real discussion to be had, since he was an absolute authority and seemed to have covered every single angle within his own mind. It was the least fun, least engaging subject, at least when she was trying to have a back and forth.

Marsh was Hannah’s current obsession, and he seemed equally obsessed with her.

“You’re beautiful,” he said as he ran his fingers through her hair.

“You always say that,” she replied. She was running her fingers through his hair as well, though on his chest.

“It’s always true,” said Marsh.

“We should get dressed,” said Hannah.

“You always say that,” said Marsh.

“It’s always true,” she replied, leaning forward to kiss him on the nose.

There were warm and gooey feelings, butterflies in her stomach and an instant brightening of her day when she saw him. More and more, she was sharing those feelings with him. They felt odd to speak out loud, unnatural, maybe because they left her vulnerable in a way that she wasn’t used to. It was hard to do clerical analysis on herself though, and the practice was widely discouraged anyhow. It was hard to be objective about your own self, difficult to stand back from your emotions. Not impossible, but also not recommended, lest you think you understood yourself better than you truly did.

Most of their time was spent in a new entad that had bound to Marsh, a large ring that could be placed on the ground to make an extradimensional space. Once it had sat there a bit, you could climb down a long ladder to get to a small earthen den, which was almost as large as Hannah’s sizable bedroom. Marsh had slowly been stocking it, which was difficult given the narrow hole, but the way he figured it, the hoop and its room would be with him for the rest of his life. He’d asked her to come along to pick out a quilt, and she’d had some input, which meant that it felt like it was her quilt too, and her den too, and like it might be a part of her life forever. She had a section of the den that had a few of her things, like the holy book of Garos, a change of clothes, a bit of perfume that she’d picked up on a whim in Dondrian — definitely not her normal thing, but Marsh liked it — and a thin notebook to fill with thoughts when she had some spare time.

“We should do something today,” said Marsh as they emerged from the den. He always let her go first, though she suspected that he just liked looking at her butt.

“Entad testin’ today,” said Hannah. “I wasn’t there yesterday, and they ended up gettin’ drunk off a needle. Besides, there are a hundred lutes to get through, which’ll be no mean feat.”

“This is fair,” nodded Marsh. “I suppose I can go find something to do with myself.”

“I could ask if it’s alright to bring you,” Hannah offered. “Normally we take turns and make a thing of it, but with a hundred to get through, I imagine it’ll take most of the day.”

“No, I’ll go spend some time with the party,” said Marsh. “They already make fun of me for how much time I spend with you.”

“Aw,” said Hannah. “Do you need me to go bully them?”

Marsh laughed. “Just Josen,” he said. “And not because he’s said anything. To be honest, I think they tease me because they’re jealous, and they know I like it.”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “Well, then shall we go our separate ways? I had a good night, as always, but said I would be back after breakfast.”

He gave her a long kiss. “I’ll miss you every moment we’re apart.”

“You’re too mushy for your own good,” said Hannah. Even with the kiss done, their faces were close to each other, noses touching. “But I love you for it.”

“I love you too,” he breathed.

“Go, now, before I change my mind,” said Hannah.

Sometimes she did change her mind, and sometimes they would keep kissing for a bit, with their goodbye taking half a bell. This time he moved away, picking up his hoop and walking off, which was a slight disappointment. She watched him go nonetheless, and waited until he’d disappeared from view to make her own way home.

She had no idea what she was going to do once Vertex or the Settlers were ready to move on for greener pastures. In part, she was hoping that some entad they’d found would allow a solution.

When she got to the house, breakfast was in full swing, which meant she was a touch late. Still, there was plenty of food, and she could eat quickly when she needed to. Mizuki had taken some obvious influence from the brunch the day before, and there were mashed potato fritters with something that was similar to an egg souffle. Aside from those two, there was an enormous amount of fresh fruit, and Hannah ate what was left.

“Alright!” said Mizuki, slapping the table. “Lutes!”

“You’re fine from yesterday?” asked Verity.

“Right as rain, thank you,” Mizuki replied. “I was actually more or less fine when I went to sleep, I think. I’m off wine for a bit though. I can’t say the experience was all that pleasant.”

“We’re going to want to be careful,” said Alfric. “I think the alcoholic needle from yesterday was a good reminder that entad testing isn’t entirely safe, and here we’ll be playing a numbers game. We’ve had our incidents in the past.”

“If you’re talking about that time I turned into water, I was actually fine,” said Isra.

“Or the time you turned into stone,” said Mizuki. “You were also fine.”

“Most of the time, entad effects aren’t bad,” said Alfric. “And most of the time if they are, they’re reversible. But if someone dies, or gets too badly injured, or if there’s something we can’t undo, then it needs to get undone by me resetting the entire day. I don’t want to do that, and I doubt that any of you want me to do that.”

“We don’t,” said Mizuki. “We want entad testing.”

“I was thinking about putting in a limit of twenty lutes, just because of the numbers,” said Alfric.

“Boo,” said Mizuki. “Boo to that, a hundred lutes, twenty each, we can crank that out in a day and leave the rest for Filera.”

“Yeah,” smiled Alfric. “I thought you’d say that. So, let’s get to work.”

Technically speaking, they had already accounted for seven of the lutes, or near enough, those whose powers they had discovered simply through handling them. That left more or less ninety-three. The ‘more or less’ was because there had been some disagreement on how many lutes there actually were.

“I just don’t understand how we can all have gotten different numbers,” said Alfric. The mess in the living room had been cleaned up the night before, but the furniture had been set off to one side. The metal struts had been removed from the chest before breakfast and laid in a disused part of the backyard, leaving only the lutes. Hannah was feeling slightly guilty that she hadn’t helped with any of it, but Alfric cracked his knuckles and started handing out the entads.

The first one Hannah got had a long neck and three strings, with a big belly — she didn’t know the technical term, if there was one — and a sizeable hole in the center. The logical thing, with a magical lute, was that it would have some effect when the strings were plucked, but this one did nothing obvious, and they had discussed beforehand that not all of them would work that way. When repeated strumming produced nothing but off-notes of a variety that seemed to be filling the room, Hannah began looking the lute over and trying to think about the other likely methods to draw its magic out. Aside from the strings, there were pegs, and she tried twisting those to and fro, which likewise did nothing.

Verity was the first to figure hers out, which was announced to the group by Mizuki saying, “Neck! Neck!” Verity’s neck had, in fact, grown an extra foot, and as she stopped strumming her lute, it retracted back to normal.

“I declare this the Long-necked Lute,” said Verity with a happy smile. The neck of the lute was long.

“I was getting there,” said Mizuki. She raised an eyebrow in Alfric’s direction.

“There are labels with string,” said Alfric. “We want brief descriptions, conditions for activation, and whatever else you’ve noticed. Spend some time on limits, useful applications, et cetera. That will help when we sell them.”

“We’re going to saturate the lute market,” said Isra, who was still inspecting her slender red lute.

“We’ll have to spread them out,” said Mizuki. “Di-lute them, you might say.” She gave Alfric a thumbs up.

“I wouldn’t fret about it too much,” said Alfric, giving her a thumbs up back.

“Did you two prepare for this?” asked Verity.

“You can’t prove anything,” said Mizuki. “Now hush, I need to listen to the sweet music of this lute, I think I’ve got something.”

Hannah returned to her own lute. It was entirely possible that it had activated when she’d done something with it, she just hadn’t noticed, and not having much in the way of options, she tried again, paying more attention to her surroundings and keeping her ears open. Something like the Full Orchestral Lute would be almost impossible for Hannah to figure out, given that the only musical instrument she had any experience with was her voice.

It was when she tried singing a bit to go along with the strumming that she finally got it. The lute seemed to be able to build up its notes, and when she strummed correctly, they came back out, layered on top of each other. It was unimpressive, as effects went, but she could imagine that they would get at least the price of a lute out of it, and it might be worth something if it could be hooked up to a different entad that needed someone to say something. Mostly, it seemed minor, and she filled out a small card for it. That was one down, nineteen to go.

The room was filled with sounds, most of them mildly unpleasant. When someone figured a lute out, they would generally call it out, and the effect would be described for the party’s appreciation, sometimes with some additional testing if the boundaries of the lute’s power were unclear.

Alfric said that sometimes an entad’s powers were difficult to peg.

Mizuki replied that some of the entad’s powers would surely have strings attached.

And Verity had said, with a smile, that they must stay resolute.

Hannah’s second lute was more straightforward. It had a sensory effect, one which got stronger the longer she played, and plucking different strings changed which sense it would affect. There were limits on how long it could be played too, mostly because her senses would get so acute that they irritated her. Being able to hear everything happening outside was, in fact, quite annoying and made it difficult to focus, and the sensory overload of being able to see every single detail of the world was terrible. She did just enough that she could write out a description. She was pleased that she’d gone long enough to find that it had a hidden power, which was a particular note that allowed magic sight, if only for a time before it got too powerful. She named it the ‘Acute Lute’, which she felt good about.

She was working on her third lute when Alfric got injured. He’d tried to play a lute and cut his fingers on the strings, which were sharp as razors.

“That one was actually a mandolin,” said Verity as Hannah healed Alfric.

Isra was the slowest among them, cautious by nature, seeming to play only as a last resort. Mizuki was the fastest, which was at least in part because she had been preparing more than anyone else.

Hannah’s third lute increased strength so long as it was strummed, which seemed fairly worthless given that it needed two hands to play. It would be good for kicking, she supposed, and there might be a way to play it with only a single hand and have some giant weapon in the other, but she was very skeptical that it was a winner. Mizuki had been quick to label it the ‘Brute Lute’, and she grinned at Alfric. They had prepared, which Hannah thought was ridiculous but also somewhat funny.

Mizuki’s sixth was a good one, and could transport both items and willing people to an extradimensional space, needing only for her to look at them and strum the strings. It immediately became a partial replacement for the chest, given that the interior space was a half-dome a hundred feet across. Alfric immediately began making plans to place beds, first aid, and other things inside it, and they took a bit of a break to look around. It needed a lantern, since there was no internal light, and there were some worries that it wouldn’t have enough air, but that didn’t stop Mizuki from dubbing it (and the entad) ‘Lutopia’.

Most of the lutes weren’t very good, particularly because of the form they took. An entad that size, which you needed to carry, would never be as good as a simple ring, and if you needed to play it as well, that would severely limit how good it could possibly be. What they were looking for, mostly, were lutes that had some utility outside of dungeons, but these were in relatively short supply.

At some point Alfric and Mizuki pulled more lutes out of the chest, making sure that they were ready and available. This was partly so that Mizuki could check which of them were party bound and which were bound to a particular person. Binding was uncommon but not rare, and after some testing, largely by having people pick the lutes up and then put them down, Hannah was given three of the lutes. Isra had the most bound, at seven, but in total, perhaps a fifth of their total supply of lutes were individually bound, and another five were party bound. That was higher than Alfric had expected, and would cut into their ability to offload the lutes into entad shops.

“What am I going to do with seven lutes?” asked Isra.

“They’ll go into storage,” said Alfric. “Maybe one or two of them will be useful enough that you keep it handy, especially if we get a transportation lute.”

Alfric’s words proved prophetic, as it wasn’t more than ten minutes later that Isra strummed one of her lutes and disappeared.

<I’m at the warp point,> she said after a moment. <This seems bad.>

<Test it,> said Alfric. <Actually, wait, go cut yourself with the dagger at the temple, then test it. Try sending yourself somewhere.>

<Will do,> said Isra with a sigh.

“Does she not like entad testing?” asked Mizuki.

“I think most of these just aren’t her style,” said Verity. “Though I guess I never really asked.”

“If she didn’t like it, I’d understand,” said Hannah. “Havin’ to figure out new things, bein’ in the
dark, doesn’t seem like the sort of thing she’d particularly appreciate, ay?”

“Put that way, I guess,” said Verity. “Personally, I’m a bit over the lutes, though I still haven’t seen one that I want to take into a dungeon.”

There was a small pile of lutes, three so far, whose function hadn’t been figured out. All those would go to Filera in undone days. It wasn’t entirely clear how many of them would end up as unidentified, but some would only react to certain things that weren’t handy, or have some effect that you’d never think of in a million years, and at least one would probably need some specific word to be said. Hannah didn’t say it often, but praise Qymmos for making sense of the entads.

Her fourth lute grew fingernails and hair, and possibly did some other things, but the fact that her fingernails were growing made it difficult to actually play, and already her hands were feeling the strain of strumming so much.

“Don’t you have picks we could use?” asked Hannah.

“I play fingerstyle,” said Verity, holding up a hand. “It’s like having four picks.”

“Ay, but you have spare strings, more pegs, things like that, you don’t have a pick, just for a different style?” asked Hannah.

“No,” said Verity. “I had a collection of picks back home — back in Dondrian — but I didn’t bring them with me.”

Hannah took a moment to clip her nails and left her hair long for the time being. Long hair wasn’t a particularly strong boon, but it felt like they had run across it a few times.

<Alright, it can go further,> said Isra, who had presumably keyed herself to the dagger. <Some combination of notes brought me to … I don’t know where. A warp point. I also don’t know how I would get back without the dagger.>

<That’s good,> said Alfric.

<Commute lute!> said Mizuki.

<I’m going to come home now, I think that’s enough, but we’ll need Filera to figure it out,> said Isra. <Incidentally, this one was bound to me, which is a problem, because I can’t play the lute.>

<I’ll teach you,> said Verity. <If it’s just a few notes rather than a song, it shouldn’t take more than a day.>

She seemed eager to teach, and Hannah suspected that this was because it was Isra that she’d be teaching. The two of them were friends again, or at least it seemed that way, which was good … but Hannah had been talking with both of them in a clerical capacity, and knew there were still feelings there of one kind or another. She’d talked with both of them, and they’d agreed that it was better to be apart, at least for a time, while they ‘figured things out’. The other day Verity had finally admitted that she did find it annoying that Isra had started changing herself, and Hannah, Garos help her, was marking that as real progress.

Alfric strummed a lute, and everyone said “Ya”.

“What was that?” asked Mizuki.

Alfric strummed again, and everyone said “Ya. Ya ya!”

“Odd,” said Alfric, looking at the lute.

“I think that’s enough of that,” said Hannah.

“It’s testing,” said Alfric. “Just a bit more?”

“If you m—” Hannah began. “Ya,” she said with the others. “Ya ya ya, yayaya, ya ya!”

“If this works on monsters …” said Alfric.

“They’ll still claw you to death,” said Hannah.

“I might still have Filera look at that one,” said Alfric. “Just in case there’s a catch.”

Isra returned, carrying the travel lute. Hannah had heard her coming, because there was another sensory lute that gave exceptional hearing. It was paired with an ability to remember sounds, and to release them through the lute when it was strummed, including the words that someone had sung, and Verity had stopped what she was doing to take a look at it.

“I like this one,” said Verity, strumming it in an easy way that made Hannah unexpectedly jealous. Verity was a professional, with no small amount of skill, and she highlighted the fumbling way that the rest of them tried to get the lutes to produce music. “You could include some extremely interesting sounds with it. Breaking glass, a raindrop — there are some good possibilities here.”

“Seems somewhat bad for dungeons,” said Alfric.

“Yes, but for everyday play?” asked Verity. “It could push music in directions that music has never been pushed before.”

The pile of identified lutes slowly grew. Most of them were curiosities, worthless under normal circumstances, but which could be sold as lutes, or which would end up collecting dust in an entad shop with a minor payout for the party. Hannah could already feel herself getting fatigued by the testing, and the discordant sounds of so many people doing their testing at once.

Mizuki blinked across the room with a strum of her lute, and gave a whoop. “It’s the scoot lute, finally!” she said.

“Finally?” asked Verity.

“You know what I mean,” said Mizuki. She strummed the lute again, and blinked back the way she’d come. “I’m going outside to test it.”

Hannah took a brief break to watch. The lute seemed to move her a set amount, only about five feet, which had seemed further when she was indoors. Each strum moved her though, and when she was going as fast as she could, she would rapidly blink across the yard and off into the trees. She was trying to see how fast she could go when she slammed face-first into a tree with a yelp.

Hannah rushed out to find Mizuki crying, lute held off to one side. Her nose was bleeding profusely, and her hands were shaking.

“Can you warp?” asked Hannah.

Mizuki nodded, but it took her a few times for her fingers to do the right motions. Hannah followed after.

<Going to get Mizuki healed,> said Hannah. <Broken nose, nothin’ too serious.>

They went to the temple together, though Mizuki probably didn’t need an escort, and given the amount of blood, she was seen right away. Nose wounds, like scalp wounds, always bled badly, making them seem more extreme than they were.

“And what was the cause of this?” asked Lin as he looked at Mizuki. “May I touch?”

Mizuki gave a pitiful nod. “Entad testing.”

Lin reached forward and touched her nose, which made Mizuki wince. “Hannah, if you’re here, can you make sure the bone is symmetrical? No sense having a crooked nose if it can be helped.”

Hannah placed a hand on Mizuki’s cheek and willed the broken bone to move back into place, which caused a gasp of pain, and then Lin applied the healing power of Oeyr, which sped the body’s natural (“emergent”) healing process up by an incredible degree. The bone was fused back together, and the places that were bleeding sealed themselves shut. Hannah had some training in how the healing of Oeyr worked, in part because a cleric of Garos was often called upon to work with them, but it still seemed wondrous to her.

“Perhaps be a bit more circumspect in your testing,” said Lin with a nod. “I know you’ve got Filera doing some identification for you.”

“I was just trying to scoot fast,” said Mizuki. She touched her nose. “Gah that hurt.”

“We’ve more than a hundred entads,” said Hannah. “It’s too much for Filera to take on.”

“Can I use the bathroom?” asked Mizuki. “I need to get some of this blood off.” It was on her hands, across her upper lip and chin, and had dripped down onto her outfit.

Hannah was, for a moment, left with Lin.

“The dungeoneering is going well then?” he asked. “A hundred entads seems quite a few.”

“It’s going oddly,” said Hannah. “There are some particulars of our circumstances.”

There was a bit of silence as he worked himself toward a different topic. “Lemmel is talking about retirement,” said Lin. “I don’t think he’s going to ask you to come back, but you should know that Pucklechurch might be without a cleric, at least for a bit, which would mean that it would fall to you.”

“Ah,” said Hannah. “I can’t say that I would prefer that.”

“The Church will send someone, I’m sure,” said Lin.

“Lemmel should be at least a decade away from retiring, if not more,” said Hannah.

“I’m only repeating what he’s said,” shrugged Lin. “It’s not uncommon to take a reduced role when you feel you can’t keep up with the work.”

“There’s not much work to keep up with,” said Hannah. “That’s a part of the reason I didn’t take to it.”

Lin shrugged. “I think it’s the emotional weight that can come with being a cleric,” he said. “From my experience, at least so far, it’s not the labor, nor the relationship with Oeyr, it’s dealing with people day in and day out, feeling empathy for them even when that’s not my natural inclination, paying attention to their problems, wanting to help them — it’s what gives me pause, when I think of this as my lifelong vocation.”

“Are you thinkin’ of retirement?” asked Hannah, raising an eyebrow.

“No, not at all,” said Lin. “But when with a cleric of Garos, it does feel like a good time for reflection.” He smiled at her. “More seriously, I think that being aware of our internal tensions is a good thing. I acknowledge that I have them, I work them over. And I do appreciate your talking with me, one cleric to another, even though you’re out of the temple.”

“You’re mighty welcome,” said Hannah. “And if Lemmel does retire, we should have some solution for me to be able to fill in for him, at least when it comes to healin’. I’ve made my peace with the church — mostly — but I don’t want people to go without.”

“It’s much appreciated,” nodded Lin.

“I’ll talk with Lemmel in the coming days,” said Hannah. “If he’s serious, I’ll want to make sure that it’s smooth. I am a dungeoneer now though, and not long for Pucklechurch, so it would be a stopgap, nothin’ more.”

Mizuki came out from the bathroom, looking worse for the wear. Her face was a bit puffy, and she’d gotten most of the blood off, but her clothes were wet and bloody.

“I think I under-estimated how much trouble breaking my nose would be,” said Mizuki.

“Bah,” said Hannah. “You’re out ten minutes or so, and need to do some washin’.”

“I guess,” said Mizuki. She touched her nose. “And you think this is something that would heal naturally?”

“Eventually,” said Hannah.

“That it would heal ‘naturally’ is why Oeyr helps at all,” said Lin.

“Because … there are some rules?” asked Mizuki. “And together, those rules … add to healing? Somehow?”

Lin nodded.

“Welp, thanks, let’s go,” said Mizuki. It looked, for a moment, like she’d been wanting to ask more, but her desire for entad testing seemed like it had won out over curiosity. So far as Hannah knew, Lin would likely be grateful: clerics of Oeyr didn’t actually know how many of their powers worked, only that they did work. They could tell you the weak point in a structure, but not exactly what set of tensions and materials defects led to those weak points.

They said their goodbyes, and Hannah insisted on the proper prayers to Oeyr, then headed off together back to the house.

“I should have taken the scoot lute,” said Mizuki. “I’d be back in a flash.”

“So soon after breakin’ your nose?” asked Hannah.

“See, but I already broke my nose,” said Mizuki. “So I know not to do it that way, to, uh, have a solid footing or whatever.”

“So you don’t know,” laughed Hannah. “And can’t rightly say what would need to go different next time.”

“Not doing it in the woods would be a start,” said Mizuki.

“It’s a terrible lute,” said Hannah. “I can’t imagine that it doesn’t get shelved or sold.”

“It’s bound to me, unfortunately,” said Mizuki with a sheepish smile. Her face was still somewhat puffy, unequally so. “But yes, I’ll shelve it, I think it’s just barely faster than the helm. I mean, you do the math, it’s five feet every time it’s strummed, let’s say five strums a second?”

Hannah waited for a moment. “Ah,” she said. “When I heard ‘you do the math’, I hadn’t realized you actually wanted me to do the math.”

“We can get Alfric to do the math,” said Mizuki with a nod.

“Five feet per second would be three and a half miles an hour,” said Hannah. “So, let’s say, seventeen miles an hour, if you could sustain.”

“Thanks,” said Mizuki. “I guess I need to check whether five strums a second is right.”

“I’d suggest you try it with a different lute,” said Hannah. “Best not to risk another broken nose.”

“Great idea,” nodded Mizuki.

They reached the house and found that everyone was taking a bit of a break.

“You waited for us!” said Mizuki.

“Not really,” said Alfric. “Look at this one, you’ll like it.” He plucked a string, and a glass sitting on a table slowly filled up with wine.

“I love it!” said Mizuki. “Infinite wine!”

“Probably not infinite,” said Alfric. “And if it is, praise Xuphin.”

“Praise Xuphin!” said Verity, who had a glass of wine, likely from a previous experiment.

“There’s more though,” said Alfric. “Each string is a different liquid.” He pointed at them. “Wine, milk, oil, water, and blood.”

“Blood?” asked Mizuki. “I guess there are a few things I could use that for, if it’s edible.”

“All fine, at least as far as I can tell,” said Isra. She had a glass of milk and took a moment to peer at it.

“How’s the nose?” asked Alfric.

“Fine, fine,” said Mizuki. “Lin fixed it. I’m hoping that’s the only injury we get though. But I’m not going to be happy until I have a lute in my hands.”

Testing resumed. There was something a bit frustrating about it, at least to Hannah, but mostly because you didn’t know that you could figure it out just by playing around. Some of them would remain mysteries until they went to Filera, which meant that when you struggled with a lute, you had to make judgment calls about when to call it quits.

Her sixth lute gave access to extradimensional space that was even better than the first one, this one through a portal that stayed open for as long as the lute was played. This one was a small house on a floating island, or what appeared to be an island, with the portal in a place of prominence. Hannah investigated the house. It had a single bedroom, a tiny kitchen with a wood-burning stove, and a bathroom whose pipes went down into the hard rock. She wondered what happened if it got full, or if it could get full. There was, overall, much less space within what was immediately dubbed Lutopia Two, but it was better space, and if Lutopia One was great for storage, Lutopia Two was ideal for a place to hide out. Hannah wasn’t entirely in love with the ‘island’ of floating rock, mostly because of the worry of what would happen if she fell off. It had a false sun that shone overhead, and blue sky in all directions, with a handful of clouds. The rock — the island — had lichen but no plant life, though there seemed to be no reason that plants couldn’t grow. The portal itself always appeared in the same place, on a dais outside the house.

“It’s amazing,” said Mizuki.

“It’s bound to me, otherwise I’d let you have it,” said Hannah. “Though it does mean that I may move out of my room.”

“Aw, really?” asked Mizuki. “You’d just be homeless?”

“It’s an entire entad home,” said Hannah. “So long as I’ve got the lute, I can sleep in my own bed. There’s enough room for the desk — or for my own desk, since I won’t be stealin’ yours.”

“Don’t you already have a house with Marsh?” asked Alfric.

“He’s a place I stay at, ay,” said Hannah. “With the lute, I could have a little addition to the den, if it came to that.”

Isra vanished again while the conversation was ongoing.

<I’m standing on a bridge in the north of the hex,> said Isra. <Trying again.> There was a moment of silence. <It seems like I’m moving between bridges.>

<Are you going to be able to get back?> asked Alfric.

<Still testing,> said Isra. She sighed slightly, into the party channel. <I think the lute moves me between bridges. I don’t know if there’s a pattern or not. I’ll be home in a bit.>

<Stay safe,> said Alfric. He had a thoughtful look. “That’s a good one too, depending on the specifics.”

“Wait,” said Mizuki, standing still. “There’s something there, some joke.”

“Many-Bridges Lute,” said Hannah.

“It would make for a better pun if the lute had two bridges,” said Verity.

“I thought a bridge was like … part of a piece of music?” asked Mizuki.

“It’s that too,” said Verity. “It’s the thing the strings are stretched over, but it’s also the part of the music that links two pieces of a song together, or two songs to each other.”

“No, there’s a joke there,” said Mizuki. “I can taste it.”

“I think the jokes have run their course,” said Alfric.

“Unless you find a good rib-tickler,” said Verity. A beat passed. “The body of the lute is made up of pieces of wood that are called ribs. Trust me, that’s funny.”

They took a break for lunch, which was sandwiches. Mizuki had gone all out again, as she didn’t seem to be able to help herself, and these were made with some two day old bread, which Hannah felt slightly guilty about. The sandwiches were, in Mizuki’s words, ‘sloppy’, served with enough wetness in them that Hannah had to wash her hands afterwards. They were heavy on the pickled things, including some of the things they’d put up, and with so much pork that Hannah didn’t have any need to add in an egg. When their lunch was finished, they went back to the lute testing.

It was hard for Hannah to believe that she was supposed to be responsible for identifying nearly twenty lutes. She’d been hoping to be done early but had accounted for going late, and it was taking longer than expected, particularly because of the ‘stumpers’ whose function couldn’t be divined just from fiddling around with them. She did say ‘fiddling around’ when it occurred to her, which did get a brief smile from the others, but Verity felt compelled to point out that a fiddle was ‘bowed’ and only counted as a ‘bowed lute’ if you were being very generous, in which case you would also be counting instruments like a viol. That caused Mizuki to declare a lute that made cuts through the air ‘an instrument of viol-ence’.

The stack of ‘stumpers’ slowly built up, while the others were labeled and then put to one side. Hannah felt like she was contributing more than her fair share to the pile of stumpers, and suspected that she simply didn’t have the right mindset for entad testing, which was something she’d never considered before. Mizuki seemed good at entad testing because she had all kinds of stupid ideas about what to do with a lute, some of which actually turned out to work, like the lute that could be swung like a club, or the lute that could return to your hands when thrown. Alfric was good because he was meticulous, and Verity was good because she really knew her way around a lute and could coax out any power that depended upon music rather than just noise. It was hard to tell whether or not Isra was adept at finding the functions of her lutes, given she’d had to walk back twice, but Hannah was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Hannah was a competitive person, and lute testing turned out to be no exception. It was a somewhat negative aspect of her personality though, so she worked to curb it, to not care that Alfric was stacking up more lutes. Having fun, for a cleric, was often a matter of shutting down years of training the mind, both in terms of the ordered relationships of the world and the more chaotic relationships between people.

“Ha!” said Hannah when she had discovered the power of her tenth lute. “A good one, for a change.” The lute had clad her in armor, and it seemed as though it was changing depending on what she ‘played’. It would have been better in Verity’s hands, she was sure, but this was among the lutes that was bound to Hannah.

“I have a feeling when we’re done there’s going to be an absolute racket before every dungeon,” said Mizuki. “And I’m here for it.”

“Remains to be seen whether this can make good armor,” said Hannah. “I might have to have a workin’ knowledge of how to play a specific song.” She strummed the lute, putting her fingers in a different position on the neck of it, and the armor shifted from scales to bands. She really had no idea what she was doing, other than that fingers in different positions produced different … notes? She felt relatively certain that it wasn’t notes, that it was more about chords, but she didn’t have enough working knowledge of music to say for certain.

In the end, she had to peel the armor off, since she couldn’t figure out the right way to play the lute in order to dismiss it — if that was even an option. The pieces of metal turned to white mist as she pulled them away.

Alfric got a lute that could change its shape, becoming large enough to climb in or small enough to fit in a thimble. Verity got a lute that could make plants grow, though apparently not that often because it stopped working almost as soon as it started. Isra got a lute that made people burst into applause when she was finished, which she found hilarious. Mizuki got a lute that whispered instructions on how to play it more effectively, which she thought was both helpful and a bit creepy, in part because of the soft voice in her ear. Hannah had a lute that summoned a local farmer, who was bewildered to be standing in their living room with a hundred lutes around him, and they set that lute aside after he was sent on his way, not wanting to inconvenience more people.

They had fun with it, though there was some general agreement that a hundred lutes was too many, and that entad testing was best in small batches where they could reasonably take turns.

The jokes went from funny to not that funny to being funny again, mostly because of how much of a stretch they were.

Alfric got a talking lute that made observations of the features of the room, and seemed to be wrong roughly three-quarters of the time. Hannah was quickest on that one: she declared that it was actually a lyre.

Many of Verity’s ‘jokes’ needed explanations, but that was because she knew far, far more about lutes than any of them did. A lute that leaked black pitch from its body was a ‘setar’, apparently some variety of lute from deep in Tarbin. One lute conjured a small blue ball that could be remotely controlled, and Verity had said that the instrument was actually a ‘theorbo’, which again was some cousin to a ‘proper’ lute that no one had ever heard of. A lute that twisted spare fabric into a hat was a ‘torban’, which was apparently the real name of a lute from Central Inter, which could be read as a play on ‘turban’, a hat that Hannah had never heard of from Tarbin.

The funny part of this was always Verity trying to explain the jokes, which she did with increasing desperation. Her suggestion that they all take a break for a lesson on the history of the lute and its many varieties was only half-serious, and met with laughter.

It was sixth bell by the time they reached the end of the lutes.

“Alright,” said Alfric. “We’ve got a pile of eleven stumpers, which is more than we should have. We can either crack through them, or we can hold off.”

“I’m going to be honest,” said Verity. “If I have to see or hear another lute, I’m going to cry.”

“Did you at least get a good one for regular play?” asked Alfric.

“I’ll look through them,” said Verity. “There was one Isra uncovered that looked like it could be played without hands, which definitely appeals to me, since I’d be able to have a bow or some other weapon.”

“Or two lutes!” said Mizuki.

Verity glared at her.

“We’ve got three extradimensional lutes, counting Lutopia One and Lutopia Two,” said Alfric. “We’ve got at least two or three that we can use before combat. We have eight for travel, and two that might actually be good, shortening trip times and letting us get to further dungeons. I think overall, that’s a pretty good haul. We have another eleven to uncover, and some limits that Filera can find for us on the best of the best.”

“Are we doing more dungeons?” asked Verity. “We haven’t had the post mortem yet.”

“I’m still getting my thoughts in order,” said Alfric. “The dungeon report is complicated, and I’d like to get that off before we talk about how the dungeon went and our next steps.”

“Next steps meaning more dungeons though, right?” asked Mizuki.

Alfric hesitated. “I was thinking that it might make sense to try a dungeon without Verity,” said Alfric. He looked at her. “We can do it in an undone day, if that’s preferred, but I want to see whether the, ah, difficulty and overall weirdness of these past dungeons is actually because of you.”

“I see,” said Verity. Her lips were thin.

“Once we know for certain, we can talk about what comes next.”

“Meaning that you’re considering what this party would look like without me?” asked Verity.

“Frankly, yes,” said Alfric.

Hannah suppressed a groan. This was not a time to be frank. “The failures have taken a toll on Alfric,” said Hannah. “I think it’s important we all acknowledge that, as much as the Overguard Maneuver and overall heroics of the last dungeon were a victory for us as a party. If it’s to be three or four failed dungeons for every one we manage to get through, that’s a strain on him that very few people are equipped for, even trained chrononauts, even trained dungeoneers.”

“No, I understand,” said Verity. “I was just … I had fun, today, in spite of the sheer volume of lutes.”

“Heh,” said Mizuki.

“I want to try to get this under control,” said Verity. “Can we do that, before you abandon me?”

“No one’s talking about abandonin’ you,” said Hannah, which wasn’t strictly true. “The first step, if we want to figure it out, is as Alfric says, makin’ sure that it is you and not somethin’ else.”

Verity was tight-lipped. She said nothing, which was a bad sign.

“You can obviously still live here either way,” said Mizuki.

This, again, was not what Hannah would have elected for Mizuki to say. They’d had a pleasant day, they’d gotten a few good prizes from their dungeon, and what should have happened was that they save all this until later, ideally with Hannah having been brought into the loop. She’d known that Alfric was none too happy with the overly hard dungeons and had been gutted by the failed dungeons, but it was the first she was hearing that he was actually considering what their party might look like without Verity. It was all the wrong way for it to come out, in Hannah’s opinion.

“We’ll hold off on any of that,” said Hannah. She looked at Alfric. “We’ll talk to some people, get opinions on the most recent dungeon, talk to that researcher you spoke of, and maybe test what a dungeon looks like without a Chosen of Xuphin, but we’ll do nothin’ rash.” She turned to Verity. “We love you, you understand?”

“I do,” said Verity. She took in a breath, then looked at Mizuki. “Dinner?”

“Urgh, dinner,” said Mizuki. “I’ll get started on it, Isra, can you help?”

“Of course,” said Isra. She’d stayed silent while the group talked about Verity. Hannah thought that was a bad sign too.

Mizuki and Isra left for the kitchen, and Verity left for the garden. There was a spate of silence.

“Sorry,” said Alfric. “I’m just trying to consider options.”

“That’s something we do as a team,” said Hannah.

“Right,” said Alfric. “I know. It’s just …”

“Just what, ay?” asked Hannah.

“I do most of the work for the team,” said Alfric. “Planning, equipment, prep, that kind of thing. I do the training, the post mortems, the dungeon reports. And I’m the one who has to experience it when we die.”

“I can help with all but that last one,” said Hannah. “I’ve offered, on occasion.”

“I know,” said Alfric. He sighed. “I know.”

“Well, ay,” said Hannah. “I know you know. And I don’t think your ideas are bad, it’s just their delivery. You can talk to me about what you feel, and better that you do it before it gets aired in front of the group at the wrong moment.” She looked out the doors into the backyard, where Verity was examining the plants.

“Do I need to talk to her?” asked Alfric.

“Eventually,” said Hannah. “Right now, no. We’ll have dinner, you keep this on a simmer, we can talk about everythin’ during the proper time and place for it. At most, let her know she’s loved, that’s what she needs to hear, that it’s more than just dungeons, she’s a friend.”

“Alright,” said Alfric. He was looking at Verity too.

Dinner went well, and talk didn’t return to the dungeons, just to the lutes, and their plans for selling them in such a way that they could get the most. Mizuki talked about becoming a wizard, which was coming up, and Isra talked about the schoolchildren, whom she seemed to adore. Verity and Alfric were both a bit quiet, but not so much that their silence called attention to itself. When dinner was over, Verity left for the cabin, taking two of the lutes bound to her.

The next morning, Alfric woke them early, saying there had been two disappearances he’d been notified of on an undone day, and for a moment, Hannah had just assumed that it would be Verity. Instead, it was Kell and Lin.

Chapter 133 - The Last Days I

Verity slept at the cabin and missed most of the early morning excitement. There was chatter across the party channel, which she’d largely slept through, the words coming and going with some annoyance on her part, never touching her mind. She might have mumbled something. If asked, she might have been able to piece it together, but it was a blur.

She finally woke up around first bell, which was still fairly early for her, and asked whether people had been talking while she slept, which was when they’d filled her in on the missing persons cases, and all the things that had gone on during a handful of undone days — the short version, anyway. The longer version came from Mizuki.

“Alright,” said Mizuki once Verity was back in the house. “So far as I know, we’ve been through this day five times already. One of those was Alfric’s, the other four were his aunt Penelope, who I think one of us got in contact with because of the similarities with her daughter that went missing and the stuff over there. Lin and Kell both left notes, and both took things with them, but it’s pretty suspicious. It also happened before the witching hour, which seems like it’s specifically an anti-chrono measure. We’ve had eyes on the past, but it seems like the enemy knows that’s something that we can do, because it’s been foiled in a couple of different ways. We did manage to track Kell down right up to the point he touched a totally random rock in the woods and vanished, which didn’t help at all, and trying to track him backwards was super rough.”

“Alright,” said Verity. She was having morning tea with short biscuits and a dab of jam. “So at this point … you have chrononauts, who have already experienced the day, combing the deeper past using entads?”

“Yup,” said Mizuki. “It’s crazy the amount of stuff they have pointed at this problem. After her daughter Kali was abducted or ran away — much more ran away, I think — the disappearances in Liberfell kind of stopped, or the character of them changed, it was much more, uh, deniable, I guess. Young people who were just passing through and never ended up getting where they were going, people who weren’t missing right away, they were missing a week or a month later or something like that.”

“But Penelope was working on the problem,” said Verity. “Preparing?”

“Oh yeah,” said Mizuki. “And getting the government involved, to the extent they’re willing. She’s got a significant portion of Inter’s ability to watch the past, spending loads of money, some of it borrowed from relatives. It’s a really pretty rare ability, as is information gathering, but we’ve got lots of stuff. And the enemy is one step ahead.”

“You’re not worried about Kell?” asked Verity.

“Oh, I am,” said Mizuki. She cocked her head to the side. “Why?”

“You just seem … excited,” said Verity.

“I mean, he’s probably fine,” said Mizuki. “The Editors don’t seem like they would have let mind control slip in, and if they had, there’s no way that you’d use it to pick up relative nobodies, right? No offense to him.”

“You think they’re all okay, somewhere?” asked Verity.

“I’m hoping so. There’s something that we got from Vertex, I guess in one of the undone days, where apparently they’ve been having a few hiccups with their party channel,” said Mizuki. “Messages that were spoken and didn’t come across, I guess. That might be nothing, but it might also mean that someone was listening in, or blocking the ability to talk, or something like that. Which is another lead! But good luck trying to find one entad out of billions, even if it went through a shop, which it probably didn’t.”

“And everyone else is trying to do things that they haven’t done before?” asked Verity.

“We’re going to do some pastwatch stuff, since a lot of the best entads need people positioned in a specific place at a specific time,” said Mizuki. “There are a few that work on specific items or whatever, but they’ve already been used, mostly. We watched Kell and Lin write their notes, apparently of their own free will. I mean, I didn’t watch it, but I was told that I watched it.”

“What do the notes say?” asked Verity.

“Kell just wanted to move on, I guess,” said Mizuki. For the first time, she seemed a little down. “I guess for him, he’d proven himself at wizard college, proven himself in Kiromo, proven himself by doing a bunch of dungeons solo, proven himself with Vertex, and it was just —” she let out a breath. “I don’t know. I read it this morning. I’m still trying to get my head around it. I guess I hadn’t realized he was that driven about things, or that he wanted to push on to greener pastures, whatever those might be.” She shrugged. “From the way Vertex tells it, he’s been talking about something like that for a while now, but he never said it to me.”

“Ah,” said Verity. “Sorry.”

“Nah, it is what it is,” said Mizuki. She shrugged. “But the thing is, he didn’t say where he was going, which is incredibly rude, and didn’t even say that he couldn’t say where he was going. So why the mystery?”

“Yeah,” said Verity. “And should we really be hunting these people down?”

“I mean, of course,” said Mizuki. “That they’re doing this without anyone knowing where they’re going is — ah crud, you’re thinking about your parents.”

Verity nodded. “I left without saying where I was going,” she said. “I think there’s something nice about just … disappearing, not having to say where you’re going, making a clean break. If my parents weren’t rich, I’d have gotten away with it.”

“Kell had friends,” frowned Mizuki. “I mean, at least one friend, if you don’t count Vertex.”

“I think he might have tried to say goodbye,” said Verity. “We told you he came by when you were drunk off entad testing?”

“You did,” said Mizuki. She winced. “But I mean, I should have had more time, right? If he was offered some kind of deal — he took his mana stones with him, did I tell you that?”

“No,” said Verity. She felt as though Mizuki was perhaps not the best one to be giving a rundown, but she liked Mizuki, and personal affection went a long way.

“So that means he’s going to go be a wizard somewhere,” said Mizuki. “He’ll still be working, basically. It just feels like, I don’t know. Bad.” She frowned. “So when we do find him, I’m going to give him a piece of my mind.”

“Do you think we’ll find him?” asked Verity.

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “I mean, we’ve got the Overguards on our side, right?”

“All of them?” asked Verity.

“No, not all of them,” said Mizuki. “This is probably the last day, the real day, actually, unless we can get more on loan. Which sucks, because that means that Alfric’s parents aren’t helping.” She frowned. “Apparently I used the ring to get in touch with Ria, and she came to help out, but let Penelope take the reset, and told Alfric that she wouldn’t be spending days on this unless there was a real need, so … I don’t know.”

“Sorry,” Verity offered. “I know that Kell was a good friend.”

“Is,” said Mizuki. “Kell is a good friend, just one who’s being an ass.”

“Right,” said Verity. “And you don’t think that, ah, maybe this has something to do with him maybe having an unrequited crush on you?”

Mizuki sighed and looked away. “It’s been mentioned.”

“Then I guess I don’t need to mention it,” said Verity.

Mizuki looked back at her. “Thanks.” She looked at Verity’s empty plate. “He didn’t say anything, in the letter, about me, though if you read between the lines … I mean we were friends, I don’t know what I was supposed to do, date someone I wasn’t really interested in dating?”

“I don’t think anyone is saying that,” said Verity.

“I mean, I guess we could have talked about it,” said Mizuki. “I could have said, ‘hey, I don’t know if you’re interested in dating me, but I definitely don’t feel that way about you’.” She chewed on a nail. “Maybe that would have been better?”

“I think he knew,” said Verity.

“I hope he knew, I mean he had girlfriends before,” said Mizuki. “But if I was into someone and they weren’t into me, I wouldn’t just … you know. Leave.”

“No?” asked Verity.

“Because of the house, I guess,” said Mizuki. “I really love this house.”

“So if you didn’t have the house … ?” asked Verity.

“I mean yeah, running away from all your problems?” asked Mizuki. “I can definitely see me doing that, as much as I love Pucklechurch. And I guess that’s the endgame for us, once we’ve mined out all the dungeons in the area.”

“No,” said Verity. “We’ve got the Commute Lute. We have a decade of dungeons, even at one a week.” She hadn’t actually done the math.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Right.”

“If we’re still doing dungeons,” said Verity. The conversation from the night before had rattled around in her head, as much as she’d tried to stop it. Hannah had said that sort of rumination was bad, that it was better to be mindful of thoughts and focus them elsewhere, but that was hard. What did you do after a bad performance? You reviewed it, noted the places where things went wrong, and thought about the proper way to do it. What did you do when you had a performance coming up? You practiced until you were too sore to go on, or until it came out perfect every time.

“I’d just not worry about that,” said Mizuki. “I mean, we’ll figure something out, I’ll fight Alfric if he tries to pull you off the party or whatever, it’ll be fine.”

Mizuki could sometimes be really bad at reassuring people.

“So, how can I help with Kell?” asked Verity.

“Pastwatching,” said Mizuki. “We’ve got a bit of a plan, you’ve got, ah, twenty minutes or so to get to the general store, which is where you’re going to follow Kell, three days ago.”

“Okay,” said Verity slowly.

“You’re going to have a little window frame, it’s pretty light,” said Mizuki. “You’re also going to have some glasses, which will let you hear silent things, like the window frame. So you just look through the frame, holding it up, watch Kell as he goes into the general store three days ago, then follow him around for the rest of the day, I guess, and hope that, uh, he talks about where he went and why, or better, that he has a meeting with a cloaked figure, or looks at a map, or whatever.”

“Alright,” said Verity. “If that’s how I can be of use. And everyone else is … ?”

“Alfric is at the site of the stone that teleported Kell,” said Mizuki. “His entad is a stake that gets driven into the ground and then, I guess, lets him see backward in time at one second per second? So like, he’s seeing the present, which is moving forward at a second a second, and he’s also seeing the past, which is moving backward at a second a second. He’s watching the present moving forward but also this kind of alternate present where time is running in reverse.”

“Uh huh,” said Verity. “So the upshot is … that he’s watching the forest, but also the forest but in reverse?”

“He says it’s super boring,” said Mizuki. “Which is why he picked it for himself. Isra is going wandering with the Commute Lute, expanding her senses as far as she can, scouting with birds, that kind of thing, just in case they’re within the uh,” she made a shape with her hand. “The spiral.”

“The spiral of hexes?” asked Verity.

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “She took our map. She’s also talking to censusmasters, where possible. But she’s done this a few times, and is on the outer edge of the spiral, so,” she shrugged. “We probably won’t be seeing her today, except for at a late dinner. And then Hannah is off talking to clerics, which she volunteered to do and which doesn’t seem to be related to anything but Lin being missing. I think she’s helping to get a replacement.”

“And what will you be doing, while I’m Kell-watching?” asked Verity.

“Touching stuff,” said Mizuki. “We’ve got an entad that works on paper, lets us see into the past, not wholly, just stuff that touched the paper. I’m flipping through a bunch of books, Kell’s and Lin’s. We already did the notes and got nothing from them. Did you want to trade?”

“No,” said Verity. “I’ll get going then.”

“Here,” said Mizuki. She waved a hand and the window frame appeared in front of her, which she caught. The frame was cedar, with plenty of embellishments, but two handholds had clearly been added later and weren’t part of the entad proper. “And here.” She waved again, and the glasses appeared. They were half-moon spectacles, and looked fragile. Verity’s eyes were drawn to the ring on Mizuki’s finger, which had three small gems, two of them dull but the last shining. “Entad!” said Mizuki. “A loaner, but exactly the sort of thing that we really need, since it would let Alfric dynamically swap weapons, or let you swap lutes.”

Mizuki was still assuming that they were all going to do dungeons again together. It might very well have been that they’d already done their final dungeon as a team though, with a hundred lutes and a successful deployment of the Overguard Maneuver to show for it.

“Who am I reporting my findings to?” asked Verity as she stood from the table.

“We’re all meeting back here at the end of the day, for dinner,” said Mizuki. “Penelope will be here. But like I said, it’s probably the last time through the day, because we’ve done basically everything that we can, and a lot of what’s left is just scraps.”

Verity felt like raising an objection to that, particularly the idea of her day being the collection of ‘scraps’ that would probably amount to nothing, and if the day was scraps, then it felt like a reset might be justified. She was in no mood to complain about work though, not with the breakup of the party feeling like it was hanging over her head.

She took her plate to the kitchen and washed it, trying to be mindful of the time, then put on the glasses and grabbed the frame. She hadn’t been told whether it was fragile, or how fragile, and it was hard not to think of the glass in it as being liable to shatter at a moment’s notice.

Even now, the window was showing the past. It didn’t seem like it was exactly three days, since through the window it was earlier in the morning. In the kitchen, the window into the past showed Mizuki cooking breakfast, and when Verity moved it around, she could see Alfric there, leaning against the counter, sneaking food when Mizuki wasn’t looking — or pretending to sneak food so that she could slap him on the back of his hand with her Anyspoon.

“I worry you don’t fear the spoon enough,” said Mizuki, and for a moment Verity was startled by the sound of her speaking. The window was giving a view into the past, and the glasses were giving sound to that image.

Verity set the window down, not wanting to see more. There was temptation, certainly, to keep watching this conversation that had happened without her, but she’d never had terribly strong voyeuristic tendencies.

This, of course, was what she would be doing with the rest of her day, but it was different with Kell, who wasn’t a friend, and when he would be in a public place.

Verity made sure she had her things in order. Since living in the woods, she’d taken to carrying a large bag like the one Mizuki often had, which she could stuff her things into. It was horribly unfashionable, and Verity liked it that way. A part of her itched for someone to say something mean about it, so she could tell them off, but that was the sort of thing that didn’t really happen in Pucklechurch. She thought about taking a lute, and decided against it, mostly because she knew that holding up the window all day was going to be a chore.

She warped into the center of Pucklechurch, which was relatively busy. It was a market day, and people were out shopping and chatting with each other. Verity suspected that half the reason market day existed was for the social aspects of it, as the sellers gathered together. Temple day was obviously the thing that brought most of the community together, but in a place like Pucklechurch, they’d take any excuse they could get.

The general store wasn’t far off from the warp, and Bethany was tidying up when Verity got there. Verity did almost no shopping, since Mizuki and Hannah took care of most of the food, and Isra took care of the rest. Verity’s primary contribution to the house was gardening, which she didn’t do all that much of, and a bit of needlework from time to time. None of that required buying things. The only time she really came into the general store was to use the travel wardrobe, which sat in one corner with a sign and payment bowl next to it, and she hadn’t done that in quite a bit.

“Verity!” said Bethany with a beaming smile. “It’s been ages.”

“It has,” nodded Verity. “Sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be sorry,” said Bethany. “I’m just happy that you haven’t gotten around to using entads for all your needs. I heard that you struck out with the lutes?”

Verity blinked. “No?” It felt to her like they’d had an astounding haul.

“No foods, few consumables?” asked Bethany. “That’s just what I had heard.”

“Oh,” said Verity. “I suppose. Good storage, good travel. A bit of food actually, or at least liquids.” She looked around. The window was a foot across, held in her hands, and Bethany hadn’t asked about it. “Um, Kell was in here, in the morning, three days ago?”

Bethany nodded. “And you’re here to look for him through a window into the past.”

“Right,” said Verity, feeling flummoxed. “You talked to, ah, someone?”

“Xy,” said Bethany. “She came zooming through here at dawn. She’s always good for getting the news around, it’s one of her better features.”

“And it’s fine if I use this?” asked Verity, holding up the window.

“Of course,” nodded Bethany. “I would like to see though. Hopefully I didn’t say anything too foolish three days ago.”

Verity brought the window up and then after a moment of indecision, went to stand behind the counter with Bethany, which offered the best view of the general store. There were other people milling about, two women that Verity only vaguely knew, and Bethany, who was cleaning the counter.

“Was this before or after Kell came in?” asked Verity.

“Um,” said Bethany. “Before, I guess?” She was shoulder-to-shoulder with Verity, peering through. “No sound?”

“The glasses give me sound,” said Verity, tapping them.

“For some reason I thought you always wore those,” said Bethany. Her attention had been pulled from the window, and she was looking Verity over. “Those are new?”

“Borrowed,” said Verity, who was feeling flushed.

“They’re a really good look on you,” said Bethany.

“T-thanks,” said Verity.

“He’s here!” said Bethany, pointing at the window. “Or, there. Or was there. You know.”

Verity watched with the window propped up as Kell entered the store. She’d seen him two days ago, and he had been looking worse for the wear then, not physically, but emotionally. Seen through the window, he was holding his head high, with enviable posture, crisp clothes, and his wizard’s stuff looking imposing. He’d had a haircut recently, she realized, and didn’t think she’d noticed that when he’d come by the house.

Kell stopped to talk with Bethany for a bit, and Verity needed to rearrange to be able to see both of them, since the glasses didn’t seem to work to make sound if she wasn’t able to see the thing that was making the sound. Because the discussion was relatively innocuous, just Bethany complaining about being a bit sick that morning, Verity did some testing of the limits of the entad. She was thankful to find that she could still get sound if she was pointing the window at the back of someone’s head and didn’t need to ‘read their lips’.

“He likes to talk,” said Bethany, who was watching over Verity’s shoulder. “There’s nothing wrong with that, I like to talk too, it’s just something I noticed, if that helps.”

“It might,” said Verity, who was feeling diplomatic.

“I don’t think he missed Kiromo, I think he missed the feeling of Kiromo,” said Bethany, talking over the conversation she was having in the past with Kell. “He missed the adventure, maybe.”

“That was more or less what Mizuki thought,” said Verity. “I’m less sure, but I never really knew him.”

“Sorry, I’ll shut up,” said Bethany. “Though if there were anything interesting, I would probably already know about it, since I was there.”

“I don’t mind,” said Verity. “Mostly I think I’ll just be in sync with him, hoping that he goes somewhere revealing. But we’re sipping the dregs here, I think.”

“I guess you must always end up doing that, if you’re with a chrononaut,” said Bethany.

Verity wasn’t paying too much attention to the conversation between past-Bethany and Kell, especially as it was just idle chatter. He was asking her how married life was, and she was gushing about her husband. Maybe there was a touch of wistfulness in his voice when they talked about it, but it was hard to say, even when she was paying very close attention to his face.

Her eyes went to what he was actually buying, and there she found what seemed like it might be a clue. He had purchased Kiromon tea, lots of it, essentially a bulk purchase that would have lasted him months if he was drinking it every day. There were two large bottles of a Kiromon sauce as well.

“He was stocking up?” asked Verity, at almost the same moment past-Bethany was asking the same thing.

“He said not,” replied Bethany. “It’s not like he was buying crates of things, he’d have had to go to Basil for that.”

“Which I guess he might have,” said Verity. She watched as Kell paid. He had a piece of jewelry on his right hand, like half a brass knuckle or a ring that spanned two fingers, and when he paid, the money appeared on the counter from nowhere. The things he’d purchased likewise disappeared at his touch.

“Entads like that make me nervous,” said Bethany. “It would be far too easy to steal.”

“That’s why we can look into the past,” said Verity with a little laugh. “Shoplifters.” She looked through the window. “And he’s going, so I need to follow him, sorry.”

“Not at all, hope you figure something out!” said Bethany as Verity walked out through the front door, following Kell.

The window made her nervous. If she lost track of Kell, or wasn’t paying attention while something happened, that was that, there was no way of fixing that aside from redoing the entire day. She was also tasked with doing this for who knew how many hours, and knew from experience that her fortitude and attention would wane, even with the occasional break while Kell was occupied.

Curiously, Kell went to the temple, which wasn’t where she had thought he would go at all, and given that he’d disappeared, she would have thought that someone would have mentioned it. He walked with confidence, humming slightly to himself. There was something pleasant about his hum, she thought, which surprised her, because she usually judged the casual music of others harshly. There was something very likable about Kell, even if he had run off. Maybe especially because he’d run off.

When Kell went to Lin’s alcove, Verity’s interest was piqued. Here was a connection between the two, and the question of why no one had mentioned it was answered almost as soon as it had been asked. The one person who could have mentioned it was gone too.

“Are you free to talk?” asked past-Kell.

“Of course,” replied past-Lin. “The same problems, or new ones?” He said it with a gentle smile.

“The same ones,” said Kell. He sat in a chair in the vestibule, as though he’d sat there a few times before. “Restlessness.”

“Have you spoken to Mizuki yet?” asked Lin.

Verity got the feeling that she shouldn’t be listening in, but there was a chance that the day would still be undone, and she resolved to listen only for long enough to know whether they were going to talk about — something that wasn’t this.

“She’s got a dungeon today,” said Kell. “I’ll come by their house later. But … I don’t think it’s about her, this feeling.”

“Wanderlust,” said Lin. “But it’s odd, for someone who’s traveled the world, don’t you think?”

“I don’t think it’s wanderlust either,” said Kell. “But I was never very good at digging deep inside and putting names to feelings. I definitely didn’t train for it.”

“That’s why clerics are here,” said Lin, nodding.

Verity had interacted with him only once or twice. She’d heard a few sermons from him, most of them stock lessons from Oeyr, God of Emergence. Her eyes went to Lin, and she tried to evaluate him as he’d been. He was nondescript, gentle, though perhaps a bit excitable when he was giving a sermon, in a way that Verity would admit she found preferable to clerical stoicism or recitation. Lin had close-cropped hair, ears that stuck out a bit, and kind eyes, which were his best feature. She had no idea how old he was, but she imagined he was in his thirties.

“I really did think that I would come back to Pucklechurch and just live my life,” said Kell. “There are plenty of opportunities for a wizard, especially one with big stones,” mana stones, in this case, though Verity didn’t imagine that the double meaning was entirely unappreciated, “I thought that I could work two or three hours a day, then have all the time in the world to myself, to just … be.”

“Many people don’t find that to their liking,” replied Lin. “Humans, we’re creatures that need more than that. Even if you could fill your day with work, that wouldn’t address all your needs. The need for culture, society, the need to build something, to create, to discuss, to have power, to grow, we have all these things within us, so many that they’re difficult to name, and they intersect each other in all these fascinating and frustrating ways.”

“And you don’t think there’s fulfillment to be found in running away,” said Kell.

“Let’s say that you’ve left Vertex behind, that you commit to Mizuki becoming a distant memory,” said Lin. “You leave it all, you take your entads with you, say your goodbyes — or don’t. What then? Where do you go?”

Kell shook his head. “You’re saying there’s no solution, that the problem is an emergent one.”

“I’m not really saying that,” replied Lin, voice mild. “I think, when someone comes to you with a problem, one of the things you can ask yourself is whether or not the solution they have in mind will actually fix things. And if they answer that yes, after sober consideration, it will fix their problem, great! But often the solutions we think of don’t strike at the roots — and of course I’m a cleric of Oeyr, I’ll always want to strike at the roots rather than the branches, it’s our way of seeing things. But I want you to consider where you would go, and what that would get you.”

“The world is small,” said Kell. “There’s so little that’s fresh and new.”

Lin shrugged. “I’ve been feeling that myself, of late. The dungeons don’t help?”

“There are enormous tomes on what the dungeons contain,” said Kell. “Sometimes you come across something that you’ve never seen, but my sense of wonder has been eroded. It’s the same with entads. I have a few good ones now, or ones that fit my needs, but it feels like I’m making the problems worse. It’s cool, for a bit, but it gets less cool with time.”

“It’s a patch of tar applied to the hull of the ship,” said Lin. “When what the ship needs is new wood.”

“But there is no new wood,” said Kell. “There’s wizardry, where I could slot myself into an established career, or at best become a researcher of some kind, and there are dungeons, where we’d largely be working from a script, all the more so as we gather up entads that reduce the need for problem-solving.”

“You need to talk with Mizuki,” said Lin. He leaned forward, and seemed to think that switching tracks was what was warranted.

“I do,” said Kell. “I will. Some of the feelings are, probably, because of that, and it’s like you said, all mixed up in my head.”

“I don’t mean to patronize, but you’re very young,” said Lin. “You’re also, from what I know, very intelligent and skilled, and have been rewarded in various ways for your good qualities. I think the quiet life was never going to suit you, it was just what you had thought your next adventure would be.”

Kell placed his hands on his knees, rubbing them for a moment. “How does it end though?” asked Kell. “If the need to go out and do something new is the branches, what are the roots?”

“Time helps,” said Lin. “But in my experience — I hate to say this, as I worry you’ll go do something ill-advised like trying to solo dungeons again — in my experience, there are always going to be unfulfilled needs. I imagine that would be true even with a wife and children, maybe more so. I’ve spoken with men in their fifties who feel the way you do, though perhaps less keenly.”

Kell sat back. “You know, I had kind of hoped that you would just give me the magic arrow that would drive right at the heart of my problems and solve them all.”

“Talk with Mizuki,” said Lin. “Once that’s done, one way or another —”

“It’ll be rejection,” said Kell.

“If you’re certain, then I have to trust you on that,” said Lin. “But it’s weighing on you, and one way or another, it won’t weigh on you anymore. Once that’s done, you can think harder about next steps, and how you might deal with those other longings.” He paused for a moment. “May I point out something I find curious?”

“Of course,” said Kell, though he sighed slightly. Whatever he’d hoped for from this conversation, he was clearly not getting it.

“When you talk of leaving, you never talk of Vertex being with you,” said Lin. “Aside from Mizuki, you say they’re as close of friends as you have. But your imagining is always that you’re no longer part of the party, and sometimes it’s as though you think you wouldn’t even say goodbye.”

“Huh,” said Kell. “I suppose you’re right. And they are friends, but they’re also co-workers, all with their own problems. I guess they came to the area because Lola was chasing Alfric, and if I put it to them, they might just as well go off somewhere else to mine out some other corner of the world. Maybe not Marsh though.”

Lin waved a hand. “What I find interesting is not the logistics, but the way, in your mind, that it was never an option.”

“I don’t really know,” said Kell.

“Think about it,” said Lin.

They said their pleasantries, then Kell went off, and for a moment, Verity almost forgot that she needed to follow Kell. It was uncomfortably intimate, a conversation that wasn’t meant for her, and she resolved not to talk about it with the others except in the abstract. She would definitely not talk about it with Mizuki. And if Kell or Lin ever came back, or were found, she would have to disclose it to them, she thought. It was the bit at the end that had seemed to be the most important to her, the way in which Kell was planning a trip of some sort but didn’t fully understand why it wouldn’t have included Vertex. He seemed as though he knew he was leaving, but didn’t know where he was going, or the particular circumstances.

That pointed to something, though Verity didn’t know what. She gave a brief version of what was said into the party channel, and they agreed that it was the most interesting thing that any of them had found thus far that hadn’t already been found in undone days.

Verity stuck by Kell for most of the rest of the day. He stayed around Pucklechurch, thankfully, eating at the Fig and Gristle for lunch and the Angry Plum for dinner. This meant that Verity needed to go to those places too, and eat there as well, though the offset in time of day meant that she was early to both. She shared a table with Kell, in a sense. A few times people came by to look through the window with her, largely in order to see themselves from three days earlier — most of them regulars — but this was a minor part of her day, and the window largely stayed pointed at Kell. The glasses made a gradual indent on her nose.

Kell visited the house four times, and each time, Verity went with him, knowing that they wouldn’t be there, that he wouldn’t see them. After the third time, he returned to the Fig and Gristle and began writing a letter. She read over his shoulder, trying her best to only skim and feeling ashamed that she was reading something that had been meant for Mizuki’s eyes. Kell was a surprisingly good writer. He had a command of details, and while he went long, to four pages, it didn’t meander in the way that she had thought it might have.

The fourth time he went to the house, he slipped the letter under the door, then turned as though to leave, then swore, turned back, and retrieved the letter by means of a magical spell that blew a gust of wind inside the house. Once the letter was in hand, he burnt it to a crisp and scattered the ashes.

This time, he didn’t go back to the taverns, he instead used his slingshot to send his amulet high into the air. He was gone not long after that, beyond Verity’s ability to follow, but his whereabouts were apparently known, more or less: he’d gone back to the house he was sharing with Vertex.

<We shouldn’t need the window there,> said Hannah. <Not unless he was meetin’ with someone right then and there. If Vertex didn’t notice anythin’, then it’s not likely we would either.>

<We’ll do it anyway,> said Alfric. <Due diligence.>

<Can someone take over for me?> asked Verity. <I’ve been holding this window most of the day, doing nothing but looking at Kell. People weren’t meant to be absorbed in things happening on the other side of a window.>

<I can take it, I just finished up my rock-watching,> said Alfric. <Which was a dead end, as expected.>

<Which way?> asked Mizuki.

<The rock disappeared with sparks and appeared with sparks,> said Alfric. <No sign of any person involved. Clearly at some point Kell was told when and where to go to find the rock, but it’s entirely possible that this was done in a way that would leave no evidence we can track. We know that he left the party late into the night last night, then went to where the rock was waiting for him. We can pretty conclusively say that whoever was responsible, they had significant entad support and were worried about chrononauts and probably knew that we’d try to look into the past. At this point, the window is our best bet, but that means we’re more or less out of options until tomorrow. Verity, I’ll grab the window and then head over to Liberfell, if we take it in shifts we can possibly just have full coverage on him to see when he went from not being sure to having a full plan of action.>

It seemed like a lot of effort for a boy who very much seemed to have left of his own accord, at least to Verity, but she could also admit that the level of resources and secrecy involved raised a few dozen red flags.

The party was briefly back together for dinner, then Alfric was off to Liberfell to keep watch. He suspected that this was fruitless, but in his words, you couldn’t let the enemy win just because you had a high estimation of their preparation and resources. It wasn’t entirely impossible that Kell had left without anyone visibly contacting him, but it did feel somewhat unlikely. The window would help them, he was fairly sure, and if it didn’t help them, they would try something else.

Alfric seemed sure that they would solve it eventually. Verity was considerably less certain.

They didn’t end up doing the post mortem, nor did they talk about the possibility that they might do some dungeons without her, either as an ‘experiment’ or otherwise. Hannah did talk to Verity, privately, but it was transparently a smoothing-over type of conversation, explaining Alfric’s reasoning and his emotional state. It did make Verity feel better, but the crux of it, that he didn’t want to see them all die on a regular basis, remained.

When she went to bed that night, she was thinking to herself about the nameless yearning that Kell had felt. It was possible that someone had influence over his mind, but she couldn’t imagine that it would be necessary. She felt the yearning too, not in the same way, where she needed adventure or power or newness and innovation, but a desire to escape. There was something twisting in her brain, a nameless need to get away, and though she felt it nowhere near as much as Kell had seemed to, she did feel it.

When she slept, it was fitful. When she woke, the monitoring of the past had turned up something new.

Chapter 134 - The Last Days II

In the interests of trying to follow Kell through time, Alfric stayed at the house with Vertex. This was partly to watch, and partly to set himself up for the next day. There were a number of ways in which that wasn’t ideal, but he didn’t want to miss it if Kell had a midnight visitor. Obviously Alfric couldn’t stay awake through the entire night, but he would wake at the witching hour as was custom, and then follow Kell starting in the morning, mostly to make sure he knew where the wizard was going.

With his aunt Penelope in Pucklechurch, Alfric would be doing the day multiple times, and using the window in various ways, or the other forms of watching the past available to them. He had a direct line to Penelope in the form of an entad earring, to help them coordinate, and when he went to sleep, it would be with the understanding that he might be called in any number of directions, either back to Pucklechurch, or to follow some other lead.

“It’s really not like him,” said Grig. He was leaning up against a wall. “I mean, he’s dependable. That he’d leave isn’t hugely surprising, but that he’d do it like this is.” He clucked his tongue. “I liked Kell.”

“I didn’t really know him,” said Alfric. “He seemed fine.”

“‘Fine’?” asked Grig with a raised eyebrow.

Alfric shrugged. “Like I said, I didn’t know him, I hope you don’t take ‘fine’ as a slight, I just never really saw anything that impressed me.”

“Not even when we were doing the dungeon escape?” asked Grig. “That was when I first thought he had something. I was thrilled to have him on the team, even with the elevation mismatch and the fact that we already had Josen — have Josen, I guess.”

It was just the two of them in the second floor dining room, though Lena, the young widow who ran the boarding house, had been in and out. Kell, in the past, was eating a very late dinner. The offset of the window was a bit more than three full days. He was talking with Lena, but Alfric had taken the glasses off so he couldn’t hear. If he needed to know what was said in that conversation, he would ask Lena, but it seemed unlikely that it would provide information, which would mean intruding on Kell’s privacy for essentially no reason. In theory, Alfric could have gotten permission from Lena, but he preferred not to do that.

“Do either of you need anything from me?” asked Lena. She was wiping her hands on her apron. “I’m about to turn in, but from what you’ve said, we’ve had this conversation before.”

“We haven’t,” said Alfric. “But it has been had. I was given information from my aunt. Nothing that needs to be discussed.”

“I had a dalliance with Kell,” said Lena, unprompted. “You know that?”

“I do,” said Alfric. He glanced at Grig. “It’s not the sort of thing that I would have mentioned in mixed company.”

“I don’t mind if he knows,” said Lena, sparing a glance at Grig.

Grig’s eyebrows were raised. “That, uh, is very … unexpected.”

Lena came around and looked at the window that Alfric was holding, where their conversation was taking place. “He was very sweet, but unexpectedly lonely.”

“When was this?” asked Grig. “Sorry, not to snoop, but —”

“The night after this,” said Lena, gesturing at the window. She was watching her own lips move.

Alfric felt uncomfortable. There was no need for her to share. The entire thing was a catastrophe of disclosure and stepping over the bounds of privacy, and Alfric thought it likely that he’d have dropped it entirely if he could have been assured that everyone who’d been taken had been taken voluntarily. Unfortunately, because of how the adversary operated, it was impossible to know whether coercion was used in certain circumstances. There was something that rankled about the way it was done, the total circumvention of provincial and national controls. Alfric really did believe that everyone had secrets and should be allowed them, but this felt like a step too far.

“Let me know if you want to talk, but if we’ve already gone over it, I suppose it’s not necessary.” Lena took her eyes from the window and looked at Alfric. “I do hope you find him.”

Alfric gave her a slow nod.

He didn’t really know the details. He didn’t want to know the details. From what Penelope had told him, it didn’t appear to have much to do with Kell leaving, except maybe that it spoke to his state of mind. The short version was that this late night talk they were having three days in the past wasn’t the first time they’d had an intimate conversation. She’d been widowed very early, a tragedy by any accounting, and hosting dungeon parties had never been her plan. The liaison they’d had was, in her version, one born of a mutual yearning for something that wasn’t each other. Alfric didn’t really understand that — he couldn’t imagine sleeping with someone because there was something else he really wanted.

When Lena left, off to bed, it was just him and Grig again.

“We had some rules,” said Grig. “For living with a chrono.”

Alfric was watching the window. “With Lola.”

“With Lola, yeah,” said Grig. “One of the rules was that you don’t tell a chrono anything, ever, because they could use it against you in an undone day. And another rule was that you never admit to anything that a chrono says you’ve done in an undone day, never take it for granted, because that might just be a way of eliciting a confession, or maybe she’s just trying to get in your head.”

Alfric looked at him. “That’s the sort of thing we’d really like to avoid people thinking,” said Alfric. “There are reasons that I try to be a stickler about the rules.”

“You’re a stickler because that’s who you are,” said Grig. “Which we never really appreciated about you, at the time. We were fools, I guess.”

In the window, Lena reached over and touched Kell’s hand. It was tender, and he turned his hand up to meet hers. It was hard to tell without sound, but Alfric thought they were silent. He tried to stay clinical about it, to treat this as a cleric would treat viewing a body, but it was difficult. He found himself liking Kell a little more, empathizing with him.

“Water under the bridge, so far as I’m concerned,” said Alfric. He looked at Grig. There were changes, he thought, from when they’d known each other a year ago. Grig seemed to have put more effort into his appearance, with more prominently cut clothes and a bit more attention to his grooming. “Or … maybe not. Maybe there’s still some resentment.”

“Yeah, I would think that was, uh, understandable,” said Grig. He shifted his weight a moment. “Most of how we — our teams — talk together is through Marsh and Hannah. I had floated the idea of us doing a dungeon together, same location, same day, and Marsh had passed it along to Hannah, and then I never really heard anything more about it.”

Alfric sighed. He glanced at the window, where not much had changed. Lena was saying something, lips barely moving, murmuring. “We had a string of failures, you must know that.”

“Yeah,” said Grig. “I understood, I never pressed, I just … I don’t know.”

“You want to be friends,” said Alfric.

“Eventually we’re going to leave the area,” said Grig. “I mean, we would have, if Kell hadn’t left us. I was thinking it would be good if we could leave together, set up some kind of pooling of resources, especially if the Hannah and Marsh thing keeps working out for them. Your dungeoneering years are supposed to be a time when you go out and see the world, and I figured it would be nice to be in Tarbin or Kiromo or somewhere if we all knew each other. I know Mizuki well enough, and Hannah a bit, since she’s here sometimes, and you.”

“What are you going to do without Kell?” asked Alfric, turning his eyes to Grig.

“Ah,” said Grig. He looked away. “I’ve got no idea. Recruit again, I guess, though I’m not sure how long we should give it. Maybe he’ll come back. Maybe you’ll find him. I think we had a good string of dungeons with him on the team, kind of opposite your own luck, and it felt like that was proof that we would survive without Lola. Josen is back on board with the whole idea of dungeoneering, Mardin is looking at our growing funds with a smile, and Marsh is — with Hannah, mostly, but in high spirits, even if he talks about her a bit too much.”

Alfric sighed. The past-Lena got up from the table, her fingers momentarily lingering with Kell’s, and she left. “Why tell me all that chrono stuff, about how it was with Lola?”

“I don’t know,” said Grig. “I think … I didn’t really tell you?”

“Didn’t you?” asked Alfric.

“I’m a bard,” said Grig, placing a hand against his chest. “We’re storytellers by nature. Even if we’re lousy musicians, even if we place our emphasis on the magic, it’s part of the tradition. So I told you, but I didn’t tell you. But I do want to, if you’ll listen.”

Alfric looked in the window. He had volunteered to come watch Kell, before anyone else could do it, and he’d known that it would mean spending time with Vertex. Maybe this was what he’d been after, though he wasn’t entirely sure. “Go ahead.”

“Lola would tell us these stories about what had happened in the dungeons,” said Grig. “She would say that I had broken and run when a monster came bearing down, dropping my song and ensuring the deaths of others. She would tell Josen that his staff had a defect and had exploded, blinding him before his head was lopped off by a monster. He’d spend the rest of the day checking over and rebuilding his constructs. She was, I think, trying to get at our insecurities, or maybe she was just poking us to see what would happen. These were in days that she kept, mind you. She told Mardin that he’d frayed his relationship with Oeyr so badly that he’d begged for a reset. It often felt like she was lying, but it was so hard to say, and there was a germ of the truth, I think, though not necessarily because it had happened, just because it was what we feared would happen.”

Alfric pursed his lips. “That’s worse than I’d thought.”

“I talked to your parents,” said Grig. “Mostly to make sure that she wouldn’t get out.”

“Good,” said Alfric.

“There was other stuff,” said Grig. “Things that were more personal. She sat me down to tell me that she’d slept with me on an undone day, that it was something she needed to get off her chest in the interests of disclosure. It threw me for a loop. I mean, she was attractive, in a scary way — no offense.”

“None taken,” said Alfric. “I don’t think I ever forget that she was my girlfriend, but I’m far enough past it that sometimes it sits below the surface.”

“I don’t know if it happened, or if it happened in the way that she said it happened,” said Grig. “It was a ‘disclosure’ she made a few times, and not just to me, though I never found out about the others until after she was gone.”

“You didn’t talk?” asked Alfric.

“I don’t know,” said Grig with a shrug. “Not about that. Mardin always thought she was harmless, and if I’d gone to him, I think he’d have laughed and said it was hilarious, even if he really didn’t think that was true. Josen never talks about basically anything but magic or dungeons. When I said before about how we understood living with a chrono, it’s not just that you should clam up around the chrono, it’s that you should clam up around other people too. Part of that was just because she’d drop things like ‘oh, so and so told me in an undone day’.”

Alfric sighed. “She was the worst.”

“She could have been more awful,” said Grig. “But I think part of why I’m telling you this is that we talked about Lola with Kell, and he didn’t really understand it. He felt like he’d have just gotten out of a bad situation. For him, you make your own way in the world and if things are going wrong, it’s up to you to change that. Self-reliance, I guess.”

Alfric thought about that for a bit. “I think part of why you’re telling me is because you want to show that you suffered,” said Alfric. “You want to say that you’ve done your penance and should be forgiven.”

Grig stared at him for a moment, open-mouthed. “I — that might be true.” He kept his mouth closed and his eyes on Alfric. “I do think some of the suffering was, kind of, ‘well, I guess this is what we signed up for’, like we’d decided our own fates and anything bad that happened was kind of, uh, our own fault.” He frowned. “‘Penance’.”

“Or you were just trying to connect in a way that we never did when we were on the same team,” said Alfric. He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“You’re not over it,” said Grig. “Which I knew.”

“I think about it sometimes,” said Alfric. “Aside from the unstable dungeons we’ve been getting — which is admittedly a big sticking point — we’re a good team. I like them all. But I do wonder what it would have been like to have that other life, which was taken from me.”

“You know how it was though,” said Grig. He waved a hand. “I know what you mean, I don’t want to get into it, I want to move past it.”

“We can just not be friends,” said Alfric. “Having friends now, I’m not sure that we were ever friends. But it’s fine by me if we just don’t see each other.”

“Is it fine?” asked Grig. “For me, it’s been like a rock in the bottom of my shoe.” He shifted his position against the wall. “Sorry, I don’t mean to hold you captive.”

Alfric looked at the window. Kell was writing in a small notebook. It was a draft of a letter to Mizuki. He didn’t need to read it though, since in a different version of the day, they had found the notebook and read through it. The message they’d given to themselves was that there was nothing much to be gleaned from it, since there didn’t seem to be any missing pages. They had an entad that could show ‘history’ of papers, so had already seen Kell writing this note, along with virtually every time the individual pieces of paper were touched by Kell. It never hurt to get some perspective on the past from multiple angles, but he trusted his undone self to have done a good job, and didn’t need an additional look into Kell’s private thoughts about Mizuki.

“I think a rock in the shoe is a good way to describe it,” said Alfric.

“I don’t expect all to be forgiven,” said Grig. “I just … would like a path forward. Let the past be the past?”

Alfric looked down at the window and started to laugh, and after a moment, Grig chuckled, though he didn’t seem to find it quite so funny.

“It’s even funnier because I’m a chrononaut,” said Alfric. He smiled at Grig. “From what I know of Kell’s schedule, he’s going to bed soon. I’ll stay in the room, wake at the witching hour, check that he’s still there, then follow him in the morning or do whatever else my aunt tells me to do.”

“You let me know if you need anything,” said Grig, rapping his knuckles on the wall. “It would be great if we got Kell back, but even if you do figure out where he went, I’m not sure he’s going to be back in the party. I’ll be searching for replacements, I guess, going through the people we rejected the first time around, I suppose.”

“Good luck,” said Alfric.

Grig gave a nod, and a last look, then made his exit. In Alfric’s opinion, that was probably what he should have done fifteen minutes prior.

Kell had his own room, which was small, meant for a child that had never come. Alfric was diligent, and waited until Kell was actually in bed, then left for his own ‘room’, the garden stone, which he’d brought with him using the lute they were calling the Packer’s Lute. It could ‘mark’ objects and then call them to him with a chord, which meant that it was almost like having them in extradimensional storage, except that they would hang around wherever they’d been.

The garden stone was a nice, familiar place, and Alfric had his own small room there, which was really more of a frame, since he hadn’t seen any need for solid walls. There were thick curtains to block the light and a hammock that reminded him of his room at home, which he slipped into and fell asleep in, knowing that he’d wake up at the witching hour.

~~~~

<What do you mean the days haven’t reset?> asked Mizuki. <What does that mean?>

<It means that we’re fresh,> said Alfric. <No one from the guild has a check in, which means that not even the highest priority chrononaut has taken his day.>

<So what do we do?> asked Verity.

<We go about the day like normal, give any information we find over to Penelope, she attempts to reset the day and probably someone gets the jump on her,> said Alfric. <Which means that she won’t remember, I won’t remember, and none of us will remember. Some uncle or aunt elsewhere in the world remembers, and since we’ve given no information to them, and will get nothing back from them, it’s all essentially moot.>

<Lame,> said Mizuki.

<We’ve probably had this conversation dozens of times before,> said Hannah.

<Thousands, more likely, though I guess I don’t always give a heads up.> said Alfric. <But we need to do everything more or less as we planned to, both for the sake of consistency and to make sure the day is failsafe.>

~~~~

<What do you mean the day has only been reset once?> asked Mizuki. <What does that mean?>

<It means that we’re virtually fresh,> said Alfric. <There’s a single check in from the guild, from my great-grandfather, which means he’s taken the day once. He’s the highest priority within the guild, which means that he’s got a duty to report a provisional all-clear, nothing that needs highest-level activation of resources or a bunch of people pointed at a problem.> He wasn’t the highest among all chronos, just within the guild, which meant that the day had likely been reset a few times, but that was the sort of quibble he’d been finding people really didn’t care for him to make.

<So what do we do?> asked Verity.

<We go about the day as normal, give any information over to Penelope, she attempts to reset the day, and probably someone gets the jump on her,> said Alfric. <Which means that none of us will remember. Some uncle, aunt, or elder elsewhere in the world remembers, and since we’ve given no information to them, and will get nothing back from them. It’s all essentially moot.>

<Lame,> said Mizuki.

<We’ve probably had this conversation dozens of times before, ay?> asked Hannah.

<Thousands, more likely,> said Alfric. <But we need to do everything more or less as we planned to, both to make sure the day is failsafe and for the sake of consistency.>

~~~~

<So chrononauts have this pecking order,> said Mizuki. <And you’re basically right down at the very bottom. And since most people haven’t gone yet, from what you know, and your aunt Penelope hasn’t gone, then most of this is pointless.>

<Not pointless,> said Isra. <Necessary.>

<You’ve said that you have five minutes after the witching hour to write a guild message,> said Verity. <Why doesn’t everyone check in?>

<Some people sleep through the witching hour,> said Alfric. <Waking up in the middle of the night just to get an extra edge that you probably don’t need isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. And besides, it changes things. If I looked at the check-ins, I behave differently, even if I don’t mean to.>

<I think I’d just not look at the guild channel, honestly,> said Mizuki.

<Some people don’t,> said Alfric. <There are ways for people to contact you, if they need you, and guilds aren’t for everyone.>

<Odd to think about how many times we’ve had this conversation and then just not remembered it,> said Hannah. <Dozens, I’d suppose.>

<Realistically, a lot more,> said Alfric. <I guess I don’t usually report on what’s been going through the guild, so maybe not, but my guess would be at least in the thousands. Hang on, let me do some math.>

~~~~

Many of their best resources had been exhausted in the first day — which was actually a great many days, thanks to chrononauts. Looking into the past was a quite rare ability for an entad to have, the same as the ability to affect party channels, guild messages, or things like that. Doing so perfectly was even rarer.

People liked to sometimes talk about a theoretical ‘ultimate’ entad. It was a sort of game that you could play, where you took something, often a pretty junk entad that could be had for relatively little at an entad shop, and imagined what it would be like if all its limitations were stripped away. A bracer that only worked on mice could be more powerful if it worked on all rodents, and more powerful if it was all four-legged mammals, and so on. Part of the trick, if you were playing the game, was trying to expand the scope without jumping up to effortlessly warping all reality. Alfric had always been surprisingly good at the game. He didn’t consider himself to be a creative person, but poking at the hidden assumptions behind entads really appealed to him, and it felt creative to show that he was clever in how he’d minorly relax some limitation that no one had mentioned was there.

The ‘ultimate’ pastwatching entad would be one which gave a complete view of the past at any time or location, and further was capable of finding whatever time and location you might want through some kind of table of contents or index similar to what the wortiers could magic into a book. All you would need to think in the direction of this entad would be ‘Kell meeting with a person’ and it would show, in chronological order, all the times that had ever happened. Of course, if you were playing the ultimate entad game, you could imagine that it would show you precisely what you wanted to see even if you didn’t know how to formulate it. And why stop at the past? Why not the future? Why not just show where Kell was at that very moment?

Nothing like that existed, of course. There was some speculation that the Editors had some powers they held in reserve, tools that they’d embedded into the fabric of reality that only they could access, but so far as Alfric knew, that was something that had come purely from someone’s imagination.

Penelope had acquired some of the best pastwatching entads in private hands, and they weren’t all that good.

Alfric had a bracelet that could give five second glimpses into the past, but which was virtually uncontrolled, showing anywhere between one to thirty days prior in the same location. It could be repeated ad nauseum, but it was unpleasant and undirected. Worse, it gave no hints to when the five second slice of time was, which meant that it had to be figured out from context. You could, in theory, use it more than ten thousand times a day … but you would get almost nothing from it unless you were looking for broad patterns. Alfric had done the math, and a meeting that lasted one hour would represent 1/720th of the available time, which meant that you’d expect to see that meeting ten times over the course of a single day of full-time use. That would be fifty seconds, not nearly enough, but it could be used to prove that a meeting had taken place.

For this particular version of the day, Penelope’s first time through, Alfric would be using a different piece of kit, a garment tracker. It would show where any garment — defined, per a cleric of Qymmos, as a textile used to enclose a person — had been. The time bounding on it was seventy days before the present at the earliest, or five days before present at the latest. There were other limits too, the most important being that you needed to have the actual piece of clothing you wanted to track.

So Alfric was left doing the very boring work of going through Kell’s drawers, picking out articles of clothing, and checking their paths through the past.

That there were clothes at all wasn’t surprising, given what Alfric had known about the other disappearances. Most of the people had left things behind. If you were moving somewhere, you would pack up your entire wardrobe, your belongings, things like that, and there were only one or two cases where it seemed like people had done that. Kell had taken his mana stones, his magical implements, and every entad that was bound to him, but left pretty much everything else. There was something creepy about that, Alfric felt.

Kell’s shirt was an earthy green, a half-robe with thin fabric for the heat of the summer like wizards sometimes wore. Long, flowing fabric was a wizardly affectation that dated back hundreds of years, and Alfric had become quite accustomed to it when he and Josen had been spending lots of time together. Alfric touched the entad drinking cup to it, then made a motion to spill what was inside.

Green spilled out into the air, semi-transparent, and Alfric let it flow. This would take some time, but already Alfric could see a swirl around the bedroom. The vision of green that the glass offered wouldn’t be seen by anyone else, but to Alfric, it was quite clear. He’d been warned that the entad would work on any clothing it touched, even if you didn’t want it to, and wrapped it in a piece of packaging paper that he’d been given for exactly that purpose.

If all the entad did was show you all the places a piece of clothing had been in the last two months, it would have been nearly useless, but this one allowed Alfric to touch the streamers of green and feel when they were from. This was unfortunately measured in hours-from-present, which took some converting, but it was far better than having to make some guesses from context. Alfric looked through the window first, checking to see that Kell was still in bed, then began following the trails the shirt had left.

He was looking for aberrations more than anything. Vertex had been in the boarding house for only a few weeks, but it was enough time that Kell had worn this particular shirt around a lot, making the smears of green in the air into clouds. Alfric moved through the house, looking only briefly at the places the green was smeared. There was a cloud at one particular spot at the table, which must have been the place where Kell routinely sat for meetings or meals. There was a trail leading in and out of Lena’s room on the first floor as well, and Alfric did no more than check to make sure that the timing lined up with what he’d been told.

It was once he was out of the house that he noticed the first oddity. Just outside the door to the house, there was another cloud, less intense than the one in the dining room, but still noticeable, a place where Kell had clearly stood around for a bit. Alfric frowned at that and reached out to touch it. There were three separate instances. Alfric made a note of the times. He’d talk with Vertex about it, to see if they knew anything, but none of those conversations Kell had were a part of their record of Kell’s days.

~~~~

Penelope had used up one of her available days, and that meant Alfric was, with the help of Mizuki, attempting to act on a lead he’d apparently discovered.

“Most entads that can see into the past can only see a single day into the past,” said Alfric. “It’s sort of like how most travel entads — the vast majority — go at most a single hex.”

“Is that true?” asked Mizuki. “Thinking about what we have, I’m not sure it is.”

“Wardrobe is one hex,” said Alfric. “With the Packer’s Lute, we can actually chain it indefinitely, but it is a single hex.”

“Wait, what?” asked Mizuki.

“The Packer’s Lute marks things, then you call them to you with a chord,” said Alfric. “Because it’s not limited per day, and because the restrictions on what objects you can take are permissive enough, all you need to do is mark the wardrobe, go through the wardrobe, summon the wardrobe, and so on.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “That’s … basically replicating the Commute Lute.”

“More or less,” said Alfric with a shrug. “You’d run into the rate limit on the wardrobe faster than the Commute Lute. But the point is, there are limits, and a lot of those limits are around the same level, which is the major problem with pastwatching.”

“And we’re past the first twenty-four hours,” said Mizuki. “Which means that the pool of entads we have is actually shrinking. Which wouldn’t be a problem if more chronos had pitched in.”

“True,” shrugged Alfric. “But there are some entads that can’t do the immediate past, they can only do the more distant past, so there are some options opening up to us as we go forward in time.”

“Like this one,” said Mizuki, pointing at the hat that was sitting on Alfric’s head.

The black silk top hat was incredibly ugly, particularly on Alfric, at least in his opinion. It was worse because he was wearing his usual outfit, slacks with a plain buttoned-down shirt, which didn’t fit the hat at all. He was sure that his brother Mo would have found some kind of style that worked well enough to pull off, but for Alfric, it was just some time sitting there in a stupid hat.

“Mostly I want to see whether this is anything,” said Alfric. He chewed the inside of his cheek and looked down at the spot again. “Window is still showing nothing?”

Mizuki looked through the window again, pointing it up at the house. “Nothing,” said Mizuki.

They were looking into different pieces of the past, Mizuki peering into three days ago in a somewhat lazy and bored way, Alfric waiting on the hat to build up its charge. You had to wait on the hat, because for some reason things couldn’t ever be easy and straightforward. He’d been waiting for nearly an hour, keeping the exact time and location he’d been told in mind.

“You know, if we follow Kell one day and Lin the next — or not the next, but on undone days — we’re going to have a really finely detailed understanding of their whereabouts,” said Mizuki.

“We already do,” said Alfric. “But yes, we’ll be able to fill in the gaps.”

“I wish we didn’t have to run all this through Penelope,” said Mizuki. “I wish we could just … leave notes for ourselves.”

“I’m sure she wished that too,” said Alfric. “But we need her directing things because I only have a single day to burn. And we’re limited by how much information she can pack into her mind.”

“There are memory entads,” Mizuki offered.

“They don’t typically work across undone days,” said Alfric.

“Really?” she asked.

“We still train memory, there’s a lot you can be very accurate about,” said Alfric.

“Why don’t they work across undone days?” asked Mizuki.

“No one really knows,” said Alfric. “It’s a blessing and a curse. We can’t use entads to boost our own memory, but we also can’t be affected by any kind of memory attack. Both of those are really rare though.”

“Bah, he’s moving,” said Mizuki. “I need to follow him, though I think we know he’s just going shopping.”

“I’ll see you later,” said Alfric. “The hat should be almost done charging, and then I need to do this another two times.”

Kell appeared beside Alfric, insubstantial, already mid-conversation. Alfric was wearing the glasses, so there was sound, but it was only from Kell. The hat required you to think about a specific person, and would show only them. The hope was that they could at least figure out what this aberration in his movements had been, a half-hour conversation just outside the boarding house four days before his disappearance. It hadn’t even been certain that it was a conversation, just that Kell had stopped for a long moment, moving somewhat. The hat had just confirmed it though, and Alfric listened in.

“I’d like to go,” said Kell, the wordless movements of his mouth given sound by the entad glasses. “To just be done with it. I don’t understand why we need to wait.”

There was a long pause. Whoever was on the other end was speaking.

“I think that’s paranoia,” he said, frowning a bit. “And I think it would be better to just tell people — we’ve talked about this before though, and I doubt I’ll change your mind.”

Alfric took the silence as an opportunity to track Kell’s eyeline. Whoever he was talking to, they were relatively tall. It was pretty much impossible to tell anything else about them.

“No, I understand. And I accept.” Kell ran his fingers through his hair. “If I haven’t concluded my business by then, I don’t think I will. I’ll write a note.” There was another pause. “Yes, of course.” He looked down, probably to something held in front of him, and Alfric tried his best to track where Kell’s eyes were pointing. “I can be trusted,” he said, looking up at the person he was talking to. “Yes, of course. And when this is over, I’ll remember?”

Whatever the response had been, Kell held his hand out. After that, he withdrew it slowly, eyes slightly glazed, then blinked a few times and retreated into the boarding house.

<I have something,> said Alfric. <Eyes on a meeting with his contact, I think, though I don’t know who it is yet.>

<Nice,> said Mizuki. <I’m watching him going entad shopping, this is super awkward because I’m pretty sure he’s going to go into Rolaj’s shop.>

<We could trade off,> said Isra. <I like Rolaj.>

<Nah,> said Mizuki. <I’ll deal.>

<Some kind of memory erasing — storing? — entad,> said Alfric. <At least, that’s my guess based on what he said. He definitely was planning to leave.>

Alfric stared at the empty space in front of the boarding house. He had gotten only the tail end of the conversation, so he let the hat drop its magic and began charging it again, this time aiming even earlier.

Four hours later, he had seen all three conversations in full. There were oddities there, ones that felt important. Kell introduced himself, or near enough, all three times, and there was confusion and hesitance on his face. He reached out to touch something at the start of the conversation, and touched what was presumably the same thing at the end. The device was explained to him the first time, Alfric was pretty sure, given the long stretch of silence after some pointed questions by Kell. He was asking about memory. But in the second and third meetings, he seemed to take it as a given, and a read of his body language showed that he grew more comfortable with the presumed entad each time.

Mostly, Kell had been listening. He asked questions from time to time, and once spent a long moment talking about how he felt like the world had so few new horizons, but much of it was silent. The longest talk had been the first one, and the ones after that seemed more like check-ins.

“There was a dungeon escape a while back, and no one looked too deeply into the past,” said Kell, during the first meeting. “Do you really think that someone will do that for me, if I leave a note?” A pause. “I suppose you’re right. Well, if someone is watching this from the future, hello, but you really don’t need to worry, I’m leaving of my own free will and would prefer you keep your nose out of it.” He was looking around, in the wrong places, but it still gave Alfric pause.

Once Alfric had made note of the conversations’ contents, there was only one thing left to do, which was to use the bracelet. He didn’t want to, but Penelope was going to reset the day, and so the actual experience of seeing five random seconds over and over again was both vital and wouldn’t be personally remembered.

He saw the road outside the boarding house at night, lit by the two smaller moons and the stars in the sky.

He saw the road outside the boarding house at daybreak, with no one around.

He saw a few people he didn’t recognize, walking at midday, down a street.

He saw nighttime, with everything quiet.

He saw the baking sun of the afternoon.

He saw a loose chicken, and a child chasing after it.

It went back in flashes of five seconds, and each time, Alfric used the bracelet again. Almost all of it was pointless nothing, irrelevant to what he was trying to find, and he found himself fatiguing faster than he’d have thought he would. He had positioned himself so he’d be looking straight at the person Kell had been talking with, as the conversations had been in roughly the same location, but from how relatively brief the talks had been, Alfric figured that he had a roughly one in a thousand chance of actually seeing anything. Maybe it would be higher, for that first meeting, which had been longer, but he wasn’t optimistic.

He saw Vertex, just for a flash, walking together on their way back from a dungeon.

He saw a rainy day when everyone was staying inside.

He saw Lena, sitting on a small bench outside the boarding house, crying.

He saw a windy day when the trees were shaking.

He saw a pitch black night, moonslight blocked by clouds.

He saw Lena leaving the house to get groceries.

He saw Kell, speaking with Cate.

It happened two hours in. Alfric had been finding the work grating and monotonous in a way that made it difficult to focus on. Five seconds was exactly the wrong length of time, not enough that he could get settled in the vision of the past, but also not short enough that it felt like he was moving at a good clip. He had a rising sense of nausea from the constant changes to lighting, and the entad was full-sensory, meaning that he could feel the changes in heat and cold, or brief wetness on his skin.

It took his brain a moment to realize that yes, he actually was seeing the thing that he’d been searching for, and he was so bewildered that there were only really two seconds of the five where he was aware of what he was looking at. It was Cate though, Seeker of Secrets for Plenarch, and Kell was in the same green shirt that had let Alfric track down this conversation in the first place. Kell was talking, speaking lines that Alfric had heard before, and then it was over.

<Alright,> Alfric said into party chat. <I know who took Kell and Lin.>

~~~~

“Does that make sense?” asked Mizuki over breakfast. “I mean, why?”

“I’m not sure ‘makes sense’ is the right framing,” said Alfric. “We don’t know her motivation, and potentially it could all be set up with national or provincial authority, though that would seem highly irregular to me. But in the undone day, at least according to Penelope, I saw her speaking with Kell and using some kind of entad to make sure that he wasn’t even aware that they had spoken. Presumably she was jamming the party channel with some other entad, which is alarming given how rare that kind of power is.”

“Says the man who’s been usin’ half the world’s supply of pastwatching entads?” asked Hannah.

“That’s overstating it,” said Alfric. “But yes, it is alarming that Cate has power equivalent to one of the larger chrononaut clans, especially without being a dungeoneer herself. And from what we know, that’s only a lower bound on what her power is.”

“So what now?” asked Verity. “We … track her down? Ask some pointed questions?”

“No,” said Alfric. “Imagine that you’re her, and that you’re responsible for disappearing somewhere between three dozen and two hundred people, maybe even more. You’ve been doing this entirely in secret for a number of months, being careful to evade a cursory pastwatch, manipulating memories so that no one can tell on you, all that other kind of thing. If someone comes to you with questions, what do you do?”

“Kill them,” said Isra.

“Flee,” said Verity.

“Seems extreme,” said Mizuki. “Cate seemed nice, even if she was a little insistent. She could easily have stolen the dragons, if she was malicious.”

“You deny everything,” said Hannah. “Then, given the plans you made earlier, you disappear forever, goin’ to the same place you sent the others, probably.”

“If you know there are chronos involved, which she certainly does, then yes,” said Alfric. “You deny everything, hope that no one tries to take you in at swordpoint, then leave at the first opportunity.”

“Is any of this actually illegal?” asked Verity.

“Affecting memories is, yes,” said Alfric. “People leaving the country of their own volition, no. But the memory thing, if it wasn’t explained to them beforehand, yes, that’s what would bring the hammer of justice down on her. It might not be enough to bring in the heavy hitters, but the Overguards have strings to pull, and I think they would pull them for Penelope. And depending on where those people actually went, and what happened to them, they might still fall under Inter’s jurisdiction.”

“So that’s what we’re doing today?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Alfric. “We’ve burnt through too many days for a confrontation now, we want to be able to iterate on what’s done. Now we need to find more evidence.” He sighed. “Which means that I’m going to have to use the hat and get her side of the three conversations.”

“And … the rest of us?” asked Mizuki.

“Per Penelope, you’ll try to track Lin,” said Alfric. “Track his clothes, look through more of his papers, peer into the past and see if there’s something we’ve missed. We’ll also make a trip to Plenarch, not to confront Cate, but to make sure that she’s there and to poke around as much as we can without raising her hackles. This isn’t the last version of this day, we’ll be sending more information backward.”

~~~~

“So this is the version of the day we’re keeping?” asked Mizuki.

“It pretty much has to be,” said Alfric. “Going one more would mean bringing in one of the other chronos, or for me or Penelope being timesick.”

“And then tomorrow, across dozens of undone days, we’re going to stick a fork in Cate?” asked Mizuki. “Put her in jail, make her reveal her master plan, things like that?”

“From the probing that I did, no,” said Alfric. “Partly because we don’t know where she is. The last people to report having seen her were us, when we sold her the dragons.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “You talked to the censusmaster in Plenarch?”

“In Plenarch, in Liberfell, in every hex around Pucklechurch,” said Alfric. “It’s technically possible that she’s cloaked from the census, but things that interfere with the census are extremely rare, even more so than pastwatching. There was a species of rabbit that would show up on the census, and an entad that would add people to it, but — I’d have to go read a book to see, I guess.”

“Nah, I probably came up with that in the undone day, it seems obvious,” said Mizuki.

“It could be she’s done,” said Hannah. “These were rather brazen, I think, and if she’s settin’ up some kind of new life for these people, she might actually be gone.”

“Possibly,” said Alfric. “Our goal, for today, is to get ready for tomorrow and hope that we can find her. It’ll be hard, because she has some kind of movement entad, and a lot of the tricks won’t work. But when we do find her, we’ll have a confrontation with as much might as we can muster.” He let out a breath. “I did manage to convince my mother to come.”

Mizuki gave a small squeal of delight.

Chapter 135 - The Last Days III

They had gotten a number of travel entads from the haul of lutes, and far too many of them had bound to Isra. She had seven lutes, which was seven more than anyone but a bard needed, and worse, they had quite a bit of overlap between them. She had the Commute Lute, which allowed for up to a hundred hexes of travel through repetitive strumming, the Many-Bridges Lute, which allowed for travel to nearby bridges, the Leaping Lute, which allowed for large leaps with a buildup of song, and the Duet Lute, which would transport you to someone playing the same song. She’d spent quite a bit of their lute testing day touring the country and then walking back home.

Then, when Alfric had taken their lutes to Filera for testing, one of the two unidentified lutes she’d bound to was also a transportation lute, this one allowing her to run extremely fast over water.

It seemed a bit like a sign, or possibly some worry of Verity’s made manifest. Isra now had all the geographic freedom she could ever have needed, and with what had bound, could even take a carefully planned day trip to Dondrian. By running across water, she could get to Tarbin, which filled her with worried excitement. When Tarbin had been far away, weeks of travel or tens of thousands of rings, she had felt comfortable putting the past in the past and simply moving on. Now though, when she could be in far-off Tarbin by noon, it felt like the barrier was so small and thin that it couldn’t possibly be put off for too long.

On top of that, all the resources that the party was using to find Kell — or Cate — could easily be turned in other directions. Isra’s mother and father were dead, but it was possible she had family out there, aunts or uncles, cousins, maybe even grandparents. She didn’t know how hard they would be to find, especially without knowing their names, but with all these tools, if she could be allowed to borrow them … the idea was growing. The desire was growing. She had unbelievable amounts of money, and would have more once they’d sold some of the better lutes that the party couldn’t use. With either the garden stone or Lutopia, she would have mobile housing. The only reason not to go digging into her past was because she didn’t want to, and she was increasingly of the opinion that she did want to.

Isra did more travel over the two days following Kell’s disappearance than she had in the entire rest of her life. Traveling by the Commute Lute was not at all like flying through the air with the helm, and even less like ‘riding’ in the garden stone. Every warp point was different from the last, most of them decorated in some way, with the mark of the hex placed on them, or sometimes with a good view of a prominent building. In some hexes that were virtually empty, the warp point was just a collection of stone that had been placed to prevent the growth of weeds on that spot, with nothing more than a few trails heading out from them, though that level of wilderness was pretty rare.

There was so much beauty in the world. Isra had known a lot from the books, but she’d never traveled except for when the party had gone to new places, and those had both been cities. The wider world, especially as seen through its warp points, had all kinds of interesting trees, odd rabbits, enormous birds, special soils, and shapes to the stones. It made Isra’s collections seem small and pointless, but only for a moment, until she resolved that eventually she would have an entire museum to herself, or find an entad that could hold a limitless quantity of objects, or possibly that she would go to work for a museum herself and could bring them the special things she’d found.

Merger’s Point, ten hexes north, was set in a gorge with peach-colored sandstone walls that had been eaten through by a river. There were houses clinging to the sides of the gorge, and some houses that were carved from the sandstone itself, individual windows bored out by human hands. She’d been there to speak with the censusmaster, and to see whether Kell or Lin had passed through, and she’d stayed a touch longer than necessary, admiring the greenery that spilled out from the windows and the way the mild river flowed below.

Fennel City, to the east, beyond the huge Lake Gornorian, had a huge number of tall spires, which she’d learned were created from a bound entad that was now non-functional. There were more than sixty of them, dotted all around, some parts of a building, others freestanding, and the censusmaster had invited her into one. There were steep stairs in the interior, but each floor had plenty of room, and more than a few families lived a vertical life in a spire, with the children traditionally taking the top floor.

Canter’s Isle sat in the middle of a deep lake, and wasn’t a natural island at all, instead having been built using enormous stone pillars that descended down five hundred feet. It was ancient engineering, probably using significant amounts of magic, and the town was built on top of those pillars, with thick wooden arches spanning between them, and a few houses that jutted out over the edge. The lake was deep and filled with fish, and the smell that filled the air was only mildly off-putting.

Isra was supposed to be looking for Kell and Lin that first day, and she did look for them, but her mind was elsewhere, on the splendors that Inter had to offer. And this was only a collection of hexes that weren’t even that far away! They had seen things in their travels as a party, but she hadn’t quite realized how much the world had to offer. Especially with the Commute Lute, it was as simple as strumming to find herself in some fascinating and interesting new place. She felt like a fool for not taking some time to fly around with the helm, though that had a much more sedate speed, and going from one hex to another would take ten minutes or so, rather than happening instantly.

She liked meeting new people, even though many of them were suspicious when she began asking who the hex censusmaster was and where they might be found. With her new understanding of the world, the suspicion bothered her less than it might have. Most people seemed to think that she was a jilted lover or something of that nature, not taking the story of missing persons entirely seriously, especially since she was so far from Pucklechurch. She thought that was at least somewhat fair, and so long as she did eventually get the information she was after, it was nothing she was too worried about.

Understanding that she was a druid, with everything that came with that, and that other people were essentially deaf and blind to the natural world, was really quite freeing. She almost wanted to tell people when she met them, to give her a bit of leeway, but Verity had said that wasn’t the best thing to lead with, and would make people think you were odd for other reasons.

It was actually funny how long it would take people to cotton on, or how much they would ignore. Eventually, she’d made a bit of a game of it, not saying that she was a druid, but calling their cats to her, or speaking with birds that landed on her finger, or watching as a school of fish swam up from the depths. Sometimes people would raise an eyebrow, but often they’d just have some banal comment about how their dog normally didn’t like people, or wasn’t she lucky that the rain cleared up right when she got there.

The second day, she’d been doing virtually the same thing as the first day, only now she was looking for Cate too, talking to censusmasters on the west coast near Plenarch. She’d done this a number of times, apparently, and felt a bit of jealousy for the other Isras who had gone to other places, their adventures known only through a little mark on a piece of paper to say ‘no, none of the people we were looking for were there’.

On the third day, their focus was still apparently on finding Cate, which was a necessary prerequisite for confronting her. This was related to her over breakfast. The Seeker of Secrets was proving elusive.

“It’s all dead ends,” said Alfric. They were staying at Penelope’s large, square house again, though Penelope herself was in Dondrian, in a final attempt to gain aid. They did have one higher chrononaut though, Alfric’s mother Ria. She was wearing a diaphanous silk dress of sea-foam green, and had a serious expression on her face that showed the family resemblance.

“She’s not on this plane of existence,” said Ria. “That actually does narrow it down somewhat.”

This was, from what they’d said, the tenth time through the day, which included Ria, Penelope, and Alfric taking resets. It was almost certainly going to be the last time through the day, even if something new was discovered.

“Same with all the others that went missing,” said Alfric. “We’ve got six options, essentially.”

“Three realistic options,” said Ria. She’d raised an eyebrow in his direction.

“I’d still like to hear them,” said Mizuki. “I think maybe we went over this when Kali went missing?”

“Alright,” said Alfric. “The ‘realistic’ ones first. Those are dungeons, which entads don’t penetrate into and where you’d have to get around the limit of five, doable, I guess, demiplanes, which are much more likely, and certain entad storage options, like the garden stone.”

“Wait, you can get around the limit of five?” asked Mizuki. “Why have we not been taking extra people in?”

“You need the right kind of entad,” said Alfric. “Extradimensional storage doesn’t work, but there are a select few entads that turn people into something that’s not, per the dungeons, a person, which means that they can slip through and be reconstituted into a person. It’s a rare thing for an entad to do, and usually pretty dangerous for those involved, so doing that with hundreds of people … I don’t see it.”

“And you only get to enter a dungeon once for each party member,” said Ria. “I agree it’s unlikely.”

“I really want to hear the crazy ones,” said Mizuki, leaning forward with a smile on her face.

“They’re not that crazy,” said Alfric. “The first is somewhere in space, where entads don’t work, which you could in theory get to by accelerating hard enough.”

“Which people have tried, dying in the process,” said Ria. She gave a little laugh. “Alfric wanted to be an astronaut when he was younger.”

“People have actually succeeded,” said Alfric.

“Yes, you’re just whipping through the sky in a metal coffin with no protection whatsoever, and getting to a very technical definition of ‘space’,” said Ria with a sigh. “There’s no air up there. Look, it’s very unlikely that Cate took them into space.”

“I’m just talking about what the bounds of possibility are,” said Alfric. “I don’t legitimately think that they were taken to space or, I don’t know, landed on the moons.”

“Which brings us to the other possibility,” said Ria. “Beyond the Barrier Storms.”

“Which also has the magic problem,” said Alfric. “And yes, same applies, it’s really not likely to be that, even if she had taken them to a different location with a ship that could non-magically handle transport.”

Isra was frowning. “What’s the third then?”

“Something else,” said Alfric with a shrug. “The unknown.”

“Lame,” said Mizuki. “You know, if I was going to disappear people, I would take them up to the Fractalwoods and just zap them into the future.”

“Creative,” said Ria with an approving nod. “But I don’t think it fits with the facts.

“You didn’t mention that they could be dead,” said Isra.

There was some silence around the table.

“Elaborate way to kill someone, ay?” asked Hannah.

“Sorry,” said Isra. She hadn’t felt that squirming discomfort in far too long. Apparently it was a bad thing, to mention that the missing persons could just have been slaughtered.

“No, it’s possible, and should be considered,” said Ria. “Though I agree that I’d be surprised if this was all a ploy to kill hundreds of people. Normally murderers don’t get the consent of their victims.”

“You know,” said Verity. “It’s possible that she’s spoken to us.”

“Er, she has spoken to us,” said Mizuki. “Several times.”

“I’m going to roll my eyes so hard I strain something,” said Verity, and she did roll her eyes, but still seemed amused, flashing a grin. “Do you think that any of us would have touched that black orb?”

“Without knowin’ what it does?” asked Hannah. “Absolutely not.”

“If she explained it, I might,” said Alfric.

“I’d do it,” said Mizuki.

“No,” said Isra. She hadn’t gloated about being right about Cate, though she’d felt no small amount of satisfaction. That the dragons were off with Cate didn’t feel particularly good, but at least her instincts had been correct.

“Well at least you have some smart people in your party,” said Ria. “I forgot what it was like to be so young. I suppose when I was seventeen I might have touched such a thing without asking pointed questions first.”

“It might still work if people ask pointed questions first,” said Alfric. “We don’t really know. Also, I’m eighteen.”

“I’m your mother,” said Ria. “I know how old you are. But when I was eighteen, I think I’d have known better.” She gave him a wide smile and a playful nudge.

There was a lot that they apparently knew through Alfric’s investigations the day before. That orb of Cate’s could erase memories, including a bit before and after the conversation, so it wasn’t just like it hadn’t happened, but they wouldn’t even remember her coming or going. Knowing what it did, Isra thought she’d never have done it.

“And Cate never said where she was takin’ him?” she asked.

“No,” said Alfric. “Just ‘someplace else’. The way she described it, it would be a community of like-minded people who wanted a new adventure. One that was permanent and would have some hardship, but a chance to prove themselves.”

“That’s what I don’t get,” said Hannah. “Why wouldn’t Kell ask after the specifics?”

“He did,” said Alfric. “I think, anyway. This is all secondhand through Penelope from my own observations. Cate refused to tell him though, which is no surprise given the lengths she went to in order to cloak what she was doing. If Kell or Lin —”

“Or your cousin Kali,” said Ria.

“Right,” said Alfric. He shifted in his seat, which from what Isra knew of him meant he was suppressing a need for clarification. “If they had known, then potentially the memory could be recovered, or it could be seen through watching the past.”

“Okay, but she might just be gone,” said Verity. “Right? This might have been the very last thing she did before going elsewhere.”

“That’s very much possible,” said Alfric with a nod. “But we’ll keep up the search for at least the next day, and from there, Penelope will keep searching with entads. If Cate sets foot back into this world … we won’t necessarily know, but there’s a good chance.”

When they broke from their entad-made breakfast, Isra was supposed to travel the world with the Commute Lute, going to places that Cate was, per her office, known to have gone. So far as everyone in Plenarch knew, Cate was still Seeker of Secrets, and if she had made her final exit, she hadn’t communicated that fact to her superiors or her staff. She had no guild, nor a party, no one to watch her.

But before Isra left, she found Verity, who apparently had little to do with the day.

“I’d offer to bring you with,” said Isra. “But we’d need some kind of storage for you, and I don’t think it would be all that fun.”

“Plus I would cramp your style,” said Verity with a small laugh.

“That too,” said Isra. “But with the lute, I should have more than enough time. This is no longer the low-hanging fruit. It’s an adventure with no real purpose.”

“I don’t really know what I’m going to do with myself,” said Verity.

“Explore the city?” asked Isra. “Go to the beach?”

“Maybe,” said Verity. “There’s something nagging at me. Do you think that Cate would have visited us?”

“Why would she?” asked Isra. “She knew that I smelled something off about her.”

“Literally?” asked Verity.

Isra frowned, thinking about that. “I don’t know. Everyone has their own smell. Usually no creature with a good sense of smell is close enough that I can smell. She smelled different, but she was different. City smell, for a start.”

Verity turned to look out the view from the house, which looked over the water. “Lin was a cleric, though not terribly accomplished. Kell was a promising young wizard. Kali was … disaffected, but maybe held some promise. Cate knew me. She knew I’d run away, that I had no one other than the four of you.”

“You’re wondering why she didn’t go after you?” asked Isra.

“No, I think she might have,” said Verity. “I want to know.”

Isra considered that. “You’ve been living out in the cabin. If Cate knew where that was, it wouldn’t be hard for her to get you alone. But you do have us. Would you have gone?”

“I don’t know,” said Verity. Her eyes were following a flock of birds that was flying over the water. “Alfric’s been talking about replacing me.”

“He’s been talking about confirming the severe dungeons are because of you,” said Isra. “Which they might not be. And if they are, we’ll deal with it.”

“I think I’d have stayed,” said Verity. “But it’s so hard to say.”

“Leaving was an option?” asked Isra.

“At points,” said Verity. “I don’t want to make running away a theme of my life, but I suppose it’s possible. There’s something attractive about it, isn’t there?”

“This world is so big,” said Isra. “I’ve been all over two relatively small areas of Inter in the last two days and I found so much. How big could the world Cate is offering be?”

“I’m not sure it’s about ‘big’,” said Verity. “What attracts me, at least, is a place where everything isn’t so … settled? Dondrian had this giant horrible society of people who had all these expectations, and Pucklechurch was better, but it’s still a collection of people who have largely known each other for decades. It doesn’t bother me, but I can see where it could bother other people. If I had come into the party and you’d all known each other since childhood, I think I might have hated it.”

“Do you wish she had come to you?” asked Isra.

“No,” said Verity, mouth firm. But it softened. “I think I’d have made a good candidate. Not allowed to talk about it with anyone else, because I wouldn’t remember, not able to be talked out of it, maybe only mentioning some longing to be elsewhere, like Kell did … being in a society that was built from the ground up, which is what I’ve been imagining?”

“There’s appeal,” said Isra. She held silent for a moment. “What happens if you change your mind, do you think?”

“Surely Kell asked,” said Verity. “We could talk to Alfric and see what he overheard, but it’s secondhand, which is annoying. I would think that the answer is that you can’t change your mind, or maybe that you’d have your memories erased, if she can do that.”

Isra frowned, caught herself frowning, and smoothed her face. “If she comes to you, don’t take the deal.”

Verity gave a little laugh. “I’d only ever have accepted in my darkest moments. You don’t need to worry about me.”

Isra nodded. “I should get going though. Thank you for the talk.”

“Anytime.” Verity smiled and then spun, causing her dress to flare out. She stalked off as though she had important business to do, and Isra took a moment to watch after her.

Verity sometimes seemed as though she was composed of far too many ‘darkest moments’. By her own confession, the winter after leaving Dondrian had been spent brooding, enough so that Cynthia, the barkeep at the Fig and Gristle, had said something about it. It had been good only for a time, and then the ‘darkest moments’ had been almost the entirety of the time when Edil was breathing down Verity’s neck about the concerts, and then also after the big concert when she’d gone off to live in the woods.

In Isra’s opinion, it wouldn’t be difficult to get Verity to agree to go off somewhere else. That was a bit scary to think about.

She had been told to keep quiet about what she was doing. They hadn’t talked to Cate’s office except in the undone days, mostly to keep from letting her know that they were onto her. There were still risks there, but mostly from the possibility of some chrononaut with a higher priority unwittingly taking a message back after an alarm was tripped. It was all very cloak and dagger, and there had apparently been some discussions about whether provincial or national authorities should be involved where it concerned Cate. But she was, unfortunately, a member of the government, even if she hadn’t been in the office in the past few days. She did that sometimes, they had said, either because her work took her elsewhere, or for unspecified reasons.

When Isra came to Plackard’s Hollow, on the coast of the Plenum Sea, she didn’t explicitly ask for Cate, she instead talked with the censusmaster and asked about Kell and Lin, then inquired about anyone else who had passed through, knowing that Cate had been there a month ago. This pretty naturally moved the conversation toward what she’d been doing at the time, most of which was already known, but Isra enjoyed the conversation nonetheless. Cate had visited as part of her role as Seeker of Secrets, as there had been a few sightings of an enormous sea beast, one that had bumped up against a fishing boat, almost capsizing it. There hadn’t been much to learn about the actual incident, but Isra had learned that there were two disappearances from a week after that visit. It hadn’t been connected to what was happening in Plenarch, and it certainly hadn’t been connected to Cate.

This pattern apparently wasn’t uncommon. Almost everywhere that Cate went, people vanished in ones and twos. Isra had, after all, been all through Greater Plenarch tracking Cate in the undone days, and these were just the lesser targets, those that needed to be tried but which weren’t expected to provide all that much information. Many of them were from up to a year ago, and provided nothing more to the party than more entries into a logbook.

In Frensel, Isra walked along the high walls of what had once been a castle while she spoke with the censusmaster about Cate’s visit. Cate had come by because of an atmospheric disturbance, green and yellow clouds that had swirled over the town, and apparently it was the business of the Seeker of Secrets to come when someone had said that something was weird.

Manse Perimont was primarily a Chelxic village, where Cate had come to inspect some artifacts. There was a boy Isra’s age who seemed smitten with her from the moment he’d first spotted her. She had practiced her flirting with him, and he’d practiced his flirting with her, which it seemed like he badly needed. He was cute enough, but more than a hundred miles from where she lived, and she let him down gently.

Isra had nine such adventures before returning to Plenarch with a small notebook that contained her findings. Cate had been taking people, many of them, it seemed, and the pattern was rather clear. Whatever Isra was doing, there didn’t seem to be any way that it would actually help things. Still, it was a very pleasant way to spend a day, and she liked having an excuse to talk to strange new people in strange new places.

When Isra came back to Plenarch late at night, Verity announced that she had made a discovery.

“It’s in the book,” she said, slamming it down on the table with no small amount of ceremony.

Alfric gave the book a raised eyebrow. Dinner had come and gone already, and they were gathered around the large dining table under the soft lights of the cubic chandelier and the cavernous roof of the space.

Isra gave the book the same skeptical eye that Alfric had. It was the entad book they’d taken from their very first dungeon, the one which recorded conversations in the immediate area. They had last used it when Lola had made her confession, getting everything in writing to go with all the eyewitness accounts.

“You have a conversation there?” asked Alfric. His eyebrow hadn’t gone down.

“She did come for me,” said Verity, who had the book open to a particular page. “At least twice, though I haven’t found the other one, and it’s possible that it wasn’t recorded.”

“Wow,” said Mizuki. “Does this actually help us?”

Verity face fell, just a bit. “Well, it’s … I mean, it’s important, isn’t it? I spent all day reading, the book is poorly organized and it turns out that we’ve talked a lot.”

“Let’s hear it,” said Alfric. “I think it’s a good find, information that we didn’t have, which is something that’s to be lauded.”

“So it’s just been sitting there, waiting to be found?” asked Mizuki.

“Hush, let the girl read,” said Hannah.

~~~~

“Hello?” Verity asked. “Cate?”

(The book provided no names or speech tags, just some punctuation, but said nothing else about what was going on. Verity was inferring the names from what was said, assuming a back and forth.)

“Verity,” said Cate.

“I have a rare entad,” said Cate. “It blocks the party channel. Stores it, actually, but the effect is the same. I wanted a private conversation, and this helps to ensure that.”

“If this is about the dragons —” said Verity.

“No,” said Cate. “Place your hand on this.”

“What is it?” asked Verity.

“It ensures confidentiality, which is quite important to me,” said Cate. “I mean you no harm.”

(Isra was burning with curiosity about what might have transpired. Sometimes the book recorded, if not gaps, then places where the same person spoke twice in a row. It was hard to say though.)

“We’ve had this conversation before,” said Verity. “This entad — no, I know all this.”

“You do,” said Cate. “Take a moment, it will come.”

“I still think it’s unnecessary,” said Verity. “The cloak and dagger, I don’t understand it. This is hard for me. I’ve had hardly any time at all to think about it.”

“We have the entire day ahead of us,” said Cate. “You can remove your hand now, and take some time. May I come in?”

“Yes,” said Verity.

(This was not at all what Isra would have said. She wondered when this had happened, when Cate had been let into the cabin.)

“Can I tell you what happened today?” asked Verity.

“Of course,” said Cate.

“I don’t think I should tell you, actually,” said Verity.

“But you do want to,” said Cate. “And I’m the Seeker of Secrets, as you know. My discretion is assured.”

“I think about what the others would say,” said Verity. “Alfric would urge caution. Isra doesn’t trust you. With good reason, I think, having had these conversations.”

(Isra tensed on hearing her own name, but Verity continued on reading out loud.)

“I’m a secretive sort,” said Cate. “That does make it rather hard for people to trust you. People want something from you, to have their trust. They want the things that you carefully guard. You’ve experienced that, with your music, haven’t you? Not the music itself, but what comes after, or before, meeting with people who want some slice of you, which your mother was always willing to serve up.”

“Mother tried to keep it from being personal,” said Verity. “‘The anecdotes should be anodyne.’”

“But they were so much more loved when they were personal,” said Cate. “People like when you give a bit of themselves, when you show vulnerability. They trust you, after that. I seem untrustworthy because I’m so unwilling to do that.”

“I love these people,” said Verity. “What Alfric said yesterday — he said that I was selfish.”

“And are you?” asked Cate.

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “I think I might be. I think it’s why Isra

~~~~

“Welp,” said Verity, staring down at the page. “I see now that I definitely should have read this in full before sharing.” She had stopped mid-sentence and her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes were still tracking across the page.

“Read it in silence then,” said Alfric. “Let us know if there’s anything relevant.”

Verity frowned at the book, doing a poor job of hiding her embarrassment.

“Wait, is there a chance that I was scouted?” asked Mizuki. “That we all were?”

“Possible,” said Alfric. “Extremely unlikely that she’d go after any of us when the others were around, and I’m a chrononaut, which means that I could get around the memory entad with a reset. From what we know, I don’t think she’d take the risk.”

Ria leaned forward. “This might be our in.”

“Our in?” asked Verity, looking up from the page.

“She was patient with the herb dragons,” said Ria. “She’s patient with people too. If she’s gone to ground for good, I’m not sure we have any hope, but we can set ourselves up to catch her, if we know who her prey is.”

“That seems dangerous,” said Alfric. “It seems really dangerous.”

“Yes,” said Ria. “And it will take some planning.”

“Then if I’m going to be prey,” said Verity, “Let me be prey.”

Chapter 136 - The Last Days IV

Mizuki was excited, happy to have some kind of solid lead and a plan in place. Unfortunately, the plan involved a lot of waiting, and that wasn’t what Mizuki considered her forte.

She was two days out from starting wizard college, which she hadn’t prepared for at all with everything that had been going on, except to arrange long-range transport. This came in the form of either Isra, with the Commute Lute, or at more expense, the Packer’s Lute and the wardrobe. The problem was that the wardrobe was making them a good hundred rings a day on average, sometimes even more, and if Mizuki took it, there was a good chance they’d get none of that. Paying a hundred rings every day seemed like far too much. But the same could be said about the Commute Lute, which might help them set up a business. They weren’t doing that though, and Mizuki did kind of wonder why. They had money, which was part of it, but she almost felt like if someone was offering you that much money, you couldn’t not take it.

There were a lot of thoughts she wasn’t super comfortable with, which is why she was focusing on Cate, and that unfortunately needed some time to work, if it would.

“How long are we going to have to wait though?” asked Mizuki.

“Potentially a long time,” said Alfric. “And it’s very possible that she’s gone for good, or was spooked, and we’ll never see her again.”

“Yeah, but … she’s gotta come eventually, right?” asked Mizuki.

“We should also not be talking about it,” said Alfric.

“Fine, fine,” said Mizuki. “I mean — not at all?”

“In the garden stone, if you need to,” said Alfric. “Remote viewing is rare, but we’re dealing with the rare entads, and she has been in the house a few times, which she could have used to plant something.”

Mizuki picked her feet up off of the table in the living room, which had been cleaned up following the lute testing. The lutes themselves were largely inside Lutopia One, where they had ectad lighting and some quick shelves that had been moved from inside the garden stone. Lining up all the lutes gave her an almost aggressively domestic feeling, particularly after she’d helped Alfric to affix little labels to all of the entads. Of all their changing circumstances, a room filled with entads seemed like the best.

“Coming?” she asked, once the lute was in hand.

“Oh, you meant now?” asked Alfric. He grudgingly rose from the couch. “Fine, fine.”

Mizuki strummed the lute, and Alfric vanished into Lutopia One, then she strummed it again to get herself there.

“You know what we need?” asked Mizuki. “Chairs.”

“I’ll get the entad,” said Alfric, going to its place on the shelf. He took the oversized quill and scratched deep into his arm, writing something out. You had to press pretty hard, and it was a bit too painful. Mizuki was quite pleased to see an overstuffed red chair appear, and a second one soon followed it.

“For me?” asked Mizuki.

“Of course,” said Alfric.

“I would say that I can scratch my own chair, but I wouldn’t want you to think I don’t appreciate your chair-ity,” said Mizuki.

“‘Chair-ity’,” sighed Alfric. “You know, I think lute testing broke your brain.”

“Can’t break what you don’t have,” smiled Mizuki. She looked at him. “You’re serious about not talking about the plan outside of a place like this?”

“Yes,” nodded Alfric. “I think Penelope’s was probably fine, but if what we want is for Cate to come, then we need to act more or less normal, which does mean that we can’t be sitting around tapping our feet and talking about how we’re basically just waiting for her.”

“We could have Verity send a letter,” said Mizuki. “Something to bait her?”

“What would that letter look like?” asked Alfric with a little laugh. “‘Hello Cate, I’ve been feeling awfully down, would you like to perhaps whisk me away somewhere?’”

“Well I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “We could do something. Because we don’t know, right? I mean, Cate might be gone for good, and even if she’s not, maybe Verity already turned her down. Right?”

“It’s very possible,” said Alfric. “And if Cate shows her face in Greater Plenarch, we’ll have some contingencies there. It’s better if she tries taking Verity though, because that allows us a path to the demiplane — or wherever it is.”

Mizuki sighed. “I want to do a dungeon, if we’re just going to be waiting around. That’s a normal thing we’d do, right?”

“Er,” said Alfric.

“Oh come on, please don’t replace Verity,” said Mizuki. “Please?”

“The plan was never to replace her, it was to run an experiment and see what kind of dungeon we get out of it,” said Alfric.

“Okay, can you do that in an undone day?” asked Mizuki.

“And spend an entire day of effort, with a full team, clearing a dungeon so that I get nothing but information out of it?” asked Alfric. He seemed offended.

“I mean, you wouldn’t have to remember it, right, if your mom or someone else just redid a day?” asked Mizuki. “And there are chrono services we could potentially pay for, so that it wouldn’t feel like you were auditioning someone to take her place. Musicians are very sensitive about that kind of thing.”

“That’s — yes, probably a better idea,” said Alfric. “I think the bigger issue is that if the dungeons are different then yes, it is her, and no, I don’t really want to get my skull caved in, or worse, see my friends dying in front of my eyes. I could maybe train myself to feel nothing about it, but that’s a big maybe, and I might ruin my mind before I was able to push past seeing that sort of thing.”

“I do want to save your mind,” said Mizuki. “And if we can pay other chronos for that, all the better.”

“You know, we don’t need to be in here for this kind of conversation,” said Alfric.

He shifted in his chair. The seat would disappear on its own pretty much as soon as they weren’t sitting on them, but the quill was a nice one for things that you didn’t need to set down or leave by themselves. It could only maintain three forms at a time, with some limits on mass and volume, and Mizuki was mildly surprised to find that she enjoyed hearing about those things. She’d always felt an affinity to Qymmos, and it was a good reminder of why that was.

“Fine, fine,” said Mizuki. “I guess we should get out just in case there’s word from Verity.”

“We’re likely going to be waiting a full week,” said Alfric. “Maybe more. There will be some logistical challenges if it happens when you’re in the middle of your studies. You’re sure you want to be a part of this?”

“A chance to go to some crazy new place that hundreds of people got disappeared to?” asked Mizuki. “Even if it’s just a demiplane, I’m in. I’ve never been to a demiplane.”

“I’ve been to a few,” said Alfric. “But it might not be a demiplane.”

“I’d also be up for an adventure on one of the moons,” said Mizuki.

“In the best case scenario, we don’t go anywhere at all,” said Alfric. “I just want to make that clear. And even if we do go somewhere, we’re almost certainly going to reset, which means you almost certainly won’t get to experience any of it.”

Mizuki threw her head back against the chair. “Why must you make everything so lame?”

“What we want from Cate is to capture her, get information from her, and get the people she took back, or at least have some understanding that they are, in fact, safe,” said Alfric. “What we don’t want is to go after her in single combat, or gods forbid, to kill her. In theory, we can place her under a citizen’s arrest. In practice, there’s no way to stop someone with a sufficiently powerful entad from just leaving unless you want to go at them with full force. We have to figure that she can leave at the speed of thought. That leaves pure immobilization, including mental immobilization, which is rare, especially without jumping through hoops. That goes double if it’s someone who’s aware, and triple if they’re expecting threats.”

“Which means no spoon to the back of the head is going to work,” said Mizuki.

“You never know,” said Alfric. “But especially if she knows that people are after her, then yes, I expect that it just wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t work on my mom.”

“Well, you’re right, we should go out,” said Mizuki. She hesitated. “And if we do go in with Verity, when it happens, we’re certain that our exit method will work?”

“No,” said Alfric. “Given that we don’t know where we’re going, we’re not certain.”

Mizuki frowned at him. Hannah had said that he was sometimes bad at being reassuring when that was clearly what someone needed, and Mizuki had defended him, but was now feeling like she shouldn’t have. They were supposed to have an escape hatch if they went out, a wizardly device that could go out from a demiplane but not in. It wouldn’t work if they weren’t in a demiplane, but if they were away too long, they would hopefully just reset. And if they got there, they would get their answers.

“We’ve got a lot of waiting around,” said Alfric. “A lot. You’re ready for that? And for minimal talking about the thing once we’re out?”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki with a sigh. “Let’s set in for the long haul, maybe I’ll help you with some woodworking or read through the wizard books some more.”

She wasn’t happy sitting around, nor with thinking too much about the future, but she resigned herself to put her mind toward other things. Hoping that Cate would pick up the bardic bait was likely going to take a long time.

It took two hours.

~~~~

Verity was meant to be brooding in the woods. She had taken to tending Isra’s garden instead though, which was a pleasant enough task. The garden had never been a terribly large or important part of Isra’s life, given that she could forage anything she wanted with ease, but there was a plot that she’d tended with her father, mostly to give them a wide variety of ready food throughout the growing season. According to Isra, her father had never said anything about his daughter being a druid, but he must have known, because any garden that Isra oversaw benefited mightily from her active interest.

With Isra largely at the house, the garden was going to seed, though less than it had any right to. There were weeds to rip out and parts of the plants to prune, though this late in summer, there was less of a point, and Verity wasn’t going to stay in the cabin forever. Still, it gave her something to do that wasn’t actually moping around, and she’d already gotten her practice in for the day.

She thought, briefly, about the conversation she’d already had with Cate, the one written in the book.

~~~~

“I love these people,” said Verity. “What Alfric said yesterday — he said that I was selfish.”

“And are you?” asked Cate.

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “I think I might be. I think it’s why Isra stopped loving me.”

Verity only had the record of the meeting from the book, but she could imagine how it had gone well enough, maybe even better than well enough, since she had, after all, lived it. She could presume the intonation of her own voice, and picture her saying these things. She had also spent some time with Cate, more than the others.

“Did she?” asked Cate.

“I don’t know,” Verity admitted. She imagined herself smoothing her dress. “I think that I caused problems between us by asking too much of her and not giving enough back.”

“How will she feel if you leave?” asked Cate. Verity imagined her imperious, gentle but firm, less like a cleric and more like a schoolteacher.

“She’ll be hurt,” said Verity. “I hope that she’ll be at least a bit put out. If she shrugged my disappearance off with casual indifference, that would wound me enormously. I don’t wish her pain, obviously, but in a few months, yes, I think she would get over it. The others will be hurt too, but the dungeons were never meant to be a permanent arrangement, and we’re running into stumbling blocks already, which might be caused by me.”

It was painful to read that. It was one thing to say that in her darkest hour she might abandon the team, but it was another to read herself saying that as the moment presented itself. It did make her seem selfish. It was selfish. Even if there were other meetings that she hadn’t seen, there was something deeply unlikeable about saying that you’d leave your friends behind.

“I won’t take you if you have reservations,” said Cate. Again, Verity read it as gentle, but there was no way or knowing without actually having the memory.

“Are there really people without reservations?” asked Verity. “People who say ‘yes, immediately, take me to some unknown place, leaving all my friends and family behind’?”

“As a matter of fact, there are,” said Cate. “Though I do prefer not to approach people at that level of desperation.”

“I do want to go,” said Verity. “You said there would be, ah, people for me to date?”

“Opportunities for courtship, yes,” said Cate.

“Other women around my own age,” said Verity. “Not too much older.”

“Twenty-eight of them,” said Cate. “You would make the twenty-ninth.”

This was the part of the conversation that Verity had felt the most despair over other people seeing. It was so base, so self-centered, and really did make her think about who she was that she was willing to express herself like that to a stranger. It was a sensible question though, if you were thinking about stranding yourself with some unknown number of people.

It was as much as they had about firm numbers, since Cate hadn’t even said as much to Kell, who hadn’t asked about eligible women. It was a high number, and implied a population in the thousands, but Hannah had pointed out that things weren’t always so rosy for women and men with an ‘affinity for Garos’, not in small towns where their prospects would be slim, and all the more so when they were young. It was one of the reasons that they had the church of Garos, but as Hannah was quick to point out, there wasn’t always something for the church to do.

“The time is approaching,” said Cate. “When we go, it will be in secrecy, largely to protect me, and the people who are already there.”

“You need me to be ready,” said Verity. “But … I’m not sure I will be. Sorry.”

“I’m a very patient yet persistent individual,” said Cate. Verity imagined a smile. “I’ll stop by, and we can talk, from time to time. Now, your hand upon the orb, so we leave no trace of this conversation behind.”

And then that was more or less it. The conversation had been brief, perhaps only to plant the idea, or to reinforce it the next time Cate came back with that same orb.

~~~~

Cate came slowly, walking through the woods, the branches somehow not snagging at her fine, flowing red robes. Verity bolted up in surprise, then second-guessed that reaction, then thought that no, her natural reaction should be to be surprised. She wiped her hands on her apron, then took it off, folding it briefly. Under the cover of the apron, she twisted the ring on her finger, which was the signal for the others. Everything would be taken care of, they had assured her.

“Cate,” said Verity, backing away slightly, almost involuntary.

“Verity,” replied Cate. “Am I intruding?”

Verity looked at the garden. “No, not at all. I’m just — how did you know where I would be?”

Cate gave a sly smile. “I was told, as a matter of fact.”

From within her robes, she drew the black orb that Verity had heard quite a bit about but never seen — except that she had, those memories had just been locked away.

“Place your hand on the orb, please,” said Cate.

Verity stared at it for a moment. “What will happen?”

“Nothing that will harm you,” said Cate. “Please, it’s important, and time is of the essence.”

Verity hesitated, then reached out.

It wasn’t a rush of memories, just an awareness that memories were there, and she could feel her demeanor change as she found a new understanding of where she stood with Cate. She had known there’d been more than one meeting, but she hadn’t counted on just how many there had been, seven in total, with this being the eighth. Cate had made the offer several times, but it wasn’t just about the offer, they had talked with each other a few times, notably after the concert, when they’d spoken together for a full hour. Verity had done most of the talking. It had, strangely, been in the house, before Verity had moved into the cabin. The timing was, in retrospect, suspect.

And Verity had said that she would come on the grand new adventure, but she’d also said that she wouldn’t, which she felt some small amount of relief about. That had been the last time they’d met, not long after Cate had bought the herb dragons.

“You’ve come to see if my answer has changed,” said Verity, letting out a breath.

“I have,” said Cate.

“Kell and Lin, that was you,” said Verity. They had already discussed the other disappearances before those two, and the memory of that sat unfamiliar in Verity’s mind.

“It was,” said Cate. She gave a gentle smile. “I kicked the hornet’s nest with them, it seems. My time in Inter draws to a close.”

“But you came for me,” said Verity. She let out a breath. “To see if I would decide differently.”

“Not just for you,” said Cate. “There are a few others. If you have no interest, I’ll be going on my way, and that will be that. You’ll keep your memories, and the mask will fall from my face. Everyone will know what I’ve done, which will enrage some and provide solace to others.”

“You’re not worried that I’ll tell?” asked Verity. “As soon as you’re gone?” The ring felt heavy on her finger. She wasn’t sure it was the sort of question that she should be asking, given their plans.

“You’ve decided on not coming with me then?” asked Cate. “There’s no chance that I can change your mind?”

Verity hesitated. She knew what the plan required of her, that they get wherever Cate was going, but she didn’t want to lie. “I have a good life here,” said Verity. “Or a decent one, anyway. I have people who love me, in their own way.” She swallowed. “But things have been going sour, and to pass up the opportunity, to hitch my wagon to theirs when the future is so uncertain …”

“I don’t want people who are uncertain, I’ve told you that,” said Cate. “I don’t want those who will always wonder what it would have been like if they had stayed home.” She gave a sigh that sounded contented to Verity’s ears. “You know, you’ve had these expectations placed on you from such a young age, and I wanted something different for you. I feel a fondness for you that I’ve only rarely felt before. Perhaps it’s because of the pressures you’ve faced, the excellence that you’ve shown which wasn’t ever about you. I appreciated that, I think. You were gifted with the lute and so it became your life, in spite of your wishes. You were Chosen of Xuphin, and you’d really rather not have been, because you didn’t need the weight of more expectations. There’s a great humility in you that I think has never had much chance to shine, except during your performances at the tavern, which I’m mildly upset that I never got to hear.”

“Would I be playing taverns, in your new place?” asked Verity, leaning forward slightly.

“If you wanted to play … it would depend,” said Cate. She gave a cautious smile. “Are you asking because you’re interested, or because you want to hand the information on?”

“Both,” said Verity, which was the truth. “You’ve never said what the other place actually is. If it’s a demiplane, that’s … that’s what Alfric thinks is most likely. We tried to find Kell. He’s a friend.”

“I’m aware,” said Cate. “He’s safe. He’s adjusting. I’m not sure I would say he’s happy yet, but he wasn’t happy here.”

Verity frowned. “I’m not sure that I’m happy here.”

She wasn’t a good liar. What she was good at, she’d found, was putting up a stone face and reacting with grace and poise, but that wasn’t the same as being good at lying. She could lie only if no emotion was required of her, and even then, she sometimes got hot under the collar. The face she put on for performances was a stoic one, which she could recall easily, at a moment, but that was hardly ever what was required to sell a lie. Sometimes, among Society people, what was called for was to tell a charming lie, or a lie that came off like a joke, or a stinging barb delivered with sweetness, and Verity had learned to simply do a hard shell.

The solution, if you were no good at lying, was to not lie.

“They’re talking about not doing the dungeons with me,” said Verity. “They’re too dangerous. We’ve been dying, and Alfric has been undoing it. I think it would be unfair — selfish — for me to expect him to keep going through all that. It hurts though, and if I were out of the party, I hardly expect that things would be the same. They’d mentioned that I could be a part of the counterparty, but that’s not the same at all.” She swallowed. “And things with my mother … they’re not resolved, father just lucked into some money from a new business, and wants me to be a part of it, and I’ve been putting off going to Dondrian for that because I feel like my mother can’t just leave things alone. Like there’s some trap left waiting for me.”

“And on the other side, your friends,” said Cate. “Who you wouldn’t want to leave behind.”

“Yes,” nodded Verity. “But they’ve only been friends for a handful of months.” This felt untrue, or like she was arguing for the sake of deception. She steeled herself. The next part was necessary to the plan, and it needed to be said. “I’d like to go with you.”

It was shocking how much easier it was to say things that weren’t technically lies. She did want to go, but not to stay.

“Then we’ll go,” said Cate. “Not now, because I assume you’re checking in with Alfric at the end of each day, but you’ll hear from me at night, not long before the witching hour.”

“I don’t, actually,” said Verity. “I could go now.”

“Better to wait,” said Cate, gentle.

“And lose my memories in the meantime?” asked Verity.

“Yes,” replied Cate. “I can’t take the risk that you’ll say something. Make sure that you’re back here, at the cabin. The orb can return the stored memories remotely, you’ll come into awareness. Stay awake.”

Verity nodded.

“The instructions will come to your mind, as a path,” said Cate. “There will be a stone that you need only to touch. Take what you need, your bound entads, nothing much more. You’ll be provided for. I think that it should go without saying that you should come alone and tell no one. The stone won’t work for more than one person, which is for security as much as it is a natural limit of the entad.”

“I won’t remember these instructions,” said Verity.

“Like our conversations, they’ll sit below your mind,” said Cate. “You’ll understand the need to get things in order. You’ll know that you need to go home.” That was confusing for a moment, until Verity realized that when Cate said ‘home’ she meant the cabin.

“Ah,” said Verity.

“Now is the last chance for second thoughts,” said Cate.

“No,” said Verity. “No second thoughts.”

~~~~

Mizuki was spending a lot of time fidgeting. They’d gotten the signal, and were prepared to move if they got the second signal through the cup, but it was still a lot of waiting. The waiting was worse because they might need to spring into action at a moment’s notice. It was extra worse because they weren’t supposed to talk about what was going on, mostly because they didn’t know what Cate’s capabilities were.

“I’m going to make dinner,” said Mizuki.

“It’s a bit early for that,” said Alfric. His voice was mild.

“Yeah,” she replied. “But I think I’ll make something that takes some time. Chili, maybe. It’s better if it melds, and can stay on the stove basically forever.”

Alfric hesitated. “Alright, I guess we’ve got nothing else planned today.”

Mizuki went into the kitchen, looking to calm her nerves. She liked ground meat for chili, but had none in the chiller, so she started the process of chopping up meat into tiny pieces. It was going to be mixed meat, beans that had been soaking since that morning, tomatoes, corn, onion, garlic, and then a whole heap of different sauces and spices. Chili was, essentially, just a stew, but it had its own identity due to the spices used. Mizuki liked to put her own Kiromon spin on it, adding in a variety of pungent sauces, ginger, a small bit of dried fish, and a little citrus. Hannah had wrinkled her nose at the inclusion of fish, but the actual flavor of the fish was mostly washed away, noticed only by a deepening of flavor.

“You’re cooking?” asked Isra as Mizuki was sweating the onions. “Now?”

“Chili is better with an hour or two on the stove,” said Mizuki.

Isra shifted. “But that means you’re staying here to watch it?” asked Isra.

“Er,” said Mizuki, looking down at the pot. “I … guess.”

“Alright,” said Isra. She gave a curt nod, then moved back upstairs with her book still in hand.

There was something soothing about making dinner, Mizuki thought. Knowing that the whole pot might need to be set aside at a moment’s notice, all the food going to waste, was something she’d have liked to have considered before getting started, but it was therapeutic. Her hands knew what to do with a knife, and the smells of the kitchen were comforting. There were things to do that took her mind off worrying.

Chili, unfortunately, didn’t take all that long to make, and the pot was simmering away, needing stirring only every five or ten minutes, which wasn’t quite enough for Mizuki to get distracted by it. She started with preparing some of their toppings — sour cream, shredded cheese, quick pickled red onions, spicy peppers, diced chives, and finally, because she had too much time, fried garlic, which she hoped would add some crunch.

When Verity came home, Mizuki’s heart almost stopped. Either Verity had become a very good actor, or her memory was wiped, but Alfric asked her if she wanted to see a new woodworking project within Lutopia One, and they disappeared together. When they came out later, she didn’t look shaken, exactly, but she did start practicing her lute. Mizuki thought that was probably a nervous habit, exactly like cooking.

Chili was a complete meal, but Mizuki started on side dishes anyway. She had all the ingredients necessary for some batter bread, which would be served with honey and butter, and once that was in the oven, she began making a creamy cabbage salad. It was too much food, enough that they’d be eating leftovers for a few days, but it helped pass the time.

Dinner was a subdued affair, with no talking about the thing that they were probably all wanting to talk about. Mizuki was feeling anxious. She wanted to ask Alfric how far into the sequence of undone days they were, but she didn’t normally ask that, and didn’t want to upset things. If there was ever a time for them to be watched, it was this. They had no idea what kind of remote viewing Cate had, if she had any at all, but there was just no sense in taking the risk. There were compliments on Mizuki’s cooking, which was nice.

The extra food almost filled the chiller, and while Mizuki was doing that, Verity left.

“She just left?” asked Mizuki, surprised.

“Yes,” said Alfric.

“Normally she says goodbye,” said Mizuki.

Alfric shrugged.

“I’m going to go to my room and read for a bit,” said Mizuki. “I’m not feeling very social.” Mostly she wasn’t feeling like talking to someone while not able to talk about the thing she wanted to talk about.

Reading didn’t go well. Her eyes went over the same sentence four times in a row. She kept at it though, mostly for lack of anything better to do.

The sun had set by the time Ria got in touch with them, which happened through her speaking into their heads, as clean and clear as though she was a part of the party channel. It wasn’t the party channel though, which was important, because while there were rare entad methods of tapping into the party channel, there were essentially no methods of tapping into entad communication. More than that, their mouths didn’t need to move, which meant that an outside observer would only see them thinking. It was, unfortunately, one-to-one, which meant anything said to any of them had to be communicated through Ria.

<We’ve got a problem,> said Ria. <We’re seven hours away from the witching hour. If Cate leaves it too late in the day, we might not be able to act. We’re very far into the sequence of undone days, which means that she must have been working around us, possibly paying to send an activation message back to herself. That wouldn’t entirely account for how ‘late’ it is. It’s very late.>

<You still have all your resets left,> said Mizuki. <So you reset and get her your next go around?>

<I’m worried she’ll give me the slip,> said Ria. <She’s prepared. And if she does give me the slip, she can warn herself by sending a message through another chrono. The complications with the priority system mean that I can’t really stop her if she can pay a messenger with a higher priority than me. That, in turn, would blow our chances. If she doesn’t already know how onto her we are, then we’ve got problems.>

<You’re suggesting we cross the witching hour boundary,> said Mizuki. <We go into her realm, then we’re stuck there?>

<We’d be able to get out,> said Ria.

<But we wouldn’t be able to undo going in?> asked Mizuki.

<I’m planning on going in,> said Ria. <We’re assuming there’s some control in place to only allow a single person through, there are a number of ways you could do that. What will screw us is if Verity is stripped bare on arrival, which is where the real risk comes in. We don’t have anything that can make us not technically ‘people’ but that also allows us to automatically become functional humans again. That means that Verity needs to be the one to revive us.>

<As though we’re dead,> said Mizuki.

<We also want to not be functionally alive,> said Ria. <For a few reasons, but partly to make sure that any entad that can penetrate won’t be able to find us.>

<I’m all in, if that’s why you were talking so much,> said Mizuki. <I mean, if this was leading up to you asking me whether I was okay with it, I am, let’s do it.>

<Good,> said Ria. <Then I’ll talk with the others. Be ready to go. We lock in once Verity signals us.>

<Who else?> asked Mizuki.

<Just me,> said Ria. <Harmon knows. If I die, the children need at least one parent.>

That was the note that she left on, and Mizuki found it sobering.

Toward the end, it was hard to stay awake, and being in bed, Mizuki eventually succumbed.

She was woken from her sleep by a gentle hand on her shoulder, and as she was still coming to her senses, she was whisked away to the inside of an extradimensional storage entad, then to a second extradimensional storage entad, then to Lutopia One.

“I’m going to disassemble you,” said Ria. She was holding a long wand. “This will take you apart, splitting you into components, which it will use to fill jars that it also makes, all Verity will need to do is point the wand at each pile to put us back together.”

Mizuki didn’t need to ask whether this was dangerous. The way Ria was saying it made it seem very, very dangerous. She wondered what would happen if you put something into one of the jars, some dirt or contaminant, and she wondered how finely the materials would be broken down, and if they could go bad, or what would happen if the jars broke, or someone stole a piece of it. She didn’t ask though, only nodded. Just before it happened, she saw that there were already jars clustered together on the floor of Lutopia, which meant that she wasn’t the first.

Then everything shifted, and she was standing in Lutopia One again. This time, it was Verity holding the wand. They both breathed sighs of relief.

“You’re feeling okay?” asked Verity.

“We’re in?” asked Mizuki, not answering the question.

“Yes,” said Verity, letting out a breath. “I don’t have much time though. It’s been four days, this is the first time I really felt like I could come.”

“Why me first?” asked Mizuki, looking around at the jars. It was strangely touching.

“They’re jars,” said Verity. “They don’t have labels.”

“Revive the others,” said Mizuki. “Then tell us all about it.”

~~~~

When her memories came flooding back, Verity grew nervous. She had stayed up, thanks in part to some tea, but it was very late at night. She was aware that she might be watched — it was the time to watch her — and tried to only do the things that she would have done if she’d really been leaving forever. She twisted the ring on her finger, to let the others know.

She went through the things that Ria had told her to do, placing things into the other book they’d gotten from the first dungeon, the storage book that was barely ever used anymore, partly because it was large and cumbersome. The last thing she placed inside it was a small cup that Ria had given her, which was the important thing. Then she wrapped the book in the blanket that made things weigh less, slung her lute across her back, and waited for the path to appear. That it came so soon after Verity was ready was a clear sign she was being remotely watched.

The cup of Ria’s was one of a pair, with the other being back at the house. Anything placed within the mouth of one would appear in the other, and vice versa. While Verity had been getting everything else ready, the others had been getting ready, turning themselves into not-people. One of the final steps would be for Ria to step into the ring, which would then fall into the cup, silently thanks to a layer of cotton. By the time Verity put the cup into the book, everything in extradimensional space would be sorted. Ideally, the cup would be one item among thousands in the book. All Verity would need to do once in the other place would be to take the cup from the book, the ring from the cup, use an entad string to create a portal into another extradimensional space, then go into Lutopia One and turn her friends back into people again.

There were a number of things about this plan that made Verity exceptionally nervous, and all of them were questions about where she was actually going and what she would find there. Cate seemed to want to make a community somewhere, and they were operating on the understanding that this was more or less true. This meant that Verity probably wouldn’t be stripped bare, her entads searched through, every item accounted for, every entad explained. If that happened though, and it seemed as though they would be found out, Verity was meant to come clean and explain everything, hoping that Cate would be merciful.

When the path came into Verity’s mind, she began walking it almost at once. The book was in a large bag that she’d grabbed for just that purpose, bulky but also weightless. It was the middle of the night, and she had only a small lantern shedding its light over the forest.

The path was surprisingly short, a hundred yards at most. The stone was sitting beneath a tree.

Verity started at it for a moment, then leaned down and touched it.

“You came,” said Cate.

They were standing in a room together. It was like being in the center of a crystal, glass panes on all sides, looking out over a fantastical water world, brilliantly lit by a sunset. There was nothing supporting their feet but glass, and Verity felt a chill run through her at the thought of dropping.

“I came,” said Verity. She looked down at the water. She’d never cared for heights, and it felt like they were a mile up. “Is it … all water?”

Cate laughed. “No, this is just a holding area. We’ll soon be off and away to our final destination.” She was smiling. It was a full smile, wider than Verity had seen before, and she couldn’t help but be nervous. Cate placed a hand on Verity’s shoulder, touching her lightly, and then they were elsewhere.

There were stars in the sky, but they were more ordered than the real stars, not quite a grid, but close to it. There were no moons, not even little Cleo. While they’d changed their location, they were still high up. It was nighttime. They seemed to be on top of a mountain of some kind, and below, there was a small village lit by tiny lanterns in a ring around its border.

“Welcome to my realm,” said Cate. She was looking out over the area with a contented smile.

“I’m here now,” said Verity. “Can you tell me what it is?”

There was a quirk of her lips. “A demiplane. You’d guessed that already. But it’s a special sort of demiplane, a living one, not an old fossil like you’ve probably heard of.”

“Living?” asked Verity.

Cate nodded. “Breathing, growing, constantly in flux, with a nature of its own.” She was still looking out in pride at the mostly dark area. Verity couldn’t tell how large it was, but thought that it was at least a hex across, possibly large enough that she wouldn’t be able to see the horizon.

“And I’ll be down there,” said Verity, pointing at the village.

“Ah,” said Cate. “No, you’ll be staying at the palace with me, at least for a few days. I like to get people acclimated before they join the others. It also helps to limit how much of a shock it all is.”

“I see,” said Verity. She clutched the straps of her bag a bit tighter. “Well then, lead the way.”

Chapter 137 - Demi

Alfric had once been in love with demiplanes, and then he had visited one, and realized that he was only in love with the idea of demiplanes.

They were like fish tanks, in a way. Alfric, as a young boy, had adored aquariums, particularly after visiting the Dondrian Zoo, which had the Piscine House where all kinds of exotic creatures had swum behind thick windows. He’d bought a set of books called The Lake on a Table and The Ocean in a Glass, and as he’d read through them — he was only eight or nine years old and they were quite advanced — he’d begun to despair.

Aquariums were not actually like having a lake on your table or a piece of the ocean in a bubble on your shelf. They were delicate, careful things which required incredible amounts of time and attention. Air, heat, nutrients, salinity, acidity, water circulation, all these things needed careful balancing and monitoring, and once you had your aquarium set up, you couldn’t be away from it for too long, not unless you left someone careful instructions. Most of the problems with an aquarium could be solved through some combination of ectads and entads, with a few of those being more or less a requirement, particularly the vent stones, which were called ‘bubblers’ for aquarists. Alfric had kept a few tanks, for roughly two years, learning as he went, but the carefully engineered environment grated on him, and he found himself wanting to keep a bigger tank that would feel more natural and less curated. The larger tank hadn’t actually helped though, because it needed more thought and care. It was a more complex system to be tended.

When Alfric had first heard of demiplanes, his reaction had been more or less the same. The idea painted in his mind was of new worlds, most of them the size of a hex, but some even larger. The world might have been explored, but there were still wild pockets, bubbles of newness and wonder.

The first one he’d been to, which belonged to a family friend, had felt wild. An enormous castle had been built along one edge of it, and a river flowed by the thick stone bricks, painting a bucolic scene. A large meadow could be reached by crossing an arched bridge, and the grounds continued on after that into woodlands. They had been there for a wedding, whisked in by the owners, and had been given the grand tour, which had taken quite a bit of time. A hex was twelve miles across, more or less, which sometimes seemed like not that much, but amounted to more than a hundred square miles. The tour had taken them an entire day, with more walking than a young Alfric was used to, and he’d marveled at everything the owners had thought to put into it. They had made one section of it a ‘map’ of the world in miniature, set inside a large lake, with different buildings in the styles of the cultures of the world. Alfric’s favorite feature had been the ‘folly’, a set of deliberately constructed ‘ruins’ that were meant to replicate something that had been overgrown after being abandoned eight hundred years ago.

When they’d gotten home, his father had complained that it was entirely too much money. Four dozen people lived within the demiplane, almost all of them employees of the owners, or family members of the employees. Most of the things that Alfric had found so enchanting were used once or twice a year, if that. But what his father had found most galling was the sheer amount of time, effort, and money that went into keeping the place running.

Demiplanes almost always came with their own internal ‘sun’, a ball of light that moved through the sky as if on rails, showing none of the seasonal drift and variation of the real world. Light alone wasn’t enough though, if you wanted a forest. You needed weather, or at least a way to water the plants, and circulation was a major issue for both water and air. The river that Alfric had admired wasn’t a natural thing, it took enormous amounts of work to make something like that, either a portal of some kind, or a tightly controlled system of water generation and destruction, or something.

So Alfric came to understand demiplanes as being something like terrariums or aquariums, controlled spaces that needed careful monitoring and intervention to keep running. When he visited his second demiplane, this one belonging to an uncle, he looked at it with a much more critical eye. This one had a larger community, ten thousand, spread out into small villages, living idyllic lives that were mostly supported by entads to give them food. Most of the machinery that made the place ‘work’ was artfully hidden, but Alfric had been on the lookout for it. Even if he couldn’t see the exact bit of artifice, he could see where artifice must have been used, and he’d gotten to know aquariums well enough to see that someone was behind the scenes making the lake have a workable ecosystem. That particular demiplane also needed to have more in the way of solutions, since the sun didn’t orbit anymore (if it ever had), leaving sunlight at a perpetual fifth bell. A large tarp was deployed to create a fake night, which was quite noticeable.

It was after they’d visited that Alfric’s mother, Ria, had given her thoughts, which ran in totally different directions.

Demiplanes were, essentially, the dregs of the old ways of living. They were fiefs, tiny kingdoms, outside the direct reach of Inter or any other nation, as much as attempts had been made to bring them under control. Much of the reason for why demiplanes were the way they were came down to how disconnected they were from the rest of the world, exempt from the Editors’ attempts at instituting change, with no magical census, no voting, or anything like that.

It was all made worse by the demiplane ‘core’, which very definitely could be owned and controlled. The core was what allowed entrance to and from the demiplane, and put bottlenecks on immigration and emigration that were managed by a single person or group of people. Once established, and especially with a surfeit of entads, a demiplane could be ruled over by a singular figure or small group. If it became known that something untoward was going on within a demiplane, Inter would do their best to bring the hammer down, but that largely had to come in the form of taxation and embargos, which were difficult to enforce, and depended in part on the demiplane owners having assets and business outside the demiplane itself.

Alfric’s mother hadn’t thought that was what their ‘uncle’ had been doing, she was more worried about the appearance of the thing. A chrononaut becoming wealthy enough to own a demiplane, which happened at the level of wealth where talking about things in terms of rings was almost meaningless, and especially lording over ten thousand people who had their movement in and out of the demiplane limited, was a problem when it came to the image of chrononauts as a whole. The demiplane was run as a democracy of sorts, and certainly no one was prohibited from leaving, but ultimate control did rest with Alfric’s uncle.

In some sense, Alfric thought that, too, was like an aquarium. Try as he might to provide a good home for the fish, shrimp, snails, and whatnot, he was ultimately their master. They weren’t thinking creatures, no, but the feel of it was a bad one, like he had trapped the creatures for his own amusement.

When Verity had related what Cate had said, he hadn’t really understood what it meant for a demiplane to be ‘fossilized’ or ‘dead’, or what this one being ‘living’ might mean. It was intriguing though, and rekindled feelings that he’d had as a boy.

He listened closely as Verity recounted her first few days.

~~~

“What does it mean for a demiplane to be living?” asked Verity.

They had adjourned from the overlook into the ‘palace’, which seemed as though it had been carved into the side of a rocky mountain. It was rough and raw carving, but the interior was splendid, and Verity was hoping that the village was just as nice.

She wasn’t staying in the demiplane, of course. She wasn’t going to live in the village.

The palace was filled with things. There were plants all over the place, dozens of them, ferns in colorful red and blue ceramic vases, but also a few creeping vines in brass pots, and at least one tall tree that seemed to have had more of the palace carved out above it to accommodate its height. Tapestries were hanging from the walls, flashy sculptures sat on equally flashy tables, and where there were no things cluttering up the space, there were vibrant tiles on the floors that crept halfway up the walls. Everything gleamed and shimmered, the lighting soft and welcoming. The chairs were large and fluffy, and made Verity feel small, especially since she didn’t seem to be able to find a way to sit that was dignified. Cate managed it effortlessly, of course.

“Demiplanes grow, by their nature,” said Cate. “They breathe. Can you imagine men fishing off the coast of Plenarch, pulling up fish which they recognize only as dead or dying creatures? Fish which are not seen eating nor swimming, only those gasping for breath. A demiplane is the same way. The ones that are known to the world are those which are dead — which have been killed, in fact.”

“And this one lives,” said Verity. “Somehow?”

“Somehow,” nodded Cate. “There will be more on that in due time.”

“But when you say that it lives … it grows?” asked Verity. “How large is this one?”

“Twenty miles across,” said Cate. “But it’s in its infancy, and will grow, a mile every decade.”

Verity frowned slightly. “A mile … of diameter?”

“Just so,” said Cate. “Which, yes, means that the area it encloses increases mightily year over year. In a century, it will have doubled in size. A century after that, it will have doubled again.”

Verity hadn’t been asking about math, she’d only been seeking clarification. Cate’s eyes had lit up at the thought of the growing demiplane though, her happiness at the prospect clear. It was that more than anything that put to rest the idea that Cate was doing this for truly nefarious purposes. She believed in the future of this place, the community that she had built.

“Now then,” said Cate. “We’ll move you to the village eventually, in less than a week, usually, unless you choose to stay in the palace.” She smiled. “It’s past the witching hour. There was some question in my mind about whether we would make it, but it seems our departure went unnoticed. I assume you’re tired?”

“I am,” said Verity. She was feeling less sharp than normal, and it seemed that her tiredness had only been kept at bay by the fear she’d been feeling. The need to sleep was starting to come over her.

“Then I’ll see you to your room,” said Cate. She stood from her seat, and Verity felt no choice but to follow. “You’ll have a roommate, for the time being. I made my last pass through Inter today, and the rooms I normally use are crowded.”

“Ah,” said Verity.

She was supremely conscious of the entad book she’d been carrying with her, now on the floor inside the blanket, which was in turn inside the bag. In one of the book’s pages was the cup, which contained a ring that led to extradimensional storage, which in turn led to more extradimensional storage, which ultimately led to Lutopia One, where her friends had been disassembled so that they wouldn’t count as people through some entad arcana. If she never went to get them, they were effectively dead, and her getting them depended upon her being able to get into the book.

Already she felt like she was close to cracking. It was a level of stress and tension that she hadn’t ever felt outside of a major performance, even including the dungeons. She wasn’t good at lying, and knew she wasn’t good at lying, but this was what was being asked of her. She tried to keep stoic, which was what she’d learned best, but all it would take was Cate saying ‘by the by, let me take that book from you’ for Verity to break completely.

The roommate, whose name was Cherry, was asleep, a mass of red hair peeking out from beneath the covers. Cate’s final instructions were whispered to Verity, pointing out the bathroom, with apologies and assurances that better lodging would be available before the week was out, once Verity had decided where it was she wanted to live.

Once Cate had gone, Verity had a fair bit of internal debate about whether or not to spring open the book right there and then. She was worried though, perhaps because of all the talk about spying and the verifiable fact that it was possible, if you had enough money and power. The time to spy on someone was the first moment they thought they were safe.

It was impossible to get to sleep, and when Verity woke up, she was mildly surprised that she’d actually managed it.

The other girl was already awake and brushing her hair. She had a nightgown on, and was giving Verity a curious look.

“You weren’t here last night,” she said.

“No,” said Verity. “I was a late arrival.” She sat up. She’d slept in her clothes, and felt worse for it, clammy and rumpled. “My name is Verity.”

“Cherry,” said the girl. She had a light lilt to her speech, an accent that was hard to place, though the red hair was characteristic of Cairbre. “I think you’re not supposed to ask people how they ended up here, but you can tell them, if you’d like.”

“Ah,” said Verity. She paused for a moment. “And are you going to tell me?”

“Mrm,” said Cherry, giving a small smile. “I wanted to start over.”

“That’s it?” asked Verity.

“I had an enormous amount of debt,” said the woman as she brushed her hair. “Truly eye-watering.” She smiled again, the smile of relief. “And now, it’s not my problem.”

Verity looked at her. Cherry was, in Verity’s estimation, not much older than twenty-five years old. That left the obvious question, which Verity wasn’t sure she wanted to ask. It seemed rude to probe, but then, the woman had been probing her.

“How did you get into so much debt?” asked Verity.

“I was an architect,” said Cherry. “I still am, actually. Do you know, they give you money to build houses? I started early, I had vision, and with every house I’d completed, they gave me more money. But I was just a small piece of it really, the person who designed everything, I wasn’t actually constructing things, though I was on site to make sure that it was all as I’d placed it. Well, after finishing another of those houses, a great cantilevered thing with a nice silhouette, I had enough money that I could found my own company. I would be the tip of the spear, the architect with great vision, and I would have the best employees, poached from among those I had worked with.”

“And … that led to ruin?” asked Verity.

“Oh, the company did fine for a time, but we were still contracting,” said Cherry. She seemed happy, in spite of recounting her doom. “I thought that it would be better not to be, to make the houses and sell them after. But no, that didn’t lead to my doom either. What happened was that I had a string of successes, houses that I’d designed which sold very well, and each time, the banks would be willing to loan me a bit more money. Each time, I would put it all into the next house, making it bigger and grander and more in line with a sense of vision that I had started to believe in a bit too much. Then I made the last house, constructed from special entad materials, with a team of hundreds, a soaring edifice with beautiful grounds, tricks of perspective and light, sweeping balconies — it was a thing of wonder. And it didn’t sell.”

“Ah,” said Verity. “And eventually, when it became clear that it wouldn’t sell, the banks came after you.”

“And it’s over now,” said the woman. “Gods, I wonder how many times I’m going to have to tell that story.” She gave Verity a little smile. “How was it? What needs work?”

“Er,” said Verity. “I think that it’s good, overall, perhaps more description of the buildings?”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” nodded Cherry. “Now, I won’t say that you owe me a story of your own, but I do suspect that it will be of some interest to people. Not all stories are so easy to share, I know. Getting too big for my britches and slapped down as though by the hand of the gods, that’s something I can sheepishly explain. And here, I’ll build new houses.” She kept brushing. Verity’s mother had been a big believer in brushing hair. “So if you’re not comfortable giving me the story of how you got here, do you know what you might want to do? Your vocation, in this place?”

“I’m a bard,” said Verity. “I suppose I’ll continue being a bard.”

“A tavern bard?” asked Cherry. “Or of the adventuring class?”

Verity gave a polite laugh. “I don’t think there will be much for adventures here.”

Cherry gave her a look. “I’m not sure that I’m supposed to be the one to tell you.”

“You have to tell me now,” said Verity. “You can’t say ‘I’m not sure I should tell’ and then not tell. It’s cruel.”

Cherry laughed. Verity wondered — not that it was important — but she wondered whether this was one of the eligible women that Cate had mentioned. “Fine, fine. Cate says that we’re in a demiplane, and that this is a special kind of demiplane.”

“She said that last night,” said Verity. “Shortly before I went to sleep.”

“Yes, but do you know what’s at the border of a normal demiplane?” asked Cherry.

“No,” said Verity. She furrowed her brow. She had a guess, but it was only that.

“A wall, usually,” said Cherry. “You place your hand against it and it’s as firm and hard as an expanse of steel. But here, it’s permeable. So soft, in some places, you’d be hard-pressed to know that you’d gone beyond it. And once you do go beyond, there are both creatures and treasures to be found.”

Verity was silent for a moment. “Like a dungeon?”

“Not particularly, I’m told,” she replied. “But I never did dungeons, have no interest in dungeons, and mostly plan to build houses, both to the whims of those who want them, and on my own, in the hopes that people move into them.” She sighed. “No money. Doesn’t that sound lovely?”

Verity gave a slow nod. “And we’ll have our own rooms, soon?”

“Soon,” nodded Cherry. “The early houses will be all the same, entad-made, but I’ll have enough tools to be a one-woman building crew within the day, and then the first of the custom houses will go up. Do you happen to know what you want?”

“No,” said Verity. “I really don’t.”

“You think about it,” said Cherry with a nod. “I doubt we’ll be in this room, fine as it is, for more than a few days as people get progressively settled. But we’ll have a special relationship, you and I. I wouldn’t mind bumping you up the queue.”

“That’s very kind,” said Verity. She looked around the room. It had been dark the night before, when she’d gone to sleep, and now it was bright, with light streaming in through a window that really seemed like it shouldn’t have been there, given that they were deep into the mountain palace. The fabric of the sheets was a fine material, and the furniture had incredible wooden filigree that Verity thought had to be the work of an entad, because if it had been made by a craftsman, it would have taken at least a decade. In the richer homes of Dondrian, every piece of furniture had a story to tell, being a gift from someone, commissioned for some occasion, or otherwise steeped in history. There were kings who lived on only in stories of the furniture they’d had built. This place felt like that.

“I’m going,” said Cherry. “Off to see the village, and to get a sense of what shape the houses are in there. They’re entad made, which is never good, and I imagine one of the reasons that Cate’s brought me in. Would you like to join me?”

Verity hesitated. She would like to join, but the book was there, and that was the priority. “How much, er, privacy do we have here?”

“Is Cate watching us, do you mean?” asked Cherry with a raised eyebrow. “I was crying, the first day I came, and she entered to speak with me. It might have been that she heard me from some distance, but the doors are thick, and I suspect, from the way she acts, that she keeps the newcomers close so she can keep an eye on them. You’d be hard pressed to have missed it, but she’s got quite a lot of abilities.” The eyebrow stayed raised, and seemed to speak volumes. Yes, we are likely being watched.

“Then I think I will come with you,” said Verity. “So long as my pack will be safe?”

Cherry snorted. “I doubt there could be anything in that pack that Cate would actually want.”

~~~~

Cherry became Verity’s unofficial tour guide, taking her through the palace. Perhaps Cate had intended to do it herself, or the idea was that Cherry would handle it all along, but the effortlessness with which it happened was a bit startling, and felt like a sign that Cate knew more than she was letting on. If Cherry had just left before Verity woke up, would Verity be left to wander the halls? It seemed like Cate wouldn’t have let that happen.

Every need was taken care of, to an extent that Verity had only experienced at the upper echelons of Dondrian high society. There were cabinets full of things, a snack cabinet with thirty different varieties of foods to eat, from chocolate to pickles, a closet that had toiletries anyone could pluck out, linens by the yard, a pot that would dispense fresh coffee or tea, and a walk-in chiller that was apparently kept permanently fresh and stocked, cold only because it would otherwise be unnerving.

Much of this was done by way of entads, but for some things, it wasn’t clear where the abundance had originated. It was all free to take as she pleased. Many of the rooms in the palace had labels on them, and while it seemed like it would be easy to get lost, most of the people they’d seen were quite friendly, with smiles and good cheer. She supposed most of them had escaped from bad situations, even if those situations were something like having too much debt.

“This is The Wardrobe,” said Cherry with a smile. “I have a feeling you’ll like this.”

The room reminded Verity of being dressed by Alfric’s mom for the concert, only this one had more of everything, more space to move around, more mirrors, and more fabric of every variety. In a position of prominence there sat an actual wardrobe, firm and tall.

“You can have anything you want from it,” said Cherry. “All you need to do is say the style, materials, and how it should fit, and it will be made for you, from nothing, ready to wear as a complete outfit. All you need to do is place your hand on the door and speak.”

Verity tried it, though she had no doubt that it would work. She asked for something nicely masculine, not giving too much more than that, interested to see what the entad would come up with. After a moment, she opened the wardrobe and found that there was a rather complete outfit inside, all fitted to her, with a bright red blouse and khaki slacks that would hug her hips. There was a white undershirt whose collar would show, and a scarf that would wrap around her. She wondered whether it had been calculated for the weather, and decided that it probably had. It even came with leather boots with a thick heel. It wasn’t her usual style, but that felt appropriate for this place.

“Throw it all at the mirror,” said Cherry.

“The mirror?” asked Verity.

“That one,” said Cherry, pointing.

Verity took the bundle of clothing and tossed it at the mirror, struck to find that it all went through. When she looked down, she was wearing it. “Oh.” The dress she’d been wearing was neatly folded beside her on the floor.

“You look rather fine, I should say,” said Cherry. She gave Verity an appraising look, and any of the doubts that Verity had about whether this was one of the eligible women went out the window. “I think we’re ready for the village, once we make a brief diversion for breakfast.”

The palace held a dining hall, which consisted of three tables, each about fifty feet in length. The middle of the three tables was heaped with food, and a stack of plates, bowls, and silverware sat at one end of it. The abundance of it all was faintly ridiculous. There were six different types of eggs: hard-boiled, soft-boiled, scrambled, poached, fried, basted, and shirred. The bacon came in six varieties, some chewy, some crisp, different thicknesses, and one that didn’t seem to be pork at all. There was fruit of every color, all of it freshly cut, and different dishes that were less identifiable. The table held a range of food from every culture, including six different pots of what Verity could identify as sobyu.

She took only a small plate, and ate hurriedly.

“The food stays fresh and hot,” said Cherry. “Between lunch and dinner, the dining hall becomes a market, and people from the village come in to fill their baskets. Again, no money changes hands.”

The money seemed to be the important thing to Cherry, and Verity wondered whether that was a common thing. There had only been one brief period in her life when she hadn’t been financially secure, that being the time she’d been playing at the Fig and Gristle. But there, at least, she’d had room and board, never missing a meal except when she wanted to. The food was good, too. She could imagine how wonderful the excess she’d seen so far would seem to someone who had really struggled, eating bland, cheap food, or clothed in patched and mended hand-me-downs.

With breakfast completed, they left the palace behind. There was a small trolley that went up and down the side of the mountain, but they eschewed that, taking the steps instead. It was a fine day for it, though Cherry was slightly out of breath from trying to speak and hike at the same time.

“There are, as I see it, three options for where to live,” said Cherry. “You’ve seen the palace, and we’re heading for the village, but those aren’t the only places. You can strike out on your own, build a cabin in the woods, or even a secondary village, gods know there’s enough space for that.”

“I actually lived in a cabin in the woods, before this,” said Verity.

“Did you now?” asked Cherry. “You’re just full of mysteries, aren’t you?”

“I suppose so,” said Verity. “How soon can I move out of the palace?”

“You’re asking the wrong person,” said Cherry. “The person to ask would be Cate. But there’s no rush, is there?”

“I just want my new life to start,” said Verity, which was a complete lie, and which she felt bad about afterward.

“If you’re concerned about her looking at you, then I don’t think traipsing off into the woods is going to help matters,” said Cherry. “I can’t say for certain that she’s got a way of keeping tabs on people outside the palace, but I would think that if someone came into her realm and then immediately ran off, it might raise some red flags.”

“I suppose,” said Verity, frowning. She looked back at the palace, keenly aware that the book was still there, and that her friends were inside, waiting for her. She had no idea how long to wait, when it might be ‘safe’ to pull everyone out. She wasn’t even sure, seeing this place, that she needed everyone. If they could use their device to exit, perhaps that would be for the best, to leave these people to their own devices. Cate was pretty obviously not mistreating anyone.

As she thought that though, her thoughts turned to her mother. Her mother had always liked to paint a pretty picture for friends, always boasting about how well her father’s work was going, how lovely Verity’s playing was, and oh how nice it was to have a daughter that was smiled upon by one of the gods. When someone wanted to cloak reality, especially if they had power, it wasn’t a particularly difficult thing to do.

It was still entirely possible that there was a seedy underbelly to be uncovered, and they were the only ones who could do anything about it, now that they were in and Cate had apparently sealed them off from the world.

The village was enchanting, almost right from the start. There was a pleasing age to it, a weathering to the cobblestone paths that made them feel like they’d been there for a few centuries, moss and lichen cover on some of the buildings that made it seem like these were very old rock. Ivy climbed stone structures, and in the center of the village was a large statue that looked like it had been weathered by time and rain. Verity had half-suspected that it would be of Cate herself, but no, when they got closer she saw that it was the six gods in human form, interpreted by the artist, entwined.

Most of the houses were, as Cherry had said, the same. Some of them shared walls, but more of them had gaps between them, and the placement was often irregular, which helped disguise the fact that the layout was the same. Most of these houses were older, their wooden shingles weathered, but maybe a third of them were new constructions. On the older houses, embellishments had been made, with a dormer added to the top floor, a bay window to the living room, or just some paint to make it stick out. Verity had heard her mother talk about zoning enough times to wonder what happened when someone created an eyesore, intentionally or otherwise, but she saw nothing that made her raise an eyebrow.

“Hard to say what the history of this place is,” said Cherry.

“History?” asked Verity.

“There’s age, you can see that,” said Cherry, pointing to the mortar that held together the stones making up the bridge. “At a guess, it’s at least two hundred years old, with some upkeep since then. But it’s hard to say.”

“Are there … natives?” asked Verity. “People who grew up here?”

“Nope,” said Cherry. “I can give you Cate’s answer, which is that there were some people here long ago.” She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter much to me.”

It definitely gave Verity pause though. What it seemed like, at least to her, was that this place had been built on the bones of an older colony. That the new houses were the same as the old meant that the same entad had been used to create both, and while there were some innocent explanations for that, it seemed rather ghoulish. Verity wasn’t entirely certain how a colony could fail, and wished that she could talk with Alfric. Her eyes also went to the trees, some of which seemed like they were hundreds of years old, and she wished that she could talk to Isra too.

“Personally, I think I’m staying in the palace,” said Cherry. “Maybe not in the same room, but I definitely want somewhere that takes care of everything for me.” She looked at Verity. “What do you think, do these houses appeal to you?”

Verity looked at the houses. Their most notable feature was a small turret near the front entryway, which seemed as though it led up to the second floor. The doors were thick and sturdy, while the windows had nine panes of clear glass and seemed much more delicate, even with the wooden shutters. They seemed like fine places to live, a definite upgrade from the cabin in the woods, but likewise a definite downgrade from the beauty of Mizuki’s house.

“I think it doesn’t suit me,” said Verity, looking at the stonework. “But I’d prefer to be out of the palace as soon as possible.”

“Your needs will still be met,” nodded Cherry. “Maybe with a visit to the palace every now and then for the vitals. There’s a general store here, though calling it that is perhaps a bit of a stretch, since again, there’s no money. It’s just a place stocked with the essentials, perhaps not as much as the palace.”

“Is that by design?” asked Verity.

“Design?” asked Cherry, raising an eyebrow.

“Is the reason the ‘general store’ has less because that’s the way Cate wanted it, or just because having two of every entad wasn’t within her means?” asked Verity.

“You have questions about our host,” said Cherry. She turned away. “Myself, I don’t look at a gift too closely, not when it means escaping a foul fate.” She looked back at Verity, raising an eyebrow. “But I suppose I don’t know what fate you were hoping to avoid.”

“My mother was terrible,” said Verity. “And my party had left me.” She shrugged. The lie had come easier this time. “Life was terrible, and didn’t seem like it was going to get better. I could have run away to anywhere, but with the offer to run away to here, it seemed as though it was worth trying.”

“‘Trying’?” asked Cherry, looking skeptical. “We’re here for the long haul. Cate’s made sure of that.”

“In my case, I think she was a bit lenient,” said Verity. “If I decide it’s not for me, that this place I’ve come to sight unseen isn’t where I want to spend the rest of my life, what happens?”

“That, I don’t know,” said Cherry. “I’ve hardly been here much longer than you have, four days or so.”

“You’re taking to it well,” said Verity.

“Every need is met,” shrugged Cherry. “Save for a few, I suppose. But I would think that anyone who comes here would be hard-pressed not to settle in quickly. There are so many things that you simply don’t need to worry about, and whatever brought you here, we’ve got leaving the old world in common.”

“I suppose,” said Verity.

“Come,” said Cherry, placing a hand on Verity’s shoulder. “Let me show you my favorite place in the village.”

~~~~

Ria’s instructions had been clear: Verity was not to pull them out until she was sure that the coast was clear, and when it happened, it needed to be as close to the witching hour as possible, in order to give the adversary as little time to respond as possible. Timekeeping was necessarily suspect in a demiplane, which meant that Verity would need to go by guild messages. This meant joining a guild, which she didn’t want to seem too desperate to do, lest she draw attention to herself.

Time passed. Cherry seemed ever-present, and when she wasn’t around Verity, she was in their shared room. Verity spent time in the palace, expecting to see more of Cate, but Cate wasn’t an ever-present figure, and was ‘away’ more often than not.

On her second day in the demiplane, Verity put on a performance in the palace. There was a small theater that expanded based on how many people were in it, with a sign-up sheet where anyone could put on a show. The sheet had seemed somewhat empty to her, and though no one had asked her to put her name on it, she wanted to gain the favor of the people here, especially so they would talk to her about their conditions, or anything else that was going on. She hadn’t expected many people to show up, but it was more than a hundred, which was at least ten times what she’d thought it would be.

The performance had gone well. She’d played ‘The Brave Knight Gave’ for them, then a few other ‘dungeon songs’, and had finally finished with a song she’d made up almost entirely on the spot, this one about a new world rich with wonder and possibility. Cate had been in the audience, and congratulated Verity after the fact, wrapping her in a warm hug.

On the fourth day, she was given her own house, one of the older ones, and Cherry had promised that she’d have something custom-built within a few months, either to Verity’s specifications or ‘something Verity might like’. They were, more or less, friends.

Verity was worried that she was leaving the resurrection of her party for too long. She was especially worried that she was putting it off because she liked this place and didn’t want to disrupt things too much. It was hard to tell where the paranoid prudence that Ria had advised ended and a need not to rock the boat began.

There was no more putting it off, if that was what she was doing. She stayed up late, so late that she was at risk of nodding off in the wooden chair she’d set up next to the fireplace, and waited until the village guild gave her a new message. She had joined on the third day, offered by their ‘mayor’, a lovely woman only a few years older than Verity was.

She’d been nervous when she brought them back, worried she would be yelled at, but mostly anxious that Ria or Alfric would immediately deliver the bad news they’d learned in an undone day.

Chapter 138 - Overguard

Being ‘jarred’ was risky, but Ria was no stranger to risk. She had gotten into sticky situations before, and it had always worked out, which she knew was a dangerous thing, because it built up confidence that nothing could go wrong, or that every situation was recoverable. Harmon hadn’t liked the plan, but he knew her well enough to know that argument would just make her dig her heels in unless he could come up with something she hadn’t already considered.

When she came back to life, she was armed and ready, wearing a modified version of her standard dungeoneering loadout. There were, she wagered, a very limited number of people in the world who could have gotten the jump on her, and most of them were her friends. Still, being unjarred meant coming into an unknown situation, and it was possible that she’d be immediately facing down trained adversaries who were ready and waiting to slit her throat — though if they wanted her dead, and were already deep into her extradimensional space, all they would have to do was to smash the jars.

When she came to, there was no threat, only five children looking at her expectantly, as though she was the danger. She lowered the two force fields, let her sword fall to her side, and undilated time down to normal, so they wouldn’t just see her as a blur of motion. She checked her diagnostic entads, largely concerned with the time, and was mildly shocked to see that it had been four days. The shock faded fast though, because it wasn’t the sort of thing that was good to dwell on. Though she didn’t need diagnostics for it, she was pleased to note that she wasn’t dead.

“We’re safe,” said Alfric. “For now.”

“It’s my first time through,” said Ria. “Yours as well?”

Alfric nodded.

“Good, then we don’t need to deal with disclosure,” said Ria with a smile. “We’re five minutes off from the witching hour. That’s good, it means there’s much less of a chance that we’ll be retroactively ambushed.” She looked at Verity. “How has it been?”

“Four days,” said Verity, swallowing.

“No, not how long, I know it’s been four days, how has it been?” she asked. “You’ve been treated well?”

“Very well,” said Verity. She seemed self-conscious. “Better than ever before in my life.”

Ria regarded her. She was in different clothes, and they seemed like new clothes, a blouse with a dark blue vest and a fair amount of cleavage with a lighter skirt, slit up the side. She was clean and styled, in spite of the lateness, and it was fairly clear that the girl hadn’t suffered much if any hardship.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like for you to relate the events of the last few days,” said Ria. “Use as much detail as you can, particularly about the layout.”

This took some time, and Ria stayed silent for as much of it as possible, which helped encourage the other children to stay silent as well. Verity started somewhat guarded and uncertain, but grew more enthusiastic as time went on, letting her enjoyment of the place seep into her descriptions of the places and people. When she got to their revival, some of that enthusiasm dampened. She had done well, overall, Ria thought, not giving anything away, pulling them at the right time and place, being cautious about what she revealed. They were late, but they appeared to have maintained secrecy. Verity had been careful to use the book a few times, for the sake of making it look like it was just an entad that she’d brought along for storage.

Ria, of course, had some pointed questions. “Have you made contact with anyone?”

“I saw Lin,” said Verity. “There’s been no sign of Kell, but I haven’t found a way to ask that wouldn’t arouse suspicion. Kali lives in the palace, but I didn’t speak with her.”

“Not asking after someone you personally knew could arouse suspicion,” said Ria. “But I don’t fault you, you were never trained as a spy.”

“What are we doing now?” asked Alfric, turning toward her.

“Escaping, to prove it can be done and get the details on what’s been happening in the last four days,” said Ria. “Then I’ll reset and we’ll get to work.”

“We want to burn a whole day on that?” asked Mizuki.

“Want to?” asked Ria. “No. Need to? Yes. I need to assure Alfric’s father that I’m alive and have things handled.”

“Alright,” nodded Alfric. “And we shouldn’t burn a day with you in here and Verity on the outside?”

Ria hesitated. “An entire day where I do nothing but get a report from her?” asked Ria. “I … can see the sense in it. But no, I don’t think that level of caution is necessary. We also need to be cautious of the intricacies of the priority system. If Cate has set up methods for it, she might be able to send a message back.” She let out a breath. Alfric could seem so mature sometimes, in ways that made him hard for her to relate to. She worried that he’d been raised wrong, but with six children, she’d learned that they were simply people with their own personalities. It was hard, sometimes, to see that.

“Should we go with you?” asked Alfric.

“What would be best would be for the four of you to stay in here, saying nothing, possibly re-jarred,” said Ria. She turned to Verity. “And you should go back out, as though nothing had happened.”

“Alright,” said Verity. “I’ll do that now. I need my sleep anyway.” She picked up the lute and hesitated. “Shall I strum you out?”

“Now, please,” said Ria. She looked at Alfric though. “If you’re bored, jar yourself.” She turned back to Verity. “And if a day passes and for whatever reason I’m not back, you unjar them, then all of you flee. Leave the rest of these people behind.”

She hoped that the children would deal with it appropriately, if it came to that. She trusted Alfric, at least.

They unnested themselves from the various extradimensional spaces, and as soon as she was on the ‘ground floor’ of the demiplane, Ria began using the magical device that had been prepared for them. She had tested it three times before they’d put this plan into motion, using a friend’s demiplane, and she prayed that it would work here — a prayer to Kesbin, for help with escape. She was in the demiplane itself for only moments, the dark bedroom that apparently now belonged to Verity, and then she was in the woods, still whole. She’d worried that she would end up in the crystal cage Verity had described, which would be a minor disaster, but the device worked as advertised, pushing her through the barrier between worlds.

She ended up somewhere in Tarbin, her map told her, but it was the work of a moment to make her way back to Dondrian, teleporting and then leaving an entad behind to teleport her a second time, more permanently.

Harmon was waiting for her.

“We’re safe,” said Ria.

“It’s my second time through,” said Harmon. He hesitated for a moment, then wrapped her in a hug. There was a tension to him that didn’t seem to go away, even as their embrace went on.

“Let me have it,” said Ria.

“The argument, or the facts?” he asked.

“The facts first, please,” said Ria.

“A day after picking up Verity, the very last thing that Cate did was to put out information and release memories,” said Harmon. “She claims to have relocated — she never says that there’s a demiplane, but it’s more or less the only option that makes sense — along with roughly a thousand people who went of their own free will. Because she released memories en masse, we also know of a number of people who she approached that said no, and their statements are still being collected and collated. I imagine that this was her plan all along, but it means that there’s very unlikely to be much national response, especially given that most of the people she invited to her demiplane were relative outcasts, disconnected from their communities in some way. So far as we know, she hasn’t stepped foot out of her demiplane since then.”

“So it’s up to me to dig up the dirt,” said Ria.

Harmon had a pronounced frown. “The argument was about whether you should extract,” he replied. “You felt that you needed to stay, to gather information, to confront this woman, and I argued that you were pursuing risk and seeking thrills in a way that I had hoped you were over. I’m extremely thankful that you were able to get out, and that does give you a cushion of safety, but this woman is an unknown.”

“You think that I couldn’t best her in single combat?” asked Ria. She was keeping the levity in her voice, though Harmon was doing his best to be serious. That was how it went sometimes. She thought that Alfric likely got his seriousness from his father.

“I think, first, that it wouldn’t necessarily be single combat, especially if it’s as you fear and Cate is setting herself up as a benevolent dictator,” said Harmon. This was the sort of thing that Ria didn’t particularly like, when someone repeated back words you’d never said. She supposed that it was accurate to her feelings, but it still grated. “Second, I think there’s a legitimate chance that Cate herself could beat you. She has a ‘living’ demiplane, which as described to me has workable weather, permeable borders, and who knows what else. She has this, and has been able to keep it quiet. That means she likely has other unknown powers. This is aside from whatever enormous entad cache she’s got. Incidentally — and it may mean nothing — that table you described to me matches one that was stolen seventy years ago.”

Ria frowned. “We did entad tracing then?” she asked.

“We’re still doing it,” said Harmon. “As best we can, anyway.”

“Hrm,” said Ria.

“Did you want to have the actual argument?” asked Harmon. “About why it might be best for you to simply leave?”

“Kali is, by some measure, my niece,” said Ria. “Family matters.”

“That’s weak and you know it,” said Harmon. “It’s your sense of justice, and more than that, your sense of adventure.” He sighed. “We really don’t need to have the argument, because you decided that you would do your own thing, and I let you know that I would do my part in shoring you up, even if I didn’t like it.”

“Thank you,” said Ria. She kissed him, going up on her toes to get the extra inch of height. “I’m spending the day out here, to gather as much as I can, then going back in for another time through, this one to gather information on that end.” She paused. “The children are well?”

Harmon nodded. “They’re mostly grown. You going off to do a dungeon isn’t the most shocking thing in the world to them.”

She hadn’t wanted to lie to the children, but she also hadn’t wanted to have five teenaged — or near teenaged — people who could potentially leak information. She would tell them later, of course, but lying to children was no way to engender trust.

“Alright,” said Ria. “Then let’s get to the task of finding out what we can.”

~~~~

“There’s a lot we don’t know,” said Ria. “What we do know is that she’s hiding something. There’s prior history to this place, and the ‘living’ demiplane needs to be explored. Unfortunately, the best method of exploration would be to have us go out, but the minute we step out there, there’s a good chance that we get detected. I don’t just mean remote viewing, I mean census-like entads, which there’s a good chance she’d have acquired, given she’s acquired so much else.” She turned to Verity. “Today, I’m going out. It’s going to be dangerous, and late in the day, but your job is to do the day as normally as you can. Be a model citizen. Can you do that?”

Verity nodded.

“Good,” said Ria. “Then we burn the day on this, we wait, and we probe.”

The waiting was difficult, especially with the children. They weren’t actually children, Ria knew that, but she was in her late forties, and the oldest of her boys was twenty-two. He’d been talking about children with his pactmate — they’d been living together for almost six years now — but she thought once she was a grandmother maybe her view on what a ‘child’ meant would change. Or maybe they would always be children in her mind.

“Talk to me about your loadout,” said Mizuki. “Unless you’ve already told me?”

Mizuki liked her, and in the time Ria had been around the party, it had been Mizuki that had come to her most often, maybe because the girl was without her own mother. They had more than a few conversations, many of which hadn’t risen to the level of requiring disclosure when the day had been undone. There was a viciousness and violence to Mizuki that Ria liked, and if the girl had been a chrononaut, she’d have made a perfect match for Alfric so they could temper each other’s impulses. Alfric’s pact situation was a complicated one, and she wanted to get it settled one way or another, mostly so it wouldn’t be hanging over his head. At eighteen, he wasn’t yet thinking about children, but in her opinion, it was best to have them early.

“Certainly,” said Ria, smiling at her.

This took the better part of two hours, which had a lot to do with the number of questions that Mizuki asked. She was very curious, and also seemed to have a desire to touch things, which wasn’t a particularly good instinct when dealing with a high-elevation dungeoneer’s things. Ria had ten swords in her standard rotation, all kept in extradimensional space and ready to be pulled out at a moment’s notice, three sets of armor she could rotate through and a fourth set that could be worn beneath the other three, and more ‘trinkets’ than almost anyone she knew. From experience, she wasn’t invulnerable, but it was as close as she could reasonably be.

“Entads are funny,” Ria explained. “It’s quite rare for there to be complete immunity to something, but not at all uncommon for that limit to be quite high, high enough that you wouldn’t normally need to worry about it. Sometimes entad sellers will shorthand it and say ‘this will make you immune to heat’ when what they mean is that you can safely dip your hand in molten steel, never contemplating that you’ll be fighting monsters so hot that they burn the air itself.”

“So you run it past a cleric of Qymmos?” asked Mizuki.

“Ideally, yes,” said Ria. “Not personally, since I have a counterparty for that sort of thing, but yes, Terra is my minder, he deals with all that sort of thing.”

“So are you immune to fire?” asked Mizuki.

“Complete fire immunity eludes me,” said Ria with a sigh. “But yes, I can withstand temperatures hot enough to flash-boil steel. I do have a complete immunity to acid though, which is neutralized on contact with me or anything I’m wearing, and likewise electrical attacks get stored in an internal reservoir to be used at my leisure.” The list of defenses was quite long.

“Wow,” said Mizuki. “Is there any possible way that I can see you in action?”

Ria laughed. “Only in dungeons, I’m afraid, or on undone days.”

“Undone days?” asked Mizuki.

“All out sparring,” said Ria. “Unfortunately, you mostly remember the losses rather than the wins.”

“You fight people?” asked Mizuki.

“High-elevation dungeoneers,” Ria replied. “And yes, I do. Mostly other chrononauts though, which is a safer display of power.”

“Safer in a ‘they will come for you at the witching hour’ kind of way?” asked Mizuki.

Ria raised an eyebrow. “Alfric’s been telling you our stories?”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “It’s important for him, I think, so I try to listen.”

Ria liked Mizuki, even though she was a bit like an overeager puppy dog. Though Mizuki did eventually drift back over to the others, there was a sense in which Mizuki was clearly a fan, which wasn’t entirely the relationship Ria wanted to have with Alfric’s party.

They slept in what the children had dubbed ‘Lutopia One’, in beds that Alfric had apparently made by hand. She hadn’t known that he’d taken up woodworking, and felt a pang of loneliness that he hadn’t shared it with her.

They ate food made by Ria’s entads, a selection of exotic fruits and meats, exotic not in the sense that they were from another land, but in that they had never existed except in the dreams of the entad. All of it was safe, and most of it was delicious, but it gave a feeling of strangeness that Ria normally liked. You couldn’t quite place the taste of anything, and sometimes the meat seemed to have been cooked with strange spices, which meant that there were layers of strangeness.

Verity returned to them after what felt like an enormous amount of time, but was almost exactly appropriate given what Ria’s timekeeping was telling her.

“How was the day?” asked Alfric.

“Pleasant,” said Verity. She seemed intensely uncomfortable, beneath the blank face she kept. “I saw Kell. Apparently he’d been out in what they call the Wildlands, the places beyond the permeable border.”

“Doing what?” asked Alfric.

“Exploring,” said Verity. “Mapping.” She shrugged. “Is this important? I did ask questions, but he didn’t seem to want to talk with me, and I didn’t want to seem overeager.”

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “There’s a chance it might be important. If this is a ‘living’ demiplane, that might be a vital distinction.”

“It wouldn’t change that she picked these people up under such poor circumstances,” said Ria.

“He didn’t seem surprised to see me,” said Verity. “He was pleasant, if a bit curt.” She glanced at Mizuki.

“What?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “He didn’t ask about you, and I’d thought that he might want to. But I’m glad that he didn’t ask, because I would need to lie.”

“The coast is clear?” asked Ria. “I should remind you all that this is going to be an undone day, so if there’s something you want reported back to yourself, you should tell me now.”

“Oh no,” said Mizuki. “You’re going to have to explain your loadout again.”

“It was my pleasure, I don’t mind doing it twice,” smiled Ria. She looked around. “Anyone else?”

“Stay safe,” said Alfric.

“She’s immune to fire,” said Mizuki.

“I’ll be safe,” said Ria.

And with that, she had Verity strum her out. The children would stay in there until the witching hour, which was for the best.

Night had fallen over the demiplane, and the irregular grid of stars above were shining. Most of the houses were unlit, and Ria looked around for a moment before cloaking herself. She didn’t have all that much for infiltration, just a pen that made her blend into shadows, a gauntlet that made her silent and impossible for wizards or sorcerers to view by magic, and a necklace that made people forget about her if they were within ten to a hundred yards of her. A few of those had been borrowed from the family stash. Harmon had true invisibility and incorporeality, but those were from entads bound to him.

Verity had left the door open, and Ria slipped out into the small town.

She rose into the air, surveying the demiplane, intensely worried that she would be seen or found. She had nothing to guard her from a pseudo-census entad, or from other entad surveillance. Entads were notorious for that sort of thing: they interacted with each other often, but it was through the medium of the world, and if you wanted to not be counted as a person for some entad that was looking for you, virtually the only way to do that was to not be a person.

There was the village, where the lights were slowly winking out, and the palace, which was still a blaze of illumination, including a grand fire in the courtyard, where people were dancing and merry-making, their music and chatter floating easily through the empty air. The courtyard was situated within the mountain, in a sort of caldera, the holes poked through the rock providing views of a large, sheltered park which the courtyard was a part of.

Beyond, there was wilderness, true wilderness, rambling forests and rushing rivers that seemed to have been completely untouched by human hands, or touched so long ago that there was no trace of the last fingerprints of civilization. It was beautiful, in the way that Ria always found nature to be beautiful, unspoilt, or having regrown from spoil. She saw animals among the woods, but enhanced senses were enough to identify them as owls, deer, badgers, foxes, nothing terribly unusual by the standards of Inter’s biosphere.

More than a mile away from the palace, there was a ruined tower, and Ria swept toward it, looking for answers, if there were any answers to be found anywhere. Harmon thought that this was all for nothing, that perhaps Cate really had been setting up a paradise. This could be nothing more than that, paradise, though Ria had a healthy skepticism of anyone who organized their own planned community away from the oversight of others. Cate could be faulted for the secrecy with which it was done, for the ways in which proper emigration proceedings had not been followed, for the months during which the families of the disappeared had worried, but it was very possible that there was no other fault. From everything that Verity had said, there was no real reason for anyone to leave, aside from homesickness.

The tower had been made of stone and was half-melted, the rocks heated so much that a few of them had exploded from water in tiny crevices. The stones which had been put in place with mortar had merged together as they grew pliable in the heat. It was clear there was nothing to learn here — it was too burnt, too old — but perhaps later on it might be possible to come back and watch the past. Whatever had happened, it had been a long time ago.

Ria heard the fluttering of cloth before she had eyes on Cate. The other woman was flying through the air, effortless and serene, exactly in the direction of the ruined tower.

Ria flew off in a random direction, not wanting to get close.

Cate changed course, moving the same direction.

This wasn’t promising.

They flew, and it was clear that Ria was slower, if only just. How she was being tracked, she didn’t know, but she was being tracked. It was unnerving, but if it came to a fight, she couldn’t imagine that she would lose. Cate was not, by any account, a dungeoneer, and even if she’d been surreptitiously buying up entads for a decade or two, there were limits on how powerful a person could get without direct access to bound entads or a good party. There were also limits on how powerful a person without direct combat experience could be.

The edge of the demiplane was marked only by a transition of the stars. Rather than the irregular grid, they were chaotic, sprinkled across the sky haphazardly. If these were ‘Wildlands’, they looked little different from what had come before, though they were changing slowly, different with every mile. The trees were getting larger, some of them with ‘horns’ of dead wood sticking from the top. The rivers had widened, sometimes gouging deep canyons through granite. And there was variety to it as well, the sorts of things that Ria had only ever seen before in dungeons, staggering rock formations and trees that swayed with red fronds that seemed to breathe, plains filled with calico grazing beasts.

Eventually, Ria came to a stop. It had been a half hour, at least, and the gentle pursuit of a silent shadow seemed like it could have gone on for ten times that long, if they had allowed it to. Unfortunately, that would take them past the witching hour, which Ria could not allow.

Cate stopped when Ria did, probing at the hundred yard border of memory and eventually moving forward in spite of it. Dropping the cloaks would have allowed a conversation, but Ria wanted to see what Cate could see, and what the other woman would do.

Cate moved within ten yards, close enough that the memory entad wouldn’t suppress anything. Her lips curled in a smile.

“Sofia Lagrange,” she said.

That was the name that Ria was known by to the census. There were entads that could change your name, and Ria had changed her name, not too long ago. So far as Ria knew, removing your name outright was impossible, but Sofia Lagrange was innocuous enough, not liable to raise suspicions. It was comforting, in a way, to know that the false name had worked.

“Or should I say Ria Overguard?” asked Cate. There was only the faintest smile on her face. Not smug, exactly, but Ria wouldn’t have objected if someone else had called it smug.

There was silence in the air. Cate’s flowing dress was slightly askew from the flight, and her hair was tousled, but as Ria watched, these imperfections righted themselves, dress adjusting itself, hairs moving back into place. The sense of calmness was incredible, and it didn’t feel entirely aesthetic in nature.

“I don’t suppose I know what you hope to accomplish by staying mute,” said Cate. “You’re going to reset the day anyhow, and there’s no harm in speaking with me. In fact, it might get you information, which is the stock and trade of the chrononauts.”

Ria removed the entad that was silencing her. She was still a barely-perceptible shadow. “You know my name.”

“I do,” said Cate, smiling. “And I don’t believe that I invited you to my demiplane.”

“Is that what you call what you’ve been doing?” asked Ria. “Inviting?”

“Please,” laughed Cate. “Did you really want to sneak in where you’re not wanted and then lecture me on morality? Tell me, did you come here under the authority of Inter, of Greater Plenarch, or simply on your own?”

“On the authority of Inter,” said Ria. This was only technically true, and her authority didn’t extend very far at all. Certainly she wasn’t allowed to simply snatch people from the demiplane, even if that was what she wanted to do. It was also an authority that had extended from a single judge, without any outside review. It was flimsy, and Ria knew it.

“And how shall we settle this?” asked Cate, who didn’t seem to care very much at all.

“Allow people in,” said Ria. “Allow stock to be taken of conditions here, a census of those you took as compared against the missing persons report. Interviews with the people here, to make sure they’re here of their own free will. Government agents need to be allowed to bond to the demiplane core, even if they’re set up to go into a small, special room that you keep barred.”

“Hmm,” said Cate. “No, I rather think I don’t like that. My counteroffer is that you and anyone else who entered without my permission will leave, immediately, without talking to anyone you might have come here for. You could even do it in an undone day, so I wouldn’t have to bother with knowing about you.”

That implied that Cate had first learned of Ria when she’d exited the extradimensional space, but this might well have been a bluff. Cate could easily have prior knowledge through a higher priority chrononaut. There was no good way of telling, and while the chrononauts had procedures for locking down the channels, there was no way that anyone would have approved doing that for this. It would explain how Cate had known Ria’s name.

“And if you don’t leave,” Cate continued. “Then by right of the dominion I claim over this place, I will drive you off.” A sliver of cold steel appeared from the hem of her sleeve and extended, traveling parallel to her arm, until a full eleven feet of thin sword was resting casually in her hand. It was, Ria was certain, an entad.

Her own sword appeared in a flash, black as pitch.

There was a part of Ria that wanted to say ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ She kept silent though, because she didn’t know who Cate was.

“I suppose this battle won’t be a battle,” said Cate. “It’s information gathering for you. You have no idea where the demiplane core is, and neither does anyone else, which would mean that you’d doom everyone here to being trapped here for eternity. I’m sure you had the wizards build you a pry bar to get out of here, but I doubt you’re equipped to take ten thousand.”

“That’s the population?” asked Ria. “We had thought less.”

“I’ll give you that for free,” said Cate. A second sliver of metal appeared from her other sleeve, this one brass or something like it, burnished and brown. It was, likewise, incredibly long and held with calm and reserve. “It’s an interesting question, whether I try to kill you with the full force of my abilities, or whether I do as little as possible, attempting to hold back so you don’t know until you have to.”

“You seem confident,” said Ria. Her grip tightened on her sword, then she relaxed, so she’d be ready.

“You have no idea,” replied Cate. Her smile had widened.

The attack came quickly, a spinning attack that seemed wildly impractical until it was there. Ria’s sword dilated time, but Cate seemed to have some similar effect. For an outside observer, they would have appeared impossibly fast, but Ria’s perception was that they were equally matched.

That was a very bad sign. There was no particular reason for their powers to be matched, and every reason for them not to be, which meant that Cate was playing with her, and worse, outclassed her, at least on that metric.

Ria parried the spinning attack and moved away, far enough that Cate should have lost her memory of their encounter and indeed, any memory of Ria’s existence at all. There was, briefly, a moment of confusion on Cate’s face, and it might have been the time to attack, but Ria held back, watching.

Dungeon monsters, at Ria’s elevation, were incredibly dangerous, even if you were nearly invulnerable along a wide number of axes, and even if you could regenerate limbs or bounce back from having half your face blown off — which Ria could. One of the things that made these dungeon monsters so difficult was that their abilities were, from the outset, unknown, and could be almost anything. Nine tenths of them could be sliced through easily and from a distance, but the other tenth could be incredibly difficult. One approach, the one Ria favored in her old age, was a probing approach, attacks at full power followed by backing off if those didn’t work. Observing a target would show its weak points, more often than not.

Cate wasn’t immune to the memory entad, which was good, and strict immunity would be highly unexpected. She had some way of reorienting herself at speed though, and focused on Ria after only a few moments. Finding the chink in her armor would be difficult. What was it? You could get around memory-affecting entads by recording the interaction then playing it back, usually, though that wouldn’t work for this particular case. Ria had other ways of cloaking herself, but worried they wouldn’t be reliable.

This time it was Ria who made the probing attack, thrusting her sword behind her through a ten-inch wide portal created by one of a few rings she wore inside her gauntlet. The other end of the portal was directly behind Cate’s back. The thrust wasn’t just parried, which Cate accomplished with the silver blade, but her brass blade slipped through the small portal, using it for a thrusting attack. Cate had done this blind, her hands manipulating the swords behind her back with apparent ease. The tip of the brass sword had stopped an inch from Ria’s armor, deliberately so.

“You’ll have to forgive me for showing off,” said Cate. “It’s so rare that someone is foolish enough to try killing me.”

Ria flew backward, extracting her sword from the portal in the process, then closing it so she would be at the right distance to be forgotten. Again, there was a moment of confusion, but it didn’t last nearly long enough.

“Ah,” said Cate to the open air. “A mysterious stranger, pestering me. I think I understand this better now. Tell me, stranger, are you trying your best? Because I should let you know that I’ve been giving you only a taste of my true power.”

Ria had not, in fact, been trying ‘her best’, but then, there was nothing to be gained from this battle except an understanding of who Cate was and how she fought. If the battle was one of information, then it seemed that Cate was losing it … but it also seemed like that loss might be deliberate.

Ria teleported two miles away, intending to wait about the forest there. What she saw instead was the world blooming into being below her, the stars blossoming into haphazard positions across the sky. It seemed to start from where she was floating in the air, spreading out rapidly. There was a lot she didn’t understand about the Wildlands, and that seemed like it was going to be a problem too.

When the landscape around her had grown firm and filled in, Ria did wait, though she wasn’t entirely sure that Cate would come.

The attack came from behind. It was the same thing that Ria had done, only without the small portal. Instead, Cate had simply appeared, showing off her own teleportation.

This time, the silvered sword crossed Ria’s first defensive line, and the reaction was instant. A thousand flechettes burst forward, tiny and razor sharp, so fast that they were accompanied by a heavy blast of wind. It was a response that had killed a great number of dungeon monsters, and Ria was pleased to see that Cate was wounded. There were punctures through her gossamer outfit and a few spots of blood. The silver blade had been blasted back, Cate’s grip on it lost, but it arced through the air for only a few moments before appearing back in her hand.

The blood flowed freely, but Cate hung in the air, head hanging down slightly. There was too much blood, in fact, more than should be in a person, streaming down to the ground below. It was the time for a riposte, if Ria was going to make one, but she hesitated, put off by the sheer amount of blood. It was enough to fill several people.

The blood arrested its motion, almost at once, then began moving in ways completely divorced from gravity. Ria backed up again, putting distance between her and Cate, right in the zone that should have removed memory, but the blood kept moving either way, coalescing in the air into three separate spots. They were first spots of blood, then blood creatures, each of them a feminine figure that bore some token resemblance to Cate.

Ria had fought against what might have been as many as a million monsters spun up by the dungeons, and held a special hatred toward liquid types, which swords passed through easily. For this very reason, she had a sword for the occasion, and she switched to it with a thought, hurtling through the air at what she’d internally dubbed the blood fairies. Her sword sliced straight through the first she reached, and the magic of the scimitar superheated the blood, which caused the entire construct to explode apart, thankfully not hot enough to overload her heat resistance.

The second and third fairies gave as little problem as the first, their bodies no match for the sword, and the flash-boiling made a mist of blood through the air, as though she was popping bubbles. There was a particular smell to flash-boiled blood, but Ria was taking no chances, and had been breathing ectad-generated air since she’d come out of the extradimensional space.

The sword worked on people too, if you could stab them where they had enough blood. So far, Ria hadn’t landed a hit.

It was time to end the fight. Part of it was the creeping sense that perhaps there wasn’t a winning move, or that the time for a decisive blow had somehow come and gone, but Ria knew most of what she needed to know, and the fight wasn’t without risks. Incapacitation was virtually impossible given the countermeasures that Ria had in place, but ‘virtually impossible’ wasn’t the same as ‘impossible’.

Ria’s weapons, all ten of them, emptied from their extradimensional space. Nine of them floated in the air, while the tenth, her black sword, was held in her hand.

“Oh?” asked Cate. Her robes showed no sign of wear, and the blood had vanished. “Are we getting serious now?”

Ria rushed in, fully armored, her weapons leading the way. One of the swords positioned itself for Cate’s heart and then fired off faster than an arrow, crossing the hundred feet between them in a blink. It was parried aside with impossible speed, so fast that even dilated, Ria couldn’t sense it happening. That attack had failed only a handful of times before, and never against another person.

Cate countered with a bolt of lightning, one which struck Ria full in the chest, but the power of it was stored, and Ria launched it back through an outstretched palm without slowing her pace. It was too much to hope that Cate would be fried by it, but the way that it bent around the woman was disheartening.

Ria’s twin blades were next, flying out ahead of her, sharp enough to cut a hair in half lengthwise. These weren’t parried, but instead Cate simply turned herself into smoke, and the blades passed through.

Ria’s spear bounced off, as though made of rubber. Her mace shattered apart into pieces no larger than grains of sand, utterly destroyed. It was happening fast, each defense seconds apart from the others, and the only sign that Cate was exerting any effort was a slight heaviness to her breath. Ria’s falchion was caught between two hands, drawing blood in the process, but it was then thrown back at Ria with such speed and force that it screamed through the air and was impossible to dodge. Ria was struck with her own weapon, activating her secondary defense, placing her two hundred feet to the left, in a different spot in the sky.

Before Ria could use the last of her weapons, Cate counterattacked. She teleported in, opened her mouth impossibly wide, unhinging her jaw and stretching the skin of her cheeks.

Then, she unleashed flame, so bright and hot that Ria was blinded just before she roasted to death.

~~~~

“She’s debatably stronger than me,” said Ria. “We had a battle and felt each other out. The fact that I remember it means that she didn’t go to someone else about it, and I retained priority. It’s entirely possible that didn’t happen every time though. If she can beat me, she might have been on her second time through the day, which would help explain how she beat me.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Alfric. “How can one person be that strong?”

“Strong enough to beat me?” asked Ria with a laugh. “Money would do it, collected carefully and out of sight of the tax collectors, or stolen carefully so that no one noticed. How can a person collect ten thousand people from around Inter and beyond without getting caught?” The numbers didn’t line up. Harmon had said a thousand, Cate had said ten. “Patience, a willful violation of the law, there are all kinds of methods.” She managed to keep the frown from her face. “So far as I know, Verity was fine out there. We can go to the next day, if we absolutely have to.”

“If she’s stronger than you,” Alfric began.

“Stronger in some sense,” said Ria. “I haven’t attempted a decapitating strike from the shadows. I suspect that it would work, though I can’t say for certain. And again, cutting her down isn’t our primary goal here. Our goal is to ideally pin her to the wall with some sort of malfeasance, get Inter involved as much as they can be involved, find the demiplane core, and so on. Once I can enter and exit at will, we can bring this under the umbrella of proper governance.”

“Which isn’t usual for demiplanes,” said Alfric. “Normally they have known custodians who bring in surveyors.”

“We need to get to the point of negotiation,” said Ria. “And in order to do that, we need leverage. We don’t even truly understand this ‘living’ demiplane, what it is, where it came from, and what Cate’s goals are here.”

“Some kind of perfect colony, right?” asked Mizuki.

“Maybe,” said Ria, shrugging. “It’s hard to say.”

“She found you,” said Alfric.

“Yes, and it’s unclear how,” said Ria. “That’s something that we need to probe with my remaining days. What I’m going to do first is to see whether it was me or whether it would apply to anyone else. Which means that I need a test subject to go out there.”

“Me,” said Mizuki. “It’s gotta be me, right? Also, staying in here for a day seems incredibly boring.”

“You’ll still have to stay here,” said Ria. “You’ll go out only at night, for a few hours, in disguise, to see whether she tracks her way to you.”

“Can do,” said Mizuki with a nod. “Whatever you need.”

~~~~

“I think, based on what we know, any of you are safe going out,” said Ria. “It’s not clear to me why, but Mizuki could spend four hours out there, while Cate came to me almost at once. Now, it could be that Cate knew perfectly well about Mizuki’s presence and chose not to intervene, but I’m hoping that it’s a gap in her defenses.”

“What could it possibly be?” asked Alfric. “You had mentioned pseudo-census.”

“There are a lot of differences between me and Mizuki,” said Ria. “The biggest one that’s built into the Editors’ information structures, and the one which I don’t have the power to change, is elevation.”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “What’s your elevation?”

“Forty-seven,” said Ria.

“Wow,” said Mizuki.

“Mizuki thinks elevation is bunk,” said Alfric. Mizuki gave him a dirty look.

“It’s a number,” said Ria with a shrug. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s Editor idiocy, but yes, it can be hard to pin that number to actual real-world meaning, especially since so much of combat preparedness comes down to entad loadout. That’s neither here nor there though, what we need now as the days tick down, is some measure of a plan. I’ll be sending you out in the morning now to see what systems are in place to respond to you.”

~~~~

Ria rubbed her face. “It appears you can move freely, so long as you don’t run into Cate herself.”

“Did we?” asked Mizuki.

“Yes,” said Ria. “But I think we can burn days avoiding that. Which means that our scheme for today will be poking around at the edges of this ‘living’ demiplane, getting some answers on what that means and why it might be important, as well as getting a full inventory of who’s here, and importantly, who isn’t.”

“We’re still doing this?” asked Verity. “From what you’ve said, you’ve been through this day four times and haven’t found anything incriminating.”

“You have a soft spot for her and her cause,” said Ria. “That much has been clear.” It seemed, disappointingly, as though that was one of the reasons that they’d been in four days rather than one, though perhaps that read on it was just Ria’s frustration talking. “What she’s doing here, setting herself up as the supreme authority, cannot be allowed. There are reasons that we don’t organize our societies in that way. It would be bad even if she were being forthright about what she knows and what she doesn’t, but she isn’t being forthright. There’s no oversight if things go wrong. On top of that, we have no idea what mechanisms are in place, if any, for when someone wants to leave this place.”

“I didn’t mean to say that we don’t have any reason for concern,” said Verity, holding herself stiffly. “Only that I want to know what happens if we find nothing of concern. I didn’t agree to this in order to bring Inter’s government into things.”

“Inter only debatably has authority,” said Alfric. “Demiplanes aren’t part of the collection of hexes controlled. They’re more akin to vassal states, and could easily be vassals of other nations, which some of them are.”

“I know this, son,” said Ria.

“I want to know more about the demiplane,” said Alfric. “It’s unusual. But I have a feeling that my interests aren’t about making sure that people are safe and under good governance, and I want to be clear about that.”

There was something almost scrupulously fair about Alfric that sometimes grated, as much as Ria didn’t like to admit that about her own son. Some of the children had taken many repetitions of specific lessons in order to understand fairness, honesty, circumspection, and all kinds of other things, and it seemed that Alfric had picked it up far more quickly than the others. In some sense, having the lessons repeated so much for the benefit of his siblings might have pushed them in a bit too hard for Alfric, though it was difficult to say. Alfric was somewhat famous within the family for not swearing: he’d been taught, when he was four, that certain words were bad words that you weren’t supposed to say, and he’d never said any of them in front of anyone, going so far as correcting others with a particular sort of insistence. At fifteen they’d explained to him that it was okay — and expected — to let loose a stream of curse words at times, but he hadn’t budged much.

“Either way, we need to gather information,” said Ria. “Alfric, I’d like you to go into the Wildlands to find out what you can. Verity, I want you to speak with Cate and those around her — the village seems to be a good place for you to lay low, but she doesn’t seem to come here often, which means the palace will be the place for you to be.” She turned to the other three. “I’d like you to go out and make friends. From what Verity has seen, there’s nothing in the way of a police force or central authority in the village, and we don’t know precisely what happens when someone steals, or assaults someone else, or anything like that. We don’t know if there are answers to those questions, but given the amount of preparation and planning that’s gone into everything else, I assume that Cate has something. Nonetheless, there’s no one to report you, at least in theory, and no one who has full knowledge of who lives within the village.”

“So we’re spies now?” asked Hannah.

“If you’d been paying attention, we’ve actually been spies since we started looking into the past,” said Isra. Her arms were folded.

“And that’s the plan for today,” said Ria. “If it goes well, we keep it. If you’re not all back here by nightfall without incident, we don’t keep the day.”

“We don’t reset if people know us?” asked Alfric.

“There’s a strong temptation to stay hidden away, knowing everything only through undone days,” said Ria. “I think that’s the wrong tack, here, because we need those memories, especially once we go back to Inter to talk with others about what’s been going on here.”

“I guess,” said Alfric. He seemed slightly uncomfortable, though whether it was about the spying or the loss of secrecy going into the next day, she couldn’t say.

“Well then let’s do it,” said Mizuki. “I’m ready.”

Chapter 139 - The Wildlands

Alfric stood out less than he had feared. The population that Cate had chosen skewed young, and there was a bit more of the variety to their complexion than across central Inter, where he’d been spending much of his time.

It had been claimed that she’d selected ten thousand people, which was apparently her own number, and that seemed like far too many people to have simply vanished without another word about it. Done over the course of a year or two, it meant an entire family’s worth of people every day, thirteen or so. Because not all of the people who Cate had spoken to had actually come, and because some had taken multiple visits, that meant something insane like organizing fifty meetings every single day.

Alfric was left looking at the people and thinking about how he would do it while also trying not to be too obvious that he was looking around and wondering about the logistics.

He decided that he would, if he had to abduct ten thousand people, run a few flophouses in the major cities of Inter. These would attract young people, or at least people prone to wandering and exploring, up for some grand new adventure. He wasn’t sure how many people he would be able to get that way, but it would be a good start, so long as there were some kind of teleportation entad involved.

As far as gathering the ‘right’ people, that would be a bit easier, if you had insane entad support. An entad had been used to declare him compatible with Lola, so he wasn’t terribly sanguine about that approach, but if you were bringing people in at volume, it seemed like it would be better than attempting to screen them in any normal way, especially if you were trying to do the whole thing alone without any confederates. Of course, confederates would make the whole thing less logistically fraught, but that introduced a lot of risks in terms of the secrecy being broken.

It would have all been easier if it could be advertised, but Alfric didn’t think that would have been able to go by unnoticed, even if it was cloaked behind pseudonyms and misdirection. A ship of a hundred people never arriving on distant shores would have raised some flags, he felt, though it was entirely possible that it hadn’t been. He thought he would have known, if someone was offering trips to a new world.

The people of the village were friendly with him, even when he asked questions that by rights he probably should have known the answers to.

“It’s sort of all wild, but the Wildlands don’t really stick,” said a girl at the general store. It wasn’t actually a general store, since no one had to pay for anything, and was really more of a communal warehouse, four times the size of Bethany’s shop in Pucklechurch. It was incredibly well-stocked, with glass jars stretching up and down a few aisles, and a number of bins for things like flour, sugar, or salt.

“Stick?” asked Alfric.

“You wander out, you see a forest, and then that forest isn’t there the next time you go out,” said the girl. “I went once or twice, just to see it, but I don’t think that I’ll go again, at least until there are some stabilizers out there.”

“Stabilizers?” asked Alfric.

“Um, little towers, I think,” the girl said. “They haven’t built any yet, but when they do, it’ll be in the best, most worthwhile places, and maybe with a nice cleared path from place to place.”

Alfric frowned. “If I wanted to go out into the Wildlands, who would I talk to?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just went with some people, you don’t really need to sign out or anything, that’s not how it works here.” She gave a laugh. “We don’t have permits or anything.”

“But there are monsters, like in a dungeon?” asked Alfric.

“Eh,” she said. “I think if you go in far enough. And you’re not supposed to sleep in there unless you’ve got someone to keep watch, or some defenses. But there’s no dungeon madness or anything like that. Most of the things you see are either docile or skittish.”

Alfric didn’t know what to think about all that. It didn’t sound even remotely like anything he’d heard of before, except that perhaps this was what the Editors had intended the monsters of the dungeons to be all along.

He set out for the Wildlands without really thinking too much about it. They had the party channel, but weren’t using it, in part because Cate verifiably had some way of capturing party communications. They suspected that she wasn’t able to do it at a distance, and not without them knowing, but it was better to stay silent and not risk it.

There was a trail leading into the Wildlands, thick enough that it was more or less a road, and Alfric walked it for some time until he felt like he was far enough away from the village. Then, he pulled out a glove his mother had given him and slipped it on. He called forth a broad wooden board into being that allowed him to fly, as long as his body. He stood on it, getting his balance, then took off.

It was slow, half as slow as the helm, and more dangerous because if he slipped from it he’d be rolling across the ground. Still, it was just about as fast as he could run, but without any of the effort, and it meant that he’d reach the boundary of the demiplane within an hour, possibly sooner.

It was an adventure, like the ones he’d dreamed about when he was little, and long since given up on. He felt the wind on his face and watched as the road narrowed. It was a pleasant day, and the sun was still rising, promising that some of the crisp chill would be cut.

He almost missed the transition. It wasn’t exactly subtle, but the moment of resistance could easily have been chalked up to a gust of wind or a bit of turbulence. His mind went to the transition between the world and the dungeons, which was always a moment of blackness, and this was nothing at all like that. He turned his board back around and crossed the border a second time, trying to pay attention to how it felt, then crossed a few times. There was something dreamlike about the Wildlands, he decided, but it was subdued. He contemplated this for a moment, then pushed off once more, drifting in deeper.

He caught the scenery in the distance changing. There had been a fine-looking mountain some miles away, one which he’d been heading toward for lack of anything else, and he’d taken his eyes off it for only a moment to look at a herd of large animals with long necks and longer tongues. When he looked back, the mountain was gone. He pulled up short, standing on the board in quiet contemplation, then closed and reopened his eyes, looking away and then back.

The changes happened in the distance, where things seemed to be more in flux, but he occasionally caught them closer to him, with the trees of the distant forests changing a hundred yards away. It only happened when he wasn’t looking, which meant that it depended on observation somehow, or was some kind of observation effect. He wondered whether everyone would see the same distant objects, and whether two people could force a mountain to stay put until they could reach it.

When that was done, he circled around to the animals, which were apparently close enough to him that they hadn’t disappeared when he wasn’t looking at them. This, too, was a good thing to know about the Wildlands, and he tucked it away for later.

The creatures were like goats, but much taller. Much of their length was in their necks, and they were standing together under trees, slipping out long tongues like an anteater’s, which they used to pull leaves from branches. Their eyes were at the base of their neck, and they didn’t seem to have proper heads or skulls. It also wasn’t clear where their brains were, if they had brains.

They were, all-in-all, not that different from dungeon monsters, except in two key ways. The first was that they seemed more at home in their environment, as though they had been eating from the trees here in their natural habitat rather than created in a room for a dungeon where they would sit and wait. The fact that they were eating at all was surprising, since it was pretty rare for dungeon monsters to eat, even if they had nominal food around them.

The second major difference was that they showed nothing like dungeon madness. Alfric kept expecting them to notice him and charge, but their eyes, which swiveled independently like a chameleon’s, went to him on several occasions with no reaction. They showed no particular anger or even caution at a flying man, and he got close enough to pat one on its flank. It kept one eye on him and the other on the leaves it was pulling down with its long tongue. The word ‘docile’ seemed apt, and he was worried that if he left, the creatures would disappear, never to be seen again, just like they would have been in a dungeon.

Eventually he did leave though, wanting to see more of these Wildlands so he could understand their nature.

Alfric wasn’t terribly good at identifying trees, but he thought that these were imagined ones too, not the oak or ash of Pucklechurch or central Inter. Aside from that, they didn’t seem to be magical, though it was difficult to tell from a distance without interacting with them. He saw mottled bark and broad leaves, long purple fruits hanging down in clusters from branches that were bending under the weight, but for all he knew, this was perfectly normal.

The forest eventually transitioned to wetlands, one which had hundreds of dead, leafless trees which he guessed had died off in flooding or something similar. They stood, stark, reminding him of gravestones or the horns of some long-dead animal.

Alfric flew low enough that his board disturbed the water, and he looked for animals, hoping to find some new species. Eventually he spotted a frog and pulled up short, though he’d only barely seen it. It was small and well-camouflaged against the dead tree, and he stared at it for a moment, taking it in. It had four eyes, with a smaller set nestled below the main pair, and long slits for nostrils that went down half its face. It looked back at him when he looked at it, then eventually leapt from the dead tree. When it did, it stretched its limbs out wide and glided through the air until it plopped, unceremoniously, into the water and disappeared.

Nothing was trying to kill him. He was simply in unspoilt nature, miles away from anyone else, seeing new plants and animals that it was likely no one had ever seen before. There might be danger, but he hadn’t seen any yet. It felt like he could pitch a tent and be relatively certain that nothing would attack him in the night. With proper preparation, he could hunt and forage his way through the Wildlands, leaving civilization far behind, exploring mountains that no one had ever so much as touched before, and that no one would touch after he was gone, because they would vanish.

There was a funny feeling in his stomach, like butterflies. He had learned things from being out in the Wildlands, and needed to go back, but it had only been two hours or so, maybe even less. It wasn’t even lunchtime yet. He had no idea what more he might learn from flying through these environments, but he was keenly aware that he wanted to go explore and see what the Wildlands might create for him.

He wanted to talk to the others, to share his excitement, but they had agreed to stay off the party channel.

The marsh turned into a swamp, this one with thick, healthy trees which seemed to be using their roots like stilts. They were draped with scarves of moss, reminding him of regal women attending an opera, the occasional spar of black rock serving as stolid men with toupees of flowers. He wished that he could find some marker of it, that he could write it down in a dungeon report, or that he had some facility with art. He could learn to be an artist, he thought, or get an entad to do it, but the idea that this would all disappear when he left made him feel something like despair. That made no real sense, and was never anything he’d felt about dungeons, for all their oddness and intrigue.

He’d been in the Wildlands for nearly two hours when he saw the house.

He flew to it, cautious, very aware that he wasn’t wearing his armor and didn’t have his weapon in hand. The glove he’d borrowed could expel the armor, but he hadn’t thought that he would need it, and from Ria’s recounting of the fight, Alfric would have been completely outclassed by the real threat.

The house was nothing unusual, just a small place with a sloped roof and cobblestone walls, thick timbers that might have come from the local trees. There was a clothesline outside that ran between the trees, and white sheets billowed in the cool breeze. There was a fire pit, cold, with two wooden chairs beside it, and a garden plot that seemed to be coming along. Alfric felt awkward about peeking inside the house, but there was a suggestion that someone lived there, and that felt too significant to let pass by.

The house was well-furnished, small and cozy, but no one seemed to be home, and the sheets drying in the wind were the only sign that someone had been there recently.

If it had been a dungeon, Alfric would have accepted it as it was, a nonsense place that suggested something but meant nothing. The Wildlands seemed different though, with less in the way of incongruent geometry and juxtaposed features that couldn’t possibly mesh together. The house raised questions, like who lived here and how they lived, so Alfric looked around more, and eventually found what he’d expected to find, which was a narrow road.

This he followed, which eventually brought him to a village, a small one like the various points around Pucklechurch, home to hundreds, if that, and abandoned, similarly to the house. It looked as though everyone had simply left at some point, full storerooms, silverware, clothes, cookery, pantries, and everything else left behind. It was spooky, in its own way, but it might have been spookier if there had been a full village of people out here, or bastlefolk. He tried a few doors and found them all unlocked, but only went in for long enough to confirm that everything was laid out like he’d thought it should be for a home, or tavern, or something like that. Everything fit, besides the lack of people.

Alfric flew away, keeping himself from looking back, then returned.

The village was gone. Alfric had expected that, but it was still somewhat of a shock, all that civilization wiped away just because he had gone far enough away from it and stopped looking. He’d gotten there by following a thin road that had thickened as he’d gone, and wondered whether that would always happen if he could find a road.

The next hour of exploring passed without incident. He never saw a home again, or a village, or anything like that, though he did see a few decaying ruins that were largely overgrown with vines. His natural inclination was to go deeper, but that wasn’t necessary, since he could return to places he’d been before and see what changes had happened while he’d been ‘away’. It was startling how well everything ‘fit’ together, not the slapdash way that dungeons would cover up the seams where two rooms joined together, but in a coherent, cohesive manner.

He diverted to the thin white trail of smoke as soon as he’d seen it. If the breeze hadn’t died down, he might not have spied it, but it was intriguing because it felt like it meant something, and it was the second sign of civilization he’d seen, if he could count the house and the village as civilization. The fire seemed different though, in that it was something in motion. The village hadn’t seemed like a place that people had left. It wasn’t as though he’d come across it mid-evacuation, half-eaten meals left behind, hot bathwater, or anything like that. Instead, it had been a sterile scene, almost as though arranged for his benefit.

The smoke was different, because it implied a fire, and a fire transpired.

Alfric landed at the campsite, which was sited at the edge of a lake in a flat stretch of dry land before a forest of trees with bumps on their bark. He saw a pot of stew bubbling over a fire that was almost down to embers. A large couch sat to one side, incongruous, as it was the kind of fine leather that you’d never leave out in the rain, and it was especially not in keeping with the canvas A-frame tent that sat to one side. There was no road or trail leading to the campsite, and the place felt different in a way, strange in how mismatched the individual pieces were. There was an ax sitting near the tent with an overly ornate handle of burnished wood and a head of engraved metal. Alfric stared at it all for a moment, wondering what rules had given rise to a place that was so comparatively odd.

“Can I help you?” asked a woman’s voice.

Alfric froze in place. A part of him wanted to go fully armed, to hiss and spit like a startled cat, but instead he turned to the source of the voice. It was a woman’s head, poking out of the tent. She had long brown hair and wide green eyes, and for a moment he thought that she was his age, but from the way she frowned at him, he decided she was probably older. She emerged from the tent, just a simple tank top and some shorts, which seemed like too little for a relatively chilly day. She had no shoes on and stepped in the dirt like she didn’t care.

“Well?” she asked.

“Uh,” said Alfric, who was still standing on the board he’d borrowed from his father. “Just … passing through?”

“Ah,” she replied. “Well, there’s stew, if you’re interested.” She pointed at the pot that was still bubbling above the fire.

“Are you … sorry, are you from the village? Or the palace?” asked Alfric.

“Nah, I live out here,” she replied. “You’re part of the new wave?”

“Yeah,” said Alfric. “I guess.” She was moving easily, and he was unsure of himself.

“Stew, or not?” asked the woman.

Alfric looked at the pot. “Is it just you here?” he asked.

“That’s not a great question to ask someone who you find out in the Wildlands,” she said, folding her arms across her chest. “It gives the wrong impression.”

“Sorry,” said Alfric. “I didn’t mean it like that, I’d just — from what I had heard, there were monsters out here.”

The woman held her hand out to the side and the ax spun through the air at frightening speed to land itself snuggly in her grip. She raised an eyebrow in Alfric’s direction, then lazily threw the ax off to the side. It spun through the air, nearly a disc, and sliced straight through a tree, which didn’t finish falling until the ax had spun its way back toward her hand.

“Everything okay out there?” came a man’s voice from within the tent. He sounded distant.

“It’s fine, just someone from the village!” she called, raising her voice to be heard in a way that didn’t seem like it should have been necessary. Alfric was suspecting that the tent was larger on the inside, possibly much larger.

“Sent by Cate?” asked the man’s voice.

“I don’t think so!” said the woman. She was looking at Alfric appraisingly. “I think he’s just a random!”

“Out this far?” asked the man.

“He’s got a flying entad!” she called. “And the fire was sending up smoke!”

There was a brief pause. “Is the stew done?”

“It’s been done, it’s just a matter of how long you’re going to wait for the flavors to meld!” she replied.

There was another pause, this one longer. “Okay!”

The woman turned back to Alfric. “You didn’t answer whether you wanted stew,” she said.

“I guess I would take some stew,” said Alfric. “I haven’t had lunch.”

“We always make enough for a guest,” said the woman. She held out a hand. “Sana.”

“Alfric,” said Alfric, taking her hand.

“We’ve been out here for three years,” said Sana, unprompted. “In the demiplane for four.”

“This is my first full day,” said Alfric.

“You have some dungeoneering experience?” she asked.

“How could you tell?” he asked.

“You just have that way about you,” she replied with a shrug. “The obvious physique, the way you tense up when someone is handling a magical ax, not like you’re about to start something, but like you’re ready to go in for a tackle or to pull something magical from out of your glove as a counter if I decided to whip some steel at your head.”

Alfric wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “Well, you’re right, I am a dungeoneer.”

“You were a dungeoneer,” said Sana. She gestured to the world. “Now you’re a wildlander.”

“Is that what you call yourselves?” asked Alfric.

“Last I heard of Cate’s grand plans, there was going to be a major expansion to both the village and the palace and who knows where else,” said Sana with a shrug. “You aren’t here to check up on us, are you?”

“No, I was just wandering,” said Alfric. “It hadn’t even really occurred to me that there would be people just … living out here.”

“Oh, there are lots of us,” said Sana. “At least a hundred, last I checked, but last I checked was at least two years ago, and who knows how many more of us there are out here? Do you?”

“No,” said Alfric.

“Here, let me get the bowls,” said Sana. She dipped back into the tent, and was gone for far longer than should have been possible if the inside was the size of a normal tent. When she emerged, it was with five metal bowls, one of which she tossed to Alfric and another which she placed on the ground. The other three she filled half-full with stew using the ladle, then dipped back into the tent without another word, three bowls held awkwardly in her hands. Alfric waited for a moment, then when it was clear she wouldn’t be back for a while, ladled out some stew for himself. For lack of anywhere better to sit, he took a seat on the large couch.

There was no spoon to eat with, so he awkwardly sat there with the hot bowl in his lap, waiting for his ‘host’ to return.

The number of bowls implied that there were at least three people living inside the tent, making it four for their group. That was a larger group than the tent and out-of-place couch had implied. In one sense it was a good sign, since these people were apparently allowed to break from Cate’s society, but that they wanted to break from Cate’s society was a little concerning. Some of the language that Sana had used was also making Alfric a bit suspicious.

Sana came out from the tent once more, and tossed a spoon to Alfric, then dropped one in her own bowl.

“So, tell me Alfric, how are things back in ‘civilization’?”

“It’s hard to say,” said Alfric. “I’ve only been here a day. The village seems … fine. A lot of new people. The palace is filled with people. There was a party there that went late into the night. There are a lot of new people, from what I’ve heard. Lots of new houses.”

“That’s not what I meant at all,” she said with a little laugh. Having gotten her stew, she sat down on the couch with him, though at the other end. The ax was carelessly deposited next to the tent, and Alfric’s borrowed board was resting up against the side of the couch. He was keeping it in easy reach, though trying not to be obvious about it. “I meant Inter. Tell me what home is like.”

“Is this not home, for you?” asked Alfric. He looked down at the stew. “Also, what is this?”

“The stew?” she asked. “It’s some kind of small animal, chopped up, a few kinds of root vegetables, something pulled from a tree, and then some garlic and salt from our stockpiles.”

“It’s good to eat?” asked Alfric. “I mean, if it were from a dungeon, I’d have some questions.”

“You really do exude dungeoneer,” she said, nodding. “My husband is a druid, he checks things over, there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Mmm,” said Alfric. He felt wary, but took a bite of the stew. If she was eating it, then he was probably safe to eat it too, unless this was all an elaborate poisoning plot. Poisoning was one of the few good ways to kill a chrononaut, but he was relatively certain that his mother would have a generalized antitoxin. “It’s good. Odd, a bit.”

“The quality varies a lot,” she replied. “We move around a lot, and the food is always at its worst when we’ve come somewhere new and are still figuring it out.”

“Which is part of the fun of it?” asked Alfric. “Or are you out here for other reasons?”

“It’s the fun of it, yes,” said Sana. She took a bite of her own stew. “Though I’ll save more answers to your questions until you answer my questions.”

“Inter is … fine,” said Alfric. “Nothing much has changed, not in the past four years. There are rumors that the Editors are going to implement more changes, but there are always those rumors. Nothing much different, really.”

“I suppose three years isn’t enough time for it to be different, and the things you’d know about aren’t the things I’d want to know of,” said Sana. “You’d have no knowledge of the internal politics of the Church of Xuphin, or how my mother is doing, or whether the fishing on the coast of Pollmar has picked up, or any of that. Do you?”

“No,” said Alfric. “Sorry.”

She shrugged.

“Cate’s finished up in Inter,” said Alfric. “She’s done there, and won’t be going back. So that’s the last news anyone is going to get, I guess.”

“Ah,” said Sana. She placed her metal bowl down on the leather of the couch and closed her eyes for a moment. Then she opened them, looking at the tent. “Looks like I’ll have to break the news.”

“I can, if you’d like?” asked Alfric.

“No, no, I’ll do it, I’m half the reason we’re here.” Sana sighed and looked over at him. “So tell me, dungeoneer, are you having second thoughts yet?”

“There’s a way out,” said Alfric. “A wizard can construct an escape from a demiplane. I have one, if you’re interested.”

“You do?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “And what does Cate say about that?”

“She doesn’t know,” said Alfric. “I’d find it hard to believe that she’s ignorant of the technique, but she doesn’t know that it’s here, with us, providing a valve for people who don’t want to be here.”

Sana watched him for a moment. “You think I might be one such person?” she asked.

“I just met you,” said Alfric. “But if you were one such person, then yes, I would be offering you a way out.” This was probably a bad thing to say for the sake of security, but it would have felt bad to not say anything. After all, one of the things they were most concerned with was if people were trapped, unable to leave.

“Me and my husbands?” she asked.

Alfric nodded. The mentions of husbands had set his ears burning. It was a custom of Xuphin, relatively rare, and had always made him feel somewhat awkward. Traditionally it was clerics of Xuphin who took extra husbands or wives, but there were others who did it as well, much less seldom. Alfric had an uncle with two wives, one of whom he was pacted to, the other of which was from outside the chrononaut clans. They had seemed happy enough, but Alfric wasn’t around it often enough for it to seem normal. Lola had floated the idea, once, of her having multiple husbands, when they’d been sixteen. He’d been surprised how jealous it had made him feel, but maybe in retrospect, that was why she’d asked. At the time, he’d treated it like a serious idea.

He wondered whether their arrangement had anything to do with how these four people had ended up in this place.

“I’ll speak with them about it, but I don’t imagine we’ll take you up on it,” she said. “There’s something nostalgic about the old world, but I don’t think you yet understand the … this.” She gestured to the Wildlands around them, the calm lake that was near them, and the mountain in the distance that hadn’t yet disappeared.

“I understand it,” said Alfric. “Though … doesn’t it get old?”

“Not in three years,” Sana replied. “Maybe not ever. We wander from place to place, moving on when we get bored. We climb mountains, explore gorges, forage in the forests, and occasionally go into the oceans. I imagine we’ll be doing this for the rest of our lives, moving back toward what passes for civilization only once we get too old for this. Hopefully Cate will have set up a hospice by then.”

“You have some sore feelings with her?” asked Alfric.

“Who are you?” asked Sana, setting her spoon down with a clink. “You’ve been here a day, you’ve said, and you’re butting up against the limits of this place.”

“No,” said Alfric. “I’m just … exploring. Trying to get a sense of what’s going on here. I didn’t have all the information when I came.” He was trying his best not to lie.

“It’s Cate’s world. It’ll never stop being Cate’s world.” Sana looked around. “And it’s a good world, but it’s still hers. The palace will never belong to someone else, you’ll never really own any of the land, you’ll run into problems if you want to burn down a forest or erect a castle or just make a sufficient mark. Unless she approves what you do, that is. So it was a trick, in a way, saying that we’d be able to come to a new world.”

“I’m not clear on what happens if you try to go against her,” said Alfric. “Or what it would mean to go against her, short of taking a sledgehammer to the palace walls.”

“Or if you attack someone else, or get too drunk, or any number of things,” said Sana. “Sometimes you get taken aside and told not to do whatever it is you’ve been doing that was so bad. Sometimes there’s a show of force. If behavior persists, you get relocated. Cate usually does her selection well, picking people who aren’t going to be problems, and she hasn’t had to deal with a lot of the people who are really better off in madhouses. She takes young people whose biggest problems are their parents, or those filled with wanderlust that the real world will never satisfy. Theft isn’t really that big of a problem, since everything is provided.”

“And if you push it harder?” asked Alfric. “If you can’t help yourself from screwing up?”

Sana shrugged. “We took off before it could get to that point. In the Wildlands, you’re out from under her thumb, or we feel like we are.”

“But not actually exiled?” asked Alfric.

“Not technically, no,” said Sana. She crossed her legs and leaned forward. “I suppose you want to know how it happens?”

“If you would,” said Alfric. “I promise that it won’t get back to Cate.”

“I’m not worried about that,” said Sana. “Cate knows what happened.” She looked down at her nails for a bit. “I’m a cleric, of Xuphin, I guess I should say, just to start.”

“You are?” asked Alfric. He looked at her. He wanted to say ‘but you’re so short’, then felt that was insensitive or obvious, so stayed silent. Sana was at least as short as Mizuki, maybe shorter.

“‘But I’m so short’, yes, yes,” said Sana with a sigh. “People expect clerics of Xuphin to be giants, nine feet tall, towering figures, and I would expect that you know at least one or two. Personally, I learned when I was in seminary that getting bigger tends to take years off your life, sometimes a full decade, sometimes more, so I was a rare short cleric of Xuphin. I wanted to live life to its fullest, for as long as I possibly could. Which created some natural problems with my relationship with the church and the laity.”

Alfric nodded.

“So I became a dungeoneer, did that for a few years, took on three of my party members as husbands, had a falling out with our fifth member which I won’t bore you with, and then ran into another spat, this one with my family, over the fact that I didn’t want any children.” She sighed. “I’m getting to the stuff with Cate, but maybe I’m taking the cleric’s path to getting there, telling you stories so that we can relate to each other and the sermon will hit harder. It’s been ages since I’ve given a sermon.”

“I don’t mind,” said Alfric.

“Well, I had said I had no interest in bearing children, and four entire families got angry with me,” said Sana. “My husbands stood by me, they really do love me, but it was pretty horrible, and felt inescapable. Which was about when Cate showed up with an offer for us. We talked it over, as a group, and accepted.”

Alfric waited. Now that she’d said it, he realized she did speak a bit like a cleric giving a sermon. If she was telling the truth, he might have been one of only a few people she’d spoken to in the last few years outside her family.

“Cate takes unconventional people, or she did four years ago,” said Sana. “We were dungeoneers of some success, not esteemed, but with enough power to our names that we could show off. She likes the people that don’t fit in, and not just because they’re easier for her to take in. But then when we’re here, she has certain expectations of what our roles will be. To wit, my expertise as a cleric of Xuphin meant I was expected to help out when someone needed healing. Since there’s no money, I wouldn’t be paid for this service, and it was never set up ahead of time that I would be functioning as a cleric for people.” She pursed her lips. “Free food for everyone, free shelter, free clothes, all that’s left for most people is to just do whatever they feel like. But people were told to come to me for both clerical consultation and for healing on the rare occasion they needed it, and that rankled, so I began turning them away, then went to talk to Cate.”

“Which she didn’t take well?” asked Alfric.

“She did not,” said Sana. “And oh, she was nice about it, but people understand that Cate has ultimate control of everything, so when I was snubbed, we were snubbed, and we were snubbed by everyone. Not that the village or the palace was really what I’d had in mind when she had spoken of a new world.” She looked at the tent. “We’re happy out here. If you popped open a portal, we wouldn’t go through, not unless we could get back. I won’t say that it’s perfect, or that I like having Cate here, but there’s a life to carve out for yourself, especially in the Wildlands, and especially if you can find a friend or two.”

“And if people want to leave?” asked Alfric. “If they decide that the Wildlands aren’t for them?”

“I don’t know,” said Sana. “I don’t really want to think about it, because if I thought about it too much, I might feel the need to do something about it.”

“You think she kills them?” asked Alfric.

Sana was silent. “I don’t think that’s her style. But it’s equally not her style to dump them back into the world where they could blab.”

“Alright,” said Alfric. “Thank you.”

“I’d forgotten how much I enjoy talking to people,” said Sana with a sigh. “It might be time for our little family to make our way back, especially with the influx of new people, and to see if there’s been a change of things. I won’t say that some mysterious dungeoneer has come asking for the dirt.”

“Appreciated,” said Alfric. “Good luck. And thanks for the stew.”

“Did you enjoy the dungeons?” asked Sana.

“Sometimes,” said Alfric. “I enjoyed the newness of them, the puzzle, the logistics, the oddness. I’m not sure how much I enjoyed fighting terrible things.”

“You’ll enjoy the Wildlands, I think. There are entads out here, though not nearly in such numbers as you’d find in a dungeon.” She sighed, looking out at a mountain that had sidled into place while they were talking. “If I ever see you again, let me know if you’ve changed your mind on this place.”

“I will,” said Alfric. He placed his hand on the board. “I think I’m going to explore more, make the most of the light. Any advice on getting the most from the Wildlands?”

“Enough to fill a book,” she said. “But I don’t have the time or inclination to deliver it all. The short version is that you should be prepared for anything, but it’s more gentle in how it treats you. A place like this, with a placid lake and gentle trees, is not the sort of place you’d expect an apex predator of enormous size. It’s not impossible though. Treat it like a dungeon, if you think you know how to treat a dungeon.”

Alfric nodded. “I think I do.”

He wanted to linger, but after only a bit more in the way of pleasantries, he hopped aboard his entad and flew off, leaving the campsite behind and forging a path ahead into the ever-changing wilderness.

Chapter 140 - Foundation

There was little visible religion in the village, which Hannah had expected. She still found it somewhat sad.

One of the key questions on her mind, going into the demiplane, before they even knew for certain that it was a demiplane, had been how the gods fit in with it all. ‘Living’ demiplane or not, it was a place where people lived, and the gods were important to people. Lin had been taken, which meant that there would be at least one cleric, but she’d had to wonder what that would be like, whether a ‘new society’ and a ‘fresh start’ would necessarily transplant some godly understanding or the structures of the church. What she suspected was that she’d find some half-baked reimplementation of the church with all the quirks of the founding clerics multiplying out.

Certainly if she had been tasked with making a new Church of Garos, she would have her own thoughts on what it should look like. It would be more complicated with a second cleric of Garos adding their opinion, and probably more complicated with each additional cleric, but she had some immediate thoughts on the matter. The obvious solution would be to just have two churches, separated from each other and engaging in their own sermons and dialogs, but of course that would open them up to competition with each other, and it had long ago been decided that clerics competing wasn’t for the good of anyone.

There was a single church in the demiplane’s village, and Hannah gravitated towards it, drawn like a moth to the flame. She wanted to speak with Lin, who she had at least some history with, but more than that, she wanted to see what they had done with the place. If possible, she would talk theology with whomever was there, though she was worried about outing herself as a cleric, not that it would be the end of the world. Ria had given no specific instructions, other than for everyone but Verity to avoid the palace. If they were found by Cate, the day would be reset, so it was best not to be found out.

The building was small, so small that Hannah doubted that it could hold even a hundred people. It was of no particularly religious design, no hand of Xuphin, Garos, or even Qymmos in its construction. Hannah wondered whether that was deliberate, and decided that it probably was. There were thick wooden timbers and sizable stones, and it wasn’t as though it was shoddy construction, just without any of the pomp and circumstance that usually came with religious buildings. Pucklechurch had an exceptionally large temple for historical reasons, but even if it hadn’t had a building that large, it would have had decorations for each of the gods, signifiers of faith and piety. There would be statues or paintings or something for either honoring the gods, or more practically, meditation on godly topics. Instead, there were the six basic symbols, all at the front, three on either side of the place where a cleric would stand to give a sermon.

There were three people in the temple, separated by some distance from each other among the pews, praying in silence. This was common in Pucklechurch as well, though they had chairs that were brought down when it wasn’t a temple day so that people could sit and pray by themselves. A handful of people made prayer in the temple a part of their daily routine. The biggest difference with these people was that most of them were younger, no gray hairs among them.

Behind the pulpit there were two open passageways, and Hannah walked down one of them, looking for rooms. She was feeling uncertain of herself, but the layout was familiar enough, and she was a cleric. She’d seen the inside of dozens of churches in her time, they were all largely the same.

Again she noted the lack of adornment on the walls, the lack of paintings or murals that she would normally expect.

There were rooms off the passageways, with open doors, a classic of clerical design, meant to show that anyone was welcome to come in and have a discussion. In practice, it worked best when the rooms were filled with clerics, since someone wandering from vestibule to vestibule trying to find someone, anyone to talk to felt horrible. Some places put out placards to say whether the clerics were in, which saved everyone some hassle, and Hannah wondered why that hadn’t been done here. In Pucklechurch, they had schedules put up so that people would know.

Hannah passed by an open doorway and looked in, only to find herself staring into the eyes of a dark-skinned man who seemed to have been in the midst of putting books up on his shelves. There were a number of large wooden crates scattered around, and a heavy desk with a few chairs haphazardly scattered around it.

“Ah, ah, sorry, just in the middle of sorting things out, but do come in, have a seat, tell me your woes.” He smiled at her and put the last book in place, not seeming to care where it went. He wiped his hands on his chasubles, which were an earthy brown, though they had none of the marking that she would have expected of them. He was a cleric, but of which god wasn’t clear, which was unusual.

“If you’ve got the time?” asked Hannah. She placed her hand on a seat.

“Of course, of course,” he replied, sitting behind the desk and gesturing to the chair. “Forgive the office, I’m a recent arrival, but the words we speak should be unaffected by the state of things, I should think. ‘There is a purity to words and ideas that transcends the material realm.’” He was on the younger side, but there was something pleasant and avuncular about him. Many clerics were, due to their profession, personable people, and had gotten into the business because they liked talking to others, in fact. That wasn’t to impugn their devotion, of course, it was just a certain class of people she’d met within the Church. “Xilco,” he said, placing a hand on his chest, as the desk between them was too large to permit him to lean across and shake her hand.

“Hannah,” she replied.

“And what troubles you today?” he asked. “If anything does. If you’d like some pleasant conversation on my — our?” Hannah nodded, assuming he meant the village. “On our new home,” he said with some satisfaction. “Let me know.”

“Hrm,” said Hannah. “I suppose I’m just missin’ the gods, as it were. They don’t seem to have much presence here. No sigils on any of the doors, no constructions that are obviously in praise to one of the gods, tall spires of Xuphin, symmetrical frontages for Garos … I s’pose the identical houses, for Bixzotl, but they’re too different for that.”

“We’re still getting settled, all of us,” said Xilco. “I doubt this chapel is going to be long for it, and from my conversations with the others who’ll be down in the village, it seems we might be best off with six temples, one for each of us, perhaps with a central space for temple days.”

“Used for other things, when there’s no sermon,” nodded Hannah.

“A possibility, yes,” he replied.

“But why’s it not been done before this?” asked Hannah.

Xilco shrugged. “That’s not a question that I know the answer to. I see Kesbin’s work in the construction of this place, and its decorations, and I’ve heard that the cleric of Kesbin who lived here took his leave some years ago. So it’s down to whether there’s someone to put in the work to build a new place that aligns better with their understanding of the world.”

“And there are plans to do that, are there?” asked Hannah.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Xilco. “There are a few people with a passion for building, but religion here — that’s how you’d like to use this time? To talk about religion and its presence?”

“It’s been on my mind,” said Hannah. “I’ve always taken comfort and strength from the gods.”

“Ah,” said Xilco. “Well, if you’ve noticed that religion is a little lacking in the demiplane, then you’re not alone in that.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “All the clerics here were selected by Cate, naturally, and I think the number who have been in good standing with their respective churches is quite low.”

“And what does that mean, ‘good standin’’?” asked Hannah. She knew perfectly well what it meant, not being in particularly good standing with the Church of Garos herself. Mostly, she wanted him to talk about Cate. She’d decided, when she set off, to see how long it would take any particular person to mention their benefactor, and for Xilco it had been relatively early on.

“Oh, clerics who have left the church for whatever reason,” said Xilco. “Some because they were always more interested in some subfield that didn’t strictly require the church, others because they wanted to go into a strictly business arrangement, and some who clashed with the mechanisms of the church itself. We actually have, so far as I understand it, more clerics than you might expect for this number of people.”

“But they’re not so interested in bein’ clerics?” asked Hannah.

“I think, having cast off the shackles of the church, most people aren’t so keen to start a new church,” said Xilco with a sigh. “And slotting right back into the circumstances you’ve left just doesn’t have all that much appeal. I think she did better with other professions than with the clerics.”

“Other professions bein’ … what?” asked Hannah.

“Oh, architects, artists, explorers, sailors, chefs, people whose problems are crushing debt, overbearing family, that sort of thing.” He shrugged. “I suppose that for clerics, their problems are so often tied up with their profession that it’s difficult for them to be untwined.”

“And you? You never said to me which god you were a cleric of,” said Hannah.

“My own personal joke, I’m afraid,” said Xilco. He had a twinkle in his eyes. “You’ve been taking stock of me?”

“Based on the joke, I’d say Qymmos then,” said Hannah. “Which is more or less what I’d thought.” She looked around the room. “A messy, haphazard room isn’t what one thinks of when they think Qymmos, ay?”

“Ah, but you came to me while I was in the process of putting things in their place, didn’t you?” asked Xilco with a smile.

“And I suppose that you’ve seen I’m a cleric of Garos?” asked Hannah. There wasn’t that much that a cleric of Qymmos could get from a person just from an extended period of looking at them, but he wouldn’t have had to press hard to get her census-designate profession, nor would he have had to look at her long to see the symmetry of her face.

“I have,” nodded Xilco. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, though I can’t tell whether you wanted to feel me out as a parishioner, or whether you really do have things you want to say or be heard on.”

“A bit of both,” said Hannah. “Religion seems not to color life here too much, which is worrisome, ay?”

“From what I’ve heard in talking to other people, Cate sold this place — not that I mean any disrespect by saying she sold it — but she tried to give them this vision of a new place, a colony on distant shores, with a bit of hardship but a lot to love, a chance to start over. I think if you say that people will be able to start over, you immediately run into some problems, because what does starting over look like? The obvious thing is that there’s no money, very explicitly no money, but then what does property look like? What are the laws? Who enforces the laws? And no one wants to build things back exactly how they were, but where does that leave religion?”

“There’d be no need to do temple days,” said Hannah. “Which is … a way that you could do things.”

“As far as I know, this is it, these are all the people that we’ll ever have,” said Xilco. “At least, until the population gets to the business of making more. But if this place is meant to be fully sequestered from Inter, then we don’t have enough people for colleges, universities, or seminaries. It’s all apprenticeship from here on in, along with learning from books. It’s a darker side to reinvention.”

“You think … in a nefarious way?” asked Hannah.

“Oh, no, not at all,” said Xilco. “I mean — sorry, I enjoy talking but I sometimes put my foot in it — I mean that if you have someone with grand ambitions to create a new society without the problems of the old, you have to wonder about how it’s all going to shake out, and where theory meets practice, it seems as though that’s where the battles are waiting to be fought.”

“Battles like whether there will be one building or six?” asked Hannah.

“Just so,” said Xilco. “But Cate has been cagey on a number of things, especially on what the law looks like here. I know I’m not the only one that sees it, but it does seem like most are willing to go along without any proper law because so far, none has been needed. I spoke with someone who’s been here for six years, the longest of anyone I’ve gotten a hard number from, and she said that it’s more or less worked because everyone’s needs are taken care of. No need for jealousy, no need for theft.”

“People don’t always need a reason,” said Hannah. “And if she intends to keep this up for a hundred years, and if the population grows, there’s no way to guarantee that the current excess can last.”

Xilco nodded along. “Entads break, buildings need maintenance, and importantly, rulers die. Cate hasn’t directly declared herself a ruler, but that is, in fact, what she is. Speaking for myself, I’m setting up a ministry of sorts here in the village. It’s something that I’ve always wanted for myself and a place where I think I can do some real good, whether my ultimate resting place is this building or another, but then I think about the need to take on an apprentice, if we really are meant to live out our lives here.”

“You never said how she drew you in,” said Hannah. “But was it that? The promise of a place to make your own rules?”

“No,” said Xilco with a smile. “All she had to say was ‘living demiplane’.”

“Ah,” said Hannah. “No disagreements with the church then?”

“Well, plenty of those, but of course there are, because there always are.” Xilco looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “The church is a collection of people, so sometimes you’ll find yourself far away from its central mass, and sometimes you’ll clash with one specific person.” He looked back down. “But for me, no, it was the thrill of the unknown more than anything else. I also had few attachments, which helped, and a position relatively low within the temple I’d been placed into, behind two others, which meant that I wouldn’t be missed so much.”

“I had plenty of disagreements with the Church of Garos,” said Hannah. “More, I’d say, than expected. I got shunted to the middle of nowhere for it, on the command of just one person, it seemed to me, and I tried to make it work there, though it didn’t.”

“And now that you’re here?” asked Xilco. “Anxiety and tension?”

“Yes,” said Hannah, though it wasn’t for the reason that he was thinking. “But I must confess the idea of makin’ my own church, one where I can be open and honest about my interpretation, where I can do sermons to those that would listen, all that holds a great appeal. Though I think I’m off for the Wildlands first, to see them, and I’d appreciate you not mention’ that I was here, lookin’ to set up shop. I presume there’s some other cleric of Garos?”

“Not here,” said Xilco. “There are at least two at the palace, but none in the village, at least that I know, but I’ve moved down here only recently and perhaps temporarily.” He looked at the crates. “It’s a time of change.”

Hannah looked up at his shelves, which were half-filled with books. “You took all this with you?”

“No,” said Xilco. “Most of these are copies from Cate’s extensive library, in the palace. We have wortiers for the copying, they’re a brother and sister pair that serve as very devoted librarians. If you have any interest in books, I’d recommend a visit, it’s a marvelous place and a brilliant collection.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Hannah.

“Did you want to talk about the things left behind?” asked Xilco. “It’s one of the reasons I wish we had a cleric of Kesbin, but as I said, he went off on his own some years ago, and I don’t believe there’s a replacement.”

Kesbin was the God of Nothing, but also sometimes the God of Loss, and Hannah could see how that would be necessary in this circumstance. Most of the people were leaving something they hated, or that was causing them hardship, but they were also probably leaving things that they liked. Certainly if Hannah had come here legitimately, there might be some thrill in the newness, in starting her own church, unfettered by anyone elses’ opinion except those who came to her. But there was something unseemly about the leaving, she thought. She had family back in Cairbre, and to leave without saying goodbye to them, or just to vanish with only a letter, wasn’t something she’d ever have done. And of course there was also Marsh, who’d have been reason enough on his own.

It was that sense of duty that likely screened out a lot of people. Cate had made a community with only those people who didn’t care about duty or were incredibly bereft of social connections.

“I left people behind once already,” said Hannah. “I went to the seminary young, very young. I had it in mind that I would write letters every day, but of course that never works out.”

“I had a similar experience,” said Xilco. “I think that might be why there are more clerics here than you’d expect. We leave our home for the seminary, then leave the seminary for whatever place needs us. It’s two uprootings. But just because it’s been done once, or even twice, doesn’t mean that there’s not some pain that comes with it. The deal we all took was imperfect.”

Hannah didn’t like talking about this too much, because she was, of course, lying. She could imagine how a person would feel, and Xilco was right to make the connection to her previous moves, but she was going home, probably in the next few days.

“You said you came here because you were curious,” said Hannah. “It was a part of the calling of Qymmos.” She leaned forward slightly, conspiratorial. “Have you found anything of interest?”

“Ah,” said Xilco. He seemed a bit perturbed by the change in subject, but then his natural need to share took over. “Well, in point of fact … the Wildlands seem, to most, to be a distinct thing, don’t they? There’s a border between the region we’re in now, and some other region. Yet there’s some evidence of overlap between them. The weather is a big one — you’ve noticed that we have actual winds?”

“I have, ay,” said Hannah. “I’d thought it might be as I’ve heard it’s done in other demiplanes, with some kind of magical support.”

“Not so,” said Xilco, smiling. “In fact, you can see the wind pass through the border. I was out just yesterday. Clouds drift in from the Wildlands. And in fact, there are several creeks and rivers which have both origin and terminus within the Wildlands, meaning that water flows from it and to it.”

“What does that mean?” asked Hannah, eyes narrowed.

“I can’t say for certain, it’s only an observation,” said Xilco. “But it’s fascinating that the rivers are fed by a region that, by most accounts, should be either in a state of constant flux, or non-existent. And it’s equally fascinating that we’re somehow protected from the things that lurk in the Wildlands. I’ve asked Cate, but if there’s one thing that she doesn’t want to speak about too much, it’s the exact mechanics of how the living demiplane actually works, and in what sense it’s ‘living’. And there are stabilizers, which are apparently something she’s been keeping in her back pocket, which I really want to get a good look at, though apparently she’s treating them as a scarce resource, possibly because she wants to control when and where they’re used. Or because there’s some material cost we’re not aware of?”

“She was cagey on the outside and continues that here,” said Hannah. “It worries me.”

“Yes,” nodded Xilco. “But I take her to be well-intentioned. One of the reasons I’m here is to catalog what comes out of the Wildlands, and I have to say that it’s a dream come true. Not like the dungeons, with their illogical creatures, but full ecosystems, coherent beasts that fit in with specific surroundings.” He’d brushed off the worries with ease, like it was an old habit.

“And there’s nothing that you’ve gleaned from her?” asked Hannah. “In the way that you’ve gleaned things from me?”

Xilco coughed into his hand. “That’s nothing that a cleric should speak of. Though … I will say that there’s some sign that not everything is as she says, with regards to who she is. We don’t have a census here, but I’m burning to know what the census might have said about her back in Inter.”

“Age? Name? Occupation?” asked Hannah. “Or somethin’ else?”

Xilco waved a hand. “I wouldn’t want to feed idle gossip.” He sat back. “Here in the village, we’ll see her only rarely. I wouldn’t worry about her, or her designs. For all that she’s clearly the one in charge, she doesn’t press that power too often, and I’m sure you’ve seen that she keeps her hands off. Besides, she’s brought in a number of powerful people, and I don’t think that we would collectively stand for too much chicanery.”

Hannah nodded, but the nod was a lie. Ria had related much of the fight. Cate was powerful, they had known that, but that power extended to combat in a way that they hadn’t anticipated. If Xilco thought that together they could overpower Cate, he was wrong, or right only because Ria would be leading the charge.

“Thank you, that’s put my mind at ease, at least on a few things,” said Hannah. She stood from the chair. “I can’t guarantee that I’ll be back here, or that I’ll be takin’ up clerical duties, but it does appeal to me.”

“It was nice to meet you,” said Xilco. “We’ll have to talk theology at some point, but I need my books in place, and ideally I’d come prepared. Too many conversations are sunk by not knowing enough when you go into them.”

They said goodbye, and Hannah walked back through the halls, feeling somewhat troubled.

She pondered, for a moment, whether Cate might ever have approached her. They had scoured through the book of conversations, but hadn’t found anything suspect, though it wasn’t always out, and not always in a place to capture every conversation.

Six months ago, she thought she might have taken the deal, if she’d been able to write a letter to her family. She might not have gone through sight unseen, but if she’d been promised her own church, built to her own design, preaching whatever she wanted, free to write her own books … that appealed mightily. Verity had already met an acclaimed architect who could construct buildings using a bevy of entads, which meant that all the funding concerns that beset the usual considerations wouldn’t have to apply. Hannah found her head filled with thoughts of what her own personal church would look like, which were coming on unbidden.

They couldn’t stay, obviously, and she wouldn’t want to stay if it meant being a plaything for Cate. Of course, she didn’t know for certain that Cate was up to no good, but there were obvious cracks showing which no one wanted to dig too deep into.

She missed Marsh, and hoped that he was okay.

Hannah found herself walking through the village, looking at all the houses, which had taken on a character of their own. The place was old, though perhaps not quite so steeped in age as parts of Inter, which had continuous habitation for thousands of years. Hannah saw Mizuki briefly, but they only gave each other a look and went on their individual ways. Alfric would be in the Wildlands, Isra would be in the woods, and Verity would be at the palace. They had their roles to play and places to be, and for the time being, would pretend that they didn’t know each other.

Hannah ended up going into one of the ‘shops’, not the large building with consumable goods in it, but something that presented itself as a clothing store with mannequins in the window showing off fashions. This, she thought, must be a place that someone owned, because it had its own unique style to it. She had to imagine that even with entads creating everything a person could want, there still needed to be someone putting in the work, making minor repairs, setting things out, restocking, and even if that only needed to be done once every few days, it did need to be done.

“Can I help you?” asked a young girl, slender and small. She was younger than Hannah, a teenager with auburn hair, wearing an outfit that was pretty clearly put on to attempt to make her look older. Hannah thought she was possibly as young as fourteen, which was quite young to have been taken to the demiplane.

“I’ve never been here before,” said Hannah. “I was hopin’ that I could get some new clothes.”

“Oh I love your accent,” said the girl, eyes bright. She had a slight lilt to her voice, northern if Hannah had to guess. “And your symmetry, it’s very nice.”

“Thank you,” said Hannah. She looked down at her tan shirt and brown pants. “Somethin’ like this, maybe? You, ah, work here?”

“I do,” said the girl, not elaborating. “And hmm,” she looked Hannah over. “Do you want exactly that, or the essence of that?”

“The essence, I s’pose,” said Hannah. “Practical. Nothin’ that calls attention to itself.”

“Can you give me a moment to think?” asked the girl.

“Of course,” nodded Hannah. “Take your time. But you seem young to be workin’, unless it’s apprenticeship, and I hadn’t thought that people needed to work.”

“Oh, there’s no money,” said the girl, who was still giving Hannah an appraising look. She reached forward and put a hand around Hannah’s upper arm, squeezing it for a moment. “But people do need to work. They go crazy otherwise. There are only so many hikes you can take, so many books you can read. A good hour or two of labor a day breaks things up, gives us purpose.”

“There’s the closet in the palace, if people need clothes,” said Hannah.

“Oh yes the closet, which has its own ideas,” said the girl, rolling her eyes. “The closet can’t offer opinions, advice, can’t make tweaks based on feedback, and at least in my opinion, doesn’t have that good an eye for conveying essential truths.”

“Those bein’?” asked Hannah.

“Clothes should convey the essence of who a person is,” said the girl. “And who that person is can change from time to time, which means you should really have as many outfits as you have truths, and as you need for the conditions.” Her eyes were still on Hannah, narrowed slightly. “You’re strong, confident, independent, practical, you want something that displays that, so people can know when they see you what you are, and importantly, so you can see that in yourself.”

“How old are you, if you don’t mind my askin’?” asked Hannah.

“Don’t worry about it,” said the girl with a wave of her hand. “Older than you’d think though.”

“I hadn’t thought that Cate took them young, usually,” said Hannah.

“I’m old enough that’s not a concern,” said the girl. “Tell me, what do you like for fabrics?”

“I don’t know fabrics well enough to say,” said Hannah. “Somethin’ breathable, sturdy?”

“I know just the thing,” said the girl. “Stay here, I’ll be back in a moment.”

Hannah stayed where she was. There were various designs up, and one wall was filled with quite detailed drawings in pen and watercolor, all of them across the wall, jumbled rather than in a grid, sometimes with the figures dancing, other times with them apart. Whoever had drawn them, possibly the ‘girl’, had taken care to show a variety of body types and skin colors, which was the kind of thing that some people, especially in central Inter, missed. As well, a few of the dancing couples were women with other women and men with other men, another of those things that people sometimes missed. Hannah was appreciative of that. But there, on closer inspection, she saw that there were feili and dwodo as well. That she was quite unused to.

“Move,” said the girl, who had just come back into the room carrying bits of cloth. For a moment, Hannah thought she was being given a command, but the girl was looking at the figures on the wall, hand held out toward them, and the drawings all began moving at once, many of them dancing together, exchanging partners, but some of them showing off their clothes in other ways, giving little twirls.

“It was a gift from Cate,” said the girl with a small laugh. “Absolutely wonderful, even after all these years.”

“You’ve been here for some time?” asked Hannah.

“Long enough,” the girl replied. “Now then, I think I have what I need, are these acceptable to you?”

Hannah touched the fabrics, which was largely perfunctory given that she knew almost nothing about textiles. She nodded anyhow.

“And of course I’d prefer to style your hair, find you some makeup, and all that other stuff,” said the girl. “All that can be done fairly easily though. I have enough entad support that I only need to do the things that I like to do. You will need to come back tomorrow though. First, can I have you try on an accessory? A bangle that I think would go well with the outfit.”

“I s’pose,” said Hannah. She hadn’t gathered much from this place, and the girl hadn’t had much to say about Cate.

The girl held out a bangle that looked absolutely hideous to Hannah, a polished brown metal with inset rubies, and decidedly not her style. She took it anyway, feeling much more hesitant about the outfit this girl was supposedly going to whip together.

<Calmly,> came the girl’s voice in her head.

<Ah,> said Hannah. The channel was there, alongside the party channel, though different from it, and she made the sound without moving her lips.

<Were you sent here by the government?> asked the girl. “Alright, perhaps that’s not you, but accessories are important to an outfit, more than some people realize.” <There’s something of you that smells like it doesn’t belong.> “Here, have a look at the people, tell me what you like among them, in case I’m wrong about you.”

Hannah looked. She thought this was all probably dangerous, but didn’t know what to say. The bangle was blood-warm against her skin.

<I’m not any danger to you,> said the girl, as Hannah watched the dancers. <I told Cate that it would be better for her to be forthright, but that’s never been her strong suit. I pledged myself not to speak too broadly on her concerns, but I do have a plea, which is that you go gently and quietly. Try not to raise her hackles. Speak with her in a forthright way. Otherwise, she’ll expel you at best and burn you at worst. You are trespassing, I’m fairly certain, and while she has some affinity for stowaways, that affinity extends only so far. She won’t like it if she thinks that you got one over on her, and she especially won’t like it if she thinks you think that.>

<But you’ll tell me no more?> asked Hannah. <Like how you came to be working in a shop like this?>

<No,> said the girl. She was standing beside Hannah, regarding the drawings as they danced and twirled. <I’m loyal to Cate, and I’ll keep her secrets, but part of loyalty means knowing when a good friend needs to be poked and prodded by the right people, if that’s what you are.>

<Are you … human?> asked Hannah. Maybe it was the long-limbed feili dancing around that made Hannah ask, or the way the woman hadn’t directly stated her age, or perhaps it was just a hunch.

<Human enough, these days,> said the woman. <Identity is a funny thing, when you’ve lived in a shell for long enough. You can’t go out in your real skin without feeling naked.> She placed a finger against one of the dancers, a woman, and to Hannah’s mild surprise, the image was pinned in place, looking slightly affronted by the finger pressing against her belly. <Cate is different, of course, but I suspect you already knew that.>

Hannah hadn’t known that at all. There’d been nothing to suggest that Cate wasn’t human. The list of things that Cate could reasonably be was very short, and if she wasn’t feili, that left only dwodo, bastlefolk … or something else entirely. If Cate was some long-lived species, incredibly secretive by nature, then it was possible for her to be almost anything.

<What is she?> asked Hannah.

<I’ve said that I’m bound to keep her secrets,> said the girl. She lifted her finger from the figure she had pinned, and it began dancing again, picking up a partner almost at once. <But I think we’re done here for today, with my advice given.> “I’ll have the clothes for you tomorrow, if there’s nothing in particular you like here?”

“Tomorrow,” said Hannah, feeling hollow.

It had been clear for some time that they were in over their heads, but just how far over their heads hadn’t been obvious until now.

Chapter 141 - Ecology

Isra stalked through the woods, feeling slightly peeved about the whole thing.

Logically, it made sense for her to be in among the natural world, which was her domain, but she felt envious of the others, particularly of Verity, who got to go to the large mountain palace. Isra liked people, she liked magic, and she was being asked to go out into the woods and speak to birds. This was, yes, her specialty, but Isra thought of herself more as a druid by circumstance rather than a druid by vocation.

“Birds!” she called out. “Come!”

She was, she could admit, feeling a bit surly, and decided that she wasn’t going to take it out on the birds, who had mostly been minding their own business.

They descended down on her position, landing on the trees around her, filling the branches in a way that she supposed other people might find frightening. She took stock of them, mostly tiny owls and relatively uninteresting small birds, though a few that had long necks — river birds — and those with colorful plumage that was a bit surprising in a boreal forest.

Isra had a good amount of reach, but it was easier to deal with the birds when they were close to her, in range of her voice. It was the old way of doing things, which she felt only a mild nostalgia for, and she was leveraging it here for the increased power.

“I need you all to be my eyes,” she said. “Tell me the secrets of these lands, from edge to edge, and the Wildlands beyond, if you can cross the border.” She had no idea whether they could, or whether they could come back. “Be cautious in your approach, as though seeking insects you don’t wish to startle. Report any conversations of interest in the village or the palace. Don’t go to places that are unfamiliar to you. Now go, and return here in a few hours.”

It was straining the limits of what a bird could actually keep in mind, but she hoped that they would err on the side of not being obvious. It was in a bird’s nature to stay hidden though, and also in their nature to be curious, so she didn’t think she was asking too much of them.

They flew off, not quite as one, some of them flocking but most of them going in ones and twos. She was controlling them, in a sense, putting herself into them, as she now understood being a druid, but there were so many that she lost a few of the threads immediately.

Isra found a patch of springy moss and laid down, sprawling herself out. She was going to spend the day listening to the birds, watching through their eyes, and not doing a whole lot else. They were playing at being spies, albeit ones with no training (and a reset to back them up if things went wrong).

The threads to the birds were lost one by one, which was somewhat expected. There had been too many of them to hold onto all of them at once, and where in the past she might have said that certain birds didn’t have the disposition to follow instructions, she thought of it differently now. It was, in some ways, a worse version of the same relationship with the world. A part of her wished that she could have some of that old naivete back.

The finches were the swiftest of the birds, and they reached the village before any of the others, perching themselves at windows and doorways, which felt conspicuous to Isra, but which she couldn’t change without pushing quite a bit of herself into them. Listening was easy though, so she listened.

Isra had traveled quite a bit, by her own estimation, not just to Dondrian but all over Greater Plenarch, and she’d decided that at least in Inter, people were mostly the same. They ate, they slept, they wanted companionship and gossip, but that wasn’t bound to be much different because they were in a living demiplane rather than out in the world. As she watched, she found a bit of hesitancy to these people, an uncomfortability that she thought matched what she’d felt for so many years in Pucklechurch. She honed in on that, trying to get a sense of it.

A girl moved through the village, looking awkward, staring at everything, backing up slightly whenever anyone came near. She was trying to see how everyone else was doing things, how close they stood to each other, what they were wearing, how they were talking, all kinds of other small things that people didn’t pay attention to when they felt at home in a place. It was something that Isra saw a lot of, as she looked around with a hundred eyes. People had been thrust into a new community with only relatively few of them having been there for longer than a few months, and they were all feeling each other out. Some would probably do what Isra did, and stubbornly do their own thing, trying to live with the feeling of being out of place, but maybe they would make up their own rules for how things would go.

Isra focused on one conversation between two girls that had apparently grown comfortable with each other.

“There was this old woman who offered to find me a husband,” said one of the girls with a little laugh. Isra detected some nervousness there. “I don’t know if that’s what she did before, but she felt like maybe the younger people could use some help, I guess.”

“I guess that’s interesting,” said the other girl. She was notably short, with darker skin and hair that had been dyed pink. “I’m not sure that I would want that kind of deal though. I mean, the sort of person who would agree to that?”

“Yeah?” asked the other girl. She was taller, lanky, with white skin that was a bit sunburnt, maybe because she had her shoulders exposed. “I said maybe.”

“I guess it’s not that weird,” said the pink-haired girl. “Only a little weird. Like do you just roll with it? Decide that whatever, it’s workable with whomever? I think that would be scary.”

“We left it all behind,” said the taller girl. “Compared to that, being put together with someone seems like peanuts.” She shrugged. “Anyway, it was just a maybe, I don’t know if she’ll figure anything out, and I can always just say ‘no’.”

There was some awkwardness to the conversation, and maybe Isra was reading into things, but it seemed like the pink-haired girl was feeling some attraction.

Isra shifted her attention to two older people, who were apparently married, working together baking bread.

“Feels odd, to be among these disconnected people,” she said. “So many singletons. I hadn’t thought it would be like that.”

“What did you think it would be like?” asked the man as he kneaded a large batch of dough.

“I don’t quite know,” replied the woman. “More like us, I guess.” She was frowning. “More couples. More families. More children. Sometimes things go wrong for a family, don’t they?”

“Often do,” replied the man.

“So I’d think that you’d see more people like, well, us,” said the woman. “Families.”

“Harder to pick, I’d expect,” said the man. “More roots.”

“Do you think we’d have come, if we’d known that it would be like this?” asked the woman.

“I suppose so,” replied the man. He was looking at a cup of flour with a frown on his face. “There will be families, with time. People will get together.”

“You’re right,” said the woman. “Of course you’re right. It just feels like we’re outsiders, and that’s one of the things we were trying to get away from.”

“They like our bread,” said the man.

“True, they do that,” said the woman.

“I wouldn’t rush to call us outsiders,” said the man. “It’s like baking. You have to give it time.”

Isra turned away from them. They seemed like nice people. It didn’t seem good to leave your home and the people who might be depending on you, but she could understand it in some circumstances, and whatever their circumstances had been, she was willing to cut them some slack.

She was looking for a new conversation to listen in on, hoping that it would be about something that would let them nail Cate to the wall, rather than semi-private things she had no business or interest in listening to. Before she could find one though, she became aware of someone moving through the forest. Moving toward her. She turned to look at him with birds’ eyes, curious, though he didn’t look much like a threat.

He had the dark skin common in Tarbin, though it was difficult to say where he was from, as Isra had almost no way to tell the ethnicities of the eastern continent apart. He dressed like he was from Inter though, a shirt with a vest and long pants, the buttons in the shirt undone to show a bit of his chest. He had curled, unruly hair, and a wispy mustache that she found herself paying a bit too much attention to. It didn’t look good, but he wore it with confidence anyway, and that was attractive enough to make up for how it looked. He was older than her, she thought, though not by all that much.

She waited for him to come, trying not to be too obvious about the animals. They turned to look at him of their own accord, some of them doing the particularly characteristic prey response of watching him while pretending that they were just going about their business. For his part, he seemed oblivious, but it was possible this was the very same obliviousness that the animals feigned.

He walked straight up to her. He had known where she was. She stayed resting up against the tree on her soft patch of moss, pretending that she hadn’t known he was coming. She had a temptation to speak into the party channel, just for the sake of letting them know, but she was certain that she could handle the mysterious stranger on her own.

“Hallo,” he said, accent hard to place. “How do you do?” He had stopped fifty feet away from her, a respectful and non-threatening distance.

“Just fine,” said Isra. She stood up from the moss and then sat right back down again, against a tree. “Nice weather.”

“Mmm,” he said. “Sorry for the intrusion.”

“No bother,” she replied. She was playing it cool, which came easily to her, but she was unnerved by this young man, and had no particular idea what he was doing out in the woods, nor how he had found her. She wondered whether she was supposed to know who he was, but Verity hadn’t mentioned anything, and they had all been through at least part of the day before, per Ria.

“How are you finding the forest?” he asked.

“It’s … familiar,” replied Isra. “Boring, honestly.”

“Boring?” he asked. There was some of the same hesitancy to him, which made her feel better.

“It’s a boreal forest,” said Isra. “Most of the trees and plants are the same. There are flowers I’ve never seen before, and trees that we don’t have, but it’s not any different than home in most ways.” She had seen a lot of central Inter, and the forests had a lot of variety to them, but not as much as she had hoped.

“You’re disappointed?” he asked.

“I had thought that coming all this way, I might see something more … interesting,” said Isra. “In the north, in Dondrian, there are trees whose roots descend down from their branches into the sandy soil. The forests are different there, filled with other animals. This is just like the sort of place I left.”

“You could try the Wildlands,” he replied. “They have something different.”

Isra tensed slightly, as she’d realized something that hadn’t been obvious until that point: the man had a mouse in his vest pocket. It was asleep, or nearly so, which was how she’d missed it, but their conversation seemed to be stirring it.

“Well, I’m sure they do,” said Isra. “But I did some dungeons before this, and they weren’t really to my liking.”

“It’s not at all like a dungeon,” said the man. “You should try it, you might like it. I could take you, if you’d like. You’d be safe with me.” He gave her a grin. She hoped that wasn’t what this was, though there was something about him that didn’t exactly make her shrink back.

Isra rolled her eyes. “I’d be plenty safe by myself.”

“There are dangerous things out there,” he said. “Especially once you get far from the palace.”

“No dungeon madness though, or that’s what I heard,” said Isra.

“A creature doesn’t need to be dungeon mad to attack,” he replied. “And there are other threats, bigger than in a dungeon.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. She still didn’t know how he’d so unerringly found her. “And who are you, that you can protect me?” He didn’t look particularly muscular, but perhaps Isra was just used to being around Alfric.

“You don’t know?” he asked.

She shook her head. “One of Cate’s people?”

“We’re all Cate’s people, in a sense,” he said.

“Is that a yes?” asked Isra. “Some kind of entad tracking?”

“Maybe it’s better to keep it a mystery, if you don’t know,” said the man. “I guess we don’t even know each other’s names then.”

“Isra,” she replied.

“Callum,” he said. He breathed out a bit. She wanted to ask about the mouse in his pocket, but she didn’t want him to know that she was a druid. “Can I ask why you’re out here?”

“Just hiding out,” said Isra. “Waiting for the day to end, I think.” The others would have information, more than she was going to get from the birds. It was clear the palace would be the place to learn things, but Ria had prohibited all but Verity from going there. After the day was done, and they had more information, it was possible that Isra would be allowed to go into the palace and watch through mice or whatever else was around.

“You’ve been watching people,” said Callum.

Isra tensed again. “And how do you know that?”

“You don’t deny it?” he asked, cocking his head.

“No,” she said. “It’s true. But how do you know? Entad?”

“I’ve heard there are entads like that,” Callum replied. “Those that let you know who’s watching you, and where they are.” He raised an eyebrow. “I think that’s how I got caught, when I did it.”

“Did what?” asked Isra.

In response, he reached into his vest pocket and pulled out the mouse. It was small and brown, and woke slowly, then stood up on the palm of his hand. Isra stared at it. There was still a part of her that thought perhaps it was well-trained, or simply obedient, but when her mind brushed against the mouse, she could tell that there was no more room in it: it was full.

“You’re a druid,” said Isra.

“One of three here,” said Callum, nodding. The mouse ran along his arm and dove back into his pocket. “Four, counting you.”

Isra looked at him for a moment. By rights, she should have felt vulnerable, because her primary defense, being able to call on the animals of the forest, had just been neutered. She hadn’t brought her bow, and even if she had, it would have been quite a bit of work to get it into position in time. She had her dagger, but that was more or less it. She wasn’t supposed to have needed anything.

Still, there was something unthreatening about him. Maybe it was the wispy mustache. She didn’t know how a fight between druids would go, but if they neutralized each other, she thought she could probably cut him up.

“You saw what I was doing with the birds,” said Isra.

“I did,” said Callum. “And I won’t tell anyone, but I thought you should know it’s the sort of thing that will get you in trouble. You’re not supposed to be spying on people.”

“Which … you know from experience,” said Isra.

“I was scolded, yes,” said Callum. He hesitated. “Were you … trained?”

Isra was silent for a moment. She didn’t understand the question, and it was her long-standing policy to not admit when she didn’t understand things, at least unless she was among friends. “No,” she said anyway. “I’m in a druid’s guild, but it’s small, and they don’t speak all that much.”

Callum regarded her for a moment. “Your skin … Tarbin heritage?”

Isra pursed her lips. “My parents left there,” she said.

“Parents … plural?” he asked.

She nodded, waiting for him to say something like ‘that’s odd’, which was what a lot of people said. He stayed silent though.

“I guess we’re here, so it doesn’t really matter,” said Callum. “I was a manufactured druid, one made by Tarbin. Born in a stretch of the Echo Desert, like a few others. They’d hoped that I would be a spy.”

Isra narrowed her eyes. “You were wondering whether that’s what I was too?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Just … you were spying, you’re a druid, you’re from Tarbin too, you’ve got a bit of an accent.”

Isra didn’t think that she had an accent. People only rarely mentioned it, and she had been around people enough that she’d suspected it had sanded itself off. Hannah had an accent. “No,” she said. “I’ve lived in Inter my entire life. I was born there.” She wasn’t entirely sure about that. Her father had never really said, or shared all that much about what had happened before she had solid memories.

“Like I said, it doesn’t really matter.” He gave a nonchalant shrug. “The old world is gone. But that does mean that we need to be on good terms with the new world. Which means not spying on people, or at least not getting caught a few days in.”

“I was doing it for a reason,” said Isra, feeling defensive. She didn’t like the feeling of getting caught, even if it was by someone like this who seemed more nosy than likely to get her in trouble.

“Oh?” asked Callum. “What reason?”

Isra shifted. She knew that there were certain things that she wasn’t supposed to say. “I’m trying to find out more about Cate.”

“Like what?” asked Callum. His tone was cautious.

“I don’t know,” said Isra. She folded her arms. “It’s just a bad feeling.” It was considerably more than that, but she was trying not to lie, and she would need to lie if he kept pressing. It was one thing for her to have been found out, which might necessitate resetting the day, but it was another thing entirely to admit that she was here when she wasn’t supposed to be, more than just a druid ensnared in Cate’s trap.

“Yeah,” Callum said with a sigh, as though deflating. His hands had fallen loosely at his sides, and some of the confidence was gone.

“You agree?” asked Isra.

“She’s kept things from us,” said Callum. “And … she’s odd. I think you’d have to be, to run a place like this, to want to create it in the first place, especially in the way that she did.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being odd,” said Isra. “It’s the way that she’s odd.”

“It might spell trouble,” said Callum with a sigh. He looked around. “Can I … sit down?”

Isra nodded, and he awkwardly tried to find a place to sit on the forest floor. He ended up against a tree, close to Isra, a spot that she’d rejected when choosing where to sit because the stones seemed uncomfortable.

“I’m not a part of the inner circle,” said Callum. “If I’m honest, I think most of the reason I’m here is because she wanted a backup druid. We’re valuable, that’s part of our curse. The weather seems to take care of itself, and I’m sure she gave you the talk about how a nice storm every now and then is part of how she likes the rhythm of the world, but the Wildlands have all kinds of things. Especially if she wants people living out there, a druid means near-absolute protection from wild animals and the more dangerous plants.”

“Because there’s no dungeon madness?” asked Isra.

Callum nodded. “That means all kinds of creatures become temporarily tamable. I actually do have a mount, a creature a little like a turtle with eight legs. Fast though.” He was silent for a moment. “How they did it, in Tarbin, was to have a woman out on her own, connected through a guild, able to be whisked away by entad when she needed to socialize. Cate talked about doing that here.”

“Making druids?” asked Isra.

Callum nodded. “I didn’t like it. I don’t think three years alone at the start of a baby’s life is good for it. I don’t think it was good for me to only ever see my mother’s face, to not know my father. Which might be why I’m on the outs with her.”

“You said that to her?” asked Isra.

“No,” said Callum. “Not in so many words. But I said it to other people, at dinner one night, and I think it might have gotten back to her. Along with the spying — if you can call it that — I think she ended up disappointed with me.”

“Sorry,” said Isra.

He shrugged. “It’s mostly my own fault. I’m hoping that you don’t make the same mistake, or at least not as visibly as I did.”

“You’re looking out for me?” asked Isra.

“Something like that,” said Callum. “I would say that druids need to stick together, but the other two at the palace don’t seem to be, so I guess I’m just … I don’t know. I saw you looking. That was all.”

“Tell me what you know about her,” said Isra.

“Cate?” asked Callum, leaning forward slightly. “There’s very little that anyone knows, and that’s with me listening in on conversations that I really shouldn’t have been. There are questions, but no answers. She’s keeping things from us. The ‘stabilizers’ that can apparently be deployed in the Wildlands weren’t known to anyone until not too long ago. And there have been people living here, in this demiplane, for years, some of them brought on when they were still young and who’ve now grown middle-aged. The source of her wealth and knowledge is a mystery. I’m not against her, I want to make that very clear, but I think when you decide to go with a mysterious stranger, there’s some expectation that they’ll stop being mysterious at some point.”

“But she still is,” said Isra.

“I think she’s not human,” said Callum. His voice was soft. “That’s a rumor that’s going around.”

“Because she’s unearthly?” asked Isra.

“Lots of reasons,” said Callum. “Her habit of floating above the ground instead of walking is definitely a part of it. Plus … all of this. All the work she’s done, for unclear reasons.”

“She wanted a place of her own, without interference from the government,” said Isra. She could, at least, understand that. “If she’s not a human, what would she be? Feili?”

“No,” said Callum. “She’d be an exceptional feil, from what I know of them. They mostly keep to themselves, and she has an entourage most of the time. Something … else. Maybe even something that explains how she came to control this demiplane.”

“Maybe she is a demiplane,” said Isra.

Callum cleared his throat. “I’m not sure you’re taking this seriously.”

“Places can be alive,” said Isra.

“In a sense,” said Callum slowly.

“Those are the words that Cate uses to describe this place,” said Isra. “She says it’s a ‘living’ demiplane. I’m trying to take her seriously.”

“What would it even mean?” asked Callum. “Wouldn’t we be able to … feel it?”

“We can’t feel people,” said Isra.

“I suppose not,” said Callum. He let out a breath and rested his head against the trunk of the tree behind him. “Thank you for being understanding about me coming out here.”

Isra shrugged. “So long as we don’t have to do battle.”

He gave her a look, and she knew that this was the wrong thing to have said, but he seemed more baffled than offended. “I don’t even know what that would look like.”

“I’d stab you,” said Isra.

“Oh,” said Callum. “Just like that?”

“No one seems to know what happens if one person assaults another,” said Isra. “Or what happens when someone steals from someone else. So if it came down to a fight, I would stab you and then figure out the finer points of governance later.”

Callum laughed, which was good, because she’d been trying to be funny. She grinned at him.

“Is this what you’re doing all day?” he asked. “Sitting out in the woods?”

“Not if you think I’ll get caught,” said Isra. She stood up from her spot against the tree. “And it seems like I’ve already been caught once. I’ll figure out something else to do.” She wasn’t sure what, given that this was the role she’d been assigned, but she hoped that Callum’s rumors would be enough, and that being found out wouldn’t warrant a reset. In fact — “Do you want to spend some time together?”

“Together?” asked Callum. He’d stood up when she did, maybe because of the uncomfortable seat.

“I’m new to this place and not fitting in,” said Isra. “Show me around the forest, or the Wildlands?” She felt unexpectedly nervous. Maybe it was the wispy mustache.

“I’m not really fitting in myself,” said Callum. He shifted from foot to foot.

“Then show me how not to fit in,” said Isra. “I need something to do with myself. Ideally in the village rather than the palace.”

“Alright,” said Callum. He beamed at her, and for a moment he seemed so happy that she worried she’d made a mistake. “You’re up for walking?”

Isra rolled her eyes. “I’m a druid. What kind of druid isn’t up for walking?”

“The kind who sits around watching through birds,” said Callum. “But come, let’s go. There’s a ravine I want to show you.”

They talked as they walked. Callum was quite open about having been deliberately raised to be a spy, which amounted to, after his third birthday, being taken to special school in Tarbin where the very small selection of ‘crafted’ druids was educated and prepared for time in foreign countries.

“It’s nice to be able to talk about,” said Callum. “We were sworn to secrecy, which was something I hated. I was never supposed to speak plainly to other people.”

“When did you come here?” asked Isra.

“Two months ago,” said Callum. “But Cate had contacted me almost half a year ago, I think, at least from the memories I now have. I don’t know how she found out who and what I was, but there was some … coercion on her part.” He pursed his lips. “She understood I wasn’t happy. She was offering a way out. It wasn’t nice, not as nice as some other people seemed to have gotten, but even if there wasn’t the risk of being outed, I might have come.”

“It proves the idea of willingness to be a lie,” said Isra.

“No, there are all kinds of other motives,” said Callum. “Is someone really willing if this is the only way to escape crushing debt, or a terrible family, or whatever else they’ve got going on? Some people jumped at the chance not because it was so appealing to go somewhere new, but because staying was intolerable.”

“Do you regret it?” asked Isra.

“I don’t think it matters,” said Callum as he kicked a rock out of the way. They were going down a deer path, or something like it, not a properly prepared trail. Some of the trails that Isra had seen looked like they must have required years to construct, moving earth and cutting stairs, but this one had been worn down by the periodic movements of animals trying their best not to expend energy. “One of the few things that Cate has been crystal clear on is that there’s no going back. But the thing is, this is a demiplane, right? So there has to be a way home, unless she’s somehow locked us in here with a demiplane core. I wish I had studied more before I came here, but I wasn’t sure exactly what kind of place this would be.” He looked up at the trees. “We’re coming to the ravine now.”

The ravine wasn’t big, but it made up for that by being quite steep, with smooth rock on either side. It looked like the kind of place that had been worn down over time, water doing the long work of carving out rock and making it nicely worn down, but there was something not quite right about it.

“You’re not just showing me this because it’s interesting, are you?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Callum. “What do you see?”

“It’s not natural,” said Isra. “Someone carved a path for the water here, to divert this stream.”

“Carved?” asked Callum, questioning.

“Not with hand tools, obviously,” said Isra. “The rock is too smooth. But something else, some entad.” She looked at it. “It looks … melted.”

“Fire,” said Callum, nodding. “It’s a scar from some battle.”

“Or someone needed to cut a path for some reason,” said Isra. She frowned. “You think this is a piece of history?”

“It’s definitely history,” said Callum. “Just like the older parts of the village.” He placed a hand against the smooth stone. “It’s just a question of what it means.”

“There’s a tower out there, burnt,” said Isra. “I imagine by the same thing.”

Callum was silent. “Entads, you think?”

“I don’t think there’s a pyro strong enough to melt stone like this,” said Isra. “Though …”

“Yes?” he asked.

“Only thinking,” said Isra. “The list of creatures that could do something like this is very short.”

“Something from a dungeon?” asked Callum. “Or from the Wildlands?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra, though that wasn’t entirely true. She’d had a thought, and wanted to keep it to herself, just in case it was dangerous to speak. She’d tell the party later, while they were in extradimensional space, hidden away.

Dragon.

Chapter 142 - Spies

When Mizuki stepped out into the demiplane, it wasn’t like she’d been hiding out in extradimensional space for the last week and a half. It was instead like practically no time at all had passed, only eight hours or so of fitful sleep followed by a quick breakfast supplied by entad, this one a pastry filled with egg, onion, and ham.

She was nervous, naturally, all the more so because they were splitting up. She’d wanted to go with Hannah, but part of the idea had been that they would just slot right into this new society, and it would be easier to do that if they were playing the parts of newcomers. From experience on undone days, there would probably not be that much issue with saying that they were visiting from the palace, or even that they were staying with Verity, or that they were still looking for a home. There were, in fact, a lot of people in the demiplane, and the best time to infiltrate was before everyone knew each other.

At the back of Mizuki’s mind was mage college, which she was missing the first days of without any warning given to them. She was bummed about that, and a bit anxious, because her mother had always said that you only ever got to make one first impression on people. That wasn’t really true for chrononauts though, which made her feel a pang of envy. Of course, Alfric would probably have said that using that power to get a second first impression was wildly unethical, but still.

Mizuki wasn’t entirely sure what they were looking for, but she was intrigued by the Wildlands, which had been mentioned a few times, and was hoping to get some kind of a look at them. Alfric had been forthright in saying that he thought they had no real business left in the demiplane, having confirmed that it was at least mostly on the up-and-up, and there was a part of her that agreed with him, though she still hadn’t spoken to Kell. The whole thing wouldn’t be over until she had some kind of conversation with him. It would need to be approached with delicacy and tact.

The village mostly consisted of houses that were all the same, though some had special paints, ornate windows, or additions. Among them were larger buildings though, communal spaces that seemed to carry a great age to them. One was a tavern, and Mizuki slipped inside it, feeling self-conscious. From what both Verity and Ria had said, so many of the people were new, especially within the last two weeks, that it would be possible to blend in. Still, there was a feeling of being naked, and not in a good way. She felt like people were staring at her, though maybe that was just because she looked so guilty.

The tavern was almost more of a barn, with a high arch going overhead and more overhead room than it really felt like the place needed. It was long, in a way that Mizuki wasn’t particularly used to taverns being, though she hadn’t been in all that many of them. There was something earthy about the place, perhaps the amount of wood that had been used for the arches, the tables, and the floors. A large sign said ‘one and a half drink maximum’, which felt odd to her.

It was morning, but the tavern was at least a quarter full, and Mizuki found a seat for herself. The plan had been for the party to scatter, lest they draw more attention to themselves, and while she had readily agreed that the five of them moving around together would be a bit suspicious, she wished that they were with her to make her feel more secure.

People were eating steaming breakfasts, and Mizuki looked around for a bit, not seeing any waiters, staff, or buffet to pull from. It was probably the kind of thing you got told when you came to the village, though if Verity knew, she hadn’t mentioned it.

A shockingly handsome boy sat down opposite Mizuki with his own plate of food. He was dressed simply, but far, far too pretty for her to do anything but stare at him for a moment. His eyes were pale blue and his hair raven black, and he had dimples when he smiled, which he was doing in her direction, showing straight white teeth. It was almost annoying how good he looked, and it wasn’t even that she was attracted to him, necessarily, it was that his looks were distracting.

“Do you need help?” he asked.

“Um,” said Mizuki. “I’m new?” she ventured.

“And didn’t get the full tour?” he asked.

“No, not quite,” said Mizuki. She looked around one last time. “How do I, uh, get food?”

“Slam your fist on the table and say ‘breakfast!’” said the boy. “You have to say it kind of loud.”

“Breakfast!” shouted Mizuki, slamming her fist on the table, hard enough that it kind of hurt.

Nothing appeared, and the boy laughed.

“Oh very funny,” said Mizuki, frowning at him.

“I love entads,” he said. “You can tell people anything and they’ll try the most ridiculous stuff.”

“So how do I get something to eat?” asked Mizuki, still frowning. She was going to have to remember telling people the wrong things about entads though, that was funny.

“Finger signs,” said the boy. “Thumb to index finger, thumb to pinky, cross index and middle fingers, then wave your hand over the table.”

“Show me,” said Mizuki, folding her arms.

“I’ve already got my food,” said the boy with a smile.

“Well make me a plate, then I’ll eat that instead of doing it myself,” said Mizuki.

“Aw,” he said. “You don’t trust me.”

“Yes, that happens when the first thing someone does is trick you,” said Mizuki.

He made the finger motions quickly, with practiced ease, and where he waved his hand, a plate of food appeared. It was scrambled eggs with chopped up herbs, a long brown sausage, a pile of sliced up strawberries, and a short muffin that was glazed with honey and decorated with orange peel.

“Huh,” said Mizuki as she took the plate. It would be her second breakfast of the day, and she immediately felt bad that she wouldn’t eat all of it. “I don’t get to decide what to eat?”

“Nope,” he replied. “It’s always the same for everyone, usually some good variety, but at the tavern all the meals just are what they are. It changes through the week, but I think this is always what we have for breakfast the day after temple day.”

“And I can’t get a boiled egg in the middle of the night?” asked Mizuki.

“Nope,” he said. He held out a hand. “I’m Thom, by the way.”

“Mizuki,” she replied, taking his hand. His handshake was a little too firm. She still hadn’t gotten used to the way he looked, but she was hungry, so she ate.

“Do you need someone to give you the tour?” he asked. “Are you visiting from the palace?”

“I’m thinking of moving here,” said Mizuki, which was a complete lie. “So yes, a tour would be nice.” She was speaking with her mouth half full, which was only because she’d been asked a question while she was in the middle of chewing.

“Were you wondering about the drink and a half sign?” Thom asked.

“I guess,” said Mizuki, covering her mouth so he wouldn’t have to see half-eaten strawberries. The food was good, though nothing all that special. She could have done better, though she’d never made her own sausage, and it was clearly a lot less work to just magic something up.

“There are glasses you can grab from the wall and fill with whatever,” said Thom. “Just tap the side and it will be anything drinkable, milk, juice, rum, wine, you name it. But if it’s got alcohol, you can’t drink more than a drink and a half. Anything beyond that will turn to water in your mouth.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. She finished a bite of muffin. It was a little overly sweet, for her tastes, and also needed a bit of salt. “What if you wait?”

“I think the rule is never more than a drink and a half in you,” he replied. “But I guess I haven’t actually tested it. The idea is that no one actually gets drunk.”

“Or you could bring your own drink in,” said Mizuki. “It’s easy enough to make wine, if you have grapes, and I can’t imagine we don’t have grapes.” She wasn’t actually sure that it was easy to make wine, but her grandfather had run a winery and talked about wine a lot, and it didn’t seem like it could be that complicated to end up with something that would at least get you drunk.

“I guess,” said Thom. “There aren’t a lot of rules, but I think trying to work our way around what’s already in place is, uh.” He seemed uncomfortable for the first time. “I mean, this place is nice, I don’t think anyone wants to rock the boat too much.”

“Who put the sign up?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t know,” said Thom. “I’ve been here a month, which is just long enough to feel like I know my way around. At a guess, all things flow from our mysterious benefactor.”

“Any idea how she got a demiplane?” asked Mizuki. “And a, uh, living one?”

“No,” said Thom. “And like I said, rocking the boat … eh.”

“What can you tell me about the Wildlands?” asked Mizuki.

“Um,” said Thom. “I don’t know, I’ve never gone out there. From what I’ve heard, it’s like a dungeon, but … less. Or less and more. A dungeon is a set of rooms, but the Wildlands are more like, um, an adventure. Forests and valleys and mountains and swamps. Less dense?” He shrugged. “Why?”

“Oh, I used to be a dungeoneer,” said Mizuki.

“You?” he asked, in an incredulous way that Mizuki really didn’t like.

Mizuki nodded. “I used to sweep through them with my party, before it all fell apart. Giant sword in hand, skull armor, glowing hair, it was really something. I was thinking that I would go out into the Wildlands, if it really is like a dungeon, or a spread out dungeon. There are entads?”

“Yes,” replied Thom. He was looking at her differently, half was though he thought she was joking about doing dungeons, and half as though he hadn’t been treating her with the proper amount of respect. “Much more rare, but they’re there, and I think they’re the same. The wilding parties usually come back with a handful, even if they’ve been out a week. It’s much more like camping or exploring.”

“But they’re parties?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, limited to five?”

“Not necessarily,” replied Thom. “But I guess I don’t know that much. There’s no real need to go into the Wildlands, at least from what I know. We have everything taken care of here.”

“And there are monsters, like in a dungeon?” asked Mizuki.

“There can be,” nodded Thom. “Fewer, more spread out, but still dangerous, I think.” He looked over. “Here, there’s someone I can introduce you to that might know more.” He gave a wave, and Mizuki turned to look.

It was Kell.

They locked eyes for a moment, and Kell faltered, then strode over.

“Thom,” said Kell with a nod. He looked at Mizuki. “Who’s this?”

“Mizuki,” said Thom. “She’s new, or at least new to the village, might be living here. She was asking about the Wildlands, and I thought since you’ve taken to them, you might be able to speak more knowledgeably on the subject.”

“Certainly,” said Kell with a sharp nod.

“This is Kell, he’s a professional,” said Thom.

Kell looked down at Mizuki’s half-eaten plate of food. “You look like you’re just about done, can you walk and talk with me?”

“Er,” said Mizuki. She wasn’t really done with her breakfast. “S-sure.”

“Right,” nodded Kell. “Thank you for the introduction, Thom, I’ll speak with you later about the game. Mizuki?”

Mizuki rose, reluctantly, and followed after Kell as he strode from the tavern.

“You were asking about the Wildlands?” asked Kell as they walked through the village. “Hang on, we’re almost to my house, I’m very close by.”

“I was just —” began Mizuki.

“Here,” said Kell. He was walking fast, and pushed in through the door, leaving it open behind him and not taking off his shoes. He went to a closet door and opened it. It led into a bright space that was larger than the closet should have allowed, extradimensional entad space that was made more obvious by the fact that the door didn’t quite fit. “I’ve been in the Wildlands quite a bit, and haven’t really had the time to set things up, but this area is well-furnished and very cozy, if you don’t mind.”

“Er,” said Mizuki. He was standing next to the open door, waiting for her. “Sure.”

She went inside, hoping against hope that it wasn’t a trap, but if it was a trap, then Ria would surely rescue her by undoing the day. The room was a nice one, a sunroom with jungle plants outside it, as though they were in an inverted vivarium of some sort, a spot of domesticity encased in glass and plopped down in nature. There were three large chairs around a large center table, which had a pot of steaming tea on it and three porcelain cups with saucers.

“Tea?” he asked as he shut the door behind him.

“Kell,” she said.

“Mizuki,” he replied. He took a seat and poured a cup for her, then for him. It smelled of juniper and honey. He sat back with the cup in his hand, held delicately, and watched her for a moment.

“I guess you’re wondering why I’m here,” said Mizuki. “But I guess I’m wondering why you’re here.”

“There are two options, as I see it,” said Kell. “Either you’re here because Cate plucked you up from Inter, like she did me, or you’re here without Cate’s blessing, having ridden in on Verity like a flea. I don’t think either of those would be great for me, but one would be considerably worse.”

“Yeah, it’s the second one,” said Mizuki. “But you disappeared, and —”

“I left a note,” said Kell. He took a breath. “Cate thought you might go looking for me, that you might bring in the others, that chrononauts might get involved, and — I really thought that you’d figure out that I went of my own free will. That I wanted a fresh start. So however you got here, it would be wonderful if you could leave. It’s bad enough that Verity is here, but we never knew each other all that well, and Cate warned me, so it’s not that big of a deal. I’m probably not long for the village anyway.”

“You’re not?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, are you just going to live by yourself?”

Kell let out a sigh. “It’s really not any of your business.”

Mizuki frowned at him. “We were friends. What happened?”

Kell looked at the ceiling for a moment, avoiding her gaze, then down at her like he was staring into her soul. Their eyes were locked with such intensity that it was almost painful.

“I was in love with you,” he said.

“Ah,” said Mizuki. She pulled back.

“You knew?” he asked, though it was a question that he seemed to know the answer to.

“I guess,” she said. “I mean, I thought it was more of a crush.” On her end, it was a feeling like she had lost interest in him at the tail end of their romance, but without actually having the preceding relationship. There was always a point when kissing wasn’t that fun anymore, when there was no thrill from a touch, and with Kell it was almost like they had a whole history which had already run its course. She couldn’t say that to him though. She was very aware that it didn’t make sense.

“I knew you didn’t think of me like that,” said Kell. He shrugged, too casual. “And it did hurt, and I did hope that it would somehow change, but — we don’t need to have this conversation. I didn’t leave because of you.”

“You didn’t?” asked Mizuki. “Because it feels like you did.”

“There were a lot of reasons I left,” said Kell. “I didn’t have a home, I didn’t have a purpose, I didn’t fit in, and here I have all those things.”

“You’ve been here a week,” said Mizuki, frowning at him.

“We’re all people who’ve been displaced,” said Kell. “I’m making friends.” He hesitated. “I’m getting married.”

“You’re what?” asked Mizuki. “After a week?” She leaned forward. “How does that happen?”

“It’s the way it’s done in Cairbre,” said Kell. “We hit it off, she proposed, I said yes.”

“That’s stupid,” said Mizuki. She folded her arms across her chest. “Wait, are you living together?”

“Not yet,” said Kell. “It’ll be a long engagement. But the point is that if you did slip in here with Verity, you need to slip right back out. I can facilitate that, there’s a technique that wizards can do, but you need to go. I don’t know what Cate will do if she finds you here.”

“So you do think she’s dangerous,” said Mizuki.

“I think she’s got an enormous amount of power,” said Kell. “I think she’s hiding things from us, both about the history and the nature of this place. But you know what? I also mostly don’t care. I can construct a way out, if I need it. I studied the technique before I left, and I have enough power. If it comes down to it, I can leave, taking a handful of people with me. For the moment? We have every single need provided for us. I have a girl I’m planning to marry. And the Wildlands — they’re hard to describe, but they’re everything I had always hoped dungeons would be.”

Mizuki pursed her lips. “You weren’t given a fair chance to decide. You weren’t allowed to talk to anyone about the decision.” These were Alfric’s words coming out of her mouth. “And maybe that works for you, but there are so many people here, most of them down on their luck, vulnerable, and the difference in power between them and her —”

“They’re taken care of,” said Kell. “They’ve got food, shelter, healing, and more than that, community. Some of it is built up already, other pieces are being built as we go, but you understand how it was for me in Pucklechurch, one step out of sync with everyone, not feeling like I had a place, like I had missed out on everyone growing up together. Here, we’re all getting a chance to do it at the same time.”

“If you’re actually happy here,” said Mizuki, slowly. “Then I guess … we can’t really do anything about it. We have to just say ‘well okay, I guess we came here for nothing’.”

“We?” asked Kell.

“The others are here too,” said Mizuki. “The rest of the party.”

Kell sighed. “I guess I should have known that you wouldn’t do this on your own. That you couldn’t do it on your own.”

“Says who?” asked Mizuki. She wasn’t sure why she felt affronted, because she couldn’t have done it on her own.

“You agree that you need to get out of here?” asked Kell. “I’ve spoken with Lin, I’ve talked to Kali, so far as I know those are the people you care most about. They’re safe. They’re mostly happy.”

“Mostly?” asked Mizuki.

“Kali was deeply unhappy, being a bastlefolk,” said Kell. “You remember us talking about it? I sought her out and talked with her for about an hour, because you’d mentioned her, and I felt like someone should be watching out for her. She’s doing alright here, but feels like an imposter, because she’s human full time.” He shrugged. “I’ve been helping her deal with it. I think for her it means more coming from me, since we’re not family or anything like it. She just wants to be normal, and she is normal, she just needs to feel it.”

“Ah,” said Mizuki. “That’s kind of you.”

Kell shifted in his seat. “You know, I kept thinking that you would see me.” He gestured at himself. “That you’d realize I was, I don’t know.”

“Mmm,” said Mizuki. “Sorry. I don’t think it, uh, works like that. For me.”

“There was nothing I could ever have done?” asked Kell. “Nothing I could have ever been? No amount of kindness, strength, competence, nothing?”

Mizuki felt awful. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t feel anything for him, only that she was sure she didn’t. “I did think that if you’d made a move, it might have been … I don’t know. That if we kissed, I might have felt something. I’d have gone on a date, I think, if you’d asked.”

“That sounds awful,” said Kell. His lips were tight.

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “Or, I don’t know, you’re doing the marriage thing, you said, where maybe you don’t feel a full connection right away, but it grows over time? I don’t think that would have worked, but —”

“I really don’t want to talk about this,” said Kell.

“Right,” said Mizuki. “Sorry.”

“I think you should leave,” said Kell. “Not just leave here, but leave the demiplane. Go back home. I’m safe. We’re all taken care of. It’s paradise.”

“We can’t do that,” said Mizuki. “Sorry, but we can’t, if Cate is allowed to close the entrance behind her, there’s no telling what’s going to happen here. People need to be able to leave.”

“I already told you I can craft an exit,” said Kell. “It’s actually not that difficult for a wizard, a week’s work, tops. We don’t have cause to deal with extradimensional stuff often, but making a small hole to get out of a demiplane is one of the things that we can do.”

“Only as long as you’re allowed to,” said Mizuki.

“This is true,” said Kell. “But do you really think that this is some very long setup for something nefarious?”

Mizuki looked out at the plants. The truth was, she wanted Kell to come back, for everyone to come back. From everything she could tell, all these people had left because there was something wrong with their life, some grudge against the world, and she really didn’t agree with that. She liked the world, and going somewhere else to start over felt false, in a way.

“I have no idea what Cate wants,” said Mizuki. “But you don’t either.”

“You know I’m no slouch when it comes to combat, right?” asked Kell.

Mizuki stayed silent. She wasn’t supposed to talk about Ria, whose presence within the demiplane seemed like it was bound to bring a fight. But that meant that she also wasn’t supposed to say anything about what Ria knew about Cate’s powers, the presumed hoard of entads backing her up, or anything like that.

“Well, we’re sticking around,” said Mizuki. “If Cate doesn’t have eyes on the village, or if she knows we’re here and isn’t going to kick us out, then we’re going to investigate as much as we can. We’ll be ‘fleas’.”

“I think I could vouch for you, if you wanted to stay,” said Kell.

“No,” said Mizuki, frowning. “And besides, I thought you did all this to run away from me?”

“Yes, I’d prefer to just move on,” said Kell. “Because … I feel it. And I know, have known from early on, that you don’t.” He was silent for a moment, and Mizuki felt a burning embarrassment. She felt like he wanted her to say that no, maybe there was something between them, or could be. She didn’t say that. “But we were still friends, and my feelings, whatever they might have been, were a problem with me, not with you.” He swallowed. “There’s this wound I’m worried about reopening every time I see you. But it’s good here, and I wouldn’t want to deny you that, if it was a possibility.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mizuki.

“Sorry?” asked Kell. “For?”

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “Just sorry. I feel like I’m saying that a lot. It feels like you came back to Pucklechurch for me, and I was exactly everything you had dreamed that I would be, and you had proven yourself strong and capable, smart and determined, and then …” She trailed off. And then I just had no interest in you.

“Yeah,” said Kell. “Look, are you trying to rub it in?”

“No, I’m not, sorry,” said Mizuki. “Sorry for saying sorry.” She bit her lip. “You won’t tell, right?”

“Tell Cate?” asked Kell. “No. I don’t know what would happen to you, but there’s some risk that you wouldn’t just be kicked out the door.”

“You think she’d kill us?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t know,” said Kell. “I think if it were in her power, she’d remove your memories, at the very least, but I don’t know if it is within her power. Everyone I’ve talked to has mentioned the same black orb. Verity too?”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “Plus we saw it while looking into the past.”

“I don’t know how many more things she has like that,” said Kell. “She’s flush with entads, which makes sense. There are entads out in the Wildlands, and they’re more time-consuming to get, but generally safer.”

“You’ve been getting more for her?” asked Mizuki.

“For me,” said Kell. “She doesn’t take the fruits of our labor.” He paused. “You really should go, out of my house, if not right out of the demiplane. I don’t want to be seen as collaborating with you.”

Mizuki frowned. “Alright. But we’re not leaving until we at least find some answers.”

Kell sighed. “Keep your head down. Cate seems to mostly let the village run as it is, but if she catches wind of you being in here … there might be trouble.”

“We already ran into trouble and undid it,” said Mizuki. “We’ll be fine.”

“And you’re hoping to uncover some kind of crime?” asked Kell. “The whole concept of crime gets sticky when she’s effectively a sovereign.”

“You know what I mean though,” said Mizuki.

“I do,” nodded Kell. He hesitated for a moment. “That was one of the things I always liked about you. The way you’d just go out and do things, even if they weren’t the smartest.”

“Thanks, I think,” said Mizuki. “You know, you could help us. Get access to the palace, put a wizard’s eye on things.”

Kell’s lips went tight. “I did say that I liked it here, right?”

“You’d rather stay ignorant?” asked Mizuki.

“I’d rather not be implicated if it turns out you’re chasing ghosts,” said Kell. “But if you do find something … then yes, you can come to me. I’ll help. I can get people out, if that’s what’s needed, and lend some firepower, if you give me some lead time. Right now I’m configured for exploration.”

“Thanks,” said Mizuki. She stood from the couch. “I wish … I guess I wish that things had been different. I hope that if I’m wrong, you can find some happiness here.”

Kell nodded. “I’m well on my way.”

Mizuki hesitated. She wanted it to be like it had been, when they were friends, just friends, but she wasn’t sure that era had ever existed. Maybe he’d always been pining after her, even when they were just hanging out and talking. That made her feel sad, like they’d never really been friends at all, so she stood up and left after another brief goodbye.

That left her with the rest of the day, though she didn’t particularly feel like wandering around the village. The palace was off-limits though, and the Wildlands seemed like a bad idea to do by herself, even though there was more than enough magic swirling in the air for her to fireball her way out of trouble.

Mizuki went back to Verity’s house, looking for someone to talk to, and knowing that it would be Ria.

Chapter 143 - Songs of the Past

Verity had gotten used to the palace, and had to admit that she loved it. It was built into the mountain, but there was enough variation among the interiors and windows carved into the rock faces to allow light in. During her first days there, she had thought that it would look like a porous rock with many holes, maybe even one of those that floated from all the bubbles, but standing from the village, the holes were disguised, the regularity of windows not at all obvious. It was a well-crafted place, an immense place, and it spoke of unbelievable amounts of time and money.

In the center was a caldera, or something like it, a depression, at least, that Cate had turned into a courtyard. This provided more light and fresh air into the palace, with ringed windows around it, and a number of tall trees that kept the place shaded during the day. At sunset, the leaves of the trees would glow softly, giving illumination to the area, and the opportunity for a party, and as the night wore on, the light of the leaves would fade away.

There was something so effortless about the palace, perhaps because every need was taken care of. Food, clothing, all was reduced to needing a fraction of the time, unless you wanted something more bespoke or curated. There were a surprising number of artists — or perhaps not surprising, given that all other needs were taken care of, that there was no true ‘need’ for artisans, cooks, merchants, or anything like that. There were painters, sculptors, and musicians, who Verity found herself relatively at home with, though she was eminently thankful that there seemed to be no other lute players among the crowd. There were thinkers as well, writers and philosophers, though Verity found a bit less common ground with them, and they had established their own forum where they held forth for a substantial fraction of the day.

She couldn’t stay, obviously, though whenever she said that to herself, a small part of her said ‘well why is it so obvious?’.

If anything, those doubts had grown since letting the party out. She’d had a fitful sleep in her assigned house in the village, and now that she was spying for real, a part of some conspiracy, now that she knew how Ria’s undone days had gone, knew that Cate possessed the power necessary to fight a world-class dungeoneer at what was arguably the peak of her power … it did invite questions about how necessary this all was, and how obvious it was that she wouldn’t be able to stay.

She wasn’t going to leave the party, but when she thought to herself ‘obviously the party can’t be here with me’, she began thinking of all the ways that she might be able to make it happen. Coming clean to Cate seemed like a necessary step in the hypothetical world where Verity was trying to stay in the demiplane. Convincing the party was the other necessary component, and some of the party would be more difficult than others.

Hannah would be the easiest to convince, as she’d embarked on dungeoneering to get away from the church and have some adventures, and what better adventure could there be? There was, naturally, the question of Marsh, but that didn’t seem that unworkable. Next came Mizuki, who would have to leave her beloved home behind, and it seemed most likely that she would be convinced last by virtue of the others having decided to stay. She was unconventional, but also liked to go along. Isra … it would depend upon whether Isra’s doubts and fears about Cate, which had been there since the start, could be assuaged, but Isra had nothing tethering her to Pucklechurch. And that left Alfric, who was the most thorny of the bunch, with the strongest familial connection. The only way he would stay would be if he could be enticed by the Wildlands.

Verity was starting to realize that she’d actually given it a lot of thought, for something that she was definitely not going to do.

Her goal for the day, as she’d discussed with the others, was to map out the palace and then find a way to speak privately with Cate, or failing that, to listen in on palace rumors to see whether there was someplace they could dig their fingers into.

The map was easy enough. It was already clear that there was nothing particularly weird going on about the palace, only fine craftsmanship, a bevy of entads, and ectads to keep it evenly heated and with fresh air where the natural construction didn’t permit. There were no strange extradimensional bumps or hallways that went too long, and there were only a few places that Verity wasn’t permitted to enter, mostly the rooms that belonged to others, where they had their privacy. There were no particularly curious choices in terms of how the building was laid out, and it would have been odd if there had been.

If Cate really wanted to hide something, she could just stick it in extradimensional space. A bound entad could only be operated by someone it was bound to, which meant that it was the ultimate in secrecy, short of someone coercing you into using it. It was for that reason that the book that was bound to the party was such a good get, not necessarily because it was good storage, but because it was bound. If Cate had something that she wanted secret, all she would need was bound storage, and the hidden thing would not only never be found, there was absolutely no way for anyone to get to it even if they knew precisely where it was. The best candidate for ‘hidden thing’ was a demiplane core, of course, but there were other things that might have been tucked away as a matter of secrecy.

Once the place was all properly mapped, every public hallway gone down and a few rooms breached that might have been private for all Verity could tell, it was time to try to find Cate, which was simplicity itself, since Cate was in the grand courtyard, sitting on the grass and listening to a public performance — a work of oration rather than song.

Verity had talked with the speaker, Puck, on a few occasions, largely because they were both bards in their own right. Puck had sheepishly confessed to knowing nothing of music, but they were from a tradition that had no need of it, following a rhythm of a different sort, their speaking following particular meters that were divorced from proper rhythm. It was a side of bardic magic that Verity had only a glancing knowledge of, given that it wasn’t taught at the conservatory and was considered to be inferior by most people in the know. And it wasn’t as though Puck had gone to a different school where they’d been rigorously taught; instead, they had been self-taught, along with just a bit of knowledge from books, and a few passing conversations with people who had interest in the historical mode. There was a certain sort of harmony to forging ahead and making up things on your own in a field of art where making things up was considered one of the key components.

There were thirty or so people on the grass under a large weeping willow, listening to Puck speak. The words were coming fast, and if Verity hadn’t known better, she would have thought that it was rehearsed. Instead, Puck’s particular brand of oration prided itself on being spontaneous, with not so much as a bar written beforehand, all of it spit out in the heat of the moment, sometimes with prompts from the audience at the start. It seemed incredibly high pressure to Verity, who had her own relationship with improvisation. At least with a song, she could let the instrumentation carry her for a moment, eschewing lyrics, and a refrain gave a break from having to think up new words to go with the tune. For Puck, there was nothing to hide behind, only the words, the cadence locking everything in place.

This particular bit of oration was a history, with a large number of historical asides, almost all of which were completely fabricated. Puck told of an epic journey across magical seas, gave histories of long-forgotten kings, waxed poetic on the beauty of a sailor’s daughter, and digressed into a long section on the nature of sailing, teamwork, and captaincy. This was all accompanied by magic, naturally, a somewhat weak bardic tinge that came and went in waves. Puck would speak of the whipping wind, and then the audience would feel the chill in the air. Puck would speak of hunger, and then the audience would feel a pang of it.

Verity enjoyed herself, and clapped appreciatively once Puck was done, though she hoped that was the end of it, and that Cate might be free for a conversation. Instead, the next performer hopped right up and started in, this one a girl who painted in the air with trails of light, something that was accomplished by way of entad — a performance that could only be done with that single item in all the world, which did make it somewhat special, though Verity thought that it would wind up being somewhat limited in the long run in a way that a lute was not.

People came and went during the course of the performances, and it seemed as though the small crowd was composed of many people waiting their own turn. Verity’s eyes went to Cate a number of times, watching her. There was a soft smile on Cate’s face, a kind smile for each of the performers, but not much dynamism. Cate chuckled at the jokes rather than laughing, and the smile never went too wide. When someone told a sad personal story, Cate’s frown was never too deep. There was something uncanny about her, but also something beautiful and graceful in a way that Verity found herself envious of.

When it finally looked as though the impromptu sharing was done, the group broke apart and people went their separate ways, but Cate immediately accumulated an entourage, or something that was indistinguishable from one. There were no servants, assistants, or anything like that, but there were people who really did seem determined to follow Cate around and hang on her every word, not that Cate seemed very talkative.

Lunch was in the main dining hall, and the seats next to Cate were taken, as well as the seats across from her, and beyond. Verity was listening, though not hopeful that she’d hear anything of note, but it felt impossible to get a word in edgewise except by butting in or talking over someone in a way that would be the height of rudeness. Verity ate her plate of food, a salad with garlic butter shrimp in it, and kept looking for her chance, or at least something to make the day worthwhile.

It was, instead, Cate who made the move, not long after lunch had concluded.

“Verity, could I speak with you in private?” asked Cate. The entire entourage turned on Verity, all the attention nearly overwhelming. It was only Verity’s experience with crowds that helped it not feel overwhelming.

“Of course,” said Verity, giving a small bow that she felt foolish about even as she was doing it.

“Do you have time now?” asked Cate.

“I do,” said Verity. “I had no special plans for the day.” In fact, her only plan, aside from meeting back up with the party, had been just such a meeting.

“Follow me then,” said Cate. She turned to her entourage, the ten or so people who had made everything Cate did feel like a group activity. “I’ll bid my farewell for now, though if anyone would like to join me in the pool in an hour or two, that’s where I’ll be.”

The entourage moved away as though they hadn’t congregated specifically for her, in a way that almost made Verity believe that they were a large group of friends doing their own thing, rather hangers-on.

Verity and Cate walked together, with Verity half a step behind, because she didn’t know where they were going. They went up two flights of stairs, which Verity had walked earlier in the day when she was making her map, then through a set of doors that led into the palace’s library. It was a quiet place, and the noise of their movement raised a few heads which immediately went back down again. They came to a door that Verity would have sworn hadn’t been there, hidden within a wall of books.

“My office,” said Cate, entering first. This was a place of magic, nestled in the interior of the palace but with two tall windows looking out onto vibrant scenes. It was obvious magic, something in the glass making every pane a different place, beaches and mountains, a bit of a mess, honestly, from a lighting perspective, but it was all behind the desk, and wouldn’t be seen if you were toiling away at papers. Verity could tell that it would be a distraction, and did her best to keep her attention on Cate.

“What was it you wanted to see me about?” asked Verity.

“Oh, I just had the feeling that it was you that wanted to see me,” said Cate. “But we have pleasantries to get out of the way first. How have you been settling? You’re down in the village now, aren’t you?”

“I am,” said Verity. “First night there, actually.” She shifted in her seat. “It’s very nice.”

“I had thought of you as one for the palace,” said Cate. She arched an eyebrow. “For my part, I’ve quite enjoyed the influx of people, though sometimes I feel like a mother duck with her ducklings waddling after her. It’ll take time for people to find their feet, and to realize that I’m just one person of many.”

“You’re the one that put this all together,” said Verity. “You’re our benefactor, if nothing else, and I’m not sure that you are nothing else.” She swallowed, thinking of the fight that Ria had described. “If you don’t mind me saying, there’s an air of mystery about you, and I can understand how people find that compelling.”

“And you don’t?” asked Cate, voice light.

“I do,” said Verity.

“You came here with, I assume, questions,” said Cate. “Things that you wanted answered, and whose answers could only come from me. Or do I have it wrong?”

“I’ve been out and about,” said Verity. “Through the palace, in those first days, and recently in the village, getting the lay of the land. There are … some inconsistencies.”

“Inconsistencies?” asked Cate. “I dare say I don’t think I’ve said enough that there could be inconsistencies.”

“Curiosities then,” said Verity. “Things that don’t quite line up with … with what we were led to believe, I guess. Questions about the hows and whys of … this place. Sorry, I’m trying to be respectful, it’s just that you have to know exactly what I’m talking about, I can’t imagine that with all your ducklings you haven’t heard what people are saying.”

“Give me an example, if you’d please?” asked Cate.

“The village,” said Verity. “There are old houses, signs of customization of the stock houses, wear and tear, a suggestion that the place is a hundred years old, or something similar. It’s lived in, in a way that it shouldn’t have been if this was all new.” And that, naturally, raised questions of who had been living there, and how Cate had acquired the living demiplane, and what had happened to the previous population.

“You are, in fact, the first person to ask me outright,” said Cate with a too-wide smile. “Curious, isn’t it? But I suppose it’s explained by the fact that I’m in a position of power, that this is, in fact, my petty kingdom, and no amount of wishing can change the reality of the situation.” She sighed and turned to look back at the windows, which were still showing their vibrant but wholly different scenes. “Really, this decoration is quite garish. It seemed such a good idea at the time.”

“What … is it?” asked Verity.

“There’s a special sort of glass, made from a special sort of sand, which can be etched with a view of a specific time and place,” said Cate. “The left pane is places that I’ve been, while the right pane is places from the Wildlands. There’s variety out there, if you follow the seams. It doesn’t quite go on forever, but it’s an entire world of its own.” She looked at the panes for a moment and sighed.

“You didn’t actually answer the question about the village,” said Verity, not because she wanted to, but because she was obliged, and knew enough about deflection to see the digression for what it was.

“There were people here before this adventure,” said Cate. “People under my ‘rule’, such as it is. It was more ordinary, fewer of the special people I’ve brought together here, and with more in the way of toil, though I think toil is good for people, at least in small amounts.”

“The village … which is at least a hundred years old?” asked Verity.

Cate nodded. “And I suppose I could let people guess, allow the gossip to swirl, as I’ve done in the past, but it’s a question of what works better for the community.” She tapped her nails on the desk. “The problem is that there are questions, and more questions that come from the answers. It would have been possible, if tedious, to scrub the history from this place and pretend that it was all new, but I didn’t want to run from my mistakes. There’s nothing so conceited as that, pretending that you’ve never been in error.”

There was something sharp to the casual way she talked, as though her claws were going to come out at any moment. Her fingernails were rather long, if very nicely maintained, lacquered like a fine dresser.

“And what was the error?” asked Verity.

“It’s very kind of you to assume that there was just one error,” said Cate. “But the primary error, at least as I saw it, was cultural, and culture is a very difficult thing to change once it’s set. Some of it comes from the people, but other parts of it come from how things are arranged, the norms that develop, all sorts of complicated things. I’ve put an enormous amount of thought into how things will go in this second iteration of the colony. The split between the palace and the village, the Wildlands as a place for people to live … these will help tremendously, I should hope.”

“You don’t seem to be doing all that much,” said Verity. There were still so many questions that needed answering, but Verity was wary of pushing too hard. Still, Cate had seemed to appreciate forthright interrogation, even if she wasn’t the most cooperative subject.

“I’m doing more than it seems,” said Cate. “And some of what I’ve done has simply been in the people I’ve chosen.”

“What happened to the old colony?” asked Verity.

“They were deported,” said Cate. “Plopped down on an island not far from the Barrier Storms, unsettled, with housing, food, and the tools to start farming. I checked in on them from time to time. It’s been two generations, and they’re not quite thriving, but they haven’t collapsed like I had feared they might.”

Verity let out a breath.

“You had thought I might have killed them,” said Cate. “I don’t treat people like that. This is one way I know that the mystery has gone a bit too far. If people are worried about me killing them, that’s a sign that the veil needs to be pulled back.”

“Only a few are worried,” said Verity. “But if you operate under secrecy, some people have dark imaginations.”

“Oh, I know that,” said Cate. “But to kill an entire village worth of people … no, that would be beyond the pale.”

“You’re old then,” said Verity.

Cate laughed. “It’s rude to ask a woman her age, but yes, the conclusion you’d have to draw is that I’m at least a hundred years old.”

“Older, because you wouldn’t have been doing all this in your twenties,” said Verity. “And that means … not human.”

“There are exotic solutions to the problem,” said Cate. “Entads and other magic. I could have been cast forward in time, locked in stasis, or some other thing. But no, I am not human.”

Verity was silent for a moment. It made her feel ill-at-ease. There weren’t many options for what a person could be, if they weren’t human, and to have the person in front of you confess to wearing a human skin was unsettling. “What … are you?”

Cate leaned forward, extending a hand across the desk, and it took all Verity’s willpower not to shrink back. “Let me show you.”

The only reason that Verity reached out to touch Cate’s hand was that she couldn’t imagine this was any more dangerous than being alone in a secret room with the woman. Cate’s hand was soft but firm, and then they were somewhere else.

They were still in their chairs, but the desk was gone, and they were outdoors. It was a field with tall grass, with clouds the only thing stopping the sun from beating down. Cate released Verity’s hand and sat back in the chair, then raised her hands to the sky.

The world changed around them. The flowers bloomed and then withered, the clouds moved around in the skies above, and trees rose from the ground, spreading branches as they reached for the sky, then falling down all at once, rotting on the ground in a burst of insects.

When it was all over, the field was more or less as it had been before.

“This isn’t just a living demiplane,” said Cate. “It’s my living demiplane. It’s an integral part of me, one which I have near-total control over, aside from the people who live there. Your friend Isra was a druid, but her power is only a fraction of mine, at least in this place, and when it comes to the plants and skies. I would show you the demiplane core, but it’s here.” She pointed to her chest, slightly to the left. “It’s like a heart would be, for your kind. A part of me.”

“The dead demiplanes are … your kind?” asked Verity.

“Like shells that wash up on the beach,” said Cate, nodding. “And a great many of those shells are that way because someone or something came along to scoop out the fleshy inside of a sea creature, discarding the shell as waste.”

“Something powerful,” said Verity.

“Mmm,” said Cate. “Humans were the worst of it. Effortlessly coordinated, capable of reaching impossible heights of power, supported by the Editors … and so complete in their conquest that they no longer remember this was something that they had done.”

“I’m … sorry,” said Verity.

“It was long, long ago,” said Cate. She smirked. “At least a hundred years ago.”

Verity gave a tentative smile back.

“I’d appreciate your confidence in the matter,” said Cate. “Take the night to think about it. I’m curious about your thoughts, and how best to frame the revelation to the others.”

“You trust me that much?” asked Verity.

“I don’t know that I do,” said Cate. “You are, however, the first to press hard against the vagueries I’ve been spinning. And nothing hinges on your silence, aside from my continued respect and trust. We can return to the palace now, if you’d like.” She held out her hand, and Verity took it, with less hesitation this time.

“What do you want me to think about?” asked Verity.

“You’ve seen the people hanging on to me,” said Cate. “It’s not a problem, per se, but I have to imagine that my status will only grow when people have a good idea what I am.”

“And … what are you?” asked Verity. “Does your species have a name?”

“We have a few names,” said Cate. She gave that same soft, mysterious smile she seemed to use when she was saying too little. “But I’m afraid anything more will have to come later. There are myths about my people, to the extent they are my people, and I wouldn’t want you to have the wrong idea.”

“What you said about your mother, how she kept you in her place, that was a demiplane, like this one?” asked Verity.

Cate nodded. “She had survived the conquests and the hunting,” said Cate. “She was protective, but also had designs for me, in the way that your mother did for you. Like you, I didn’t take to the grooming. You must understand that I never lied to you, or at least did my best not to.”

“I think I’ll go now,” said Verity. “If that’s alright with you.”

“Tomorrow, then,” said Cate. “You’ll have more questions then, and I’ll do my best to provide more answers.”

Verity nodded and stood from the chair. “Thank you for confiding in me. I’ll do my best to think it through.”

Cate gave a happy nod, then began pulling papers from her desk, which Verity thought was her cue to leave.

Verity wasn’t sure what to think. This had answered questions, but it had also raised other ones. Cate was some kind of species that created demiplanes and either looked human or could wear human skin. She was old, ‘at least a hundred years’, but that had seemed cheeky, which meant much older, a thousand years, back when the world had been much different. And she had power, above and beyond what she’d demonstrated in the fight with Ria, an entirely different suite of powers, in fact.

She was sure that Cate wasn’t telling the entire truth, but at least she’d been honest about that.

~~~~

“She’s a dragon,” said Isra.

There were some skeptical frowns, but Verity’s deepest among them. They had seats within the extradimensional space, where all but Verity would be spending the night. They’d all reported on their days, and Verity had gone last.

“And … why?” asked Verity.

“Very old, lives in a demiplane, and with evidence of fire hot enough to melt stone, along with the attack that killed Ria,” said Isra. “She said her kind has a name that’s associated with some myths. We went to the museum together, and looked at the dragon exhibit. The evidence fits.”

“There’s not much evidence,” said Alfric. “Besides, dragons living in demiplanes is —”

“Well-established,” Mizuki finished for him.

“It’s a theory,” said Alfric. “And the theory never specifies that demiplanes are made by dragons.”

“There’s no theory that demiplanes aren’t made by dragons,” said Mizuki. She rolled her eyes.

“That’s not —” Alfric began.

“She has a point,” Ria said quietly. She was deep in thought. “There’s no strong theory on the origin of demiplanes. This fills that hole. Though if we were hunting dragons and stealing their demiplanes, it seems like it would be difficult for that knowledge to be lost.”

“It wasn’t lost in Kiromo,” said Mizuki, folding her arms.

“That might be,” said Ria. “Unfortunately, I think this means that we’re past the limits of what I can accomplish, assuming that she’s telling the truth about certain facts. We can’t take the demiplane core without killing her, and killing her seems unlikely, at least so long as she’s here. In our entire fight, she wasn’t using her control of the demiplane. Unfortunately, we’re trapped here — not trapped, since we have an exit, but we can’t bring in more tools or forces. We’re well-past what I expected the upper end of problems to be.”

“We don’t have cause to go to war,” said Verity.

“No, I agree, we don’t,” said Ria. “Fortunately, we have contact with the outside. We’re only an undone day or two away from tracking down the previous village and checking her story there.”

“Are we keeping today?” asked Alfric.

“Wait, is there a chance we’re not?” asked Mizuki. “I thought this one was the keeper.”

“There was a lot of exposure today,” said Ria. “Your names are out there. People have seen you. On the flip side, you’ve made contact with a number of people, some of whom can be developed as either sources or allies. Hannah in particular got lucky. We could attempt to redo the day with foreknowledge, but I don’t imagine it going too much better than this, and we’d have the same exposure risk, possibly worse. Being a chrononaut means knowing when to keep, and I think this is a keep … but I’m not the only one with my neck on the line.”

The vote was unanimous to keep the day, with some discussion about the shape of that exposure, and how much they knew about Cate’s ability to surveil.

Verity felt awkward about the whole thing, and once it was over, she went back to her bed in the house that had been gifted to her. She thought about Cate, and what she had said.

She felt like she owed the dragon some serious consideration.

Chapter 144 - An Interlude on the Island at the Edge of the World

Harmon had always liked the Barrier Storms. They weren’t visible from Dondrian, not even on a very clear day, but there were a set of islands an hour’s flight to the north, and those had a view of the endless roiling storms. He’d spent a week at a hostel there when he was young, and had marveled at them from afar, miles-tall black clouds that flashed with lightning at all hours of the day. The people of the islands got used to it, apparently, maybe because it was far enough away that the thunder was only faintly audible in very good conditions.

The Barrier Storms were, by some accounting, one of the last great unknowns. Beyond them, magic failed, which made crossing them difficult and returning even harder. There were only a few semi-successful forays into the Barrier Storms themselves, and no recorded returns from them. Chrononauts had ventured into the Storms, but the power seemed to fail there in the same way that entads and wizards failed.

Assuming that Cate was telling the truth, she had dumped a relatively small group of people on an island near the Barrier Storms. They had no concrete information on where the island was, or even how close to the Barrier Storms it was, which meant that it could be almost any one of them. In total, there were nineteen thousand islands within suitable range of the Barrier Storms, but only seven hundred of them were large enough to hold a self-sustaining village of perhaps fifty people, and only one hundred and twenty-two of those were non-national.

Harmon had pulled in all kinds of favors, some of them in undone days, trying to find some evidence of a similar spate of disappearances somewhere in the distant past some three to five generations prior. He’d come up with nothing though, which might simply have been because it had passed out of living memory. It was also possible that the means of abduction had been different the last time, assuming that Cate hadn’t been lying. Still, there was nothing for it but to do things the hard way, which meant visiting every single one of the one hundred and twenty-two islands.

“With a team of six, it won’t take that long,” Harmon told his children. “That’s only twenty each.” The search would need to be expanded if they didn’t find anything, of course. The distance from the Storms had been selected somewhat at random — close enough that they’d be visible, which was what Harmon thought of as ‘close’. It was entirely possible that Cate’s definition was more liberal. Still, part of the reason for choosing an island close to the Storms was that ships wouldn’t go near them, not just because of the occasional inclement weather, but because there was hardly ever a reason to.

“I can’t say I love this,” said Beryl. He was fitting a bracelet around his wrist, one of the better travel entads, this one creating portals rather than granting speed, flight, or teleportation.

“What are we even looking for?” asked Kyrie. “Dragon prints?” She was the youngest, and had been flirting with the idea of joining the church, though the fact that she hadn’t picked which church was a sign that it wasn’t likely to be serious.

“Molten rock would be a good first sign,” said Harmon. “Other than that, you’ll be looking for a settlement where there shouldn’t be one, or signs of a settlement having once been there. You might just be looking for foundations. If you find something suspicious, report it, then we’ll get some of our past-watching and diagnosis up and running.”

“Is it exactly a hundred years?” asked Mo. “Or is that just tossed off?”

“Tossed off,” said Harmon. “Your mother didn’t bring much diagnostics in with her, so it’s only a guess. We think that it’s close enough.” Harmon had given himself three days to play with, which meant room to adjust the parameters.

“I really don’t think she should be in there,” said Mo. He was the eldest of them, his own man now, and their relationship had changed over the last two years. Mo wanted to be equals.

“No, I don’t want it either,” said Harmon. “But she is in there, and she needs our support on the outside.”

“This is an undone day, why is she not out here helping?” asked Faith, the eldest of his daughters. She was surly by nature, which thankfully hadn’t gotten in the way of her being a high achiever — it was possible that she was surly with her parents and gregarious around her friends and teachers.

“She’ll be out here for a few iterations,” said Harmon. “I spoke with her on a different day. There are certain things she wants to attempt on my undone day, and we’ve coordinated as best we can.”

“She’s going to be fighting the dragon,” said Faith.

“She’s going to be testing to see whether it even is a dragon,” said Harmon. “But yes, the mechanism for testing will be brute force.”

Faith rolled her eyes.

“Be diligent out there,” said Harmon. “It’s important that we hit every island on the list. If we miss something on one of them, we might have to burn another day on this. We want to grind this out while not making mistakes or getting sloppy. And if there’s a problem, report in immediately, don’t wait for confirmation or for it to go sour. There’s a chance that this is a trap of some kind.”

“Let’s just get it done,” said Mo. There was a way he spoke that made him seem like second in command, which had been there since he was very young. Now, as an adult, Harmon thought his son’s ‘bossy’ voice would probably need to be retired, at least with the other children, but that was a conversation for another day — a day that Mo would have memory of.

They departed, going their separate ways, some blinking out, others zooming away, and in Faith’s case, turning into water and splashing down into the ocean.

For Harmon’s part, he flew. He had a profound love of flight, though with entads, flight came in many forms. The entad he was using wasn’t the most enjoyable one he had, but it was the fastest, so fast that he needed protection from the sheer speed it was capable of. He made a trip of three hundred miles in just minutes, leaving a booming echo behind him. Sound, apparently, had a speed, and for reasons that were still unclear to him, if you went too fast, it would make a terrible racket.

There was a second reason that Harmon had chosen this entad for himself: if anyone was going to announce their presence, he wanted it to be him, rather than the children.

The first island was actually a chain of islands, meaning that Harmon was crossing five off his list all at once. Even the smallest of the five was large enough to have held a village, though they’d have been hard-pressed to keep themselves fed even if there was good fishing.

The idea of dumping people onto an island so they could survive there on their own was shockingly cruel. Most people in Inter took it for granted that they’d have food, water, clothing, and shelter, but even in her own accounting of things, Cate had cast them out of her paradise with almost nothing. It wasn’t quite tantamount to execution, but it was highly unethical, and a good sign that Ria was on to something.

Harmon went down among the vegetation, looking for signs of a settlement, and found only animals that seemed disinterested that he was there. There was a good possibility that he was one of only a handful of people to have ever set foot on this island, and that he’d be the only person that these creatures would ever see.

It took an hour for all five islands, because he was attempting to be thorough, but if he had wanted to dump people off on an island, these weren’t the ones he’d have picked. They were too mountainous, and while the trees and plants could be cleared away to make room for houses, farming seemed like it would be a challenge, and the waters didn’t have quite enough fish. Of course, if Cate had been intent on a slow and painful way of letting people die, she might not have cared.

The next island was another two hundred miles away, all on its lonesome, and within half a mile of the Barrier Storms, which made them look massive. That close to the miles-high clouds, the wind was strong enough to put some fear into a person, and because the exact border wasn’t static, Harmon worried that the island might be engulfed by it. The maps had placed the island in the safe zone, but the maps were old things, and the entad maps they’d used to supplement didn’t make a record of the Storms at all.

He landed on the rocky island, not expecting much. There was almost no soil, but some plants that grew in spite of that, spreading vines and roots.

He came to a stop when he saw the house. It was made of pieces of stone from the island, mortared together in a way that seemed like it had taken deliberate craftsmanship, with timbers that seemed like they might have come from the native plants. It raised questions though, like how such a thing could be made without access to metal tools. He supposed that Cate might have dropped them off with everything they needed, even though that would make the tools irreplaceable.

Still, the house looked in good repair, and there was only one house, which didn’t suggest an entire village. It was more than he’d thought he would find out here, but —

“Can I help you?” asked a man with a sword who’d come from inside the house. The sword was held over the shoulder, resting there casually, but the man, who had sandy blonde hair and a fair bit of muscle, looked ready to bring it down.

“Just a bit lost,” said Harmon. “Can you tell me when this island was settled?”

“Can?” asked the man, spitting to the side. “Sure. Will? Not a chance. Who are you with?”

“Private citizen,” said Harmon. “Tell me, have you seen a dragon?”

“You’ve got about five seconds to get off this island,” said the man. He grinned. “No laws out here but what we make by the sword.”

“Just you in this house then?” asked Harmon.

“And that’s time,” said the man. He strode forward, lowering the sword, and went at a run for the last few steps, angling the sword in at Harmon’s midsection.

The sword bounced off, so hard that the man lost his grip. Harmon was quietly pleased by that, since he’d worried that the man’s sword might have some hidden magical effect that would defeat his layers of defense.

“I’ve got a lot of islands to check today,” said Harmon. “So are you going to answer some questions now? I just need to make sure —”

The man ran away, back toward the house, and Harmon bounded forward, cutting off his path. It was just under the speed that would make a cracking sound that would have deafened the man.

“What do you want?” the man asked.

“I want to know whether this place was ever frequented by a dragon,” said Harmon. “Or whether there’s any evidence that a village of castaways lived here.”

“Oh,” said the man. He narrowed his eyes. “No.”

“That was all,” shrugged Harmon.

There was something that made him cast a glance back at the house though. Someone who would choose to live on an island so close to the Barrier Storms, cut off from everyone else, someone whose first thought when a stranger landed was to grab a sword … it did raise his hackles. The island wasn’t under the auspices of any country. There was no law here. And it might very well be that there would be something objectionable inside that house. In fact, with the right travel entads, this house might be essentially adjacent to civilization, and a place like this might be a hideout. If that was the case, stolen goods might be the best case scenario, and the worst case scenario …

Harmon took to the air and flew away before his desire to insert himself in the situation grew any larger. This was exactly the instinct that Ria had so much trouble with, and the entire reason they were dealing with a dragon in the first place. You could not, in Harmon’s opinion, waltz into someone’s house just because you had a bad feeling about them and no respect for their privacy or personal property. This was true even if they were the sort of person to threaten someone with a sword before making sure they knew who they were dealing with.

It was tempting, of course, especially because this was an undone day, but this was the sort of thing that chrononauts weren’t supposed to do. It was bad for their public image to go snooping around where they weren’t wanted, even if the subject in question was undoubtedly guilty of something.

They will come for you at the witching hour. It was a family refrain, not to be forgotten, and it was easy to forget when you knew that you held enormous power in your hands.

The next island had a large number of skeletons, and Harmon examined them closely before deciding that they didn’t fit, the bones too thick, the skulls too misshapen. It was hard to say what had happened there, but it wasn’t a group of villagers being dropped off and forgotten.

Three more islands came and went as Harmon covered enormous distances. Most of them were too small, or had nothing at all on them, and there were no telltale signs of humans, let alone dragons.

The island after that had people.

He had seen their huts from a distance, and made a show of getting their attention before landing, just so there would be no question of where he’d come from and whether or not he meant them ill. They were conversing rapidly with each other, thankfully speaking a dialect of Inter, and a tall man came to stand in front of the others.

“Are you with her?” asked the man.

“No,” said Harmon. “No, I’m not.” He gave them his best practiced smile. “And I come bearing gifts.”

Harmon was a seasoned dungeoneer, and had plenty of extradimensional storage. A brass ring on his finger had entads inside it, and with those, he was able to produce a table, then on top of that, things he thought they might want or need, starting with food. They were hesitant as he did this, uncertain, until a small girl raced forward, away from her mother’s clutches, to grab a pastry. Once that was done, the rest followed. It was a small community, less than fifty people, but fifty people could feel like a crowd when they were all around you, and Harmon stepped back once they started taking things from the table.

The man who’d greeted him stayed back, regarding the scene.

They were, overall, malnourished, people made small by a lack of food. They were dirty, in a way that came from not having much clean water. Harmon had expected, if they found anyone at all, that there would be some level of poverty, but this was such obvious poverty that he still felt slightly shocked by it. Their clothes were sparse, made from palm fibers, if he had to guess, or some kind of rugged seaweed, with browns and blacks, and adornments of shells.

Harmon made his way over to the man.

“My name is Harmon Overguard,” he said. “I should tell you upfront that I’m a chrononaut, and this day will be undone.”

The man was silent for a moment, then nodded. “I don’t know those words. There’s some magic that will remove the food?”

“No,” said Harmon. This wasn’t something that he was entirely prepared for. “It means … there is some magic that will cause us to have the same conversation twice. You will remember only one of those times. I’m still here to help, but I need to know about the woman who stranded you here.”

“Woman?” the man asked.

“You asked, when I came here, whether I was with her,” said Harmon. He still didn’t have the man’s name, and realized only belatedly that if this man was in his thirties, he would have been born on this island. That would mean that he had never introduced himself to anyone, and never learned any of the social rules of Inter or the wider world — only whatever rules existed in this place.

“She’s not a woman,” said the man. “She’s a beast. A spirit.”

“Do you have a name?” asked Harmon.

The man hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”

“Can I have it?” asked Harmon.

The man looked away for a moment, then back. “Fern,” he said. Harmon immediately felt that the name was probably a false one, but let that slide by.

“Fern, does the woman come here often?” asked Harmon.

“Not since before I was born,” said Fern. “There are stories of her though, and we were told that she would return.”

“Did she come here in living memory?” asked Harmon. “Please, this is important. I can get you anything you’d like, food, clothing, shelter, tools. I can help you move to somewhere else, with —”

The man, ‘Fern’, spat to the side. “We don’t accept your deal.”

Harmon took a step back. “It sounds too much like a deal your ancestors were offered,” he said. “I understand that. The gifts are offered freely. I have — can you read?”

Fern shook his head.

“Then there will be other people, those more equipped to handle this,” said Harmon. “People from Inter, which is a large nation to the south. South-west, actually. But like I said, we’ll have this conversation twice, and you’ll only remember the second time.”

“You can erase memories,” said Fern, eyes narrowed.

“No,” said Harmon. “I mean … not really. It’s different in important ways.” He tried to reorient himself. “I want to know about her, and how your people came to be on this island. I’m willing to do anything in my power to speak with you or someone else, especially someone who knew her, or can give some details about where you originally came from.”

“She last came eighty years ago,” said Fern. “Everyone who has seen her is now dead.”

Harmon winced. That was bad news, but not entirely unexpected. “How many years has it been since your people were dropped here?” he asked.

“One hundred and thirteen years,” said Fern. “And one hundred and thirty-six since the world before that.”

This gave Harmon pause. “The other world, the demiplane, the ancestors of this group were there for twenty-three years?”

Fern nodded slowly, and it occurred to Harmon that the man’s math might be weak.

“Tell me about her,” said Harmon. “What you know about how she worked, how she came here, what she wanted and how it ended.” He was so tempted to say that things would be better, that he would give them everything they needed, that they would be relocated — but for someone who had heard the stories that this man must have heard, those assurances would raise too many alarms rather than provide comfort and security.

Fern looked at the table of food, which had run empty, and Harmon moved over to it to fill it back up. He was trying for familiar foods, but wasn’t entirely sure what these people routinely ate. He guessed fish, but had no idea what the fish of the region were, let alone which of them could be caught by people on this island.

They ate, and talked, and Harmon felt sad that this was probably the best day anyone had had for possibly their entire lives. There were some wounds on some of them, limps and scars that a cleric could easily heal, and the more he watched, the more he felt a burning rage.

“She came with sweetness,” said Fern, who had moved to stand next to Harmon. He’d taken none of the food, Harmon noted. “She promised a new world, a better world, free of the old sufferings. For a time, she held to her word. The deterioration was slow, with minor disputes and broken promises. There were things she could not or would not deliver. People grew homesick. She provided, but couldn’t offer everything they wanted, because some of what they wanted involved other people. People were cooped up. Tensions ran high. Eventually, she opened her mouth and burned down the home of a detractor with flame so hot that the air itself crackled.”

“She killed someone?” asked Harmon.

“No,” said Fern. “Not at first.”

“Later, then?” asked Harmon.

“There were attempts to kill her,” said Fern. “Rebellion. Strife.” He bit his lip. “Those parts of what I was told were always difficult to understand.”

“Civil war,” said Harmon.

“I don’t know what that is,” replied Fern.

“Fighting amongst yourself,” said Harmon.

Fern nodded. “There was more of that, when we were forced to the third world.”

“The third world being this one?” asked Harmon.

Fern nodded. “The first year was good. The second year had a bad harvest.” He looked out over the people, who were now smiling and working on second or third helpings of the fish, vegetables, and everything else Harmon had produced. “She returned to us after half our number were dead, in the third year. She treated it like a punishment for bad behavior. She offered some of us a return. Some accepted, and were never seen again.”

“And others were left here,” said Harmon.

“They were given food, tools, other things,” said Fern. “She returned, from time to time. Sometimes she gave things. Other times she stood in the air and watched.” He turned and gestured at the Barrier Storms, which were an immense wall that took up a third of the horizon. “The Wall pushed out one year, and she returned to shield us. The island has been protected since then.”

Harmon had more questions, but thought it best to wait. He’d conduct interviews with the others, maybe someone who wasn’t the nominal leader of the small group, and then they would move in with the past-watching, as little good as he suspected that would do.

He put out word to his children that the search was over not more than six hours since it had started, and they came to the island in their various ways with portals, bubbles, racing across the water, or in Faith’s case, rising up from the ocean like a goddess of the sea. There was awe from the group of survivors at each of these arrivals, and the children helped to take interviews.

“It’s awful,” said Faith an hour later.

“We’ll fix it,” said Harmon. “Inter is no stranger to refugees.”

“To live like this,” said Faith. “No clerics, no magic, no ectads for heat, water, lighting …”

“They have water ectads,” said Harmon. “More than they need, actually. And they’re tropical, no need for heat, only for shelter from the sun. No winters here. People used to live like this. The tragedy here is that they have no culture of it, no body of knowledge to draw on, and they have no ability to make a choice for themselves.”

“I can’t imagine wanting to live on an island like this,” said Faith. She shook her head.

“You should talk to Alfric when he gets back,” said Harmon. “I think it would appeal to him, at least for a few years. Living by the sweat of his labor, battling against the elements, needing to fight and struggle to survive, even if that meant making nets from palm fibers or however they do it here.”

“We’re saving these people, right?” asked Faith.

“We are,” said Harmon. He had already said that, she just needed to hear it again.

“I see why mom cares so much,” said Faith. “I don’t think I got it before.”

Harmon nodded, but he wasn’t entirely sure that it was true. Ria cared for the people, saw rule-by-dragon as tyranny, and wanted the demiplane to at least have some level of oversight by a democratic society like Inter.

She was also spoiling for a fight, and unfortunately, it was a fight that Harmon wasn’t sure she’d be able to win.

~~~~

“Your father found them,” said Ria. “The lost village. Several undone days later, and we’ve pieced together as much history as possible. They’ll be rescued from there, returned to Inter where their ancestors came from. They were malnourished, living in conditions that we wouldn’t wish on our enemies, without the tools or knowledge to thrive.” She looked at the rest of the party. “Harmon said that they were within spitting distance of the Barrier Storms.”

“I don’t think any of that helps us,” said Alfric.

“It’s proof of wrongdoing,” said Verity. She let out a breath. “I’m extremely impressed that you were able to find anything with so little to work on.”

“Chrononauts are good at that sort of thing,” said Ria. “We can organize a search party and then iterate through that way. Usually we do it with more people, but in this case it was thought better to keep it in the family. Harmon also did well to narrow down the search. At any rate, there was something like a civil war, if you can call it a war when one side has all the power. Tyranny, in short, of exactly the sort you’d expect from someone who’s installed herself as queen.”

“It’s possible she’s changed though, ay?” asked Hannah. “Not to defend her, but she’s not here to defend herself, and I do think people can change.”

“Can dragons?” asked Isra.

“Well, we don’t know enough about them, ay?” asked Hannah.

“I don’t know what I’m going to say to her today,” said Verity. “She said that I should think about what she’d told me, and now I know things that I shouldn’t know. That’s bad, isn’t it?”

“Talk to her then,” said Ria. “See how it goes. I’ll undo the day if you’re not back here safe and sound with a report on how it went.”

Chapter 145 - Allies

Alfric didn’t particularly like how they were doing things. They were running into classic chrononaut problems, largely relating to trust and secondhand information. His mother had made several attempts at fighting Cate, which included the party at various points. They hadn’t managed to actually kill the dragon, nor to get her to reveal herself, though when they had her in a bad position, she did resort to torrents of incredibly hot fire that could burn straight through anything they threw at her. This had all come with mountains of disclosure and caveats that conversations weren’t verbatim, or had passed through a few hands before getting to them.

There were clear, obvious violations of everything that chrononauts were supposed to do. He’d spoken to his mother about it, and she’d disclosed that they’d had the conversation six times before.

“I understand,” she’d said. “It feels like hypocrisy to you. I’m doing all the things that people suspect that we do, killing — attempting to kill — in an undone day because there’s no consequence there, spying, probing. We taught you that it was wrong.”

“The argument being that it’s too important not to do?” asked Alfric.

“She’s not the only dragon,” said Ria. “If there are more of them, hiding away in demiplanes, if they can come out, if they’re older than her —”

“The ethical imperative of disclosure doesn’t apply to your enemies, and not if you’re in conflict with someone,” said Alfric. He wasn’t used to employing sarcasm, and it didn’t come out quite right. “If that’s what other people think about us — if that’s what’s true about us — then we deserve people talking behind our backs about what we do with our power.”

She gave him a sad look. “Do you mean that?” she asked.

“I think we’d be reaping what we sow,” said Alfric. “If you want people to trust you, you need to be trustworthy, and you can’t slip up. You can’t have people saying ‘well I’m glad they’re on our side’ or whatever else.”

“Then I understand if you don’t participate,” said Ria, giving him a nod. “I won’t try to coerce you into killing someone, even if they are a monster with too much power.”

“That’s exactly how people see us,” said Alfric.

“Fine then, a monster who’s using that power in all the wrong ways,” said Ria. “Someone — something — gone rogue.”

“This isn’t just an academic argument,” said Alfric. “I really do think that this is wrong. If we had the backing of the national authorities —”

“If we go for the throat, it will be with someone negotiated, maybe even with pen put to paper,” said Ria. “Your father will talk to people, explain what’s going on, and it’ll all be above board.”

Alfric was skeptical of that, and didn’t really think that ‘pen to paper’ would mollify him, but it was something. It was a bit upsetting that he’d had this conversation with his mother six times and that was the best that she could do, but at least she hadn’t tried to game it out, answering his questions before they were asked. He hoped that she hadn’t planned for that conversation, because if that was as good as she could do, it didn’t say much in her favor.

They were tasked with finding secrets, weaknesses, and allies, and everyone had their own things to do, though some less than others. Alfric wasn’t suited to subterfuge, and while he probably wouldn’t have outright confessed everything to Cate if asked outright, he did think that he would probably end up saying too much if he had any kind of extended conversation with someone.

He saw some of the things the others had talked about, like the food hall, and he had breakfast there, away from the others, trying to get some sense of the place. The food was good and plentiful, but Mizuki was right that there was some sterility to it, something that didn’t feel like a joyous breakfast. It felt perfunctory, he supposed, not like a breakfast that Mizuki had made, which always felt like she’d put effort and care into it. It was an entad meal, after all, and entad meals did feel a bit bland in that way sometimes, but this was the most that Alfric had ever felt that feeling — a feeling of eating something that was devoid of human touch.

He had, once upon a time, thought that he was going to be a spy, and it wasn’t until having this experience that he’d realized what a terrible spy he would be. He wasn’t good at lying, didn’t like lying, and preferred everything to be on the level. He’d only really ever been attracted to the spy game because it had seemed dangerous and interesting, a world that actually had some frontier to it. If there was one thing that all Alfric’s dreams had in common it was that, whether it was being a sailor, explorer, spy, or yes, dungeoneer.

Well, the demiplane had exactly what he’d been wanting all along. He had some excuse to be there: if there was one place he thought he might have some insights, it was the Wildlands. When someone mentioned at breakfast that a small group was going out and was looking for more people, he decided that he would go with them, not just to see the Wildlands again, but to see what they had to say. They were also people who were spending time away from the village and the palace, which meant less chance of them knowing that he didn’t fit in.

The meeting place was right at the edge of the Wildlands, right along the same path that Alfric had taken his first time. Alfric wasn’t entirely sure how big the group would be, but he hoped that it would be more than five, and more than a party. Dungeons had their limits, but the Wildlands didn’t, and he thought he would like to see how it was different with more.

There were only two others when he got there, a solemn girl with red hair and a few too many knives strapped to her person, and a lanky boy with spectacles sitting on top of a large pack.

“You’re coming out to the Wildlands with us?” asked the girl as he approached.

“If that’s alright,” said Alfric. “Someone at breakfast mentioned that you were looking for more people. Will it just be the three of us?”

“You’re early,” the girl said. She was looking at him. “A bit under-equipped though.”

Alfric held a hand out to the side and a pack appeared in it.

“Ah,” she said.

“Any way you could carry this?” the boy asked, standing up from his pack.

“Of course,” said Alfric. His pack disappeared and he stepped over to the other boy’s pack, whisking it away with a touch. The extradimensional storage was from an entad borrowed from the family vault, among those taken in by Ria. He felt slightly unclean about using it, given that he hadn’t earned it himself.

“Will we have a full party?” asked Alfric. “I’m only curious.”

“It’s whoever shows up,” said the girl. “Only one more confirmed.” She held out her hand. “Gelica.”

“Alfric,” he replied, shaking her hand.

“Bosmo,” said the boy, waving slightly and standing back, clearly not in the mood for a handshake.

“Have you been in the Wildlands before?” asked Gelica.

“Just once,” said Alfric, which was true for a given perspective on time. He only had firsthand memories of one time, but his mother had told him of other times he’d gone, and what he had reported to her.

“A good experience, if you’re doing it again?” asked Bosmo. Maybe it was the spectacles, but he looked like he wasn’t cut out for a hike through the woods. He was dressed for it, but that only made him look less prepared, somehow.

“Wonderful,” said Alfric. “Though I didn’t have any entads to show for it.”

“They’re not really the point,” said Gelica. “The village and the palace have everything a person needs already.”

“Er,” said Alfric. “But Bosmo didn’t have something to carry his pack?”

“Everyone will always have a need of some sort,” said Bosmo. “So there will always be problems for entads to solve, especially since they solve them so incompletely sometimes.”

“There’s our fearless leader,” said Gelica, nodding down the road.

Alfric turned and looked. It was Kell.

Either Kell was cool as a cucumber, or had already seen and recognized Alfric, but either way, he didn’t react at all. When he reached their small group, he pulled up short. “You’re coming with us?” he asked.

“I am,” said Alfric. “If that’s alright with you.”

“It’s fine,” said Kell. He looked at Gelica. “Do we have any more coming?”

“Not that I know of,” she replied. She moved over to him and slipped her hand into his, standing close to him. “It’s still early.”

“Less early, now,” said Bosmo.

“We’ll give it five minutes,” said Kell. “I think in the future, we’ll have to do things differently if we want to attract a good core of people. There’s no reason to have a group this small, not that it’s been hindering us.”

“I’m just glad I’m not the third wheel,” said Bosmo with a little laugh.

“Sorry, introductions,” said Gelica. “Alfric, this is Kell, Kell, this is Alfric.”

“We’ve met, actually,” said Alfric.

“Kell and I are engaged,” said Gelica. “Not that we’ve known each other all that long.”

“The Cairbre fashion, I’m familiar with it,” said Alfric.

“I think we might be the first wedding in the demiplane,” said Gelica. “Which would be nice.”

“I think there have to be some star-crossed lovers around here somewhere,” said Kell, giving a little laugh. “Though maybe that’s less common than all the stories would have us believe.”

“It’s usually a long engagement, isn’t it?” asked Alfric. He was looking at the place where Gelica had attached herself to Kell.

“Gelica isn’t actually from Cairbre,” said Kell. “So this is more a borrowed tradition than a cultural assumption. We can do things however we’d like.”

“I’d say that it’s been going very well,” said Gelica. She gave Kell’s arm a squeeze.

“I really don’t think anyone else is coming,” said Bosmo. “We’d be able to see them by now.”

“I can fly,” said Alfric. “Do you want me to go look?”

“No need,” said Kell. “This is just a one day trip. If they miss it because they’re late, they can just catch the next one.”

“Do people not want to go?” asked Alfric. “I would think it would be more popular.”

Kell snorted at that. “They equate it to dungeons, which it shares some similarities with,” he said. “So they think it’s a reckless thing that only people in hard times would do, or that you’d only do for wealth, and without the warp, they think it’s even more dangerous. Once you’ve been out a few times, you realize that it’s nothing like that.”

“It’s safe?” asked Alfric.

“Not entirely,” said Kell. “And not for longer trips. But I was a dungeoneer before this, and got to know the dungeons well enough. Those were dangerous in an immediate way, the danger was essentially the entire experience.”

Alfric didn’t know whether or not they were pretending that they weren’t acquintances. He didn’t like the deception, especially if it was being perpetrated against a woman Kell was possibly going to marry — but maybe she knew too, and it was only Bosmo they were keeping in the dark.

“Is a day long enough to get anywhere interesting?” asked Alfric.

For the first time, Kell smiled. “That all depends upon how we do it.”

It wasn’t long after that they started walking. Alfric tried not to watch Kell too much. They really didn’t know each other, and he felt as though he knew Kell more as Mizuki’s friend than through any interaction they’d ever had together. Mizuki didn’t talk about him much though, except in passing, and as much as he cared for Mizuki, getting a feel for someone else through what Mizuki chose to mention about them seemed like a bad idea.

“So what did you do, before this?” asked Bosmo. They had fallen in together while they walked.

“I was a dungeoneer,” said Alfric. “At least, that’s what I thought I was. We didn’t really do enough dungeons that I was comfortable with the title.” He’d been a dungeoneer in spirit, anyway. With Verity charging the dungeons up with more power, it was still an open question when and how they would go back to it.

“Oh, interesting,” said Bosmo. “I was a politician.”

Alfric reacted to that with real surprise. “A … politician?” he asked.

“Political theorist, mostly,” said Bosmo. “Though I had a position in Dondrian as censusmaster of one of the less populous hexes, and took a stipend for that, most of the actual work was in understanding voting trends and making strategies to ensure that certain candidates won, myself among them. I was fairly good at it, actually.”

“You’re going to have to mention it,” said Gelica, who was walking side-by-side with Kell, ahead of them.

“There was a scandal,” said Bosmo. “I suggested — only suggested, mind you — that Inter had an opportunity to take one of Kiromo’s provinces with a re-pledge. And of course those remarks would have died quietly, but they were picked up by a newspaper, and because it was a slow day, it had a good position in the paper, and I’m sure you can imagine how it went from there. I very quickly became a person of ill repute, cast off by everyone who had once supported me, and told that if I wanted to help, it would need to be from the shadows.”

“Which is when Cate approached you,” said Alfric.

“Just so,” said Bosmo. “She understood that I hadn’t been talking about war, or something that would lead to war, I was only observing that Kiromo is a country of discontent, and certain provinces are ripe for a change in how they pledge. Actually making that happen … I had some thoughts on what it would take, how to budget it, the ways we’d sneak people in and engage in a different sort of war, a war where democracy and public opinion were the tools we employed, but I had never actually said we should do it. I’d certainly never put any plans in motion, only put them on paper.”

“But you did think that it was something Inter should do,” said Kell. His voice was mild.

“Well yes, I did,” said Bosmo. “But I had plausible deniability in the matter. That’s important.”

“Is it?” asked Alfric. “I guess I really wouldn’t know.”

“It shows that I’m not committed,” said Bosmo. “It means that I know which way the wind blows. If I’d cast off all caution and decorum, if I was actually advocating it rather than laying down the groundwork, that would be quite a different thing.”

“And Cate … wanted you to do a similar thing here?” asked Alfric.

“She never asked,” said Bosmo. “I have been trying to take the pulse, but it’s been very different, and of course we’re not in a hex, so we don’t have a vote, and there are no positions except whatever Cate actually is. I think there’s some argument that one of the things people want most is for there to be more structure in that regard, but she hasn’t asked me, and I haven’t spoken to her since my first day here, which was more than a month ago.”

“He’s off into the Wildlands because there are people living out here,” said Gelica.

“And some not-people who seem to have lived out here,” said Kell.

“The empty villages?” asked Alfric.

“They’re the best place to find entads,” said Kell. “And even then, they’re really not that good. We’ve been hoping to find a city, but it’s not likely without a multi-day trip.”

They were moving through woods, still along a path, though they were well into the Wildlands by that point. The background seemed to be shifting less than Alfric recalled from his previous trip, no mountains in the distance disappearing or shifting around, though he was moving slower. If it worked off observation, which it seemed to, then a group of people should have less of those shifts, he thought.

“You can coerce a city into being?” asked Alfric.

“There’s a principle of self-consistency,” said Bosmo. “It starts from the core of the palace and the surrounding stable area, and everything after that needs to plausibly be right next door. It’s woodlands, so everything in the Wildlands close to the hub will also be woodlands, or a place that can be next to woodlands. A river’s not just going to stop, you’ll reach the terminus, usually a sea or ocean, or you’ll reach the headwaters.”

“It’s the same with cities,” said Kell. “There are maybe a thousand people between the village and the palace, or something like that, and no major roads in or out, which means that they’re probably not close to a major city or in a populated area of the world. That’s what we think, at least. So to get to a city, you need to get to a place that wouldn’t be connected to the palace, or would be connected by a different road, or something like that.”

“But there are cities?” asked Alfric. “Cities without any people?”

“Nothing like bastlefolk,” said Gelica with a shrug. “Which is a bit of a shame.”

“I think it’s better that we don’t have people who only show up for as long as we look at them,” said Kell. “It would make me feel awkward about walking the Wildlands.”

Alfric agreed with that. The bastlefolk had made him feel awkward about the dungeons sometimes, even with the assurance that they were dungeon mad and typically brainless, the exceptions so rare that you could forgive yourself for not thinking about them. Here, with everything more coherent, less prone to errors, and no dungeon madness, the idea of there being real people was horrifying.

“How does it work?” asked Alfric. “The Wildlands?”

“We don’t know,” said Bosmo. “Cate’s been keeping mum. Which is another thing that people don’t really like. It’s not clear whether she knows and isn’t saying, or whether she’s just as clueless as we are.”

“With her talking about stabilizers, I think it’s pretty clear that she knows much more than she’s letting on,” said Kell. “Which is her prerogative. Personally, I’m hoping we can find the principles before she tells us.”

“Kell likes to know things,” said Gelica. “But to know them without being told.” She squeezed Kell’s hand and gave Alfric a smile.

They continued on until the road reached a small, empty village, then broke apart to search for anything worthwhile. Kell had a small piece of glass for each of them, a construct he’d created which would allow them to see magic, and they went their separate ways for a moment. It was a small village, maybe sized for a hundred people all told, the kind of place that would be labeled a ‘Point’ in central Inter if it had no other distinguishing features. There was a statue in the center carved from marble, but this seemed to be the terminus of the road.

The feeling of a place that had been only recently abandoned was as haunting as it had been when Alfric had seen it before, and having other people around didn’t feel like it helped all that much. The biggest difference between this and exploring a dungeon, other than the relative lack of danger, was that everything felt more real — was more real, more consistent, more like it was part of a whole, even if it hadn’t existed before they’d come here, and wouldn’t exist once they left.

Alfric was startled by motion, but instead of a monster, what came out of the bedroom he’d been near was a mid-sized dog with a golden coat of fur and too many ears. His legs were longer than a dog’s, but other than that, he could have been mistaken for a normal dog.

“Hello,” said Alfric.

The dog barked once, then circled Alfric and sat down.

“Were you — are you someone’s pet?” he asked.

The dog wagged its tail and panted slightly, just sitting there. When Alfric made to leave, the dog followed behind him.

“You got a pet?” asked Kell once they’d regrouped. He was holding a sword in his hand, and Gelica seemed to have found a cloak, both magical once Alfric lifted up his eyepiece.

“I don’t really want a pet,” said Alfric, though the dog had followed him. He wondered whether he should feed it, but he felt as though if he did, then it would never stop following him.

“I came up empty,” said Bosmo.

“These are probably worthless,” said Kell. “We’ll bring them back and get them checked though. A sword is probably too violent to see any use, but the cloak might be good. We’ll pack them up.”

“I was going to wear this,” said Gelica, wrapping the cloak around herself. It was blue with silver trim, finely made, and wearable as it was even if the magic turned out to be nothing.

“If I leave this dog, will it just disappear?” asked Alfric, looking down at the dog.

“Yes,” said Bosmo. “We tested that.”

“Ah,” said Alfric. “But if it comes into the village with me … it stays alive? Even if no one is looking at it?”

“It stays real,” said Kell. “All things do. Otherwise the entads we bring in would vanish.”

Alfric looked at the dog again. “Shame there’s only one of him. Seems like it would be lonely.”

“We’re at the end of easy travel,” said Kell. “If you don’t want him, it should be easy to leave him behind. I think we’ll head for a mountain, cross some rough terrain, and hopefully find something worth the trip before we have to head back.” He took out a sack and slipped the sword into it — the sword was longer than the sack but swallowed up easily — then pulled out a long contraption with two thick wheels set with one in front of the other, which he set on the ground. It had a seat between the wheels, and handlebars, like a wheelbarrow. Following that, there were a handful of rings.

“Er,” said Alfric. “What’s that?”

“Transport,” said Kell. He mounted the vehicle, as that’s clearly what it was, and as he did, the ground around him flattened out. Gelica wasted no time in hopping on with him, wrapping her hands around his waist. Bosmo took a ring, and Kell offered one to Alfric. “If we get too far apart, which we very quickly will, this will surround you with a bubble and pull you behind me. I found it two trips ago.”

Alfric took the ring and slipped it on, feeling somewhat skeptical. “Do you have one for the dog?”

“You want to keep it?” asked Kell. “You didn’t seem that interested in it.”

Alfric looked at the dog, which was sitting by his side, as though listening to the conversation.

“I’ll take it with us, yes,” said Alfric, though he really wasn’t sure about it. It seemed earnest and friendly in an unnatural way, though earnest friendliness was, in Alfric’s opinion, the best feature of any dog.

It took some time to affix the ring to the dog’s paw, helped somewhat by the knuckles that were slightly undoglike. For its part, the dog sat patiently while Alfric figured it out, after first having attempted to shake his hand.

When that was done, Kell leaned forward on his contraption, and the vehicle began to roll forward, slowly at first and then with more speed. The ground flattened around it and in front of it, making a path for him, crushing bushes and grasses flat. Once he was ten yards away, shimmering bubbles formed around Alfric, Bosmo, and the dog, and then floated up into the air, trailing after Kell at the same approximate speed.

It was an interesting way to travel, and he braced himself for impact against a tree a few times until realizing that the bubble was protective, and would bounce him off harmlessly without him being able to feel it. Alfric was weightless inside the bubble, floating, and eventually worked out how to affix himself in place so he didn’t turn upside down.

They were moving quickly, but the trip somehow still felt slow, perhaps because Alfric was having no part in it. He’d at first thought that Kell was going in a straight line, but there seemed to be some corrections as he went, perhaps based on the horizon. At a certain point, they were speeding toward the water, and Alfric braced again, but the two-wheeled thing went out over the water with no problem, flattening the waves down to a glossy surface.

Gelica clung to Kell, resting her head against his shoulder as her hair whipped behind her.

They rounded a mountain, which took at least an hour, even going as fast as they were. It was faster than Alfric’s board, which left him with a sense of unease. If he was stranded out there, he didn’t know whether he would be able to get back to the house in time. He could communicate through the party channel, but that still felt vulnerable since they knew Cate had a way to capture it.

“Mushrooms,” said Kell, and when Alfric looked, he saw them, great big ones all around the forest they were moving through, as big as dinner plates. In one place he saw one so tall that it was standing among the trees, the mushy stalk having veins of woody material to support it.

Kell’s voice had been surprisingly clear, and Alfric wondered whether they could have been talking to each other this entire time.

“What are we looking for?” asked Alfric.

“Something interesting,” said Kell. His voice was wind-whipped.

Kell stopped the vehicle not long after they’d rounded the mountain. The trees and over-large mushrooms had fallen away, leaving scrubland, and across it walked large creatures the size of elephants whose details were obscured with long, glossy hair. Just beyond them was a crystal spire surrounded by trees that had been planted at regular intervals, their shapes speaking to a careful gardener who’d pruned both branches and leaves to get a desired uniformity.

“There,” said Kell, letting out a breath. His hair was wild from the journey. “Something interesting.”

“I think I’m taking the ring next time,” said Gelica. She’d produced a brush from somewhere and was getting the tangles out.

“We’ll get better transport, if we keep doing this,” said Kell. “Better everything.”

“I’m not so sure that’s good,” said Bosmo. He looked at Alfric. “Can I have my pack, please?”

Alfric produced it, and Bosmo drank almost an entire waterskin.

“Why wouldn’t it be good?” asked Alfric after he was finished.

“I want to understand the Wildlands because people are going to come live out here,” said Bosmo. “It’s a refuge from Cate’s control, and it seems inevitable, even if just because of the demographics of who came here. But if we keep getting better and better transport, that will mean that everywhere is ten minutes from the capital, and there won’t really be a release valve except by mutual agreement.”

“Ah,” said Alfric. “So you didn’t just want to see the Wildlands?”

“I did,” said Bosmo. “Do. But I also wanted to get a handle on things. I think Cate picked me for a reason, and part of that reason was understanding people and how they vote, even if it’s how they vote with their feet.”

“Come,” said Kell. “Let’s go.”

They walked the rest of the way to the spire, which had no roads or other obvious transportation away from it. The interior had a cavernous area with a staircase that spiraled around the inside wall, at least ten stories, and was empty save for a statue of two people, one clutching the other. They had long ears and bushy hair, not human, and they were three fingered. A plaque in two foreign languages, different scripts side by side, sat at the base of the statue.

“A monument then,” said Kell. “That’s a bit disappointing.”

“I want to go to the top,” said Gelica. “There’s got to be a great view. Plus it should let us see far enough that if we blink, the whole view will change.”

“We could lock in a new location, if we’re careful,” said Bosmo.

“I’m staying down here,” said Kell. “I was hoping to talk with Alfric for a bit, privately.”

That got them some looks, but the other two nodded, and went up the stairs together.

Kell walked outside the spire, and Alfric followed.

“I didn’t know you’d be the leader,” said Alfric. “I had thought there would be more people. We don’t want to step on your toes.”

“That’s not what Mizuki said,” Kell replied. “She said you want to uncover major crimes, or something like that, and get Inter involved, which feels exactly like stepping on my toes.”

“Fair,” said Alfric. “Still, we don’t need to involve you.”

“You got involved because of me,” said Kell. “You watched the past, followed me, then snuck in. Right?”

“Yes,” said Alfric. “This is bigger than just you though.”

“I know that,” said Kell. He had his hands folded across his chest. “Have you found anything since yesterday?”

“I’d rather keep it to myself, if it’s all the same to you,” said Alfric. “The less people know, the better the chance that we can keep Cate in the dark until it’s time to make a move, if it ever is.”

Kell pursed his lips. “I like this place. I like the Wildlands.”

“I do too,” said Alfric. “I wish that I could do this, rather than dungeons, even if the entads aren’t coming fast and thick.” He gestured to the hairy creatures, which were close enough that they hadn’t disappeared when they were out of sight. “I like being able to see a creature like that in what seems like its natural habitat.”

“Not trying to kill us,” said Kell.

“Did I ever tell you that you were an alternate for the dungeoneering party?” Alfric asked. “I do think in some other world, we could have gotten along. I don’t know who you’d be in for, but it could have been a good party.”

“Maybe,” said Kell.

There was something between them, something almost like animosity, and he didn’t really know where it was coming from. Alfric would have loved to bury the hatchet, if only he knew where the hatchet was. He’d never been friends with Kell, had never even really thought about Kell all that much, but he didn’t dislike Kell, not really. There didn’t seem like there was much to dislike, aside from him being a bit reckless with the solo dungeons and joining up with Vertex when Alfric thought that was a bad idea. And of course going to a demiplane seemed bad to Alfric in some hard to identify way, as did the impulsive engagement. There was still some friction between them, an unplaceable sourness.

“I told Mizuki that if you had something on Cate, on the demiplane, I would help,” said Kell. “You don’t think it’s risen to that level though?”

“No,” said Alfric. “I’ll know more tomorrow. Or … today, I guess.”

“You’re undoing this?” asked Kell, raising an eyebrow.

Alfric nodded. “Probably. It’s too precarious and unknown to let a day go through the first time. Sorry.”

“So it’s all pointless, except for you,” said Kell, looking out at the scrubland. He let out a sigh. “Alright.”

“I can pass a message on to you, if you’d like,” said Alfric.

“No,” said Kell. “It’s fine.” He paused. “You and Mizuki … are you just not interested?”

Alfric didn’t like the question, in part because it felt like it was only coming because Kell thought the day would be undone.

“I think being interested isn’t the best reason to do something,” said Alfric. “If we weren’t in a party together, if we weren’t living in the same house, I think it would be smarter to try it out. But my last relationship, my only one, was with Lola, and when it fell apart, it destroyed my life.”

“She’s smitten with you,” said Kell. “I know you know that, because you’re not oblivious.” He shook his head. “It was so painful seeing you together sometimes,” he said. “She likes you, you like her, but for whatever reason — fear of failure, whatever — it wasn’t happening. You, saying ‘no thank you’, when it was all I wanted.”

“Ah,” said Alfric. “I … hadn’t realized that was how you felt about me.”

“I don’t want to talk about this with you,” said Kell. “I’m talking to you now because I don’t want to talk about it on some other day that I’ll actually remember. It would be better, for me, if you got together, but I don’t think that you’d ever do that on my account. Knowing that at least she had someone would be helpful for me.” He let out a breath.

“How much does Gelica know?” asked Alfric.

“Almost nothing,” replied Kell. “I should probably tell her, but I don’t know when the right time would be.”

“Soon,” said Alfric.

“I don’t suppose your code of ethics would let me test it out on an undone day?” asked Kell.

“Not really, no,” said Alfric. “But I’ve been running up against the limits of what I’m supposed to do for the past few days.” He hesitated. “I wish I could help you.”

Kell waved a hand. “I have my own problems. I’ll do my best to solve them on my own.” He let out a breath. “You know, part of me hopes that Cate really does have something that you can use as cause for a war with her, because then I’d have something more important to think about.” He gave Alfric a weak smile. “I think you’re a good man. I wish that all these feelings weren’t getting in the way. Maybe we would have made a good team.”

Alfric nodded slowly.

They heard a shout from the top of the spire, and looked up to see a waving hand.

“We should go join them,” said Kell. “We have some time, anyway, before all this goes away.”

Alfric wondered whether Kell was referring to the Wildlands disposing of things when no one was looking, the day being undone, or the end of the demiplane itself, but he didn’t ask, because it was very possible the answer was all three.

Chapter 146 - Meetings

“You need to be more circumspect,” Ria told Verity. “Cagey with what you know, and how you know it. You came back the last two times, and we’re probably going to have to keep the day if you come back again, just because we’re running low on days. Cool and imperious does seem to be the way to play it. She’s serious about wanting to have it go right this time, and seems willing to say that she’d made mistakes in the past, but if you press too hard, you’re likely to run into trouble.”

“Alright,” said Verity. “But you’re not really learning anything from this anymore, right?”

“We’re learning some,” said Ria. “Not as much as I would like, which is why we have to go into the next day. If we want to end this peacefully, which we do, then we need to find some kind of leverage for concessions. What would be ideal would be a permanent monitoring station of some kind, but it’s not like a normal demiplane, because the core is, apparently, inside her. That means entry would be through her say-so every time, and obviously that’s a non-starter if we want to make sure that she’s not, for example, dropping a bunch of people off to starve on an island.”

There was a fast, clipped way that Ria spoke sometimes, which made Verity feel like it was something rehearsed, a formality to be gone through, a conversation that was, for her, perfunctory. Alfric had never made her feel that way about undone days, though he hadn’t had so many of them with her.

The coaching felt, to Verity, like the rehearsals that her mother had put her through before important engagements. They had sat at the family dinner table together, talking as though to their guests, running drills, thinking through scenarios. Her mother had felt it vital that Verity knew, at a minimum, the names of everyone who’d be at any given function, their business interests, their professed hobbies, and their relations, as well as whether they had children or marital interests. The memorization required for the task was extreme, especially when Verity was meant to be memorizing music sheets at the same time. As she’d grown older, she’d spent less and less of her time on the social instructions her mother had given, much to her mother’s bitter disappointment.

Verity knew that it wasn’t fair to have those feelings projected onto Ria, but she also felt it wasn’t entirely fair that she be subjected to all this. Under better circumstances, it would be someone else who was dealing with Cate, and Verity would be in the village, doing something else. Alas, it was not to be. She’d commiserated with Isra about it.

“Do you think that I want to be out in the woods, listening to the plants and animals? Not seeing through their eyes, mind you, but getting secondhand information?” she asked.

“That does seem a bit rubbish,” said Verity. “Not being able to stretch your wings.”

They were laying together in one of the nested extradimensional layers, separated from the others by an entad. Not ‘together’, but side by side, elbows touching every now and then. Verity still held a candle, a large and bright one that was probably obvious to everyone, and was trying to respect that Isra was doing her best to move on, or at least have some breathing room. The last thing Verity wanted was to cling to a relationship that was now in the past. She didn’t want to become Kell.

“What would you do, in your ideal world?” asked Isra. “How would you take down the dragon?”

“I’m not sure she needs to be taken down,” said Verity. “I really would prefer to get her side of the story, and not her side of the story as filtered through Ria.”

“You think it’s excusable somehow?” asked Isra.

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “Maybe? Not excusable, but maybe not a reflection on this current project. She said it was a mistake.”

“She said it was a mistake, then did nothing to correct it,” said Isra. “She left those people there on that island, only coming to give them aid later, and never bringing them back to wherever she got them from.”

“I know,” said Verity. She wished that she hadn’t known, not because she wanted to turn away from the truth, but because knowing would mean that any future conversation she had with Cate would be tainted by the knowledge. Verity would have to act ignorant, rather than just being ignorant. “So in your ideal world, how would you be using your skills, if it’s not skulking about in the woods?”

“That’s an excellent question,” said Isra. “You go first.”

“Playing music,” said Verity, almost immediately. “I would somehow save the day through the power of song. Cate would hear my lyrics and think ‘oh, I guess I should listen to you’.” Verity wasn’t even sure that would work, or what specific changes she wished would be made. She didn’t think that the government of Inter really needed to be able to come and go as they pleased, she just wanted to make sure that there was a safe way home for the people who didn’t want to stay, and she wanted some assurance that Cate wouldn’t burn people alive with dragonfire.

“I think I would hunt,” said Isra. “Some kind of proper hunting.”

“Hunting … Cate?” asked Verity.

“No, she’s a person,” said Isra. “Hunting as in … stalking through the woods, in my element, bow in hand, on the trail.” She looked over at Verity. “That sort of thing.”

“That does sound better than what you’re doing now,” said Verity.

“On the plus side, I did make a friend,” said Isra. “Unfortunately, I don’t think he’s going to be a friend once we finish things here, and I’m not staying in the demiplane a moment longer than I have to.”

“I actually quite like it,” said Verity.

“You get to move around freely,” said Isra. “Or mostly freely.”

“I wouldn’t call what we’ve been doing free movement,” said Verity. “I’m just being a spy, very badly.”

“Well, good luck with it,” said Isra. “Come back in one piece.” She reached over and gave Verity’s hand a squeeze.

When Verity made her way to the palace, she was thinking about that moment, and what it meant, if anything. She was also thinking about Isra’s new druid friend, who she’d apparently spent the better part of the day with.

She shook those thoughts off once she was inside the palace walls, and spent some time moving through the now-familiar halls, looking for Cate. She wasn’t looking forward to the conversation, not even a little bit.

She eventually found Cate in the palace bathhouse, a large room with a pool in the center and places for people to sit and steam on the sides. Cate was, as before, surrounded by people, though it was less structured this time, and some of them were talking amongst themselves. Cate was partially nude, as some of the people in the bathhouse were, draped with white towels that didn’t cover everything. Verity felt herself blushing and tried not to stare, tried to treat it as though it was as uninteresting as a textbook, but it was one of those things that was difficult to reframe in her mind.

Cate excused herself when she saw Verity, which Verity was thankful for. She found the idea of getting naked mortifying, but she’d have done it if it needed to be done. Instead, Cate dressed herself with a flourish, the clothes coming as if from nowhere, and after brief goodbyes to the others, they were walking down the hallway together.

“I’m hoping you had time to think?” asked Cate as they walked. “You needn’t have been so prompt in getting back to me.”

“I know,” said Verity. “But I think I have some things that might be worth saying.”

“Excellent,” said Cate.

“I was discreet,” said Verity, which was a lie, and didn’t really need to be said, but she was nervous, and none of the preparation she’d done with Ria seemed like it was helping.

“I appreciate that,” said Cate, which made Verity feel worse.

They went through the library, to the same office room with its kaleidoscope windows. Verity had hoped that they would be different, less distracting, but Cate had made no changes in the intervening day.

“Now then,” said Cate. “What thoughts do you have?”

Verity folded her hands in her lap. She felt awkward, exposed, and a bit out of sorts. “I think you do yourself a disservice with the half-truths,” she said. “To answer a question but not answer it fully is to give people room to think you’re hiding something, even if you’re not. Letting people draw their own conclusions is one thing, but what you’ve been doing is just giving rope to hang yourself with. To say that you’re not human, to let people find their own interpretation — you’re a dragon, right?”

Cate watched Verity for a moment, then slowly nodded.

“Alright,” said Verity. She had already known that would be the answer, since she’d heard her own reports from the undone days. “That raises questions, but at least if you say it first instead of leading people to the conclusion, you can answer those questions in the next breath. You can say that you’re a dragon, but the human understanding of what a dragon is doesn’t really match the reality. Do you see how that would be better?”

“I do,” said Cate. “It goes against my nature, but I do see it.”

“And I would like to know how dragons are different from what I might expect,” said Verity. “I went to the museum in Dondrian and saw their dragon there, and read through what there was to read, but I’m sure that some of it is wrong, because there was almost nothing mentioned about demiplanes, or shapeshifting, or … anything.”

Ria had warned that Cate would be cagey — was simply cagey, as a person, maybe — but how it came off was that she was hiding things even when trying to be forthright.

“And you want those answers … now?” asked Cate.

“You can take your time,” said Verity. “You were raised in secrecy, have lived a private life, it’s not my place to push you — but if you tell people that you’re something that has a name, and they guess you’re a dragon, it’s better to tell them at the same time that you aren’t going to eat them, that you won’t burn them to death.”

The richness of nearly everything in the demiplane was stunning, but the office in particular seemed like it had taken thousands of hours of dedicated labor from skilled craftsmen. The windows whose panes each showed a different area were magical and impressive, but the window frames were carved with characters cavorting around oversized leaves and plants, and the rug was patterned exactly so it could match the footprint of the desk, and the desk itself was a huge, impressive thing of hard wood that had been polished to perfection.

Cate was frowning. “Those are the things they’d think?”

“They would think of the implied power, yes,” said Verity. “Sorry, have you been to the museum in Dondrian? Have you seen the wingspan of the dragon they have there?” This was something she hadn’t gone over with Ria, either because it wasn’t important, or possibly because she’d never asked it before.

“I have been to see it, yes,” said Cate. “My feelings are complicated. It’s an impressive specimen, and it’s a central part of the largest museum in the largest city in the world, which is a better end than most people could ever ask for, a monument to the might and power of a dragon. But there’s something in the regal viciousness they use to frame it that displeases me. It’s what people will think of, if I say that I am a dragon.” She gave a small shiver. “It still feels odd to say it after keeping silent for so long.”

“Your true form,” said Verity. “How, ah, large are you?”

“I’ll let you see sometime, though not today,” said Cate. “I don’t know whether you’ll find my wingspan impressive or disappointing, having seen the one they have in the museum.”

“And you can breathe fire,” said Verity.

Cate gave a slow nod. “I would prefer that people not think about that.”

“It’s what they’ll think about,” said Verity. “I’m sorry.” She was sorry. Verity knew what it was like for people to focus entirely on one specific thing they knew about you, and no, being Chosen of Xuphin wasn’t exactly equivalent to being a dragon in human guise, but it was parallel.

“I think you should help me reveal myself,” said Cate. She had a far-off look.

“Sorry, what?” asked Verity. Ria had made no mention of anything like that.

“I’d like to commission a song,” said Cate, focus snapping to Verity. “A song whose message is that I am a dragon, and not to be feared on that score. Something that smooths out the edges.”

“I — I’m not a songwriter,” said Verity.

“You’ve written songs, and performed them for an audience,” said Cate.

“That’s not the same thing,” said Verity. She was feeling slightly desperate. “I’ve never been commissioned to write a song, never finished a commission — I don’t think that I would be capable of doing it.”

“Then I’ll commission you to try, and if I hear the song, and we agree that you’ve come up short, we can be the only two that need to hear it,” said Cate. “Though I suppose ‘commission’ is the wrong word, since we don’t have money here.”

“I think this is what people worry about,” said Verity. “That you’ll ask for things, and expect them done.”

There was dead silence in the office, a moment of pure tension, and Verity really did think that she’d be roasted alive, if just for a moment. She couldn’t get the words out to undo the damage she’d done, only sat there with her mouth hung open.

“You are right, of course,” said Cate, sighing as though there had been no moment of shock or anger. They both deflated slightly. “Many of the people I’ve asked to come to this place, I’ve asked with the intent that they serve a role, but I’ve made the mistake of having no lever to move them with. I didn’t want a world of levers, you see. It seems to me that there are levers all over the place in Inter, which make things unseemly. But then those matters I can’t deal with myself, or don’t want to deal with — I’m not talking about songs, but in general, issues like clerical healing or policing the inhabitants — it’s too easy for them to be pushed off to the side.”

It seemed, to Verity, like a bald admission that this second attempt at a colony already had its own flaws. “If you make labor a condition of people staying here, I think almost all of them would,” she said. “But we don’t really know what happens if we want out.”

“There is no getting out,” said Cate. She sat up slightly. “That was one of your questions, was it? Well I have said, always, that the answer is that moving to this place is forever. Forever is a word I take seriously. If people could leave, they would slowly drain away, and they would follow each other, leaving as the place felt more empty, each loss compounding.”

“Meaning,” said Verity slowly. “That you wouldn’t do as you’d done before, put them on an island, they would just be … here? With the rest of us?”

“Off in the Wildlands, which have more than enough room for people who dislike our society so much,” said Cate. She huffed slightly. “Yes. I admit that it’s a problem, but slowly bleeding away people needs to be prevented as much as it can be.”

“Because it’s hard to get people to come in,” said Verity. “Or, not hard, because there are thousands that would jump at the chance to be here in a place where they don’t have to work, can pursue their passions, and be free from their obligations. It would be hard because you want to maintain your secrecy and keep this place private.”

“It’s not the first time I’ve heard a suggestion that I open the gates,” said Cate.

“You have, ah, advisors?” asked Verity. “Others who know more of the truth?” She knew that Cate did, because Hannah had already spoken to one of them.

“I do,” said Cate. She didn’t elaborate.

Verity’s view of Cate was changing. She had known most of what Cate was saying, having heard it through Ria, but at least some of the conclusions she was drawing from the actual conversation itself weren’t things she’d been told. Cate seemed more childish in this light, the secrecy less that of an old woman who had seen too many atrocities and more that of a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

That would have been fine, save for the fact that Cate had enormous amounts of power and no accountability. The childishness made her more threatening, not less.

“And you’ve ignored their advice,” said Verity, slowly, as though it was a question.

“Power ultimately rests with me,” said Cate. “But no, I didn’t, there are only certain concessions that I’m not willing to make. To become a government-in-fact, one which interfaces with other governments, those with incredible amounts of power and resources, cannot be stomached.”

“I see,” said Verity. She sat still in her chair.

“But you wish to press the point, yes?” asked Cate. “I do like that about you.”

“I don’t want to press the point,” said Verity. “But there’s a point there that wants pressing.”

“Press on then,” said Cate. She had the same imperious pose as before, serene and a bit haughty.

“There’s no release from the pressure,” said Verity. “For myself … my mother put enormous pressure on me, it’s the entire reason that I came here, and I tried to escape it in various ways, to talk with my mother about what I didn’t like and get her to agree to … well, anything, really, fewer social engagements, less practice on the lute, anything. She didn’t relent. She didn’t give me space. But if you build up pressure high enough, if there’s no vent, something is going to give. In my case, it was something beyond the bounds of what my mother had expected of me. I ran away from home and hid myself somewhere she couldn’t find me.”

“And you think that’s what will happen here?” asked Cate. “Is not the village a vent from the palace, the Wildlands a vent from the village? People are free to live elsewhere within this realm.”

“They’re not free to live outside this realm,” said Verity. “And power ultimately rests with you, so if you’re worried about being attacked by someone who feels they have no other options, then giving them an option seems necessary.”

“And the drain?” asked Cate. “The flow of people out of here? How would you deal with that?”

“I don’t think there would be much drain,” said Verity. “Personally, I’m not planning on leaving, even if you are a dragon.”

She worried that the joke was too much, but Cate laughed, and Verity felt a wave of relief.

“You understand I need to do it personally?” asked Cate. “Moving people here and there?”

“Yes,” said Verity. “But you’re open to the idea of letting people leave? Giving them a possibility of escape? Maybe not exactly when they decide, but once a season? Because that’s the thing that people fear, that they’re trapped here. If they weren’t trapped, if they knew that they were lucky to have been chosen, it would be different.”

Cate was silent. “I did let everyone know what I had done,” said Cate. “Back on Inter, the truth is out. I hadn’t been lying about that. They don’t understand who or what I really am, but that creates problems, if I’m meant to be coming and going. There’s vulnerability for me.”

“Is it possible to kill a dragon?” asked Verity.

Cate laughed. “You’ve seen a dead one. Of course it’s possible. The Pyros and the Knives come in to deal with threats to the country, and beyond them, there are all kinds of entads, some of them hidden away in secret government vaults just on the off-chance that they’ll be needed. If Inter wanted me dead, I think they could manage it, and that would make this living demiplane just another dead one.”

Ria had wanted the question asked, and Verity was glad she’d been able to do it in a way that felt natural, though she was very aware that she wasn’t a good liar.

“Do you think they would?” asked Verity. “You were a member of the government, weren’t you?”

“Of Greater Plenarch, yes,” said Cate. “A special person who got many things done.” She steepled her fingers. “I didn’t leave on good terms. I left with secrets people didn’t want me to have, and a few of those government vaults, those I had access to, were left a bit lighter.”

“Ah,” said Verity. “You … stole.”

Cate tapped her fingers against the desk. “I flew over Plenarch and the response was immediate. They called in the Knives, tried to track me with chrononauts and entads, walked in my shadow and bristled like porcupines.”

“I recall,” said Verity. “Our party was in the area for some of that.”

“Will you ask why I did such a thing, or have you guessed?” asked Cate.

Verity cleared her throat. She already knew, of course, and now needed to pretend to guess, though she didn’t think it was too much to get it right. “Dragons build their demiplanes, then leave,” said Verity. “But unless you can have your young without a mate, that means that most of the time everyone is away from each other, hidden in their own house. If you wanted to be with another dragon, you’d need some big, splashy way of letting them know that you were out and about. It was, ah, a way of finding a mate, is my guess.”

“Of letting a mate find me,” said Cate. “I keep close tabs on dragon sightings, naturally, though they’re very rare, and most often it’s someone who’s mistaken a bird or flying lizard for something much larger.”

“It didn’t work though?” asked Verity. “No one came?”

“No,” said Cate. “It’s very difficult to know how many dragons are left out there, but we might be so few in number that no one would come.”

“I’m sorry,” said Verity. “That must be difficult.”

“We’re not social in the way that humans are,” said Cate. “With another dragon, I would be worried about their strength and power.”

“The same as you’re worried about Inter’s strength and power,” said Verity.

“An interesting parallel,” said Cate. “Though of course you know little about draconic coupling.”

“Do you?” asked Verity.

That hadn’t meant to be a slight, but Cate’s raised eyebrow made Verity shrink back in her seat. It wasn’t the difference in power between them so much as the precarious position that Verity was in with all the things she knew and wasn’t supposed to know, the ways that she was on a knife’s edge.

“I do like you,” said Cate, softening slightly. “And I will take your counsel under advisement.”

That seemed to be the end of their meeting, which had stopped before Verity could get all that much more from it. She hadn’t learned things that she’d apparently learned in other undone days, which was a problem, because she would have to keep track of these things going forward.

There had been, in some other version of the day, some extended conversation about what it was like for a dragon to be young, eating and killing with relative abandon. Cate had said that it wasn’t unthinking so much as the thoughts of a starving woman, a focus on food and where to find it, devouring a herd of cattle and still not sated. When that time had passed — fifty years of scouring the lands, being a terror to farmers and cities — Cate had been like a different person. In Verity’s opinion, it was that aspect of transition that allowed her to think of her ‘mistakes’ as being the actions of someone else.

But now Verity didn’t know that, or wasn’t supposed to, and if she wanted to help Cate, or even to find a way around Cate, she was going to have to pretend that she didn’t know.

“Did you still want the song?” asked Verity.

Cate nodded slowly. “I do. If there’s some compensation I can give you, some favor, do let me know, but I give freely. I can’t promise there’s anything you could ask for that I wouldn’t give you if you asked for it without a song.”

“I’m mostly going to be focused on making it good,” said Verity. “But I may need to talk with you again, to make sure that it’s what you want.”

“Thank you,” said Cate. She stood. “And I appreciate your continued discretion.”

Verity swallowed and nodded, but didn’t let out her breath until she was far away from the office.

~~~~

“It’s the way in,” said Ria. “She doesn’t know that I’m here, which means she thinks that the threat is on the outside. All you need to do is ask for something from back in Inter, it doesn’t matter what, and we can sneak an entire battalion in.”

Verity let out a breath. They were all together again at the end of the day, having gone their separate ways, and it very much appeared that the day was going to be kept. Alfric had his hands folded across his chest, as he often did when his mother was speaking, at least of late. These small meetings had become a regular thing, though annoying, they were all done standing, perhaps because with a table and chairs it would have felt too formal.

“I’m not doing that,” said Verity.

Ria paused. “Why?”

“It’s escalating to war before we’ve tried other means,” said Alfric. He looked at Verity. “She seemed receptive to the idea that she was making mistakes?”

“It’s hard to say,” said Verity. “I’ve seen people admit fault and then continue on making the same mistakes enough times that I can’t tell whether this is genuine regret or something else.”

“It’s a plan for the back pocket then,” said Ria.

“You need to start talkin’ with people in the government,” said Hannah. “Get them to understand how it needs to go.”

“Harmon has been talking,” said Ria. “And the overall feeling is that Cate has engaged in some of the worst crimes of the modern era. The island she left behind is enough for anyone to call for her to be stripped of power, and we’re working on ways of doing that. She left the previous colony on an island.”

“If she gets killed, this whole place goes away, right?” asked Mizuki. “Isn’t that kind of … not what anyone wants?”

“The Wildlands need to be preserved,” said Alfric.

Ria raised a skeptical eyebrow in his direction.

“Unless there’s a catch, we can pull entads from them more safely than from dungeons,” said Alfric. “There’s no element of escalating threat, no pegging to elevation, nothing that normally stops people from going into the dungeons. With the right entads, some of them easily found, a wilding party could outpace a dungeoneering party in terms of their returns.”

“It would be hard to adventure without the consent of the dragon,” said Ria, who seemed to dislike the idea. “And getting the consent of the dragon means that centuries of crimes are allowed to go by without so much as a whisper. Remuneration would be a start, given the largesse of this place, but there are crimes for which there is no possible remediation.”

“I think it’ll have to be forgiven,” said Hannah. “Unless you do mean to sneak a battalion in and kill her that way, which might be where Inter lands on the subject, and which we wouldn’t have too much say in one way or another.”

“We do have a say,” said Verity. She looked at Ria. “If your intent is to bring in help, then it’s going to be after we try to bring her around to some kind of conversation. The nations of the world haven’t been at war in a long time, and there’s no reason for there to be a war here, not yet.”

“There are reasons,” said Isra. “It’s just whether you think those reasons are enough.”

“Our time here is limited,” said Ria. “We were never meant to stay here. Keeping to the village seems like it won’t be enough, not in the long term. How long are we allowing this attempt at stealth diplomacy to go on?”

There was silence all around.

“I’m actually overdue for the mage academy,” said Mizuki. “And really, I’ve seen as much of the village as I want to see. These don’t seem like my sort of people.”

“I’d rather be out,” said Isra. “Only once we’ve helped these people.”

“But it would take more than an assurance, ay?” asked Hannah. “There would need to be some way of knowin’ that it wouldn’t go sour in a few years, that Cate wouldn’t seal the place up with impunity. Gettin’ her to say that people can leave if they’d like, that’s one thing, but makin’ sure that they’ll always be able to leave is another. And I don’t know how that’s goin’ to happen, frankly. I don’t think any of us want to be mired here forever.”

Verity looked at Alfric, whose lips were thin.

“I’m not sure how many more days I can take,” said Mizuki. “And I think for Kell’s sake I should get out of here, should probably never have come in the first place, if I wasn’t going to confess my love. Which I wasn’t.”

“I’m fine staying,” said Alfric. “The Wildlands have more secrets to give up, more opportunity. I don’t think I have much to offer when it comes to Cate, but I do want to exhaust some of the possibilities of this place, especially if it’s going to come to blows.”

“I don’t think it needs to,” said Verity. She looked at Ria. “Give me a week. Let me speak with her advisors. Let me try to talk with her.”

“An entire week?” asked Mizuki. “That seems like a long time.”

“Well then how long should it take to talk a dragon into changing their mind?” asked Verity, feeling slightly exasperated.

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “Depends on the dragon, I guess.”

They broke for the night not long after, having concluded nothing. Verity was feeling even more frustrated than she’d felt at the start of the day, in part because of the circumstances.

She fell asleep thinking about the conversation that she hadn’t had with Cate, the one about being a ravenous teenaged dragon whose only thoughts were food and how to get it, and how to deal with what was in the way. She hadn’t spoken about it with Cate, and Ria hadn’t pressed the issue, but it seemed important to Verity, something that needed to be reckoned with but wasn’t. Was it understood that Cate was a different person then? Or was it only that the deaths were so far in the past that they’d become irrelevant to everyone?

Verity was half asleep when the first line of a song came to her, the hunger had abated, which she thought was a good start. She hoped she would remember it when she woke up.

Chapter 147 - Making Moves

Five days passed. It felt like an eternity. They were too cooped up, and in a way, Mizuki felt like she was the most cooped of all of them. She was supposed to be going to wizard school to learn how to throw wizard fireballs, which they did through a complicated system of magical bulbs and valves. Instead, she was mostly spending her time in the extradimensional space, stepping out only occasionally to talk with other people, and enduring the fights — she couldn’t call them anything else — between the other members of the party. No one was raising their voice, but they were getting less polite about it all, running in circles, talking too much. Mizuki liked talking, but not this kind of talking.

There was, at least, Ria, who had a good claim to being one of the coolest people in the world, though not, per her own accounting, one of the most powerful. They spent a lot of time chatting, often with wine.

“Entads are funny things,” said Ria. “My sword is amazing, it’s killed millions — no joke, millions of creatures. But I’m a dungeoneer, or set up as one, with a kit that’s meant for handling any kind of problem I run into in a dungeon. Most of the time, the sword does the trick, but my standard loadout is mostly about adapting, not sheer killing power, which is usually what people mean when they say ‘power’.”

“But it is still killing, right?” asked Mizuki.

“It is,” replied Ria. “It’s just multifaceted.” She shrugged. “I might be in the top ten most powerful people when it comes to dungeoneering. But when it comes to killing another person, I think at full strength I’m possibly only in the top one hundred. I don’t know though, because it’s not as though there are competitions for that sort of thing, not like there are leaderboards for the dungeons.”

“You could set something up though, right?” asked Mizuki. “Something something undone days?”

“I could, technically,” she replied. She’d taken a sip of her wine. “And I think I’d place in the bottom, because I have only my own entads, and what I occasionally borrow from the family vault. Despite what people may tell you, the vault in no way compares to what Inter is able to field.”

“War preparedness stuff?” asked Mizuki.

“That, and the Knives,” said Ria. “Also, people don’t like to say ‘war preparedness’ because at the highest levels of government, ‘war’ is a dirty word. Saying that you’re preparing for war would be even worse, because Kiromo and Tarbin are our neighbors, who we trade with. War is not just unthinkable but bad for business. Even worse would be talking about a civil war.” She gave a little laugh. “So Inter does its best to arm people, to arm properly trained people with incredibly powered entads, and then they have to say ‘oh, just in case, you know, possibly something might escape from the dungeons, or we might run into something, you never know’.”

This struck Mizuki as quite cynical, but also with an edge to it that she couldn’t help but like. She could imagine herself saying something similar, admitting that she really did like having a fireball on hand just in case, with the implication that if someone did try to mess with her, she would explode them.

Time spent in the demiplane was always less entertaining, in part because they weren’t allowed to go to the palace. Mizuki was practically aching to go, as she’d seen the lights of it from the village in the night. There was a tram that people rode up and down the slope, and there were parties there almost every other night. Since the village was comparatively close, the village didn’t really have any parties of its own. People would come home from the palace, looking exhausted and happy, and Mizuki could only look at them with envy.

Going up to the palace wasn’t something that happened on purpose. She’d been told to stay away by Ria, told by Alfric that it was too much of a risk, but she’d been with a few people from the village and they had all encouraged her to come to a palace party. She’d said no, of course, but they’d insisted in the kind of joking way that people did that always got to her, and eventually she’d relented, since that seemed like the easiest thing to do in the situation. If she hadn’t, then maybe they would talk about her, and that wouldn’t be good either, would it?

The whole friend-making enterprise had mostly been what she was supposed to be doing anyway, though they seemed to have transitioned into a different phase of the whole disorganized thing. Ria was gathering combat information in undone days and dipping into the real world to marshal forces there, while Verity was trying her best to cozy up. Alfric was off in the Wildlands while Hannah was on a back-channel with one of Cate’s non-human advisors, which had revealed little (and which Hannah was cagey about). That left Mizuki and Isra, who should have been together, but Isra had a druid friend with a wispy mustache, and was spending a lot of time with him.

“Like … in a friendly way?” asked Mizuki. “Or a different way?”

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” said Isra.

“Er, in a way that you think he might end up being your boyfriend, or in a way that it isn’t even on the horizon?” asked Mizuki.

“No, I knew what you meant,” said Isra with a sigh. “I was trying to do that thing, where I say that I don’t know, feigning innocence, which is a way of showing that it’s probably not innocent.”

“Your inflection was wrong,” said Mizuki. “You have to be more snooty, like you’re almost offended that anyone would so much as suggest it. ‘I don’t know what you mean by that’.”

“Ah,” said Isra. “The voice you use when you talk about Alfric.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” said Mizuki, in her most snooty voice, which got a gratifying giggle from Isra.

“Putting that on pause until this is all done?” asked Isra.

“I choose not to answer that,” said Mizuki. “Though this is making me rethink my life.”

“Oh?” asked Isra.

“We’re around all these people who have just thrown a bunch of babies out with the bathwater, in my opinion,” said Mizuki. “They got enticed, they went in, and they got what they wanted, or something like it. I guess I’ve been thinking about what I want in life. What could Cate have offered me? And if I can figure that out, then I can just go get it for myself.”

Isra had taken that as something wise and important, even though it had just been something that Mizuki had said in the moment. Mizuki did give it some thought though, and decided that there really wasn’t much that she wanted from life aside from a spouse and a family, which weren’t things that Cate could offer.

It was one of the things that Mizuki thought about as she rode the tram up with her new friends, all of whom had been plucked up by Cate, either escaping some bad situation or brought to the demiplane with a promise of paradise. They were high achievers, mostly people who had demonstrable skills, and Mizuki felt out of place among them, especially when she was fitting in.

“I think you’ll love it,” said Sarang, a tall, slender girl who tended to wear far more makeup than Mizuki ever would. She had a sense of style, so Mizuki thought that it was probably stylish, but she also wondered what the girl looked like under it all. Sarang had run away from a failed marriage. “It’s hard to imagine that you haven’t. You were in the palace when you first came here, right?”

“I was,” Mizuki lied. “The village seemed like a better place for me. More like home. Will Cate be at the party?”

“She wasn’t last night,” said Thom. Mizuki had met him on the first day, and he was too much of a joker, too unserious. She didn’t know his story, and didn’t really care to, but he was tolerable in a group, funny in a way that one-on-one got to be a little much. He was sweet on her, she was pretty sure. “Nor the night before. I think most of this place was built to her tastes, and a lot of that taste is more calm, less merriment. She likes people to pretend that they’ve got something to get up for in the morning.” He laughed a little.

“He talks about rocking the boat,” said Grace, rolling her eyes. “Yet it’s all gossip from that mouth.”

Grace was Mizuki’s favorite, sardonic and aloof, also Kiromon, but an immigrant to Inter rather than the descendants of immigrants. Grace had been disappointed that Mizuki’s command of the language was poor, but after that, they’d gotten along well.

It was a nice group of friends, and they chatted as the tram climbed the hill, but Mizuki was very aware that they weren’t real friends, that in fact, she was a spy, though not really spying on them. Still, it was nice to know that she could make friends anywhere, that her dungeon party wasn’t just a fluke. If they ever got out of the demiplane, she would be able to make friends at the wizard college too, friends in Plenarch or wherever else she’d ended up. She hadn’t realized how afraid she’d been of not making friends until she’d actually made some friends and proved that it had been nothing to worry about. These friends were temporary, but there was no reason that they would have to be, if they weren’t living somewhere that Mizuki didn’t want to live.

If Mizuki could avoid Cate, there might be something to be learned from the party, and if Mizuki couldn’t avoid Cate, then the day would almost certainly be undone. That wasn’t a good reason to do risky things without any real benefit, and Alfric would be mad at Mizuki for thinking that way, but she hoped that it wouldn’t come up.

The palace was everything that Mizuki had dreamed it would be, grand and imposing, with all kinds of strange hallways and promising rooms to go down. The place reeked of magic, with entads at every turn, and if not for the cover story — which was that she’d actually lived at the palace for a few days before her move to the village — Mizuki would have spent the entire night going from thing to thing and seeing how it worked. She did want a new outfit, if those were on offer.

The ‘party’ took place across a dozen rooms, one of them a large ballroom that had at least a hundred people in it. The caldera courtyard was another major location, this one with as much food as anyone could possibly want. Mizuki moved between them, keeping her eye out for Cate, or for anyone who looked like they might report to Cate. As far as Verity had said, there wasn’t all that much in the way of hierarchies, and surveillance wasn’t necessarily non-existent, but the demiplane was mostly expected to run itself. That arrangement was something that Mizuki had heard people comment on, both positively and negatively.

The party had too many people, really. There were hundreds, at a guess, a substantial fraction of the entire demiplane. Mizuki normally liked functions like this in Pucklechurch, though Pucklechurch reserved gatherings of that size for special holidays or occasions. In Pucklechurch, she knew everyone, or near enough, and there was no awkwardness of introductions and uncertainty about whether people were nice or not. If they weren’t nice, you knew it. She had some worry that it wouldn’t be like that here, that she’d run into people who would only reveal themselves to be mean later.

Mizuki was scarfing down a plate of tiny pies beneath a willow tree when a small woman came up to her.

“Mizuki?” she asked.

“Erm, yeah?” Mizuki asked back.

“I’m a friend of Hannah’s,” she said, placing her hand on her chest. “Liana. Can you come with me?”

“The tailor?” asked Mizuki. Mizuki had no description of the girl, but she was small with green eyes and clothes that had a subdued beauty to them, which ran in contrast to some of what people were wearing to the party.

“Clothier,” the girl replied. “But yes. Shall we?” She extended her arm. Mizuki took it, reluctant, still holding her plate of mini-pies.

“Am I in trouble?” Mizuki asked.

“No, not at all,” replied the girl. “We can talk once we have some privacy.”

Mizuki let herself be led, trying not to be frightened. Ria would reset the day if Mizuki wasn’t back in the house before the witching hour, that was the arrangement she had with all of them. There had already been a decent chance that the day would be undone, Mizuki had gone up to the palace with that in mind, but this virtually guaranteed it.

They came to a small room, which seemed like a library but wasn’t the library, since it was too small. Alfric would surely have memorized their map of the palace, but Mizuki wasn’t even sure that she’d be able to find her way out. It was a satellite library, she decided, a place where you could go if you wanted to be surrounded by books and not disturbed.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” the girl said.

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “Sorry. Some friends invited me and it felt rude to say no.”

“I can keep things that happen in the village within the village,” said Liana. “If you’re blithely wandering around the palace grounds, I can’t. How much has Hannah told you?”

“Er,” said Mizuki. “I don’t know how much she’s told you, but apparently you know my name, so … you’re a friend, or an employee, or just someone who keeps secrets,” said Mizuki. “And you’re on our side.”

“I’m on Cate’s side,” said Liana. “I happen to think that’s the side of peaceful resolution, and that Cate can be made to see the light, but it’s not going to happen if she discovers the four of you because you were sloppy, and not if you’re wandering around the palace like you live here. She wouldn’t like being made the fool.”

Mizuki looked around the room. “Do we need to worry about being heard?”

“Not particularly,” replied Liana. “I know the people who would be doing the listening. They’re in the loop.”

“But … I’m not in the loop,” said Mizuki. “I don’t even know what the loop is.”

“Verity has Cate’s ear,” said Liana. “That’s going well. The course of action that’s going to work best for everyone is if Cate opens up to the outside world. It would help to keep things stable in here, especially among those who left for the wrong reasons.”

“The wrong reasons being … what?” asked Mizuki.

“Reasons that left them with regrets,” said Liana. “There are too many people here with trauma of some kind, stress or anxiety, and they’ve dealt with it by simply leaving everything behind. It’s one of the reasons this experiment is most likely to fail. As brilliant as she is, Cate is an amateur when it comes to crafting communities, but there’s no particular way to practice that, especially when you insist on secrecy.”

Mizuki listened, but she had a sense that Liana was watching her. “Hannah has been pretty tight-lipped about you.”

“She hasn’t come by that often,” said Liana. “And I understand you have your own concerns. You people came here to make sure that everyone was taken care of, and you’ve seen that to your satisfaction, which means you have only Verity’s attempt at changing Cate’s mind left.”

“I guess,” said Mizuki. “I mean … if Cate says ‘no, I’ll tell people I’m a dragon, but I’m not changing anything, people aren’t allowed to leave, I need them’, then I feel like we’re out of options.”

“Out of options?” asked Liana, quirking an eyebrow.

“I mean, at that point we’d leave,” said Mizuki. She really wasn’t sure what Hannah had said, but confessing that force was on the table was probably not a topic of discussion. The existence of Ria, a high-powered chrononaut, might also not have been something the two of them talked about. But there had to be a reason that Hannah had kept quiet. Hannah was hiding something, and knowing Hannah, it couldn’t be all that bad, but there was something.

“Or stay,” said Liana. She was watching Mizuki closely.

Mizuki didn’t know what to say, so she kept her mouth shut, which was its own way of saying something. She was worried, intensely worried, that Liana would simply say ‘I see’ or something like that, but instead Liana only moved past and opened the door.

“Go,” she said. “I can keep things from Cate, but if you’re wandering around the palace, that’s more than I can handle, and if she finds you on her own, Cate won’t be happy.” She paused. “Talk to Hannah.”

“I will,” said Mizuki.

She left the small library and did eventually find her way out of the palace, mostly through retracing her steps. It was rude to leave her friends behind, especially when she’d hardly gotten a chance to spend much time with them, but she needed to have a conversation with Hannah. She rode the tram back down the mountain, alone, back into a village that was already growing quiet.

Hannah was in the deepest of the extradimensional spaces, Lutopia One, reading from a book of prayers. She and Ria were the only ones there, Ria cleaning weapons.

“How was your day?” asked Ria, looking up.

“Fine,” said Mizuki. “Boring.” This wasn’t quite true, but had been said not as a lie, but because it felt like what she was meant to say. “Hannah, can I speak with you?”

“Ay,” said Hannah, placing a forefinger at her spot in the book.

“Privately?” asked Mizuki.

“Ay,” Hannah said again, putting her book to the side.

They went into a separate extradimensional space, this one down a level and then back up a different level, a room that was nothing more than a set of two chairs. Mizuki had called it the Interrogatorium, since it was pretty much only good for two people having a conversation with literally no other distractions.

“Alright,” said Hannah. “I’m ready to listen.”

“I went up to the palace,” said Mizuki.

“Oh,” said Hannah. She seemed genuinely surprised by that. Whatever she’d been prepared to listen to, it hadn’t been that. “That doesn’t seem like a good idea. Not spotted, I hope?”

“I was,” said Mizuki. “But by your clothier friend from the village, who told me to scram.”

“And why did you go to the palace?” asked Hannah.

“Some friends asked me to,” said Mizuki. “And I did say ‘no’, but then they said ‘yes’, and it seemed like it would have been more suspicious not to go — but that’s not the point, the point is that I talked with Liara, and she seemed to be probing —”

“You didn’t tell her about Ria?” asked Hannah, looking anxious.

“Well I didn’t know whether you had told her about Ria,” said Mizuki. “She knew my name, so I guess you’d told her about me. But no, I didn’t tell her about Ria.”

“It’s a piece of information I’ve left out,” said Hannah. “So far, she thinks we’re bumblin’ around, maybe agents of the state, but those in over their heads, ay? Every time Ria comes out of the nest, Cate tracks her down and kills her, and I have to imagine that Liara’s reaction to knowin’ about Ria wouldn’t be to hide it from her master. We’re on a mission of peace, so far as Liara knows, and raw power wouldn’t be a solution, so far as Liara sees it.”

“Right,” said Mizuki. “Okay. But … I had kind of understood that you weren’t getting much from her, just vague answers, mostly because she was trying to protect Cate. And she made it seem like there was something more.”

Hannah sighed. “And now you’re talkin’ to me without the others — which I do appreciate — but that probably means that I should just talk to the others, have it all out at once.”

“Are you hiding something?” asked Mizuki.

“I’ve been tryin’ to get around Ria,” said Hannah. “Not that I don’t trust her, but everythin’ we do or say on undone days has to go through her, and she’s got her own views on matters. I don’t think she’s malicious or ill-intentioned, but she’s seein’ the whole thing in terms of power, and I’m seein’ it a different way.”

“Okay,” Mizuki said slowly. “But there are things that Liara has said that you haven’t shared?”

Hannah sighed. “There was an offer of amnesty,” said Hannah. “We’re stowaways, and practically speakin’, we’ve been livin’ here a week. More, dependin’ on how you count. Verity is fittin’ in, Alfric has spent so much time in the Wildlands I’m not sure he’s ever goin’ to want to leave, and while you and I have no interest in stayin’ here, I think that the two of them might.”

“Amnesty,” said Mizuki. “Meaning we’re just ‘allowed’ to live here?”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “We step out of the shadows and just become normal citizens, or whatever they’ve got here. Subjects, I s’pose. I don’t favor it, but it’s better than hidin’ out, waitin’ on the other shoe to drop.”

“Liara can’t make that offer on her own,” said Mizuki. “I mean, she can make the offer, but she’d need to ask Cate, right?”

“She made the offer without Cate, ay,” said Hannah. “But the offer was confirmed in an undone day. So long as Cate thinks that she’s caught us out, she’ll let us stay. There’s some ego there that’s not too promising, but with Liara massagin’ things, it worked out.”

“Wait, so Alfric knows?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” sighed Hannah. “When I say undone day, I mean that I passed a message to myself. That was yesterday, I haven’t been sittin’ on it long.”

“Wow,” said Mizuki. “This seems like a lot to be doing behind someone’s back.”

“We’re doin’ this all behind someone’s back,” said Hannah. “I’m tryin’ to get around Ria, who’s on a war footin’, callin’ in favors and bringin’ the government to bear on the problem without so much as a word to Cate about it. All these undone days and we haven’t had a frank talk, mostly for fear of bein’ burned, outplayed, or whatever else. I’m tryin’ to get some of the truth out, that’s all, and I think when it comes down to it, Ria’s goin’ to exercise her veto.”

“You don’t trust her disclosure,” said Mizuki.

“I do, I said,” replied Hannah. “But it’s disclosure with a slant to it, her bias creepin’ in. Much of which is down to how things went with Lola.”

“Lola?” asked Mizuki. She hadn’t forgotten about Lola, exactly, but didn’t get the connection. That was a different chapter of her life.

“Listen to Ria the next time she talks about power, and the people who hold it, the people who need to be put down with more power, how we need to hold others accountable, need to make sure that we’re not just relyin’ on trust.” Hannah sighed. “She’s feelin’ guilty, and gone most of her life tryin’ to solve things through violence, so that’s how we end up here.”

“Except Cate is a dragon,” said Mizuki. “I mean, I understand you, but Cate’s a dragon? She’s a dragon.”

“Oh, is she?” asked Hannah. “Somehow I missed that.” She rubbed her chin. “Really changes things, that.”

“So you’re going to tell the others about this amnesty offer?” asked Mizuki.

“I was plannin’ to,” said Hannah. “Most of the confirmation was yesterday, makin’ sure that Liara knew what she was on about. She knows us, knows where we are, and if she meant to sell us out — it wouldn’t be sellin’ us out, her loyalty is to Cate — but if she meant to tell Cate where we were, she’d have done it by now. And I think it’s better all around for us to be on the level.”

“Makes it harder for Verity, right?” asked Mizuki. “And we’re not on the level, since we’re hiding Ria.”

“Ay, both true,” said Hannah. “Still a hypothetical, which is why it needs group discussion.”

Mizuki wasn’t looking forward to that. She was pretty sure that she knew how it would go, if not the outcome, then at least what the process would look like. She was strapping in for a fight.

~~~~

“We take the deal,” said Verity. “Become citizens, with a guarantee that we can leave, and stop all this cloak and dagger.”

“We can’t,” said Ria. “It gives up any leverage we have. I’ve come very close to killing her, but haven’t actually managed it yet, and that means that what she says goes. She’s a sovereign power. We give up our advantage if she knows we’re all here. If she knows that Alfric is here then she’ll already be thinking in terms of undone days. If she learns that Verity has been duplicitous, that undermines attempts to control her, and we won’t be able to sneak anything more in — and we don’t have the power we need right now.”

“I’ve talked to her about concessions,” said Verity. “Reparations. We talked today. She seemed not to like it, but also like maybe she would do it anyway.”

“Reparations for the island people?” asked Mizuki. “Or for all the sheep she killed seven hundred years ago or whatever, and the shepherds that might have gotten caught up in the crossfire?” Cate had killed people, according to Verity, a long time ago, but for a young dragon that wanted meat, people were far more trouble than they were worth.

“She has wealth,” said Verity. “She pulled back pretty much everything she had in Inter when she left, sold houses and land, but what she has here has enormous wealth, enough to pay back debts, to pay for things she stole, to pay families. Some of that depends on what Inter might decide about what’s owed. There’s the matter of other debts, the debts of people who are here, the legal status of those people, but … she’s open to it. To actually making it right.”

“You think,” said Ria.

“She’s in the best position to know,” said Alfric. “Everything we hear is filtered through Verity. We need to have some faith in what she says, what she knows.”

“Once we give up leverage, there’s no way to claw it back,” said Ria. She had her arms folded, which made her look more stern, and she was doing things with her voice that Mizuki didn’t quite like, punctuating what she said with an unpleasant sharpness. Mizuki was on her side, really, but it didn’t feel like it was a good side.

“I don’t like the idea of her giving up only the things she’s prepared to give up,” said Isra. “She’ll feel no consequence for her actions. There’s no question of whether she’s free.”

“You understand putting a sword to her throat is just going to enrage her, right?” asked Verity. “The more pressure you put on her, the more she’s going to react to it, and that’s going to result in this entire demiplane going away, maybe for a hundred years before she tries again.”

“And she would try again,” said Hannah. “It’s clear that she needs this, in some manner of speakin’, given all the time she’s spent on it, all the money and effort that went into the demiplane. But raw power … I don’t think it’s the way.” She turned to Ria. “You’re the one speakin’ with Inter, who speaks for their position on this.”

“She’s a criminal, a thief, a killer, a liar, and a threat,” said Ria. Her arms were still folded. Mizuki wished that she’d stop doing that. “She abused a position of power and gave the government a black eye, doing herself no favors by spilling everything as she left. They’re willing to forgive and forget, to move on if there’s some compensation for her crimes, and some reliable method of keeping her under control.”

“That’s not a good basis for a relationship,” said Hannah.

“No,” Ria agreed. “It’s not.” Mizuki felt some relief at that. “They’re willing to give you time to try other options, to have Cate come to the table on her own, but what they’d like is for there to be some backup strategy in case that goes sour.”

“Which comes back to force,” said Verity. Her face was stuck in a frown.

“Which comes back to not giving up leverage,” said Ria.

“I’d rather be known,” said Mizuki. “Even if that does give up ‘leverage’ or means that no one will be able to sneak in a battalion or whatever. I want to be nice.”

“I feel the same,” said Alfric. “Disclosure would be a relief.” He had been looking tense, even though he was spending his time in the Wildlands, mostly away from people.

“We test it then,” said Ria. “In an undone day. We make sure that it’s safe, that she won’t roast you alive, and we talk about the results in the morning before deciding whether to go through with it.”

“We would need to disclose the test,” said Alfric. “On our second meeting, we would need to tell her that we’d gone through it once before, that I had memories or at least a secondhand report.”

Ria frowned. “Or I tell you nothing, so you need to say nothing.”

“Nothing, as in no information?” asked Alfric. “That’s — I guess.”

“Then it’s what we’ll do,” said Ria. “Tomorrow.” She looked at Hannah. “Arrange it with your contact, please.”

Hannah gave a wary nod.

~~~~

“It failed,” Ria said the next morning. “She didn’t lash out, but she insisted that she take our wizardly exit from us. That’s a failure state. It’s not just giving up leverage, it’s trapping us here.”

“So we try again,” said Alfric.

“We did try again,” said Ria. “We tried three times. I’m low on days. It’s not working.”

“Kell can build us a way out,” said Mizuki. “He said he could, anyway. It would take a few weeks, maybe, but … we wouldn’t be entirely stuck here.” She didn’t want to be asking Kell any favors, but they could.

“It’s time for the other plan,” said Ria. “We’re not living here for weeks, hoping that a novice wizard can replicate something he’s read about in books.”

“He’s actually really talented,” said Mizuki.

“What’s the other plan then?” asked Alfric. “We were supposed to be here for a day, maybe two, not this long. We’ve got cover, but our cover is someone who wants us to take an amnesty. Personally, I’m willing to give up our exit.”

“I am too,” said Verity. “I think she would let us out, she just doesn’t want us going around with an exit, free to leave without a discussion. I’d need to know her reasoning, her wording. And we can just continue on as we were, can’t we?”

“I still want to hear the other plan,” said Alfric. “You can leave on undone days, you want to keep that, I understand, but … how do we proceed?”

“I’m not helping to sneak in a battalion,” said Verity. “I’m not helping to put a boot on her throat, whatever she’s done, however much I agree she needs to drop the veil.”

“I did it without you,” said Ria, looking for a moment, like she felt some regret. “The battalion is here. We will try to talk, to come to an arrangement, but if that doesn’t work … You’ve got some time, a day for the staging to be complete, and then we’re going in with every day we can muster.”

Chapter 148 - Bellies

“It’s kind of a relief, in a way, because one way or another it’ll be over,” said Mizuki.

“I don’t find that relieving,” said Verity. Her lips were thin.

They were outside of the extradimensional space, in the village, together. There had been fallout from what Alfric’s mother had said, loud arguments, and he did feel betrayed — but she had lived through the day several times, and had at least told them rather than violating disclosure. In his opinion, the losses had started to pile up, more losses than Ria Overguard had ever faced before in a long lifetime of battles. Or maybe it was just who she was, when the other things were stripped away. She’d brought the fight.

“It might mean the end of this place,” said Alfric. “Unless Cate is willing to bend the knee, which … seems unlikely.”

“How much force do you think Inter can actually bring in?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, are we talking about an actual battalion? What even is a battalion?”

“A battalion would be a thousand people,” said Alfric. “Though I don’t think that’s what it will be.”

“It’ll be the Knives,” said Isra.

“Probably,” said Alfric. “Though for all I know, Inter has some kind of dedicated anti-dragon force that they keep up their sleeve for situations like this.”

“They’d have gone after her in Plenarch,” said Verity. “Right?”

“She was a government official in Plenarch,” said Alfric. “It would not at all surprise me if dealing with dragon sightings fell under her purview.”

“Ooo, that’s a neat trick,” said Mizuki.

“You say that as though you admire it,” said Hannah.

“I do,” said Mizuki. “I would love to be in charge of investigating my own crimes some day.”

“That’s not a crime, flying above a city,” said Isra.

“I actually did get called down from the air when I was in Plenarch,” said Mizuki. “Though you’re right, if it was a proper crime, they’d have to start arresting swallows.”

“We need a plan of action,” said Alfric. “We have today to get something done, and my own two undone days to do it. Potentially I could call on my siblings by exiting the demiplane, but I don’t know whether or not they would be willing to help with a diplomacy mission.”

“Is that what we’re doin’?” asked Hannah. “Seems that diplomacy has failed.”

“No,” said Isra. “Ria’s plan — Inter’s plan — is still diplomacy. It’s diplomacy backed by overwhelming power. That was always her plan.”

“It seems like a foolish plan to me,” said Verity. “Like trying to get someone to do what you want by threatening them with a club.”

“Does that not get people to do things?” asked Mizuki. “If someone threatened to beat me with a club — well, I would fireball them, but if I didn’t have that, then sure, I would say ‘please don’t beat me with a club, I’ll do what you want’.”

“Depends on if she’s more like a cat or a dog,” said Hannah. “A cat you can beat as much as you want, and it just learns to be sneaky, doin’ the thing you beat it for when you’re occupied with somethin’ else, watchin’ you carefully to make sure you’re far enough away and the like.”

“Do you … beat cats?” asked Isra.

“No, as I said, all the cat would learn is to be a sneak about it,” said Hannah. “And no, I’ve never done that with a dog either, never had a dog, but from what I’ve heard, dogs do learn in a way that cats don’t.”

“I’m not sure that’s true,” said Isra.

“So if Cate is a cat, she’ll just do all the same stuff, but be sneaky about it, waiting until there’s no oversight,” said Alfric. “And if she’s a dog, then she’ll get smacked on the nose and submit?”

“In the analogy, sure,” said Hannah.

“She really, really seems more like a cat,” said Mizuki. “They’re solitary creatures, right?”

“Cats, or dragons?” asked Isra.

“Dragons,” said Mizuki. “I mean, cats too, but you don’t hear about dragons making a lot of friends.”

“We don’t know anything about dragons,” said Alfric. “I think almost everything that the Dondrian Museum has to say about dragons is wrong or incomplete, given we didn’t even know about their connection to demiplanes.”

“That ‘we’ didn’t know?” asked Mizuki. “‘We’?”

“That wasn’t apparent to the scholars of Inter based on a lack of evidence,” said Alfric with a sigh.

“Mmm hmm,” said Mizuki.

“We have approximately ten bells until the witching hour,” said Alfric. “I do think we go to Cate, explain things to her, and make a plea for a peaceful end.”

“Which means what?” asked Verity. “Submitting to the higher power?”

“Mom won’t be in control of things anymore,” said Alfric. “She hasn’t said where the battalion is, if she’s right that it’s here already — and I don’t think that she would have said anything, if there was any hope of us stopping it. Inter will have negotiations first, not backed by the sword, just with the sword off to one side, looking innocent, or with the sword only implied by the fact that there are a few people in nice clothes with some paperwork.”

“You’re mostly guessing, right?” asked Mizuki.

“Yes,” Alfric admitted.

“I feel like it won’t go well for them,” said Verity. “That’s my understanding of Cate.”

“They’ll have chrononaut support, and will let her know there’s chrononaut support,” said Alfric. “Her other option is trying to battle it out, trying to kill the unknown number of people that Inter has sent in to contain her. They’ll be prepared, and as much as mom hasn’t been able to score a single victory, I have to imagine that they’ll have the fire problem dealt with, at the very least.”

“So we go handle the situation before it becomes a situation,” said Hannah. “Go to Cate, tell her that we snuck in, that this all goes far better if she comes clean and goes to them first.”

“And you think she’ll respond to that?” asked Isra. “Do we … want that?”

“A peaceful solution?” asked Verity.

“A living dragon of enormous power,” said Isra. Verity gave her a dirty look, as though the answer was obvious, though to Alfric, it did seem a bit complicated.

“I like this place,” said Alfric. “I fully believe that humanity went after the dragons at some point, maybe before modern history, before the creation of Inter as a state, before most of the major changes that the Editors had implemented — and I think that Inter might think that Cate was too much of a threat, and decide that they have no choice but to kill her.”

“You want to save the Wildlands,” said Mizuki.

“I do,” said Alfric. “It’s unique, or … not unique, because I don’t believe that Cate is the last of her kind, but there’s nothing else like it. And if we can get Cate to treat with Inter, to have relations with it as one nation to another, then it’s possible other dragons will pop their heads out. How many other places like this could there be?”

“How many other atrocities?” asked Isra.

“That’s actually a good point,” said Hannah. “If the wizards find a way to punch in rather than out, then this is just the first of many situations that will need to be dealt with.”

“Mmm,” said Isra, frowning.

“You don’t think so?” asked Mizuki.

“I’m thinking of being told that I was hunting too much,” said Isra. “I didn’t like that, nor agree with it, and if I had been able to force my way out of it, I would have. Do you think all dragons are like this one?”

“Hard to say,” said Alfric. “But we have less than ten bells now.”

“I’ll go to Liara, tell her to tell Cate that we’ve been ‘caught’, that this needs to happen today,” said Hannah. “And then we’ll see.”

~~~~

They rode the tram up together. Alfric had been to the palace before, on an undone day, largely so that he would know the layout in case there was ever cause to go there. He’d been using his undone days every day, and for him, it had been nearly three weeks in the demiplane, much of which had been spent in the Wildlands. After the first few days he had no illusions that he was doing anything useful there, only learning things about a place that was largely incidental to their problems.

The thing he’d learned most was that he wanted this to be his life, going off into the Wildlands, whether alone or with others, a wildling rather than a dungeoneer. He’d learned that he wanted this place to be preserved.

“So do we tell her … everything?” asked Mizuki.

“Everything,” said Alfric. “That’s disclosure. You don’t hold some things back because they make you look bad, or because you’re afraid the other person is going to react poorly.”

“But I am afraid,” said Mizuki. “She’s got breath hot enough to turn me crispy. I don’t want to be crispy.”

“I’ll protect you,” said Alfric. “You know that.”

“You know, somehow that makes me feel better,” said Mizuki. “I think it shouldn’t, but it does.”

“To be clear,” said Hannah. “We’re telling her about Ria, about the battalion, the assumed incoming diplomatic team?”

“Yes,” said Alfric with a nod.

“That seems like it makes their job a lot harder,” said Verity. “It seems as though you’re putting your mother at risk. As though my house will be burned down seconds after the witching hour?”

“Mom won’t be there,” said Alfric. “Either this is the undone day where she sees what we’re going to do, or she’s already seen. I don’t think we have the means to stop the battalion, if we even knew where it was, and we don’t know how it got in.”

“Er, there’s some stuff at the house I’d also like to not be burned,” said Mizuki. “Stuff that’s in extradimensional space.”

“We’re not worrying about it,” said Alfric. “It’s inconsequential. If Cate is going to set the world on fire, we’ve failed, so let’s focus on not failing.”

“Well, I think I’ll keep my mouth shut,” said Mizuki. “Negotiating with dragons has never been my strong suit.”

The tram came to a stop, and they stepped off together. The feili girl was waiting for them, looking nervous. Alfric wouldn’t have known what she was except that Hannah had said, and he felt a bit of inexplicable nervousness about her being there. Old enough to have been a part of Cate’s last colony, almost certainly an extreme outlier if she was here, and an enigma that wanted poking at — if only they didn’t have a dragon to talk to.

“She’s irate, as you might expect — as you’ve probably already experienced, Alfric,” said Liara.

“It’s my first time through the day,” said Alfric.

“She detests chrononauts,” said Liara. “Try to do as little speaking as possible.”

“Are we safe?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Liara. “She likes stowaways and has you dead to rights, but would have been happier about this if she’d caught you right away. Then it might have warranted a slap on the wrist, a ‘did you really think that you could trick me’, now it’s my own betrayal and a feeling that this went on under her nose, as much as she acknowledges that I’m the one who caught you.”

“Are you safe?” asked Mizuki.

“I stood by her during a civil war,” said Liara. Looking back at Mizuki. “I’ve known her for a hundred and fifty years. She knows that what I do, I do for love.” She looked at Alfric again. “It would be nice if this were your last day. She’d like that better, having you against the wall.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Alfric.

They were led to a part of the palace that wasn’t on the map that Verity had drawn, which was no real surprise to Alfric, who’d grown up with a house whose doors led to different places around the country, whose rooms were only connected through expensive magic that his parents had acquired. From the hidden hallway they were taken to a large door, and through it, a mountaintop that was far away from anything they had known to exist in the demiplane.

It was a ruined place, filled with fire and brimstone, some of which Alfric could feel settle in his lungs. It smelled bad and had a certain taste to it, like eggs that had gone off. They had a view of spectacular surroundings, the same blasted landscape, though there was at least some variety to it, plains of sulfurous yellow and woods of thick red bramble. There were fires in many places, distant mountains spewing lava, and a heat in the air. It was, overall, alarming, and matched to no place that Alfric had ever known. He assumed that it was an illusion, or something like it, possibly generated by entad, but he couldn’t rule out that they had been transported somewhere else.

Five plain wooden chairs sat in a line in front of a large iron throne, and Cate was waiting for them there, dressed in furs rather than one of her usual dresses of silk or some other delicate material. The warm clothes, when Alfric was already starting to sweat, seemed to make a point.

“It’s all a bit much, don’t you think?” asked Mizuki, even as Hannah had begun to bow.

This was a horrible thing to say, but sometimes Mizuki was just like that, trying to lighten things with a joke. If that was what got them burned to a crisp, he wasn’t sure that he would forgive her.

“Oh it is, it is, a ‘bit much’,” said Cate. “But you don’t go to the theater and whisper to your friend that it’s all stagecraft, do you?”

Mizuki glanced at Isra. “Depends on the friend.”

“Sit,” said Cate. “Please.”

They sat down. The chairs weren’t comfortable. Mizuki was right, it was a bit much.

“Is this, uh, real?” asked Alfric.

“This place?” asked Cate, gesturing around them. She raised an eyebrow. “It is, in fact. This is part of the Wildlands, stabilized a great while ago, one of the most horrible places that anyone has ever encountered in their wanderings. It was appropriately immortalized.”

“We’re sorry,” said Verity.

“For?” asked Cate. She leaned forward slightly.

“For lying, sneaking, spying,” said Verity. “For not being forthright with you from the start.”

Cate regarded them. She reached into her furs and pulled forth a small blackish sphere that swirled as though it had something inside it, the one that Alfric had seen in the past.

“Hannah, Isra, Mizuki, you can have your memories back,” said Cate. She touched the sphere only lightly, then replaced it within her furs.

“Wait,” said Alfric. “You had approached them?”

“Yes,” said Cate. “When there were opportunities to get them alone. They can tell you about it later, and I don’t believe it’s germane to a discussion here, but they would have gotten their memories back, had they been technically alive and on the material plane at the time. I did return everyone their memories, as promised.”

“Er,” said Mizuki. “I’m off-balance here.” She had a perplexed look on her face.

“I did nothing to harm any of you,” said Cate. “I believe I only mildly annoyed the five of you in pursuit of your dragons. Four of the five of you came here without an invitation. Verity, I hope that my civility here doesn’t cause you to mistake the depth of my anger and feeling of betrayal.” That ‘civility’ was somewhat undercut by their present location. Cate took a breath. “I want to know everything you have to say about your actions while here.”

There was a brief moment when it wasn’t clear who was going to do the talking, then Alfric opened his mouth and kept up a steady stream of words for what felt like a very long while. Cate’s face remained impassive. Alfric held nothing back, not even that his mother was sitting in an extradimensional space within Verity’s house — or at least, that’s where she’d been when they left. He didn’t think that she was in any danger. Ria’s policy was to reset if the five of them weren’t back before the witching hour. They’d been caught before, with varying results, but permanent death was never in the cards.

“I have not accepted your apology,” said Cate once Alfric had finally brought her up to the present. “What you did, you did without proof of wrongdoing on my part, fueled only by suspicion, and by your own account, even after you had resolved that everyone was being taken care of you kept digging for no other reason than mistrust.”

“I wasn’t trying to paint us in a good light,” said Alfric. “I was trying to be honest and objective about what happened and why.”

Cate gave a snort of disbelief, rolling her eyes as though his words disgusted her.

“He really does mean that,” said Hannah.

Cate regarded Alfric. “I don’t trust chrononauts,” she said.

Increasingly, Alfric didn’t blame her, but there was a wide gap between ‘some chrononauts’ and ‘all chrononauts’. His mother was at least trying to do the right thing, as much as she was stepping on important precepts. That Lola had been allowed to exist, had been able to continue on unchecked, was another black mark against the clans.

He pursed his lips, not wanting to actually voice agreement, nor quibble about whether trust should apply to him. In his experience, someone asking for trust was one of the most suspicious things they could do.

“I do still like it here,” said Verity. “I do empathize with you, with wanting your own place.” She had her hands folded in her lap. “I am sorry. I’ve been sorry.”

“There are still problems here,” said Hannah. “Beyond the army knockin’ against your door, there’s some discontent among your people, and keepin’ them here, not lettin’ them leave, is the biggest thing that does need changin’. It’s why we stayed, once we saw that no one was bein’ outright killed.”

“You use that as an excuse for crossing into my sovereign territory?” asked Cate.

“We didn’t actually know it was yours,” said Mizuki. “We didn’t even understand demiplanes, I guess.”

“You still don’t,” said Cate. She sat back in her throne. “And who do you side with, in the coming war?”

“We’re against a war,” said Alfric. “We don’t know what they’re bringing to bear, what they’re coming in with, or even how they got in. We think they’ll send diplomats, maybe a few diplomats, but we’re not agents of the state, except in some unofficial capacity that made sneaking into the demiplane legal in the first place.” He wasn’t sure whether it would have been legal or not, but they at least had coverage.

“They’ve got chrononaut support,” said Hannah. “Hundreds of undone days to spend, if they want it, which it seems they might.”

“They don’t understand the power of draconic might,” said Cate. There was a frightening firmness to her voice. “My kind have stopped razing the countryside, have kept our predations far from humans for centuries, have ensconced ourselves in our demiplanes to the extent that we barely know of the existence of others. We claim no territories in your world. Perhaps it’s time that Inter learned a long-forgotten lesson.” There was a gleam in her eye. Alfric found it familiar. It was the same gleam his mother had sometimes had when talking about Cate.

There was silence from the five simple chairs, though they exchanged some looks. Hannah’s seemed practical, ‘does she really think that she can take on the entire unified nation of Inter?’ while Verity’s seemed sad, as though she was working on accepting the bad outcome as a simple inevitability.

For his own part, Alfric wanted to offer advice, to tell Cate that she couldn’t possibly win, that with a hundred attempts they could certainly kill her, and they would kill her if it seemed like the other option was facing loss of life. He had no way of framing that that didn’t sound like a threat, no way of telling her that wouldn’t push her further toward a battle of some kind. He wasn’t even entirely sure that she would lose, since there were clearly things about dragons that people didn’t understand. There was a demiplane core somewhere inside her, or as a part of her, and he worried that she could draw on it somehow, or at least use it with less of a transfer time than a normal demiplane might require. There were lots of things she could do to make herself incredibly inconvenient to kill.

“Honestly, maybe you should just go for it,” said Mizuki. “I mean, kill a whole bunch of people, make them come to you, groveling? It’ll all be undone days if you light Dondrian on fire, so you can just open with that just after the witching hour.” She had her arms folded and legs crossed, bouncing one leg on top of the other.

“Do you think that I wouldn’t?” asked Cate.

“Burn a city down?” asked Mizuki. “I guess I don’t know, but you’re a decent person. You’re providing for people, you tried to make sure they knew what they were getting into, you really didn’t need to give a bunch of memories back to everyone and completely burn your bridges back home. You feel bad about eating sheep or whatever. So I guess no, you want to kill people, but it’s more the idea of killing than the actual killing.”

“You come here, having been caught in your lies and sneaking about, and suggest that I won’t kill?” asked Cate.

“I didn’t say that,” said Mizuki.

“I can sense sarcasm, girl,” said Cate. “When you say that perhaps I should burn down Dondrian, your voice is laced with disdain.”

“It’s not because I think you won’t do it,” said Mizuki. She leaned forward. “It’s because I think it would be evil and idiotic. So that I think there’s a chance you’d do it out of spite is about a low opinion of you, rather than because I think you’re weak.”

Cate stared at Mizuki for a moment.

Then she rose from her throne, growing taller as she did so, furs dropping to the ground, then other clothes slipping away. Mouth opened wide, pointed up at to the sky, and Alfric thought that she was going to let out a gout of flame, but instead, her mouth opened wider. It was wider than a human mouth could open, and a dragon’s snout pushed out from it, ripping apart the lips and cheeks. The dragon emerged from within the body, enormous, leaving a ruined husk behind.

In her true form, she was as tall as a building, though not approaching the size of the one that Dondrian kept in its largest museum. Her scales glistened and her body dwarfed the throne, which she quickly crushed with a swipe of her tail. Her scales were red as blood, her teeth as white as bleached bone. The mountaintop felt small with her there, towering over them, and she lowered her head with the sinuous motion of a snake, angling her body down so her face was only three feet away from Mizuki.

“Sorry, sorry!” said Mizuki. She was wincing, gripping her chair tight.

“Who are you?” asked Cate, voice now ten times as loud, low and rumbling. “Who are you to have a low opinion of me?”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said it, I’m sorry!” said Mizuki.

The breath from Cate’s nostrils was pushing Mizuki’s hair back, her dragon’s fangs clacking against the ground.

Yet as impertinent as Mizuki had been, as downright hostile, Cate was doing nothing more than threatening, showing her power, hungry for submission.

It was, Alfric thought, how it would go with Inter. They wouldn’t be impertinent, not like Mizuki, but they would have their own demands, and some of those demands would be seen as the same kind of hackles-raising comments. He wasn’t sure that there was a path forward, not if Inter was going to want concessions from her, bonds placed on her, interference with her demiplane and the society she was trying to create. She would want submission, to feel like she was important, worthy of respect, and he was skeptical that the government could give her that. He had no idea what to say though, what could possibly allow both institutions — Cate and the government of Inter as represented by its diplomats — to save face.

“You need the people behind you,” said Verity.

Cate turned to look at Verity, twisting her head and then reorienting her body.

“The people?” asked Cate.

“The people of this demiplane, and the people of Inter,” said Verity. “You’re not going to frighten Inter like this. You’re terrifying, when you want to be. We know that flame is so hot that it can boil steel. But if you bring force against Inter, bring force to the table, they’ll start thinking about all the ways that they can kill you. They’ll look at your flame and find a counter. They’ll look at your scales and find something that can pierce them. Hide, and they’ll search every corner. They will never submit.”

“Then perhaps the small one is right,” said Cate. She placed a claw down not far from Mizuki’s feet, and it dug into the ground. “Perhaps I should go with wings spread and flame raining down.”

“No,” said Verity. “You go the opposite direction.”

In her draconic form, Cate no longer had eyebrows, and was so large that they could only see parts of her at once, so it was hard to read her expression.

“The opposite?” Cate finally asked. Alfric could already see what Verity was proposing though, and hoped that Cate would go for it.

“The framing that Inter will use, that Ria used, is that you’re a dangerous animal,” said Verity. She wasn’t wilting under Cate’s gaze, not like Mizuki had. Alfric wasn’t sure that he would have been that calm. “Inter moves by the will of its people. They see you as a criminal, someone who’s stolen away its citizens, that’s engaged in theft against them, is responsible for crimes. But so long as there’s no public support, no one can act against you. That means that if people think you were right, you’re in a better position against Inter. It’s that, not your might, that will get them to show their belly.”

“Mmm,” said Cate. “They do not particularly like me. There are stories in the paper about the missing, with testimonies from those who I had approached.”

“You bring in stories of your own,” said Verity. “You have genuinely helped people, gave them an escape from intolerable situations, allowed them to live a life away from abusers, from strangling obligations — and no, not all of those people who left their old lives were sympathetic, but many of them are. And all you need is two or three, the best stories.”

“There is too much of the past,” said Cate, shaking her head. “Too many mistakes, too much history that will feel, to them, like it was immediate. Humanity lives and dies, then says that it has changed, that it has no longer beholden to what came before. I have no such luxury, even for things that happened seven hundred years ago.”

She was considering it though, the idea of stopping Inter coming in with blades out by simply being sympathetic.

“Some of the concessions that they would ask for can be given freely,” said Alfric. “Assuming that it’s not important to you, there are things that you can do ahead of time, before they try to negotiate, which make it more difficult for them to unsheathe their blades.”

“Such as?” asked Cate.

She didn’t like him, didn’t trust him, and probably thought that this was his second or third time through the day, using their previous conversation against her.

“Immigration policies,” said Alfric. “You’re worried about people leaving, that’s understandable, but most of them don’t want to leave, and there are plenty who’d want to come. As soon as you say that people are free to go whenever they want to, Inter loses half their reason for being here. Inter coming into a demiplane to aid well-fed former citizens who can leave at any time is incredibly unpalatable to the average citizen.”

“They cannot stomach my power,” said Cate. “You misunderstand what people will do when threatened.”

“Kindness is the threat,” said Verity. “Inter isn’t some huge beast. It’s people. Those making the decision aren’t just looking out for their fellow citizens, they’re looking out for themselves, and no one is going to send in a battalion if it costs them too much.”

Alfric thought that was an entirely too cynical view of the political reality of Inter. There were good politicians, people who would do necessary but unpopular things. If Alfric were a politician, he would act in the interests of the people and employ the law in an even way, regardless of whether it was immensely popular or not. An unpopular application of the law was a sign that the law needed to be changed, but the law couldn’t be just ignored because there was a victim who deserved it or a charismatic perpetrator. That didn’t apply in this case, he didn’t think, which was unique through Inter’s history, but it made him skeptical that Verity was right.

“There’s no time,” said Cate, after a long moment of contemplation.

“Time is tight,” said Alfric. “They’re here already, somewhere, and I would guess that they’ll be impossible to find, or with chrononaut backup if they are found. You can get the ball rolling though. We can help.”

Cate eyed him.

“We want to help,” said Alfric. “I want to do this the chrononaut way, with full disclosure, being honest and forthright. We never should have done it the other way.”

“No, you shouldn’t have,” said Cate, her loud voice rumbling. She flapped her wings once, kicking up dust. She looked off into the distance of the sickly landscape. “I feel, at any moment, that one of you will bring up my intolerable hypocrisy.”

They were all silent. Mizuki had gone quiet after Cate had transformed, and was still gripping her seat with white fingers. The threat of death felt closer with Cate as a dragon, long tail whistling through the air, but Alfric had faced death before — had died before.

“No?” asked Cate, looking at them. “Then I will flagellate myself in my own time, once this mess is dealt with.”

“Do you agree?” asked Verity. “To make these changes, to put out stories in papers, puts them on the back foot?” She looked so earnest, which wasn’t normal for Verity.

“I will try,” said Cate. “And the moment they bring out the knives is the moment I stop showing them my belly.”

Chapter 149 - Diplomat

‘How hard can it be to kill a dragon?’ wasn’t something that Harmon would ever have actually asked his wife, but it was something that he’d thought. She’d been inside the demiplane for more than a week, and taken a number of runs at it from different angles, all with the element of surprise and usually with the element of foreknowledge.

There were a few reasons that Harmon would never have asked ‘how hard can it be to kill a dragon?’ He understood that most things were more difficult than they first looked, with specialist knowledge usually being non-obvious and hard-won. He had accumulated a number of skills in his life, and while there were certain things that were deceptively simple in whatever field he tackled, mostly it was domain knowledge that interlocked with other domain knowledge. So he knew it was entirely possible that taking down a dragon was more involved than just cutting its head off.

The other major reason that Harmon would never have asked the question was that Ria was obviously quite upset about the whole thing.

“I don’t think we need to kill her now,” he said. “The battalion isn’t there so they can end her life, they’re there so that if diplomacy fails, there’s some way of containing the problem.”

“We need to kill her specifically for the sake of diplomacy,” said Ria. “Once, at least, so we know the extent of what she’s got up her sleeve. If someone comes to you with a sword in hand and asks you for money, you’d want to know their skill level so that you know how much you need to give them.”

“That’s a terrible analogy,” said Harmon.

“I’m a dungeoneer, not a wordsmith,” said Ria. “In my personal testing of her limits, I’ve come up short. Either I test with the battalion, or we get her outside of the demiplane and test her there — which, in my opinion, you should have done when you were placing the battalion in.”

Harmon had been instrumental in that, though he certainly wouldn’t have said that it was primarily his doing. He had been running things outside the demiplane, transmitting information and speaking with Ria, getting the government involved as much as seemed advisable while still attempting to keep information from leaking back to Cate somehow.

They knew from some of the things Cate had said that she was keeping track of the outside world, at least a little bit, though not nearly as much as Harmon would have expected. She was keeping herself sequestered, as she’d said she would, which he believed to be partly for the sake of her own safety. He’d used the children to help look for her, which increased the total surveillance while keeping the circle of trust, and had used what Ria had reported in order to allocate their resources.

They’d finally caught sight of Cate when she went to visit a place that she must have thought no one would know about: the island she’d left the previous denizens of her demiplane on.

Harmon had wanted to get in contact with Inter as quickly as possible, to let them know that this island held a decent number of people who would likely welcome civilization with open arms. They were not, technically, citizens of Inter, being generations removed from the demiplane settlers, but Inter would step in, as it liked to do — their country engaged in a bit too much intervention for the sake of some.

Ria had instead argued that it was too much information to give up to Cate and too useful a trap.

They had argued about it, which was mostly an ethical argument of the kind that neither of them particularly liked. In the end, Harmon had said there were limits to how long he’d allow those people to go uncontacted, and Ria had agreed that she would try to hurry things along as best she could.

In the end, it had worked, and Ria had been vindicated. Harmon had gotten everything ready well in advance, and because the day was undone, well in advance meant ‘before the thing had even happened’. He’d given advice to the battalion and the diplomats who were a part of it, which included a full debrief on Cate’s known abilities, the features of the demiplane, and what Ria had observed through twenty different battles. That was just about all he could do though, and he stayed on the outside, waiting.

He’d never liked waiting, especially not for Ria. When she did multiday dungeons, he had always found himself fretting. She was a chrononaut, yes, but there were circumstances a chrononaut couldn’t beat, and many of those circumstances could be found in the incredibly tough dungeons that Ria and her party went down into. This was no different, though he worried that Ria had gone into it with a dungeoneer’s mindset.

But the diplomatic solution seemed as though it was on the table, and still Ria was there, lending her power to the battalion, who was otherwise dependent on awkward setups to get chrononaut support. The barrier between the demiplane and the real world was troublesome, the exit easy but the entrance gated.

“You’re planning to not disclose this final fight?” asked Harmon the day after Alfric’s diplomatic foray appeared to have worked.

“Alfric has already disclosed that I’ve made a number of attempts on her life,” said Ria. “He also disclosed that I haven’t actually won, which I’ll bet she loved.”

“That’s good for us,” said Harmon. “It makes her feel superior, generous.”

“It makes her feel like we’re weak,” said Ria. “Surely we don’t want to be too weak, or she won’t agree to our demands. And I’ll leave disclosure for the diplomats to decide, I don’t plan on having a chat with her. I am, after all, a dungeoneer, not a diplomat.”

“You give them advice though, right?” asked Harmon. “You’re in on their meetings, talk to them about what’s happened in their previous iterations of the day, surely they’re not just ignoring you?”

“They aren’t,” said Ria. “So yes, I do advise that we get a win. At least one? It’s not something that we need to spend huge amounts of time or effort on, but it lets us gauge who and what she is.”

“I don’t like it,” said Harmon. “But I suppose this is my day, not yours, so this is more about whether when you talk to me you’ll be talking to someone who grudgingly agrees or someone who doesn’t.”

“I’m just hoping to find something,” said Ria. “That’s all.”

It was, of course, more than that, but he didn’t say that, because he felt that she knew it.

In the end, she was vindicated again, but not for the reason that they might have hoped: Cate had contingencies.

~~~~

The chrononauts didn’t meet together for business often, but there were plans in place for when they needed to, especially when they needed to on short notice. They had a large hall and an entad that amplified voices, and while this was nowhere near the full group, there were more than twenty of them. Harmon normally wouldn’t have been asked to come, but he’d spoken to a few of the elders about what Ria was up to, and he was there because of that. It was a large hall and a long table, gently bowed out so that people could see each other even if they were on the same side.

“The dragon, Cate, has left traps,” said Mollo. He was one of the two in charge. He was scarred in a way that spoke to their deep North Tarbin heritage — something he’d adopted late in life, not having been born to it. “If she dies, or if she’s captured, it means calamity in both Plenarch and Dondrian. We’ve burned nineteen days on this so far, and needed to come to some conclusion on the way forward.”

It was like that with chrononauts sometimes, a conversation already accomplished. Here, they spoke to him because his role had already been determined, a path forward chosen, possibly with his help.

“How many dead?” asked Harmon.

“Five thousand in Dondrian, on the first day,” said Poddo. She was one of the oldest chrononauts, at least among those with some decision-making ability, wrinkled and gray. “Thirteen thousand in Plenarch. Seventeen thousand in Veria.”

“Less, with evacuation and containment,” said Mollo, waving a hand. “Starting at the witching hour, we can get everyone to safety, though it’s difficult to confirm, and both the Dondrian and Veria calamities can be contained without all that much property damage. We’ve been working on defusing them before they can happen, but it’s not simple, even knowing where they start from.”

“But it’s been linked back to Cate?” asked Harmon.

“She left notes,” said Poddo. “Explanations of what happened and why. Apparently she had reason to believe that someone might try to kill her.”

“Hmm,” said Harmon. “Paranoia, mostly, unless she placed those traps very recently. She was hoping to stop someone from trying to kill her?”

“Chrononauts, specifically,” said Mollo, shaking his head. “As deterrents, they’re not perfect, we could spend another set of days, make different approaches, break out tools and weapons that we use only rarely — or we could simply have Ria know, as soon as possible, to put an end to this.”

“If there are traps, they’ll need to be dealt with,” said Harmon.

“We know of three,” said Poddo. “But I’ve read the notes. Three is not all there are.”

“No?” asked Harmon.

“The traps were meant for us,” said Mollo. “Unacceptable loss of life for a chrononaut to stop, a beacon that would light up if the dragon died. Those traps were easy enough for us to get to, to save people from — which is why it was assumed that there would be someone to read her letters. In them, she details other calamities that we’d be incapable of stopping. An example, she stresses that this is only an example, would be a poison that would spread through a city and show no symptoms until well-after the witching hour had passed.”

“It’s not clear how these traps were triggered,” said Poddo. “The only reason we know there’s a link between the dragon’s death and these calamities is that there were letters left for us, and we knew for certain that Ria was attempting to kill her today.”

“Some kind of dead man’s switch,” said Harmon. “Difficult, given the planar barrier. A check-in?”

“From what we know, it happens exactly as she dies,” said Poddo. “We don’t know what happens to a demiplane when a dragon dies, because we know so little about both those things. These Wildlands … something happens to them, which triggers something else, which triggers her contingencies? We don’t know. We could spend days attempting to figure it out, but this is disrupting and clouding everything.”

“You want me to deliver a message to her to stop?” asked Harmon. They were concerned about their vision for the day ahead, the things that must have been cloaked because of deaths or evacuations.

“This is not actually an emergency,” said Poddo. “It’s only someone who feels clever using their own custom chrononaut solution to save their skin — albeit someone whose very life is threatened by a chrononaut.”

“I can do that,” said Harmon. “She won’t be pleased, but I think she’d agree that this is far more hassle than it’s worth.” He wasn’t entirely sure she would agree.

“It’s good for Inter to know these traps exist,” said Poddo with a sigh. “This is, unfortunately, an intersection of our interests with the government’s, which isn’t what we want at this juncture, not with other scandals too fresh in peoples’ minds.” He was speaking of Lola, though obliquely. The girl had relatives in the room. “We’ll let you know what we know, then there’s agreement to let the day go through. She’ll need to be absolutely certain to reset, especially if the attacks happen again.”

“Will do,” said Harmon. He really didn’t need to be told twice, but it was difficult for those with higher priority to let the reins slip.

When Ria came out of the demiplane at the appointed time, she had already heard the news, because it wasn’t her first time through the day.

“You could have come out early,” said Harmon.

“Better to keep it consistent,” said Ria. She let out a long, low sigh. “It’s all been called off.”

“Good,” said Harmon. “Then it will be settled diplomatically.”

“It takes a real snot-rag of a person to kill civilians in an undone day just to get a reset,” said Ria. “I hope that counts against her. It’s also very much something we don’t want to encourage.”

“Undone days don’t count,” said Harmon. He chuckled, and she glared at him. “She’s turned the tables on you, you have to admit that’s a little funny. You were going to kill her in an undone day just to see whether you could, on the thought that it was alright to kill because it doesn’t ‘count’, and she’s also killed people because it doesn’t ‘count’, which you’d never have found out if you hadn’t gone in against her.” Ria was clearly not seeing the humor. “I woke up this morning to an emergency meeting of chrononauts, and now it’s dissolved away to nothing, I think it’s okay that I’m relieved, right?”

“It is,” she sighed, in a way that made it feel like it wasn’t actually okay. “I’m sorry, I love you, this is just very trying, and I never got to actually do it, only reports from timelines where I did it.”

“That’s how it is,” he said with a shrug. He’d gotten the same reports. “Never a perfect kill.”

“No,” said Ria. “Always losses, either entads or people, usually both.”

“But you did kill her,” said Harmon. “And on her home turf. That’s something, right?”

“I just wanted to remember it,” said Ria. “All I remember are losses. I’m not used to losing.”

“You’re a winner,” said Harmon, smiling at her. “That’s what I love about you.”

“Yes, well, this is your day to remember, so remember to prepare the house for me. I’ll be out soon.” She sighed again. “Give the children my love.”

“Of course,” said Harmon.

~~~~

Three days after they’d sat on their uncomfortable chairs on the mountaintop, Cate met with the diplomatic team from Inter. They had only two people, a lead negotiator and a higher-up in the government, with no military to be seen. Cate came in her human form, with a larger entourage, and Isra could immediately see that this made her look weak. She was puffing herself up like a small animal that had been backed into a corner, and that was worrying, because the meeting would go better if they were instead meeting as equals, like two dogs sniffing each other.

There was also a threat inherent in Inter only sending two people. It meant that they had hidden resources elsewhere, certainly in the form of chrononaut backup, but perhaps entad support for their diplomats, or a military force that could appear at a moment’s notice.

The meeting was taking place in Inter, rather than in the demiplane, Cate’s sovereignty respected at least in that regard. Yet there was a threat there too, that there were people inside the demiplane, a battalion, who likely wouldn’t leave until the threat had been fully resolved, and perhaps not even then. The stick was being kept from view, the carrot dangled in front.

It felt good, to Isra, to be back in the real world. Their entire party had been brought out, since they were in some technical sense agents of Inter — though they’d never signed up for that. Still, they were on Cate’s side of the negotiation, physically if not entirely in spirit. They stood well away from the actual negotiation table, which sat in a wide field with a type of short grass that seemed to have choked the life from the soil and prevented anything else from being grown there.

<Is this actually going to work?> asked Mizuki. <Or is this some chrononaut ploy where we’re going to see the same day like thirty different times?>

<Diplomacy will be done without much foreknowledge,> said Alfric. <Cate doesn’t like chrononauts. Who would? She’ll assume that there are undone days, but the diplomats have probably assured her that they’re not going through the day for the thirtieth time. They could be lying, but … probably not, since this is step one of a larger campaign.>

<Which is?> asked Isra. She was curious about that, because this seemed like the end, rather than a beginning.

<Dragons,> said Verity. <From the perspective of Inter, this isn’t just a negotiation with Cate, it’s a template negotiation that informs all future deals with all future dragons.>

<I had kind of hoped there would be a fight,> said Mizuki.

Isra looked at her.

<I mean, how often in your life do you get to see a dragon going all-out against the best that the largest nation in the world has to offer?> Mizuki asked.

<Never, if you’re lucky,> said Alfric. <I’ll ask the family to see if it actually happened in an undone day, but Cate fought my mother at least a dozen times, and Cate got the better of her. I have to assume that Cate has a lot up her sleeve, especially if she was willing to step foot on Inter. And because of the interests of everyone involved, Cate is incentivized to target civilians.>

<Would she actually?> asked Mizuki.

<I don’t know,> said Alfric. <Likely the chrononauts know, which means that someone in Inter knows, but it’s information that you’d want to keep from the public.>

<I’m just glad that it’s over,> said Verity. <Though there are a few lingering issues.>

<Are there?> asked Isra. <Aren’t we all … well, going home?>

<I hope that we are,> said Mizuki. <I really need to get to wizarding college.>

Verity was silent, and Isra looked at her. <You’re coming back, right?> asked Isra.

<I don’t know,> said Verity. <I … don’t think that the demiplane is the home for me, as much as I enjoyed my time there.> She glanced at Alfric. Isra knew that Alfric felt affection for the place too, though in a much different way.

<We haven’t been invited to stay,> said Alfric. <And they’re negotiating immigration policy right now. It might not be up to us.>

<You’d really want to be there for the Wildlands?> asked Mizuki. <You like them that much?>

<I’ve just scratched the surface,> said Alfric. <If I leave now, when I come back there will be people who have it all down to an exact science. I’d be doing nothing more than running through an algorithm. I think my interest holds so long as it’s new and unique, and after a certain point, it won’t be.>

<That would kind of put a damper on the party,> said Mizuki. <I mean, it would be the end of it.>

<We were already at an impasse before all this began,> said Verity. <My presence was causing something in the dungeons. And … I think I felt it in the Wildlands too.>

<When we were being yelled at?> asked Mizuki.

<Yes,> said Verity. <I had never felt it in the dungeons before, never really knew that it was happening — but the dungeons do all their generation at once, and the Wildlands do their generation all the time, whenever you look away.>

<You’re only bringing this up now?> asked Alfric. <We’ve had plenty of time to test it.> He had asked her to go into the Wildlands before and been declined, though part of that was because her ‘purpose’ within the demiplane was to speak with Cate.

<I kept bringing terrible things into the dungeons,> said Verity. <There’s a reason that I hadn’t gone into the Wildlands.> She swallowed, visibly. <I had the thought that Cate would ask me to go. She knew about our troubles, that I was a Chosen of Xuphin, and once I knew about the Wildlands … but she never brought it up, not even in a gentle way.>

<You feel like you can do something with the Wildlands?> asked Alfric. <During our brief trip out there … you felt something?>

<I don’t know,> said Verity. <I need to try.> She looked at Alfric. <Possibly in an undone day.>

<You think that it’ll be dangerous,> said Alfric.

<Very much so,> she replied.

Mizuki tapped her foot and had her arms folded. She was watching the negotiations, which were well past their first hour. <Alfric, if you go out into the Wildlands, I don’t know if I’ll be able to forgive you.>

<I’m not decided,> said Alfric. <I think it would be lonely, and I’d be throwing away everything that we’ve been working toward. But Verity is right, until we have some understanding of what’s going on with her, or with the party, dungeons are … not what I want to be doing.>

<Give me a chance to see if the Wildlands are any different,> said Verity. She let out a breath. <Then we’ll try swapping me out with another party member.>

<You’d be okay with that?> asked Alfric.

<Yes,> said Verity. <This, watching Cate and how she behaves, has made me think about my own choices. I got to Pucklechurch by running away from my problems, and while I do think I needed to cut ties with my mother, as a general approach, I think running away is lacking. Cate has too little trust. It’s why it’s been so hard for her to allow people even the option to leave.>

<You keep seeing parallels with her,> said Isra. <I’m not sure they’re apt. She’s a dragon.>

<She’s a what?> asked Mizuki. <Holy crow, we need to tell the diplomats, they have no idea what they’ve just walked into.>

<I do hope we’re allowed back,> said Alfric.

<I wish we had somethin’ to do,> said Hannah. <Not that we’re diplomats, or mediators, but it might be nice to not just sit back with arms folded, not able to hear a single word they’re sayin’.> She did have her arms folded, and was looking disgruntled. She had new clothes, ones that had been made for her by Liara, which really did suit her. Liara was away from their group, looking anxious.

<It’s not something that’s going to happen over the course of a day,> said Alfric. <They’ll make an agreement, or maybe take a second day to do it, but even once there’s something signed, there’s the matter of actually implementing it. I’m hoping that Cate takes some of my structural suggestions, but either way, it’s going to be a rocky few weeks with different pain points.>

<She’s doin’ it on her own though,> said Hannah, looking at the table. <Seems a bit like a lesson not learned, ay? No offense to her.>

<She has people listening in and speaking into her ear,> said Verity. <She talked to me about it this morning.>

<Ah,> said Hannah. <I s’pose I shouldn’t have opened my mouth then.>

<She’s still presenting herself as the head of state,> said Verity. <That might not have been the wisest thing to do.>

<One of my suggestions was that the office of head of state could be different from the person of Cate,> said Alfric. <A division of rights and responsibilities, at least going forward, would make everything more clear for everyone. But I don’t know if she’s going to follow through with it.>

<Is there anything preventing the chronos from getting their way?> asked Mizuki. <Doing the negotiation fifty times and just taking the best result?>

<It’s linear,> said Alfric. <So you can’t take the best result, you have to look at each individual result and ask yourself whether or not you want to keep that specific one or whether you think you can do better. And … in terms of overall reputation management, I would think that the chronos would like to keep to the shadows. Inter is the only nation with a significant number of chronos, and if other nations are concerned that talks are subject to that kind of thing, it might be trouble.>

<The chronos would prefer people forget they exist,> said Hannah.

<Not forget, no,> said Alfric. <But we’d prefer people aren’t looking over their shoulder. If the story that gets told to the public is that Cate voluntarily poked her head out from her demiplane to treat with Inter, that’s probably best for everyone. It saves face better for her, and I don’t think Inter wants people to know about the dubiously legal things that we were up to in there.>

<She’s coming over here,> said Mizuki.

Isra looked, worried that there’d been some sort of blow up, but Cate was gliding over to the group with a smooth motion and a mild expression on her face.

“I’ve suggested that we take a break for lunch and so that I have an opportunity to confer in-depth,” said Cate.

“Excellent,” said Liara. “You’ve been doing wonderfully so far.”

“Then we’ll have food,” said Cate. She clapped her hands once, and a full dining table appeared with plates, food, and seats for everyone that was a part of ‘her’ side. This included Isra’s party, who had been against Cate from the start and did a pretty significant amount of sneaking and spying. That this was all considered to be ‘in the past’ was a bit shocking to Isra, who had never been terribly quick to forgive and forget.

They ate in relative silence while the two government diplomats ate their own modest meal not far away. The full team involved had to be much bigger than just those two, and Isra wondered whether they were eating lunch too, the battalion of people that were apparently still in the demiplane, the countless advisors who were likely onhand to offer advice to those two … she didn’t know how many people were involved, but she imagined that it would be like the entire town of Pucklechurch coming together for a major problem, so many people that many of them were simply in charge of telling others where to go and what to do.

The meal was herby fish with vegetables, a light and simple affair, but Isra couldn’t really focus on it. Everything seemed like it was up in the air, not just with the fate of the demiplane, but with the party as well.

“So,” said Cate as she pushed her plate away. “There are some sticking points, and I thought I would get the opinions from around the table before I returned. Inter is requesting reparations, which I will happily pay, and remuneration from my citizens, which I’m much less inclined to agree with. Debts incurred by those in Inter have no means of being collected without my consent, and that, I’m afraid, is more than I’m willing to give up. I would pay the debts in full, but in a few cases they’re quite large.”

She waited, and it became clear she was waiting for opinions.

“Unless the government owns some of the debt, it’s a matter between individuals rather than states,” said Alfric. “Kiromo does cooperate with Inter, I think, but that’s because they want Inter to do the same. That doesn’t apply for you, unless you hold debt, which I don’t imagine you do.”

“I’ve said the same,” replied Cate with a nod. “It’s unreasonable.”

“Well, not unreasonable, ay?” asked Hannah. “There’s some reason to it. They don’t want people to rack up payments they can’t afford and then run off into your demiplane.”

“Hmm,” said Cate. “Yes, thank you, I do think that gives me an idea.”

When the talks resumed, the table disappeared, and the party was left off to the side, speaking with each other.

<We don’t really know much about international negotiations, huh?> asked Mizuki.

<We’re mascots,> said Alfric. <I’m fine with that, if it’s helping on a psychological level.>

<She asked that debt question and I just sat there hoping she wouldn’t single me out,> said Mizuki. <I literally don’t even understand what’s at stake there. I really don’t understand why Inter would care. They should be worried about getting burned up, right?>

<It’s more complicated than that,> said Verity. <They want to establish a basis for business, and there are details that need to be in place before they can work on the other things.>

<Are those island people going to be okay, do you think?> asked Mizuki.

<They’ll be fine,> said Alfric. <They’re non-state refugees, Inter takes care of people like that.>

<They’re actually inside the demiplane,> said Verity.

Alfric looked at her. <What?>

<Cate brought them in,> said Verity. <It happened before we came to her, and is the likely way that the battalion got in. She mentioned it to me this morning when I asked. So … they’re out of the picture, or I guess a part of this deal.>

<They really went with her?> asked Alfric.

<She wanted to take ownership of that failure,> said Verity. <They weren’t given a better option, in part because Inter wanted to set a trap for her, so … yes, they went with her. Obviously they don’t trust her, but she’s lavished them with gifts, built a separate village for them in short order — I think she was waiting for me to ask, so she could say ‘oh that, I already took care of it’.>

<Seems kind of bad of Inter to use that kindness to sneak in,> said Mizuki.

<They’re a nation,> said Isra. <She’s just a person.>

<Eh,> said Mizuki. <I’m just saying it seems bad.>

<It also would have been more kind to just bring them to Inter,> said Hannah. <Where they don’t need to fear for their lives.>

<So far as we know, she hasn’t killed anyone lately,> said Verity. <Even when killing someone might have been in her best interests.>

<She killed my mother a few times,> said Alfric.

<To be fair,> Verity began.

<Yes, I know,> said Alfric. <It’s an undone day.>

<I was going to say that your mother had it coming,> said Verity.

<That too,> said Alfric. He gave a sigh. <I think I need to start paying more attention to the chrononauts and how they do things. Much of what went on shouldn’t have been allowed. I don’t know how much pressure Inter was putting on anyone, but either way it doesn’t sit right with me.>

<Is that what you’ll do, if she doesn’t let you back in the Wildlands?> asked Mizuki. <Become a chrononaut politician or whatever?>

<I’ll dip my toe in,> said Alfric. <Mostly to check the temperature.>

Isra stayed tight-lipped. They were dancing around the subject of whether they were going to stay together, but no one seemed to want to bring it up again.

The party was the reason that she’d turned down Cate’s offer, which had been made a month ago. She had the memories of it now, which seemed clearer than other month-old memories, and that might have been because of how the memory was returned to her. She’d been at a different part of her life then, less worldly, but she’d felt closer to the party then, less like they were being pulled in their own separate directions.

She wanted to tell Alfric that she still needed him, that he shouldn’t go, but no one else was saying it, and she worried that he would gently explain that he needed some distance from the party. They had said that they would try something to deal with the dungeons, but it felt like a last gasp, as though their ‘one more thing’ wouldn’t work out and then that would be it.

Most of the chatter among the party wasn’t terribly important. Mizuki was eager to get a delayed start on becoming a wizard, Hannah was eager to see Marsh (which Mizuki teased her for), and Verity had a delayed trip to Dondrian to speak with her father about his sound making machine and the music she was meant to provide it. From everything they knew, life hadn’t moved on much while they’d been absent, though they hadn’t even been in the demiplane for all that long.

When the sun began to get low in the sky, Cate broke from the negotiations again, this time for the day. There would be more talking, which was apparently going well, another day of it, which wasn’t just because there was more to talk about, but in order to guard against the chrononauts and the potential for them to pick the best day out of the lot.

The party went back with Cate, which they had expected but still seemed a little crazy to Isra. She wanted to go home — Mizuki’s home — but was worried that when she did go home, it wouldn’t be the same as before.

Chapter 150 - Wild

Verity didn’t particularly like the Wildlands. They made her nervous. By contrast, Mizuki seemed to enjoy them enormously, visibly enjoyed them more than even Alfric, and she had a smile on her face the whole trip.

“The trick is to go with the flow,” said Mizuki. “Are we walking to a mountain? To a lake? A little village? Doesn’t matter!”

“It’s a lot more stable with five people,” said Alfric. “Mostly because you have eyes everywhere.”

“More stable with me, I think,” said Isra. “Because I have eyes everywhere.”

“True,” said Alfric.

“We should have done this ages ago,” said Hannah.

“There were things going on,” said Alfric. “It made a lot of sense for us to separate.”

“Still,” said Hannah. She took a deep breath through her nose. “If you can put up with the murderous dragon, perhaps the Wildlands are worth it.”

“I wouldn’t say murderous,” said Alfric.

“Leaves a bad taste in my mouth, that’s all,” said Hannah. “Offends my sense of justice.”

“You pushed for peace though,” said Mizuki.

“Ay,” said Hannah. “Peace is best for everyone all around. I’m only sayin’ that my sense of justice didn’t take kindly to it. When you get older, you’ll understand that you need to quell the part of you that wants people to get bashed in the head for their wrongdoings.”

“If you’re suggesting that I shouldn’t have bashed Lola on the head —” Mizuki started.

“No, no, nothin’ like that,” said Hannah. “But there’s somethin’ to be said for compassion to our enemies, hopes of reform, gentle forgiveness, and all that. It’s of Garos.”

“Symmetry,” nodded Verity. She did like that, and felt no small amount of symmetry with Cate. It was, somehow, easy to imagine herself in the same position, even though she wasn’t a long-lived dragon. She could imagine having mistakes lorded over her for the rest of her life, and the deep regret at the actions of a person that she no longer was. She kept that thought to herself though, because she knew that not everyone felt the same way.

This was their last full day in the demiplane. Cate had offered for all of them to stay, except for Alfric.

“You’re a chrononaut,” Cate had told him. “It’s impossible to get away from them, but I won’t let one stay here simply by dint of having crept in.”

“I don’t think that’s fair,” Alfric had frowned.

“No offer was ever extended to you,” she’d said. “The others I thought had their charms, but you … you’re industrious, but you come from a good home. You have the restlessness of someone who was well-fed, the eagerness of someone who’s suffered little. Being a chrononaut alone would have been enough for me to disqualify you, but you aren’t temperamentally suited to being among the people I’ve chosen.”

He hadn’t taken it well, which for Alfric meant a frown and some polite disagreement.

“Immigration and emigration will be done seasonally,” said Cate. “It’s easier for everyone that way, especially as I need to be the one to ferry people. In a month’s time, we’ll have applications sorted out for those who wish to come live with me. If you still wish to stay, there will be people to consider whether or not you’re suited.”

That was a gentler way of saying ‘no’, but it was clear he still felt wounded.

Verity watched him as they walked. There was something mournful in how he looked around, knowing that it was likely the last time he was going to see this place. Of course, in the Wildlands, everything was gone in the blink of an eye, never seen twice, but she could understand what he was feeling.

“You’re alright?” she asked him after moving close to him, far enough away from the others that if they were eavesdropping, it was impolite.

“I’m fine,” said Alfric. “I really thought that it would be a choice.”

“And now it’s not,” said Verity. “You’re kicked out.”

“Yeah,” said Alfric, letting out a long breath. “I don’t want to feel like I’m stuck being a dungeoneer.”

“You could easily be something else,” said Verity. “Anything else, really. But I suppose you’re not used to having limitations placed on you.”

“No,” said Alfric. He raised an eyebrow at her. “That’s not a dig?”

“Oh, no,” said Verity. “I’m just saying … you’re the great Alfric Overguard, man with infinite resources and a can-do attitude, capable of doing whatever it is he wants. Having a mountain that you’re simply not allowed to climb is new.”

“It does have that going for it,” said Alfric, laughing a little bit. “I think you underestimate how long I was out in the cold, looking for a good dungeoneering party and failing. It feels like that.”

“Will you apply in three months?” asked Verity.

“No,” said Alfric. “Or … probably not. It depends on how things are going with the party, whether we’re going strong or falling apart. It depends on how many people apply, whether they can scrape together a proper government, whether it all falls apart and ends with a sword falling down on someone’s neck.”

“Seems unlikely, at this point,” said Verity.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “Thankfully. As much as I agree with Hannah’s ‘sense of justice’, I’m glad that no one is going to have to be killed over this. And we’ll see how the long-term experiment goes. I know Cate is still pushing for as minimal of an internal government as possible, partly for her own sake, but … it’s not going to involve us.”

“No,” said Verity.

Cate had asked Verity to stay, and Verity had said no. It seemed very possible that Verity could have made a good life for herself in the demiplane, but she’d thought that she could make a good life for herself in Pucklechurch too, or anywhere else in the world that wasn’t Dondrian — though she had more confidence now that she’d have been able to forge a path there as well, so long as it was her own.

The weather was nice, though Verity was on-edge, thinking that at any moment she might accidentally summon up a monster they’d have to run away from. The world warped around them as they went, always when they weren’t looking, and Isra kept her senses confined so that she wouldn’t have such a stabilizing effect on their surroundings. Mostly it was boreal forest, and while the species changes and the scenery differed, it didn’t differ all that much. From time to time they would all close their eyes at once, which helped to induce changes in what was on the horizon.

They’d been walking for a good thirty minutes when Mizuki picked up a stick and gave Verity a poke.

“Do something!” said Mizuki.

“I’m trying,” said Verity, which was only partly true. “If you poke me with that stick again, I’m going to make you regret it.”

“The border has an anchoring effect,” said Alfric. “There are self-consistency principles in play. We might need to go further, but we don’t have anything that can move us as a group.”

“So, explain this to me like I’ve been zoning out every other time you talked to me about it,” said Mizuki. “And also like you don’t expect me to remember what you’ve said beyond this conversation, because realistically I’m never coming back here.”

“The easier explanation just uses some simple math,” said Alfric.

“I’m out,” said Mizuki. She gave him a smile.

“Alright,” said Alfric. “You’re reading a book. You’re sitting there trying to predict the next word. That’s pretty easy, right? If you’re in the middle of a sentence, sometimes it’s —”

“Obvious,” said Hannah.

“Yes,” smiled Alfric. He’d paused just long enough to let someone fill in the word. “But predicting the word after the next word is harder, and predicting a word on the next page is harder than that, and if you just read the first page of the book, you won’t be able to make many predictions at all about what the last page is going to look like.”

“That’s not really been my experience,” said Verity. “Endings are easy to predict.”

“It’s maybe a bad analogy,” said Alfric. “But the center of the demiplane gives some definition to its surroundings, and the further into the Wildlands you go, the less that definition matters to what you see.”

“Verity is right, it’s usually pretty easy to predict an ending,” said Mizuki.

“I’m trying to break down something I don’t really understand into a concept that’s easier to digest,” said Alfric. “I was going to write up my adventures in the Wildlands.” He shrugged. “Maybe it needs work.”

“No, I think it makes more sense than whatever you were saying before,” said Mizuki. “And then the people who are in the Wildlands, they’re like … people holding a page of the book, say page 146. And if they go forward, they can get to page 147, but that means giving up page 146, and if they go back to 146, it’s different, because it’s just a made up 146 that was invented on the fly from whatever was on 147.”

“I didn’t find that any easier to follow,” said Isra. “Mizuki’s addition somehow made it more confusing.”

“She gets it though,” said Alfric. “Though this is the fourth time I’ve explained it to her.”

“And a book is linear, ay?” asked Hannah. “This is different.”

“Linear is easier to understand,” said Alfric. “I think the best analogy takes the simplest version of the concept. I don’t necessarily think that books are the best, but at least there’s something there to latch onto.”

“So,” said Mizuki, raising her stick and pointing it at Verity. “You think that this is going to be like the dungeons?”

“The dungeons were possibly built on the bones of the Wildlands,” said Verity. “Cate thinks so, anyway. We’ve all noticed the similarities, and the simplest explanation is that the Editors were taking something that already existed and just making their own version of it, more like writing a variation on someone else’s work than composing a concert completely from scratch. But …”

“But there are a lot of questions about that,” said Alfric. “Questions that I don’t think we’re ever going to answer unless we could get a candid discussion with the Editors. The mechanism is obviously different, there’s no dragon involved —”

“That we know of,” said Mizuki.

“— and the most significant difference is that the generation here is continuous, dependent on who’s looking where,” Alfric finished. “With dungeons, the whole dungeon is ‘created’ at once from the moment the first member of a party steps in.”

“That’s one of the things I didn’t understand about what was happening in the dungeons,” said Verity. “The strange things — dangerous things — seemed to be there whether I was first or last.”

“It’s a clue as to the nature of it,” said Alfric. “Though when in a party, there’s some melding of personhood, which — I mean, you know, you’re a bard.”

Verity nodded. The ‘blending of personhood’ was often remarked upon by bards, as it was one of the things that helped them to be more powerful when singing songs for those in their party. Alfric was almost always the first one into the dungeons. If Verity was affecting the generation, it wasn’t happening when she stepped in, it was when Alfric did, through the mechanism of the party. This had a frightening implication, which was that if Verity was ever stupid enough to go into a dungeon on her own, the problems would be five times worse.

“Please,” said Mizuki, throwing back her head. “You said you’d felt something when we were at Cate’s death mountain, I just want to see what you can do, even if it’s dangerous. Especially if it’s dangerous.”

“Alright,” said Verity. “Everyone close your eyes please, shut off your senses, and give me a blank canvas?”

“You’re mixing metaphors,” said Mizuki. “It would be, uh, squinting so that we can only see a single line of the page of the book we’re on?” Her eyes were closed tight.

“Shh,” said Alfric.

“Don’t shush me,” said Mizuki. She leaned over and poked him in the ribs, and they rough housed for a bit, eyes closed, until Isra told them that it wasn’t the time.

They were along a river, which was flowing gently by them, short grass dotted with small blue flowers and so many insects moving away when they walked that it was like puffs of chitinous confetti by their feet. From what she knew, Verity didn’t expect to be able to change their immediate surroundings, not things that would change the acoustics, but she turned her attention to the distance, where closing her eyes for a second was enough to make mountains appear and disappear. It would have been better to do it in a place with a view, somewhere that would make any changes more immediately obvious, but perhaps a sheltered area was better. They hadn’t exactly chosen this spot, it was just the place where Mizuki had gotten bored.

Verity had felt something. It might have been because she was so worried about the Wildlands, so in tune with her own anxiety and fear about accidentally calling something forward. She was trying to tap into that, to see what it was, and if possible, she was going to change it.

Bards had extra senses, honed over long periods of time. A bard pulled on what was there, and had some sense of what was there, though only vaguely, even for a master. There were threads to pull on, hard to feel unless they were the sole focus of a performance, threads of the senses like flavor and vision, Mizuki’s ability to see magic, Alfric’s swiftness, Hannah’s strength. Those were notes that could be woven into a song, increased or diminished, warped by the music.

Verity could feel the Wildlands, not a note to be plucked, but a vastness that was, itself, plucking.

“Most of the song …” she began, feeling it out as though she was saying a lyric whose ending she didn’t know. “Most of the song is about the completion of what’s come before, dominant moods and —” She stopped abruptly, because she’d felt it for just a moment.

“Okay?” asked Mizuki.

“Improvisation,” said Verity. “For an audience. I don’t know if that’s actually a metaphor, I think that might just be the whole of it.”

Alfric’s cheek tensed, but he stayed quiet. Verity could practically hear his question. ‘So, can you do something with it?’

Verity looked at the horizon. “I’m getting there. Give me a minute.”

Due to the peculiarities of her training, Verity hadn’t done all that much in the way of collaboration or duets. The orchestral lute was its own orchestra, that was the entire point, and she’d been much more about the music than the magic. There was a way bards had of weaving their magic together that she was certainly no expert at, something that was more than just adding two things together. There was influence on each other, and if Verity could feel what was being plucked from them, then it was possible that she could change it, impose at least a small part of her own will on it.

Verity looked at the horizon, where there was currently a mountain, and squeezed her eyes shut. She tried to hone in on the sensation, that of being drawn on for a song, and hummed a few bars to get herself in the right mindset, not spinning up her own magic, but testing that she was right about where things were.

She opened her eyes, and the mountain was gone, but it was hard to tell whether she’d actually done anything.

“This might take some time,” said Verity.

“As in hours, or days?” asked Alfric.

“I have no idea,” said Verity.

“How long do we need to stand around with our eyes closed?” asked Mizuki.

“You can go back,” said Verity. “I think that I at least have a handle on what I’m trying to do.”

“Respectfully, the Wildlands can be dangerous,” said Alfric. His eyes were still closed. “Not in the same way that a dungeon is, but if you’ve had some insight, I don’t want to have that vanish into an undone day.”

“I’m not sure that it will work,” said Verity. “And I’m really not sure that it will work for dungeons. But if you had to tell me anything, I suppose you should tell me that it’s like a duet.”

“Unless you actively want us gone, I think I’ll stay here,” said Alfric. “We can put up a tent, make a fire, stay out of the way, minimize what we’re actually looking at.”

“Alright,” said Verity.

“We’ll need lunch,” said Mizuki. “The question is, can I cook a meal while blind?”

“I have faith in you,” said Isra.

“I’d rather not have to heal burns,” said Hannah with a sigh. She opened her eyes, blinked a few times, and looked at Verity. “Take a break then? Or are you on the cusp of it?”

“I’ll go wander off,” said Verity. “Just … don’t look in my general direction.”

By the time an hour had passed, there was a smell of wood smoke in the air, and the first signs that a stew would be ready to eat in not too long, though Mizuki was insistent that a proper stew needed to meld the flavors, which took some time. The food was a combination of things they had in storage and some root vegetables that Isra had foraged for.

At the end of that time, Verity could semi-reliably make the mountain in the distance appear or disappear.

“Alright, I’m not saying that’s not impressive,” said Mizuki. “However, I’m concerned about how long we’re allowed to stay out here, and whether or not we have enough supplies.”

“I can forage,” said Isra.

“We could probably stay out here indefinitely,” said Alfric. “At some point Cate would come looking for us, and I imagine she’s got entads to find people, because that’s exactly the kind of thing that I would get if I were her. But between the five of us, I think in a year we could have a house built, nice warm beds — I suppose textiles would be a problem.”

“Skins,” said Isra.

“Ah, right,” said Alfric. “We could have our own small tannery.”

“Do you know how to tan skins?” asked Isra.

“No,” said Alfric. “I sort of assumed that you did.”

“A bit,” shrugged Isra.

“Well, we’re not doin’ that,” said Hannah.

“Just as an exercise in thinking about it,” said Alfric. “Obviously we won’t.”

“But maybe,” said Mizuki.

“Oh come now, you want to get out of here more than anyone,” said Hannah.

“This is true,” Mizuki nodded. She stirred the pot of stew. “I’m going to be a wizard, even without my wizard friend. I have a house, a cat, and a dungeoneering career that I’m still hopeful about.”

“Verity, I know it’s early, but do you think this gives you some insight?” asked Hannah. “That what you’re doin’ here will help with dungeons?”

“Yes,” said Verity. “Though … I don’t really understand it, because there’s such a sharp difference between the two. I can feel it here, but in a dungeon, crossing the border, it’s all at once.”

“Not quite all at once,” said Hannah. “There’s a gap. I know for certain that I feel it.”

“I also don’t know how it’s possible that I was doing anything accidentally,” said Verity. She frowned. “I really didn’t want to put the party through the wringer, Alfric especially.”

“We got rich off it though,” said Mizuki. “I never minded much.”

“If you can accidentally make a near-copy of a theater,” said Alfric. “Then I think the upper limit on what you can do intentionally is very high. And if you can teach a skill at dungeon manipulation to other bards, it will change the entire profession, making it safer, more lucrative — better, in a word.”

“It’s going to take time,” said Verity. “I think I’ve had the insight here, but even another few hours with the Wildlands might only be enough to get, say, a church to appear in the distance. And dungeons are harder to test, because you can only go in once. Exploring them, getting feedback on what you’ve seen, takes much longer, and carries its own dangers.” She made a fist for a moment, then released it. The whole thing was frustrating. “It’s like learning how to play an instrument, but you’re only allowed to try a few notes a day, and if you play a note wrong, your finger gets cut.”

“I don’t think it’s as bad as all that,” said Alfric. “Besides, we have far better mobility than we once had, and I think we can stop treating dungeons as valuable resources to be conserved. If we want to pursue this, then I think we adjust our thinking and really focus on it, to the exclusion of ‘actual’ dungeons. We’d still have to explore, to get you the feedback, but we could do it.”

“Aw, he’s getting excited again,” said Mizuki. She was sitting next to him and bumped into him. “There’s the dungeon guy we know and love.”

“I want to temper expectations,” said Verity. “Though I do think, if this is the thing that Xuphin chose me for … it’s not that bad.”

“Hooray!” said Mizuki.

“I need to get more practice in,” said Verity. “The stew will be another hour?”

“It’ll be ‘done’ in ten minutes, but yeah, an hour to simmer,” said Mizuki.

“You need to let the flavors meld,” said Hannah. “You know, I still don’t really know what that means. You talk about ‘depth of flavor’ and I’m left scratchin’ my head. And that’s from a baker.”

“Baking and cooking are totally different,” said Mizuki. “The only thing they have in common is some of the ingredients and the fact that you put the end result in your mouth.”

“Are you challengin’ a cleric of Garos to find more similarities between two things?” asked Hannah.

“I’ll leave you to it,” said Verity, getting up from the chair Alfric had pulled from extradimensional space.

She walked far enough away that she could hear their voices but not make out the words, to a spot with a good view of what was in the distance, and felt again for the improvisation of the Wildlands.

The book metaphor wasn’t actually that bad, she thought, but it did bring to mind the question of who the author was. Similarly, imagining the Wildlands as a musician, perhaps something that was literally using something from the same suite of powers, made her wonder about whether there was some intelligence behind it, rather than just a process. It was generally accepted that for dungeons there was nothing remotely smart about them, but there was no reason that the Wildlands had to be the same. She had asked Cate, who seemed to have no answers on the subject, though it was hard for the woman not to act like she was wise and mysterious.

After another hour, Verity could reliably cause a church to appear or disappear on the horizon, though she had no control over the shape that it took, the aesthetics of it, and hadn’t actually gone to check the interiors of any of them.

“Everyone is eating,” said Isra, who had crept up. Verity jumped, just a bit. She’d been lost in her own mind.

“Okay, I’m almost done,” said Verity. “I’m getting somewhere.” She pointed in the distance, through the trees, careful not to lose sight of the steeple. “Do you see that?”

“That church?” asked Isra.

“Yes,” said Verity. “I did that.”

“Impressive,” said Isra. “But come, let’s eat.”

Verity followed her, and found a bowl had already been ladeled out for her, topped with a dollop of cream and some fresh herbs, which was just as she liked it. It was too hot to eat, though Hannah seemed to be handling it just fine, so Verity shared what she’d learned, and told the others what she thought she could do.

“That’s fantastic,” said Alfric. “Really. Only two hours’ time and you’ve pretty much got it.”

“No,” said Verity. “Learning new things, it’s like that sometimes, you have enormous jumps in your ability, then run straight into a wall where you’ve learned all the easy things and only have the details and technique left, which will take years.”

“Oh just let him have it,” said Mizuki. “He’s excited about dungeons again.”

“Sorry,” said Verity. She ate a spoonful of stew. “I do think that there’s some cause to be optimistic. I also think that trying this when I can’t take my time, when it’s a different system entirely, when I’ll be crossing over the threshold, will be much more difficult. And I’m not sure that it would ever be possible to do the things that might be racing through Alfric’s mind.”

“You could create a custom entad,” said Alfric with a goofy grin. “Think about that.”

“Alright, he’s going overboard,” said Mizuki with a sigh. “But I’d rather have this than the other guy. And hopefully he’s not going to go back to being glum about the Wildlands.”

Alfric’s smile fell, just a little bit. “I do like this place,” he said. “And I wish that I’d had the option to say no. I think I would have said no, really, it’s just … that got taken from me.” He shook his head. “I’ll deal with it.”

“No,” said Hannah. “You’ll deal with it with other people, and if you do get to the point where no one wants to lend you an ear, I should hope that we’ve got the courtesy to tell you that you need to move on.”

“Thank you,” said Alfric. “It’s still fresh, I guess.”

“What’s the first thing everyone does when we get home?” asked Mizuki. “Personally, I’m going to find the cat and pet him like his life depends on it.”

“Restock,” said Alfric.

“Track down Marsh, I suppose, who I imagine misses me terribly,” said Hannah. “Then explain things to the church, as much as they need to know.”

“I’ll talk to some birds,” said Isra. “There have surely been happenings in the forest. And I have gardens to check on.”

“Oh no, the garden!” said Mizuki.

“You forgot?” asked Isra.

“I wouldn’t say forgot, but yeah,” said Mizuki. “Probably all gone to seed now, or eaten up.”

“It’ll be fine,” said Isra.

Everyone was looking at Verity, who felt like she needed to contribute. There were things that she needed to do in Pucklechurch, and other things that she wanted to do, but there was really only one thing she’d been feeling after the stress of being in the demiplane and having too many fears hanging over her head.

“I’m going to go home and practice the lute,” said Verity.

“Really?” asked Mizuki. “That’s it?”

Verity looked off at the Wildlands, and a church that was still sitting in the distance.

“Practice makes perfect,” she said. “Now, I think we have about three hours before we need to head back. If it’s alright with everyone, I’m going to make the most of it.”

Chapter 151 - The Rayedhcraft School

A week passed.

Mizuki was thankful that she wasn’t bound to secrecy anymore, and talked all about their adventure to anyone who would listen. They even had someone from one of the Dondrian newspapers come to visit them, which had resulted in an interview over tea. Mizuki normally didn’t read newspapers, but she’d gone out of her way to pick one up, and then ended up having to pick another one up when the story wasn’t in the first paper. The interview had felt like it had lasted a long time, and was reduced down to a single quote from Hannah, which was a disappointment.

She had cut out the paper and framed it anyway, just to have something to hang on the wall.

“I feel like it should be a bigger deal,” said Mizuki.

“It’s been a front page story multiple times,” said Alfric. “Everything with Cate is being reported on.”

“But I mean … us being there,” said Mizuki.

“It would be a bad thing if it were a big story,” said Hannah. “That would mean that someone was takin’ umbrage, which, I think I should remind you, isn’t somethin’ that anyone wants.”

“Also why did Hannah get the quote?” asked Mizuki. “I wanted the quote. Also, I kind of thought they’d print the whole thing.”

“You should read more newspapers,” said Alfric.

“Hannah got the quote because it was the best,” said Isra. “She’s a cleric, she’s trained. We never had a chance.”

“I wasn’t trained for that,” said Hannah. “But I was trained on talkin’ to people and gettin’ to the point, rather than meanderin’ through the finer details of a thing.”

“I thought ‘I got screamed at by a dragon’ would have been a great quote,” said Mizuki.

“I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” said Alfric. “There will be other news stories about our exploits, surely.”

“I’m somewhat hoping that we’re on an even keel after this,” said Verity.

But they settled in, and things were more or less the same as they’d been, which was a good way for things to be. The garden was mostly the same as it had been, slightly wild but nothing that an afternoon couldn’t fix, and with a bounty that quickly got integrated into lunches and dinners. Tabbins, Mizuki’s cat, seemed no worse for their absence, though Marsh had been by to feed him, and that was all that Tabbins seemed to care about. Nothing all that much had actually changed in Pucklechurch, save for the church having gotten two new clerics. One was a cleric of Oeyr, to replace Lin — whose name was more or less mud, his absence not appreciated — while the other was a replacement for Hannah. That was its own thing, which Mizuki didn’t find all that interesting.

She had bigger things on her plate.

“Do I look good?” Mizuki asked Alfric. She had woken up early for her first day at wizard school, so early that only Alfric was awake. She’d come into his room to get his opinion, but also because she was nervous about the whole thing.

“You always look good,” said Alfric. “And you’re going to do fine. Most of the first year is boring stuff, you said.”

“No, wait, go back,” said Mizuki. “Tell me again how good I look.” She smiled at him.

“Well, there was that time you dressed up in dungeon gear, and then you looked like you were about five years old,” said Alfric.

“You laugh,” said Mizuki. “But that’s exactly what I’m worried will happen here.”

She looked down at her robe. It was black with maroon stripes, stitched at the waist to give her a little bit of figure, and with deep pockets that weren’t filled with anything yet. She wore a black cap too, one which Verity had called a beret and Hannah had called a bonnet, but which Mizuki knew as a toronimi. She’d made sure that her hair was in place, put on just enough makeup to make her look good but not like she was trying to look good, and had looked at herself in the mirror more than was really necessary, making her feel like she was being vain rather than properly preparing for school. Verity had been her tailor, helping to take everything in and making sure that it wasn’t absolutely formless, as robes could sometimes be. There wasn’t a ‘uniform’ for wizards, nor for the school, but there were expectations about what a wizard would wear, and at Rayedhcraft those just starting out were quite heavily expected to wear black ‘trainer’ robes in order to show that they were serious about the whole thing.

Wizards were, to borrow Isra’s phrasing, social animals. They learned together, worked together, and often lived together. Wizards could copy each other’s designs, though not without some work, and their creations could work together if need be, though usually it was better for a single wizard to take on the bulk of the work.

Mizuki didn’t really want to be that kind of wizard. Partly that was because wizards were a bit dull, at least in her opinion. She hadn’t been around wizards all that much, just Josen and Kell, and while Kell wasn’t dull, the times when he talked about wizard stuff were interesting only because of his enthusiasm for it. Wizards mostly talked about math, though Kell had assured her that it wasn’t math math, it was more about taking account of the specifics of a construction, and tolerable so long as you could do basic sums. Besides that, wizards did share, so if you saw a complicated thing, all you needed was the power to create it for your own and the precision to not make any major mistakes.

Mizuki wasn’t sure about all that. She had mostly been interested in having a backup when the magic went ‘flat’, a replacement for sorcery or a way to empower sorcery.

She made herself a quick breakfast, plus enough for everyone else, thick yellow goat’s butter over some bread that Hannah had made, some cherry jam, hard-boiled eggs with salt and pepper, and a slab of pork. She left a brief note on a slate in the kitchen that if anyone wanted more than that, there was cheese in the chiller and some fruit on the counter. She almost left a recipe, but stopped short, lest she be late for her much-delayed start of school.

Transit was through a temporary measure, a parting gift from Ria to account for the disruption to Mizuki’s schedule, since their long-term solution was going to take a bit of effort, and it spared Mizuki from depending on Isra’s movement lutes.

Mizuki went out into the backyard, checked that she had her bag, and that it had everything she needed in it, took a deep breath, and exploded into stardust.

The actual trip, as stardust, felt like nothing, but Ria had demonstrated the entad, and it looked spectacular both coming and going. The body became tiny shimmering pieces of rock, which launched at screaming speeds and a loud bang, and then you were through the air, on a long arc through the sky that ended with you at your destination some ten to fifteen minutes later, reconstituted with no sensation of any time passing.

It was unfortunately much cooler from the outside than the inside. The landing was a rain of multicolored meteors that bounced harmlessly against the ground like a gentle hail, followed by all the various pieces slotting back into place. This, Mizuki got some sense of, like she was being unscrambled. It caused a bit of commotion in the center of the Rayedhcraft, but she gave a friendly wave, and it was still early enough that most of the students hadn’t shown up yet.

Mizuki was getting that butterfly feeling in her stomach, the kind that came with meeting a new guy, a feeling of possibility and wonder. She hadn’t had much luck with boys though, and while Hannah insisted that it really wasn’t a matter of ‘luck’, that was still how it felt to Mizuki. She tried not to think of Rayedhcraft as being someone she’d met who was giving her the keen eye, but if she squinted, that was exactly what it was. She wasn’t exactly a normal wizard-in-training, and a large part of the reason that she was going to Rayedhcraft at all was because they wanted a sorc.

Mizuki was early to her first class — an introductory one, which she’d missed the introduction for. She’d hoped to talk to the professor and explain herself, beyond what he’d have learned from Professor Arturo, who was Mizuki’s sponsor. The professor was late though, and Mizuki grew more nervous the more people filtered into the room. There were at least a hundred other students, all of them in their own robes, chattering with each other. That was a lot of people. The entirety of Pucklechurch’s school, all grades, wasn’t that much more than all the people crowded into the tiered seating. People were pulling out paper and pens, and Mizuki did that too, thankful that she could at least pretend that she knew what she was doing.

Professor Limpet came in only after the last of the students had trickled in, and immediately began writing on the giant blackboard. She did this with magic, though the actual mechanism wasn’t all that clear to Mizuki. The writing was done in the air, the chalk making exaggerated marks that were clearly visible from a distance.

Mizuki couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and dutifully wrote it down on her paper, checking the desks of those next to her.

When the lecture actually began, some five minutes later, Mizuki was even more lost.

“Control development is one of the fundamental aspects of applied wizardry and the key way in which a wizard can distinguish himself,” she said, pointing at the blackboard. There seemed to be quite a bit of shorthand, and ‘CD’ in large letters had arrows leading off of it. “A wizard is not doomed to failure without CD, but those without it are pushed into small corners of the profession. With that said, time and effort are finite, and at a certain point a wizard with impeccable focus on CD will be left leaning on others like a crutch. While it’s commonly posited that CD is the primary gate to wizardry as a profession, it is equally true that there are other, less obvious and less severe gates. Likewise, CD can be divided into ‘natural’ and ‘learned’, and the relative success of some notable wizards who didn’t have the aptitude is proof that aptitude alone does not make a wizard — something which sets it apart from other practices which wizardry is often compared to.”

Mizuki felt like the professor was looking at her, if only for a moment. It might have been meaningful, if Mizuki knew what the lecture was even about.

It did make more sense as time went on, but when the three hours were up, Mizuki mostly felt hungry. The lecture was on wizardry as a profession, seen as being an interlocking set of skills, practices, and systems, but some of it Mizuki didn’t understand, and other parts of it just felt like more complicated restatement of things that she already knew. There was a bit of history mixed in with the more dry things, which did the bare minimum to make the whole thing more palatable.

“Sorry,” Mizuki said to the boy next to her once they were done. “Is that about how it normally goes?”

“Just about,” he said. “Usually Limpet has all the stuff up on the board when we come in, even if she’s late.” He paused. “Are you … new?”

“Yup!” said Mizuki. “I was supposed to start at the normal time, but I’m a week behind now, playing catch up.”

“It’s a long-haul profession,” the boy nodded. “A week or two will make almost no difference at all.” He looked at her. “Why were you starting late?”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “It’s a long story. But if you have notes and other stuff, I do need someone to help catch me up?” she gave him a hopeful look.

“Sure,” he replied. “It’s lunch, do you have lunch plans?”

“I was going to check out the cafeteria, yeah,” said Mizuki. “I’ve heard it’s good. Lots of seafood?”

The boy nodded, and since Mizuki didn’t actually know where the cafeteria was, she followed after him.

His name was Landro, and he was Chelxican — not just by ethnicity, but from the province that had once been the Kingdom of Chelxic, now part of Inter’s northeastern coast. He had an accent, more than Mizuki was used to, and light brown skin. There weren’t a lot of Chelxic people in Greater Plenarch, mostly owing to how people had settled, but according to Landro, a school like Rayedhcraft was always a place to meet people from all over.

“One of the professors is from a floating island on the opposite side of the world,” said Landro. “Really, there are people from all over, at least that I’ve seen so far.”

“Why here?” asked Mizuki. “Why not Dondrian?”

“Depends on the person,” said Landro. “There’s more room to breathe in Plenarch, I guess.”

“And … can you give me the short version of what you learned in the last week?” asked Mizuki.

“I can try,” said Landro. They were eating shrimp with pasta, which was apparently what had been prepared in quantity that day. The shrimp were enormous, and they’d only gotten one each, but that was proving to be plenty. Vegetables were served off to the side, lightly and quickly pickled. “Most of Limpet’s class has been like that, everything very high level, very basic, hours spent on describing what being a wizard is like without actually getting into any magic at all. She’s been walking us through these diagrams and explanations pretty slowly. There hasn’t been anything practical, but it’s been good from a career perspective, I guess.”

Mizuki frowned at that. It definitely wasn’t what she wanted out of the school.

“After this, if you’ve got the same schedule as I do, which you probably do, there will be drawing practice,” said Landro.

Mizuki nodded. She was relieved that they would at least be together, so she’d know someone, but the more she looked at Landro, the more she wondered how old he was. Mizuki was pretty old to be starting school to become a wizard: Kell was younger than her and already accomplished, and Josen was a reasonably proficient dungeoneer while being four years below her. With Landro it was hard to tell his age. He was short, without a beard, and had a wide nose. She was guessing that he was sixteen, which was also a little old to be starting, but not quite someone she’d be comfortable calling a child. The youngest the Rayedhcraft admitted were twelve, and Mizuki was thankful that she hadn’t seen many students who were visibly that age.

“You’ll be given a mana stone and then, I guess, spend three hours trying to draw from it,” said Landro. He shrugged. “No one has been able to do it yet, and won’t for the next two months, at least from what Professor Marks says.” He leaned forward. “They’re trying to be nice about it, but we’re not real wizards yet. More than a half of the class will drop out when they find they don’t have the aptitude.”

“That was mostly what the class was about, right?” asked Mizuki. “Aptitude?”

“Um,” said Landro. “Not really? It was more about, uh, all the things that make up practical wizardry, the ways that wizards separate themselves out into useful functions and interact with each other, I guess. Limpet is doing a drill-down approach, she’s said, where she’s giving the overview first and then diving into specific pieces at the same level of understanding as for the higher levels. But it’s a very wizardly way of doing it.”

“It is?” asked Mizuki. She frowned. “How so?”

“Wizards think in terms of pieces,” said Landro. “At least, that’s what Limpet said. You get an understanding of a specific part of a thing, work on its internals, then it gets, uh, ‘abstracted’ so you stop worrying about what it looks like from the inside and start worrying about what it looks like from the outside. You think about a blacksmith, right, and all the processes that go on, heating the metal in the forge, hammering it in place, whatever. A wizard planning out how a blacksmith shop works would probably start by thinking about inputs and output — high-powered heating elemetal, the ingots, water, stuff like that. And then each individual step, they’d think about by itself, taking everything around it as a given. The blacksmith isn’t thinking about the miner, right? And he’s not thinking about the person who’ll eventually be using the hammer.”

“Okay,” Mizuki said slowly. “I mean, I’ve known a few blacksmiths, and they do think about the materials they’re getting, and they think about what their stuff will be put toward.”

“Sure,” said Landro. “It was a long lecture. There was a lot about when it’s okay to treat things like their source and destination don’t matter, and what happens when things that shouldn’t matter do. I got the sense that it was one of those subjects that we’re going to spend a full week on later.”

“Hmm,” said Mizuki. She wasn’t sure that she liked that. It felt so unbearably slow. But being a wizard was about being slow, at least in the beginning.

“Can I ask … aren’t you kind of old to just be starting?” asked Landro.

Mizuki stared at him. “Old?” she asked. “I mean — how old do you think I am?”

Landro looked as though he thought this might be a trap. “Thirty?” he asked.

“I’m twenty-two,” said Mizuki. It was maybe the first time in her life that she’d ever been mistaken for being older than she was.

“That’s still pretty old though,” said Landro.

Mizuki shrugged. The question was making her feel bad. She did want to be a wizard, even without Kell around to help her out and encourage it, but she was out of place at Rayedhcraft, at least among the wizards who would wash out before the third moon had made its orbit.

“Hey, I didn’t mean — it’s just weird, that’s all,” said Landro.

“It’s not really that weird,” said Mizuki. “And it doesn’t help to say that it’s weird.”

“Most likely neither of us are going to make it,” said Landro. “I’m here for six months unless I have the aptitude. Right? I mean, would you stick around if you had no magical talent?”

“I guess not,” said Mizuki. She wasn’t sure whether she should mention that she was a sorcerer.

“I do think it’s neat to go to school late in life,” said Landro. “My mom always felt like she was too old to learn a new skill, but she wasn’t very happy being a wortier.”

Oof. If there was one thing he could have said that would make her feel even older and more out of place, it was a comparison to his mother. “I think I’m going to do more or less the same thing I was doing, actually,” said Mizuki. “Just … with more magic.”

“Oh?” he asked. “And … what do you do?”

“I’m a dungeoneer,” said Mizuki with a beaming smile. She was waiting for him to say ‘You?’, and ready to pounce on that if need be.

“Wow,” he said. He drew back a bit. “That’s so cool.”

“It really is,” said Mizuki. “I’m doing this, and also part of a dungeoneering party.” She wasn’t sure when the next dungeon would be, but they were all still together, and there were new possibilities on the horizon — which was sure something, for one of the world’s oldest professions.

“Don’t they, you know, wander?” asked Landro. He was giving her a very gratifying look, like he was actually impressed with her. If she was going to be seen as a mom, then at least she’d be a cool mom.

“We have entad travel,” said Mizuki. “We’ve gotten a lot from the dungeons we’ve done. And if I can add wizardry to my repertoire, all the better.” She said ‘repertoire’ like Verity did, a little bit of Dondrian accent seeping in, since it seemed like a very Verity sort of word.

“That’s so cool,” Landro repeated.

She was waiting for him to ask what her role in the dungeons was, because she was obviously not a frontline fighter, and then it occurred to her that this was, as described, a wizardly way of looking at things, slotting people into particular roles and duties and overall trying to divide things up. With sorcery, Mizuki’s role changed a lot depending on what the dungeon had available and whether she was able to go all-out or was just fighting for every scrap of magic that the others were casting off.

“My friends and I did a dungeon before I came here,” said Landro. “Sort of a going away thing? It was awful really, we hated it. I got an entad, but it doesn’t do much, just a piece of paper that folds and unfolds itself into shapes. Not worth it at all for just a trinket. We’d thought that it would be easy, that dungeoneering was the simple life, like farming, but it turns out that it’s actually horrible.” He smiled at her. “So I have a lot of respect for people who make it their job.”

“Er, farming is also a lot of difficult work that takes a load of expert knowledge,” said Mizuki. She’d spent a good portion of her time on various farms, playing with the farm kids, and especially the Pedder’s pig farm. “I think most professions are probably like that, once you get to know them. I’ve got no idea what most people actually do with their day, but there’s probably more to it.” She paused for a minute. “And I guess wizards are like that too, where you can describe them in a sentence or two, but each word in that sentence can be its own sentence, and you really do need a full course from a professor just to go over the basics.”

They talked some more, both about the course and some about Landro’s home city, and then a bell chimed, which made the dining hall start to empty itself.

Their lecture had been in a large room with tiered seating and a huge blackboard in front of it, but the second half of the day was in a large open room — it reminded Mizuki of a ballroom — which had pillows and mats laid out in a loose grid. People sat either on small seats with no backs or cross-legged on the pillows, and each of them had a small rock, semi-translucent, black with a bluish tint to it.

Landro found his own spot, and Mizuki just stood for a moment, feeling awkward and unsure. She didn’t have a rock. People seemed to have pulled theirs from either their bags or from a cubby, and they were already getting to work, which seemed to mostly consist of placing a hand on their rock and then staring at it intently.

A gray-haired man came up to her after not too long though, Professor Hollingsworth, with gray robes that draped across the floor.

“You must be Mizuki,” he said, taking her hand. His other hand had a letter in it, and when their handshake was done, he brought it up. “You were delayed due to …” He was obviously reading the letter for the first time, and trailed off, a frown deepening on his face. “That … is quite something.”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. She shrugged.

“Well,” he said, smiling once again. “The first third of the class is independent, so I can take that time to get you up to speed, if you’d like. Otherwise, the second third will be guided practice, done as a group, and you’ll learn the various meditations and methods then. The final third involves the teachers going around to help with specific questions and look at matters of technique, but at this stage there will be nothing to critique, especially for you, so you can knock off early, if you’d like. Strictly speaking, these three hours of the day aren’t mandatory, and you’re expected to practice on your own outside of this structured time.”

“Alright,” said Mizuki. “I’m … not really sure what it is I’m supposed to be doing here, or what the practice is.”

“It’s simple in theory,” said Hollingsworth. “You will bond to a specific mana stone with a drop of your blood, then touch or hold it and attempt to coerce some of its natural energy to do something. The stones are small, twenty pounds, not enough that you could seriously injure yourself, but for most, it’s at least two months before you can do anything at all.”

“This is, uh, control development?” asked Mizuki.

“Mmm, no,” said Hollingsworth. “It’s a question of terminology, but this is a precursor to control development. I won’t give you the whole talk, you’re an older student, I’m sure you’ve had to overcome adversity in your life, but the first step into wizardry is quite challenging, both mentally and emotionally. You’re expected to spend time with your stone every day, running through the exercises, and at least the first month of that, you’ll see absolutely nothing in the way of results. You’ll ‘brush’ the mana, and it will work one time out of a thousand, and you’ll feel as though you’re getting no better at a positive result, always one time out of a thousand even after you know what it feels like, what you’re looking for. The knowledge that some people simply don’t have the aptitude will weigh on you, and you might think that the reason for what feels like failure is that you’re simply incapable. It will be almost a comfort to say to yourself ‘this is too hard, my failures are too frequent, and I will never get it’. You’ll want to give up. It will be exceptionally boring, grueling, and seemingly unfair. But this is the path to wizardry, and every wizard you see has walked it.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “That’s the short version?” She smiled, and was relieved to see him smile back. “It’s a test of patience, right, listening to you go on like that? You have people wash out because they don’t want to sit through two hours of you going on like that?”

He genuinely did seem to find it funny, and was laughing hard enough that she felt the need to keep going, but then he started to cough, and she relented, worried that maybe he was older than he looked. She’d never seen someone get hurt laughing, but she’d heard that it could happen.

“Now then,” Professor Hollingsworth said once he’d calmed down. “We start with some simple exercises. There are twenty of them, all different, but all looking for similar things, at least at this stage.” He handed her a stone, which seemed to be conjured from nowhere. Mizuki took it, and was surprised by just how heavy it was, at least thirty pounds. She set it on the ground, like she’d seen the others do. “The first thing to do is to feed it a drop of your blood, which will give it some sympathy to you.” He pulled a tiny knife with a cap from his pocket and handed it to Mizuki. The wooden handle was thick, but once its stubby sheath was removed, the blade was miniscule, only big enough to poke through the skin and draw blood, nothing more.

When Mizuki went to prick her finger, Hollinsworth’s eyes grew wide and he rushed to stop her. “No, dear, sorry, that’s my fault, there’s a technique to it. You find a finger that’s least important, usually the ring finger, and go in from the side rather than the pad of the fingertip itself. There are bandages, if you need one after, though with a knife like that, it should be small enough.”

“Do we do this every time?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Hollingsworth, shaking his head. “Just once, per stone, and with a certain understanding and skill you won’t need that. It’s — ah, not incredibly important, not unless you have some desire to understand the fundamental truths of wizardry.”

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “I just want to throw fireballs.”

He laughed again, and Mizuki was left feeling a little awkward while she waited for him to finish.

Mizuki pricked herself on the side of her ring finger, squeezing the wound to produce a single drop which landed on the mana stone. It sizzled a bit, and the red blood sank straight into the blue stone, making a small purple splotch.

The actual exercises took some explaining, and most of them were so simple that Mizuki almost wondered whether it was a trick.

“Hold one hand on the stone, and with the other, pass your hand over it in a sweeping motion,” said Hollingsworth. “This is the ‘brush’, and for a long time, it was the only exercise that wizards practiced. Over time, we’ve added more, though mostly for the sake of variety.”

Mizuki did as instructed. She could see the way that stone affected the aether, a slight emanation that was leaking out into the world, the same that was coming from every single one of the dozens of stones around the class. She could equally see that her hand passing through that emanation did absolutely nothing. The emanation didn’t change, and she felt nothing with her hand.

“Nothing?” Hollingsworth asked.

“No,” said Mizuki. “But … that’s expected, right?”

“Right,” said Hollingsworth. He smiled at her. “Usually on the first day I have the class do this all at the same time, and I watch as they come to terms with the fact that exactly nothing has happened. Every now and then someone gets it on their first try, but then it might be another few days before they feel it again.” He gestured to the room. “Day in, day out, they’ll be going through the exercises, feeling for the disruption to the invisible energies. Once you can do it reliably, which will take at least a month if you do have the aptitude, then we’ll get you some glasses so you can see it, and following that, you’ll get started on shaping the mana, accessing it remotely, no longer using your hands.”

“I can actually see it already,” said Mizuki, looking down at the stone. “I don’t know if the letter mentioned it, but I’m a sorcerer.” She’d stopped herself from saying ‘sorc’ at the last moment.

Hollingsworth’s entire demeanor changed, his jovial nature peeled off. “Fascinating. Is that why Professor Arturo is advocating for you? I had wondered, he normally doesn’t concern himself with the incoming students, not until they’ve had their proving, and usually not for years after that.” He looked Mizuki over. “You look so much the part of a wizard I would never have guessed. And … you can see? Without the glass?”

“Yes,” said Mizuki. She felt a bit uncomfortable.

“We don’t normally give people the glass until they can affect the mana with some reliability,” said Hollingsworth. “It’ll be quite interesting to know whether it hampers you, being able to see it. You’ll have to let me know. Now if you’ll excuse me, I can see my assistant needs some help. We’ll begin the group portion soon, and I’ll go over the individual exercises at that time.”

Mizuki sat down with her rock. She’d had a fantasy for quite some time now that she would just get it, right from the start, that she would be one of those rare and lucky few for whom the rocks responded right away. After all, she was a shaper of the aether already, and could see whether others could not, and it wouldn’t have been crazy.

Instead, Mizuki spent the next three hours with the stupid rock, doing the stupid exercises, and feeling nothing. Being able to actually see the emanations felt awful, because she could watch as her hand passed right through them, doing nothing. It would have been easy to affect them through sorcery, but she was certain that wasn’t what was desired here. She thought she felt movement only once, but she didn’t see movement, and it was definitely possible that her brain was playing tricks on her.

During the group section of the class, they all did things together, with Hollingsworth giving instruction so they could all follow along with him and get the finer points of the techniques down, not that it seemed to matter all that much. Mizuki’s favorite one was the one where they leaned in close and screamed at their rock, but most of them involved hands in one way or another, patting the rock, clawing through the air above the rock, and the classic brush.

At the end of the three hours, Mizuki felt as though she had learned absolutely nothing and entirely wasted her time, and also as though she was perhaps not cut out to be a wizard.

“How’d it go?” asked Landro.

“Fine,” said Mizuki. “I … didn’t get much, I don’t think.”

“Same,” he said with a shrug. “That’s the path, I guess.”

“Have you ever felt it?” asked Mizuki.

“Once,” said Landro. “I don’t know what I did right though, and it didn’t help me to do it again. It was good though. It let me know what to watch for, and it was proof that there wasn’t something wrong with me, or wrong with the rock.”

“So we just struggle?” asked Mizuki. “We beat our heads against the wall until something gives?”

“I guess,” shrugged Landro. “I’m sure if there was a better way, they’d tell us to use it. You’ll get it though.”

“Thanks,” said Mizuki. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Do you have plans?” asked Landro.

“I’m going back to Pucklechurch,” said Mizuki. “And we’ve got stuff to do there.”

“Ah,” said Landro. “Then yeah, tomorrow.”

Mizuki burst into stardust as soon as she was out of the hall, and took a great sigh of relief once she was in the backyard once more. It had been six hours, seven including the time she’d spent standing around and lunch, and she was feeling drained. Wizardry was one of those things that was worth it in the end, not one of those things where you got a pretty big benefit up-front. Woodworking, by contrast, at least from what she knew through Alfric, paid off pretty much right away, each individual skill letting you immediately do more things, and the smallest bit of woodworking could still help you to fix things or make a cutting board or something.

Mizuki went in through the back doors, dropped her bag onto the ground — she’d brought her rock home with her, to practice, though she wasn’t sure she was going to. The house was dark and quiet, and the party channel had been pretty dead all day.

<I’m home, where is everyone?> Mizuki asked.

<Dining room,> said Alfric.

When Mizuki went through the door, she was greeted by cheers and party horns. All four of them were around the table, along with a special guest: Alfric’s dog Emperor, who’d been dyed purple for the occasion.

“Congratulations on your first day!” said Alfric.

“I made a cake,” said Hannah. It was very obviously the only thing on the table, but she pointed at it anyway. “Chocolate, from Dondrian, mixed into the batter and the frosting, then put some shavings on top.”

“This is the nicest thing that anyone has ever done for me,” said Mizuki. She almost felt like crying.

“It was Alfric’s idea,” said Isra.

“Of course it was,” said Mizuki.

“I wrote a song for you,” said Verity. “A going-to-wizard-school song. But we can wait on that. I’m afraid it turned out a bit … ribald.”

“I’ll have some cake, and then I’d love to hear it,” said Mizuki. She took a seat, and felt the tension melt out of her.

“Can you tell us how it went?” asked Alfric as Hannah cut into the moist cake and began putting slices onto plates — six plates, Mizuki noted, which included one for Emperor, since the dog was magical and could eat anything. The dog was staring at the cake with the focus of a hunter who had a doe in his sights.

Mizuki thought about Alfric’s question, and what she knew of wizardry so far. There was a lot to learn, and an arduous road ahead, but she had friends at home, and it was good to know she had their support. She’d lost sight of that after three hours with her stupid rock.

“I think I can handle it,” said Mizuki. “It’s not playing to my strengths, but … I’m going to be a wizard.”

Chapter 152 - First Steps

Two weeks passed.

Marsh had welcomed Hannah back like she was his long-lost love, reunited after turbulent and uncertain times. Her instinct had been to be exasperated with him, but she’d reined that in and allowed herself to enjoy being fawned over.

“I love you,” he said to her for the tenth time.

“I love you too,” she said. He was warm and heavy, and smelled like sage. He hadn’t known exactly when they would come home, so he’d apparently been fretting, and part of how he’d been fretting was learning how to bake, mostly because it reminded him of her. He’d spent some time looking after the house — he was the one taking care of Tabbins while they were gone — and had gotten into the herb garden, which he’d apologized for. No one had actually cared, but it was nice of him to think of apologizing, Hannah thought.

“I missed you,” he said for the nineteenth time.

“I missed you too,” said Hannah with a sigh. And she had missed him, deeply, and worried that somehow her being gone would break the spell between them. She had a keener understanding of relationships than he did though, and she wasn’t quite old enough to have counseled dozens of couples through the early days of a relationship, but she had training, which was something. She could see the heady way that he made her feel for what it was, and it tempered her ardor quite a bit.

But of course, ‘temper’ meant both to act as a neutralizing force, and to strengthen and harden, and of the two definitions, she felt that the latter might have been more true of her situation. When Hannah’s mind instinctively said ‘no, this is just how people feel at the start, when they find someone who’s compatible, it fades with time’, she was left thinking about Marsh from a more logical, less emotional standpoint — and she found that there was much to love. He was quite open, unbothered by seeming goofy or over-enthusiastic, and he was strong in many ways, though restrained in how he used that strength. He had no doubts about his ability to make his way through the world, and that showed in how he talked and acted, which might have come across as apathy if it came from someone less kind. He had ambitions to run some kind of a business with the entads their party had gathered, but was still hoping to find something that he found more compelling. He talked about his family in a way that made her feel good.

It was supposed to be a fling, and it had only happened because both of them had thought that it was going to be an undone day. Hannah wondered how many people ended up getting together that way, but she didn’t suppose most of them stayed together.

Mizuki had been teasing Hannah about the whole thing for quite some time.

“You were talking so much about casual relationships, how it’s the right time of your life to sow your oats,” said Mizuki with a little laugh. “And now it’s looking like Marsh is going to go the distance.”

“Well, ay,” said Hannah. “And I do stand by that, I am of the right age and temperament to go out and do whatever I please, with whomever I please. But knowin’ theory from practice is one of the most important things a person can know, and if Marsh does go the distance, I don’t think I’ll feel too much regret about adventures not had.”

“Ha,” said Mizuki, pointing at Hannah. “You like your boyfriend.”

Hannah grinned and rolled her eyes. “You know, there are certain proverbs about throwin’ stones that you might want to keep in mind.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” said Mizuki.

“Which proverb?” asked Isra, who was on the couch with them. Alfric was in his makeshift woodworking shop, trying to get the house ready, while Verity was upstairs practicing the lute in preparation for a trip to Dondrian to ‘record’ some music. “The one about killing two birds with one stone?”

“Yeah, I’m actually confused,” said Mizuki. “You’re saying … leave no stone unturned?”

Hannah sighed. “I was sayin’ that if you’re in a position of weakness, you shouldn’t be takin’ potshots at people, as much in jest as they might be.”

“I mean, I think it’s lovely for you,” said Mizuki. “It’s just also hilarious.”

“I don’t find it quite so funny as you do,” said Hannah. “But there’s some element of … comeuppance, I suppose.”

When it was two weeks from when they’d returned from the demiplane, all the preparations had been completed, and the day before temple day, when Mizuki didn’t have school, they made a last pass through the house, making sure that everything was, as Alfric kept saying, ‘ship shape’. The windows were secured in place so they wouldn’t open, many of the doors had new latches to them to keep them closed, and most of the furniture that hadn’t already been anchored in place had been nailed down or otherwise had some kind of ‘stowed’ position where it could be strapped in place.

The long, long dungeon that Alfric had done his modified Overguard Maneuver through had given them, among other things, long, thick metal tubes that had taken an incredible amount of work to package away. Alfric still had his long-standing arrangement with Filera, and she’d identified the tubes, which he’d really been hoping were something they could use.

It had taken the better part of four days to attach the entads to the house, and then more time than that to make sure that the house was ready.

“Are we sure this isn’t going to destroy the house?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Alfric. “Filera couldn’t make any guarantees. Qymmos is very good for understanding basic facts about the world, but what’s going to happen is really more of an engineering question. What you’d really need is an engineer who’s a cleric of Qymmos, which isn’t uncommon, but we don’t have one readily available.”

“I’m going to be very upset if this house gets destroyed,” said Mizuki. “Very.”

“I don’t think it’s likely,” said Alfric. “We’ll do it slowly, mostly to check whether or not we’ve forgotten anything. There are latches on almost everything now.”

Hannah had brought some chairs out to watch, and sat with Marsh, who’d come to visit and make an event of it. A table sat in the backyard with refreshments, including some of Marsh’s herbal-spiced lemonade, apparently one of his signatures. The rest of Vertex had come too, apparently being invited by Mizuki, and that included their newest team member, a girl who seemed like she was having a tough time fitting in.

More than an hour after it was supposed to have happened according to Alfric’s schedule, he gave the metal tubes their command, and the house lurched upward, supported by the entads that had been attached to it.

They were legs, and Hannah had accepted that when Alfric had reported it, but still didn’t really believe it. The house, for its part, had only risen up six inches, which was a bit of a disappointment.

“It’s by design,” said Alfric. “I’m not going to have the house thrust up into the air first thing, I’m going to lift it six inches, go inside to check where the stress is, if it’s not just been solved with the magic of the legs, check whether everything is still sturdy and stable, and then I’m going to lift it another five feet.”

“This is going to take ages,” said Grig.

“That’s why we’re making a thing of it,” said Mizuki. “Otherwise there’s a risk that we might die of boredom. Unfortunately, Alfric won’t let anyone use the sink or bathroom while this is going on.”

“I can let you into Lutopia Two,” said Hannah. “There’s a bathroom there.”

“I don’t need to go,” said Mizuki. “I’m just complaining.”

“Ay, well, if you do,” said Hannah.

“Or just go in the woods,” said Isra.

“I don’t need to go,” Mizuki repeated. “And no, I’m not going to pee in the woods, that’s where the bears pee.”

“You do look a bit like a bear,” said Grig. “In the right light.”

It took Alfric some time to do his tour of the house, which he had a bit of company for. Hannah wondered how much Alfric actually wanted his old teammates to come with him, but Josen had insisted, and once Josen was coming, Mardin was too. They both had applicable skills — if you wanted to look for where a house would fracture, there was no better cleric than one of Oeyr. Hannah suspected that they would keep their conversation to matters of fact, cold and distant in the way that men sometimes did even if they were friends.

“Has Marsh told you we’re coming with you?” Grig asked Hannah.

“If he hadn’t, you’d have just ruined quite the surprise,” said Hannah. “But ay, he’s told me.”

“We haven’t mined out the area, but with a new member of the team, it’ll be good to get a fresh start,” said Grig. He looked at the girl, Tilde, who was having a quiet conversation with Verity. “I do think she’s going to work out.”

“To be clear, this is the one who insulted you durin’ the interview?” asked Hannah. “That tried to, in your words, extort you?”

She looked at the girl. She was tall, and had a sword at her hip, blonde hair and large eyes. She was so tall that it was hard to focus on anything else about her, but she was well-muscled and comely, with the kind of brutish strength that Hannah so liked in a girl. She felt a wave of jealousy pass through as she thought about Marsh spending time with a girl like that, and she let the wave pass like water crashing against stone. It was a sign of how things with Marsh were going that Hannah would look at a tall, muscular girl, that nice blend of feminine and masculine, and then have some instinct toward getting jealous of all things.

“I don’t think I’ve ever said ‘extort’,” said Grig. “But yes, she knew we were in a rough spot, and tried to get a good deal from us. But then she came back and offered us equal terms, so — Marsh, were you the one to say that she was trying to extort us?”

“I might have been,” said Marsh. He tugged at his beard for a bit. “I don’t think I meant anything by it.”

“Well, no more of that talk,” said Grig. “She’s with us now, the terms are equitable, we’re going to plow on ahead. The first two dungeons have gone extremely well.”

“We got almost nothing,” said Marsh.

“Yes, but we were functioning smoothly,” said Grig. “That’s got to count for something.”

“Initial check is good,” said Alfric, who’d emerged from the house. “Let’s raise it another few inches.”

“That had better be a joke,” said Mizuki, who was in the midst of eating one of the pastries Hannah had baked that morning. “Raise it to the sky!”

“What happened to being patient?” asked Alfric.

“I’m a wizard-in-training,” said Mizuki. “Patience is what I do all day, petting rocks and trying not to go crazy. If you’re going to make me be patient while we’re having a party, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Pick a fight, probably.”

“Fine, fine,” said Alfric. “I’ll be cool and dramatic, just this once.” He turned around and raised his hands into the air. “House, rise!”

The house got to its feet, claws extending from the bottom of the hinged tubes, the embellishment of scales on the metal becoming more pronounced. There were six legs in total, which was an auspicious number, but the house was built around fours — four rooms to a floor, four sides — and the mismatch nagged at Hannah a bit.

Compared to the house, the legs seemed far too thin. Each was as thick as a tree trunk, but the house dwarfed them. With the house only ten feet up off the ground, it gave the impression of a scuttling crab more than anything else, or a shiny beetle, at least with the windows gleaming in the sunlight. It was an impressive house though, even when it wasn’t walking, and the legs themselves were of fine craftsmanship of the sort that often came from a dungeon. As Hannah watched, the legs were in the process of growing, fitting in a little bit more than they had before, and from what Alfric had said, they’d be even more in theme by the end of the week, bulking up a bit.

There was a brief round of applause for the house, and then another when it took its first step at Alfric’s direction. Any of them could control the house with the word of power that Filera had told Alfric, and Hannah was just counting down the minutes until Mizuki wanted to take her turn with the new toy. They were doing this for her, and she’d expressed a few too many times how grateful she was, but there was little hope that Mizuki would be able to resist for long.

“Wait!” said Mizuki. She was pointing, not at the house, but the ground below it. “Why is there grass?”

Hannah looked, and immediately wondered how she hadn’t noticed right away. It seemed quite natural for the house to rise up and for there to be grass beneath it, as though it was a creature that had been taking a nap in a meadow, but it didn’t really make sense.

“Where’s the basement?” asked Mizuki. “I had a basement.”

“I guess we can go investigate,” said Alfric, but he had a smile on his face.

“You kept something from me, you sly dog,” said Mizuki, but she was beaming. She took the helmet — ‘her’ helmet — from her bag and leapt up to the door of the house, which was ten feet off the ground. It took her a moment to fiddle with the latches, but then she was inside.

“So what is it?” asked Grig.

“Just extradimensional space,” said Alfric. “The bottom of the house is rounded now, I’m not sure you can see from here, but any doors that go to a lower level are still accessible, just through magic. I asked Filera, of course, but I thought that Mizuki would enjoy it more to experience it on her own. For her, that’s half the fun.”

“You’re a good friend,” said Grig.

“We should build a second basement!” Mizuki called out the open door, having returned from a hurried exploration.

“I’m not sure that would work,” said Alfric. “I don’t know how much basement space we’d be able to carry around.”

“Well, figure it out,” said Mizuki. She leaped from the door and landed on the ground in a pose with her arms spread out.

“I actually was wondering whether we could actually travel with you,” said Grig. “You said that it would take you a month to get all the way to Plenarch, that’s a fast pace if we want to hit all the dungeons in a straight line. Not that we’d live with you, but if you had a spare room that we could use, it would be better than following along. And obviously we’re hoping for more coordination.”

“It’s up to the party,” said Alfric. He folded his arms across his chest. “I do want to honor the ongoing deal, but the house really isn’t big enough for ten people. If you had extradimensional space you could park in one of the rooms … but you’d have to stay in there, which I don’t think you want to do.”

“Surely they could be in the living room while we travel, right?” asked Mizuki.

“The plan is six hours a day on the road,” said Alfric. “The legs will handle most of it, but if the Vertex is going to be in the living room for six hours a day, that’s basically like them living with us.”

“Maybe we’ll go ahead,” said Marsh. “We can scout a place for your house to sit for the night, then at night, share resources? Just a bit?”

“We’ll work something out,” said Alfric. “We’re not moving today, just testing, making sure we know how this thing works. We might be as much as a week away from actually taking the house down the road.”

“Sorry,” said Mardin. “Maybe I’m missing something obvious, but … how? The house is wider than any road. You’re not going to be able to get it down the path without cutting down a dozen trees.”

“The legs have that handled,” said Alfric. He clapped his hands once.

The legs extended, and the house shot up into the air, twenty feet, then thirty. The legs looked even more spindly as it rose higher, and it swayed slightly in the wind, though down at ground level it was a calm day. Alfric brought the house back down, having made his point.

“And so what, you just do a tightrope walk down the roads, stepping around or past the trees?” asked Mardin. “I don’t really see it.”

“We’re going to figure it out,” said Alfric. “The entad’s value is in mobility, and I think leaving the property is going to be the most difficult bit. Once we’re on main roads, we won’t have to deal with overhead trees or tunnels or anything like that. There are well-trod paths between the hexes, usually, once you’re not in the middle of nowhere.”

Hannah was a bit skeptical that any of this was actually going to work, but Alfric was enamored with the idea, and Isra seemed strangely excited too, even though they’d mostly be going through the province of Plenarch and leaving the garden behind right as a few of the plants they’d been growing would be coming into season. The actual distance wasn’t all that much for Isra though, not with her ability to travel, so perhaps that didn’t matter — or perhaps she was simply ready to leave it all behind. The plan was to make regular trips back to the plot, but Hannah was skeptical about that. When she’d been young, she’d been charged with cat-sitting for a family friend who was away, and by the third time she’d walked two miles to the neighbor’s house, she was well and truly ready to be done with the whole thing.

“Well, I wish you luck, and not just because we’re supposed to be running dungeons together,” said Mardin.

“We’ll be fine,” said Alfric. He was looking up at the house, and Hannah could see the gears turning. She had no idea what direction they were turning, but she knew the look that Alfric got from time to time when he was trying to work something out.

The new girl, Tilde, was standing awkwardly to one side during this whole affair, not speaking to anyone, and Hannah’s clerical instincts took over. She went up and introduced herself, formally rather than just being pointed out, which was a good way to reiterate names. Those could get overwhelming for a new person, especially one that wasn’t as steady on their feet.

“You’re new to the party, but not to dungeons, ay?” asked Hannah.

“I am,” said Tilde. “I was what I’d consider seasoned, fifty dungeons under my belt.” She seemed more confident speaking about that, rather than the awkwardness of the introduction. “I’m a front-line fighter.”

“With your own flesh and blood?” asked Hannah. “Or with augmentation?”

“Augmentation?” asked Tilde.

“Marsh fights on the front lines sometimes,” said Hannah. “But he’s got flame and locks to back him up, along with the entads.” Marsh’s current weapon was a spear that left sharp lines of magic in the air.

“I’m taking over for Marsh,” said Tilde. “The team had too many half-fighters. Someone needs to be in the way of the monsters, as much as possible.”

“Right,” said Mizuki, who’d come to join them. “But that doesn’t always work out, does it? Like with a swarm.”

“True,” nodded Tilde. “But having someone in their face works most of the time.”

“I didn’t get a yes or no,” said Hannah. “Whether you fight as natural, just yourself, or not.”

“I have entads passed down to me from my father,” said Tilde. “That’s it.”

Hannah nodded. She figured that Marsh would have said something if the girl had some special ability. He had been distracted lately though, and it wouldn’t have entirely surprised Hannah if something had slipped his mind.

“Can I see?” asked Mizuki. “I love entads.”

Tilde snorted. “Who doesn’t?” She seemed to second-guess her dismissive answer though, and pulled her sword from her sheathe. She held it out, at arm’s length, and with a burst of fur it merged with her arm, the tip of the sword splitting in three to become terrifyingly long claws. The fur went up her arm to where it disappeared beneath her sleeve. Once the transformation was complete, she held the claws up and wiggled them for Mizuki’s benefit.

“Alright, I like her, she’s cool,” said Mizuki.

“Anyone could have this entad though,” said Tilde.

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “Anyone could have it, but it takes someone special to get up close and personal with a weapon like that.” She smiled, then looked over at Alfric. “Most cowards just use a spear to be as far away from the monsters as possible.”

“I heard that,” said Alfric, who moved over to join them.

“I was joking,” said Mizuki. “Personally, I prefer to be as far away from the monsters as possible when they explode into pieces, having never had a chance to see me.”

“I was told your party doesn’t really do dungeons anymore?” asked Tilde, looking between them.

“Er, that’s not quite true,” said Alfric. “We’ve just been busy with other things until now. We’re hoping for a few dungeons on the road, though not as many as the streak that Vertex is planning.”

“And … you’re a chrononaut?” asked Tilde.

“Is that a problem?” asked Alfric.

“No,” said Tilde. “Not unless … you know something?”

“No,” said Alfric. “I tend to go away from others on my undone days.” He looked at Mizuki. “Sometimes with her.”

“Oh,” said Tilde. “Are you two … together?”

“Yup!” said Mizuki. “Peas in a pod.”

“That’s not what she’s asking,” said Alfric.

“They’re just close friends,” said Hannah. “Mizuki is incapable of giving a straight answer.”

“Mmm,” said Tilde. “I’ve never met a chrononaut before. You’re giving us insurance on our dungeon runs, so I suppose I should thank you.”

“It’s part of a trade we made,” said Alfric with a shrug. “I follow the rules of disclosure closely. If we have any interaction on an undone day, I’ll let you know about it.”

Maybe a few weeks ago, Alfric would have said ‘chrononauts follow the rules of disclosure’. It was a subtle change, but one that Hannah took note of. He hadn’t talked with the party all that much about his feelings on the matter, but he’d once viewed Lola as an exception to the rule, rather than a symptom of rot. There wasn’t much that anyone could say though.

Alfric spent most of the rest of the day running tests, and Hannah spent most of her time with Vertex, playing cleric in some respects, mostly in listening to them talk and offering advice when it seemed that advice might be wanted — and a few times when it seemed they needed advice. They’d taken a liking to Kell and were clearly wanting to leave the region behind as a way of leaving him behind, but little was actually said of the errant wizard. Hannah felt a keen desire to throw the subject out into the open, but Marsh had warned against it, and she did trust him.

Besides, it was supposed to be a special day when your house took its first steps.

When the sun began to set, Alfric lowered the house back down and tried to place it approximately where it had been before, but the legs had been slowly growing and changing, and it wasn’t quite so easy to lay it flat, since the house needed to squat down. There was now a two foot gap between the bottom of the house and the doorframe of the back door, and Alfric was scratching his head, trying to puzzle out some kind of unfolding staircase, as the rest of them scrambled up.

“I don’t technically own this house,” said Mizuki. “It’s mine so long as I live in it, but I’m not sure grandpa realized that I might go wandering and take the house with me. Legally, there’s probably some stuff that we should do.”

“That you should do,” said Verity. “I don’t think we can hire a barrister on your behalf.”

“Well, no,” said Mizuki. “I guess not. But I don’t know the first thing about the law, so …”

“I can look into it,” sighed Verity. “I don’t have all that much else to do, and won’t be of any help with Alfric’s projects.”

“You’re the best!” said Mizuki wrapping Verity in a hug. Verity pretended to be exasperated by the affection, but Hannah knew that Verity loved hugs.

Marsh stayed over, of course, though they were in Lutopia Two rather than Hannah’s actual bedroom within the house. In truth, the bedroom had become superfluous, since she had her own bed within the Lutopia. If they needed room for a sixth person — a seventh person really, because Marsh stayed with her more often than not — she’d have readily given up her room and simply treated the entad lute as though it was an extra room jutting off the living room. The lute was bound to her, and while she could invite others in, her privacy was pretty absolute.

When she left to get a midnight snack from the kitchen, Mizuki was there, eating from a crock of pickles.

“Hello,” said Mizuki. “Up late?”

“It’s not so late,” said Hannah, though she was in her pajamas.

“I’m having trouble sleeping,” said Mizuki. “Temple day tomorrow, then back to school, and I feel like I need to make the most of my free time, especially since we’ll be moving the house, if Alfric can figure out a way to do that without trampling everything.”

“Natural to be anxious,” said Hannah with a nod. “Share a pickle?”

Mizuki hefted the crock and put it on the counter where they could both reach. They were Kiromon pickles, with a bit of soy, ginger, garlic, and a hint of lakeweed and fish. Hannah liked her own pickles better, which had different herbs and a bit more crispness, but Mizuki’s were nice.

“So that new dungeon girl they got thought me and Alfric were a couple, right?” asked Mizuki.

“Yes,” said Hannah, nodding. “‘Dungeon girl’ seems a bit, ah, not like what she’d like to be called.”

“I think it sounds daring,” said Mizuki. She spread out her hands, one of which was holding a half-eaten pickle. “‘Dungeon girl!’”

“In any case, yes, she thought that you’re with Alfric,” said Hannah. This was clearly what Mizuki wanted to talk about, and Hannah was happy to listen, even after a day that had more than the usual amount of listening. There was a part of her that missed that part of clerical work.

“I keep thinking that, I don’t know,” said Mizuki. She bit into her pickle, then kept talking with her mouth half-full. “I keep thinking that someday he’s going to say to me, ‘So I have to disclose to you that in the undone day we got a little tipsy and made out on the couch’. I think that’s what the dungeon girl was thinking, that something like that would have happened.”

“Do you think that would happen?” asked Hannah.

“No,” said Mizuki. “Alfric would never, and I would … probably not. I mean, if I’d had a lot of wine, but that usually gets me sleepy, not daring, and if I knew it was an undone day, then no. It’s the kind of thing he wouldn’t like.”

“So is this a worry, a thought, or more of a fantasy?” asked Hannah.

“A what?” asked Mizuki, drawing back a bit.

“I mean, when you think about this scenario, Alfric coming to you and saying ‘look, we were laying together on the couch and I kissed you on the neck’, does that make your heart flutter, or does it make your stomach sink?”

“Flutter, I guess,” said Mizuki.

“So it’s more somethin’ that you wish would happen,” said Hannah.

“I … I don’t know,” said Mizuki.

“It’s fine to not know,” said Hannah with a shrug. “Just so long as you’re not lettin’ it get in the way.”

“I’m not, I don’t think,” said Mizuki. “I’d know if I was, right?”

“Not necessarily, no,” said Hannah. “But we’ve got to think about what we want, and what we can have, and what we can’t. So long as you’re thinkin’, that’s as much as anyone can ask.”

“I’ve never felt like thinking is my strong suit,” said Mizuki.

“Well, you’re a wizard-in-training now,” said Hannah. “Maybe it’s time to change how you think of yourself. And maybe it’s also time to think about it like Alfric does.”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “Okay, I guess I will.”

Hannah finished her pickle and said a late goodnight, then went back to her room, and into Lutopia Two. She had little hope that Mizuki would simply sit down and figure things out, but stranger things had definitely happened.

Marsh was asleep, sprawled out in the bed, snoring very softly and gently. He looked very peaceful and content, and when she got into bed with him he wrapped an arm around her, pulling her close even in his sleep. She liked his warmth and protectiveness, the way he knew what he wanted, and the fact that what he wanted was her. They hadn’t been dating that long, in the scheme of things, even including the time where they were having more of a fling than being a proper boyfriend and girlfriend. He had no shyness about declaring his love for her.

She was worried that he was going to propose to her, just pull out a ring and say that he wanted to be with her forever, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized that her heart was fluttering at the scenario. It wasn’t a fear so much as a fantasy, the exact thing she’d been talking to Mizuki about. Once she realized that, she tried to revel in the fantasy, but her mind wouldn’t stop making all the usual objections, most of them about how they hadn’t met each others’ family yet, how they hadn’t been dating long enough, how they needed to have half a dozen serious talks on important things, and to experience each other in different circumstances. It blunted the fantasy somewhat, when she was trying to feel good about it.

Hannah dreamed of the house moving on its spindly legs, wandering around the countryside or to other villages, not wanting to settle in one place.

Yet somewhere out there was a place for the house to settle, a plot of land so perfect that there would never be a point in moving anywhere else.

Chapter 153 - Setting Records

Verity’s trips to Dondrian for the concerts had been times of incredible stress, not least because she always felt like she was pushing up against a hard deadline, never able to practice quite enough that she felt confident going in. She still wasn’t sure whether the concerts had actually been any good, except that she’d genuinely enjoyed playing ‘The Brave Knight Gave’ for an audience, and had been momentarily elated by the applause before the inevitable confrontation with her mother.

This was different though, as there were no obligations. She hadn’t told her father that she would be doing ‘recordings’ for him, she had said that she would be prepared to do them, and that she would come to talk about payment and negotiate something that worked for her — a negotiation that was not to include her mother in any form.

To his credit, her father had rolled right over and said that was a lovely idea and that it would go better for both of them if they handled it in a professional way. It had made her suspicious, naturally, but only because she didn’t particularly trust either of her parents.

Isra had come along for the trip, partly for moral support and partly because she liked the city. They had almost all of the moving preparations out of the way, but Alfric was still trying to work out what he called ‘the kinks’. They’d somehow managed not to break anything, and the house was settling into its legs, transforming slightly to accommodate a full range of motion. Verity actually quite liked the idea of a traveling house, as it appealed to her wanderlust, and while they’d be bidding a fond farewell to Pucklechurch, new horizons held a great deal of interest, even if they were still staying within Greater Plenarch.

Of course, if their trip to Plenarch went well, there were always options for something more, and Alfric thought that he might be able to turn the house into a boat and sail them to either Kiromo or Tarbin. Most dungeoneers eventually did go abroad, he’d explained.

Verity had never actually visited her father’s workshop. Her mother had always treated the ectad engineering business as a curiosity at best, a sort of rich man’s hobby whose eccentricity at least gave her something to talk about with other people. Verity hadn’t been around for it, but she had to imagine that any talk about the ‘other’ business had stopped when the primary business had come under the threat — and eventual completion — of seizure.

But now that the workshop had spawned a factory and was an important business in its own right, small but with many people talking about it and a suddenly-valuable national patent, Verity had to imagine that her mother had pivoted back to being proud of her husband. Perhaps the seizure was even old news, rather than blood in the water, or a boon, somehow. Verity could only imagine what the attempt to change seizure into a positive must have been like, but she didn’t doubt her mother’s ability.

“Do you think your mother will be there?” asked Isra as they looked at the building. It was soundly unimpressive, a building of gray bricks with no attention whatsoever paid to the outside, not even the wooden sign, which said in unimpressive lettering ‘Parson Musical Appliances’. It was larger than Verity had expected, but then again, it was also a place that her father had poured colossal amounts of money into, so she’d have been a bit surprised if it were small. It wasn’t out of place in the more industrial part of Dondrian, though it was a bit more shuttered, the windows high on the walls so that no one could see in, the doors drawn closed instead of left open for air.

“If my mother is there, we warp immediately,” said Verity. “It was a condition of this meeting.”

“Good,” said Isra.

“I hope she’s not there,” said Verity. “I was never close with my father, but I’m hopeful that … I don’t know. That there’s some way of having something with him, a relationship of some kind.”

Isra nodded. Verity was painfully aware that Isra was an orphan, without the luxury of even a strained relationship with a parent. It seemed unfair, in a way, for Verity to have Isra come with. She wished that she had parents to share with Isra, if that was a thing that people did, but she didn’t want to share these parents, with all their problems.

The interior of the workshop was a busy place, with hundreds of the machines lined up, and occasional sounds from them as they played bits and pieces of music during testing. They were a far cry from the prototype sitting in the house, and to Verity’s eye they were one of the few fancy things in the place, set within handsome wooden cabinets with scrollwork and a proper logo of the sort that she would have expected to see on the sign out front. This made sense: they were going to be expensive, and marketed to people of means, which meant that they needed to fit inside rooms with other fine things.

Her father was wearing only half his suit, having left the jacket behind somewhere and rolled up his sleeves. He looked nearly like a workman, except for the close shave, careful styling of his hair, and a few other details of finery about him. He wrapped Verity in a hug before she could exchange a word with him, and he smelled of sandalwood and soap, which brought back memories of her childhood.

“Verity, my one and only,” he said, holding her at arm’s length after the hug, hands on her shoulders. “It’s still so hard to believe you grew up so tall.”

“You’re looking well, father,” said Verity.

“Oh, it’s the glow of success that does it,” he said with a smile. “All the worries wash away, leaving a bit of youth in their place.” He turned to Isra. “And this is your girlfriend, Isra?”

“Ah, no,” said Verity. “We’re not together anymore. Just friends.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” said Isra, extending her hand.

“Yes, yes, any friend of Verity’s, and I’ve heard so much about you, of course.” He was brushing past the embarrassment with aplomb, as though Verity wasn’t about to die from shame right in front of him. She had written about Isra, once or twice, when they were dating, and then had simply never mentioned her once they were broken up, so it wasn’t his fault that he’d made that mistake. But for Isra, it was possible that would have all kinds of implications, and Verity felt herself shrinking back from a clarifying conversation. “But don’t you normally wear a headscarf?”

Isra shrugged. “I didn’t want to call attention to myself.”

“Well, that’s never a good reason, in my opinion, but as I’ve said, I’m riding the high of success, and so long as you’re successful, it can feel good to give the naysayers something to talk about,” her father laughed.

“Is there a place we can talk?” asked Verity. The main floor of the workshop was a noisy place, and there were perhaps twenty workers putting the final touches on the machines.

“I have an office, come, I doubt that this will take long, and then perhaps we can get lunch together, my treat, of course.” With that he swept away, and Verity followed. The office was in a small corner of the workshop, and surprisingly quiet inside, which must have been due to some baffling, or possibly hidden magic. The office was overflowing with papers, even though there were two filing cabinets against one wall, and it was anyone’s guess whether there were simply so many papers that they’d spilled out of the cabinets, or if the cabinets were simply unused. Her father moved papers from the desk until he plucked one of them up, and he began reading it as Verity and Isra took their seats.

“Now then,” her father said, his lips moving as he continued reading. “Let’s get this business of contracts out of the way.”

“I was hoping to do the recordings today,” said Verity. “There are a number of pieces that I have prepared, and it would save me from having to make another trip later.”

“Yes, I think we can accommodate that, the only trick will be finding a quiet enough room. The process picks up all kinds of noises, from the rustle of clothes to the cough of someone half a room away, and we don’t want those sorts of things immortalized,” he said, nodding. “There are half a dozen places we could use though, and if you’re picking the songs, all the better. You have your lute?”

“I have a lute,” said Verity. “Actually, several, but one that I prefer for playing, yes.”

“Then here,” her father said, handing over the piece of paper. “It’s a generous per-song agreement, with a provision for more should the master recording degrade, or should it prove popular. I had a man of mine draw it up, it’s in line with what an author or painter might get for contracted work, though there’s no real comparison as yet.”

Verity took some time to read the contract, then handed it to Isra.

“That’s not the sort of arrangement I was interested in,” said Verity. “And I do wish that you hadn’t had it drawn up in advance of our meeting. There’s no point in the meeting if you’re going to hand us a thing like that and ask us to sign.”

“Well, certainly there’s some leeway, chipmunk, but I’ve had to deal with barristers far too much of late, and wished to spare you.” He frowned. “If it’s a matter of compensation … I find talking about money with family to be somewhat embarrassing,” he spared a glance for Isra, as if to say ‘all the more when outsiders are involved’, “but I’d thought the sum was fair.”

“It’s the same sum regardless of how many copies you make,” said Verity. “That’s what I’d like to change. The stones you inscribe, they can be replaced within the machine, can’t they? The business model, at least as you’ve described it, is to sell the machine a single time, then a collection of stones, especially as they wear out with repeated listening. You’re wishing to treat me as a contractor whose business is concluded in a single session, or perhaps a few, taking a lump sum for my labor rather than having any interest in what happens to the final product.”

“Ah,” her father replied. “And you wish, instead, for a slice of the pie.” He leaned back in his chair. “I do admire that, in a way, but it sets a dangerous precedent going forward. The machines are sold, the workshop is doing the final assembly of them, and the first of them will be shipped out within a fortnight. I had been hoping to have you as the guiding star. You’re still the talk of the town, you know.”

Verity resisted the urge to say that she didn’t know, which would be bad from a negotiation perspective. You weren’t supposed to let other people tell you your worth.

“There are a number of reasons to use Verity,” said Isra. “Not only does she have some level of fame, she’s been a selling point for those units that have already been sold. You help tie the machine to your family name, and boost the idea of this device as being a product of the artist, of these scribings as a form of patronage.”

“I would help with that,” said Verity. “A flattering interview in local papers, a signature on the packaged stones, something like that.”

“True partnership,” said her father, raising an eyebrow. “But the money would need to come from somewhere, and I can’t increase the price of the stones, not at this point.”

“You wouldn’t need to,” said Isra. She turned the sheet around to show him. “You were prepared to pay this, as a lump sum. We would simply change the contract so that the same sum is paid out assuming the machines do moderately well.”

“You would be taking on risk, chipmunk,” Verity’s father said to her. “The payment, I can guarantee, I have the funds available to me. That the business will be a success — well, it’s already a success, we’re expanding to meet the orders, the workshop is only the place for final assembly there’s a whole factory down the street where the cabinets are being made, where the majority of the machine is put together. But the lump sum, that’s optimistic. If you ask for a portion of every stone with your song contained upon it, you might lose out in the long term.”

“I understand that,” said Verity. “But I’m young, and can handle the risk.”

“And as for the other aspects,” her father said. “You would put yourself in the public like that? Promote the machine?”

“If it were on my own terms, yes,” said Verity. “And if I had some stake in the outcome.”

“You don’t want to see your father succeed for his own sake?” her father asked with a nervous grin.

“I do,” said Verity. “But I want my music to be a piece of me, rather than released out into the wild, untethered from me. I’m sure you understand, if you’re emblazoning your name on every cabinet.”

“I suppose I haven’t thought of it that way,” he replied, stroking his chin. “But it might make the prospect of inscribing more attractive for others.”

“It will come down to the rings,” said Isra. “The question of specific amounts, more than ownership and publicity.”

Verity disagreed with that, but she let the point stand, and her father apparently jumped on the chance to talk about specific amounts.

Verity found it dreadfully boring, a question of percentages and earnings thresholds, sometimes with discussion of sales of the machine, and expected sales, of risk and certainty. For a moment it felt as if this was the sort of thing Alfric would have enjoyed, but then she remembered him saying that bartering and negotiation weren’t something he felt particularly suited to.

Verity didn’t really care that much about the money. They had made incredible amounts from the dungeons, and the concerts had been lucrative, even if the money had been going toward her parents and their legal fund. If Verity ever truly cared about money, she would have put herself through more concerts, this time on her own terms, or she’d have gone to the Church of Xuphin, which often sponsored its Chosen. She had all the money she needed though, or rather more than she needed, and arguing over percentage points and earnings potential seemed terribly dull to her, and somewhat pointless. She knew she was somewhat spoiled in that regard, as not everyone found themselves so free to not worry about their income. Her personal expenses were quite small though, which was a large part of it.

Twenty minutes or so passed with Verity saying almost nothing as Isra traded numbers with her father. She watched him, seeing him argue, and she could see how he wasn’t terribly suited to this either, even if he did have some experience with it. He gave away too much, admitted too readily that it would be nice to have Verity in a more stable position, not a contractor but a partner, someone who could write little cards about each of the songs on the stones or something to that effect. It did seem to Verity that her responsibilities grew as the two of them talked, but the percentages were growing as well, and the prospect of sharing her music — her music — held a great deal of appeal.

Verity was in the middle of composing a note about one of her songs in her head when they apparently came to an agreement.

“Does that sound agreeable to you, chipmunk?” asked her father.

“Hrm?” asked Verity. She looked between the two of them. “I’m sorry, I lost the thread there.”

“We’ve come to final numbers,” said Isra. She had written on a sheet of paper in shorthand.

“Ah,” said Verity. She looked at the shorthand and nodded as though it was meaningful to her. “I’ll be honest, I want to be out of this room and not thinking about numbers.”

Her father laughed. “I don’t believe I’ve ever said that out loud, but yes, I’ve had many meetings with accountants that go like that. You did well to bring your friend, she has a head for business.”

“The numbers look fine,” said Verity. “I trust Isra. Most of what needs to be done aside from the recording will be done remotely, but we have some capability to travel now, especially Isra, so we can return to Dondrian once or twice.”

“Very good,” her father smiled. “I’ll speak with my barrister and have a new contract drawn, which you — or Isra — can look over. It should be ready later today, so you can do the recording before then, or after, if you prefer.”

“After would be good,” said Isra. “We’re going to see the town, and will be back in a few hours with our own barrister.”

“Ah,” her father said, deflating slightly. “Well, that is the proper thing to do.” He let out a sigh. “You know, I wish that business were less like this, terms and conditions, numbers and figures.”

“Alas,” said Verity with a smile. “Perhaps you should become a dungeoneer?”

“Oh, I had my time in the dungeons,” her father replied. “Ten dungeons, and that was it, a rite of passage which passed by.”

Verity blinked. “I never knew that.”

“It wasn’t terribly proper,” he said. “But your mother and I were young and daring.”

“She went into the dungeons?” asked Verity.

“She did,” her father nodded. “Ten dungeons. We did them together. That was ages ago though, and not the sort of thing to be mentioned in polite company.”

Verity couldn’t imagine that, no matter how she tried, and she sat there, flabbergasted and not knowing what to say.

“She had wanted to be here, of course, and had encouraged me to speak on her behalf,” her father said. “I said no on both accounts. I know your feelings on the matter, and while I don’t think you’re being entirely fair, it’s for you to decide how you wish to handle your mother. I’ve told her it’s better not to send letters, better not to push, but it’s a struggle getting her to understand.”

“I — thank you,” said Verity.

“She’s used to getting her way, and to being proactive about the problems in her life,” her father replied with a sigh. “I can’t guarantee that she’ll listen to me forever, but I’ll do my best, and if you elect never to speak to her again …” He trailed off, then closed his mouth. “I don’t want to argue in her defense. Let’s speak of her no more.”

“We need to go speak with our barrister,” said Isra. “We’ll return in, say, two hours, if that gives you enough time?”

“It should, yes,” her father replied. “I suppose lunch together is out of the question?”

“We’ll eat together sometime,” said Verity. “I don’t plan to be a stranger. And … thank you.”

“For what?” her father asked.

“For telling me that you and mother went into the dungeons,” said Verity. “For listening. For understanding, and having my back.”

“It’s motivated by guilt,” he replied, chuckling a bit. “Better late than never, eh chipmunk?”

Verity gave him a smile, and not long after, they departed.

“Do we have a barrister?” asked Verity.

“We do,” said Isra. “I arranged it ahead of time.”

“You know, I’m supposed to be the one helping you with this sort of thing.” She gave Isra a fond look. “You did most of the work. I wish there were some way to express my gratitude.”

“I’m taking a percentage of the profits for my role in the negotiations,” said Isra.

Verity rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. I don’t really care about the numbers. What will we do with more numbers?”

“It’s going to be more expensive, living in a moving house,” said Isra. “I’m not sure how much more expensive, but it certainly won’t be cheaper.”

“Can I ask how you do it?” asked Verity.

“Do what?” asked Isra. She turned to Verity, eyebrow raised. She had pretty brown eyes, and Verity felt her heart beat a bit faster.

“How do you handle people like that?” asked Verity. “How do you plow on ahead? You’ve said you don’t enjoy negotiation.”

“You grind people down, that’s all,” said Isra. “You get mean about it, if you need to, make them feel like they’re cheating you, or like you’ll walk away.” She shrugged. “It’s not comfortable, but being uncomfortable isn’t the worst thing. I think I got very used to the idea of talking to people just being like that, a war to be fought.”

“Well, I’m grateful,” said Verity. “There’s no one I’d rather have in my corner. If I were alone, I would have signed the contract right away, just to get it over with.”

“I’ve seen you grit your teeth and get things done,” said Isra. “You have that expression when you begin to practice your lute sometimes.”

Verity was following Isra. She had no real idea where they were going, but trusted the druid to have a sense of the city, especially as seen through the eyes of birds and the whispers of mice. They were leaving the industrial part of the city and going somewhere a bit nicer, with at least a few parks around, though some of them were the graveyards that dotted Dondrian, tucked away in random places.

“I think hammering away at practice is manifestly different than hammering away at people,” said Verity.

“I would watch your phrasing there,” said Isra.

Verity giggled. “Well in either case, the point would stand, manifestly different experiences.”

“Here,” said Isra. “This is the place I picked for lunch.”

“Don’t we need to meet with our barrister?” asked Verity.

“We can do it afterward. He was recommended by the Overguards,” said Isra. “They hired him for the day, there’s no rush.”

“That’s generous of them,” said Verity as they slipped into the restaurant. It was a small place, only four tables, and the kitchen in the back was small too, smaller than the one Mizuki usually cooked in, though much more intensive. It was Tarbin cuisine, which Verity had never eaten all that much of. Dondrian had a fair number of people either descended from Tarbin or who’d immigrated from there. It wasn’t terribly close by most measures, but Dondrian was on the coast, and a center for shipping as well as being among the largest cities in the world.

“It is generous,” said Isra. “Too generous?”

“They want to help, I suppose,” said Verity. “Mizuki got an entad to go to school, and I get a lawyer. I suppose that’s something.”

“I’m not sure whether it goes against the principles of self-reliance,” said Isra.

“Seems a poor idea to leave a one-time contract signing in the hands of someone who really has no clue what they’re doing just because of self-reliance,” said Verity.

They ordered from the small menu, both picking a kind of spicy stew served over rice. Verity could smell the food from the kitchen, pungent and strong.

“Did you choose this place for a reason?” asked Verity.

“I don’t know,” shrugged Isra. “We have all kinds of dishes that have a Kiromon flair to them, and Hannah cooks on occasion. I was thinking that I’ve never really had food from Tarbin. Even the things my father made were mostly from what he’d foraged or hunted in the woods. There are ingredients, spices, that my father would have known.”

“You’ve been thinking about that?” asked Verity. “Your father?”

“My past,” said Isra. “When we went to the demiplane … there were so many people so eager to leave their past behind, and I’m a woman without a past.”

“Nothing to leave behind,” said Verity.

“And I’ve left behind what I could already,” said Isra. “I would like to have a funeral for the cabin in the woods, if we can do it before we leave.”

“Not to spoil the surprise, but we already have something planned,” said Verity. “There was actually some debate over whether it should be a surprise.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. “They’re planning to make an affair of it?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Verity. “Nothing big.” She almost put her foot in her mouth by asking whether Isra had ever been to a funeral, but the girl had buried her father, and didn’t need to be reminded of it. “We could go big, if you liked, but I prefer a subdued funeral. I can’t say I’ve ever been to a funeral for a house, but I don’t imagine they’re much different.”

“It’s a time to say goodbye,” said Isra. “To let it go, and allow it to collapse, or become a place for animals to shelter.”

Their food came, piping hot, and they ate it slowly, blowing on their spoons. Verity was more used to spicy food than Isra was, owing largely to the differences in cuisine across Inter, and so ate a bit faster. It was lamb, cooked with peppers and beans, orange-brown and rather rich, with the rice balancing out the flavor.

“Tarbin is a huge nation,” said Verity. “I’m not sure this is what your father would have had.”

“I’m not sure either,” said Isra. “He was so closed off.”

“Mine too,” said Verity. “Though I imagine for wholly different reasons.” She took another bite. There was something different about the rice, the grains longer than she was used to, or more spindly.

“Do you imagine we might go to Tarbin some day?” asked Isra.

“We’re moving toward Plenarch,” said Verity. “That’s the opposite direction. If we move with the house, when Mizuki is on break from school, it would take two months to get there, maybe more, if we’re just walking, and that’s without considering Alfric’s idea for the house to become a boat and for us to take up sailing.” She regarded Isra. “I would move mountains for you, of course. Moving a house would be no problem.”

“Maybe I would go alone,” said Isra.

“We wouldn’t want you to shoulder too much burden,” said Verity. “I feel bad enough that you’re helping me with the contract.”

Isra shrugged. “We can help each other then. I’d like that.”

“I don’t know how many songs they’d need sung in Tarbin, but I have other skills,” said Verity. She’d been hungrier than she’d realized, and was eating quickly, talking around her food in a way that was a bit undecorous. “Sewing, perhaps?”

“Mostly I would need a friend,” said Isra. “I find it easy to be cold. You provide good warmth.”

“I’d mind your phrasing,” said Verity, smiling.

“I know what I said,” shrugged Isra.

Verity cleared her throat and dabbed at her mouth with a napkin. “Speaking of, you and that boy, that other druid you were spending so much time with in the demiplane. Did you … was that more than a friendship?”

“Mmm,” said Isra. “He liked me, in that way. We held hands once, as we walked. But … no.”

“No?” asked Verity.

“It was hard for him to see past the way I was being,” said Isra. “It was easier to be guarded, so that’s what I was. And I knew we were spies, and that we were leaving, so it was just nothing, attraction but no rutting together.”

“Just curious,” said Verity.

“Would it have upset you?” asked Isra.

“No,” said Verity, reflexively. “I mean, yes, it would, but I don’t think that’s an emotion I have a right to.” Her cheeks felt warm, which wasn’t just because of the spices in the stew. “I hate being frank about these things.”

“I do appreciate it though,” said Isra. “Is it normal, do you think, between people who’ve been together? To still feel that spark?”

“I have no idea,” said Verity. ‘That spark’ was a suggestive way of phrasing it. “I’m glad that we can at least be friends. And you should know that if you do find a cute boy, I’ll be quite happy for you, as much as I might also be a touch jealous.” It was a polite way of phrasing it. Verity thought she would be more than a touch jealous, but wanted to massage the language a bit, to communicate that she would be in charge of her own feelings.

“It might be hard to find someone, on the road,” said Isra.

“You have your lutes,” said Verity. “You can go almost anywhere you please. A hundred hexes, if you want to spend the night at your destination, that can get you right across Inter, more or less.”

“We’re sharing the room again,” said Isra. “It might be awkward.”

“We’ll figure something out, if it comes up,” said Verity. “Hannah doesn’t actually use her room, she spends her time in Lutopia Two.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. She looked down at the bowl, which she’d eaten barely half of. “You know, I don’t particularly like these spices.”

“You didn’t grow up with them,” said Verity. “Give it some time and they might grow on you.”

“I wish that I had a past,” said Isra. “But I suppose the past is complicated.”

“Thinking about the contract, and my parents, and the trip across Inter, I suppose the future is complicated too,” said Verity.

Isra reached across the table and squeezed Verity’s hand. It was a kind, soft gesture, and whatever doubts Verity had been having, they were washed away.

Chapter 154 - Roads Go Ever On

Moving the house was, at least, something to focus on. It was a thorny problem that had other thorns growing off of it, which was a good feature in a problem, at least so far as Alfric was concerned. The long legs meant that they could get above most obstacles, though they would have to route around places where the primary road was through a forest, covered by branches that would block their path. They could go through fields, if they got permission from the local farmers, which Alfric didn’t think would pose that much of a problem, especially since the feet of the house didn’t press down as much as they should have given the extreme weight. They would need to find places to set the house down when they rested, since the house couldn’t be trusted to move itself through the night, and there were going to be continual problems of finding food from local places, doing laundry, and all kinds of other things.

It had been fun to find all the things that would need to be strapped down for the move, and had taken quite a bit of time. All around the house were now signs that it could move, leather straps and latches on the drawers, as well as hidden things like screws to anchor dressers and bookcases to the walls. All the beds were locked in place now, and the windows would hold firm. It filled Alfric with a sense of satisfaction, and his childhood dream of being a sailor was coming to fruition, just not in the way that he’d expected it would. He was doing something that no one else was doing, that no one else could do, and that was worth something to him.

Alfric sat with his legs dangling out the front door as it moved, the better to direct the house as it made its way. They were past Liberfell, though still well within the region, and a small boy with a riding bird was acting as their scout, running ahead and checking the path for places that might give them some grief. In some ways, moving the house was an echo of moving the huge wardrobe, which they were leaving behind in Pucklechurch for the time being, in part because it would sit there and passively collect money through their arrangement with the general store.

“How goes it?” asked Hannah as she sat down next to Alfric.

“Just fine,” said Alfric. “Perfect weather, which I credit Isra for, and a nice trundling pace.”

“You’re over your homesickness?” asked Hannah.

Alfric laughed. “No nausea, no, and I really don’t think that’s going to stick.”

The gentle swaying of the house had made Alfric a bit green in the gills, but he’d adjusted to it, and drank some tea that Isra had prepared from roots, which calmed his stomach. He’d found it mildly embarrassing, given his position as the leader of the party, as though the nausea from the swaying gait of the house was something that he should be able to think his way around, or otherwise overcome through sheer will. Instead, it had passed on its own, but it had taken three days. He wasn’t sure what he’d have done if it had persisted, other than borrowing some form of flight and following the house that way.

“I wanted to talk, to make sure that you’re doing well with things,” said Hannah. “Not a formal clerical appointment, per se, but I hear more from the others than you.”

“Do they come to you sometimes?” asked Alfric. “Is that … okay with you?”

“Oh, ay,” said Hannah. “I’m out of the profession, but I’ve still got the trainin’, and the way I figure, they do need someone to talk to in confidence, since we can’t always have each other. And since I’m not a cleric in the traditional sense, I can say some things that I wouldn’t dare if I were actin’ on behalf of the temple.”

“I’m fine,” said Alfric. “Nothing much to report, I guess.”

“Always such phrasin’,” said Hannah, shaking her head. “It’s not a ‘report’, I’m askin’ about how you feel. And I can’t tell whether that was a brush off, or whether you just don’t think like that.”

“It wasn’t a brush off,” said Alfric. He considered it for a moment. “I miss the Wildlands, and I’m eager for our next dungeon in the hopes that Verity can get her technique under control.” It was optimistic to call it a technique, he knew. “I think the moving house is wonderful, but we’re only moving with purpose until we get to Plenarch, so we can be close to the wizarding school, and I’m looking on the horizon and seeing … that I might grow restless again.”

“It’s a diversion, you mean,” said Hannah.

“No,” said Alfric. “It’s a wonderful adventure, but it’s an adventure that will last us a month at most, and I want a second adventure lined up after it. I want a whole set of them, if I’m honest.”

“Hence you thinkin’ about turnin’ the house into a boat, so we can sail across to Kiromo,” said Hannah.

Mizuki’s cat, Tabbins, came to sit between them. He looked out at the road from the swaying house, as though he’d decided to be a part of the road-watching with them. The cat had been quite frightened the first day, hiding under the couch and refusing to come out no matter how much Mizuki tried to coax him, but by the third day, Tabbins had acclimated. Now he walked around the house with an imperious air, and gave a sense of superiority about the whole thing, as though to say ‘Oh yes, houses? They move sometimes, didn’t you know?’ Alfric petted the cat, who flicked his tail.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “A part of me thinks that I should be dealing with the chrononauts. There’s a sickness there, I think, a hypocrisy at best and an abuse of power at worst. I think they raised me with ambitious ideals, but now I need to hold them to task, and I’m really not a political animal, so I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“It weighs on you,” Hannah nodded. “But I’m not so sure it’s a problem that’s for Alfric Overguard to solve. You’re the type to see somethin’ wrong and go barrelling into it headlong, but there’s somethin’ to ignorin’ things that are bigger than us, beyond the scope of our power to change. It’s somethin’ that you could live with, I think.”

Alfric shrugged. He wasn’t sure he wanted to live with it. His aunt Penelope had seen an injustice with the bastlefolk and how they were handled by society at large, and then devoted herself singularly to the task of raising and caring for the babies pulled from dungeons. He didn’t quite agree that this one particular issue should be the thing that Penelope cared about, but he admired that she’d chosen a purpose for herself.

“I think for now, I’ll keep myself focused on what’s in front of me,” said Alfric. “I’m only eighteen.”

“How old, countin’ the undone days?” asked Hannah.

“I have no idea,” said Alfric. “Twenty-two, maybe.”

“Mmm,” said Hannah. “As old as Mizuki then.”

“You’re using that voice,” said Alfric.

“I think of all the numbers you could have picked, you picked that one,” said Hannah. “Is it true? Four years of undone days for you?”

Alfric shrugged. “I don’t think I ever really counted, but yes, as soon as I could do it without being timesick, I was using the undone days to learn and train.” He hesitated. “Maybe not four years.”

“I don’t think the difference in age matters to her,” said Hannah.

“No,” said Alfric. “And chrononauts don’t count like that either, a ‘hypothetical’ age.”

“It actually worked out between Isra and Verity, havin’ them be together for a spell,” said Hannah. “A bit awkward for a moment, but they worked it out.”

“You think they’re going to stay apart?” asked Alfric.

“Well, I think it was a fine rule to say that we shouldn’t date each other,” said Hannah. “But if we do end up datin’ each other, I think it’s a good rule you’re allowed only one break up. Back and forth, that, I think, would grate.”

Alfric looked behind him, to make sure that they weren’t nearby. “Likely it would take them forever to get back together.”

“I don’t think so,” said Hannah. “Isra understands better now, at least. But I can’t repeat what they’ve told me, of course.”

“Of course,” nodded Alfric. “You and Marsh?”

Hannah sighed. “Ay,” she said.

“That means it’s going well?” asked Alfric.

“It is,” said Hannah. She shifted. “Do you know, I resist the urge to gush about him?”

“Why?” asked Alfric.

“I don’t know, really,” said Hannah. “I think I find it annoyin’ when other people gush about their partners, when it’s a stream of complimentary things about how sweet and gentle such and such is, how comfortable to be with, how rough, at times, in a good way — I think I don’t like to hear that private talk, since I feel glad, in the abstract, but there’s no way to relate to it. It’s like Mizuki talkin’ about a piece of music that she likes, has she done that with you?”

Alfric laughed. “She has. And no, I never understand it. It’s cute though.”

“‘And then at this other part it’s ‘bram ba ba bum!’’” Hannah imitated. “Would be easier if she had a gift for song, but alas.”

“I like her voice,” said Alfric. “She can do justice to some ditties.”

“Well, I don’t want to sound like that when I talk about Marsh, but then I pen the feelin’ all in, share it just with him, and so I stay silent because that’s what’s on my mind,” said Hannah. “I think I shouldn’t though. It’s embarrassing how much I love him, honestly.” She had gone a bit pink about the cheeks.

“I’m happy for you,” said Alfric. He put his arm around her, and she leaned into the hug a bit, which was nice, because Alfric had felt awkward about it.

“He thinks I should go back to the church though,” said Hannah.

“Oh?” asked Alfric. “But you haven’t floated the idea at the dinner table, which means it’s either not too serious a consideration for you, or a very serious consideration.”

“I’m giving it thought,” said Hannah. “Not now, not even in the next year or two, but maybe, eventually. The Church welcomes clerics back, so long as their connection is strong.”

“He wants you to settle down?” asked Alfric, frowning a bit.

“He knows what Garos means to me,” said Hannah, shaking her head. She looked out at the road ahead of them, which was mercifully straight. “I talked to the girl who replaced me in Pucklechurch, and it made me feel … oh, I don’t know. Like I was missing out.”

A few months ago, Alfric might have felt like his career as a dungeoneer was threatened, but he was more calm about it now. If Hannah left to go be a part of her church again, they would find a way to go on without her. After the last dungeon they’d done, he didn’t feel the burning need to go again, it was just the tug of adventure, and as the moving house was showing, he could find his own adventures.

Before he could give some words of encouragement to Hannah — not that she would ever need them from the likes of him — the boy Bib came down around the bend toward them, prodding his riding bird along to its top speed. He came to a halt in front of the house, then turned the bird around so the house could keep walking.

“River up ahead!” Bib called. “You’re going to have to get your feet wet!”

“There’s no bridge?” asked Alfric.

“Not that you’d want to put your weight on!” said Bib with a happy smile. “You’d crack that thing right in half!”

“Thanks!” said Alfric. “We’ll figure it out!”

“Lunch is soon!” called Hannah. “We’ll be stoppin’, there’s plenty for you!”

Bib waved her off and then sped back down the road, presumably to look at the river crossing again. The boy liked to give advice, though Alfric only occasionally found it useful. They had maps, entad and otherwise, but the purpose of having a runner was partly so they could deal with anything unexpected, like a lizzo pulling a cart or something else they would need to move out of the way of.

“What’s lunch?” asked Alfric.

“It’s Verity’s turn,” said Hannah. “So I don’t know. Sandwiches, if we’re lucky.”

“She’s not bad,” said Alfric.

“Sorry, but she’s not good,” said Hannah. “I said I’d do all the food, but she seemed to have somethin’ in her craw about equitable livin’.”

That was, more or less, how it had gone. Before wizarding school had started, Mizuki had said she might just make them a lunch that could be reheated on the stove, but once school was in swing, it was clear that it was going to take far more of her time and energy than she’d planned. That had left a discussion of what the other four would be doing for lunch, and they had settled on taking turns, including Verity, who seemed a bit offended that they’d meant to leave her out.

In her defense, she was getting better in a hurry, and she wasn’t usually overreaching too far in terms of what she decided to tackle. Lunch was a small meal anyhow, and they could afford some mistakes.

Lunch was fish, fresh-caught, and if it was much better than Verity was usually capable of, that was because Isra had been in the kitchen with her. The skin on the trout was crispy, and it came with roasted vegetables and a rather small serving of roasted potatoes. There were nits to pick as far as the preparation went, perhaps a bit too much salt, and the carrots might have been better with the leaves removed, but the way a person got better at something was practice, and the best way to practice cooking was to actually cook things. Verity was good at practice, at least, even if she wasn’t good at cooking yet.

“Seems a bit backwards to have Mizuki teach Isra to cook, then Isra teach Verity,” said Hannah, who was cleaning her plate in spite of her misgivings about Verity’s efforts.

“Mizuki’s not done teaching me,” said Isra. “It was the blind leading the blind.”

“It’s quite good,” said Marsh as he crunched into a potato.

“I think I can at least see the flaws,” said Verity, who was picking at her plate and taking only small, occasional bites. “In theory, if I just don’t make the same mistake twice, I’ll run out of mistakes that I can possibly make. Right?”

“In theory,” said Alfric. “Though sometimes you don’t even know why you made a mistake, only that a mistake was made. Or you need someone to point out where things went wrong.” He shrugged. “Thank you for lunch, if I haven’t said so already.”

“You’re welcome,” said Verity. “But alright, perhaps I should find some other way to pull my weight.”

“For what it’s worth, I think this is your best effort so far,” said Hannah.

“That’s damning with faint praise,” said Isra.

“Well, maybe next time it will be sandwiches, but that’s hardly cooking,” said Verity. “You could make sandwiches on your own.”

“There’s somethin’ to be said for food you don’t need much work for,” said Hannah. “I’m not pullin’ out all the stops every time, that’s for certain.”

“Do I need to be a part of this?” asked Marsh. “I don’t think I was around when you decided to switch cooking.”

“Can you cook?” asked Alfric.

“I’m a pyro,” said Marsh.

“Sounds like he’s dodgin’ the question,” said Hannah with a laugh.

“There’s a difference between heating things up and cooking them,” said Alfric.

“I can do all the pyro classics,” said Marsh. “But that would be enough to get by, right? It’s meats on sticks, mostly. Flame, which is better than the heating of a stove. A bit of char.”

“That does sound good,” said Verity.

“Can I take a turn?” asked Bib.

Alfric looked at the boy, who they’d invited in for a meal. He had eaten everything on his plate in a hurry, a full meal even for an adult, but then again, he’d been riding the bird all day, putting it through its paces.

“No, Bib,” said Alfric. “This is the last leg of the journey for you.”

“Aw,” said Bib. “Come on, you need someone to scout ahead, that’s just common sense.”

“I’m not sure it is,” said Hannah. “But we can’t take you from your family.”

“My dad said it was okay,” said Bib, frowning. “He said that you’re only a kid once, and if you want to follow around a walking house, you do you. But then I told him I wasn’t following the house, I was guiding it.”

“Where would you sleep?” asked Isra, smiling at Alfric’s expression. Where the boy would sleep was not the primary objection to having a child along with them.

“I have a hammock,” said Bib. “I could set it up when we make camp for the night.”

“No,” said Alfric. “We’re not looking after this child.” He almost said that they had enough people in the house as it was, but he worried that Marsh would take it the wrong way.

“I don’t need looking after,” said Bib. “I can take care of myself. I can even cook some. I make pasta for my folks sometimes.” He looked at Alfric. “Please? Wouldn’t you have wanted to travel along with a walking house when you were ten?”

“I would,” Alfric admitted.

“Mizuki would be ecstatic,” said Hannah.

“Well, it’s not up to me,” said Alfric. “We’ll have to talk to your father to make sure it’s okay, and I’d want to discuss it as a party, then get everyone’s input.”

“It wouldn’t be hard to bring him home,” said Isra.

“Even with the bird?” asked Alfric.

Isra gave him a pitying look. “You think a bird can get the best of me?” she asked.

“I suppose not,” said Alfric. He turned to Bib. “Provisionally —”

Bib gave out a little yip, then got up from his seat and brought his plate to the kitchen. “I need to go ask my mom real quick, I’ll be back later tonight.”

“You said your father said it would be alright,” said Alfric.

“Yeah …” said Bib. “But you know how it is. I won’t be gone long.” He hesitated. “Do the river crossing without me, try to pick good spots for the feet to come down.”

“Will do,” said Alfric. He wasn’t that concerned about it, but the boy appreciated feeling like he’d had some input.

The river crossing ended up going smoothly, as it was a creek more than a river, and narrow enough that Alfric could simply have the house step from one side to the other. It left a deep footprint in the muddy bank, but that was it, and then they were off down the road once more. From his spot at the front door, Alfric spotted people from time to time, and spoke with them a bit, trying his best to be friendly. The friendliness was something that the others were a bit more suited to, but he did his best. It was easier when people had technical questions he could answer, like about the legality of the operation, or whether they would go on through the night, but he found it more difficult when they just wanted to chat — to gawk, really.

It was late in the afternoon when Mizuki got home, and she was so wiped out that she guiltily asked someone else to make dinner. They were happy to oblige, since they hadn’t really been doing much all day, but this wasn’t the first time she’d begged off.

While Hannah and Isra cooked, Alfric found Mizuki laying on her bed. She hadn’t changed out of her robes yet. He liked how they looked on her, though it did feel a little like she was playing dress up rather than a serious wizard, since she hadn’t settled into the new outfit yet.

“Pre-dinner nap?” he asked.

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “I’m just beat.”

“I’ll give you some time,” said Alfric.

“No, no,” said Mizuki. “Come in, lay with me for a bit.”

When she scooted over, Alfric took a spot on her bed. It was the largest bed in the house, one that had once belonged to her parents, and they could comfortably lay together without touching.

“I think I’m finally rounding the corner,” said Mizuki.

“Yeah?” asked Alfric. “You’re doing well?”

“It’s impossible to know,” said Mizuki. “I feel like I’m caught up, more or less, but it’s just thinking, day in and day out, and if you zone out while you’re doing the exercises, or during a lesson, you’re missing the entire point. Today was the first day I didn’t feel worn out by all the thinking, like I wasn’t just ground to dust by the end of it. I haven’t been moving around much at all, and I just felt so drained.”

“You’ll build up some stamina,” said Alfric. “That’s all it will take. Personally, if I wasn’t moving the house, I think I would feel incredibly cooped up with nothing to do.”

“And why didn’t it work out for you to become a wizard?” asked Mizuki. “You tried, right?”

“I put in my six months,” said Alfric. “Eight months, actually, though not all of that was formal schooling.”

“And your pet rock never loved you back?” asked Mizuki.

“Nope,” said Alfric. “I wasn’t at a proper school though, I just had a tutor, and we were doing the minimum amount to get me to the point where I would be able to call on the stones, rather than getting some of the background you have. The aptitude runs in families though, or seems to, and without the aptitude, which I definitely didn’t have, it would have meant running uphill. It was a grind, a long, slow grind.”

Mizuki groaned.

“You know there’s nothing keeping you there, if you hate it,” said Alfric. He tried to keep his voice gentle.

“I think that actually makes it even worse, knowing that I’m the one doing this to myself,” said Mizuki. “But I don’t hate it, and I’ve got friends at school now, though … I was listening to them talk today, and they’re all babies.”

“Hopefully you didn’t say that to them,” said Alfric.

“No,” said Mizuki. “But some of them treat me like I’m their mother, which is hilarious but also mortifying. There’s a girl who’s fourteen in one of my classes. I feel so protective of them, but also … jealous?”

“Fourteen isn’t that young,” said Alfric. “You’re not literally old enough to be her mother.”

“Figuratively though,” said Mizuki. “I have friends who have five-year-olds. And I found out yesterday that one of my professors is a year younger than me. She’s a low rank one, but still, it’s humbling.”

“Mmm,” said Alfric. “I had always wondered how I would feel about seeing some rising star who was younger than me. There was a time when I thought I was a rising star.”

Mizuki sat up a bit. “You still are though, right? I mean, when I have my next day off, we’re going into a dungeon and we’re going to crack them wide open, right?”

“Maybe,” said Alfric. “Or maybe Verity won’t be able to do it, and we’ll get something so difficult that we can’t possibly handle it, and the day will be a reset.” He sighed. “And then we’ll try subbing her out, and narrow it down, or we’ll do more dungeons, with me feeding her information, and if you thought that wizarding school was a grind … I guess you won’t be experiencing most of it.”

“A return to dungeons,” said Mizuki. “It feels like it’s been longer than it’s really been.”

“We’re ostensibly a dungeoneering party,” said Alfric. “I don’t know how it’s going to feel, going back.”

“I think it’ll feel great, personally,” said Mizuki. “You let me know when we can slip in some training. I don’t want to go in soft.”

“You’ve been worn out from school,” said Alfric.

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “Like I said, I’ve turned the corner. I helped someone understand the lesson today, and I’m pretty sure that I was right about what I said.” She looked over at him. “And I have the exercises down, mostly. Maybe we can go for a run alongside the house, or do some sparring.”

“I’d like that, if you’re up for it,” said Alfric. “Strong heart, strong lungs, those are an important foundation for dungeoneering.”

Mizuki sat up. “Well, I’m going to change into something more comfortable, though maybe it’s a sign I’m starting to become a real wizard that the robes are comfortable. Like I’m not just an imposter wearing them to look cool?” She looked at Alfric. “Are you doing okay? You look so comfy there, like you could fall asleep.”

“I’ve been moving the house all day,” said Alfric. “It’s thinking work.”

Mizuki had said that she was going to change, but she hadn’t said it in a flirtatious way. She’d been less flirty since starting wizarding school, either because she had a lot of work on her plate, or because she was feeling old. He missed the old way it had been, even though it had sometimes felt like they were moments away from making a mistake.

She’d been very respectful on undone days, flirty, but not doing anything that crossed a line. He had worried about that, early on, and his fears had proven unfounded. It made him appreciate her more, because he’d set boundaries, and she’d listened, listened even when she knew the day was going to be undone. Maybe that shouldn’t have been so attractive to him, but if Mizuki could be both fun and impulsive, and also not blow things up on undone days …

“Alright, I’m going,” said Alfric as Mizuki looked through her dresser.

“Or you could stay,” said Mizuki, who was moving aside shirts and pants. “Just close your eyes or something.” She looked over at him, pausing what she was doing. She smiled at him. “You know, I trust you so much that if you said ‘I won’t open my eyes’ I have zero doubt that you’d keep them shut?”

“I guess that’s good,” said Alfric. “I think you would peep.”

“Oh, I would definitely peep,” said Mizuki. “What harm would a little peep do? Maybe if you said you really didn’t want me looking at you, that would be different, but if I said ‘oh, I’ll close my eyes’, then yeah, I’m human, I’d crack an eyelid.” She returned to the drawer and pulled out some clothes. “But see, I think it’s one of those things where you know that, so it’s okay. If you were undressing, you’d expect me to peek, unless, I guess, you were very strict and serious about it.”

“Well, I’ll go, rather than test my morals,” said Alfric. He gave her a smile. “We’ll have to test your theory some other time.”

She seemed slightly flustered as he left, and he found that a bit gratifying.

The house had settled in a field that was lying fallow, with the permission of a local farmer, and with Marsh there, had a full table for dinner. Dinner was oversized dumplings, stuffed with finely chopped meat and vegetables. Each was almost a meal by itself, and they couldn’t be eaten in a single bite, which Mizuki complained broke the fundamental covenant of dumplings.

A feeling of contentment settled over Alfric as they chattered. The trip was going well so far, he thought, now that his homesickness was over with, and now that Mizuki felt like she’d settled into school life. Bib was going to be a part of their trip, it seemed, and while he was a scrawny rascal, knowing what was coming was of some help. There were plans on the horizon, ways to make the best of the trip, maps to be consulted, attractions to visit, and all kinds of things. They were beyond Liberfell, to places they’d never visited before. Verity was idly talking about possibly doing some shows on the road, little one-night-only concerts that she could put on at the random villages they stopped at, mostly to hone her craft and get some honest responses to the songs she’d been writing for the next round of ectad inscribing.

And in a few days, they’d do the next dungeon, and if it didn’t work out, Alfric wouldn’t sweat it.

Chapter 155 - Wanderings

Thanks to the surfeit of magical lutes from the last dungeon they’d done, Isra could walk the world with an ease and grace that inspired a deep envy in most people. While their house made its slow, plodding way toward Plenarch on long metal legs, Isra got to exploring.

“Here,” she said one day, presenting a map on the dining room table after they had all eaten dinner together. The hexes of Greater Plenarch were all laid out, the hex grid having been printed on a long piece of paper that Isra had bought in Dondrian on her last trip there, but the individual towns, meadows, and forests had largely been Isra’s own work. She had marked places worth seeing, then charted a revised course.

“This will take us some extra time,” said Alfric, looking it over. “We’ve been trying to go in a straight line.” This was, formally, a ‘party meeting’, which meant that all the people they’d eaten dinner with had left the table. Marsh was out in the field, sparring with Bib and taking it quite easy on the boy.

“We could speed up though,” said Mizuki. She brushed her hair from her face. She had switched to long hair after three weeks in wizarding school, since apparently that was a part of wizardly style. They liked things long — long robes, long sleeves, long beards, and long hair. The length had been obtained through magical means, and she was clearly not used to it yet. “I mean, this house can gallop.”

“It’s harder to control when it’s moving at speed,” said Alfric. “We want to be conscientious travelers and leave no trace of our passing, at least as much as possible.”

“Gods forbid the walking house draws attention to itself,” said Mizuki with a roll of her eyes. “Gods forbid, Alfric.”

“We could still be goin’ faster though,” said Hannah. She had her arms crossed. “Not a gallop, per se, but faster.”

“If one of the legs clips a wall, we have to pay for it,” said Alfric. “We would also have to stop, if that happened.”

“I am regretting letting you be captain,” said Verity with a sigh. “I have loved the trip thus far, but if we could get where we’re going in half the time …”

“We took a vote on captaincy,” said Alfric. He frowned. “But alright, I can speed up a bit tomorrow.”

“Look, there’s no way that Alfric wasn’t going to be the captain,” said Mizuki. “But if I could have a turn at rampaging the house through the villages of Plenarch —”

“Yes, there’s a reason that Alfric is the captain,” said Hannah. “Though we should have gotten him a hat.”

“There’s still time,” said Alfric, looking hopeful.

“What are all these things?” asked Verity, who’d taken the map and was looking over it. “This just says ‘cool cave’ here.”

“I tried not to spoil it for myself,” said Isra. “What I would do is go to various villages, introduce myself at the local taverns, buy people some drinks, ask them what things were worth seeing in the area, then warn them about the large house that might be coming down their roads in the near future.”

“Aw, you warned them?” asked Mizuki. “Scaring people with a giant walking house is half the fun.”

“Wait,” said Verity. “With the Commute Lute you can travel a hundred hexes a day. How much travel have you been doing?”

Isra hesitated. “I like to travel.”

“But, as an actual answer to the question … ?” asked Verity.

“Somewhat more than a hundred hexes a day,” said Isra. “Since I have other lutes for travel as well.”

Verity shook her head. “Well I won’t say that it’s excessive, but there’s a point where I think a person is right to worry.”

“How much are you spending on buying people drinks?” asked Mizuki. “That must be quite the bill.”

Isra shrugged. “We don’t lack for money.”

That much was true. The money that they had would let them coast along for years, and their funds weren’t the kind that could be depleted by modest living, nor by buying drinks or food for strangers. It was, in fact, the kind of wealth that could only be depleted through the purchase of high-end entads, a house, or fancy things whose prices, it seemed, could have no limit.

For her part, Isra hadn’t been spending all that much of her share. She’d bought makeup and clothing, then more clothing when she grew dissatisfied with the first round of purchases, but it had only made the smallest dent in the pile of rings — which wasn’t a literal pile, but rather, a bank account in Plenarch that could be borrowed against in ways that still felt foreign. Mizuki had assured her that no one ever really got used to banks, nor understood how they worked.

“Well, I’m fine with detours and a longer trip,” said Alfric. “Part of the reason we’re doing this is because we can. We’ll have to consult with Vertex to see whether it suits them, but I have to imagine that it does.”

“I’m ready for the next dungeon,” said Verity. “I want to make clear that I’m not the hold up here.” She looked over at Mizuki.

“Right, sorry,” said Mizuki. “It’s just … running a dungeon right after I’ve had a week of school, or late in the day on the day of school, or the day before school, all feel kind of, uh, bad? But before the next temple day, for sure.”

“We have a date then?” asked Alfric.

“I’ve mostly been sittin’ around the house,” said Hannah, waving a lazy hand. “No conflicts here.”

“Same,” said Verity. “I’ve been practicing for the dungeon as best I can.”

“Good,” said Alfric, taking a breath. “Then I do think we should have a refresher on dungeon protocols, and I’ll go over the equipment, make sure everything is in place, and that we can bunker down for an extended time in the dungeon. Given what happened last time, we’re going to have to change a few things so there’s no risk that we can’t immediately get back to the exit.”

“Oh no, he’s back on the dungeons again,” said Mizuki.

“I’m not,” said Alfric. “I mean, I do still want to go into dungeons, especially if we can manipulate them, but I’m not as unabashedly enthusiastic as I was when we first started. Partly I don’t need to be, because I know and trust you all.”

“Aw,” said Hannah. She smiled wide. “So sweet.”

Alfric gave her a very serious nod.

“And we’re not having the house walk at night?” asked Mizuki.

“Too dangerous,” said Alfric. “Even if we decked it out with lanterns.”

“We should deck it out with lanterns anyway,” said Mizuki. She gave a little laugh. “Can you imagine walking by, and there’s a house where there wasn’t a house the day before, lanterns shining out into the night? I’d run the other way.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” said Isra.

“You’d go straight for it,” said Alfric.

“Alright, fine, I would love to find a mystery house, and I would act without the slightest hint of self-preservation,” said Mizuki. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“It’s the truth, at least,” said Hannah with a laugh.

This was the part of ‘party meetings’ that Isra loved best, when they were just talking with each other rather than getting down to brass tacks. She cared about the business aspects of the life they were leading together, but not as much as she cared about sitting around and having fun. Alfric seemed to think that there was a time and place for everything, but Isra appreciated that they could sometimes spiral off into some tangent for half an hour.

“In theory, you should assume that it’s someone’s entad and just leave it alone, right?” asked Alfric.

“Oh, this is somehow germane, but talkin’ about temples isn’t?” asked Hannah.

“It’s germane, but it’s secondary,” said Alfric. “It’s not a matter of party business.”

“And findin’ houses in the night is?” asked Hannah. She seemed legitimately grumpy. She’d wanted them to make arrangements to have a place to go for each temple day, and Alfric had put it off as something that was outside the bounds of a party meeting — important only in that they would need to travel in a group to whatever temple they ended up going to.

“It’s important in that we’re going to be living in a house that people might stumble across,” said Alfric. “Most people won’t assume that it’s an omen of some kind. My hope is that they recognize it’s an entad and then move on, rather than coming up and asking us about it.”

“I wouldn’t mind that,” said Mizuki. “What’s the point in having a moving house if you’re not going to talk to people about it?”

“It seems annoying,” said Alfric. “Maybe not the first time, but by the fifth I think it’ll be a nuisance.”

“No need to have the house squat down then,” said Hannah. “Just raise it up on its legs like they’re stilts, no one will knock on the door then, because they won’t be able to.”

“I’d throw a rock, if it were me,” said Mizuki.

“We can work out which temples to go to along the way,” said Isra, taking the map from Verity, who had finished looking at the notes. “I didn’t ask around at any of those places, but if you’d like to wiggle the route, we can do that? Are there clerics whose sermons you want to hear? Or places you want to go?”

“Pucklechurch had an interestin’ church,” said Hannah. “I’m not sure what’s on the way, but you shouldn’t go to temple for the temple itself, that’s missin’ the point, so it is said.” She nodded. “We’ll talk about it later, if it’s not ‘official’ business.”

Part of the problem, at least as Isra saw it, was that Hannah had been left with nothing to do. Alfric was guiding the house, Mizuki was going to wizarding school, Isra was exploring the countryside, and Verity was working on her music. Hannah had no real purpose as the house moved, and worse, couldn’t do what she called ‘proper’ baking while the house moved, unless it was while sequestered away in her private extradimensional space — and there was only so much baking that a person could do in a day anyway. The house was overflowing with bread, frankly.

When they eventually ended the ‘meeting’ after deciding on a few alterations to the route, then went their separate ways. Isra took one of the cinnamon buns that Hannah had brought out, then took the stairs up to the room she shared with Verity.

Isra sat and listened to the natural world, staring up at the ceiling with her own eyes, but also looking out at the world with the eyes of the animals around the house. They had turned the corner on the year, and the nights were once again getting shorter, which meant that all of the animals had started to prepare for winter in various ways, putting on weight or storing foods as best they were able. They weren’t far enough from Pucklechurch for there to be much difference among the animals, and they were avoiding areas that were both swampy and mountainous. It would be somewhat different once they reached Plenarch, which was practically on the other side of the province, but that would be because of the warm air that came over the ocean and the salt that made the winds smell different.

“Knock knock,” said Mizuki, rather than knocking.

“Enter, if you dare,” replied Isra. She looked up and watched Mizuki come in. With the longer hair, Mizuki looked older, which might have been part of the point.

“How’s it going?” asked Mizuki.

“Fine,” said Isra, laying back down. “You know, I’d like to see a desert someday. None on the path though.”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “Tarbin’s got deserts.”

“I know,” said Isra.

“So … you were wearing the headscarf today,” said Mizuki. “I wanted to ask about that, but not in front of the others, just so you wouldn’t feel weird about it.”

“Ah,” said Isra. “And if I said ‘I don’t know, I just felt like it’, you’d accept that?”

“Of course,” said Mizuki. “I mean, I think it looked good, it’s just you kind of stopped, and now started again, and I don’t want you to ever feel weird about what you’re wearing, but … also I didn’t know whether anyone else would ask you about it, if it was more than just ‘I felt like it’.

Isra thought about that for a moment. “There is a reason, but it might be a stupid one.”

“See, now I’m glad I asked,” said Mizuki. She found a seat at the room’s single small desk and put her hands on her knees. “I’m ready for some stupidity.”

“I was off traveling, as I’ve been doing,” said Isra with a sigh. “And I saw these women, a small group of them, probably family, just going about their business in a village to the west, very normal, except they wore the headscarves, and they had the same dark skin. I waved to them, and nearly pointed at my own head, except … I wasn’t wearing it, obviously. I had on a shirt with no sleeves. So I just stared at them mutely, and they stared at me, and I think they thought … I don’t know.” She let out a little groan. “I was thinking about that all day.”

“Thinking what?” asked Mizuki, leaning forward a bit.

“I recognized them as my people,” said Isra. “I got excited by that, seeing other immigrants — not that I was ever truly an immigrant, but I was raised by my father in the custom of Tarbin, at least in part. It made me feel lonely.”

“I never really got that,” said Mizuki. “The headscarf thing. Modesty as a virtue of Kesbin I guess I understand, but I’d think that would involve less clothes, not more.”

“It’s about being a gentle and quiet person,” said Isra. “Not drawing attention to yourself. It goes for men as well.” She frowned. “At least, as I was taught.”

“So someone walking around naked is less of Kesbin because they’re calling attention to themselves?” asked Mizuki. “In theory, the most Kesbin thing would be, I dunno, full camouflage?”

“Something like that,” said Isra. She grinned. “I imagine you could have a very illuminating discussion with a cleric, and that they could have wild disagreement about the principle of the thing.”

“Do you like the feeling of being camouflaged?” asked Mizuki.

“Hmm,” said Isra. “I think … I was stared at for my manner of dress for a long time. Perhaps not stared at, but definitely noticed. It was the opposite of camouflage, at least in Pucklechurch, something that made me stick out.” She smiled. “Not of Kesbin at all, in that way.” She looked at Mizuki, with her long hair, in her robes. “And … you’re engaging in camouflage?”

“Um,” said Mizuki. She grabbed her hair where it hung down her back and moved it so that it was in front. It was long enough that it ended down at her bellybutton. She stroked the sheath of straight, shiny hair, looking at it. “A bit? Mostly just trying things out, honestly. It seems like a pain to maintain though, I don’t know how you all do it. Takes forever to wash, takes forever to dry, so I probably won’t keep it. I just, uh, want to stick out in good ways?” She sat up a bit straighter. “How did it work out for you, going back to your Tarbin humility?”

Isra shrugged. “I didn’t feel much different. I do wish I were less aware of how people view me, so I could just be without thinking of what goes on in the minds of those who see me.”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. She rubbed her knees. “So you spent years going into Pucklechurch, very aware that you weren’t dressed like other people, just very bullheaded about it?”

Isra nodded. “Alfric always found that bullheadedness appealing.”

“It is appealing,” said Mizuki. “Best thing about you, other than the druid powers, which aren’t really about you.”

“I’ve been coming back to it, in my travels,” said Isra. “I come into these villages dotted about the province as a stranger, walk into taverns that go entire years where they only serve regulars, and make a stir whether I want to or not. I think in the past I’d have stayed stone-faced, allowed their gazes to wash over me, but now I smile. Inside, it feels the same. I’m stepping on unspoken rules, making a fool of myself and trying not to care.”

“I thought you liked going out?” asked Mizuki. “Isn’t that why you do it so much?”

“I’m only talking of specific sorts of places,” said Isra. “Places that wilt my confidence, where I get through by being a hulking bear of a person who crashes around and knocks things down. A market is fine, people expect travelers. A temple sees visitors. It’s the taverns sometimes, and only sometimes, where they have a sense of it as almost a second home, and you as an intruder.” She shivered slightly. “It’s part of why I want to save as much as I can for exploring with my family.”

Mizuki gave a nod. “If you’re just one person, you stick out like a sore thumb, but if you’re a group of five people, you stick out like five sore thumbs, which is its own form of camouflage.”

Isra gave a bright smile. “And we’re dungeoneers, aren’t we? We’re supposed to be roaming the countryside.”

“I’m not getting my hopes up about the prospect of dungeons,” said Mizuki. “I think Alfric will come down from his room with a defeated sigh and say that it didn’t work out. But I’ve been known to be wrong. It’s happened twice.”

“Thank you for coming to talk to me,” said Isra.

“Sure,” said Mizuki. “I was a little worried this would be the fourth private conversation you’d had about it.”

“No, just you,” said Isra. “You’re a good sister.”

“I’m actually an awful sister,” said Mizuki. “I’m behind on my letters, and my parents don’t even know that I’m at wizarding school. I’ll lay claim to being a good surrogate sister though.”

Mizuki stayed and talked for a bit after that, and Isra had asked the obligatory questions about wizarding school. There was a torrent of names that Isra couldn’t hope to remember all of, which might have been because Mizuki was bad at giving important context to things, but it was nonetheless good to hear someone talk about something that excited them. Mizuki’s excitable nature was infectious sometimes.

It wasn’t until after Mizuki had left to ‘go bug Alfric’ that Verity had slipped in.

“I heard you talking,” said Verity. “Not overheard you talking, just heard that you were talking, and wanted to give you some space.”

“It’s fine,” said Isra. “It wasn’t anything important.”

“Oh,” said Verity. “Good.” She set her lute down in the lute case beside her bed. The sounds of her playing had drifted up from outside.

“How is your song-writing going?” asked Isra.

“Very good,” said Verity. “Though I think part of it is just a fool’s confidence. I think you need that though, as a creator of anything, an ability to say ‘no, this is not garbage’.” She shrugged. “You go out on stage and say ‘oh, this will be fine, they can’t see that I’m an imposter, they can’t hear the places where there are off-notes, where the lyrics underwhelm’.”

“It’s like that every time?” asked Isra.

“No, not lately,” said Verity. “There is, in my opinion, a real feeling of ‘well, what’s the worst that can happen?’ Confidence is at an all-time high, in part because the venues are microscopic, some even smaller than the Fig and Gristle was. I’ve gotten nice, polite applause, at a very minimum, from the four places I’ve played. Honestly, I’ve been a little surprised that it’s so easy to have places give me a chance.”

“You’re a world-famous lutist asking to play songs for patrons for free,” said Isra, raising an eyebrow. “In what world would that pose problems?”

“I’m not world-famous,” said Verity. “I have some level of fame in Dondrian, and a lesser level of fame in large cities where people might read newspapers from Dondrian, or take casual trips there. So if I show up at a tavern, it’s very likely I have nothing to present as bonafide proof. And I can’t imagine leading with ‘oh, I’m actually quite popular’.” She made a face. “Gross.”

“I could go ahead of you,” Isra grinned. “I’ll show up — in a disguise, of course — and ask whether the barkeep has heard of the great Verity Parson, Chosen of Xuphin, Voice from the Machine, Dragon-Botherer.”

Verity laughed. “Someday I’m going to run into someone who’s been keeping an eye on me, and I think I’ll just die of embarrassment. I’ve been making the papers for the wrong reasons, I fear.”

“We have a date for the dungeon,” said Isra. “Maybe we’ll make the newspapers for the right reasons?”

“Let’s hope,” said Verity. “If I can turn a dungeon into even half of what the Wildlands are, or better, do that and then teach the technique to other people, I will consider myself to be a proper Chosen of Xuphin.”

“And wear that label with pride?” asked Isra.

“Perhaps not pride,” said Verity, frowning slightly. “But I’ll be able to say that it wasn’t a mistake, which is always what I had feared.”

Isra hoped that was how it would happen. She liked this new Verity, who was meeting the world with more confidence, and she worried that they were just a single misstep from a regression to anxious moping. She didn’t say that out loud, of course, but she cared for Verity deeply, and also knew her friend well enough to know that there were things that could push her off course. A single negative review, a letter from her mother, even a lone boo from a crowd of hundreds, might return Verity to a grim state. Isra hoped that she was wrong, that this change was a permanent one, but she was trying to prepare herself for it.

She missed their relationship sometimes. Some of it was missing touch, the feeling of fingertips on bare skin, the press of lips against each other, and some of it was intimacy. She had made a few deniable overtures and watched how Verity responded, and she knew that there was a possibility that they could pick up right where they had left off. It was the thought of Verity slumped over, despondent, that stopped Isra. She loved Verity, but those moments had been difficult, almost torturous, seeing someone in pain and not being able to help them, giving them advice that they wouldn’t follow, being expected to stand by and not get frustrated or sad or angry. Isra didn’t know how married people handled it, but it was something that the custom of marriage seemed to expect.

There were also, as the expression went, other fish in the sea. Isra had been visiting towns and making a splash when she did, and she’d found that she attracted a specific sort of attention from men who were around her own age, interest and flirtation if not actual courtship. She enjoyed it, overall, though she imagined she’d have liked it less if she were obligated to stick around. As it stood, she could simply leave at the strum of a lute, though she’d only employed that tactic once, and not so much because it was needed but because it was funny.

With the lute, she was unconstrained by geography. If she wanted a boyfriend or girlfriend, it would be as easy as leaning into the advances, or making advances of her own, and while she wasn’t entirely clear on how all that was supposed to work, in her opinion making an effort probably counted for a lot.

It might get awkward, sharing a room with Verity. Isra was hoping for an extradimensional space of her own, like Hannah had, a simple room that she could retreat to, perhaps with someone in tow. It would be less awkward that way, if it happened that these encounters developed into something, if she was reading the flirtation and interest right.

It was entirely possible that she was reading the flirtation and interest wrong.

When Verity got ready for bed, Isra kept her eyes to herself, but it was cause to meditate on modesty and what it might mean. They all wore their own pajamas, some of which had been sewn by Verity, and Verity’s left most of her legs showing, her thighs almost bare. In conversation with Mizuki, they had talked about Kesbinite asceticism, but Isra was starting to think that it might be more about warding against Xuphinite desire.

Clothes weren’t an invitation, necessarily, but there was something about Verity’s legs that suggested an invitation, that at least made Isra think that a card might be in the mail. There was always a temptation in those moments to see how far the whiff of invitation extended, to climb into Verity’s bed and have it be like it was. Most likely Verity would be happy, her recent good moods propelled to higher heights.

But if Isra was lonely in that way, she thought it better to go further afield and find someone among the villages she was visiting. It wasn’t a goal of her travels, but it was a consideration.

The next morning, a researcher from Lambria showed up at their doorstep.

Chapter 156 - Searching

Pinion had been warned that they were eccentric even by the standards of dungeoneers, which he found quite intriguing, especially because the warning had come with no other qualifiers. It was like being warned that someone’s appearance was a bit odd, then not being told how, which was really no warning at all. As Pinion had an affection for paradoxes, he spent much of the trip down south thinking about it and trying to come up with a name for it.

He had been given an entad for the trip, which was a kindness he hadn’t expected. It was a rake, the kind used for gravel and rocks, and he sat astride it in a way that grew uncomfortable only five minutes in. It was frightening to fly with it until he fell off for the first time, at which point the rake swooped under him and gathered him up until he was steady again. This happened four more times during the extended trip, which felt arduous but in reality had been cut down by almost a day thanks to the entad.

Pinion had dressed in his best adventuring clothes, though he’d never actually been on an adventure. He had high-waisted pants whose cuffs came down at mid-calf, long, comfortable socks, heavy boots, and a few layers of shirts, which kept him warm as he flew and also meant there was some extra room in his bag. His head was regrettably shaved, which had been a part of a deal with a different research assistant so they could see whether hair had any impact on sunburns — it turned out that it did — but it was growing back in, and would look presentable again in only a few months.

He was nervous about meeting new people, and the inevitable conversation he’d have to have with them about his appearance. He’d been born sickly and blind, and the person he was now was because of extensive interventions by a large number of clerics. His eyes didn’t quite match his face, and he was fairly short, which the clerics of Xuphin had only allowed him to correct in limited ways. All the many visits to clerics were in his past now, but they’d left their mark, and he’d always felt like he was somewhat odd. He’d made peace with that oddness, but every now and then someone said something that got under his skin.

The city of Lambria was built on a quite enviable hill, and the rest of Greater Plenarch seemed absurdly flat by comparison. The province had little verticality, mountains only in small quantities and largely at the southern border. Pinion had grown up with proper mountains, the kind near Inter’s eastern coast, so high that trees no longer grew, snow-capped peaks that made travel with the warp difficult where the layout of the hexes was poor. Pinion had loved it, but Callawald was a place where small villages clung to the edges of lakes in the places where the mountains didn’t bury any chance of farmland. If there had been a big city, he might have stayed, but the biggest of the cities in Callawald would have been rated as a mere hamlet by the standards of the rest of Inter.

It took some time to find what he was looking for. He was going off a letter that was several days old, which had come with a helpful map, but the drawing of a three-tiered house on long metal legs had been rather crude.

He almost missed it, because it wasn’t actually moving and its legs were tucked under it, the whole thing sitting in a meadow. There was some oddity about the base of it, but the way he might have been able to figure out that it didn’t naturally belong there was that there were no paths leading to the place, no outside structures aside from a large white tent that had been set up some distance away.

The house was large, three stories in total, and reminded him of a tiered cake, growing smaller with each additional floor. It had a pleasing symmetry of it, and whoever had built it was obviously a devotee of Garos, as all four sides were the same. There was also something in the way that it got smaller toward the top — or conversely, larger toward the bottom — that spoke to Xuphin and Kesbin. Pinion couldn’t imagine that it didn’t have some consideration toward the other three gods, and he sat for a moment, rubbing his chin, trying to figure it out.

The front door swung open and a woman leaned out to look at him. She was wearing long robes, almost assuredly the party wizard, her long black hair down to her midriff. She had a cool, imperious demeanor, a wizardly no-nonsense approach, which Pinion had always found easy to deal with. She looked somewhat irritated with him. That was the way some people were, he knew.

“The house is allowed to be here,” she said. “We’ve got permission.”

“Oh?” asked Pinion. “That’s, ah, nice for you?” He looked around the meadow. “Permission from whom?”

She waved a hand. “I don’t handle that. Some farmer. But we do have permission, and we’ll be off within the hour.” She was staring at him. “It’s fine.”

“Okay?” asked Pinion. He didn’t really know what that had to do with him. “Er, I came from Lambria, to the north. I had spoken with an Alfric Overguard?”

“Oh,” she said. Her face changed entirely, and a smile came over it. “Oh, sorry!” She waved a hand. “Come in, come in, there’s still breakfast, we were expecting you.”

“Er, alright,” said Pinion.

“Is this guy bothering you?” asked a voice from off to the side. Pinion turned and saw a ten-year-old boy with his shirt off, a giant riding bird in tow.

“It’s fine,” said the woman. “Are you sure you don’t want breakfast, Bib?”

“They don’t eat breakfast in the cities,” said the kid, Bib. He gave Pinion the stink-eye. “Let me know if he’s messing with you.”

“Yes Bib, I’ll let you know if I need protecting,” said the woman with a roll of her eyes.

“I’m Pinion, by the way,” said Pinion, holding out his hand. He was slightly too far away, and had to hustle a bit to get close to her. She had a wizard’s soft hands. She was also short, which he liked, shorter than he was.

“Mizuki,” she replied. “Come in, do you like eggs? What am I saying, everyone likes eggs.”

“Eggs are … fine,” said Pinion. He wasn’t sure that he could eat a plate full of eggs, if that was on offer.

The house had a number of paintings hung up, fairly simplistic things, most of them different flowers, and most of the flowers themselves exaggerated rather than true to life. They had all been done by the same artist using a delicate hand.

The bottom floor of the house was laid out into loose quadrants, and Pinion spied a living room and kitchen through the hallways, connected to each other, before Mizuki led him into a dining room, where four other people were sitting around a table.

“It’s unbelievable how nosy people can be,” said Mizuki as she sat down. She pointed at a chair, and Pinion took it. There was much more than eggs, it was a meal of meats, pastries, fruits, and some cooked mushrooms. There was so much of it that Pinion thought it was probably entad-made, though he could see no obvious entads on the table. Mizuki almost immediately got up from her seat and went to the kitchen, returning with a plate for him. “So we have this problem of where to settle in for the night, because we’re not on the move at night, and we’ve been — wait, you know the house moves, right?”

“That was mentioned in one of the letters, yes,” said Pinion. He was looking around at the people, who he took to be the party he’d been sent for. The man was Alfric, he knew, but he didn’t have so much as names for all the others.

“Well, we’ve been moving the house, and at night we need somewhere to be, and we don’t want to be on the road for obvious reasons, but there aren’t that many places that you can just plop a house down, so we’ve been asking around about empty fields, meadows, parks, things like that. Which is tedious but fine. Except twice this morning we’ve had people coming by to ask if we’re allowed to be here. People who don’t even own the land! I think mostly they’re just interested in seeing the house.”

“Are you just not goin’ to do introductions then?” asked a woman with curly red hair. She had the look of a fighter and sat at the table with her arms out, taking up more room than the others. The letters he’d exchanged hadn’t had much in the way of names or descriptions.

“Oh, right,” said Mizuki. “This is, um, …” She trailed off and stared at Pinion. “Nope, it’s gone.”

“Pinion Falk,” he said. “Pleasure to meet you all.”

They went around the table then, and it was a rush of names that Pinion wasn’t sure he was going to be able to keep track of. Alfric was the party leader, and the one whose letters Pinion had gotten — mostly secondhand, through his mentor and boss Argya Ham.

“So, you’re here from Lambria to help with the issues we’ve been having with the dungeons,” said Alfric. He was an imposing man, tall and muscular, and while he was wearing a simple buttoned-down shirt, it was obvious that he was a fighter too. “You’ve seen the letters that I sent to Argya, which lay everything out as I understand it. Obviously we can’t take you into the dungeons with us, but you can talk to us afterward, and we can do any information-gathering that you need from us.”

“Erm,” said Pinion. “Well, actually, I was sent here not to help, exactly, but just to, ah, study. I’m a researcher, not a …. dungeon … fixer.”

“Your research has the purpose of finding out the nature of the problem though, right?” asked Alfric. “And once we know, we fix it.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” said Verity. She looked like a mountain to Pinion, not just because she was tall, but because she seemed immovable. “I do think that I can do it all myself.”

“Pinion was contacted before we had gone into the demiplane,” said Alfric. “I think having him here is still going to be of benefit.” He turned to Pinion. “I’ve mentioned that Verity is a Chosen of Xuphin.”

“Er, yes,” said Pinion. “Though from my understanding, that’s not, er, germane?”

“It’s not?” asked Verity.

“I did some reading before I came here,” said Pinion. “It’s, ahm, somewhat complicated, but knowing that someone has been personally chosen by one of the gods doesn’t lend us any power of understanding a given phenomena. That is, Xuphin did not grant you any special powers, or at least as I understand it.” He glanced at Hannah, the cleric. They hadn’t said what she was a cleric of, and he was left to guess. His first instinct had been Xuphin, but she wasn’t quite tall enough.

“Well, so long as we can help further the understandin’ of the world,” said Hannah with a sigh.

“We can also take him into dungeons, right?” asked Mizuki.

“The dungeons?” asked Pinion. “That’s, ah, not really what I’m here for.”

“Sure, but we could kick someone out of the party,” she said. When she didn’t think that he was a nosy passerby, her demeanor was much more lively. “Pinion comes in, goes into the dungeons, sees how terrible they are, and it’s firsthand experience, right?”

“That’s not really —” Pinion began.

“We’re trying it my way first,” said Verity.

“Of course,” said Mizuki. She turned back to Pinion. “Have you done dungeons?”

“No,” said Pinion. “Mostly I’ve read about them. Er, I do want to clarify that I’m not a proper researcher on my own, this is more, ah, something that my mentor strongly suggested that I pursue. Real world experience, she called it.”

“Wait, how do you become a ‘proper’ researcher?” asked Mizuki. “And how hard would it be for me?”

“It’s a long process,” said Pinion. “Mostly you need a mentor, who vouches for you, a starting body of work that proves that you know things and can reason well, and then at a crucial point when you have the backing of your mentor and the goodwill of the community of researchers, a cleric of Qymmos puts you and your work through the wringer.”

“The church is involved?” asked Mizuki. “But … why?”

“Qymmos knows,” said Pinion with a shrug. “Clerical insights are a vital part of any research process. Sometimes there will be a wortier too, though any serious project will have a wortier involved from the time you first start putting it together.”

“So you’ve written books?” asked Isra. She had spoken little, and was watching Pinion with an unnerving intensity. She was also beautiful in a way that he immediately found intimidating. Somehow Pinion had a conception of dungeoneers as being a bit grimy and homely, but they were well against type, her in particular. Her hair fell down in curls, and she had a look as though she was one step away from attending a dinner party. The collision between expectation and reality was what he hoped for. Dungeoneers, when they weren’t in the dungeons, were just rather normal people, at least in appearance. In this case, perhaps, attractive people.

“No, no books, just … pamphlets, I suppose, and most of that has been helping others with their work.” Pinion looked down at his plate. He’d hardly had a chance to eat, and all the food looked good. “Actual books are a rarity, unless it’s a meaty subject.”

“We’ll let you eat,” said Alfric. “You caught us at mid-breakfast, we can obviously talk more later. Do you have accommodations?”

“I had thought I would stay at an inn,” said Pinion, but Alfric was already shaking his head.

“That would be a nuisance,” said Alfric. “We technically have a spare room, or more than one spare room if you’d like to stay in extradimensional space.”

“You’re offerin’ up my room?” asked Hannah. Alfric nodded, and Hannah shrugged. “Fine, I s’pose.”

“I don’t want to impose,” said Pinion. “And if I’m not needed — you had said, in your letters, that you were looking for insight and help.”

“We’re hoping that the ‘problem’ aspect can be dealt with,” said Alfric. “And then you can just focus on the ‘understanding’ aspect.”

“That’s mostly what I’m here for,” said Pinion, grateful that Alfric seemed to understand this.

Pinion ate the food, which was abundant and all good. He’d always found mushrooms a bit suspect, but these had been cooked with shallots, garlic, and a healthy amount of butter, and he’d gone back for seconds of them, mixing them in with the eggs. He’d left early in the morning, mostly because he hadn’t known for certain how long the trip would take or whether he would have trouble finding the place. They had been mid-breakfast when he’d come in, and finished before he did, which eventually left him alone at the table with their cleric as the empty plates and serving dishes were pulled away.

“We’re glad to have you, in any case,” said Hannah. “I’m not sure if we said.”

“I don’t think I can help you, if that’s what Alfric wanted,” said Pinion, glancing at their leader. “I’m here to learn.”

“Ay,” said Hannah. She had a strong Cairbre accent. “Noble, in its own way. We’re not optimistic on the learnin’ you’ll be able to do, or at least I’m not.”

“They never said who you were a cleric for,” said Pinion after he’d taken a slice of toast with jam. There were five jams, which seemed excessive, but he was making a point to try all of them.

“Garos,” said Hannah. “Though I’m a cleric in the sense of a wanderer, my connection with my god strong, and with the church, weak.”

“I was in a seminary for six months,” said Pinion, nodding. “Qymmos though, not Garos.”

“Really?” asked Hannah, leaning forward. “You washed out? Most do, I mean, but I’m not sure I’ve met with someone who’d left after embarkin’ on a life of devotion.”

“There was a lot about Qymmos that appealed to me,” said Pinion. “But … I liked the categorization, I think, the God of Sets appealed to me, but I didn’t want to do what their clerics did, which was endlessly debating different sets, or relating every problem to the problem of understanding. Being a cleric felt like it was a club, I think, one for talking about the thing we all liked rather than engaging with it. But it was only six months, so perhaps I had it wrong.”

“No, that’s right, a bit,” said Hannah. “But the talkin’ was what I loved about it, the debates, the books, the scripture, the meanin’, all that.”

“Mm,” said Pinion. “To me it felt as though … there was a club devoted to organizing things, understanding the world through the lens of categories, and I was very excited to do those things, only to find that people were using this powerful and interesting idea of sets to argue at the fringes of it. It was like joining a sandwich club where people want to spend all their time thinking about the borders of mythical sandwichness rather than actually making sandwiches.” He sighed. “Luckily I found out that it wasn’t for me early on, and abandoned it in due course.”

“Never the touch of Qymmos?” asked Hannah.

“Unfortunately, no,” said Pinion. “I might have, if I had stayed on. They said I was suited to it. And of course, it would have been a minor boon as a researcher.” He hesitated, unsure whether to ask. “Did you always want to be a dungeoneer?”

“I’ll be back to the church in due course, I feel,” said Hannah. She picked some lint from her shirt. “But I’d need to be older, more set in my ways. It’s a young person’s game, dungeons. And there’s the recent difficulty, as much as Verity is optimistic — not that I’m not thankful for the optimism, which I’ve always thought the girl had in short supply.”

“Well, if I’ll be taking your room, I apologize,” said Pinion. “I’m rather on my own out here, with barely a stipend, and while I don’t like to depend upon the generosity of strangers, I will if they’re feeling generous.”

“Any idea how long you’ll be here?” asked Hannah.

“Not all that long,” said Pinion. “A few weeks, depending on whether I can figure it out.”

“And is that likely?” Alfric asked from the door. He’d apparently been doing dishes, and had returned.

“That, I don’t know,” said Pinion. “I’ve read your reports, but I’ll want interviews as well. The most likely outcome is that we never figure anything out and all I have to show for my efforts is a report that says ‘so there’s this interesting thing’.”

“It’s something that I wanted to talk with you about, if you have time,” said Alfric.

“I have nothing but time,” said Pinion. “Though I’d like to get settled, if there’s time.” He looked down at his plate. “I think I’m done.”

“We need to get the washing up done before the house starts moving,” said Alfric. “Just as a note, you might get sick, it’ll pass in a few days, but if you don’t want to bother with that, we can put you into extradimensional space for the duration. I’m not sure which you’d prefer.”

“I’ll see how I handle it,” said Pinion. “Should I … not have eaten first?”

“You’ve got to eat,” said Hannah. “Come, let’s go.”

She showed him her room, which was being offered as his room, and he set his things out. He’d packed somewhat heavily, taking almost all his worldly goods, which had been packaged into a bag that was twice as big on the inside, the most minor of entads. He didn’t fully unpack, only set the bag down, and Hannah took a lute from the room, which was apparently the only thing she actually used there. There were a great many lutes about the house, he’d noticed. The bed was already made, and she’d assured him that the sheets were clean.

The house lurched up without warning while he was still in there, and for a moment Pinion felt pure terror as the ground dropped away outside the window, but then it stopped as the house reached its full height. When the house began striding, it was actually fairly gentle. He’d expected something more extreme given all the obvious straps, clasps, and anchors in place. Once Pinion was certain that he wasn’t going to be sick, he made his way back downstairs.

In truth, he wasn’t certain where to start, but he found Alfric sitting at the open front door, legs dangling down, and took a seat beside him. The view was breath-taking, though they were down in a valley. They felt so high up, and like they were moving so fast, even while the movement of the house’s legs was rather gentle.

“Maybe you can answer a question for me,” said Alfric.

“I can certainly try,” said Pinion with a smile.

“Why did no one care?” asked Alfric. “We pulled out a pretty much exact copy of a large theater, I told everyone, and we were met with silence.”

“Not silence, exactly,” said Pinion. “We spoke of it, even before you contacted us, but … there wasn’t much to do with it. It happened, that was all.”

“It was unprecedented in the history of dungeons, so far as I know,” said Alfric.

“Well,” said Pinion. “What are we talking about, really? There are hundreds of factors that influence what a dungeon will produce. There have also been hundreds of attempts at getting them to produce specific things, some of those were even successful. You’ve heard of the City of Knives?”

“In the northeast, yes,” said Alfric. “Hundreds of thousands of knives, a museum of bladed weapons, all brought in for the purpose of ‘forcing’ the dungeon to make more.” He frowned as he looked at the road. His attention was clearly split, and Pinion wondered how much was going on that he couldn’t see as far as controlling the house went. “It’s spotty though.”

“Spotty,” nodded Pinion. “But it does work. My mentor was a part of the team that did a very long survey of a few cities around Inter where such measures had been taken.”

“I haven’t read anything about that,” said Alfric.

“Oh, are you a researcher?” asked Pinion. “Or rather, I know you’re not, since you’re out here, but an amateur then?”

“I am,” nodded Alfric. “I have no formal education though, except from tutors.”

“Well, there are a wealth of papers you wouldn’t have access to, wouldn’t even know about,” said Pinion. “What’s available to people outside our little club lags far behind what’s available to everyone else, especially because so often the findings are so cursory or speculative. In the case of the City of Knives, the research team staked out the dungeon entrance and recorded the number of knives removed by every single dungeoneering team who came out of the dungeon. Of course, there were confounders, but we had to deal with them as much as we could.”

“Confounders?” asked Alfric.

“Things that would cause spurious associations where none exist,” said Pinion.

“Oh, I know that,” said Alfric. “I was wondering what confounders there could be.”

“The largest one was that it’s the City of Knives,” said Pinion. “It’s known as the City of Knives. Dungeoneers come there looking for knives, or at least knowing that’s what they’ll find, which means that they come in with knife-finding and knife-carrying solutions. That means the dungeoneers are different, which means that the data is different even if the dungeons themselves are not.”

“Ah,” said Alfric.

“It was also, embarrassingly, not something that was caught during the design of the study,” said Pinion. “They had done their best to account for everything they could, but the psychology of dungeoneers wasn’t one of them, and they had somewhat of a beating when someone brought it up later.”

“I wish they did more like that, comparative studies,” said Alfric.

“They’re ungodly expensive,” said Pinion with a laugh. “You need to pay for someone to watch the dungeon entrance, or rely on the dungeoneers to report every little thing they find, so it’s a balance between expensive, time-consuming information gathering or bad information. They ended up doing both, separate methods at different sites, but had to throw out a lot of what was gathered, as it was too useless.”

“It sounds like an interesting problem,” said Alfric.

“Does it?” asked Pinion. He was genuinely surprised. He’d bored more than enough people with this in the past that he was always hesitant to speak of it.

“You want full, complete information, but you don’t know how best to get it, and you’re constrained by funding,” said Alfric. He rubbed his chin. “Very much of Qymmos.”

“In some sense, yes,” said Pinion. “We’re trying to do what many see as Qymmos’ will. But we do tend to see the aspects of the other gods as well. I’ve been told I have a more clerical mind than most — I mentioned to your cleric that I had spent some time in the seminary — but I see Bixzotl often, though perhaps not as she would prefer me to see her. Two dungeons, copies of each other, save for all the differences of the hexes they pull from.”

“Possibly,” said Alfric.

“Possibly?” asked Pinion.

“You probably know more than I do,” said Alfric. “But there’s an assumption there, that dungeons are all the same as each other, that there aren’t intrinsic differences between them. I … don’t know whether that’s true. I didn’t know whether we, as a people, knew whether it was true. Do we?”

“We do not,” said Pinion. “It’s an assumption. But so far as I’m aware, all the dungeons appeared at once, and for them to have intrinsic differences right from the start would strain credulity. Everything the Editors have done are premised on the idea of universality. No nation is favored by nationalist superstructure, except from the ground conditions.”

“Inter is favored,” said Alfric.

“Inter is favored now,” said Pinion. “But Inter only barely existed when the change was made, and now bears only a passing resemblance to the nation that once was. Much of how it has changed has been in response to what the Editors put in place. If it’s favored, it’s because it was more adaptable.”

“Or adaptable in the favored ways,” said Alfric.

Alfric was surprisingly sharp, and Pinion was quickly changing his initial opinion of the man. Aside from the moving house, there was a somewhat surprising lack of eccentricity among them, and Alfric reminded Pinion more of a solid oak tree than the wild juniper he might have expected. He could see why they had him as their leader.

“I think, having spoken to you, that you’re not a fabulist,” said Pinion. “It’s frighteningly hard to say though. Maybe it wasn’t taken too seriously by people who hadn’t spoken to you, which is why they simply shrugged. I apologize for that, I suppose. We can be very set in our ways, very skeptical of new evidence, which comes with the profession.”

“Dungeoneers really are the worst sometimes,” said Alfric with a sigh. “They bring that skepticism upon themselves.”

The house was going a bit faster than it had been before, picking up speed as it went down another rather narrow road. The boy with his bird was racing ahead, still shirtless, and it seemed as though they had gotten into a smooth rhythm. Every now and then, the boy would pull flags from a pack on the bird’s side and signal to Alfric, who would signal back with his own flags.

“Is that … someone’s child?” asked Pinion.

“Most people are,” said Alfric. “But no, he doesn’t belong to us.” He raised an eyebrow. “Whose son did you think he would be?”

“I don’t really know how old any of you are,” said Pinion. “But Mizuki seems older, I suppose.”

“She’s not that old,” said Alfric.

“Late twenties?” asked Pinion.

“She’s only twenty-two,” said Alfric. He shifted uncomfortably. “She’s got a birthday coming up.”

“She carries herself older, I suppose,” said Pinion. “Or it might be the long hair.”

“I liked it better short, personally,” said Alfric. “She’s taking the wizard thing seriously.”

“Did she not, before?” asked Pinion.

Alfric paused for a long moment. “I suppose I left certain things out of my letters,” said Alfric. “I was doing most of my requests for help without the party knowing about it, and there were certain details that didn’t make it in.”

“You had said that you wanted to be discreet,” said Pinion. “Though now that I’m here, I can just ask directly.”

“It was mostly the matter of Verity who was going through some trouble,” said Alfric. “Though … I don’t want to broadcast Isra’s name far and wide either, and I don’t want my family’s notoriety. I assume we can request that for when you write your, ah, pamphlet? That names be changed?”

“I don’t think that would be an issue,” said Pinion. “And … your own family’s name?” he asked. “Overguard? I’m afraid I’m not familiar.”

Alfric stared at him. “You … study dungeons?” he asked.

“I do,” nodded Pinion. “Mostly comparative dungeon generation, though that’s a recent area of interest for me.”

“But … not the actual practice of dungeoneering? The League, things like that?” asked Alfric.

“No, sorry,” said Pinion. “I’ve never been in a dungeon, never wanted to, and I have to imagine that I’d be particularly useless. Are you or your family … famous?”

“Er,” said Alfric. “I suppose you don’t need to worry about it, but yes.” He gave a laugh. “I never really know how much weight the name carries, whether I should say something or not.”

Pinion’s own family was somewhat infamous. His father had been a high-ranking member of the Church of Qymmos before being unceremoniously expelled in one of the larger church scandals of the modern era. Falk was a common name though, and people made the connection only rarely, the scandal now far enough in the past that it didn’t come to the forefront of the mind. If Alfric preferred not to speak of his family, Pinion would respect that, unless it helped to explain what had been happening with the dungeons.

“I’d like you to come with, to the next dungeon,” said Alfric. “There’s another dungeoneering party traveling alongside us, which will be a good control so we can compare and contrast with conditions as close as possible. That wasn’t planned, but it works out well.” He looked out at the road. “For now, there’s a cool cave we’re going to visit. You’re welcome to come with us, if you’d like.”

“That’s very generous,” said Pinion. “I wouldn’t want to impose though.”

“We’re a large group, at least for now,” said Alfric. “I don’t know how long the other party will be with us, but they’re breaking in a new member. And you met Bib, of course.”

“Every dungeoneering team needs a bird boy, I suppose,” said Pinion.

“Something like that,” smiled Alfric.

“And now you’ve acquired your own researcher,” Pinion smiled. “For a time, anyway.”

“We’re a team that’s been living on ‘for a time’,” said Alfric. “But we’re coming up on a corner.” He paused for a moment. “Literally, as it happens. You might want to find something to hang onto.”

Pinion made his way into the living room and found a seat on a couch there, which was firmly affixed to the floor. He’d heard the sound of music, but this was the source of it, Verity, playing a lute while facing the back door of the house — which showed the scenery receding. She took no notice when Pinion came in, and continued to play on, heedless of the motion of the house.

It was a pleasant tune, though as Pinion listened, he slowly grew mortified by the lyrics.

When she was finished, which happened just as the house was taking its turn, she turned and jumped at the sight of Pinion.

“Apologies,” he said.

“No, sorry,” she said. “I had forgotten you were here.”

“That song was, ah … like nothing I’ve heard,” he said. “Very … explicit.”

“It’s something that I’ve been trying lately,” said Verity. She began tuning her lute as she spoke. “It’s a way of getting past any feeling that I have something to be embarrassed about. If I can play a song like that, I shouldn’t really worry about anything.”

“Erm,” said Pinion. “I didn’t actually know that they wrote songs like that.”

“Well, I wrote the song,” said Verity. “So I suppose I don’t know if ‘they’ write songs, but I do, or can.” She frowned at him. “You didn’t like it?”

“I … was a bit shocked by it,” replied Pinion. “I suppose if you can play that without being self-conscious … you’re the bard then?” It was a stupid question, he knew that, but he was befuddled, and had always defaulted to questions.

“I am,” she replied with a nod. “And I do seem to be the reason that you’re here, at least so far as we can tell. Alfric has plans to replace me if there’s another bad dungeon, if only for the sake of seeing whether we can isolate what’s going on. He’s his own sort of researcher, in a way.”

“He’s surprisingly clever,” said Pinion.

“Surprisingly?” asked Verity. She arched her eyebrow as though she had practiced doing it.

“He doesn’t meet my expectations of a dungeoneer,” said Pinion. “Not that I have a low opinion of your profession, but it doesn’t have a reputation for intellectualism.”

Verity’s frown was a tiny thing, a slight downward quirk of her lips that he might have missed. “I would agree with that, in principle, but I think you’ll find that Alfric Overguard knows quite a bit about dungeons.”

“Er, right,” said Pinion. He felt the need to apologize, but didn’t know what he’d be apologizing for. He had complimented Alfric, hadn’t he? “Well, I’ll leave you to your practice.”

“No, we have a ‘cool cave’ coming up,” said Verity. “I want to figure out some kind of spelunking outfit.” She looked Pinion up and down. “Do you have something? I doubt Alfric’s clothes would fit properly, but we have plenty of spare clothes.”

“That’s generous, but … I’m not exactly clear on why you’re going into a cave.” Pinion paused. “You’re a dungeoneering party?”

“Not just a cave, a cool cave,” said Verity. “I think you’ll find that we do relatively little in the way of dungeons.”

“I suppose you’ve had challenging dungeons in the past,” said Pinion.

“All in the past though,” said Verity. “This is the new era. You’ll see.”

Pinion wasn’t so sure about that. He would be happy for their troubles to be over, but unless it was a regression to the mean, he didn’t think that all their problems could be so easily solved. He was, selfishly, hoping that if they did solve their problems, they would have newer, more interesting ones.

And along the way, he was hoping that he would get some of the experience his mentor thought he was lacking. Apparently there were cool caves on offer.

Chapter 157 - Cool Cave

The mouth of the cave was almost wide enough that they could have maneuvered the house into it, but it narrowed quickly. Alfric slowly and carefully parked the house in a meadow just outside of the cave, then once they were out, had it rise up to its full height, almost thirty feet on its long metal legs. It looked impossibly unsteady, and swayed slightly in the wind, but Alfric thought that it was fine, and everyone trusted his judgment. Bib stayed back, to guard, but when pressed admitted that he found caves to be creepy.

They were halfway into the entrance of the cave when Mizuki came running up. She was slightly out of breath, and Verity frowned at her. She was supposed to be at wizarding school, and in fact had left shortly after breakfast, but she was here now, having returned far too early.

“So what’s the opinion on Pinion?” asked Mizuki.

“Er, I’m right here,” said Pinion.

“Is he cool, is he lame, what’s his deal?” asked Mizuki. “What dark and terrible secrets is he keeping?” She had turned to the researcher and was eyeing him carefully.

“We’ve known him for two hours or so,” said Hannah. “Not nearly enough time to uncover secrets.”

“Doesn’t someone know secret interrogation techniques?” asked Mizuki.

“Well, I do,” said Pinion. “But I don’t think that helps you.”

“Do you really?” asked Mizuki.

“Shouldn’t you be at school?” asked Verity.

“Yes, well,” said Mizuki. She was slightly out of breath. “You see, there was this cool cave to explore.”

Verity frowned. “You’re skipping?”

“I got through half the class, then yeah,” said Mizuki. “Look, I’ll be back in time for the rock petting, it’s no big deal, they understand if you’ve got other things to do, and most of what we’re doing is just theory, it’s not super important.”

“You’re a teacher’s assistant?” asked Pinion.

“What?” asked Mizuki, looking at him.

“That’s your, ah, day job?” he asked.

She stared at him, then gave a quick look at Alfric. “Right,” she said, looking back at Pinion. “I’m a wizard. Who teaches wizardry in Plenarch. As an assistant.” She nodded. “Just a perfectly normal wizard.”

“Uh, okay?” asked Pinion.

“I’ve been a wizard my whole life,” said Mizuki. “Or, I guess I trained when I was younger.”

“Right,” said Pinion. “Most do.”

Verity giggled. She wondered how long Mizuki would deign to keep that up, but Mizuki had trouble with commitment, as shown by her ducking out of school to come see a cool cave. Verity had, at various points, deeply loathed the conservatory, but she had never skipped out on practice nor lessons. It was, in her opinion, one of the reasons that she was highly regarded as a bard — though there were other reasons which were far out of her control. There was a chance that she was wrong about Mizuki, and she hoped that she was, but if the past was any indication …

“So, Isra, my lady, what’s down this cool cave?” asked Mizuki. “How far are we going?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. They hadn’t gone far, though far enough that they needed lanterns. They were doing it like the dungeons, one for Alfric, who was the leader, and one for Verity, who was brought up the rear and was the least mobile of them.

“You don’t?” asked Verity. “I’d thought you were going to be our guide?”

“I just find the places,” said Isra. “I want to go in unspoiled.”

“How are we to know which way to go?” asked Alfric.

“No turns so far, right?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Alfric. He was looking around. “So far, this is just a long tunnel.”

The walls were some kind of soft stone, shaped like a tube with occasional ridges, and by the time they had gone a hundred feet in, there was a small trickle of water that ran down the center of the place. The lanterns were of slightly different colors, Alfric’s with a slight tint of yellow, Verity’s with a slight tint of blue, which was down to defects in the ectad creation process and normally not noticeable unless they were in total darkness. Alfric had said he preferred it that way, since it helped with situational awareness.

“Is this what going into a dungeon is like?” asked Pinion.

Alfric laughed. “A bit, though we’d be better equipped, armed, and armored, and worrying that we would be attacked.” He reached out and touched the side of the wall, frowning a bit. “Isra, what kind of stone is this?”

“I have no idea,” said Isra. “Nothing that I’ve ever seen before.”

“Huh,” said Alfric. “And this cave is safe, right?”

“How can a cave be dangerous?” asked Mizuki.

“The locals said that it was an interesting cave, well worth the trip for anyone in the area,” said Isra. “I think if it were dangerous they would have warned us.”

“Yeah, but how could it be dangerous?” asked Mizuki. “We just warp out if there’s anything wrong, we’ve got a cleric and a druid, there’s no danger at all.”

“I guess,” said Alfric. He rubbed his head. If Verity knew him, he was thinking that he wished there was more danger. “The house is half a mile from the hex’s warp, so I think we should plan on warping out anyway, once we’re done.”

“So far, it underwhelms,” said Hannah.

“I didn’t ask what was good about the cave,” said Isra. She was frowning.

“I think it’s nice to just all be together on an adventure again,” said Verity, perhaps a little too quickly.

“Plus Pinion,” said Mizuki.

“Thanks?” asked Pinion.

“The walls are odd,” said Alfric. He was touching them again, and looked at his fingers, rubbing them together. “I don’t think I would expect ridges to naturally form like this.”

“I was wondering about that,” said Pinion. “I had imagined that it might be something like sand bars or sand dunes, influenced by a wave motion that deposits materials, but we wouldn’t expect to see that to be on the walls and ceiling as well as the ground.”

“It’s changing,” said Mizuki as she moved ahead of Alfric. “Bumps instead of ridges. Ugh, this is going to be a pain to walk over.”

“You should have worn boots,” said Alfric.

“Yes, well, I was in class,” said Mizuki. “Boots are unfashionable for wizards.” She had a put-upon air of the high and mighty, ruined only by a small giggle.

Verity wondered how much the long hair and long robes were a matter of fitting in and how much they were Mizuki playing dress up. It was hard to say. Verity had done quite a bit of work on the robes, making sure that they fit her figure, and had been quite happy with how it had turned out. Mizuki had complained that she didn’t really have much of a figure, and Verity had felt somewhat awkward about disagreeing — she was somewhat short and very slight, but Verity had found Mizuki appealing almost from the start, something that she was normally happy to forget.

The ‘bumps’ were more difficult to walk on, like cobblestones that hadn’t quite been smoothed down or fitted in properly, which Verity had only experienced in the poorest parts of Dondrian. She walked carefully, thankful that she’d worn sensible shoes for this minor expedition.

Her eyes went to Pinion, who was walking alongside Isra. She liked him more now than she had on first blush, in part because he seemed to have a natural curiosity about the world, a wealth of knowledge, and was at least humble enough to say that he wasn’t going to come in and solve all their problems. One of the things that had marked their time with Cate in the demiplane was an exposure to overwhelming hubris and grandiosity, Pinion seemed, at least, like a nice contrast to that. He was getting along with Alfric, at any rate.

The long tunnel with no side exits eventually began a sharper downward slope, and at a certain point, was so steep that they would need to slide down it.

“See, this seems dangerous,” said Mizuki. “Also creepy.”

“It’s a very long cave,” said Alfric. He was holding up his lantern to look all the way down. The light didn’t quite reach. “What causes something like this?”

“I have a theory,” said Pinion.

“Share?” asked Mizuki.

“No, I want more data,” said Pinion. “If I’m right, I can explain it.”

“Some burrowing creature?” asked Isra, looking down the tube to the depths below.

“You wouldn’t get the bumps, I don’t think,” said Alfric.

“Welp, I’m going down,” said Mizuki. She stepped forward and slid down on her butt, in the nice wizarding robes that Verity had helped to tailor, and disappeared down the cave with a subdued ‘whee!’.

Alfric was next, and Hannah after him. They didn’t know whether the tube flattened out, or whether it would turn into a vertical drop, which Verity found legitimately frightening, but a broken leg would probably be fixable by Hannah so long as it wasn’t a compound fracture, and they’d all had their own injuries in the dungeons. Surprisingly, Pinion went after Hannah, showing more daring than Verity had thought he would be capable of as a soft-handed researcher.

<It’s safe!> called Mizuki.

When Verity stepped forward, Isra put out a hand. “Are people making fun of me, when they say this is a cool cave?” she asked.

“No,” said Verity. “At least, I don’t think so. I think it’s just … a phrase that they picked up.”

“Sorry, if this isn’t what people wanted,” said Isra.

Verity put a hand on Isra’s shoulder. “It’s fine. We appreciate your scouting.”

“It was the first one,” said Isra. “I think that it was important that it was good, and this is just … a cave.”

Verity brushed a strand of hair from Isra’s face. It was perhaps a bit too tender, but Isra showed no change of expression. “We’re doing these things to break up the monotony of the road,” Verity said. “Even if this were the worst, most boring experience, no one would hold it against you. The point isn’t seeing a cool cave, it’s being together, right?”

“I suppose,” said Isra. “Thanks.”

Verity got down on her butt and slid down the tube, which was essentially just a large slide, though very slightly wet. She was going to have to change into different clothes when they were finished, they probably all were, but that was a relatively small price to pay.

When she reached the bottom, the rest of the party was standing around in a large chamber, which arched nearly twenty feet overhead. Alfric had his lantern, but it was outshone by something in the center of the cave, a ten-foot high growth that protruded from the ground. It shone and shimmered, looking like a glob of glass studded with stars and black ink. Verity felt the urge to touch it, but held back. This place had lots of different ways to go, other tunnels of varying sizes.

“What is it?” asked Isra once she was down.

“That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out,” said Alfric.

Mizuki snapped her fingers. “I’ve got it. We’re in the belly of an enormous beast. What happened was, we came right down his stony gullet, and this is his heart.” She reached out and touched the iridescent lump, which reacted to her touch with a pulse of light. She poked it a few more times, but the effect was lesser each time. “Weird.” She looked at the others. “Anyway, the villagers that pointed Isra in this direction were probably under its control.”

“I really doubt this is a creature,” said Alfric.

“Actually,” said Pinion. “That was going to be my guess, though without the villagers. There was a historical creature, a cavermunk, that lived in these parts, one that burrowed deep underground and sent up appendages — a combination of feelers, arms, and mouths — up the surface to eat.” He looked around at their expressions. “Er, to clarify, they’re all long dead, and this would be a corpse.”

“Dead?” asked Isra. She was looking around the chamber. “I would have liked to see one.”

“During the Clearance,” said Pinion. “When the lands were being tamed.” He looked more closely at the glob of shimmering stone. “As a researcher I’m duty-bound to say that I’m not sure that this is what it is. It might be a different sort of thing altogether. Maybe that’s a dungeon escape that generates tunnels away from it, it really could be anything … but I think it’s the cavermunk.”

“You know a lot about long-dead creatures?” asked Mizuki.

“I came into the study of dungeons sideways,” said Pinion. “I was, ah, quite interested in biology from a young age, especially creatures.” He cleared his throat. “I was a difficult birth, and sickly as a child, which might be where the fascination comes from.”

“I’d wondered why you were short,” said Mizuki. “Also you have weird eyes, is that part of it?”

“Mizuki,” said Alfric with a sigh.

“What?” asked Mizuki. “He was the one who brought it up, I don’t like people calling me short, I wasn’t going to say anything, but if he’s saying ‘oh, this is why I look like this’ then yeah, I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t notice.”

Verity let out a little sigh. Pinion was practically crimson, and Verity was feeling secondhand embarrassment.

“I hadn’t realized either of those things,” said Isra. “Can I see your eyes?”

Pinion was still looking like he would rather die, but he moved toward Isra, and she stared at his eyes for a moment. It was, in truth, fairly subtle, the sort of thing that you would never pay attention to if you passed him on the street. Verity had only noticed because she had a habit of studying new faces, a relic of her time as a socialite, when knowing a person’s face was of prime importance. His eyes were slightly larger than average, the color not seeming human, and it gave him an odd look that Verity found somewhat alluring, truth be told. She was, as a rule, not attracted to men, but the more she looked into his eyes the more she felt like there was something a bit fetching about him. That wasn’t nearly enough, of course, and she didn’t want to give him the wrong impression, but if he was self-conscious about his appearance, she didn’t think that he should be.

“You’re very pretty,” said Isra. She was still staring into Pinion’s eyes, but when she spoke, he turned away.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Shouldn’t matter whether he’s pretty or not,” said Hannah, folding her arms across her chest. “Too much a focus on looks, in my opinion, a person’s self worth bein’ decided by whether they look good or like a hideous beast — better to not let it have such impact, ay? Which starts with not makin’ the boy feel self-conscious about his eyes or his height or what have you.”

“He brought it up,” said Mizuki. “I probably wouldn’t have said ‘hey you look funny’ until I’d gotten to know him a lot better.”

“But you would have asked?” asked Alfric.

“I mean, yeah,” said Mizuki. “Because I was curious.”

Pinion looked like he had meant to back away, but he was standing tall anyhow.

“Sorry if you thought I wasn’t being kind,” said Mizuki after an elbow in the ribs from Alfric.

“It’s fine,” said Pinion. He let out a breath. “It went better than I’d expected.” He cast a glance at Isra, and she gave him a slight nod.

“Does it go poorly sometimes?” asked Hannah.

“Awkward, usually,” said Pinion. “People want to know what exactly was wrong with me, what was done to fix it — these are things that I’m happy to talk about, they’re interesting, but sometimes the way that people want to talk to them is a bit too much like I’m a curiosity.”

“Rather than the curiosity bein’ somethin’ apart from you,” said Hannah with a nod.

“I really didn’t mean anything by it,” said Mizuki. “I mean, I’m half-Kiromon, some people think I look weird, I’d rather we talk about it than them just sitting there wondering and not paying attention because there’s this thing on their mind.”

“Is that what you were doing?” asked Alfric.

“No, but, you know, hypothetically someone might do that,” said Mizuki. “Anyway, this ‘Clearance’, it’s the first I’m hearing about it, people just came in and killed a bunch of monsters?”

“The Clearance was a decades-long project to claim more arable land, which was limited in those days,” said Pinion, who seemed relieved to have something else to talk about. “Most of the area that’s now ‘Central Inter’ had a specific set of conditions that left it ripe for particular types of very large and somewhat dangerous creatures. The thing we’re probably standing inside was one of them, not all that dangerous if you knew where it was, but it would extend one of those tubes — like the kind we walked through — up through the floor of a house and kill everyone inside in the middle of the night.”

“I don’t even understand how you’d kill a thing like this,” said Mizuki. She had turned back to look at the shimmering rock. “And what is this? The heart?”

“It’s hard to say,” said Pinion. “Sorry, I’m obliged to do the scholar’s thing and hedge three times in a row before giving you a guess.”

“Or you could skip that,” said Hannah.

“Well, I think it’s more like a tooth,” said Pinion. “So this room would be the mouth.” He reached forward and touched the rock in the center. “This would have been possessed of magic, before the creature was killed, pulverizing everything into a mash before it moved down, uh,” he paused, looking around the room. “That tunnel?” he asked.

“It’s too small to move down,” said Alfric.

“It would go deeper into the bowels,” said Pinion. “But it’s like the human circulatory system, right? The heart is the largest piece of it, then it gets smaller as it goes, as the arteries and veins branch off.”

“Why hasn’t anyone taken a piece of this?” asked Mizuki, pressing her hand against the glowing rock again.

“Maybe they were leaving it here for others to enjoy,” said Alfric.

“More likely it can’t be moved,” said Pinion. “Most of what we know of the Clearance was that it was a time when people were very concerned with killing everything that was dangerous or that could be dangerous. Some of these creatures we only know because there were books of instruction on how to murder them.”

“That’s sad,” said Isra. She was staring at the rock. Verity reminded herself that it wasn’t a heart, but a tooth, which seemed less poetic.

“It is,” said Pinion. “Things lost, things forgotten, things dead because no one could see the value in them. I wouldn’t want a thing like this eating sheep or invading houses, but … all the same.” He pursed his lips. “Sorry, I’m talking too much, I think I was meant as more of an observer.”

“Right,” said Mizuki. “But if you weren’t here we’d be saying ‘oh, cool rock, what’s it do, I don’t know’ and then moving on, which seems less fun. Granted, that’s how it goes in the dungeons more often than not.”

“Which is lonely in its own way,” said Isra.

“Lonely?” asked Mizuki. “I mean … sure, I guess.”

“I think bereft of meanin’ is more like it,” said Hannah. “I’ve been doin’ my dungeon book, and sometimes it feels as though the randomness of it makes sayin’ anythin’ at all a bit suspect. It’s paint splashed on a canvas, rather than applied with a careful hand. And ay, sometimes we shrug and move on.”

“That makes more sense,” said Alfric. He stepped forward and touched the oversized, singular tooth. It glowed fiercely at his touch, then settled down. It seemed to react strongly the first time someone touched it, then less so every time after that, like it was sensing them.

“Can you feel anything from it?” Verity asked Isra.

“No,” said Isra. She frowned. “It has all the life of a bone.”

“I’m … not sure what that means,” said Verity.

“There’s a faint impression of something that was once living,” said Isra. “A shell.” She pursed her lips. “Literally like a shell, which is a discarded piece of a living thing.”

“Is it?” asked Verity.

Isra nodded. Verity didn’t know enough about shells to dispute it, but something about the comparison, or possibly the metaphor, felt off to her. If it had been a line in a song, she’d have second-guessed it.

“I want to see the rest of the cave,” said Alfric. “It’s a shame we’re on the inside of the creature, rather than the outside, but I want to see as much as we can before going back. This is just the digestive system, if Pinion is right.”

“And if I’m not, then there’s more to look at,” said Pinion. “Sorry I didn’t get through my three disclaimers about uncertainty.” He smiled.

They spent another hour in the ‘cave’, following the tubes that led out from the mouth as much as they could. Mizuki at one point got stuck in a tube that was clearly too small for a person, even a short one, and had to be hauled out by the ankles by Alfric. Another of the tunnels was flooded, the ultimate destination of the trickle of water they’d seen, and Isra had briefly entertained the notion of going for a swim before feeling just how cold the water was.

They got out of the cave by warp, with Alfric going last as a matter of habit, though not being able to warp out would have been quite surprising.

It took another fifteen minutes or so to return to where the house was, though Mizuki exploded into starlight and returned to Plenarch. Along the way, they talked.

“Alfric, it always surprises me that you didn’t take to magic, nor to religion,” said Hannah.

“I tried,” said Alfric. “I conclusively don’t have the talent for magic, and religion … is hard to grind out, if you don’t feel it.”

“Cultivated mindset,” said Hannah. “Ay.”

“I washed out of the seminary,” said Pinion. “But you never got that far?”

“No,” said Alfric. “I did go for introductions and consultation when I was twelve — to all of them — but nothing felt right to me, not like the sort of thing I would want to devote myself to.”

“Twelve seems young,” said Isra.

“It’s normal, more or less,” said Hannah. “I was near that age. Hard to be away from family, though not that hard if you’re stubborn and independent, ay?”

“You don’t talk about your family much,” said Isra.

“I see them seldom,” said Hannah. “I returned home for a week after I was through with the seminary, but they’re strangers, more or less.”

“Which is as the church wants it,” said Verity.

“Och,” said Hannah. “Anti-religious sentiment?”

Verity shrugged. “You’ve said yourself that the churches have aims and goals of their own. Being able to mold their clerics without parents and siblings getting in the way is … not even bad, necessarily, but it’s certainly by design. There was a reason that I never went to seminary.”

“Which is?” asked Pinion.

“Oh, my mother never would have had it,” said Verity. “Even the seminary in Dondrian, where I would have been nearby, would have had too much distance. The conservatory was different, easier for her to access, to interfere.”

“Ah,” said Pinion. “And which seminary would you have gone to?”

Verity blinked at that. “I’m … a Chosen of Xuphin.”

“Oh, I know that, of course,” said Pinion. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have an affection for Xuphin, nor that you feel the closest connection with her. I wasn’t sure whether it was a given.”

“The clerics would have been extremely put out if I’d heard the words of their god and then elected to go elsewhere,” said Verity with a little laugh.

“So what?” asked Isra.

Verity spent some time thinking about that, and they walked in silence, making their way back. She still didn’t have a proper response by the time they reached the house again.

“How was the cool cave?” asked Bib, who rose from where he’d been laying on a blanket to greet them. “Cool?” He was, as always, shirtless.

“It was actually a horrible monster,” said Alfric. “We descended down into his mouth, and touched his tooth, which glowed with ancient power.”

“You made that up,” said Bib, putting his hands on his hips.

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Alfric. “How’s your bird been?”

“He’s a bird,” said Bib. “He doesn’t really do much.”

“Nonsense,” said Isra. She went over and stroked the oversized bird’s head for a bit. “You know, you’re riding him hard. It’s good for him to have a rest. We could bring him inside for today, let him ride with the house instead of ahead of it.”

“Birds aren’t allowed indoors,” said Bib. He watched carefully as the house lowered, which was happening by Alfric’s will. “They poop.”

“I’m a druid,” said Isra. “I’d just ask the bird not to poop.”

“Does the bird not have a name?” asked Pinion.

“What kind of bird has a name?” asked Bib. “Names are for dogs, and maybe cats.”

“I wasn’t aware,” said Pinion. He smiled at the boy, who didn’t smile back.

There was something surly and independent about Bib that Verity quite liked. He slept outside almost every night, and didn’t hang around with them, sometimes taking his meal to go, often racing off on his bird only to return hours later having had some adventure of his own. Bib was, in many ways, who Verity wanted to be when she grew up. He was also allowed to go on extended adventures with strangers, which was a shocking way to raise a child, at least so far as she was concerned. Alfric had gone so far as to have a meeting with Bib’s mother and father to make sure that it was okay with them, and they’d expressed to him in no uncertain terms that either Bib could take care of himself, or he could come home, and they expected that he would figure things out himself.

If Verity had been raised like that, she had no idea what she might have turned out like. She didn’t think that she would have been nearly so accomplished as a musician, but it was impossible to say. She would never force expectations and labor on her own children as much as her mother did, but she thought it possible that those expectations and the relentless work she’d had to put in really did have material benefits. It was a scary thought, in a way.

Verity went to the living room and began to practice as the house rose once more and sprang into motion. She had an audience, of a sort, Isra and Pinion sitting down on the couch together, and she tried out a song about a creature whose corpse was a cave, a song of the Clearance, of monsters or ‘monsters’ being killed for the sake of settling. It was a wandering thing, lines repeated a few times because she was working on it, trying to make the lyrics have a better flow, but what she needed was a better historical grounding. She knew almost nothing about the Clearance, and knew that she would need to speak to Pinion in order to have a firmer grasp on it. For all that time, effort, and presumably lives had been spent on the endeavor, Central Inter was relatively unpopulated, with large forests, sprawling meadows, and areas that were untouched by the hands of humans, save perhaps for a road here or there.

“Here,” said Isra once Verity was finished. She had been writing something on a piece of paper, and it was only once she handed it over that Verity realized that it was, in fact, a drawing. “It’s the creature.”

Isra didn’t have the best artistic ability — Verity was probably the most skilled among them — and the moving house had done her no favors, but she’d made a rendering of the creature. It looks a bit like a squid to Verity’s eyes, and showed a bulbous end that they hadn’t actually been in. They’d seen only a fraction of the thing, if the drawing was accurate, which made sense, as they’d mostly been inside its mouth and fingers.

“I think that’s close,” said Isra. “It’s hard to tell what it once was.”

“This is your guess?” asked Pinion, who’d moved over to Verity to look at the drawing.

“No,” said Isra. “There are things in the ground. I can sense through them. I moved worms and moles while we were in there, trying to get some sense of it, but there were roots that had grown around the tubes.” She frowned. “I apologize for the drawing.”

“It’s good,” said Pinion, too quickly.

“It’s not good,” said Isra. “Verity’s the artist.”

“I’d find it hard to paint while we’re moving,” said Verity. “And I can’t do animals or people very well.” She looked at Pinion. “I do flowers, mostly, and music is where most of my creative impulse goes.”

“You did the paintings on the walls?” asked Pinion. “They’re nice.”

“They’re sparse,” said Verity. “Also, as Isra pointed out, inaccurate.”

“Ah, I do love accuracy,” said Pinion.

“I offered to consult,” said Isra. “She said she didn’t want to get bogged down in the details.”

Verity shrugged. It was hard to explain. She’d run into the exact same problem with the song about the Clearance, the need to be accurate to what had actually happened warring with a desire to go with the flow, to invent, to be free with her lyrics. She’d run into Pinion’s type before, the kind who liked to point out ‘errors’ in plays and operas, but she’d always found it tiresome.

“I’m going to get some rest,” said Verity. She looked at the drawing again. “Maybe the song should have focused on this thing. The cavermunk, you called it?”

“Possibly,” said Pinion. “I’m ninety percent sure, but I’ve been in the field of dungeons for quite some time now, and left historical creatures behind.”

“Don’t nap too long,” said Isra. “You were going to do a show tonight, if our schedule holds.”

“I’m going to nap because I have a show,” said Verity. “I’ll need my energy, and some tea, and I’d like to finish that song so it’s ready for the stage.” There was something about the movement of the house that made falling asleep incredibly easy for Verity, like she was a baby being rocked in a crib.

“Is it alright if I come to see the performance tonight?” asked Pinion.

Verity laughed, though he was serious. “You’ve heard songs in progress, even the lewd song, I think I would be fine with you being in the crowd.”

“We’ll make a night of it,” said Isra. “I think I’ll go fetch Mizuki once she’s done with her classes, unless she wants to spend the night in Plenarch.”

“Later then,” said Verity. She reached for the drawing, almost by instinct. “Can I keep this?”

“It’s terrible,” said Isra.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” said Verity. She looked the drawing over. It had nice lines to it, even if it was lacking in aesthetic.

She felt awkward leaving Isra alone with Pinion, but they fell into easy conversation almost at once, a discussion of the Clearance.

Chapter 158 - Performance

While the Settlers were off exploring a cave, Vertex had been doing a dungeon, their own descent that hadn’t been nearly such an easy and carefree thing. They had fought a firebreathing dog, a moving yellow slime, and a swarm of small snakes. Those last had been poisonous, though it had only been Tilde who’d been bitten, and they had entad support and Oeyr’s healing to get her through the worst of it. Hannah listened patiently to Marsh’s after-action report as they sat together in Lutopia Two.

The extradimensional house had grown on Hannah, in part because she’d made a number of changes to it. The wood-burning stove had been interesting and quaint, but it would have required a large stockpile of wood, and a wood fire was difficult to keep a consistent temperature, which made baking all that much harder. She hadn’t removed it entirely, but it had been retrofitted to use a burner she’d bought, and she’d put a chiller into the tiny kitchen as well, which allowed her to have a midnight snack of hardboiled eggs and cheese if she chose to. She’d also filled the place with plants, especially out on the rocky island, which had been filled with moss before, and while she’d opted for pots instead of moving in soil, that had meant that it was easy to put them in a nicely symmetrical arrangement. Hannah had no particular green thumb, but she did like plants, especially in comparison to the lichen-covered rocks that the plants were covering up. She’d gotten tiny waterstones for each of them, a minor extravagance that meant they wouldn’t ever need to be watered, especially with the steady and regular rhythms of the false sun of the extradimensional space. She’d also made sure to get plenty of herbs, which not only helped the space to smell fresh, but could be worked into her baking.

“We’re working well together,” said Marsh as he had his second slice of rosemary-bread toast coated in cream cheese and butter. “You wouldn’t think it to look at her, but she’s a beast.”

“I would think it to look at her,” said Hannah. “Would you not, a tall, muscular girl whose hand seems to go to the pommel of her sword like it makes her comfortable?”

“I don’t know,” said Marsh with a shrug.

“It’s the first thing I thought of,” said Hannah. “I thought ‘my, I suppose that woman can fight’.”

“A bit of envy?” asked Marsh.

Despite Tilde being a new member of the team, they hadn’t talked about her all that much. “Envy, ay,” said Hannah. “Jealousy, a bit.” She frowned, not knowing whether to say it. “She’s comely.”

“Is she?” asked Marsh. He seemed a bit surprised. “Also, I’m not sure that I know the difference between envy and jealousy.”

“Envy is when you want what someone else has,” said Hannah. “Jealousy is when you feel threatened. In my case, she arouses feelins’ of both.”

“And … you find her ah, comely?” asked Marsh. “Attractive?”

Hannah nodded, just a bit. “She’s the sort of woman I go for. There’s a complex set of emotions there, to be sure.”

“You mean … the sort of woman you used to go for?” asked Marsh.

Hannah looked at him. “When you met me, it killed all sense of attraction for any other person, did it?” she asked.

“Kind of,” said Marsh. “Mostly, I would say. I can’t imagine I would ever need anyone else.”

“Oh, ay,” said Hannah. “You’re quite sweet.”

“And … it’s not the same for you?” asked Marsh.

“I’ve not had a desire to wander from you, no,” said Hannah. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t look at someone else and see the appeal.”

Marsh was silent for a long moment.

“She really doesn’t appeal to you?” asked Hannah. “I’d have thought she would. We’re cast from the same mold.”

“No, not at all,” said Marsh. “You’re more … soft. Strong, but soft. Firm, but soft. Stout?”

Hannah laughed. “You’ve a way with words.”

“She’s a bean pole,” said Marsh. “We were changing into dungeon clothes, and —”

“Changin’ in front of each other?” asked Hannah.

“We’ve only got the tent,” said Marsh. “We’re low on space. Does that bother you?”

“It’s a surprise, that’s all,” said Hannah. “We don’t change in front of each other. Or, well, Verity and Isra do, or did, but that’s different, ay?”

Marsh shrugged and took another bite of bread. “I think you’ve had too much time to think lately.”

“Mmm,” said Hannah. “Very possible. Might be time to speak with a cleric, in fact.”

“To deal with, uh, emotions?” asked Marsh.

“Talkin’ to you isn’t goin’ to help,” said Hannah. “Which is just because we’re close, because I know the emotions aren’t productive, because sayin’ them out loud sounds too much like an accusation, which it shouldn’t be, because it goes on in my own head.”

“See, this is why I love you,” said Marsh. “You have a problem, then you solve it all on your own without me having to say anything.” He beamed at her.

“Well, it’s not solved, ay?” asked Hannah. “I’m just sayin’ that whatever I feel, it’ll cause problems to discuss it with you.”

“Sure,” said Marsh. “But do we agree that I’ve done nothing wrong? That it is, in fact, you who has wandering eyes?”

“They’re not wanderin’,” said Hannah. “They’re seein’ a tall, pretty woman and havin’ thoughts. We’ll be in town soon, I’ll find a cleric, and I’ll talk it out, and I’ll keep talkin’ it out until the thoughts and emotions have been handled.”

Marsh nodded. “But … you won’t be happy about it?”

“Course not,” said Hannah. “The mind, sometimes, is the enemy. It’s a crafty beast that you’ve got to be equally crafty to put down, but it’s not like a hunt, where there’s some back and forth, some pride in it, it’s more like gettin’ rid of vermin. No pride in killin’ a mouse that’s taken up residence in your kitchen, in my opinion, just somethin’ that must be done.”

Hannah returned to her baking, interrupted only occasionally by Marsh, who came by either to squeeze or to steal a bit of what she was working on, sometimes both. Her recipes had all been altered to account for this, an extra few percent of any sweets, fruits, or anything else that could be eaten plain or half-baked. He had a penchant for raw batter, which she indulged, always warning him that it was a good way to get sick.

A few hours later, there was another small batch of bread to show for Hannah’s labor, decorated with flowers and in a few cases some pretty patterns, mostly the result of herbs, fruits, and tomatoes. It was a bit non-functional as bread went, since using a dried tomato for a flower meant a lot of the tomato flavor was concentrated in a single bite, but it looked nice, and there was, admittedly, a bit too much bread in the house. Hannah planned to give it away at the town they were stopping in, perhaps to the local church.

Marsh was right that she’d had too much time to think, no clear goal ahead, but it was a line of thinking that she hated. Clerics did it often, because it felt clever and wise: the thing which you say is bothering you isn’t what’s actually bothering you, it’s the second thing that you didn’t even connect to the first thing. This felt very much like offering up enlightenment, which was why it was so attractive as advice, but some didn’t realize the crucial problem that not all issues were like this. Linking someone’s fretting over their romantic prospects to the impending visit of their mother felt good, as a cleric, but sometimes the thing people complained about really was where their central concern lay. In Hannah’s opinion, there was nothing much worse than a cleric who insisted on being clever.

Marsh wasn’t a cleric, so could be quickly forgiven, and it was even possible that he had a point, but that was why Hannah intended to find a real cleric to speak with.

The town they stopped for the night at was a small one, another farming community that mostly existed because of the hex system. You couldn’t have stopped communities from cropping up there if you had wanted to. It was smaller than Pucklechurch, but marked on the map as having a church, and that likely meant a small building that could sit, at most, a hundred people. They’d be lucky to have a single cleric, though sometimes a position like this one was prized, since it meant that you didn’t have to ‘share’ and got to know the community more intimately. Hannah wouldn’t have minded a singular posting like that, though with a town that small there was a risk of advising and counseling the same dozen people over and over, week in and week out. Clerics were meant to help people, but the reality of the matter was often that people could only be helped so long as they helped themselves.

The church was pitifully small, smaller even than the local tavern Verity had arranged to play at, with no room for a proper sermon. Five shrines dotted the edges of the room, each a copy of the others, and when Hannah saw the cleric, it was obvious why: she was a cleric of Bixzotl, God of Copies.

“How do you do?” she asked. She had long straight hair, honey-blonde, which went down almost to the small of her back, and she wore a chasuble with one of the sigils of Bixzotl, twin wolves. They could easily have been made symmetrical, but weren’t, which was something the Church of Bixzotl often did to distinguish themselves from the Chruch of Garos, even though doubling or tripling lent itself well to symmetry. It irked Hannah, if just a bit. She was also frighteningly young, even by Hannah’s standards, as she was only twenty. The girl looked like she must have gotten out of the seminary early, and was perhaps sixteen. That was old enough to be a cleric, if you started very early and went very fast, but too young for a solo posting, at least in Hannah’s estimation.

“Sorry, I’m just passin’ through,” said Hannah.

“I’ve time to talk,” said the girl, smiling. “There are two back rooms, if you’re more comfortable somewhere away?”

Hannah gave a weak smile. Clerics weren’t supposed to push too much, but they were supposed to push a little. “Alright, if you’ve the time.”

The back room was one of two, with three chairs in it and an assortment of cookies in a small tin on the table in the center. It was a dangerous thing, offering snacks, because then sometimes people would come by for the snacks, rather than because there was anything in particular on their mind.

“You’re from out of town?” asked the girl. “Any relation to the monstrously large walking house?”

“Ay, he’s my father,” said Hannah, grinning. “But no, that’s my party, we’re dungeoneers, though not in town for that reason. We’re travelin’, I suppose.”

“That sounds lovely, if you like time on the road,” said the girl with a nod. “I’m CeeCee, by the way.”

“Hannah,” said Hannah.

“Very symmetrical,” said CeeCee. “You’re a devotee of Garos? Or your parents were?”

“I’m a cleric of Garos, actually,” said Hannah. “Spent some time in the church, but it didn’t work out, so I’m on the road now.”

“Oh,” said CeeCee, frowning slightly. “Usually when the clerical life isn’t for someone, they find out while in seminary. That wasn’t the case for you?”

“I’m not here for that,” said Hannah, though of course it would be the obvious thing. “There’s this new girl who I’m havin’ some complicated emotions about, and just needed someone to speak with. I’ve been through seminary, of course, know all the things I’d say to someone in my position, all the usual platitudes, the things that work ninety percent of the time … but I think I might need them said to me, since three hours’ bakin’ didn’t get it out of my head.”

“Sorry, the problem being?” asked CeeCee. “Attraction … ?”

“Och,” said Hannah. “You know, I know people do this, come into talk with a cleric havin’ everythin’ set in their head, then sharin’ none of that, and here I go doin’ it just as they do. Give me a moment, let me get my thoughts in order.”

Sometimes, in these matters, talking about things was enough to make them better. Relating emotion to other people, being forced to describe them and your relationship with them, ruminating on it all … that was something even without a cleric to provide their input or try to tease apart your blind spots.

To Hannah’s surprise, even knowing that happened sometimes, it almost worked on her.

“It’s the allure of the unknown, I s’pose,” said Hannah. “I love Marsh, truly, but he doesn’t give me those wild and free feelins’ anymore, he’s more soft and comfortable. And the girl, I know little about her, so my mind’s free to fill in the details, speculate and ponder. I know every inch of Marsh, and he’s a good man, would make a good husband, but I’ve plumbed his mysteries. The well is dry.”

“Is that what happened with the church?” asked CeeCee.

Hannah frowned. That wasn’t the direction she would have taken it. “Ay, a bit. Not the Church itself, not Garos, but I do feel that, ah, I was done with my postin’ at Pucklechurch, that I’d seen what it had to offer and knew that when Alfric came in that door I had a way to leave that would satisfy me.”

“And you think that you’ve seen what Marsh has to offer?” asked CeeCee.

“Ay,” said Hannah. “And it’s a good offer, it is.” She bit her lip. “I worry he’s seen what I have to offer, or that he’s still thinkin’ that I have some mystery left, which I don’t. I got to know myself in seminary, I’m a pretty full person, pieces fit into place. I had planned for a wild time as a dungeoneer, but only to get some bit of myself out, to be able to say that I had my wandering.”

“You’re in a large moving house now, yes?” asked CeeCee.

“Ay,” said Hannah. “But it’s only the view that’s changed. And with the others … I’ve helped them, I think, as both a friend and a cleric, but there’s less to help now, fewer things Isra needs explained, less coachin’ that Verity needs on how to handle herself, we’re doin’ well, overall, and to the extent that they ever needed me, they need me less. Maybe I liked feelin’ like I was useful.”

“You don’t feel useful now?” asked CeeCee.

“I feel restless,” said Hannah. “But that shouldn’t mean a thing when it comes to Tilde, she’s not a source of restlessness, and I can’t imagine how she’d be an refuge from it.”

“She would be new and exciting,” said CeeCee. “For a time, anyway.”

As a rule, clerics of Bixzotl were fans of repetition, monotony, monogamy, and all things of that ilk. Hannah appreciated that, in her own way, but it did color the sort of advice that they were likely to give. CeeCee was dismissive of the idea, which was probably the right way to be given that Hannah had never actually exchanged all that many words with Tilde, but some of that was colored by how a cleric of Bixzotl was trained to see the world.

“And you think it’s that, with my worries about Marsh?” asked Hannah. “I see a threat because I’m in a rut and project that onto him?”

“Are you in a rut?” asked CeeCee. “That’s the first time you’ve used that word.”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “Now that I say it … but we’ve dungeons comin’ up, new and different dungeons it’s hoped, so the rut might go away on its own.”

“I think there’s a lot to enjoy about a proper rut,” said CeeCee. “But a comfortable groove that you’ve happened into, that you didn’t choose for yourself, that’s something to be wary of.” She tapped her fingers on her knee. “You came here because you wanted to deal with the uncomfortable feelings surrounding Tilde, and I don’t want to give those short shrift, but it seems to me that some of this runs deeper, and is much more about a lack of purpose. You liked the process of talking, the clerical duties that you no longer have, and if the Church got in the way … you wouldn’t be the first to feel that.”

“I still might go back to the church,” said Hannah.

“Would you feel happier if you made some plans right now?” asked CeeCee. “If you left here today with some kind of actionable list of things you needed to do in order to rejoin, conditions you wanted to meet, people you’d want to meet with, would you feel better?”

“I … don’t know,” said Hannah. “Havin’ a direction at all might be nice. None of the dungeon stuff is, to be honest, pointin’ me down a path.” She frowned to herself. “You know, Marsh said as much, and I don’t think I took him seriously enough. I hope it’s just time on my hands, but … I’ll give it some thought.”

“Good,” said CeeCee with a nod. “Now I don’t mean to rush, but this copy isn’t long for this world, and it’s best to get back together in person.” She stood up from the chair.

“You can do that?” asked Hannah. “At your age?”

CeeCee smiled. “I was considered a prodigy among my class.”

“Then why … here?” asked Hannah. She had tried not to make it sound as though this small town, whose name she’d already forgotten, was some kind of consolation prize, or something to be ashamed of, but she failed. She’d met her own appointment to Pucklechurch with disappointment.

“It’s home,” said CeeCee with a shrug. “I grew up here, went to the seminary, then returned. It’s a path that appeals to many who feel Bixzotl’s calling.”

“Mmm,” said Hannah. “I suppose I can see that.”

“I wouldn’t imagine you’d be interested in giving a sermon next temple day? Or will you be long gone by then?”

“We’ll be some distance … but I could return, I s’pose.” Hannah felt unexpectedly buoyed by that, some of her haze of discontent lifting. She’d have to prepare for it, of course, pick a topic that would resonate, maybe something about Verity’s yet-to-come performance, or the walking house, or the dungeons, or something. It had been some time since she’d done public speaking, and of course she was worried that she was rusty … but she could do it, of course. “We’ll plan for it.”

“Good,” nodded CeeCee. She smiled. “Now I must go, before I melt into a puddle.”

Hannah did feel better about herself once she’d left the small church, just as she’d imagined she might. It had even gone in the expected direction, in a sense, diverting from the issue of Tilde and toward a lack of direction or meaning in her own life. She had not, as CeeCee had suggested, left with a firm plan in place for her grand return to the Church of Garos, but it had been a surprisingly revealing trick, and one that she felt compelled to remember for later.

By the time Verity’s ‘concert’ rolled around, Hannah was in a much better mood, helped in part by Marsh, who had gotten Verity’s permission to do a bit of a pre-show of light and magic, what were called ‘pyrotechnics’. It was done away from the village, where nothing would catch fire, and as the sun set, Mizuki grumpily showed up and proclaimed that he really should have waited for her. Any sourness faded when Marsh presented her with a special flower made of fire, small and tightly controlled in comparison to his other workings.

Verity was playing in a small tavern, the only tavern the village had, though it was easily larger than many such places Hannah had seen, and seemed to serve as a meeting hall when it wasn’t serving its simple fare. It was a step down from the Fig and Gristle back in Pucklechurch, but Verity seemed quite enthusiastic, and the turnout was good, in part because of the advertising — which had consisted of Bib coming into town the day before and talking up a storm, Marsh’s pre-show, and of course the house on stilts, which would have attracted attention even if they weren’t in the middle of nowhere.

The party found a table for themselves and ordered rather a lot of food, and Vertex came in right after them, taking the table next to them. The tables were rectangular, and after some negotiation, they were merged together so that it was a single long table that held both parties plus their two hangers-on, Bib and Pinion.

The food was what Mizuki called a ‘half-stew’, meat that had been cooked low and slow in its own juices, root vegetables that had likewise been cooked long enough that they were nearly mush, and then a sprinkling of other, greener vegetables that had been a bit less cooked. These three things were all served in a bowl together, but separate, so they could be eaten individually or swirled around. It was good, hearty food, if a bit fatty, and they had a curious custom of having a dish of salt at the table so that more could be added as you wished.

“Does this salt taste funny to anyone?” Grig asked. He’d taken a pinch of it and was inspecting it, then touched it lightly to his finger.

“A bit,” said Alfric. “It’s also sort of … brown? Black? It’s got something added to it, I think.”

They all took turns licking the salt and commenting on it. Isra thought that it might be smoked salt, but the taste didn’t quite seem right for it to be smoked to Hannah. It was almost sulfurous, in fact, and she ended up adding quite a bit to her dish as she tried to place the flavor of it and see what it was doing to her meal.

“See, it’s a half-stew because it’s a bunch of things that weren’t cooked together,” said Mizuki. “I’d almost call it three stews, except we’re also kind of missing a lot of stewing liquid for each of them, which is kind of a rip off.”

“Do you cook?” asked Pinion.

Mizuki stared at him. He was sitting beside her, and she leaned in slightly, looking into his odd eyes. “Have … I never cooked for you?”

“Er,” said Pinion. “No?”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “It’s sort of my special skill.”

“Not wizardry?” asked Pinion.

“Er,” said Mizuki. “You know what? No, not wizardry, I think I’m a cook before I’m anything else. So I should cook for you.”

“Just him?” asked Alfric.

“Oh come on,” said Mizuki. “It hasn’t been that long. And you guys have overall been doing great.”

“Not great,” said Isra. “Adequate.”

“Wait, so Mizuki used to do all the cooking?” asked Pinion.

“Isra was my helper chef,” said Mizuki. “Sadly, the student has grown beyond the master.”

“I really, really haven’t,” said Isra. “I mostly just make meals that are difficult to screw up. No delicate balance of flavors, no finicky meats, nothing that has touchy timing.”

“Should we be paying more attention to Verity’s playing?” asked Pinion. He looked behind him, where Verity was up on stage with her lute. They were having a relatively early dinner, though this was one of those places who served everyone at around the same time.

“I think she’s plannin’ to wait until people are done,” said Hannah. “Then the big songs come in. She’s only playin’ it as a normal lute right now, that thing can get loud enough to hurt your ears if she lets it — though it’s nothin’ compared to the other one.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” said Pinion. “Though I feel like I’ve heard all her songs by now. It’s been nice having her to listen to over the course of the day.”

“Living in that house, you either learn to appreciate the lute or go insane,” said Mizuki. “Though it’s not like her practice is bad.” She turned to Isra. “Remember when you were taking up the lute? Gods that was awful.”

Isra laughed. “I think that anyone would sound awful next to Verity, but especially a beginner. And Verity said that all beginners sound awful anyway.”

“Did you drop it then?” asked Alfric. “You’re not going back to the lute?”

“Maybe,” said Isra with a shrug. “But you’ve seen how much time is taken up by practice for Verity. I’m not sure I’d want to give up my time. And the lute … I think I would rather have some kind of wind instrument, something that I could store in a pocket.”

“We have so many lutes though,” said Alfric.

“We’ll find a good aerophone,” said Isra with a shrug. “Or I can just buy one.”

“I can’t imagine taking up a new hobby,” said Mizuki. “It seems so daunting.”

“I’m not very serious about it, to be fair,” said Isra.

“Wait,” said Pinion. “I know this song.” He turned around in his seat to look at Verity, and began to sing along, softly enough that only those at the table would be able to hear him. His voice was high and unexpectedly sweet, clear and confident. It wasn’t a talent Hannah had expected from the researcher.

“You can sing?” asked Isra once the song had concluded.

“Oh,” said Pinion. “A bit. Sorry, I shouldn’t have, I got carried away.” He blushed and returned to his food. “I’ve been in and out of choirs throughout my life. But anyone can sing, really.”

“I actually don’t think that’s true,” said Mizuki.

Hannah looked over to the other table, where they were having their own conversations. Marsh had sat next to Tilde, which was almost unavoidable given that there were five people in the party, but it still drew out a pang of jealousy. It was getting easier to tamp down though, which Hannah was grateful for, because jealousy was an unattractive emotion — not just (presumably) unattractive to Marsh, but unattractive in herself.

Tilde was fitting in with the group a little better, it seemed, engaging in conversation a little more, but not nearly so loose and free with them as Pinion already was with the Settlers. Vertex was a less welcoming party overall, still healing from the pains that Lola had inflicted on them before she left, and they conversation often went to various bits of arcana — which were interesting in a way that Hannah didn’t imagine most people would appreciate — or toward relationships, which were hard to get a handle on from the outside, and possibly awkward because of the faint whiff of romance that seemed to come anytime there were two young people next to each other.

Once all the food was finished, they were left with their drinks, a rather sweet and slightly alcoholic drink that had been made with the first of the season’s crop of apples. Hannah had resolved not to get too tipsy, as she sometimes did when they went out, but it seemed that Mizuki had no particular compunctions in that regard, and had stolen a bit of Alfric’s drink for herself, which he’d indulged. It was her last day of schooling for the week, and she seemed intent to let loose, especially since she had no cause to get up in the morning — save for the dungeon they were about to do.

Verity had been playing what she called ‘background music’ until this point, the kind of music that filled pubs and taverns across Inter. It was relatively soft, steady, and unobtrusive, the sort of thing that people could easily talk over. Now though, as the lights were half-shuttered around the tavern, and a main light was opened up to shine down on Verity, the music grew louder, with larger crests and falls.

It was during that opening song that someone slipped into an empty seat at their table.

“Hi!” said Xy. “Did I miss anything?”

“Xy?” asked Isra. “What are you doing out here?”

“I’m a cartier, I go everywhere,” said Xy. “You’re also moving at a snail’s pace. You’re still within the territory of my deliveries.” She was keeping her voice low as the song ramped up. “I’ll hush now.”

It was surprising to Hannah how quiet a tavern could get with just a simple change in the lighting and song. It helped that the lute Verity was using could get quite loud, like five lutes playing all at once, and while she didn’t play to the full volume often, she did it enough that people knew their talking might be interrupted.

Hannah hoped that Verity would get what she wanted from this. The girl had talked about doing a little show like this a few times a week as she attempted to hone her craft and work on new songs, which seemed absolutely grueling to Hannah — but Hannah was also growing bored and listless, and if she’d had three sermons to give every week, she might have felt energized. She did feel energized by the prospect of a sermon at this town’s small church, and tried to look around at the people to see what they might be most interested in.

Verity played three songs in a row, taking only mild breaks between them, and Hannah found herself captivated. She’d been in Lutopia Two quite a bit, and missed out on hearing Verity’s near-constant practice, which meant that some of the songs were genuinely new to her. It was difficult for Hannah to judge, but it felt as though Verity had improved as a songwriter, and beyond that, was taking better advantage of her entad lute. There were songs of sorrow, songs of love, of adventure, mystery, and longing. It wasn’t until she was reaching the end of her fourth song that Hannah realized these were going to make a part of a set — one for each of the gods, in their own ways, a very old religious tradition that predated the Churches coming together.

There was a brief break from the songs then, and Verity spoke to the crowd.

“Thank you all for joining me here today,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve seen our walking house, and if you haven’t, I’d suggest you take a look after the show, which will only last another two songs. As we make our way west to Plenarch, I’ll be playing a number of these shows, but it’s a work in progress, so if you’d like to talk with me after the show, I’d love to hear anything you have to say.”

Verity was putting on the charm, which in her case meant that her natural chilliness was more of a brisk breeze. It didn’t feel like she wanted to be your friend, but like she wanted to make the trees wave back and forth a bit, which was fun in its own way. Hannah was mildly surprised that Verity was soliciting feedback from the audience, and worried that it wouldn’t end well, or that Verity was taking on too many things at once. Hannah felt an urge to meddle and tried to tamp down on it, but among friends you expected some amount of meddling, or at least friendly advice. There was no particular consequence to Verity burning herself out on a rigorous schedule of concerts — she could simply cancel them — but Hannah hoped that wouldn’t happen.

The last of the songs was the one to Xuphin, if Hannah’s reading was correct, and it ramped up slowly until it was a thunderingly loud and fast piece, frantic crashing of strings, including something that Verity was doing that sounded almost like background percussion. The start of the song had lyrics, but they went away toward the end, as they’d have been drowned out by the lute.

When it was finished, Hannah stood and clapped, and she wasn’t alone, nor was the applause limited to just their party.

“Encore!” called Pinion. “Play the lewd one!”

Verity heard and stuck her tongue out in his direction, but she was smiling, and she sat back down after a brief curtsey. She stuck her hand out and lowered it slightly. “Alright, there’s one more song I’ve been working on, if you’ll indulge me.” She launched right into it without waiting, and the crowd quieted down.

This song broke the symmetry of those that had gone before, as six was a lovely and holy number, and seven was not. It was on a different theme though, that of an interloper, and Hannah suspected that it must have been made up on the spot. Pinion didn’t seem to cotton on until the line about the ‘researcher with pretty eyes’, and while the gender of the researcher was left ambiguous, it was pretty clearly aimed squarely at him — in a teasing way, and not seemingly directed at his appearance, or at least not in a derogatory way.

While there was more applause at the end, Verity took that as her cue to leave, and she packed up her lute as the lights went back to normal. There was another full night of drinking and carousing for most of these people, and there would be another bard along shortly in order to keep the spirits up.

“Was that for me?” asked Pinion when Verity came back.

“Just a trifle,” said Verity with a shrug.

“Improvised?” asked Hannah.

Verity smiled. “Am I that obvious?” She was sweating slightly, looking around, and her eyes finally found Xy. “You came!”

“I came!” said Xy.

“How did you even know?” asked Verity.

“I’m a cartier, people tell me things,” said Xy with a smile. “I saw your house out there, which almost made me late. Do you have plans for after?”

“None,” said Verity.

“We were just going back to the house, I think,” said Alfric. He looked to the side. “Vertex is invited, there’s plenty of baked goods, we’ve got meats, cheeses, chocolate, —”

“Wine,” said Mizuki.

“What’s chocolate?” asked Pinion.

“Do you mind if I stop by for a bit?” asked Xy. “I’m done with delivery for the day.”

“No problem!” Verity squeaked.

It took some time for them to leave the tavern, since the whole group was a dozen people or thirteen including Bib. Twelve was another holy number, but as it turned out, moving a group of twelve took far, far more effort than moving a group of five or six. Hannah had sought out Marsh, who’d had a bit too much of the apple drink, but alcohol made him cuddly and affectionate, so that was okay. There were a fair number of people who came up to thank Verity for the music, and the tavern owner had wrapped her up a meal to take with her, which was nice … but then again, Verity had done this little concert for no pay, which made Hannah frown.

Twelve people proved to be too much for Bib, who ducked out quickly, but the adults gathered in the living room, where they had just barely enough room if some people sat on the floor. Alfric apparently had some party games planned for the next time they were hanging out with Vertex, and launched into them with gusto, while Mizuki took great pleasure in cracking jokes and trying to throw things off course.

This was more like what Hannah had thought being on the road would be, and she liked it more as the night went on, even as ‘tipsy’ began to turn into ‘drunk’. Grig was practically fawning over Verity, as he saw himself completely outclassed as a musician, and as Alfric tried to get the games back on track, he ended up getting into an extended — if friendly — argument with Josen about the rules they were supposed to be playing by.

“We should go somewhere more private,” said Marsh, loudly whispering into Hannah’s ear.

“I think you might be a bit far gone for that,” said Hannah, who was mostly sober. “But I’d be willing to give it a go.”

They said their goodnights, and their spot on the couch was taken far more quickly than the goodbyes were said. True to Hannah’s prediction, Marsh had overdone it, and he was asleep in their bed in Lutopia Two before she was done undressing. She sat for a moment, contemplating going back out there, but things were churning in her mind, and it was nice after all that talking and music to be alone.

She looked at her desk, where the scraps of her dungeon book were, and began setting it all aside.

For as much fun as she’d been having with the others, she had a sermon to write.

Chapter 159 - Finding Joy

Isra had uncomfortable butterflies in her stomach, which had nothing at all to do with the upcoming dungeon. They were having a gathering, both parties together, which was surprisingly uncommon given that they had agreed that they would mostly be moving together. The unexpected arrival of Xy had been … well, the source of the butterflies, actually.

“Oh, I’ve been socking away money,” she said as she ate from the cheese platter. “The plan is another few months in Plenarch, then I’ll be off to some other place. Cartiers have a proper guild, a huge one, tightly controlled, but swaps are common enough, and I’m eager to see some other part of the world. I’ve just about had my fill of the region, seen and done everything that I’ve wanted to see and do.” She gave Verity a wide smile. “Almost.”

Xy was unbelievably forward, though she was helped, in part, by the wine, which was flowing readily. She had come with a singular purpose, which was not attending the concert.

It was a very animal way of doing things, at least depending on the animal. Copulation, for some, was as simple as a yes or a no in their own languages of bodies and odors, and Xy was proof that it could be equally as simple for people. This process of aggressive romance was apparently something that she’d honed to a fine craft during her trips to and fro along the ley lines, though Isra wondered how often it was a complete miss. From everything that Hannah had said, some women just weren’t at all interested in other women, though how they figured that out was a mystery to Isra.

Isra felt surprisingly little jealousy at the attention that Xy was lavishing on Verity. It was interesting, mostly, to see how Verity reacted from the outside, how shy she was about that kind of thing. In retrospect, she’d been like that with Isra as well, which Isra had simply read as her being composed and perhaps stand-offish. There was a touch of jealousy, but only a touch. Isra would make herself scarce at the first opportunity, loudly announce to the two girls that she was going to spend the night camping in the woods or in the garden stone or somewhere.

Pinion was in their small cluster of people, and seemed quite interested in talking to Verity.

“The music was beautiful,” he was saying. “Do you alter how you play based on the acoustics? It sounds so different than when you play in the living room.”

“Of course, I change how I play,” said Verity. “Our living room, when the house is moving, is hardly ideal conditions for play, but it’s good practice, especially since I need to play in the dungeons. At the conservatory, we practiced in perfectly silent, sterile rooms.” She put on a light, airy voice. “The absolute purity of music. Which is trash in the world of playing taverns, I’m afraid. Always someone shouting or laughing, talking over the lyrics, even when they’re trying to be quiet.”

“It always irritates me,” said Xy. “When people break the silence. A cough when you’re vibing to the music is like a slap to the face. Same with sermons.”

“Sermons?” asked Pinion.

“It’s where a cleric gets up and talks on temple day,” said Isra.

Pinion laughed, and Isra smiled at him.

“There’s a silence that comes before a sermon,” said Xy. “Or during a sermon, even, save for what the cleric is saying. There’s something so nice about everyone coming together to focus on a singular thing.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you for the religious type,” said Verity. “You seem much more … free.”

“Religion has freedom, if you know where to look,” said Xy. “It’s got joy.”

“Doctrine of Xuphin?” asked Verity.

“No, not just Xuphin, that’s base reading,” said Xy. “Admittedly, it does fit well, but no, if the infinitude of Xuphin can equate to a sort of hedonism, then the nothingness of Kesbin can be asceticism … but neither is only that. Kesbin is freedom, slipping free from obligations, going out on the road, that kind of thing.”

“Alright,” said Verity. “But what’s the ‘joy’ that comes from, say, Bixzotl? Repetition?”

“No, no,” said Xy, shaking her head. “I mean, yes, classically they go copies to repetition to making peace with a boring life that’s got nothing new or interesting in it, but that’s sort … backwards, right?”

“Is it?” asked Isra.

“To me — there was a great sermon I heard over on the coast of the Eastern Sea, paraphrasing it really but — there’s a way that we look at new things, how we see them full of wonder, that fresh excitement of them. One of the ways to honor Bixzotl is to bring that perspective of newness and freshness to the fifth of something as well as the first. It’s a form of practicing joy in a way where you’re not thinking ‘oh, this thing again’.”

“But you are a world-traveler,” said Verity. “And you are leaving as soon as your unfinished business is concluded.”

Xy sat back, glass of wine in hand. “Well, yes. I never said I was a devotee. The perfect follower probably doesn’t travel the world seeking out new experiences.”

“There’s something about the way you’re saying ‘new experiences’,” said Pinion.

“Well, maybe it’s the wine,” said Xy with a smile. She downed the rest of her glass, and Isra watched the movement of her throat as she drank. “I need to use the restroom, it’s on the second floor?”

Verity nodded. Her eyes were on Xy.

There was, at that moment, a bit of a shuffle. Hannah and Marsh went upstairs, which freed up room on their couch, and the arrangement of conversational partners shifted. Vertex’s new member, Tilde, looked for a moment like she was going to come over to where Isra and Verity were, but Pinion took that moment to stand up, and when Isra moved over so there was more room, Pinion cleared his throat.

“Do you mind if I sit there?” he asked, pointing at the spot next to Verity, where Xy had been sitting.

“N-no,” said Verity. “I was probably going to turn in soon.” She gave Isra a significant look, half questioning, half apprehensive. Isra nodded in return.

Pinion sat on the couch, a glass of wine in his hand. “My butt was starting to hurt.”

“We have other couches,” said Verity. “We should have brought them out of storage. I think this is the first time we’ve had this many people in the house.”

“It sounds like things in the dining room are going well,” said Pinion, after there was a brief cheer from there.

“Alfric is explaining to Mizuki that she didn’t actually get the points she thought she did,” said Isra after a moment to listen in.

“You can make that out?” asked Pinion. “The acoustics in this house seem very good at blocking the travel of sound.”

“Druid senses,” said Isra. “Mizuki’s cat Tabbins is in there, I listen through him. He’s slightly annoyed by the whole thing, but he’s found some feet to sleep on.”

“It’s the wood,” said Verity. “The acoustics? There’s something special about the tree that was used for the timbers — not magical, but it’s either hard or soft, or just doesn’t like vibrations, I forget exactly. It helps to keep my practice sessions confined to their proper room.”

“Somewhat,” said Isra.

“Well no, it’s not perfect,” said Verity.

“You were saying about what it was like in your conservatory,” said Pinion. “I would love to hear more, if you’re willing to indulge me. Institutions of learning are all alike in some ways, and all different in others. I have thoughts on institutions and why they’re like that, and I’ve had just enough wine that I’m eager to either gather more data or talk at great length.”

“Oh,” said Verity. “Well … I can hardly compare the conservatory to a seminary or wizarding school or anything else, but I somewhat hated it, particularly that aspect of being judged on performance.”

“As opposed to?” asked Pinion.

“Performance as something to be enjoyed, appreciated, marveled at,” said Verity. “Tonight, the ‘concert’, people weren’t sitting there intently listening to my timing, to whether I was slightly out of tune, watching my technique, they just wanted to hear music.”

“Ah yes,” said Pinion. “And in the conservatory there’s less in the way of appreciation, it’s all focus on the parts that you don’t find beauty in. Like what Xy was talking about, finding joy?”

It was at that point that Xy returned from the restroom, and she sat back down on the couch, taking a place between Pinion and Isra. The couch was a long one, with just enough room for four people if they squeezed in.

“How’s my favorite druid?” asked Xy, putting her arm on the back of the couch so it was just behind Isra’s head.

“Your favorite?” asked Isra. She felt faintly amused. Pinion and Verity were still talking to each other, but Xy was in the way of Isra hearing Verity talk about joy-finding.

“You’re wondering how many druids I know?” asked Xy. “Three, in fact. But you are my favorite, and I haven’t seen you since … ?” She looked puzzled.

“Moose?” asked Isra.

“Yes!” said Xy. “Since moose.” She moved her arm, which had been behind Isra, and let it drop casually down so that her hand rested on Isra’s knee. “We should hang out more often, sorry I haven’t made a real effort.”

Isra let her tongue wet her lips. There had been something that Xy had said, long before, about how language wasn’t really what mattered between people, that it was about smiling at them, touching them in specific ways, watching their faces and waiting for their own touch in return. Xy had said that she’d gone through places where she didn’t speak the language and had done everything by giving certain signs and looks.

She had a smile on her face, a grin. Her teeth were nice, and Isra was close enough to smell her, like elderflower and the wind.

Isra smiled back.

They talked, but they weren’t really talking, they were watching each other.

“You’re hard to get a hold of,” said Isra. Xy had nice forearms, with fine hairs on them. Her fingernails were trimmed very short and coated with a clear lacquer.

“Not that hard,” said Xy. “You just leave a letter and I’ll come running, faster than the wind.” There was a brightness to her eyes, and a quickness with which they moved around. She was looking at Isra’s mouth.

“And then go running away again just as fast?” asked Isra. She wasn’t sure what compelled her to say it. She knew what Xy was, that she wasn’t around for long, that after this night there wouldn’t be some long relationship in the future. She’d meant it as teasing, but it had come out tremulous, as though she was worried about being left behind. She wasn’t sure where that feeling was coming from, or why, and for a moment the spell they’d been weaving together felt like it had broken.

“Not until after I’d taken care of you,” said Xy. She hadn’t missed a beat. Her voice was down to a low purr, and she’d moved in closer. Her fingertips on Isra’s leg shifted, moving to the inside of the leg. Isra was wearing a dress, and the cloth was thin enough that it was like having those fingers on her skin.

“Did you want to see my room?” asked Isra.

“Oh, I’d love to,” said Xy. She got up from the couch, using Isra’s leg for support, then turned back and offered a hand.

The touch of her skin was electric, helped by her winning smile.

Isra spared a glance for Verity. There was a rough mixture of feelings going through Isra, choppy seas, but Verity’s face was too difficult to read, to know whether it was okay. There was only slight movement from Verity’s head, an ambiguous motion, and then she had returned to her conversation with Pinion.

“This is the room,” said Isra when they were upstairs. “It used to belong to Mizuki’s younger sisters, years ago.”

It was home for Isra. The room was rather large, even given that it was for two people, and Isra had now seen enough places to know that wasn’t just her own sense of scale being off from having grown up in the cabin. It was also a place that was thick with memories for Isra, most of them involving Verity.

Again there was that feeling of trepidation and worry.

“Which bed is yours?” asked Xy.

“That one,” said Isra. It was the one closer to the windows, since Verity complained about the light coming in in the mornings. Xy moved over to it, and sat down. It was a comfortable bed, soft and warm, an enormous upgrade over the bed that Isra had in the cabin.

“It’s nice,” said Xy. She grinned. “Very soft.”

Isra sat down beside her. As soon as she did, Xy’s hand went to Isra’s leg again, this time to her thigh. Isra felt a shock to her heart, and it began to beat faster. She barely had time to take stock of the feeling when Xy’s other hand had come up to turn her head to the side. The kiss came slowly but inevitably, and lasted for a long moment. Xy tasted mostly of wine, but being so close, the smell of her was heavier.

The kiss was well-practiced. It reminded Isra of being swept along the dance floor by an experienced partner.

“You’re new to this,” said Xy. Her voice was soft.

“Not that new,” said Isra.

“I don’t like to push,” said Xy. “I don’t want you to have regrets.” Her eyes were half closed, her face still close to Isra’s. Another kiss was incoming, and Isra was welcoming it.

“No,” said Isra. “I want this.”

“Good,” said Xy. She had a smile that was almost sleepy. “Lay back.”

~~~~

Isra had somehow thought that Xy would slip out of the room when it was over, but she stayed, arms wrapped around Isra, cuddling with her. Isra had thought that she would give it a moment, then prod Xy to leave, but before that could happen, Isra had fallen asleep.

It was late in the morning when Isra woke up, and Xy was gone. The bed felt cold and the sheets needed straightening. Almost instinctively, Isra looked to Verity’s bed. Verity wasn’t there, though the bed was unmade. That didn’t mean much, as Verity didn’t often make her bed in the morning — Isra did — but it was a sign that maybe Verity had stayed out of the room. It was early enough still that Verity should have been asleep, especially with a night of drinking.

Isra crept out of the room, took a quick shower, got dressed for the day, and made her bed. The house was quiet, which made sense in the wake of a party that had gone late.

It was while she was making the bed that she found the note. It was a simple piece of paper, folded, and when she opened it, it had a message from Xy.

“Hate to have fun and run, but it’s an early morning of deliveries for me. You were great, let me know if you want there to be a next time. Your favorite cartier,” and then there was a symbol that Isra had learned from Verity was a monogram, two letters merged together, the X and Y, with a little flourish to them.

Isra folded the note. She went to her dresser and placed it there, in the bottom.

She wasn’t sure how she felt. It would depend, she thought, on how Verity was, whether there was some obvious pain behind her eyes, or whether she was even still in the house. The look last night, as Isra had been going upstairs, had been ambiguous, and they really should have taken a moment to talk about it. It was Verity who had wanted it, who’d needed it really.

Hannah would be disappointed in their lack of communication.

Isra thought that it would be a good time to speak with Hannah, but she wasn’t around either. Her lute lay in its place, and she was almost certainly having a late morning in Lutopia Two.

Mizuki was the only one up, in fact, and she was in the kitchen, making breakfast.

“I’m about two minutes away from talking into the party channel to get everyone up,” said Mizuki. “Breakfast is not a meal that keeps well. Bacon grease congeals, eggs get kludgy … fruit and cinnamon cake will be fine, I guess, but the hot stuff needs to not cool down. How was your night?”

Fine,” said Isra. “Good, actually, just … have you seen Verity?”

Mizuki paused in her stirring of the eggs. “Don’t you sleep in the same room?”

“Not last night,” said Isra. “Xy … stayed over.”

“Ah,” said Mizuki. She gave Isra a sympathetic look. “And how are you doing with that?”

“She stayed over with me,” said Isra.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Oh.” She frowned. “Well then how is Verity doing with that?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “That’s why I asked if you had seen her.”

“Ah,” said Mizuki. “You know, we have a dungeon today. And given that Verity’s mental state is, er, maybe linked to the dungeons somehow, maybe … I’m not judging, not saying that you shouldn’t have done it, but —”

Alfric knocked on the doorframe as he entered the kitchen.

“Morning,” he said.

“Isra slept with Xy,” said Mizuki.

“Oh,” said Alfric. He blinked. “That’s … congratulations, I guess.”

“Have you seen Verity?” asked Isra. “Last I saw she was talking with Pinion.”

“She was gone when we were finished with our games,” said Alfric. “Though the games ended up going quite late.”

“Alfric and I went head to head once Vertex left,” said Mizuki. “I crushed him.”

“You won the tiebreaker of our best-of-nine match by a single point,” said Alfric. “I would hardly call that a crush.”

“Sorry, let me be a gracious winner,” said Mizuki. She turned to Isra. “Alfric suffered a bitter humiliation by the narrowest of margins.”

“Ha ha,” grinned Alfric.

“You won too many other games for me not to crow about the one that I did win,” said Mizuki.

Alfric turned to Isra. “You’re worried about Verity?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “I shouldn’t be, but yes, I am.”

“If she didn’t sleep in your room, she must have slept somewhere,” said Alfric. “The options are pretty limited. Lutopia One, the garden stone … I can’t imagine that she went with Vertex, and they were mostly with us, I think, except Josen went to bed early.”

“Or just wait,” said Mizuki. “She’ll show up. Breakfast is basically ready, I was going to put out a call on the party channel anyway.” She hesitated. “Assuming that she’s still in the party.”

“Oh come on,” said Alfric. “That would be a pretty extreme reaction.”

“You always say to think about and plan for the worst,” said Mizuki. “I’m only trying to be a good student.”

“Make the breakfast call then,” said Alfric.

Mizuki cleared her throat. <Everyone, sorry to wake you but it’s well-past waking time, and there’s some hot breakfast. This is wake up call one of three, they will get progressively louder if you don’t respond.>

<Comin’,> said Hannah. <Enough for Marsh?>

<You know it,> said Mizuki.

They all stood in the kitchen for a moment, waiting.

<Just need to get dressed,> said Verity.

Isra let out a sigh of relief.

“You think she’ll be put out?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, Xy did come here for her. I guess I don’t know how it is for you people.”

“Us people?” asked Isra.

“How would it be if you were competing over a boy?” Alfric asked Mizuki.

“Competing with who?” asked Mizuki. “With Isra?” She looked at Isra and frowned. “I’d be irate. Fury of a thousand suns and all that. I would go scorched earth, salt the lands. I mean, if you slept with a boy that I had my eye on.”

“Um,” said Alfric.

“But it’s not like that with Xy, right?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, I feel like I know enough about the girl to know that she’s not going to be anyone’s girlfriend, just … a fling.”

“Right,” said Isra. “Can I help move things to the dining room?”

“This, this, and this,” said Mizuki, pointing to plates.

They were getting seated in the dining room when Verity came in. She had a faint smile on her face. “Morning!” she said. She stretched out, arms wide, and looked at Isra. “How was your night?”

“It was … good,” said Isra. “Where did you sleep?”

“With Pinion,” said Verity.

Isra felt her eyes go wide before she could help it.

“Oh, no,” said Verity, immediately looking flustered. “No, no, no, we didn’t sleep together, didn’t, um, it wasn’t like that.” She was still blushing as she sat down. “We talked a lot, that was all.”

“About what?” asked Mizuki. She looked somewhat suspicious.

“My family, his family, my time at the conservatory, his time in academia … we have a mutual appreciation of fighting.” She shrugged. “I don’t know, it was one of those conversations that went on late into the night, even after the whole house had gone silent. He’ll be down in a bit, he’s just changing.”

“You didn’t stay up too late?” asked Alfric. He looked around the table. “We’re good to dungeon today?”

“I don’t think you can verb it like that,” said Mizuki.

“I’m good to go,” said Hannah as she entered the dining room with Marsh in tow. “I do think that I slept less than proper, but we’re hopin’ that our lovely bard can put in a good performance, ay?”

“If we need to put it off,” Alfric began.

“Then we would put it off,” said Verity. “But I don’t think we need to put it off, frankly.”

“So long as you’re good to go,” said Alfric. He glanced at Isra. “I don’t want to place pressure on you, but the oddities of the dungeon seem like they’re linked to your mental state, and if there’s anything that you want to talk about, anything that’s bothering you that might crop up …”

“What’s this about?” asked Hannah.

“Nothing,” said Verity. “Or, I’ll talk with you about it later, so this doesn’t have to be the business of the whole party, but Alfric,” she turned to him. “I’m fine. I would call it, if I thought that it needed to be called.”

“Well, let’s let it lie then,” said Hannah. “Personally speakin’, I finished a sermon last night, and it’s ready for temple day tomorrow. The timeline’s short, but I think it’s good, a rousin’ bit of commentary on Garos and the nature of purpose.”

“This is for tomorrow?” asked Alfric.

“Ay,” said Hannah. “If time does not matter, better to be fast and early, so it is said.” She seemed to be in a good mood. “Sorry for not bakin’ this mornin’, it was a late night for me.”

“We have enough baked goods to last us,” said Mizuki. This was a mild understatement.

Isra wasn’t feeling too much like eating breakfast, and she put the food in her mouth with mechanical motions. Verity seemed to be in high spirits, which was somehow worse than if she’d been upset. Pinion had sat down next to her and they were engaged in their own private conversation, which seemed to be about which animal was the spookiest, a topic that was provoking intense debate and need for clarification.

When they were getting ready for the dungeon, dressing to cover themselves, Isra found herself alone in the room with Verity.

“Sorry,” said Isra.

“For what?” asked Verity.

“I know that you had your sights set on her,” said Isra. “That … you had meant to be the one with her.”

“She’ll be back,” said Verity with a shrug. “And it’s not like I had planned a whole night. I hadn’t even known that she was coming. So it was … fine. Pinion was very nice. He was relieved when I told him I wasn’t interested in men. We had a long talk about that.” She was smiling to herself. “I really empathized with it.”

“With … relief?” asked Isra.

“With that feeling of being able to set aside any concerns of romance,” said Verity. “When Xy showed up … I was immediately thinking about whether I smelled good, whether I looked good, whether I needed to freshen up, whether my bed was made, our room looked nice, if I was being funny enough, seductive enough, saying the right things … I had thought that it would happen with her on the night of Bethany’s wedding, and was worried that she wasn’t actually as much on the prowl as I had thought she was, so I was also worried about whether I was sending the right signals, or reading the right signals.”

“That sounds exhausting,” said Isra.

“It’s what a whiff of romance does to me, I think,” said Verity. “To Pinion too, he’s said. Too many thoughts running around that don’t need to be there.” She had been half-naked as she talked until finally slipping into her dungeoneering outfit, one with heavy fabric. It was one of the only times that Verity ever wore pants, and Isra had always found the change of pace attractive. “I don’t want to pry, I don’t think we need to share everything, but it went okay, for you?”

“It was good, in the moment,” said Isra. “I didn’t like that she was gone when I woke up. I guess I didn’t like that she was gone, that there was never going to be anything more, just mutual attraction and … the act.”

“Mating,” said Verity. She had a slight smile.

“I think I’m more interested in someone who will stay with me,” said Isra. “Someone who will love me.”

“Well, you’re very loveable, and once we’re settled down I think you’ll have no problem,” said Verity. “Would it bother you if she and I … got together?”

“No,” said Isra, which was the correct response, no matter how she was feeling.

What she was missing, she thought, was the other part of it, the shy smiles the morning after, the mutual appreciation, the tenderness of knowing each other. Isra had felt excitement and pleasure, but it wasn’t the same as it had been with Verity, not just unfamiliar in the expected ways, but unfamiliar in ways that Isra hadn’t quite seen coming. She hadn’t been prepared to be loved and left, as it were.

The trip to the dungeon entrance was conducted as the party sat around the dining room table, save for Alfric, who was guiding the house from the front door. Vertex was in the in living room, having packed up their tent, along for the ride as they were doing the dungeon right afterward — contemporaneously, in fact, since a dungeon could have two instances running at once.

When they got there, Alfric lowered the house, and they gathered for one final talk.

“The plan is to see what Verity can do,” said Alfric. “With two teams going in at the same time, we’ll have a better understanding of what a normal dungeon does, the only thing that varies is the party composition and the inherent randomness of the dungeon. Pinion will be just outside, we’ll keep good notes, a good map, and take samples of everything we see, stuffing it into whatever space we can. If it looks like a normal dungeon, we do it like a normal dungeon, but at the first whiff of something above a normal danger level, we’re leaving.”

“What’s a danger level?” asked Mizuki.

“Pretty sure that’s rhetorical,” said Hannah.

“Well I don’t want to be in the middle of a dungeon and get stuck arguing about whether it’s too dangerous to go on,” said Mizuki.

“What happens if I’m able to shape it?” asked Verity.

“Then we stay there, collect samples, see how close it got to what you intended, and throw a celebratory party when we get out,” said Alfric. “I think that’s the thing that we can least plan for. You have something in mind?”

“I do,” said Verity. “Pinion would prefer me to register my intent beforehand.”

“Also she would ideally not tell you once you’re in the dungeon,” said Pinion. “It’s better science that way. I can collect statements from all of you, then compare it against what she was trying to do. That’s mostly only helpful if the impact is low and relatively unobvious. It means that no one except Verity will be ‘interpreting’ the dungeon.”

“No, I will,” said Mizuki. “I mean, we’ve always done that in the past.”

“Either way,” said Alfric. “We’re ready, we’re going in, we’ll take things as they come.”

They stood outside the dungeon entrance, which was, unusually, set into the side of a cliff. A tunnel had been mined out to get to it, but it was only ten feet in. The air smelled like wet stone, and Isra steeled herself for the dungeon. Vertex would be in right after them, and their party was standing around, fully armed. She’d only rarely seen them in their battle gear.

It was agreed that Verity would go in first, with Alfric right behind her. Isra watched her stand in front of the entrance, at the moment before the dungeon would be created for them. Verity’s hair was covered in a helmet, her lute strapped securely around her, and she was standing tall and firm.

Verity stepped into the dungeon and Alfric followed close behind.

Chapter 160 - Dungeon Wide and Dungeon Vast

Mizuki stepped through the portal feeling like there was a badger in her guts. It had been a good while since they’d done a dungeon together, and all the ‘I’m a dungeoneer’ feelings that had been building in her seemed like they had left. It was like a structure abandoned mid-way through construction, leaving everything to rot. Here she was, trying to get back into it, and she felt like she didn’t belong. It was worse than the first few times, because she remembered how it had been, and what it would take to get back to being comfortable with the dungeons.

They came through into a small room, an antechamber, thick worked stones making up the floor, ceiling, and walls. It was gray stone, nothing exciting, and Mizuki felt a wave of relief at not having to be right in the thick of it, one of those dungeons where you started with a fight.

After everyone was through, they spent some time making their preparations for a swift exit. Alfric moved with the same sureness he always did, and Mizuki wondered whether he was shaking off the rust too, or whether he was simply so self-possessed that there could never be any rust. The walking chest had trundled in with them, and seemed to Mizuki to be as impatient and uncertain as she was.

They moved through the hallway, mostly wordless, or only with the little chirps to verbally let people know what was happening. All communication happened through the party channel, which they didn’t use too much outside of the dungeons, and that too felt somewhat unfamiliar. The hallway was long, made of the same material as the entrance, stones so large that they must have been pulled by lizzos or something else quite large — and it was strange, because it felt like they were underground.

A light appeared at the end of the long hallway once they’d taken a mild turn, and they moved forward more slowly, until it became clear that they were going to come out. Mizuki didn’t like hallways, not in dungeons. There wasn’t enough room for her to do any proper spellcasting, not if she wanted to make sure she didn’t hurt anyone.

The whole tenor of the party changed when they came out of the hallway. It was enormously bright and took Mizuki’s eyes a moment to adjust, but when they did, she found herself standing at the foot of a mountain, a wide lake beyond it, and more mountains clustered around. The sun was shining overhead with a few clouds here and there.

“Alright,” said Alfric. He was staring. He hadn’t used the party channel to speak. There were woods around them, but in front of them was a meadow leading down to the lake. A skinny dock led to a rather large boat with a furled red sail, beckoning them to explore. He turned to Verity. “Is this what you were going for?”

“Pinion said that I should keep that to myself,” said Verity, though she was doing a bad job of hiding her smile.

“Well,” said Alfric. He looked out at the lake and the ship that seemed to be waiting for them. “I guess … we explore?”

“Do you know what’s out there?” asked Isra.

“I … don’t think I should say?” asked Verity. “It really would be more conclusive if I didn’t say.”

“It worked,” said Alfric.

“No,” said Mizuki. “We can say that it worked once we’re not attacked by some horrible monster.” She paused. “Unless Verity was trying to include horrible monsters, I guess. Also, where’s my pile of entads?” As she said it though, she caught a glimmer from the ship, even as far away as it was. “Oh, entad ship. Neat.”

“That ship is an entad?” asked Alfric, pointing at it.

“What else would ‘entad ship’ mean?” asked Mizuki with a laugh. She looked back at the entrance. “No idea how we’re going to get it out though.”

“I have no idea how we’re going to do a full clear,” said Alfric.

“We’re not,” said Hannah. She pointed out at the water. “How many square miles do you reckon this is? Just what we can see? And those elevation changes, even with the helm to fly the party up, would slow us down even more.”

The mountains weren’t sloped, like Mizuki thought a proper mountain should be. Instead, they were nearly vertical, like pieces of enormous stone furniture had been thrust up from beneath the ground. The trees and bushes mostly grew around them, unable to find purchase on the rock.

“We’ll do as much as we can,” said Alfric. He looked back at the entrance. “We’re going to have to devote some time to getting the ship out. It … might fit in Lutopia One if we lower the mast.”

They hadn’t been in a dungeon since they’d gotten all the lutes, and they had a few of them with them, ready to use, though most were stored away because they weren’t necessary to have out. The Precarious Lute, which would play when there was danger, was on Alfric’s back, though it had been shrunk down to a tenth of its size by a different lute. Alfric had used the Bounce Lute on himself, making him stretchy and squashable, at least for a bit, and his walk was different in a way that Mizuki had trouble describing. Their lute collection was quite large.

“The ship really does seem like it’s beckoning us,” said Isra.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “I think I’m the only one that knows how to sail?”

“If I knew how to sail, I would be talking about it all the time,” said Mizuki.

Alfric wasn’t listening though, just staring off at the ship. “There’s a good wind, but we might have trouble getting back, and the rigging might not be ‘proper’ rigging, which would add a challenge.”

“Is this going to be like the Wildlands?” asked Mizuki. The mountains were making her feel small. “Are we going to find ghost villages or something, no people in them?”

“I hope you’re not expecting me to answer that,” said Verity with a frown. “You’re not supposed to know.”

“Fine, then I guess that question is for the rest of the party,” said Mizuki.

“I don’t think we ever got a good answer as to why the Wildlands didn’t generate people,” said Alfric. “Whether it was a limitation of the place, a conscious decision on Cate’s part, or something else. And we still have no idea what causes dungeon madness, or why it wasn’t an issue in the Wildlands.”

“Editorial mistake,” said Hannah with a level of confidence that might have fooled Mizuki when they first met. Hannah didn’t actually know, she was just making an argument, putting forward a strong version of it to be argued against.

“We should get moving,” said Alfric. “Explore on foot first, then possibly take the ship, if it’s there for a reason. Things don’t really happen in dungeons for a reason, but,” he glanced at Verity. “This doesn’t seem like a normal dungeon.”

It was so wide open that it was almost intimidating. The mountains made it feel different, like they were huddled giants that might awaken at any moment, and that in turn made Mizuki feel quite small.

They explored the forests around them, which had nice little paths through them. There were, according to Isra, no animals around, nothing that would allow them to see whether Verity had conquered dungeon madness or not, though the path was like that a deer might make in its wandering through the forest. There was no birdsong, no chirping of insects, nothing rustling except the leaves of the trees around them, and that was creepy in a way that dungeons normally weren’t.

Eventually they had circled the mountain they’d come out of, gone back to confirm that the entrance was still where they left it, and then sat to look at the boat. The mountain was on an island, sitting tall and proud, and there was nothing else around save for the trails and a place that looked like it had contained a campfire, now long put out. It was evidence of human habitation, at least at some point, but not better evidence than the ship at the dock.

“This is creepy,” said Mizuki. “It’s creepy, right?”

“I think it’s more creepy given we’re in full armor,” said Hannah. “Walkin’ around armed to the teeth an’ all that, ay?”

“Is that a joke about my armor?” asked Mizuki, looking down at the skull armor she was wearing. The mouth of the skulls moved with her own mouth, and could deliver quite the bite.

“Sure, let’s go with that,” said Hannah.

“Nothing left but to take this ship,” said Alfric.

“Or we could just have someone fly with the helm,” said Mizuki. “Meaning me, since I’m the only one experienced with aerial combat maneuvers.”

“Go ahead,” said Alfric with a nod.

Mizuki hadn’t expected that, but she rose into the air nonetheless. She was weighed down by her armor and her awesome sword, which made the helm feel sluggish, but soon she’d gained speed and was soaring through the sky.

The land stretched out for miles. The mountains were like little thumbs, each with their own islands, though some of them shared one or two. It was all curiously uniform in a way that real landforms weren’t, and there was no sand, just grass and forest leading right up to the edge of the water.

<Calling in some better eyesight,> said Mizuki. <I’m hoping to see something other than just a bunch of islands.>

<On it,> said Verity.

<Or you could come back down and grab the Acute Lute,> said Alfric. <Actually, wait, I just had an idea. Carry on.>

Mizuki peered out at the islands, looking for something that seemed like it was worth going to. The ship was an entad, at least, but that was the only one that Mizuki had seen, and there’d been nothing she’d spotted in their jaunt around the island, not even at the campsite.

When Mizuki’s vision sharpened, several things came into focus at once. There were wisps of smoke coming up from more than one of the islands, and there were houses among the trees that Mizuki’s eyes just hadn’t been able to make out. There didn’t seem to be farmland, but one of the far-off islands had a windmill on it. The populated islands, if they were populated, had a number of holes in their very vertical mountains, as though the insides had been hollowed out or something.

Mizuki dropped back to the ground, letting herself gain speed. The helm had limited speed, but you could drop as fast as the ground would pull you, and it was a unique thrill that Mizuki loved. There was a moment when the world was coming fast, yet she still felt weightless, when the wind was whipping over her, and nothing beat that. She made a cool landing, sparing her legs with good timing.

“There are some islands with smoke,” said Mizuki.

“Nothing from the Precarious Lute,” said Alfric. It was a lute that played itself when there was danger around, and was normally very continuously loud in a dungeon, at least under normal circumstances. “That means either no creatures at all, or no dungeon madness.”

“We’re going to sail to one of those islands, right?” asked Mizuki.

“Seems a bit much, sailin’,” said Hannah. “Alfric, you’re the one who says that a dungeon isn’t the proper place for entad testin’.”

“In this case, we’re looking at a huge amount of labor to get it out,” said Alfric. “If it has some kind of magic that will let us get it out easier, we can save the better part of a day — and this is a one day dungeon no matter what, since we’ve got scheduling concerns.”

“Very well,” said Hannah with a sigh. “I s’pose we’ll have to empty out Lutopia One to make room, ay?”

“Shove things to the side, yes,” said Alfric. “But if we can take the ship out and see how it does, there’s a chance that we can avoid all the logistical challenges and most of the work.”

“Fine, fine,” said Hannah, waving a hand.

Personally, Mizuki would have had no problem leaving the ship behind, especially because they’d have absolutely no use for it. They weren’t seafarers, as much as Alfric might have an affection for the sea, and while it seemed like they might have a lovely time going out on one of the Proten Lakes, that didn’t get her all that excited. Now, if it was an intensely magical ship, that might be another story, but Mizuki felt no call of the sea, or at least not like their fearless leader seemed to.

They walked down to the boat and climbed aboard, looking around. It wasn’t huge, but it was large enough for the five of them, and had a hold which was almost entirely empty, save for six hammocks set up there. There was room for a modest amount of cargo, but it would be cramped sleeping quarters if it was stuffed full of anything they wanted to transport. Of course, with their various extradimensional storages, they wouldn’t have to be worried about sleeping space or room for cargo, and anyway most cargo was carried by cartiers or through better options than the ship would offer.

“She’s a beauty,” said Alfric, who had spent quite a bit of time marveling over the ship.

“Is she?” asked Mizuki.

“Yes,” nodded Alfric. “The craftsmanship is exquisite. The joinery is solid, everything is sanded down smooth, the lacquer is a mirror finish, and it’s got amazing balance, especially for a ship that’s currently empty. I think if we had some time, I would add some ballast, but I want to see more of what this — it feels wrong to call it a dungeon, doesn’t it?”

“It’s hardly a dungeon at all,” said Verity. She was smiling, seeming quite pleased with herself. “I’ll feel different if we do run into a monster, or if the water threatens to swallow us, or some other horrible thing.” She pursed her lips. “I suppose we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves.”

“More entads next time,” said Mizuki.

“Alright,” said Alfric. “I should be able to sail this on my own, so everyone else can just take a seat. If I need help, I’ll call for it.”

It took another fifteen minutes though, during which time Alfric was mostly familiarizing himself with where everything was. Eventually, the sail was unfurled, the ship was untied from the dock, and they were off and away, cutting across the waters with a strong wind behind them.

“The winds are odd here,” said Isra. “Like in the Wildlands.” She was speaking up to be heard over them.

“Oh, can you control them?” asked Alfric.

“Maybe,” said Isra. “I’ll wait until there’s need.”

“That way,” said Mizuki, pointing. “If you want to go to where I saw some smoke.”

While the ship was fast, the distances were large, and it took some time to maneuver. Alfric knew how to sail, but he was no expert, and though he cut an impressive figure moving around on the deck of the ship, pulling hard on the ropes to get the sail into position, it was admittedly a bit clunky, especially as he was doing it all in full plate armor. When they got closer to the island with smoke coming up, he reined in the sail and stood at the bow of the ship, looking out.

“No signs of life, save for the smoke,” he said, frowning. “We’re really hoping not to find people here.”

“Are we?” asked Verity.

“Were you trying for people?” asked Alfric. “It’s an ethical quagmire. We would need to evacuate them. Common wisdom is that a dungeon disappears after a party leaves it, we couldn’t just leave people to be unmade. But that would also mean that we would be introducing potentially hundreds of people into Inter, ripping them from the lives they had ‘known’.”

“Oh,” said Verity.

“Were you?” asked Alfric.

“Not particularly, no,” said Verity. “It was more … an image in my head. A song in an instant. I was going for … well, not quite this, but yes, it’s close to what I had pictured, at least in general terms.”

“I see a dock, we’ll tie up there,” said Alfric. “If we need to leave in a hurry, everyone but Mizuki gets into the chest, then Mizuki flies through the air as fast as possible.”

“The Precarious Lute isn’t playing,” said Verity. “That’s a good sign, right?”

“It is,” said Alfric. “Though … it’s not supposed to be perfect.”

It was only when the ship approached the dock that its magic was made apparent. Hands reached out from the side of the ship and grabbed the side of the dock, hooking it in place without the need for any ropes.

“Good, but not great,” said Alfric, frowning at the boat. He patted it. “Though there’s a good chance that it’s got some other magic to it.”

“Come,” said Hannah. “Let’s see if there are other entads to pull from this place.”

They got off at the dock, where the ship was still holding itself in place with wooden hands, the chest trundling after them.

The party came, at last, to a small village, the source of the smoke, which was coming up from a workshop of some sort, large and tall. Around it were smaller buildings, dome-shaped with round openings, made from stones that must have been quarried from the mountains. The village was sat next to a mountain entrance, arched and neatly done, carved out with a bas relief of trees and clouds.

“No one is around,” said Alfric. He seemed somewhat relieved.

“Then let’s go hunting for treasure,” said Mizuki. She moved forward, sniffing the air as though that was how you did things. It seemed clear that she wasn’t going to have to use her sword, which was both a relief and a disappointment.

They didn’t intend to split up, but after the second time of all filing into a room together it felt as though they were wasting a lot of their time. Isra’s senses were blunted by the almost total lack of animals, but they had the Precarious Lute, and it really did seem like the danger, if there was any, was pretty low. Mizuki knew that was a dangerous way of thinking, but they did slowly start to cover a wider area, each of them taking a different one of the small houses.

They found only a single entad among them, which had been spotted by Verity before being brought to Mizuki for confirmation. It was a jade staff taken from one of the larger rooms, and its effect was thankfully obvious, a space-warping travel ability that came with some sensory enhancements.

“I can see onto the other islands,” said Verity as she held it. “It’s a little sickening, but … the range is a few miles, I think.”

“A few miles?” asked Hannah. “That’s as large as this dungeon is?”

“That’s the minimum,” said Alfric. “Dozens of square miles. We’re not going to be able to search it all today.”

“We knew that, didn’t we?” asked Mizuki. “From above, there were just too many islands.”

“Where are all the animals?” asked Isra.

“We didn’t want animals,” said Verity. Her eyes were glazed over as she used the staff. “I think I’m getting sick using this.” She handed it off, and Mizuki snatched it up.

The vision the staff offered was like a warped window into whatever was in front of you, and while the range was amazing, it wasn’t the easiest thing to use, in part because you controlled distance by mentally prodding the staff and angle by actually moving the staff. As you pushed further, tiny changes in the staff’s angle resulted in large swings of where you were actually looking, which did make the stomach churn a bit. Verity had used it once already, and it seemed like the sort of thing that would come with restrictions, but Mizuki still itched to step forward into the view the staff offered. This dungeon was big, and it seemed as though they were only going to get to explore a small fraction of it.

“We actually do want animals, if they’re not dungeon mad,” said Alfric. “Entads are good, but there’s lots of money in a breeding flock of any kind of creature that has some kind of use. Something like a sheep, if we could bring out fifty of them, would be incredibly worthwhile, not just in terms of the return we could get, but for the world. Another animal like the chicken, easy to breed, good to eat, with plentiful eggs? It could actually reduce farm labor by a substantial amount. And there’s the ultimate get that has eluded dungeoneers for a long, long time: a rideable animal.”

“We’ve got birds, right?” asked Mizuki.

“The birds have their size increased by a cleric of Xuphin,” said Hannah. “They’re smaller when born. Makes them expensive, ay? At least more than they could be. And you could ride one, without armor, but most couldn’t.”

“There are lots of potential solutions,” said Alfric. “But most of them take entads, other magic, or otherwise have some kind of process. A lizzo can be ridden, but it’s a slow, plodding creature, better for pulling a wagon.”

“So you’re saying that I should be trying to create animals?” asked Verity. “Even if I don’t know for certain that they won’t be dungeon mad?”

“That’s a discussion for the future, I guess,” said Alfric. “We also need to know how much control you’re able to apply to the entads that we get from here. So long as all this is intended, or close to it … this is perhaps one of the biggest breakthroughs in dungeoneering to have ever happened.”

Verity was beaming.

To Mizuki, it took some of the fun out of the dungeons. It wasn’t like the Wildlands, where you didn’t know what was around the next corner, and it wasn’t like a dungeon, where you got your heart pumping fast with the explosions of fireballs and the risk of injury. Instead, there was a functional sterility to it, a creepiness from all the houses with no people in them but no risk, no excitement. Part of that was how this dungeon had been made, a set of islands that had some variations among them but nothing new and exciting. It was hard to know what Verity had been going for, but if this was the future of dungeoneering, Mizuki wanted no part in it.

She wondered whether Alfric felt the same way.

The workshop with the smoke coming up from it had a large interior, the largest of all the buildings they had been in, and the machines for making things smacked of ritual in the way that they were aligned and decorated. There was something that was obviously a loom, but it had been built like a throne, embellished and carefully painted.

“Ectad materials,” said Mizuki, pointing at a stockpile set off to one side.

“They’re so … organized,” said Alfric. “We’ll load them up. That loom isn’t magical?”

“Nope,” said Mizuki.

“Shame,” said Alfric. “We might want to take it though, it’s good henling stock.”

They spent some time loading up the ectad materials, which were shoved into the chest to be pulled out later. Mizuki had only a guess as to what kind of ectad materials they were, and wondered whether that was something that could be altered as well, or whether there was something fundamental to ectads that meant that only certain elemetals could be created from them. That got her interested. It was still unclear how much of this Verity had intended, and Mizuki kept watching the bard’s face, trying to see if she could pick up any clues.

When they had looted the workshop (or temple, or workshop temple), they went further in, to the mountain itself and the entrance to it.

“We haven’t found any books so far,” said Alfric. “Just tapestries.” These, they had looted as well, and while they might have been made by the ornate loom, it was difficult to say. “I was hoping for books, if this place really is more coherent than a normal dungeon. It would be a good test of that.”

“It’s already more put together,” said Hannah. “You look in the house and you can imagine someone livin’ there, ay? No questions about where or what they eat, where they use the bathroom, the clothes they use — and it’s a village, not just a collection of houses. You can see it in how they’re laid out, how there are specialties.”

“I suppose,” said Alfric. He looked at Verity. “You’re really set on not giving us more?”

“When we get out, I will,” said Verity.

“I guess I’m looking forward to that,” said Alfric.

The mountain entrance was a tunnel, which turned into steps that went down, then opened up into a huge room that made the interior of the mountain seem more like it was a dome than a proper chunk of rock. There was a spiral staircase going up the interior, a very long loop around the interior, and light came in from the windows, and from a hole directly in the top. The floor was flooded, seemingly intentionally so, because it created a placid pool around the two nude statues in the center of the place. It was a grand place of worship, or felt like it, though it was hard to know. The two men were wrestling with each other, muscles straining.

It was when Verity’s hand went to her mouth that Mizuki realized that it was probably two women instead of two men, and that ‘wrestling’ was only one way of interpreting the strain of their muscles and the contortions of their faces.

It took Mizuki another moment to realize that these weren’t just any people, they were two specific women, or at least might be, from a different angle.

The Precarious Lute on Alfric’s back began to play.

“Um,” said Alfric.

“I don’t know what this is,” said Verity.

The statues were enormous, large enough that if they’d been standing up they would have been thirty feet tall. They were of the same stone of the mountain, and while it would have been the work of a team of master artisans to do it, it seemed as though they’d been carved where they were, from the mountain itself, the entire interior dome excavated in order to leave only those two figures behind. It gave them a feeling of more weight, more solidity.

That made it particularly frightening when the woman on top turned her head to look at them.

Mizuki acted first, unleashing her best fireball right at the statue’s head. It was Xy’s face, Mizuki realized as the fireball erupted into full bloom.

The statue was unharmed, and climbed down off the other woman, moving toward them with heavy footsteps that disturbed the still water. The other one was moving too, lifting up its head.

<Mizuki, sword!> called Alfric.

Mizuki unsheathed the sword and extended it to its full length, nine feet, then crouched slightly and launched herself into the air, right at the statue. The sword was incredibly sharp at that length, capable of cutting through stone, and Mizuki swung it at the statue’s head as hard as she could, trying to keep some semblance of form.

The sword got stuck halfway through the cheekbone, lodged in place.

Mizuki zipped back, leaving the sword behind, narrowly avoiding being swatted from the air. The statues could move relatively fast, as fast as a person could move but at a bigger scale, and Mizuki knew that meant enormous amounts of power.

<Run,> shouted Alfric, but he stayed where he was so he could bring up the rear. Mizuki flew out through the tunnel without needing to be told twice, leading the way.

The entrance they’d gone through was too small for the statues to get out of, but once the party had made their exit, there was a banging and rumbling sound against the interior walls of the mountain dome. The party stood and watched for a moment while the Precarious Lute played.

<We should make our exit from the dungeon,> said Alfric. <Unless someone has a plan to kill those things.>

<They’re not alive,> said Isra. <How could we kill them?>

<Flatten them into dust,> said Alfric. <But we don’t have the power necessary for that.>

<I’m so sorry,> said Verity.

<Don’t worry about it,> said Alfric. <We head for the ship.>

He’d just finished saying that when the side of the mountain exploded outward, with pieces of walls falling down. One of the women — the one who looked like Xy — came out of the hole she’d made, gray stone legs flailing in the air for a moment before she slipped down, sliding against the rock and making a landing that kicked up dust and knocked over trees.

Mizuki reached the boat first, because she could fly faster than any of them could run, and she willed the boat to use its slender wooden hands to push off from the dock. As it turned out, she was a little bit premature in doing that, because the others had to jump to make it, and Alfric nearly fell into the water — before being caught by the ship’s protruding wooden hands.

<Out of the dungeon then,> said Alfric as the ship started off without its sail. When Mizuki looked over the side, she saw hundreds of wooden arms coming out of the hull, all of them doggy-paddling, moving the ship along. That was good, because the second statue had come out through the hole, and the first was making its way toward them. <Isra, how deep is the water?>

<It’ll come up to their necks,> said Isra.

<That’ll slow them,> said Alfric. He was watching the statues. <I think we can make it, but we may have to abandon the ship.>

<Wait,> said Mizuki. <Sword.> She took a running leap from the ship and flew through the air, skimming the water for just a moment as she’s mis-judged how much power she would need.

The sword was still stuck in the head of the one that looked like Xy, and Mizuki angled herself to snatch it. The stone hands were reaching for her as she came in, and she switched her angle at the last moment, zigging to the side. She reached for the hilt and just barely managed to grab it, letting herself flip around. For a moment she thought it would be caught fast, but the weight of her movement let it cut itself free, and then she was off into the sky as stone arms reached for her.

Mizuki landed back on the ship with a flourish, brought the sword back to a more reasonable length, then sheathed it. This was dungeoneering.

<Nicely done,> said Alfric. <That would have been a bad thing to lose.>

Mizuki had expected him to be reproachful, and she felt glad that he understood the need to get the sword back, even if it had been done in rather dramatic fashion.

The chest was walking on the water, easily keeping pace with the ship, and they all moved forward a bit so that it would make the jump up.

Verity was looking at the statues, who were still walking through the water after them, their heads only barely visible. The ship was moving faster than them, but not by that much, and if they wanted to get the ship through the dungeon entrance, it was going to be a challenge and a matter of time.

<That stone is tough,> said Mizuki. <Or … seals back up quickly after a clean cut. Hard to tell. I might be able to take them out, but if I get hit even once, that’s probably the end of the dungeon for me. One of those hands grabbing me would crush bone to paste.>

<I think we race into the exit,> said Alfric. <With these long arms, we might be able to have it walk on land, and then … I don’t think it’s going to fit, but if it doesn’t fit, then we need to kill the statues, and I’m not sure I want to risk that given how few options we have. Stone is notoriously difficult to deal with, and this is worse than stone.>

<I don’t think it’s worth riskin’ Mizuki, her tryin’ to make an attempt on them,> said Hannah. <This was meant to be exploratory, we explored, information gathered, some henlings and such taken, success all around.>

<It was going so well,> said Verity, still looking at the statues, which they’d gained some distance from. She turned to look at Isra. <I really am fine, it’s fine, this is just —>

<It’s okay,> said Isra. She was also looking at the statues. <You made me look nice, at least.>

<I think I can make it so this doesn’t happen next time,> said Verity. <I hadn’t even considered things that weren’t monsters.> She seemed to want to move on from the topic as quickly as possible.

<We’ve still got an exit to make,> said Alfric. <We’ll have a debrief later. I do think this exceeds expectations.> He went over and put a hand on Verity’s shoulders. <I was wrong to doubt you. You did very well.>

She smiled at him. <Thanks, I guess.>

The statues were still coming after them, fully submerged now, save for their heads, and even those occasionally dipped down beneath the water due to variation in the terrain.

It took some time for them to reach the island they’d started from, and they put even more distance between them and their pursuers before they got to it. Mizuki was feeling much better about the dungeon — it wasn’t a proper dungeon if you didn’t have a chance to throw a fireball.

<Alright, slow down a bit as we get to the dock,> said Alfric.

<What?> asked Verity. <Aren’t you controlling the ship?>

<I thought Mizuki was,> said Alfric, turning toward her.

<Nope,> said Mizuki.

<So it’s been moving on its own?> asked Alfric. <That’s worrying.> He looked down at the deck of the ship. <Slow down as we approach the shore,> he said.

<How’s it goin’ to understand you through the party channel?> asked Hannah.

“Slow down,” Alfric said.

The ship didn’t listen to him.

“Brace,” said Alfric, holding onto the ship’s railing.

Mizuki followed suit, though she could fly, and if she got knocked off, it was no big deal. When the ship hit the shore at full speed though, there was nothing like a crash, only a smooth rising up from the water as the arms at the bottom of the ship moved it along like it was a centipede. It didn’t slow down as it reached the dungeon exit either.

While the ship was too big for the entrance, it began to warp and shape itself, seemingly without any input from anyone on the ship. It grew longer, slimmer, and started scuttling lower to the ground, though when Mizuki peeked over the edge she could see that the arms hadn’t gotten any shorter, they were only bent a bit.

It still seemed like a tight fit, even as the mast lowered itself, and Mizuki flattened herself onto the deck to avoid being clipped by the roof of the tunnel.

When the ship hit the tunnel entrance, they heard the splintering of wood, but they were all flat on the ship’s reduced deck, and couldn’t do anything to help. Mizuki regretted not jumping off the ship when it had been clear that it was going to force itself into the tunnel, but after some brief struggle, the roof of the tunnel began moving swiftly overhead. The sound of hundreds of wooden hands clawing their way through the tunnel was almost overwhelming, but it didn’t last all that long before it was blue sky overhead again, and the ship was once again expanding itself.

“Wow,” said Mizuki, standing up. “And no one was controlling this thing?”

They were out of the dungeon, and the ship was at rest again, mast rising once more.

“That’s a bit dangerous,” said Alfric.

“Are — are you all okay?” asked Pinion, who was standing nearby.

Alfric took off his helmet. He was smiling. “Great.” He patted the railing of the ship. “We have a new sailing vessel, and it came fully armed.”

Mizuki groaned, but she loved it.

Despite the statues of naked women coming to kill them, or maybe because of them, it felt like they were back, dungeoneers once more.

Chapter 161 - The Empty Dungeon

Tilde felt like she was finally fitting in, though she was well aware that she’d made a pretty horrible first impression, and not that great of a second impression. She’d said that they needed her and asked for a larger share, then came crawling back to them some weeks later, since it turned out that while they did need her, she needed them more. Finding a party wasn’t all that difficult, but finding a good party, and one at the right elevation, had proven to be much more of a challenge than she’d thought it would be — much more of a challenge than, by rights, it should have been.

Still, when their dungeon was a bust, she kept her mouth shut. She didn’t fully understand the relationship between the two parties, nor the depth of history they seemed to have with each other, which included two people that Tilde had never met: Lola and Kell. She was, in effect, taking their spot. So when the party spoke, she kept quiet, only listening.

“We got nothing,” said Mardin. “It was almost impressive.”

“By far the worst dungeon we’ve ever done,” nodded Grig. “In fact, the worst dungeon that I think I’ve ever even heard of.”

“They sucked the dungeon dry,” said Josen. He was tall, balding, and imperious in the self-important way that some boys his age could be. They were all eighteen years old, two years younger than Tilde, who had spent the last two years going into dungeons. They’d kept up a healthy pace, almost as many dungeons as she’d been a part of with her old party, which made them roughly matched on elevation, but there was an undercurrent of immaturity that was unmistakable.

“That’s an interesting hypothesis,” said Pinion. “We won’t know until they come out, and possibly won’t know even when they come out. Do you suppose that this has happened before? Selden dungeons for those who go in after the Settlers?”

“Er, that’s not the proper use of the term,” said Grig. “A selden dungeon is more … all monsters, no loot. This was no monsters, no loot.”

“One newt,” said Mardin.

“It was a salamander,” said Tilde. She knew her animals.

“And it did attack me,” said Mardin. “So it technically counts as a monster, even if it was easy to stomp.” The stomp had felt needlessly cruel to Tilde, perhaps just because of the anger with which it had been done.

“Does that imply that their party got a dungeon that used up absolutely all of the magic in the dungeon?” asked Marsh.

“That is the leading hypothesis,” said Pinion. “Which unfortunately means that our ability to derive useful information by comparison between the two dungeon runs is compromised. Next time we’ll have you go first.”

“It’s bad news that they used all the magic,” said Marsh. “Is that … is it legal for them to do that? Will they get in trouble?”

“Dungeons are only barely regulated,” said Josen.

“Yeah, and even a normal party takes from the available store of the dungeon,” said Grig. “It’s not insignificant for a party of our size. In theory you want to avoid places that other parties of your elevation have gone, but in practice no one bothers with that. Besides, weak dungeons have weak rewards, it’s a fair trade-off.”

“Er,” said Pinion. “That is, weak dungeons are correlated with weak rewards, since they’re presumed to be governed by the same mechanism. But it’s not always the case.”

“Why do you say presumed?” asked Mardin. “Isn’t it true?”

“It’s presumed to be true,” said Pinion. “We don’t actually know how dungeons are created. It’s possible that the distinct categories of things inside a dungeon have different origins, or are governed by different systems within the systems.”

“Urgh,” said Mardin. “Researchers.”

“It’s an important distinction,” said Josen. He was standing with his arms folded, somewhat away from the others. He considered himself to be better than them, and a more vital member of the team, which irked Tilde to no small degree. He was marginally more likable when drunk, because he showed a bit of passion, but that passion was always for wizardry rather than anything she could relate to. The only reason he was friends with the others seemed to be that they had known each other for years, since they were young, and even then, they didn’t seem to like him all that much.

“Alright,” said Mardin after a moment. “I’ll bite. Why is it an important distinction?”

“In wizardry we start from basic systems and build them up in order to perform incredible feats of power and utility,” said Josen. That was just how he talked. “Pinion is attempting to do the opposite, to take the incredible and reduce it down into something that can be understood piece by piece from the structure of entads to the layouts of the dungeons. It’s likely an impossible task, even with all the blessings of Qymmos, but an understanding of the individual components and those that can be broken down further will be paramount to the endeavor.”

“Right,” said Mardin. “Sure.” He just barely refrained from rolling his eyes.

The dungeon had been a disappointment, weaker than even the first dungeon that Tilde had ever been to, which had been picked because it was expected to be weak. There had been three rooms, hardly anything adorning them, and a single ‘monster’, which was the small salamander that had quickly been put out of its misery. They’d found no entads, no ectad materials, no henlings, just those three small rooms that had little except for barren earth.

The Settlers still hadn’t appeared from within the dungeon, and they had gone in first.

“How long do we wait?” asked Tilde.

“We don’t need to wait,” said Mardin. “Personally, I’m going to head off, spend some time reading and praying, take a nap, and get over the disappointment of the dungeon.” He turned to go without even waiting for anyone to respond.

“I’m going too,” said Grig. “They can fill us in later, if they end up coming out.”

“They might not?” asked Pinion.

Grig drew a finger across his throat and made a gurgling noise.

“Ah,” said Pinion. He looked nonplussed, as though the idea hadn’t even occurred to him.

“Well, I’m staying,” said Marsh. “I’d like to be here when they come out, especially if they need some help.”

“I’ll stay too,” said Tilde. “I brought a book.”

“You brought a book to a dungeon?” asked Grig, who hadn’t left when he’d said he was going to leave.

“Dungeons can have a fair amount of waiting to them,” said Tilde. “There’s no reason not to bring a book, so long as you can keep it safe from the elements.”

“Huh,” said Grig. “One of the first rules of dungeons is that they’re never safe. You’re not supposed to be sticking around long enough to read a book.”

Tilde watched him. She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to respond to that. Her own experience — which was more than his — was that dungeons were safe enough if you had properly cleared each room and created a fallback point.

“I mean,” said Grig. “It’s just, we were all in Junior League, and there are specific ways of doing things we all learned.”

“I was in the Junior League,” said Tilde. “I just disagree with some of the scripture they preach.”

“Ah,” said Grig. “Well, I guess I’ll get going, let me know how they did, if and when they come out.”

He scuttled off, and Tilde watched him go. Josen had left without so much as saying goodbye, and that meant that it was just her, Pinion, and Marsh. Pinion pulled out his own book, a slender volume on bardic magic, while Marsh seemed content to simply stare at the dungeon entrance.

The book Tilde had been reading was about warfare, an imagined battle between Inter and Kiromo using publicly known information about the military dispositions of the two nations. There was a good deal of speculation in it, and some of the speculative elements she simply didn’t agree with, but more noxious were the elements of fiction that the author had woven in. The characters had all the weight and heft of a cotton ball, and there were no less than three romance subplots that added nothing to the work, especially because they could be seen coming a mile off. There was also the stench of propaganda about the work, which leant heavily in favor of Inter, though Tilde had to imagine that was more because of the leanings of the author rather than any actual effort or pressure on behalf of the actual government.

She was skimming through another romance scene when she paused for a moment to look up at Marsh. It had been ten or fifteen minutes and he was still just staring at the dungeon entrance.

“Are you okay?” she asked him.

“Oh, fine,” said Marsh. “Just worried about them.”

“About her?” asked Tilde.

“No, all of them,” said Marsh. “They’re friends. Some more than others, but they are friends. Even Alfric has come back around on me. I think. I spend more time with them than the others in our party, so that makes sense.”

“Sorry,” said Pinion. “Come back around?”

“Er,” said Marsh. “You don’t know the backstory?”

“Not really, no,” said Pinion. “I have a full history of dungeons done by the party, thanks to Alfric, but I wasn’t aware that there was any … unpleasantness.”

It took Marsh some time to recount everything. Tilde had heard it all before, and zoned out just a bit, though didn’t return to the book. Marsh wasn’t a particularly gifted storyteller, but to his credit, he didn’t attempt too much in the way of defending himself or the others. They were the villains of the piece, and he cast them as such. He seemed happy to have gotten some kind of resolution in the end, with Lola cast out, even if it wasn’t by their own hand. He’d been stabbed, apparently.

Tilde’s previous party had their own drama, and she found herself thinking about that again, which had become a bit of a pastime now that they’d all gone their separate ways.

Discussions of party makeup often resulted in discussions of both gender and attraction. It was widely considered best if there was no romance within a party, and sometimes people tried to force that by having everyone be of the same gender — which had one large, obvious flaw (Garos), and one slightly smaller and less obvious flaw (jealousy and competition for partners). Either way, it was widely regarded that if you weren’t going to do that, it was better that the genders be at least roughly balanced. One girl with four guys, or vice versa, was a recipe for failure, the largest disadvantage you could give yourself.

That was how Tilde had ended up with her party. They’d wanted another girl.

Emi was the party’s cleric. She was an intellectual, always reading, whip-smart, and eminently likable. But where Tilde was tall, lanky, and got consistently described in cliches like ‘beanpole’, Emi was slender and well-proportioned, and her height never seemed to be an issue, was not, in fact, something that Emi or others ever gave any thought to. All three of the boys adored her in their own way, and all three had ended up sleeping with her.

It had hurt to not be considered, to not even be in the running. She understood that every party eventually developed their own petty dramas, and that these were often romantic in nature, but it still stung fiercely, and she ended up having to deal with her party members, console them when things felt like they were blowing up, play peacemaker and ‘group mom’ with them. There had been a time when she’d felt like she and Diedretch were on the outside, watching a love triangle, commiserating and possibly having their own flirtation … and then Diedretch had found comfort in Emi’s arms, same as the others.

All that was gone now. They’d ended on amicable terms, all of them, but there had been times when it was a complete emotional slog, a knock-down drag-out fight. They had talked about reunions or letters, but in the end, Tilde had taken her share of the money and split, and she was doing her best to look forward, not back.

So far, no one in the new party had made a pass at her. She didn’t imagine that they would. She was attractive in an unconventional way, which was a nice way of saying that most people weren’t attracted to her. Her face was more or less normal, but she was a lanky giant, and not in the way that clerics of Xuphin were giants. Her proportions were all wrong, stretched out, much more in her torso than her legs, and while she wasn’t self-conscious about it, she was very conscious of how others saw her.

“What are you reading?” asked Pinion.

“Oh,” said Tilde. She looked down. It had been at least five minutes since she’d read a word. “Just … a book on speculative warfare.” She paused. “It’s a little too concerned with its characters and narrative, a little too blase about creating a plausible world.”

“Interesting,” said Pinion. “But of course, in a real war between nations, there would be all kinds of things that only a dozen people even know about.” He looked up slightly. “Entads pulled from the vaults, monsters pulled from the dungeons, exotic ectad contraptions and wizardly warfare, things like that.”

“Pyros would get called up,” said Marsh, absently. “Though I don’t think we’d have much to do.”

“No, most of it would get handled by national instruments,” said Tilde.

“Why are you reading it, if I can ask?” asked Pinion.

“Oh,” said Tilde. “I don’t know. It’s of a genre that I normally like. Incredibly high stakes, the fate of the world, that sort of thing. Grounded though.” She looked down at the page she was on, where the buxom spy was seducing the handsome ectad engineer who knew state secrets. Of course she would fall in love with him, that was just how these things went. “More grounded, anyway.”

“Sorry if that’s a bad question,” said Pinion. “I always hated questions about what I was reading and why, though it’s such a natural thing to ask.”

“And you’re reading … something about dungeons?” asked Tilde.

“Well,” said Pinion, looking down. “It started off as being about dungeons, but the author used dungeons as a segue into other matters, now —”

He was interrupted by the sound of splintering wood. The tunnel that led into the dungeon was momentarily filled with wood, crashing and breaking as hundreds of wooden hands just barely pushed it through, and Tilde leapt to her feet, sword at the ready, instinct for combat pumping through her veins. The ship came to a stop though, and people slowly stood up from the deck of it, looking a bit puzzled that they had emerged from the dungeon. She missed the exchange of words, as her heart was still thumping in her ears, but she was able to slowly relax. Her mind had gone to dungeon escapes, which was natural, but apparently it was only a dramatic exit.

“There’s some damage,” said Alfric when he’d hopped down. “But it seems like it’s repairing itself. Pretty soon it’ll be ship-shape.”

He was right. The ship’s many arms were formed from the wood, and apparently could generate more wood from nothing. Curiously, the ship didn’t simply regenerate. Instead, the hands would create splinters, which they would then carefully slot into place, as though they were artisans putting together a delicate puzzle.

“Nice,” said Alfric, patting the ship. “This is a good get.”

“It’s really not,” said Verity. She seemed more hesitant to jump down from the ship, but it extended arms interlocking them to form steps for her. She smiled at the ship, and gave it a pat too once she was on the ground. “That is to say, we don’t have a use for it.”

“It would be good to get impressions now,” said Pinion. “Individually, ideally, so that there’s as little pollution as possible.”

“I can go first,” said Alfric. “Unless you want someone else?”

“I was hoping to speak with Verity, actually,” said Pinion. He looked at the ship. “Does it just … walk where you want it to go?”

“We don’t know yet,” said Alfric with a smile. “We’ll do our best to figure it out.”

“I think I’m going to go out, if we’re done for the day,” said Isra. “There’s still enough time for me to do a bit of scouting and hunting.” She turned to Mizuki. “Anything that you want to make for dinner?”

“Pig,” said Mizuki without hesitation. “Which I guess means boar. It’s been a bit since I’ve cooked for both parties, it’s temple day tomorrow … oh, and get something starchy, potatoes or something like that, and lots of vegetables.”

“I can try,” said Isra with a nod. She looked over at Pinion. “I’ll give my recounting later.”

“Looking forward to it,” said Pinion with a smile.

He went off with Verity, while Alfric and Mizuki looked at the ship together, particularly the wooden arms that sprouted in a thicket from the bottom like a forest of limbs. They apparently did not have time to do this in the dungeon. The arms weren’t still, and moved around casually, very lifelike, just in the same way that a person wouldn’t sit perfectly still.

“Anything I can do to help?” asked Tilde.

Alfric turned to look at her. “Your party came out early? We were in there less time than we’d planned, and you went in after us.”

“Our dungeon had almost nothing in it,” said Tilde. “Our running theory is that you somehow sucked the dungeon dry. If that bird boy was around, I’d suggest that he go in on his own to get another data point for Pinion.”

“That’s a really good idea,” said Alfric. “When you say nothing, what do you mean?”

Mizuki had made herself scarce, disappearing without fanfare, which had been accomplished through the use of a jade staff, one that seemed like a new addition. Hannah and Marsh had also gone off together, which meant that Tilde was alone with Alfric.

She hadn’t thought much of Alfric when she’d first met him. He didn’t leave much of an impression, and from everything she’d been told by his former party, she had expected him to be … less. He had been an overachiever in the Junior League, with rich and famous parents, and then had lost his carefully crafted party at the last moment and spent nearly a year floundering around. There was some suggestion that his ex-girlfriend had been responsible for his woes, and from everything Tilde had heard, she’d been awful, but it might have set Tilde up with the wrong ideas.

Last night, at the party, Mizuki had sat next to Tilde. She’d been an absolute terror while they were trying to play games, but at least she was a terror in a fun way. She had also taken it upon herself to be Tilde’s guide, not just to the games — which Mizuki only vaguely understood, though that might have been a bit — but to the table as a whole, to the house, and to the party. Mizuki was pretending that they were fast friends, and that was almost like being fast friends, though Mizuki had done almost all the talking.

Tilde had initially thought that this was flirtation, especially from the way that Mizuki would readily rest her fingers on Tilde’s arm or back. At a certain point though, just when Tilde had felt herself opening up to the idea, Mizuki had shifted to talking up Alfric.

“There is absolutely no way that anyone else wins this game,” said a slightly drunk Mizuki. “Alfric comes in with a plan, see, he started the game with a plan, cooked it up three nights ago and has been workin’ the variables ever since. Even the people at this table, their positioning, it’s all part of what he put to paper, or if it’s not what he decided was going to happen? Then it’s accounted for anyway. Flowcharts. He’s got them.”

“That sounds a bit extreme,” said Tilde, which felt diplomatic. Alfric was in the midst of explaining some aspect of the game to someone, but he could almost certainly hear everything that was being said.

“Oh, no, it makes him sound like he’s awful,” said Mizuki. “I mean, plans, right? Who needs them. But he’s very kind, always ready to help out, to put in the work, and honestly? It’s made me want to put in the work too, because I can’t stand seeing him take charge and then not pull my own weight. He’s very generous though. He’d give you the shirt off his back.” She turned to Alfric. “Alfric, give Tilde your shirt.”

“I’m not going to do that,” said Alfric, barely pausing in his conversation with Josen. A faint smile crossed his lips.

“He’s also very modest,” Mizuki continued, directing her attention back to Tilde. “He probably didn’t want you to see all his muscles.” She gestured to her own body, as though Tilde didn’t know where muscles were. “But he got his heart broken by Lola, just absolutely shattered, she was his only girlfriend and I get that he doesn’t want to risk that again.”

Tilde had thought that might be the end of it, but Mizuki continued on for quite some time.

“He picked up woodworking in a week flat,” she said. “Not even a week, like two days, something like that? There’s nothing that he can’t do. He knows the names of birds and fish, he’s studied fifty different weapons and fighting styles. You talk to him about knots, and he knows all of them.”

“Who doesn’t know knots?” asked Tilde.

“Yeah, right?” asked Mizuki, nodding in agreement. “What kind of absolute loser doesn’t know knots? But I mean my point is, he’s like a machine for self-improvement, like a wizard’s construct, clockwork, but in a good way, one of those that can tell you where each moon is. That’s nice, you know?”

“It does sound nice,” said Tilde.

She had thought about Alfric before going to bed. He wasn’t really what she considered to be her type — she liked men that were more expressive, quicker to joke, unserious types — but she was coming around on him and starting to see the appeal. She wondered whether that had been Mizuki’s intent. Mizuki did seem like a meddler, in a good way, and there seemed to be little other reason to spend an hour of their time drunkenly explaining all the ways that Alfric was great.

This was the mindset that Tilde was in when she was speaking with Alfric.

He was an attentive listener while she explained what their dungeon had been like, which was nice. Tilde wasn’t sure that she’d had someone listen to what she said with such obvious, patient interest.

“Our own was odd,” said Alfric. “No monsters, though there were hostile statues, so large and so dangerous that we had little choice but to run. I actually do think that we could have taken them, but especially with two, it would have been a challenge.”

“A challenge without reward,” said Tilde.

“No, the reward would have been more exploration,” said Alfric. “The place was huge, but the density of entads and ectad materials was actually quite low. I think next time we’re going to see whether Verity can iron out the kinks, naturally, but we’ll also plan for it to be a longer trip.” He rubbed his chin. “There were no creatures in the place, which was a bit of a shame, since I think if we could get them to our specifications, we could make a huge impact on the world.”

“My father was a bastlekeeper,” said Tilde.

“Really?” asked Alfric. “So you grew up around a lot of animals?”

“It was a bit … sad,” said Tilde. “We took in many that weren’t suited to this world, and others that were dungeon mad. Those needed to be dealt with at a remove, because if they knew you were there, they might beat their heads against the wall until they died, just trying to get at you.” She sighed. “I think it was good training for going into the dungeons, especially given how violent they were.”

“Have you ended up taking many bastles?” asked Alfric.

“No,” said Tilde. “It’s something that I wanted to transition toward, but it’s quite difficult without proper entad support. I think with Marsh on the team, there’s a good chance we can do it, but I haven’t broached the subject with him, and he seems to use his skill as a pyro more than his skill as a warlock.”

“There’s some difficulty involved in locking a living thing in place,” said Alfric. “He’s tried it on me during sparring. I didn’t particularly enjoy it.”

“You sparred together?” asked Tilde.

“We’ve tried it, yes,” said Alfric. “It’s one of the best ways to train, in my opinion. You get someone actively trying to use their skills against you. In Dondrian’s Junior League we would have monster matches, where you each get a rule you need to follow during the match. Sometimes it’s that you have to use a certain weapon, other times it’s that you have to use a certain tactic. The rules aren’t known to either participant, and the matches are often lopsided, which they think helps to prepare people for the process of learning and discovery that goes on in the dungeons.” He looked her up and down. “You’re a frontliner, would you like to spar some time?”

“Together?” asked Tilde. “I … suppose.”

“No pressure,” said Alfric. “I know you’re doing dungeons more regularly than we are. I went into this dungeon feeling like I was out of practice, and I think that bore out. I’d ask some of my party, but Hannah is the only one that comes close to being a physical match for me, and it’s good to be with someone new.”

Tilde felt her heart beating. He had only asked her to train with him, but there was an intimacy to fighting, she knew that well enough. She’d sparred with the members of her old party, and it had always been in those moments when they were drenched in sweat and panting with exertion that she felt attraction most keenly. She felt certain that Alfric didn’t mean it like that, and yet … there was a chance he did. Possibly she wouldn’t have seen it if she hadn’t been primed for it the night before.

“Sorry you didn’t get anything new from the dungeon, by the way,” said Alfric.

“It’s fine,” said Tilde. “There was no hard work involved. If we’d had to go through a few tough battles to come out with nothing, we might have minded. As it was, we only wasted the trip.”

Alfric smiled at her. “Well, we’ll see if we can find a way to make that up to you.”

She felt, again, that heat at her collar. Mizuki had been right about him. He was nice.

“Now to see if we can move the boat,” said Alfric. He turned to Tilde. “Let me know if you have any thoughts?”

She moved to stand beside him and looked at the boat. It felt good to be asked for her input, and while she had never been very good at entads, for him, she was willing to try.

Chapter 162 - False Starts

“What I had been going for was something like Pinion had told me about where he’s from,” said Verity. “Tall mountains, wide lakes, lots of fir trees, stony beaches … and at the start, it seemed like it was good, but then it was more of a sea than lakes, individual islands rather than a mountain range, and the trees were wrong.”

Hannah was off with Marsh, or possibly working on her sermon for tomorrow, while Isra was still off hunting, or possibly just taking some time to herself. It was the four of them, in the living room, Alfric, Mizuki, Verity, and Pinion. Pinion’s ‘interviews’ had been mostly concluded.

“So it wasn’t actually that close?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, overall?”

“The ship was what I had wanted,” said Verity. “But I hadn’t known what it would actually do.”

“You didn’t have a plan for it?” asked Alfric. “A blueprint for what the entad would be?”

“Oh, I had lots of plans,” said Verity. “I wanted the ship to fly, so we could tie it to the house and drift along behind it. It was meant to be a second home for me, something like Hannah’s space, a place in the air. So that didn’t work out, obviously, it’s just hands.”

“Lady hands,” said Mizuki.

“Er, yes,” said Verity. “Lady hands. Do you think that’s relevant?”

“No,” said Mizuki. She folded her arms across her chest. “Or … maybe?”

“We can talk about the statues,” said Verity. It would be easier, with Isra gone, though that conversation would have to happen eventually.

“Do we need to talk about the statues?” asked Mizuki.

“I’m just saying that we can,” said Verity.

“I find them interesting,” said Pinion. “But they’re much, much less interesting than the fact that you conclusively did it. You have, for the first time in human history, altered the makeup of the dungeon, and you’ve done it through mental effort alone. That’s enough to get a whole team of researchers out here, and the funding for a long study.”

“There have been successful attempts at altering dungeon makeup,” said Alfric. “This isn’t the first. It’s just the first where pre-specification worked absent physical alteration.”

“I’m not sure how I’m going to phrase it, but yes,” said Pinion. “We don’t actually know whether it’s physical or mental or spiritual or aetheric yet.” He bit his lip. “In theory, this is the first direct glimpse we’ve ever had into how dungeons work.”

“This is what I was trying to communicate by letter,” said Alfric.

“It’s stunning,” Pinion nodded. “When is the next one?”

The party took it in turns to look around the table. In Verity’s opinion, the next dungeon couldn’t come soon enough, and if someone voiced their opinion that they should find a new dungeon and do it today, she probably would have agreed. Still, they had been put in danger thanks to her, and if they had stuck around, who knew what else they might have found? They were luckily faster than the statues, but if there were other booby traps, it couldn’t be guaranteed that they wouldn’t smack straight into something awful. In part, the decision to leave had been forced by the ship, but knowing that there was danger, it was still a good time to get going. The shifting dungeon and the poisonous dungeon had proven that these bespoke dungeons she was accidentally creating could get incredibly dangerous in a hurry.

“I have school,” said Mizuki, frowning a bit. “But I can take a day off, or we could do it tomorrow if that’s not too soon, or … after I get back some day?”

“We want to spend more time, not less,” said Alfric, frowning. “I think it was good to get out while we did, good that we didn’t actually suffer, and we got two good entads. Next dungeon, assuming that it’s not dangerous from the start, I’d like to fully map. It’ll be better information for Verity, not to mention Pinion.”

“That dungeon was huge though,” said Mizuki. “And we stole all the mana it had stored up. From what you’ve said before, it was like … like a dungeon created for a party of one hundredth elevation?”

“Not quite,” said Pinion. “The ‘percent per party elevation’ rule starts to break down at higher elevations, and it’s difficult to translate mana consumed into dungeon size. It’s one of those things that isn’t at all clear. And then there are the infinidungeons, which exist at the upper end of mana capture.” He shook his head.

“So Verity might be capable of making an infinidungeon?” asked Mizuki.

“Probably,” said Alfric. “Any one of the Dondrian hexes has so much captured mana that what gets generated is impossible to complete by any one team — impossible to fully map, even with very good mapping.” He glanced at Pinion. “That might be down to the specifics of the curves involved.”

“Curves?” asked Mizuki.

“Mathematical curves,” said Pinion. She was giving him a blank look. “Um, if you plot the numbers on a graph, most of the rules of thumb break down because they’re linear in some way — a line.”

“Imma stop you right there,” said Mizuki. “Math is not a good subject for me. Talking about curves and lines and plotting things on graphs isn’t going to work. I’ll just take your word that big dungeons in saturated hexes are different.”

“The point is that they’re not different,” said Pinion. “Or, not thought to be different. The differences are accounted for by basic rules, and those basic rules hold for all dungeons, at least in theory. That might not actually be true though, and dungeons in general are so variable that if there were exceptions, they would be difficult to spot.”

“This is making my head hurt,” said Mizuki. “I’m going to just trust all of you to figure it out and let me know where to point my fireballs.”

Pinion laughed. “Alright, well right now there’s very little we can figure out. I was going to start with some analysis of the components of Verity’s aims, give them some grading in terms of how successful she was in reaching those aims, and then move on from there.”

“I’m out,” said Mizuki, placing her hands flat on the table. “Hopefully Isra comes back soon and I can do some cooking, which I actually know how to do. I’ll be upstairs until then.” She slipped out of the living room seeming unconcerned with leaving them behind. She was normally a cheery person, but there wasn’t a trace of a smile on her face.

“Was it something I said?” asked Pinion.

“Nah,” said Alfric. “She’s just not having fun, and honestly, doesn’t really need to be here for a technical discussion. She’s smarter than she gives herself credit for, but especially when you start breaking out math, she gets overwhelmed and then gives up. She’ll be right as rain once she’s doing something in one of her domains of expertise.”

“Good,” said Pinion, who seemed to take that as fact.

Verity wasn’t so sure, and decided that she’d pay Mizuki a visit, or possibly offer some help with cooking, at least once they were done.

“Now then,” said Pinion, who had a notebook out. “We can dissect aims and then outcomes. One of the most clearly successful aims was to not have any creatures or people in the dungeon, which was accomplished flawlessly, at least insofar as we can tell. For everything else, we need to break down categories, and figure out some kind of rubric.”

“I … don’t really think that it’s like that,” said Verity. “It’s like a song, a song that’s sung in an instant. It’s not an imposition of will, it’s a duet, I guess, an understanding of the dungeon and what it can produce, and a prodding that gets it to make something that we agree on.” She frowned. She didn’t fully understand it, and would have been able to better avoid the pitfalls if she had, but there was something about the way Pinion was attempting to understand it that felt like the wrong approach. “I think, when we do this again, we’ll get different results, and I think it will be because it’s a different dungeon, almost by necessity.”

“Hmm,” said Pinion. “You think that next time you might have trouble excluding creatures?”

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “When I was on the precipice, I was trying to construct, in my head, a kind of time and place that might spring from the world around me, from the hex. We went in through a tunnel, so it seems natural that we went out through a tunnel, I suppose. I didn’t plan that, but it went through my head, the shape of it. Does that make sense?”

“Not particularly,” said Pinion. “We’ll attempt to unwrap it though, with time. I think for now, I’ll go work on my own way of seeing things, and then I can talk with you about the ways in which I’m wrong — which will be borne out by a second dungeon. I might have some thoughts for next time, things that I would like you to try in order for us to get some better understanding of what you’re doing, what you can do, and what we might try after that.”

“Alright,” said Verity. It felt good to have a plan in place, even if she still thought that Pinion didn’t have the right angle on it. To Verity, it had felt like a song, and while she knew that you could do the Qymmos thing on songs, she didn’t feel like it was often that helpful.

“Before we go our separate ways,” said Alfric. “I want to apologize. You said that you had a handle on it, and it turns out that you did. I should have been more supportive.”

Verity laughed. “To be honest, the idea that no one had any faith in me might have helped to spur me on. It’s possible that I got a good result purely out of spite.”

“Low level spite, right?” asked Alfric.

Verity grinned. “Yes, of course. I know you care, that you mean well, no apology necessary.”

Statues aside, it did feel good to have a success, and Verity was, overall, quite pleased with herself. The concert had gone well, the dungeon had gone well, and if she wasn’t as completely fine with Isra going off to be intimate with someone, that was relatively small potatoes.

Relatively.

Verity went upstairs, to where Mizuki was laying facedown on her bed. The door had been open, so Verity stepped in and shut it behind her.

“Hey,” said Mizuki without moving. “Isra back yet?”

“The dungeon wasn’t what you wanted,” said Verity. “And the post-dungeon wasn’t either.”

“I’d been looking forward to it,” said Mizuki. “And I didn’t even get to throw one fireball.”

“You did,” said Verity. She sat down on the bed, next to Mizuki. “It just splashed harmlessly against the statue.”

“Yeah, and it was awesome,” said Mizuki. “The only thing that would have made it more awesome would have been if it had worked. And did you see that thing where I snatched the sword back? Just flew in with hands reaching up for me?” She was still face down. “Badass.”

“Anything I can do?” asked Verity.

“Oh, I don’t know, I just don’t like feeling like I’m out of my depth,” said Mizuki. “Pinion … he’s fine, but he’s going on about all this stuff that Alfric is nodding along to, and I just feel like, ‘is this what dungeons are going to be now?’ Because I was kind of good at dungeons, I think, the old dungeons, and now I’m worried that they’re all going to be like that, and you’ll get the statue thing licked, pun not intended, and where does that leave me?”

Verity patted Mizuki on the back.

“Yes, more of that,” said Mizuki.

Verity continued to pat Mizuki on the back, then gradually moved to scratching her back instead.

“You’re doing well at Rayedhcraft?” asked Verity.

“Yup,” said Mizuki. “Just super.”

“Any progress with the magical rocks?” asked Verity.

“They’re called mana stones,” said Mizuki.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever once heard you call them that,” said Verity. She scratched a little harder, and Mizuki made a noise. “You’re fitting in though?”

“Hey, why don’t we do this more often?” asked Mizuki. “I like back scratches.”

“You’ve got the most going on,” said Verity. “Maybe even too much going on, since you insist on cooking so much.”

“Do you think that Alfric would scratch my back like this?” asked Mizuki.

“Absolutely,” said Verity. She pulled her hand back. “Do you want horrible dungeons with horrible monsters?”

“Kind of,” said Mizuki. “I mean, you remember those bats that dived down from the ceiling at us? The ones that I dodged like I was the wind? That was such a rush.”

“It seems like a bad way to get your kicks,” said Verity. “A dangerous way to get your kicks. You’ve been like that for as long as I’ve known you though, blowing up things, going absurdly high into the air and then plummeting to the ground, which I don’t understand at all. Do you need more kicks in your life?”

“Maybe,” said Mizuki. There was a long pause. Mizuki still hadn’t risen from the bed. “Being a wizard is kind of boring, at least at the start.”

“You knew that, right?” asked Verity. “I mean, everyone said.”

“Yeah, I knew, it’s just,” Mizuki took a breath. “It’s booooring.”

Verity smiled. “Even more than practicing an instrument, I’m told.”

“I’m not going to quit, I just want to get to the good part,” said Mizuki. “The best part of being a sorc, at least for me, is seeing these things hanging in the air, bits of magic, not always different but different often enough, and you think to yourself ‘welp, I guess this is what I’m working with’.”

“Which is usually some form of fireball,” said Verity.

“Oh there’s like a dozen ways of making fireballs,” said Mizuki. “And sometimes they’re not proper fireballs, they’re something else that only looks like a fireball. It’s like cooking, in a way, there are lots of things you’d call a stew, or a sandwich, even if they’ve got totally different ingredients. It’s the thing that I like. And everything that I know about wizardry is that it’s like that, but you get to pick your own ingredients. One of the friend groups I have at wizarding school has these constant conversations about loadouts, reconfiguration, all that kind of thing, and even within wizardry, there’s some improvisation.”

“You have multiple friend groups there?” asked Verity.

“Sure,” said Mizuki. “The newbies, who I do the rock petting and stuff with, the researchers, who I met through sorc stuff, and then some older students who I met at a house party. None of them are close friends, but I don’t have classes all the time, and I need to be with someone.”

“Do you?” asked Verity.

<I’m home, with food,> Isra said into the party channel. <Raw food.>

“Finally,” said Mizuki, sitting up. She looked at Verity. “Don’t tell her I said ‘finally’, tell her I said something more complimentary. And … thanks for stopping by.”

“No problem,” said Verity. “Let me know if you need anything.”

“More back scratches,” said Mizuki. She beamed. “But later. Right now I need to find out what kind of meat I’m going to be cooking.”

Verity sat for a moment after Mizuki left, then went to her room for another bout of practice.

Maybe it was the talk about the dreary reality of grinding through practice, but Verity picked Beruchald to work on, one of the pieces she’d played at the large Dondrian concert series. She was out of practice with it, which happened frighteningly fast, but she picked it back up easily enough, and knew that the flaws wouldn’t be noticeable to the common audience. There was something that thrilled her about the idea of playing it at a run-down tavern in the middle of nowhere, but it was thrilling perhaps because of the reality that no one really had the training or education to understand it or its cultural importance. Verity didn’t particularly like Beruchald either, it just tickled her to imagine that music in such a different context.

When Isra came into the room, she was in only a towel, having come straight from the shower. Verity continued on as though this wasn’t incredibly distracting — but it was less distracting than it had been when they were dating each other, or before they were dating each other.

“It wasn’t a clean kill,” Isra explained. “Too much blood, too much dirt.”

Verity nodded, but brought the song to its natural conclusion before responding. By that time, Isra was half-dressed. Verity had been keeping her eyes at the middle distance, pretending that she couldn’t see anything of the dressing process. It didn’t ignite the same fire in her as before though, which was good but perhaps a little sad. Isra was doing nothing to entice though, and the actual process of dressing was not, by itself appealing except for the brief nudity involved.

“I’d like to talk, if you don’t mind,” said Verity.

Isra had just finished slipping into a dress that left her arms bare, and she sat on the bed on the other side of the room. “Alright.”

“It’s really not a big deal. The statues, they were … just things going on in my head that ideally you wouldn’t have to know about,” said Verity. “Not jealousy, or envy, or … maybe those things a little bit, unavoidable thoughts, the kind of thing that you’d have to have complete control of your own mind not to feel …” She pursed her lips. “We’re going to do more dungeons, and they’ll probably betray things that I would rather keep to myself, and I just don’t want it to be an issue.”

“I thought I would enjoy it more,” said Isra. “Hooking up.”

Verity shifted. “Oh?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “In the moment, it felt electric, but with you there was more … emotion. Connection. It’s hard to describe.”

“I’m unfortunately not in a position to give advice,” said Verity. She felt bad for Isra, and had no way of knowing how to make it better. “You now officially have more experience with women than I do.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. “I think maybe I just … won’t do that again.”

“Was she … she treated you well?” asked Verity, frowning slightly.

“Yes,” said Isra. “It wasn’t her, it was me. You know, I had liked flirting? I would flirt a lot when I went out for scouting. But I was out today, in a different village, and this cute boy walked up to me with that sort of swagger they do sometimes, and it felt … I don’t know. Different? I kept imagining what it would be like to be with him, and to just get up and leave the next day, as though it hadn’t happened.”

“Er,” said Verity. “And so you didn’t flirt?”

“I don’t really know,” said Isra. “There are different ways of flirting. I think I was flirting, just not that happy about it.”

“I think it might be better to talk to Hannah about this,” said Verity. “I want to help, if you’re feeling bad feelings, or if you’re confused, but … I’m not sure that I get it. It’s hard to put myself in your shoes, I guess. Sorry.”

“I understand that,” said Isra. “It would be hard to put myself in my own shoes. I just thought it would be different.” She didn’t seem sad, really, just a bit lost and confused. “I don’t know why it should be that way.”

Verity shrugged. “Who knows? There have been times I’ve wondered where my thoughts and emotions come from, and I never had all that good of an answer. Sometimes I dread practice, I would rather do anything else, and then five minutes in it’s perfectly fine. I know that it will be fine, but I still feel the dread, and it doesn’t make any sense to me. And for the small concert, I didn’t feel that dread, and I didn’t know why I shouldn’t be feeling the same. A performance is a performance whether it’s for fifty people or five thousand.”

“But it’s not,” said Isra. “It should be one thing, but it’s the other.” She pursed her lips.

“Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” said Verity. It felt perfunctory, because of course there was nothing that she could do, not when the problem was in Isra’s own head.

“I will,” said Isra with a sigh. “Why is life so difficult to figure out?”

“I wish I knew,” said Verity.

After another half hour of practice, Verity made her way downstairs, where the house was starting to smell good. Isra had bagged a deer and then also gathered entirely too much in the way of vegetables. The tubers she’d found were something called ‘slug yams’, which were slimy and gray until their skins were removed. Once that business was done, they were mostly just bog-standard yams, and Verity was assured that the taste would be just the same, maybe a tiny bit sweeter and more nutty. All the work was done by the time Verity came back down, though Mizuki had saved a single slug yam to show off, which was doing nothing to whet anyone’s appetite.

“So,” said Hannah, who’d emerged from her private room. “Everyone is comin’ to the sermon tomorrow? It’s been some time since I’ve done a proper one, and this’ll be before townsfolk, no one that I properly know save the other cleric.”

“Of course we’ll come,” said Mizuki, who’d just sat down on the couch. The venison roast and the yams needed time, but only time, so that meant a break from the cooking. “Why wouldn’t we?”

“Maybe you get enough of me at home,” said Hannah. “I can’t imagine I’ll say much that I haven’t said before.”

“Can we get a sneak peek?” asked Verity.

“And ruin it?” asked Hannah.

“I give sneak peeks all the time, does that ruin it?” asked Verity.

“Ruin, no,” said Hannah. “But I imagine it’s easier to hold your interest if you haven’t heard the whole rant beforehand, and the last thing I need is my friends lookin’ bored in the audience.”

“It might help to run through it,” said Verity.

“Nah,” said Hannah. “Marsh has heard it half a dozen times already, and I want to save my voice. But so long as you’re all comin’, that’s what I wanted to know.”

“And Vertex is eating with us today?” asked Verity.

“They’d better be,” said Mizuki. “The oven is basically full of food, if I’m not feeding a dozen people we’re going to be eating leftovers for the rest of our lives.”

“They’re doing okay?” asked Verity.

“Okay?” asked Alfric. “How do you mean?”

“With the new girl,” said Verity. “I don’t know, I haven’t spoken with them much, even though we’re ostensibly traveling together. I didn’t really talk to them much when Kell was in their party either.”

“Grig is holdin’ it together,” said Hannah. “And Marsh, of course, can do no wrong.”

“I talked with the new girl at our party,” said Mizuki. “She seemed nice, a bit shy maybe. I think she’s in it more for the dungeons than for anything else. And Vertex aren’t really … I mean, they’re not so much friends as they are people who spend most of their time together.”

“I think they’re friends,” said Alfric. “It’s just the way they are around each other is different. That’s all. I was noticing it last night.”

“Well, I’m glad we’re not them, that’s all,” said Mizuki.

“There’s probably a better way to phrase that,” said Verity.

“Story of my life,” said Mizuki. “I need to go check on the roast, and the dining room needs to be reconfigured for twelve.” She popped up from the couch.

“I’ll get on that,” said Alfric. Hannah went to go join him, and Isra went to go with Mizuki, either to check on the roast or to help get the sides ready.

“Can we talk for a bit?” Pinion asked Verity. He’d been jotting things down in his notebook while Tabbins sat in his lap, seeming not to pay any mind to the conversation that was going on around him.

“Certainly,” said Verity. She’d intended to just sit there, her practice for the day done.

“I was wondering how much you know about ship’s rigging,” he said.

“Er, nothing at all,” said Verity. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been on a sailing ship, though I have been on one without sails.”

“Well, I went to go look at the boat, and talked to Alfric, and it seems as though it’s functional,” said Pinion. “It got me to thinking, essentially focused on the question of how dungeons produce such things, and how the dungeon you helped nudge in one specific direction ended up being a product not just of you, but of things that you don’t know.”

“Ah,” said Verity. “Well, there were plenty of things that I know nothing about. I’ve done loom work, but I don’t think I could produce a design for a loom, let alone actually create one. There were aspects of the dungeon that the others pointed out that made me think ‘oh, I’d have never come up with that’.”

“Yet there was consistency, wasn’t there?” asked Pinion. “It’s one thing that’s notably lacking in dungeons. Everything was consistent, aside from the lack of people, and the lack of people accounts for some of the other lack of consistency, like the ship at a dock on an island with no one on it.”

“The statues?” asked Verity.

“Religious in nature, perhaps, a place of worship,” Pinion replied. “That is to say, it wasn’t random in the way that a monster made of necks sitting in a bathroom is random.”

“And … why would they have statues of those specific women?” asked Verity. “Why women? Why moving statues that wanted to kill us?”

“That, I don’t know,” said Pinion. “The theory that I’m going with is that ‘your’ dungeons are capable of exhibiting extraordinary coherence, perhaps even complete coherence, though it’s alternately possible that you’re providing a seed from which everything else is springing, and that coherency is only an illusion that comes from that.”

“Meaning?” asked Verity.

“Well, meaning that … let’s say that you provide keywords, ‘mountain’, ‘island’, or something like that,” said Pinion. “Let’s say, in fact, that there are dozens of these keywords, or key concepts, or something like that. If you create two separate things from that same cluster of concepts, they might look congruent with each other, linked or consistent, even though they’re only linked by their wellspring.”

“I’m still not sure I understand,” said Verity.

“Two songs, written with the same constraints,” said Pinion. “They might look like they were written by the same composer, or for the same purpose, but if they’re only following a pattern that’s been set, that might easily be a lie, and we might tease apart that lie, finding those places where it’s clear that they share only an origin, nothing more.”

“Hmm,” said Verity. “It would be easier with books. Two books, from different sections of the dungeon, which disagree on basic areas of history?”

“That would disprove some level of coherency, yes,” said Pinion. “Though we’d need to be very careful, because in the real world, books can and do disagree with each other.”

“I … suppose,” said Verity.

“The fundamental composition of a dungeon is a ‘room’,” said Pinion, who seemed quite excited. He was overall, a somewhat excitable man, which Verity thought was one of his better qualities. “So in the future, we can attempt to tease apart where or whether there still exist ‘room’ boundaries or whether that paradigm has been put to the wayside. But to do that, we need to not only map out the dungeon, but map out the henlings that have been pulled from the dungeon, and catalog the creatures and traps and what have you as well.”

“Alfric is going to love that,” said Verity. She gave Pinion a smile. “And I’ll do what I can. I think, from doing it the first time, it’ll be hard to create the separate pieces, to make a dungeon that’s not all of a single theme, that has sections, but … I suppose I don’t know.”

“We’re right at the beginning of this,” said Pinion, nodding. “I do want to see whether I can secure better equipment, entads that can give us feedback, or possibly see one of your dungeons on my own, if you could keep me safe.”

“Now that we might be able to arrange,” said Verity. She looked toward the other rooms, where the rest of the party was busy. “You know, I appreciate you being here.”

“Do you?” asked Pinion.

“It’s a good change of pace,” said Verity. “I think I resented your presence, before you actually came.”

“Ah?” asked Pinion.

“And it was a pleasant surprise, that’s all I’m saying,” said Verity. “Sorry if that was too much, I just … I think that it could have been bad. Thought that it could have been.”

“Well,” said Pinion. “Hopefully I can bear out as a useful resource while I’m here, before I make the journey back.”

The thought of him leaving hit Verity somehow, in an unpleasant way. He wasn’t a permanent addition, she knew that, but his small, bookish nature appealed to her. And he would be gone, relatively soon, moving back to his school, never to see them again. It made her preemptively sad, she realized. There was something about the idea of moving on that she didn’t like, whether it was herself or others. She’d left Dondrian, of course, but that had been a bad situation, and leaving a good situation, somewhere that suited you, felt wrong.

“I’m going to go see whether I can help with dinner, which I almost certainly can’t,” said Verity.

“Sounds good,” Pinion smiled. “I’ll be working on this, trying to find the best rubric for you to smash.”

She left, wondering why it felt so uncomfortable, but soon there was work for her to do, even if it was mostly just setting the table and making sure they were ready for guests.

Chapter 163 - The Sermon

Hannah felt nervous about the sermon, and dealt with that nervousness by baking. She was, as a rule, up early, a baker’s habit, and this day was no particular exception. She left Marsh snoring softly to himself in their bed in Lutopia Two, then went through into the house, where the sun was still half an hour away from peeking its head over the horizon. It was a three moon night though, relatively bright. Hannah felt some comfort in being the first one up, and always had, even when she was a young girl. It was like being the first person in line, or the first to get food.

Isra had been out foraging for a long time after their dungeon, and had brought back all kinds of things above and beyond the scrumptious meal that Mizuki had prepared the day before. In this case, she’d brought back barkberries, which were actually a type of parasite, red bulbs that would grow out from an infected tree. They were a delicacy that weren’t usually found so far to the south, and while Hannah had never cooked with them before, she was fairly sure that with enough experimentation, she could make a good sauce with them.

This ended up taking longer than Hannah had planned, but the end result was a thick, sticky sauce that had a good punch to it. Hannah then began work on the dough, which would be nicely laminated, with layers of the berry jam between them.

“You’re actually using the barf berries?” asked Mizuki when she woke up and made her way downstairs.

“Barkberries,” said Hannah. “And ay, I’m usin’ them.”

“She said it was a parasite,” said Mizuki. “And no one I know uses them.”

“You’re gettin’ further from home,” said Hannah. “Besides, you eat cheese, smelly ones even, don’t talk to me about some food or other bein’ gross.” She pushed the small bowl over. “Taste.”

Mizuki was skeptical, but dipped her finger in all the same. She looked at the red sauce, then stuck her finger in her mouth.

“Alright, not bad,” said Mizuki. “How much is that being covered up by lemon and sugar?”

“Almost not at all,” said Hannah.

“I’m never going to cook with it, but I can see where people would get used to it,” said Mizuki. “Tree pustules though, yuck.”

“All kinds of things sound gross when you make them sound gross,” said Hannah with a sigh.

“Hey, shouldn’t you be, I don’t know, preparing for the sermon or something?” asked Mizuki.

“As my teacher used to say, there’s nothin’ left but the worryin’,” said Hannah. She let out a breath. “I think I’ve another ten minutes or so with these, just assembly and then pop them in the oven, were you doin’ breakfast?”

“What would go well with them?” asked Mizuki. “They’re sweet, so something fatty and savory to balance out? I hate to keep doing bacon and eggs, but …”

“Bacon and eggs are a classic,” said Hannah. “Nothin’ wrong with doin’ what works.”

“Is that why you used barkberries?” asked Mizuki.

“I used them because Isra plucked them,” said Hannah. “And goin’ on an adventure is also perfectly fine. Tryin’ new things, new experiences, like that.”

“Venison bacon,” said Mizuki, frowning to herself. “Nah, too lean. You know what, I think I’m going to use some of the roast and just do eggs.”

“I’ll be out of your hair in a bit,” said Hannah.

They shared the kitchen together, and Hannah tried to do her baking when Mizuki wouldn’t be cooking, but it wasn’t always so easy, especially if Hannah had a long bake and Mizuki was cooking something that took quite some time in the oven. Sometimes they collaborated, but other times it was just an awkward shuffling of things. The kitchen was thankfully rather large, as all the first floor rooms were, but Hannah had been thinking that she might move all her baking into Lutopia Two. There were downsides to that though. On top of the lack of room, the biggest issue was that she wouldn’t be in the house, a part of the rhythm and flow they’d established. Baking in the kitchen meant that people could stop by and chat. Since Lutopia Two could only be accessed by Hannah, it meant that she was alone, in solitude, unless she brought someone in with her, and there wasn’t much to do in there unless you brought in a book or were dedicating yourself to helping. Hannah liked the small space, it was cozy and profoundly hers, but it was also lonely.

Once Hannah had the pastries in the oven and was cleaning up, she stuck around to watch Mizuki at work. Mizuki was swift and sure in the kitchen, and it was undeniably her domain, though Mizuki herself always demurred when anyone pointed this out, and didn’t seem to think all that much of her clear skill and competence. She was a decent enough sorcerer, though Hannah didn’t really have a point of comparison for that, and a neophyte wizard, but when Mizuki was cooking, it felt like everything else she did was sheer incompetence.

By the time breakfast was ready, the only one not up was Verity, which wasn’t all that unusual. For everyone else, it was a matter of either waking with the sun or as the activity downstairs rose to a dull murmur, but Verity seemed able to sleep through all that, and sometimes need to either be prodded through the party channel or have someone physically go into her room and give her a poke.

Everyone was dressed in their temple best, more formal and finely made clothes for special occasions, though generally more conservative than at a nice party or a wedding. Hannah had her old chasuble, with other liturgical vestments below it, and she’d spent some time in the mirror, both praying and making sure that she was properly symmetricalized, which mostly involved getting her hair into place.

The food was particularly amazing, especially the day-old roast, which Mizuki had worked some kind of magic on to make it tender and moist. Venison wasn’t a meat that kept extremely well, but this came with flaky salt and a white sauce, and the eggs had a nicely gelatinous center to them. The pastries were something that Hannah could have taken or left, but they were a good first attempt at using the barkberries, and she was certain that the next batch would be better. Baking often put the focus on recipes where cooking was focused on the feel, but the truth about baking was that it was as much about all the variables as it was about everything else. As much as Hannah loved the precision of baking, you had to account for differences in the basic materials, the flour, eggs, even the water, and you had to deal with changes in humidity too, and temperature variance that happened even with the elemetals to even things out.

She jotted down the idea for a sermon of some kind, though she wasn’t certain that there would be a second sermon. Certainly there would be a second sermon in her life, but if this one was a disaster, or not what she wanted, she would drop it like a hot rock and try to put her focus toward something else.

The house hadn’t moved terribly much, and had been put back into position near the small town, within a very easy walking distance of the small temple. They filtered out using the unfolding wooden steps that Alfric had made — a temporary solution, he’d assured them, since he had something more fanciful in mind — and made their way in.

Hannah immediately regretted not making extra baked goods in large quantity, because there was a table of refreshments that the barkberry pastries would have looked nice on. Temples had different rules about food and drink, but especially for the smaller ones, it was common that people would grab something to eat before sitting down. It was also a way for the churches to help feed those in need, distributing some of their largesse, which ultimately came to them by way of taxation. There were other systems in place to feed people who didn’t have food, but the churches functioning to provide support was a very old tradition for all of them, dating far, far back, and it seemed as though it was a function that wouldn’t easily be pulled from their hands, at least not entirely.

Hannah found her place up at the front of the temple, where CeeCee was already standing and in conversation with one of the parishioners. There were forty people or so, which was more than she’d expected, though it did include some small children, who were sometimes disruptive to sermons.

“You’re ready?” CeeCee asked. “I was almost worried you wouldn’t show.”

“I’m ready,” said Hannah. “Thank you for the opportunity.”

“We don’t get wandering clerics all that often,” said CeeCee. “We aren’t large enough for them, usually, no more than the mandate, which is only one week a year.”

“You’ll introduce me?” asked Hannah.

“Of course,” said CeeCee. “We’re just waiting for the last few to filter in.”

Hannah stood near the front, trying not to feel awkward, but it had been too long since she’d done one of these, and she didn’t know anyone here. In Pucklechurch, Lemmel had done most of the Garos sermons, and Hannah had known and spoken with a large percent of the congregation, though usually on temple days or during town events rather than in private consultation.

“Well, it looks as though everyone is here,” said CeeCee. “As I think I’ve mentioned to a few of you, we have a surprise special guest to give a sermon today, which I’m grateful for. This is Hannah, a cleric of Garos, and I’ll let her take it from here.”

CeeCee took her seat, and Hannah stood before the audience, trying her best to feel natural in the moment. It didn’t feel natural, but she pushed on ahead, which was what you needed to do.

“I don’t know how many of you might have seen it, but I came to this town in that giant walking house,” said Hannah. She spoke loudly, so she could be heard, pushing as much confidence into her voice as she could. She was working to soften her accent, something that she’d learned to do in seminary, not just so she’d be easier to understand, but so that she’d seem less foreign. “I’m a wanderer, a dungeoneer, moving from place to place, never staying in a hex for all that long. A friend of mine recently called us ‘unmoored’, which I thought was an interesting analogy, as an unmoored ship will drift, and that’s the feeling that it calls up. In some sense it gives that wrong impression: that we’re off on our own, subject to the whims of the winds. This isn’t really what being a dungeoneer is like, as we have our own chart plotted out, and are much more like a merchant vessel sailing from port to port. But in another sense, I think it’s apt: we’re unmoored from the rhythms of any given town, no longer tied to any institution.”

She was finding her rhythm, which was a good thing to find now that the opener was done. She’d established the theme of the sermon, that of connection, finding a place, and now it was time for the meat.

“I think it happens to everyone, from time to time, that feeling of not fitting in,” said Hannah. “It happens in times of loss and grief, but also when we have a change in circumstances, moving in or out of a relationship, or from one stage of life to another. Sometimes a falling out with someone can produce that feeling, the unmooring.” She took a breath, hoping that the point had come across. Loss was traditionally the realm of Kesbin, and there was a chance she’d be ruffling some feathers.

“There’s an exercise done within the Church of Garos, that of finding symmetry between two things,” said Hannah. “It’s a common exercise, and a common prayer, a meditation on the ways in which two things can be seen as a reflection of one another, finding a common axis, or axes, which explain away much of the differences. It is not so much an exercise in finding similarity as it is commonality, and there’s where I’ve found much of the comfort and thoughtful reflection in my travels. Every new place that I come to, every town we pass through, every hex that we see — even the dungeons themselves — are cause to think about how we were formed from the same clay, molded by the same pressures.”

Hannah gave a smile. “There’s a dictum within the Church of Garos, a somewhat controversial one, which is that symmetry between any two things can be found through the application of the correct axes. We think of this in terms of glyphs, or possibly even mathematical constructs at the higher levels of the Church, but the dictum applies to everything, and it’s quite powerful in that regard. In practice, finding symmetry between complex things like people is a matter of feeling and faith much more than it is a struggle to puzzle your way through the math,” said Hannah. “There is, as yet, no way to reduce a person to math, but until that day comes, we’re stuck with feeling it out — and I personally love to feel it out.” She paused for a moment, looking out over the crowd. She was starting to lose them, which was fine, because this was the point in the sermon when she expected to lose them. The thing to do was to pivot to concrete examples, which was exactly as she’d planned it.

“When I was young, my grandmother passed,” said Hannah. “It was the first time I had ever felt true grief. She hadn’t been too old, only barely starting to fade, but it had come in the night, and the next morning she was gone. And I, of course, immediately began packing my bags, determined to follow her soul as best as I could and help it to make its way to the Spirit Gates. My parents stopped me, since I was only seven.” That got a chuckle. “With no way that I could help, nothing that I could do, I was left with that unmoored feeling, a ship that had found itself sailing to an island that no longer existed. In truth, it’s a large part of why I became a cleric, or at least where the idea of being a cleric first entered my head. It’s a hard thing to deal with, death, especially when it comes sooner than it was expected, when you haven’t had to time make peace with it before it happens. Where it hits most often, in my experience, is when you have those things that used to be touchstones, constants, which are no longer there. My grandmother used to bake cookies on temple days, big flat ones with a nice crisp to them, and suddenly they were gone. I had taken them for granted, in the way of a seven-year-old. They became a part of the unmooring, and so I decided to take up her mantle, to bake the cookies on my own, which I’ve always thought was a good way of dealing with things. It brings me closer to her.”

Hannah stopped for a moment, pursing her lips. “My other large unmooring was a happy one: going off to seminary. I went a bit early, at twelve, and all the old rhythms of life, all the old chores and duties, the old friends, were washed away. I was in a new city, in a new order, with a job to do. It was freeing, liberating, in a way that becoming unmoored can be, and even though I had new chores and duties, they benefited from that newness. It was cause for reflection then, and I’ve done more reflection now, making sense of the ways in which tearing things out of our life can feel so different. Now I think, with these two examples, that it might be tempting to say that it’s as simple as good things being good and bad things being bad, but I do think it’s worth our while to meditate on the nature of the differences — the axis the concept is being flipped on.”

Hannah tapped her fingers against the side of her legs, a nervous habit, done with both hands at the same time. It was hard to know whether it was going well. “There’s an element of choice that always makes a loss easier to handle. Some don’t deal with adulthood well, since it inevitably gets thrust upon us whether we feel ready or not. Puberty can be a troublesome time, an unmooring time, even if we’re properly prepared for it, this new strength and power, this new body, not necessarily one that we’d have chosen, beyond our control. There are losses we choose though, and sometimes they sting just as badly, especially when there’s a trade-off involved. Cutting loose a relationship that’s no good for you can be just as difficult as a loss from death, I’ve talked to enough people to know that. The same goes for the bittersweetness of leaving a vocation that doesn’t suit you, or a community that can’t give you what you deserve.”

“I’ve found this helpful, in bringing context to my life, to relate the good and bad together, to see how they are each other, only flipped,” said Hannah. “It helps to make sense of our emotions, and why we feel them, to bring clarity to our decisions. I’m a traveler now, and I’ll be on my way later today, but even for those who have found a firm place to sit, there are changes in our lives to reflect on, marriages and births, deaths and times of moving on.”

There was some polite applause, and Hannah took her seat as CeeCee said some words. The sermon was on the shorter side, but Hannah had always preferred a short sermon, in part because attention tended to wander when a sermon went long. It was also the case that many sermons included far more than they needed to in order to hit the proper word count and expected length, which irked Hannah to no end. Not every concept needed four thousand words and a half hour of speaking time.

There followed two short songs, sung without hymnals, apparently well-familiar to the locals but which Hannah was a little rusty with. She hummed along but didn’t try her hand at singing. Verity’s voice dominated the songs without really trying to. The first was a palindromic song of Garos, while the second was a fugue of Bixzotl, and once that was concluded, CeeCee came up again to speak some final words and say the ending prayer to the six gods, which was a rather recent invention in religious terms.

When the sermon was concluded, the real work of temple day began, which was socialization. Temples were a “third place”, with the first two being the home and the workplace, and served a vital function within the community, namely to bring people together on a specific day of the week to speak with one another and ensure that the community didn’t grow too far apart from itself. Temple day was important for political and social reasons, and had always been Hannah’s favorite day of the week, even before she’d become a cleric.

The first parishioner to approach her was an older man with gray in his beard, his younger wife in tow.

“Thank you for the sermon,” he said with a brief bow. “I had never heard that, about the dictum. Everything symmetrical with everything else — it’s a beautiful thought, though I think it might take me some time.”

“It’s Harlon’s Dictum, if you’d like to know more,” said Hannah. “There’s a strong and weak version of it, the strong being that it applies to everything, the weak being that it applies to only certain classes of things. I don’t believe that I’ve heard it brought up much, and never in a sermon to the laity, so thank you for giving me the opportunity.”

“I’m just glad that it wasn’t the usual for Garos,” said the wife. “We get a cleric of Garos here one week a year, and the sermon is always on the usual issue.”

Hannah refrained from frowning, but only just barely. She knew perfectly well what ‘the usual issue’ was, and while she had her own disagreement with the church’s focus on that, she didn’t like hearing someone say that they were tired of it.

“The stock sermons are stock for a reason,” said Hannah. “But ay, hearing the same thing over and over again can wear on us, especially when we’ve heard it all before — though I suppose you must get a bit of repetition with your primary cleric being of Bixzotl.”

They smiled politely at the joke, then moved on, which was more or less what Hannah wanted. If she’d been a mainstay at this temple, she might have wanted to interrogate it further, but it seemed like a fight that wasn’t worth having, not when she’d be leaving so soon.

The second couple to come up to her seemed much less pleased with the sermon. “What can it mean for everything to be symmetrical with everything else?” asked one of the men. He was with another man, and Hannah couldn’t quite tell whether they were related or married. “I don’t follow that at all. All this stuff about axes … where does it come from?”

“I did my best to refrain from quoting scripture, as I know it can make eyes glaze over,” said Hannah. “But the Garam Ashar is clear on this point, ‘All life is separated by boundaries and all boundaries are axes upon which truth is reflected’, section seven, verse one. There are others, but that’s the most straightforward.”

“That would be like saying that everything is a copy of every other thing,” the man insisted.

“I’m no cleric of Bixzotl, so perhaps we could take the matter up with CeeCee,” said Hannah. “From my understanding, it’s a common claim for every religion to make in one way or another, though I think it’s more apt for Garos than the others. It dips into the history of theology, and a time when the gods were worshiped separately. They had incentive to claim all creation for their own. The dictum is principled, but we must also be aware that it was motivated when it was written, and if your understanding of Garos doesn’t work with the application of the dictum, that’s for you to decide.” This was a polite way of telling him to sod off.

The others who spoke with her were much less confrontational, but there were a few of them, perhaps because she was a novelty. An old lady came forward to talk about cookies and baking, and a younger boy came forward to express that he was happy to have a cleric of Garos come through. Hannah was tempted to stick around for a day or two and offer something in the way of consultation to these people, but the house would be moving on soon enough, off to the next hex if they wanted to keep to their schedule.

“I thought it was nice,” said Mizuki on the way back. “A bit short though.”

“It was lovely,” said Marsh. “I never realized how much I had wanted to hear a sermon from you.”

“I like a short sermon,” said Pinion. “Depending on the subject matter, I guess.”

“You’ve never really talked about your grandmother,” said Verity.

“I’m not sure any of us have,” said Alfric. “Aside from Mizuki.”

“My grandpa is great,” said Mizuki. “Also we all literally live in his house, it would be weird not to mention him a bunch.”

“I never met my grandparents,” said Isra.

“We saw each set once a week when I was growing up,” said Alfric. “But we weren’t particularly close.”

“Well, my parents were both among the youngest, their parents older,” said Hannah. “So they’re elderly now, save for the one grandmother. And I don’t know that I ever had cause to bring her up, save for when I bake using her recipes.”

“Also, can you just suppress your accent like that?” asked Mizuki. “You sounded so weird.”

“Ay,” said Hannah. “Learned it in seminary, as some people have trouble understandin’ me. Can’t be a cleric and let the way you say things get in the way of what you’re sayin’. Harder than it sounds though, because people have different ways of speakin’ all over Inter, and what works for one won’t work for others. I’ve a few accents I can do well enough, smoothin’ things over so that people don’t focus on it.” She gave Mizuki a glance. “You never have trouble understandin’ me, right?”

“No,” said Mizuki. “And now I’m used to it, it just fades into the background. Like I said, the sermon sounded weird.”

“Did you enjoy it?” Marsh asked as they came to the house.

“Ay,” said Hannah. “I’m not sure how much they appreciated it, overall, but it was good to get my thoughts out, and I’m already written revisions to it, figurin’ out ways to make it land better. I think the core was good, but it was written in the course of one night, so … traditionally, in a place like Pucklechurch, you have almost six weeks between sermons, plenty of time to draft, redraft, and refine. Here, it was a day, almost spur of the moment, and I’m happy enough overall.”

“I’m still not sure that I get it,” said Mizuki. She flopped down on the couch. “But I did like hearing about your grandmother.”

“I guess I never realized that you were so young when you went into the seminary,” said Verity. “As young as I was when I went into the conservatory.”

“I was about twelve when I joined the Junior League,” said Alfric. “It’s a common age for starting on a vocation.”

“The Junior League isn’t really a vocation, is it?” asked Pinion. He’d taken a seat on the floor.

“It is,” said Alfric. “Or, it’s where people get the training and knowledge to effectively pursue the vocation of dungeoneering. I don’t consider it any different from going to a seminary or conservatory, or wizarding school for that matter.”

“Except it’s not, right?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, when you join Junior League you’re still in normal school, or with tutors or whatever, you said that it was more like once a week, or a few times a week, and no one took it all that seriously.”

“I guess,” said Alfric.

“We should be looking at the symmetry,” said Isra. “That was what the sermon was about.”

“I don’t think there’s need or cause to apply it here,” said Hannah.

“I guess I don’t get how this is different from Qymmos?” asked Mizuki. She had her legs crossed and was bouncing one on the other. “Comparing and contrasting things, that’s Qymmic.”

“It’s the focus on the axis,” said Hannah. “Or on the plane. Garos is often — though not always — about reversal or rotation, and Harlon’s Dictum is about taking two things and seeing all the ways in which we’d need to change things to get the two to match. It is of Qymmos, though of course most things can be of one or two gods.”

“I assume it’s mathematically sound,” said Pinion. “But I confess that I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s one of the things that I want to bring to sermons,” said Hannah. “Those parts of Garos that are often not touched upon. There’s more than just the usual.”

“You’re going to do this again?” asked Marsh.

“I can scout ahead for you,” offered Isra.

“Ay, I’ll be doin’ it again,” said Hannah. “Though … I have some thinkin’ to do.”

“Thinking about what?” asked Alfric.

“I need to get started on lunch,” said Mizuki. “It’s just sandwiches.”

“I love sandwiches,” said Hannah. She turned to Alfric. “Thinkin’ about how long I want to do this, bein’ on the road, if I’m honest. I gave the sermon because I was feelin’ restless, and it made me want to do more, to get back to the life of a proper cleric rather than a dungeon runner.”

Alfric froze. Hannah expected that he might, as his gears started turning. “You’re talking about quitting the party?”

“No,” said Hannah. “But as Verity seems to be gettin’ along, I feel like the party’s need for a cleric is far less than it was, and will be diminished as she improves. Healin’ is a vital part of normal dungeons, but we’re not doin’ normal dungeons anymore. And as far as what the party needs outside of healin’, there’s less and less of that over time too.”

“Wait, so you are talking about leaving?” asked Mizuki.

“I live in a lute,” said Hannah. “I’m goin’ to keep livin’ in that lute for probably the rest of my life, I hope. Whether that lute lives here or somewhere else seems not to matter, and I want to be on hand, but ay, I’m thinkin’ about how my life might be different. I’ve been floodin’ the house with bread for lack of anythin’ better to do, you’ve all seen that.”

“But … you’re our friend,” said Isra.

“Well I’m not goin’ to stop bein’ your friend,” said Hannah. “And whatever happens, I’ll come by on the regular, so long as there’s a path for it, and I’m hopeful that we’ll expand our travel even more in the comin’ month. But I will be lookin’ for some way to satisfy my need to be a proper cleric.”

“It’s a lot to spring on us,” said Verity. She was frowning, the mild, controlled frown that she sometimes used.

“To spring on you?” asked Hannah. “I’m not movin’ out tomorrow. I’m not even planned to move out at all, I’m just lettin’ you know that there’s a sunset on the horizon for me.” Marsh was sitting next to her, and slipped his hand into hers. They had talked about some of this before, always with him encouraging her, though she didn’t know for certain that she’d ever find her way back to the church.

“We appreciate it,” said Alfric. His voice was firm. “I’ll start looking for a replacement, if we end up needing one, and I’ll also be on the lookout for travel entads to make sure that you can come with us no matter where we are or what else you have going on.”

“We’ll talk about it more later,” said Hannah. “In depth. I’m just lettin’ you know where I stand now. I liked bein’ up there, talkin’ about somethin’ dear to me.” She had known that she would like it though, and that was one of the reasons she’d jumped at the chance.

“Is this why you decided to do a sermon about unmooring?” asked Mizuki. “Also you said ‘unmoor’ a lot.”

“Too much?” asked Hannah. “I’d hoped it to be a motif.”

“Nah, it was fine,” said Mizuki. She frowned for a moment. “Is there such a thing as a grief sandwich? Because I’ll miss you when you’re gone.”

“Come,” said Hannah, getting up from the couch. “I’ll help you invent one.”

Chapter 164 - Collegiate Daydreams, pt. 1

The Army Ship and the Jade Staff were both good gets, though the staff was particularly annoying to Mizuki, since its drawbacks seemed really counter to her circumstances. It warped space, allowing you to both see long distances and step through, but the distance limit was fifty miles shy of what she would need to get to Rayedhcraft, and it was incredibly nauseating and difficult to aim when using it at a distance. It had a small notch in the bottom of it that allowed it to be planted in a specific place if you had a friendly woodworker to make you a stand for it. Even better, a friendly woodworker could make a vise that it could sit in that would allow fine control. This would have been great so that it didn’t need to be constantly repositioned to get from one place to another, except the house was moving, which meant that Mizuki had to do ‘recalibration’ every morning. Recalibration was a sickening affair, mostly due to the fact that you controlled the staff’s destination through the angle of the staff. At its greatest distance, a shift of a hairsbreadth could mean miles away, and a few times Mizuki had simply resigned herself to walking.

She could have kept using the entad that Alfric’s mom was loaning her, but she really didn’t want to. Maybe it was all the self-sufficiency talk that Alfric kept going on about, but the staff was Mizuki’s — or at least belonged to the party — and she wanted to use it, rather than something that was given to her. The vise that Alfric made had helped, and she found a place to put a different vise in her advisor’s office in Rayedhcraft, and one that was at a thankfully-stationary midway point, but the moving house meant constant fiddling, and sometimes it was hard to find the house, even with directions from Alfric over the party channel. It was all making her a bit grumpy.

Then one morning Mizuki finished making breakfast and went to use the jade staff, only to find that it had already been set to the proper location.

“I just wanted to take some of the load,” Alfric explained.

“Thanks,” said Mizuki. She was surprised by just how much relief she’d felt at not having to set up the stupid thing, which was weird, because if she’d really wanted to, she could just have used the entad from Alfric’s mom. “Like, really, thanks.”

“No problem,” said Alfric. “You were complaining about it, and I thought ‘I can do something about that’.”

“I don’t remember complaining about it,” said Mizuki, frowning a bit.

Alfric winced. “Might have been an undone day.”

“Aw, well it’s still very sweet of you to think of me,” said Mizuki.

“There was something I wanted to talk about, and if you’ve got a spare five or ten minutes not needing to set up, maybe it would be a good time?”

“Er, sure,” said Mizuki. “I owe you at least one favor.”

“We’re a bit asymmetric right now,” said Alfric, rubbing his head. “That is, I’ve been having an undone day almost every single day, partly because I find moving the house to be a bit unstimulating, and partly because I’ve been trying to do a rapid skill-up on sailing.”

“I know all this,” said Mizuki. “You’ve been good about disclosure.”

Alfric had been taking the boat — apparently it was a ‘boat’ and not a ‘ship’ because of the number of masts or sails or something, but Mizuki knew that was a distinction she wasn’t going to remember and continued to use them interchangeably — out to various lakes to get in practice with it. It was totally unnecessary, but he’d said that when they went together, they’d had a good time. It was on their to-do list, something that they wanted to do together ‘for real’, but Rayedhcraft was getting in the way.

“Disclosure isn’t everything,” said Alfric. “There are things said, and then there are things done.”

“And we … did things?” asked Mizuki. She grinned at him.

“No, no, nothing like that,” said Alfric. He still got flustered by it, and she hoped that he would never stop. “I’m just saying that it’s different to say ‘hey, we spent a pleasant day on the boat, having a picnic, joking around while fishing’, and to actually spend twelve hours experiencing that. That’s where the asymmetry comes in, it’s a hazard. So I just wanted to kind of, I guess, point out that it was there, that I’m spending a lot of time with you that you’re not spending with me.”

“Great,” said Mizuki. “I’m not getting boring?”

“Nope,” said Alfric. “I’d go out on my own if you were. It’s been nice, really. I think I’m getting good at teaching you how to sail, not that it’s wholly necessary with the boat as it is.”

Alfric always gave her the cliff notes, and it always sounded like it was a good time. He was also pretty good about not letting any of it bleed into their friendship, which he’d said was always a risk. If she was repeating a story he’d heard before, he was kind and patient about it, though she was starting to get to know the particular look he would get when she was repeating herself. Of course, they’d known each other long enough that sometimes she ended up repeating herself even when undone days weren’t involved, but that was just a part of being close friends.

“I’ll try to keep it in mind,” said Mizuki. “Maybe we should schedule some kind of, I don’t know, time together? Next time we don’t have something going on, when I have a break from school, we could have a proper day together. Something we’d both experience.” The more she spoke, the more it felt like she was describing a date.

“That sounds nice,” said Alfric. “I won’t hold you to it though.”

“I need to get going if I don’t want to be late again,” said Mizuki. “Who is on dinner tonight?”

“Hannah,” said Alfric. “Meat pies.”

“I got invited to a party,” said Mizuki. “There’s a chance that I will miss dinner and either come home late or not at all.”

“No big deal,” said Alfric with a shrug.

Mizuki kind of wanted it to be a big deal, to have him say ‘can’t you stay home just this once, haven’t you been spending a bunch of time with your wizard friends?’ and then she would have been a little thankful to make her excuses and stay home. He had just said that there was some asymmetry between them, and maybe that explained why he didn’t think he could meet her saying she’d be out with a shrug, but to her it felt like they were barely seeing each other, especially since she’d been putting in extra hours at Rayedhcraft with her research and investigation team.

“Smell you later,” said Mizuki as she stepped up to where the staff was waiting.

“You know I hate when you sniff me,” Alfric replied.

Mizuki grinned at him and stepped through the jade staff’s portal, letting him have the last word.

The staff brought her to a general store, or at least the storeroom thereof. Normally Mizuki did the calibration so that she was close enough, somewhere in the town of Knottomak, which then necessitated a short walk to the store. Here, Alfric had taken the time and gotten a precise bead on the actual storeroom itself, so that Mizuki only had to carefully slide the staff into the vise, tighten it, and then step right into the heart of Rayedhcraft, a courtyard that she’d favored ever since her first visit there.

“Mizuki!” called a girl’s voice, and Mizuki turned at once.

“Becks!” said Mizuki. “Were you waiting for me?”

“You know it,” said Becks.

Becks was a girl from Mizuki’s beginner’s class, the first person to actually succeed in rock petting, and she saw Mizuki as something between a big sister and a cool mom. Mizuki had taken up the ‘cool mom’ role with good grace and much aplomb, and had started packing her large bag with the kinds of things it seemed like a mom should have, like handkerchiefs, snacks, sewing equipment, and water. It was almost like preparing for a dungeon, and Alfric had fun gaming it out with her.

Becks was short and slender, so short that she made Mizuki feel tall, and while Becks was still hoping to grow some, she was sixteen and probably past her final growth spurt. She had blonde hair that was almost always in a different braid from the day before, usually elaborate and artistic. For someone young, she could be very intense, and had worked herself to the bone to be first across the starting line to become a wizard, but she was also sweet and friendly, especially toward Mizuki.

“Did your baker make you anything today?” asked Becks.

“No, I wasn’t blessed by Garos today,” said Mizuki.

“Good,” said Becks. She reached into her own bag, which was somewhat similar to Mizuki’s and had only appeared in the last week. “I got you this.” From her own bag she extracted a thin piece of fabric, which turned out to be wrapped around a pastry.

“Thanks!” said Mizuki. She started eating it almost immediately.

“It’s cinnamon, they had them in the dorm today,” said Becks.

“Good,” Mizuki said around her food.

“Last night I was wishing that I had some kind of thing like you do, a house of my own, or something like it,” said Becks.

“Yeah?” asked Mizuki, who was still eating. They had started to walk to their class, which was yet another lecture. Rayedhcraft loved lectures. “Too noisy or what?”

“Just the worst,” nodded Becks. “The common room is too close to the bedrooms, and people just get insanely loud when there’s a party going on, and I think because of how the schedules lined up a lot of people didn’t have classes in the morning. Or they’re just tired all day, or taking naps, or … I don’t know.”

“I’d probably have died if I wasn’t borrowing my friend’s entad,” said Mizuki. “An extra hour of napping every day, for free? Criminally underrated.”

“You’re so lucky,” said Becks with a sigh. “I should go do some dungeons.”

“I absolutely will not allow that,” said Mizuki. “Do you know how many times I’ve almost died?”

“Um,” said Becks. “You’ve never really talked about the dungeons.”

“It’s been a lot,” said Mizuki. “Now personally, I can handle it, but going into dungeons because you want some nice piece of kit is probably the wrong thing to do.”

They found their seats in the classroom, and Becks got serious, which she always did in class. Mizuki had a few friends among the newbies, and knew quite a few more. They all had their own approaches to study, particularly the lectures. There were tests to make sure that everyone was keeping up, but these were relatively few and far between, and at least some of the students had come to the conclusion that their time and efforts were better spent elsewhere. Some didn’t even come to class, which Mizuki couldn’t really fathom, but she supposed that a lot of people washed out, unable to shape the mana. But if they were waiting to apply themselves until they knew whether they had the knack, Mizuki had no idea what they would do once they proved capable. Maybe it was Alfric’s influence, but it felt to Mizuki like it was pointless not to push yourself just on the off chance it ended up being worth nothing.

Mizuki kept loose notes, which ended up with more drawings than she’d thought she would have, little diagrams, circled words pointing to other words, and sometimes entirely pictorial representations of whatever the lecture was about. This wouldn’t necessarily have sunk her, but as backup, she paid a premium to a different student who was a wortier and made complete transcripts, with copies, for each lecture. These were done in a precise hand, the ink laid precisely on the pages, and they were a godsend. Mizuki would have paid for them at five times the price.

The lecture this time on was on pipes, one of the fundamental units of magical constructs, and while Mizuki couldn’t make anything with the stones, she more or less understood how they fit in with the other stuff. They were pipes: they moved things. A lot of the lecture was about all the ways in which the pipes were different from pipes, and there were, no joke, a dozen different principles that were apparently important principles to keep in mind. The ‘pipes’ carried magic, but didn’t really ‘carry’ magic and were a bit more like portals with a fixed width and physical space than they were pipes.

Toward the end of the lecture, the professor let them actually see one of these pipes, in the form of a construct that moved mana between two wells at a set interval. For Mizuki, actually seeing it was a bit of a problem, since there was an enormous second construct around it in order to make the construct visible to the naked eye, but she thought she got the gist of it, at least, and it was the sort of thing that would only become helpful once she was actually underway. She was happy to have the complete notes mostly because she thought she might need to refer to them later, when she was actually in the thick of it.

Once the lecture was finished, Becks brightened right back up.

“Lunch is something special today,” said Becks. “You’ll sit with me, right?”

“If you’ll have me,” said Mizuki. “You were in the cafeteria, did you see the lunch posting?”

“Roots and fruits,” said Becks, making a face. “It’s a meal without meat or dairy, since it’s a minor holy day for Kesbin.”

“Is it?” asked Mizuki. “It’s … Handol Day?”

“Yup, that’s the one,” said Becks. “You know, I think the cafeteria people get bored, that’s why it’s always such weird stuff for dinner. Or … like they were put under a curse to make great food, but only if it was a different meal every day.”

“That’s not how I cook at all,” said Mizuki. “Plus it’s hard to get good at cooking if you don’t make the same thing a few times and make notes. Everything I’ve seen about wizardry says that it’s basically the same. You make the constructs, you screw it up, you make them again, and you do it enough times that the third time is the first that’s actually good.”

“I’m not looking forward to that,” said Becks.

They went to the cafeteria, filled their plates, got drinks, and found their seats, where some of their other friends were sitting. Mizuki did think of them as ‘their’ friends, but many of them living in the dormitories with Becks, or were otherwise connected to a larger social network that Mizuki just didn’t have time for. Mizuki also didn’t have a full catalog of their names, in part because proper introductions seemed to be a bit of a rarity. It didn’t really matter if you didn’t know someone’s name, so long as you could sit down to have a good conversation with them.

Becks’ friends were, to a one, young girls, all in their mid teens, with Mizuki being the only standout among them. She stood out in other ways too, but she had long hair and fine robes, and fit in well enough, at least most of the time.

“Time manipulation is possible through wizardry,” one of the girls was saying as Mizuki began picking at her food.

It really was just ‘roots and fruits’, though it had been prepared just about as well as it could be, for being traditional food. When the gods had been separated from each other — or rather, when worship of gods was regional — certain traditional foods had been developed that carried into the present day. Kesbin food was, in theory, simple fare that celebrated minimal preparation of high quality ingredients, but in practice was usually under seasoned and lacking. Here, the chefs had bent the rules of Kesbinite cuisine a little bit by making more than a dozen different options, which meant that Mizuki’s plate was filled to the brim with different dishes in such startling variety that she thought Kesbin would probably get mad about it. It was all as good of Kesbin food as she’d had.

“That’s weasel words,” said another girl, this one Parram, a girl from Tarbin who Mizuki at least in passing. She had a thick accent, which felt much lower class than Isra’s in a way that was hard to define, maybe the roughness of the vowels. “When people say time manipulation they can mean all kinds of things. The flow of time is always forward, at least for wizards, whether that means looking into the past, pushing the present into the future, or slowing things down.”

“What’s the topic of discussion?” asked Becks. “Time?”

Mizuki didn’t tend to like the technical discussions, but they happened at lunch often enough, especially with these girls. It sort of made sense that they would talk about things they’d been learning in class, but Mizuki would much rather talk about boys, extracurriculars, the food, or something else.

“Time travel,” said Parram. She took another bite of beets. “Which isn’t possible, with one exception.”

“In theory,” said one of the other girls.

“But not in practice, you think?” asked Becks.

“Seems more likely that it would be the opposite, right?” asked Mizuki. “Impossible in practice, possible in theory? Also what’s the one exception?”

“Chrononauts,” said Carlan, leaning forward slightly. She was a pretty girl with freckles and blonde hair, and an enviable bust. Mizuki had mentioned the enviable bust to Alfric, and he’d raised an eyebrow, but she’d said that it wasn’t like he was going to meet her anyway, so it wasn’t a rude observation to make.

“The conversation,” said Mel, an imperious girl who was way too skinny, “Was whether wizardry could ever replicate what a chrononaut could do, or whether it could come close to replicating it.”

“Mel has been very interested in replication,” Becks explained. The two girls lived next to each other, sharing a wall.

“It is interesting,” said Mel. “There are lots of things — entads, prayers, other magic, what have you — that wizardry can replicate, even if you never would replicate any of it because it would either be too complicated or take horrendous amounts of power. Wizards can’t replace clerics, obviously, but they can come in sideways for a few clerical functions.”

“But probably not chrononauts,” said Carlan.

“All the better,” said Becks. “They kind of creep me out.”

“Why?” asked Mizuki, trying to sound curious rather than defensive. They got enough time for lunch that they could be pretty leisurely about it.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Becks. “The idea that someone could do all kinds of things to you, learn all kinds of things, and then just,” she snapped her fingers, “and you’d have no idea that it had even happened, wouldn’t even necessarily ever have met a chrononaut.”

“Better not to think about it,” said Carlan. “They’re super rare.”

“They’re not that rare,” said Parram. “A thousand or so, right?”

“No, see, it’s weird though,” said Mel. “Because why should this one thing be unique?”

“Might not be unique,” said Carlan. She speared a tender chunk of sweet potato with her fork. “That is, if you model it as being a form of precognition rather than time weirdness —”

“Precognition is time weirdness,” said Mel.

“Kind of,” said Carlan, wiggling a hand. “But I guess it’s rare enough and bad enough that it can’t compete with the chronos.”

“The chronos really aren’t that bad,” Mizuki said to Becks, trying to keep her voice low. This really wasn’t effective though, given that it was a poorly timed comment that came at a lull in conversation.

“I know they’re good overall,” said Becks. “I mean, they help us to avoid disasters, cheat death, that kind of thing, I know that, I just wish that it wasn’t something that was attached to people, and I think that it’s probably right to be creeped out.”

“You’re not a chrononaut, are you Mizuki?” asked Mel with a laugh.

“Well, no,” said Mizuki. “But I know a few of them.”

“Wait, you do?” asked Mel. “How?”

“There’s one in my party,” said Mizuki. She felt somewhat sheepish saying it. Alfric had made clear that he’d rather people not know unless there were direct questions that needed to be answered, maybe because he’d been burned one too many times. “He’s a great guy though.”

“Are you serious right now?” asked Pallma. “There are so few.”

“I mean, seven hundred,” said Mizuki. “There are fewer Chosen, and I have one of those in my party.”

This got some looks from the girls.

“I swear I mentioned this before,” said Mizuki. “Not the chrononaut thing, but — one of my party members is a Chosen of Xuphin?”

“But then what are you doing here?” asked Mel.

“Wait,” said Becks, leaning forward. “The guy who’s a chrononaut, it’s Alfric? He’s the chrononaut?”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “And he’s super sweet, really. I don’t think there’s a person that I would trust more.”

“But you’re not worried about it?” asked Becks. “I mean, he’s got to have had undone days with you, even if there wasn’t anything weird about them, does he just … tell you what happened? Not mention it?”

“He tells me,” said Mizuki, frowning a bit. “It’s really not that big of a deal, if it’s important, he tells me, if it’s not important, he leaves it out. He can’t repeat every conversation we have verbatim, and I wouldn’t want him to.”

“But he’s the one who decides what’s important and what’s not, right?” asked Becks.

“You’ve got it twisted,” said Mizuki. “He’s a great guy.”

“Eh,” said Mel. She had finished her food, leaving a small pile of orange melon to the side, as it had apparently not met with her favor. “I think I would feel uncomfortable, like Becks. He’s your friend, you’ve known him a long time, but if he makes a mistake or a bad impression he can just undo it. That is a bit creepy, even if you fully trust someone.”

“He’s really not a bad guy,” said Mizuki. “And I mean, I’ve met his family, and some other chrononauts, I actually had to bash one of them in the head —”

“What?” asked Becks as her eyebrows shot up. “You fought a chrononaut? How does that even work? Don’t they see it coming?”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “No, that’s why you have to do it from behind, and then make it so they can’t reset the day. Anyway, that was months ago, the only time I had a problem with any of it really, aside from —” She stopped herself. She wasn’t sure whether they knew about the dragon thing, but she’d found that she didn’t really like the attention that it had brought her. “Well, Alfric has been lovely, couldn’t ask for a better friend.”

“Okay, but if you have an argument —” began Becks, but then the bell rang, and it was time to start heading to the bane of Mizuki’s existence, rock petting.

Becks was there, and took a seat next to Mizuki, but Becks never talked during class unless it was something involving the subject at hand.

Her words, however, kept going through Mizuki’s mind.

There was absolutely no way that Alfric would have ever done anything untoward, and if he had, she was sure that he would confess it immediately, and if he didn’t, then she would know somehow. Alfric was a terrible liar, and it had taken a long time to figure that out, because Alfric would only tell a lie if there was some urgent need for it. They had played a game where lying was required, and he’d been just awful at it, visibly uncomfortable even before the lie had left his lips.

Still.

Mizuki lied easily, though they were always frivolous lies, sometimes just jokes, ways for her to contribute to the conversation or relate to someone, passing her lips before she even really knew what was happening. It wasn’t that she meant to lie, or even really like she was lying in order to get credit for things she hadn’t done, she was just going with the flow, and sometimes that meant saying things that weren’t true, or were only true from a certain point of view. Some of the worst lies she’d ever told, at least so far as outcomes were concerned, were the lies that followed a question like ‘Do you want to go on a date with me?’ It always felt so much like resistance or confrontation to say ‘Not really, no’ to that, so she’d say ‘yes’ and then just end up dating someone for a bit because she was going along with it. There were a number of meals she’d said were great when they really weren’t, and things she’d said she enjoyed when she actually didn’t. It was a bad habit, and she at least recognized now that’s what it was, though it was a hard habit to break.

It was possible that Alfric was lying like that, going with the flow, not mentioning things because it would be horribly awkward. That didn’t feel like something Alfric would do, because he was so painfully aware of the conflicts and potential conflicts and appearance of conflicts, but it was possible, sure. He would say something if she had kissed him in an undone day, and he would definitely say something if he’d kissed her, or he’d just not undo the day. But if they were laying on the sailing boat as it doggy-paddled through a lake with the stars in the sky over their heads, her head in the crook of his shoulder, making appreciative noises as they cuddled together … she could understand if he thought it was easier to not mention that. She could believe that he wouldn’t mention it, especially if it was something like that, romantic but with some deniability, where saying any of it would necessarily mean talking about his own emotions and what he imagined her emotions to be.

None of that made her feel uncomfortable though. It made her heart beat a little faster, and it also made her feel a little sad, because it was the kind of thing that Alfric might undo. The scenario was entirely imagined, and it was odd to Mizuki that she could feel so simultaneously thrilled and heartbroken by something that had probably never happened, something that she’d invented within her own mind.

It wasn’t a productive day of rock petting.

Once class was finished and all the exercises had been done with no discernible progress, Mizuki had one final stop at the university before the house party: the researchers.

Chapter 165 - Collegiate Daydreams, pt. 2

Professor Arturo was the entire reason that Mizuki was even at the Rayedhcraft School, and she was grateful to him on that account … but she found all the research stuff to be incredibly dull, and was growing to outright hate the obligation, especially because it was soaking up even more of her precious free time. At the end of the school day, she often just wanted to go home, but she had promised Arturo, and a promise was a promise, not something that you could just weasel out of.

“I have twenty samples for today,” said Arturo. “We’ll try to get through them quickly.”

Many wizards had a ‘workshop’ of some kind, though most of the students had a shared space. The workshop was a place to keep manastones if you didn’t have extradimensional storage for them, and a place to craft your creations in relative silence with whatever tools you needed — mostly those for measurements and precision, but also for things that interfaced with the constructs a wizard could create.

Mizuki was starting to understand wizardry a bit better now, but Arturo’s creations, which had been prepared just for her, were almost entirely beyond her. Most were small, with a tiny well, and then some kind of assembly to transform that stored mana into some kind of effect. These were for Mizuki to ‘sniff’ as Arturo called it.

“That one is, uh, kind of an earthy warmth?” said Mizuki as the device worked. “Like compost gets when you’ve got a big heap you’ve left there for a bit.”

“Compost?” asked Arturo.

“I dunno, yeah?” asked Mizuki. The sad thing was, she was getting better at describing the flavors of magic to other people, and this was still the best she could muster. “It’s not two things either, it’s specifically the warmth of earthy stuff.”

“And what could you make from it?” asked Arturo. “First thing that comes to mind, please.”

They had done this almost a hundred times now, from Mizuki’s count, and the questions were almost always the same, which was starting to drive her insane. Arturo had two research assistants, one who kept records of everything and another who had made the actual constructs. Rosalind was the recordkeeper and seemed happy to have her quill moving rapidly as she filled a notebook. Mizuki was more or less friends with her, and they’d had lunch together a few times. Garth was the one who’d made the constructs, and he was usually in the workshop when the ‘tests’ were going on, looking bored. She’d talked to him only briefly, and he’d said ‘at least it pays well’, but in a way that implied that either the pay didn’t actually help that much, or that he wasn’t paid well. Mizuki hadn’t asked which.

“Fireball,” said Mizuki.

The professor closed his eyes for a moment, then let out a sigh. “We need to get to the bottom of this. Explain why it’s always fireball.”

“It’s not always fireball,” said Mizuki.

“It’s at least forty percent of the time,” said Rosalind. “More, if we don’t include the times you said ‘I don’t know’.”

“It’s disproportionately a fireball, or something like it,” said Arturo, nodding. He seemed pleased by the correction.

“Permission to use another cooking analogy?” asked Mizuki.

“A wizard does not trade in analogy,” said Arturo with a weary voice. Apparently wizards did trade in platitudes, because Mizuki had heard that one a few times before. “But in the interests of moving forward, yes, give us another of your analogies.”

“Alright,” said Mizuki. “A fireball is like stew.”

Arturo was watching her with absolutely no humor on his face, but Rosalind had a small smile she was doing a bad job hiding, and Garth had a ‘here we go again’ expression.

“Stews are like … fundamental,” said Mizuki. “All a stew is, really, is something solid cooked in something liquid, but without so much liquid that it’s a soup. And there’s gravy involved, I guess. But stew is the one thing that pretty much every culture can agree on, or I guess one of the few things, like sandwiches, which are also pretty much found anywhere that people have bread. So I guess some places that don’t have bread wouldn’t have sandwiches. Anyway, since all you need for stew is cooking solids in liquids, anytime you have something solid and something liquid, you can make a stew, and since water is a liquid, you can make a stew from any solid. Meat, potatoes, veggies … not fruit, but I guess that’s … basically a compote, right?”

Arturo was still looking at her.

“So, basically, same with a fireball,” said Mizuki. She tried to clear her head for a moment, which wasn’t easy. “A fireball is, I guess, just … sucking up all the aetheric imbalance, bunching it up, then throwing it or otherwise getting it away from you so you don’t get caught in the blast. Once it’s far enough away, or when you want it to, you lose your grip on it and all that energy comes out at once. Ideally it’s concentrated in a specific direction, so you don’t lose a bunch of the energy off to the sides, but … yeah, a fireball is just bottled up energy, and the ‘fire’ is just how a lot of things end up coming out.” She looked down at the contraption. “I would need something better than this, it’s only enough imbalance for a wet fart of a spell.”

Arturo rubbed his chin. “So if I put chicken and carrots in front of you, you might say ‘oh, you could make a stew with that’. But if I put lizzo meat and potatoes in front of you, you might also say that you could make a stew. And the same with rice and cabbage.” Mizuki took this as proof that he did understand metaphors, despite his protestation. “So is there perhaps a problem here where I’ve been asking the wrong question?”

Mizuki shrugged. “I guess I don’t really know what the point of the question is. If you ask me what I would make from a specific flavor of magic, aren’t you just learning more about me than you are about magic? Like, you ask someone what they would make with carrots and they say ‘oh, I don’t like carrots’, that’s kind of useless, right?”

“Mmm, quite,” said Arturo. “But we don’t want to get too far off-track with metaphor, do we?”

“We could investigate the fireball question,” said Rosalind. “Or have that be separate. Which moods are good for fireballs, which aren’t? That’s interesting, and possibly important.”

“You think a new typology might come from it?” asked Garth.

“It’s possible,” said Rosalind. “We’re seeking multiple typologies, aren’t we?”

“Sorry, that’s … a Qymmos thing?” asked Mizuki.

“Mmm, technically yes, technically no,” said Rosalind.

“Categorization is Qymmos, emergence is Oeyr,” said Garth. “So it’s both, but we’ve already had a cleric in, and neither has been able to give us much in the way of answers. We’ll go to them again once we have some data, which might help.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “Well whatever, we should get through these, I have a party tonight, and if you’re going to change the questions, we’re going to have to redo some of the other ones, right?”

“This is true,” said Arturo. “I think it’s been productive chatter, for a change. But you’re right, let’s move on.”

Mizuki answered the questions as best she could, trying to stay away from analogies as much as possible, but it was hard sometimes, because analogies and metaphors were helpful. Arturo seemed to think that everything could be distilled down in some way, or if he didn’t think that, he at least wanted it to be true. Maybe because of how specific everything needed to be in wizardry, Qymmos was a little bit over-represented, though it was well-known that Qymmos didn’t have all the answers, even if she was that God of Answers.

There seemed to be a theme of biology among the moods she was being asked to sample, and she wondered whether that was by design or not, though she didn’t think to ask until after it was all over. There was a particular one that she thought she could use for rapid plant growth of some kind, but it was so weak that she would have needed a hundred times the amount. That she had found interesting, because it was something she’d never come across before, and making plants grow faster wasn’t something that wizards could do.

“It’s weird,” said Mizuki afterward. “Why can’t wizards do it? Ectads can do it.”

“Are wizards ectads?” asked Arturo with a sigh. He was putting on his cloak, which went on over his robes.

“Is this a trick question?” asked Mizuki.

“No, wizards are not ectads,” said Arturo.

“They give off pretty much exactly the same moods though,” said Mizuki.

Arturo froze. “They do?”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “I’ve never seen a wizard pull a void like an ectad can, but everything else has seemed pretty similar. Ectads, the proper ones, hardly disturb the aether at all, but they do just a bit, enough for a sniff.”

“Well, I don’t want to be late for a dinner party, but we will definitely have to take this up later.” He frowned at Mizuki, a serious fatherly frown. “Thank you for your work today, and every day. We’re still in the opening stages here, but your contributions are invaluable.”

“Er, no problem,” said Mizuki.

MIzuki had thought that she was somewhat of an annoyance to Arturo, for almost as long as they’d known each other. Part of it had been her delayed entry into the school, but there were a few other bumps, and he hadn’t been terribly gracious about it, no waved hand while he said ‘it’s fine, don’t worry about it’. There had been a mixup with her mailbox, where she hadn’t even known she had a school mailbox, and certainly hadn’t been checking it every day, because she hadn’t known that it existed. She’d been a week into her time at the school before a rather annoyed Arturo had asked him why she hadn’t stopped by, which she of course hadn’t known to do. Now she was checking her mailbox twice a day, which is what most people did, but she’d felt like the damage had been done.

Apparently she’d been wrong about that, which was nice. Arturo did seem to find her a bit annoying sometimes, but so far as she knew, he was like that with everyone, so that was okay.

“Plans for tonight?” asked Rosalind.

“I got invited to a party,” said Mizuki. “Not the other newbies, some advanced wizards that I know.”

“Mercette House?” asked Rosalind with an arched eyebrow.

“You know it?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, you know about the party?”

“They’ve got a lot of parties,” said Rosalind. “And yes, I’m going. Garth too.”

“Oh, cool,” said Mizuki. She brushed her hair from her face. “I guess I’ll see you there. It’ll be our first time seeing each other outside school.”

“We might not see each other,” said Rosalind with a shrug. “It’s a big party.”

“How big of a party?” asked Mizuki.

“Um,” said Rosalind. “Usually something like two hundred people.” She was fiddling with her magical staff, which was laden with all kinds of things, a setup that wizards sometimes used to give them a lot of flexibility for minor things.

“Two hundred?” asked Mizuki as she realized what Rosalind had said. “That’s like … as many people as a major festival in Pucklechurch.”

“Oh, it’s a huge party, you’re expected to pitch in a few rings for food, drinks, stuff like that,” said Rosalind. “Huge house too. But there are so many people that we might miss each other.”

“They do this a lot?” asked Mizuki.

“Every other week or something like that,” Rosalind nodded. “I’ve heard that from the donations, it’s actually pretty lucrative for the house, but it feels like you’re giving a pittance.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “I’ve never been to a party of that size. Good?”

“Fun and games, lots of people to chat up, very easy to find a partner if that’s what you’re after, or maybe even if you’re not,” said Rosalind. “The younger kids aren’t allowed in, it’s adults only, so if you’ve got little friends —”

“Hey, don’t make fun of my little friends,” said Mizuki. “They’re great, they get me.”

“Well, as far as being uneducated in wizardry, you’ll be in good company,” said Rosalind. “They tend to be about half wizards, half other people from around the city, young adults who know someone who knows someone. If I see you, I’ll say hi. You’ll get to see me out of my robes for once.” She looked down at them with a frown.

“Oh, I didn’t realize it was that kind of party,” said Mizuki with a grin.

Rosalind gave her a playful slap, then looked at Mizuki’s robes. “You’re changing though, right?”

“Absolutely,” Mizuki lied, though it was the kind of lie that became true because she decided right in that moment that it was true.

The problem with Plenarch was that Mizuki didn’t really have a place to stay. The house was on its way, extremely slowly as was Alfric’s way, but that meant that Mizuki didn’t have a room to get changed in, nor had she brought along a spare set of clothing. She’d thought that she’d just go to the party in her robes, like a proper wizard, but if Rosalind was saying not to … well, it was time to call in help.

<Activate Wardrobe Protocol,> Mizuki said into the party channel.

<Which one is that?> asked Isra.

<The chest,> said Mizuki after a moment. <Send it to me. With Lutopia One, please. And something to wear, if there’s not something in there.>

<Dungeon clothes?> asked Alfric.

<Er, have one of the girls find me something nice to wear,> said Mizuki. <Maybe with some options. Then send the chest with Lutopia Two, so I have a place to stay.>

Mizuki left campus while she waited, biting a nail and thinking about how she was going to occupy herself for the rest of the day. She could have gone and had a very early dinner, but Gina had said that there would be food at the party, which meant that Mizuki needed to find some other way to occupy herself.

She decided to go flying.

Mizuki zipped up into the sky as soon as the helmet was on, pushing it as fast as it would go, which wasn’t all that fast. She was longing for a better flying entad, maybe a staff of some kind that she could sit on. The ideal, in her opinion, was something that made her feel like she had more control, an entad that didn’t feel like strapping into a chair or being pulled along, but until Verity was able to churn out custom entads, it was a bit of a pipe dream. Flying entads, especially ones that were fast and fun to use, cost insane amounts of money, mostly because they were great for leisure and they were useful for commerce.

Mizuki chased a flock of birds for a bit, listening to them caw at her, then threw them some oat nuggets, which were apparently a better food for birds than bread, at least according to Isra. She looked across the sea that Plenarch sat on, waiting for the sunset, then got bored when the sun wasn’t setting fast enough and let herself fall. Falling was great for getting up a good speed, much much faster than the helm could handle on its own, especially when Mizuki shaped her body like an arrow pointed downward. This was fun for a good twenty minutes until her stomach started to rebel against her, and at that point she dropped down to the ground, trying a new landing method where she would look like a leaf twisting in the wind rather than a stone dropping down into a cool pose. She wasn’t sure that it was a success, but it was nice to do new things.

On the ground, the chest was waiting for her. She popped it open and took the lute out, gave it a strum, and then was elsewhere.

The party had done right by her, and she gave a heartfelt ‘thanks guys!’ into the party chat. A mirror was set up so she could see herself, there were three different outfits laid out, and Verity had loaned a carrying cart of makeup, since Mizuki still didn’t have one of her own.

Mizuki had tried on all three outfits by the time she realized that she should have asked Rosalind what the dress code was like. Her ‘temple best’ seemed too reserved and formal, the outfit she’d worn to Verity’s last concert was way too fancy, and her everyday wear seemed like it wasn’t quite right either. Eventually, she settled on the everyday wear anyway, but gussied up with some makeup, a fancy braid in her long hair with a little clip for an accent, and some extra jewelry. She picked a pair of boots to go with it, and hoped that she wouldn’t look out of place, or that if she did look out of place, that it would seem like that’s what she intended.

That still left her with some time to kill, so she sat inside Lutopia One and practiced some rock-petting, which got her nowhere. She was certain that she’d get it eventually, and was equally certain that it was going to catch her so off-guard that she was going to have no clue how she’d actually done it.

The party was taking place at a large house, so huge that it was basically a mansion, except that it also had so many people living in it that it was a lot less impressive. It was three stories, built with heavy stones and timbers for the upper level, a somewhat more simple place than Mizuki would have expected, and less styled than the others in the neighborhood. The university was big enough that it needed a lot of housing for students, and this was the more independent option once people ‘aged out’ of the dorms.

Mizuki walked in slowly, feeling more nervous than she felt she should be, but she didn’t know the people whose house this was, even if she had quite a few friends who’d be going.

“Welcome!” said a slender man with a cup of wine in his hand. There were a few people milling around a central entryway room, which had balconies looking over it, but it was the man who stepped up to speak. He had long blonde hair that hung down in pleasant curls and a womanly way about him, which Mizuki had always been a fan of in guys. “I don’t know you, have you been here before?”

“I’m Mizuki,” Mizuki said. “I was invited?”

“Oh, I’m sure you were,” he replied, waving the cup. “You’re a wizard?”

“In training,” said Mizuki. “But … sure.”

“Come on, I’ll give you the tour,” he said, puffing himself up.

“You live here?” asked Mizuki.

“Name’s Grim,” he said, placing his free hand on his chest. He was dressed in a green tunic that was unbuttoned enough that she could see some of his chest. “Come with me, I’ll show you around.”

The first place they stopped was a long dining room, which had a table filled with food. There were at least thirty pots and a stack of plates at one end, and there were all kinds of smells coming up from the table. It was clear that they had done this before, because there were both chillers and warmers, keeping preserved meats and fruits cold and the pots warm, though both rather mild. Mizuki was a bit surprised that there weren’t entads for eating, though she supposed that it was possible the foods were created with the assistance of entads.

“Food,” Grim declared. “Take what you want, be careful not to put your plate down though.”

“Why?” asked Mizuki.

“They’re magic, they’ll disappear, along with all the food, and that can be a huge waste of food.” He pointed to a small sign on the table, next to the plates. “See? ‘Plates and food will disappear when set down!!’ But of course we have so many people in here that it doesn’t really help anything.”

“We’re supposed to donate, for the food and stuff?” asked Mizuki.

“If it’s your first time, don’t worry too much about it, we mostly get by on one or two people who really find the parties worth it, or have enough money to keep us going,” said Grim. “No, the real money is necessary for the drinks, which are in the other room.”

Grim led her there, and Mizuki stood in awe of the selection. There was a full bar with a bartender, and along with the usual assortment of wines there were hard liquors, enough to get her entirely too drunk. Grim was looking quite pleased with himself as he watched her take it in.

“This must have cost a fortune,” she said.

“Well, yes,” said Grim. “But we’re mostly students, we drink cheap, there’s very little of any quality, and then only for special circumstances. We go to the bottle shops and buy up the cheapest by volume for whatever strikes our fancy, or go off what’s on discount, or what we can get in bulk. There was a rather dire period a year ago when we had this horrible spirit made from a variety of potatoes. We drank through it, in the end, as one must.”

Once Mizuki had gotten a glass of wine to match Grim’s, they kept moving through the huge house. There was a music room with a piano and a few other instruments in it, along with a number of couches for people to sit on, a ‘sitting’ room which was essentially the same, and a games room that had a large table for a game played with balls and sticks, in addition to a second table for cards.

“This one will get hopping in short order,” said Grim. “You’re on the early side, the whole party has begun but hasn’t really begun.”

“Where do people sleep in this house?” asked Mizuki.

“On party nights, we don’t sleep,” said Grim. “There are sixteen of us living here, and we’ve all got entads that can shave off the need for a night of sleep. Mercette House is something of an institution, and the rooms accumulate favors over the years, entads that are tied to them, along with certain pieces of furniture that get donated by former residents.”

“So … how do people end up living here?” asked Mizuki.

“You’re interested?” asked Grim, raising an eyebrow.

“Nah, I have my own house,” said Mizuki. “It’s trundling along toward Plenarch, on its way.”

“Well, here you have to apply, and they check to see whether you’d be a good fit. We have entads for that.” He looked up at the ceiling. “The rooms are nice, all perfectly soundproof, which can be a godsend.”

“If you don’t need to sleep, why do you need the soundproofing?” asked Mizuki. She was playing along, interested in whether he would demure or go along with it.

“Maybe I could show you later tonight?” he asked, giving her a sly smile.

Mizuki laughed. “Wow did that not land for me, sorry.”

Grim gave her a fake pout. “Worth a shot?”

“You would have had way better of a shot if you’d slow-played it,” said Mizuki. She giggled. “Does that line work on people?”

“Works on men more than women,” said Grim with a shrug. “Did you want me to show you the rooms?”

“I think I’m fine,” said Mizuki. “The party spills out into there?”

“Eventually, yes,” said Grim. “The rule is that if a door is open, you’re invited in, sometimes it’s private, intimate conversations, other times it’s people getting into loud debates.” If he felt any shame about his failed pickup attempt, he wasn’t showing it, and Mizuki was grateful that she could shoot him down and continue on. “We have just one more room on the ground floor, unless you’re interested in the kitchen.” He swept into the next room, and Mizuki followed.

This room had a boy and girl standing around a box on a table, in argument with each other.

“This is,” began Grim. “Oh, this is the grand device?”

“It’s not working,” said the boy.

“We’re on it,” said the girl.

“This is the variety room,” said Grim. “Sort of a talent show type thing, for at least part of the night. People come up and share stories, songs, talents, weird stuff they want to show off, that sort of thing.”

“Sounds neat,” said Mizuki. “You have a lot of talented people?”

“The room attracts a certain sort of performer,” said Grim. “Lots of poets.”

Mizuki was looking at the box, which had wooden panels and for some reason looked familiar. It wasn’t until the sides had been folded down that it struck her though.

“It’s supposed to be making a tone when you lift the lever,” said the boy.

“Well, it’s not,” said the girl.

“May I?” asked Mizuki.

The girl gave her a skeptical look. “This was expensive. It makes music using some newly discovered ectad property or,” she looked at the boy. “Or something.”

“We’re going to try to make one for ourselves,” he said. “But we need to get the thing working first.”

“You need to disengage the lock,” said Mizuki. “There’s a lever — can I just do it?”

The boy and girl looked at each other. “Sure,” the girl said. “Please don’t break it.”

Mizuki went over to the box, branded with ‘Parson Musical Appliances’, and looked at the internals. The ectad stone was sitting right in the center of it, ready to be played, but as she had guessed, there was a clamp pushing down on the stone, holding it steady. She pulled on the lever, using more force than the two of them had probably felt comfortable with, and the music immediately began to play.

“There’s a dampener, and then also a lock,” said Mizuki. “The lock is for when you’re moving it, the dampener is so it doesn’t make any noise when you don’t want it to.”

“You have one of these?” asked the girl.

“No, I’m just a mechanical genius,” Mizuki grinned.

“Seriously, these are brand new,” the girl insisted. “As in, this is the very first one to make it to Greater Plenarch, so far as I’m aware. Who are you? How’d you get one?”

“This is Mizuki no-last-name-given,” said Grim. “Mizuki, these are the Coffler twins, Beryl and Mira. They do everything together.” Once it was pointed out the family resemblance was obvious, and they were even dressed alike, in brown coats and tan pants.

“I do share the question of where this mysterious creature got one of these,” said Beryl. He was eyeing Mizuki. “It was quite expensive.”

“Who said I have just one of them?” asked Mizuki, still smiling.

“Well now you’re just taking the piss,” said Mira, folding her arms.

“Technically they don’t belong to me, they’re just in my house,” said Mizuki. “But I’m in a party with Verity Parson, whose song you’re trying to play. She’s actually going to be in Plenarch relatively soon, another month at the latest, and I imagine you’ll have a chance to hear her live, if you’d like. Though you’ll excuse me if I don’t want to hear ‘The Brave Knight Gave’ again.”

“Wow, we could hear her live?” asked Mira. “She’s famous.”

“She’s not that famous,” said Mizuki. “I could probably get her to this party if you wanted, though I’m not sure she’d want to put on a performance.”

Mira and Beryl shared a look. “Can we have her come to the next one?” asked Mira. “Would you invite her? We’d want to set up for it, to let people know, have it be a draw. And we’d pay her, obviously, I mean even if she’s a friend.”

“Let me ask,” said Mizuki. <Verity, are you interested in playing a gig at a party in a few weeks? In Plenarch.>

<Sure,> said Verity.

<They would pay,> said Mizuki.

<I would hope so,> Verity replied. <Give me the details when you get back, we’re in the middle of dinner.>

“Alright, all set, just let me know when the next party is,” said Mizuki.

“Wow,” said Mira. “That’s going to be amazing. Now I’m almost ashamed that we’re going to be using the machine when we have the real thing next time.

“Wait,” said Beryl. “Isn’t she a dungeoneer? Does that make you a dungeoneer?”

Mizuki shrugged. “We only do a dungeon once a week, if that. Mostly I’m a student.”

“Well, we’re going to listen to this now, then save it for lulls in the variety show,” said Mira. “I’ll come find you if we need some help. Do you have a talent, aside from fixing things?”

Mizuki hadn’t really fixed it, she’d only moved a thing that needed to be moved, a lever that was part of totally normal operation, but she still felt a nice glow from being helpful. “Um, I’ll think of something, Grim said that you can do basically whatever you want?”

“Five minute limit,” said Mira, holding up her fingers. “But you can go up again after five minutes, if you’d like, and you have more to offer. Sometimes someone has a hot streak, other times it’s just one-ofs. Show off an entad, if you have it, that kind of thing.”

“Oh, I love entads,” said Mizuki. “I’ve got a bunch with me, maybe I can figure something out. It’s gotta be cool though, right?”

“We only accept the coolest,” said Mira. She laughed. “You get a lot of duds, but it’s a short enough time limit that you just move on with things.”

“Bring your best,” said Grim. “Otherwise we’ll have to ban you.”

“Is the tour done then?” asked Mizuki. “Because I was going to get some food.”

“Knock yourself out, and I’m sure that I have other tours to give,” said Grim.

“He loves his tours,” said Beryl.

More people were already starting to stream in, and Mizuki found that the dining room had a bit of a line, which she happily joined. She was unfamiliar with a lot of the dishes, though she didn’t know whether that was because she was still unfamiliar with what Plenarch had to offer or if it was just the peculiarity of Mercette House.

Once her plate had been loaded up, Mizuki found a place to sit in the music room, hoping that someone would play something, and she was rewarded when a girl with a giant coil of hair on the top of her head began to play at the piano.

“Zuki!” said Willow as she sat down on the couch. She was one of Mizuki’s older friends, the group that had invited her to the party, and the feeling of relief was overwhelming to finally have someone she actually knew. Willow was ridiculously pretty, with hair she’d dyed blue and a ton of piercings all over her face, and for the party she’d put on a black dress that hugged tight to her body. “I was worried you wouldn’t come.”

“I said I would,” said Mizuki. “And I always keep my promises, if it’s to a friend, and not too much trouble.”

Willow laughed. “So, any cute guys?”

“I talked to Grim, who seemed to suggest that his room was soundproofed,” said Mizuki.

“Oh gods,” said Willow. “Please tell me that didn’t work on you?”

“It didn’t,” said Mizuki. “Plus I’m not really, ah, that kind of girl.”

“I thought you said you were way into boys?” asked Willow. “I think that was one of the first things that I learned about you.”

“Yeah, well,” said Mizuki. “I need a little more warm up than just ‘hey come up to my room’.”

“Alright,” said Willow with a nod. “Well what if he’s hot?”

“Oh, then,” said Mizuki with a laugh. “But no, I need at least a few days. I’ll fall for a guy fast, but even a kiss too soon feels like you’re missing out on the fun part.”

“The fun part being … not kissing?” asked Willow.

“Yeah, actually,” said Mizuki. “The not kissing can be great, the idea that you might kiss, that it could happen at almost any time? That’s hard to beat. The start of a relationship is always the best like that, when it’s all fresh and new.”

“Sounds awful,” said Willow. “To me, the best part is when we’re in bed together.” She was looking around the room. “Now, mind you, it’s got to be the right guy.”

“Someone hot,” said Mizuki.

“You get me,” said Willow. “Anyway, the rest will be here shortly, we’re going to party. Are you in for a wild night? Wild beyond your wildest dreams?”

“You have no idea how wild my dreams can get,” said Mizuki with a laugh.

Chapter 166 - Collegiate Daydreams, pt. 3

“My god, this tastes like grass,” said Mizuki. “What’s it made from?”

“Would you believe me if I said grass?” asked Rosalind.

“I would not,” said Mizuki.

“It’s made from candyleaf,” said Rosalind. “And it’s quite the delicacy.”

“That’s hooey,” said Mizuki.

“What she meant,” said Willow, “Is that it can be a delicacy, something for the refined palette, made by artisans. This is swill.”

“I don’t mind it,” said Rosalind. “There are worse spirits to drink, if you’re drinking in volume.”

There were six of them around the table, and as many bottles, with more people at the edges of the room engaged in their own conversations. One of the boys was tall and muscular, and Mizuki had the good fortune to be sitting next to him. He was a star athlete, good enough that he could make a career of it, sponsored by the province for competition at the national level. His name was Harrison, and Mizuki had forgotten the names of the others, in part because she’d never met an athlete before.

“Alright,” she said. “So tell me, how do they prevent cheating?”

“Cheating?” asked Harrison.

“Like, I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “You get an entad to run faster. What stops that?”

“Oh,” said Harrison. “Well, wizards, I guess.” He frowned. “A cleric of Qymmos might work too, but I’ve never seen one at a match.”

“You’d have to cheat subtle, if you wanted to cheat,” said Rosalind. “Teleporting across the field, obviously that’s right out. Jumping without gravity? Nah. But if you just drink the right kind of potion, something that enhanced the body but didn’t have a waft of magic, I think you could do it? Until you got caught, I mean.”

“I don’t think that’s really how things are,” said Harrison. He was barely drinking, and very polite, which Mizuki appreciated. He had short blonde hair and excellent posture, and his sleeves were rolled up to show his forearms. “Sports are about testing yourself, your abilities, they’re about achieving the best you can, proving yourself. You can run faster with magical boots, but everyone knows a level playing field is important.”

“It would be awesome to have entad sports,” said Mizuki. “Just … anything goes.”

“You mean Mana League?” asked Harrison.

“Uh,” said Mizuki. “Here’s where I confess to you that I haven’t actually been to any proper sports game, and don’t know anything at all about them.” She placed a hand on his forearm, almost without thinking about it. “Teach me?”

“Alright,” he said, brightening up. “You’re from some dinky little town out east?”

“The dinkiest,” said Mizuki as she took a drink. She felt like she should be defending Pucklechurch, a perfectly reasonable place to live, a place she really did like, but she’d found it much easier to simply downplay it with the city folk. They seemed to like that, and she was a people-pleaser when she was a bit tipsy.

“But you have some sports, right, games you play, a pitch?” he asked.

“Oh, sure, there are games we play, usually friendly, not the whole team thing and people cheering in the stands or whatever, just … standing around.” She looked down in her glass, which Rosalind was filling up. She thought she could eventually get used to the sweetleaf liquor.

“Here, let me set something up,” Harrison said.

He began taking the glasses and bottles and moving them around, and what followed was a very thorough explanation which Mizuki was somewhat disinterested in. There were teams of six, and specialized roles on the team, and some of what he was talking about was strategy stuff that made no sense because she wasn’t even clear on the rules. She could almost literally feel her attraction toward him starting to wane. Normally she liked when people talked about things that they were excited about, and he was excited about this, but he was explaining it poorly, and any sympathetic excitement she could have gleaned from it just wasn’t happening.

“So then we do the push, and my job is to come around and do interference,” said Harrison.

“Which is mostly just crashing into other people,” Rosalind explained.

“Neat,” said Mizuki, though she really didn’t find it all that neat. “So it’s sort of like huddle, that’s what we play, you get the ball into the goal.”

“Erm, no,” said Harrison. “The ball we use is too expensive, too hard to retrieve, there’s a version you can play that’s grounded, and we sometimes do it for training, but you really need the ectad materials.”

“What?” asked Mizuki. She wasn’t sure whether she’d zoned out and missed something or whether he’d just assumed that she would know something she didn’t know.

“The ball they’re pushing is like four hundred pounds,” said Rosalind. “It’s padded, and then there are floatstones to make it neutral buoyancy, basically weightless, so you also need someone to go retrieve it if it goes up, or encase the arena in either nets or barriers.”

“Nets for training,” said Harrison. “Barriers for public games, so people can see what’s happening.”

“Sorry,” said Mizuki. “It’s like … a floating ball? That weighs four hundred pounds?”

“Erm, four hundred and eighteen pounds,” said Harrison. “But yes.” He looked a little nonplussed, but quickly returned to his explanation. “So we take turns doing the push, and usually we meet it with a hook, because they’ve had time to get the ball moving, and we’re trying to divert rather than stop or gain control. When we’re on the push, I run ahead and try to stop their interference.”

“Alright,” said Mizuki. “So tell me about Mana League, how’s that different? It’s not just people using their brawn? Also wait, aren’t there like entads that just change your body? Or clerics that make you taller, a Xuphin thing? How do you stop that?”

“That’s two questions,” said Harrison.

“In any order, please,” said Mizuki. She’d stopped touching his forearm, and was now using her hand to prop up her chin.

“Well, the cheating … it’s not really something that happens, I don’t think,” said Harrison. “There are limits, sure, we wouldn’t let someone nine feet tall walk onto the field, and if it were obvious then sure, someone might say something. But when it comes to sports, I guess the clerical stuff is just … permitted, and kind of assumed? I mean, why should someone be effectively barred from the sport just because they were born short? So yeah, probably some guys go to a cleric of Xuphin and do that, at least a little. And as for entads that change a person but don’t leave any marks behind, nothing that a wizard could see, again people don’t really do that, don’t cheat, and I guess there are entads that can see what changes have happened to the body.”

“Oh!” said Mizuki. “I had one like that, a pair of goggles. We got it from a dungeon, seemed kind of useless. I think we sold them though.” She blinked.

“Wait, really?” asked Harrison. “Those could be worth a lot.”

“Well, money,” said Mizuki with a wave of her hand. “Money money money, always money, but they were just some boring goggles, except I guess maybe they help people for sports or something.”

“To answer the other question, about Mana League, for a few games a year, after the season is over, we do special games where virtually any non-lethal magic is allowed. It sounds fun, but in practice it ends up being very hard to follow and the pushes are either over right away or one team completely shuts the other out.”

Mizuki frowned at that. “But isn’t the point of rules to make for a fun game?”

“I guess,” said Harrison. “It’s actually pretty complicated, now that I think about it, but that’s one of the goals, yeah.”

“But, okay, hear me out,” said Mizuki. “Shouldn’t they just, I don’t know, not have everyone go into the match like they’re going into a dungeon, dripping in magic items, all the armor, the weapons, the backup weapons, the lutes — so many lutes.”

“Er, there are rules on how many things are allowed to be brought in,” said Harrison. “It helps to level the field. But there are still consistent blowouts. So, if you have six guys on each team and two entads each, that’s two dozen entads, which is just way too much. And of course it’s all magic, not just entad league, which means that you can get guys on the team that normally wouldn’t be there, specialists that come in for a game or two.”

“Warlocks!” said Mizuki. “To lock the ball in place.”

“Right,” said Harrison. He’d had a few drinks since he’d first sat down, and his nods were getting a little sluggish. “But you know what I’m saying, the last match we did, one guy was a twelve hundred pound bear that could move like liquid, another guy was twenty feet tall with fists of steel, just teleportation and time dilation and future sight and all kinds of other things.”

“Chrononauts,” said Mizuki.

“Ugh, chrononauts,” said Harrison.

“You don’t like the chronos?” asked Mizuki.

“Getting the results of a game reported before the game has actually happened is the worst,” said Harrison. “It makes it feel like it’s a foregone conclusion. They’re not supposed to, there’s an agreement among their cabal, but yeah, sure does seem like the cabal drops the ball a lot.”

“But if you drop the ball, it floats,” said Mizuki with a giggle. One of the things she liked about drinking was that you were free to be silly, to say things that were just little jokes that didn’t make sense, and no one would take you seriously, even if what you said was stupid.

“And there’s no betting on sports,” said Harrison. “Because of the chronos.”

“Bah,” said Rosalind, who’d been leaning in to listen to the conversation. “There’s enough ways to catch a glimpse of the future that you’d be an idiot to bet anyway.”

“Not that many,” said Mizuki.

“Entads can do anything,” said Rosalind.

“No,” said Mizuki, shaking her head. “Future sight is bad and rare.”

“Ethically bad or … ?” asked Rosalind.

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “I mean yeah, that too, but every single one I’ve heard of is just terrible, not worth the paper it’s printed on. They’re bad guesses about the future, or they’re just telling you about the present, it’s not, um, not really the kind of thing you’d want if you really needed to know what was going to happen tomorrow.”

Mizuki turned to Harrison, and found that he was gone.

“Missed your chance,” said Rosalind.

“Bah,” said Mizuki. They had been saying ‘bah’ a lot, and it was almost a running joke. “You know, it’s been forever since I’ve had a boyfriend. Since I’ve kissed anyone. Months.”

“Two years, for me,” said Rosalind. She had leaned in and was speaking up, which ruined the somewhat intimate feeling of the conversation. “I think I’m past the point where I care, like it’s just my life now. It used to be about not having the time, but now it’s kind of like, I don’t know, I just don’t remember what courting is like, and there’s not much attention from anyone, and …” She was shaking her head.

“You’re so pretty though,” said Mizuki. “I’d date you, if you were a guy.”

“Oof,” said Rosalind. She clutched her chest in mock pain. She down her drink. “Oof,” she said again. “I think I’m off, I need to get home.”

“So soon?” asked Mizuki.

“Yup,” said Rosalind. “That last drink put me over my limit. Besides, I like the parties when they’re noisy, when it’s just a thrum of people, the warmth of all these bodies, it’s going to quiet down. And hey, I’ll see you around.”

“Okay,” said Mizuki. She felt like she’d said something wrong. Maybe it was that ‘I’d date you’ had been interpreted as pity, but she was a bit too tipsy for introspection.

When Rosalind had left, the twins from before took the empty spots next to Mizuki.

“You haven’t come to see the player,” said the boy. “It’s a hit. We wanted to thank you.”

“I’ve been hearing it in the distance,” said Mizuki. “There’s competing music coming from both ends of the house, it’s kind of nice.”

“The talent show is on break, but you’ve got something, right?” asked the girl. Their names slowly surfaced, Beryl and Mira, and Mizuki was quite pleased with herself for remembering.

“I do,” said Mizuki. “A special kind of magic.”

“Ooo,” said Mira. “That sounds lovely.”

“It’s secret,” said Mizuki. “So I’ll have to swear everyone at the party to keep quiet.”

“My guess would be she’s a pyro,” Mira said to her brother.

“No no,” her brother said. “That is, a pyro would be interesting, we haven’t had one of those in a while, but she doesn’t look like a pyro, save for the long hair.”

“I’m not a pyro,” said Mizuki, shaking her head. “They’re all sweethearts though.”

“Are they?” asked Mira, arching an eyebrow. She was less inebriated than Mizuki, but her cheeks were flushed, and she had a huge glass of red wine swirling around one hand.

“I only know one,” Mizuki confessed, keeping her voice low, as though it was a secret. “But he’s a sweetheart.”

“Well, we’re very informal about the whole thing,” said Beryl. “So come by and show us what you’ve got, and we’ll keep mum on it.” He had a bit of a smirk, which Mizuki found attractive. Alfric didn’t smirk enough. She’d only seen him do it once or twice, and it had pleased her to no end.

The ‘talent show’ regrouped sooner than she’d thought it would, and Willow, who’d been chatting up a boy, got up from the table in order to see what Mizuki had in store.

Mizuki watched before going up. She wasn’t like Verity, who performed without thinking about it too much, and she wasn’t like Hannah, who’d been trained to be a people person in that way. Mizuki liked people, chose to spend her time around people as much as she could, and had no problem being the center of attention, but that was entirely different from putting on a performance.

The actual structure of the ‘show’ was extremely unserious, with nothing like sign-ups, and people seemed to just go up whenever they felt like, sometimes waving each other to go when two stood at the same time. It was good, disorganized fun that made Mizuki feel far less self-conscious about going up, especially after a boy read out some dreadful, if heartfelt, poetry.

Mizuki took her turn after a girl who juggled some fruit that was laying around the house, which had gotten a smattering of applause. Mizuki had had a bit more to drink while waiting for her turn, and for the courage to actually get up there.

“I am here to present some magic,” said Mizuki. She had taken her staff from the chest, which was parked upstairs. One of the fringe benefits of the staff was that even if you were a bit drunk, you would be able to keep your balance. She wasn’t relying on it entirely, wasn’t nearly drunk enough for that, but it was nice to not sway at all. She had a glass of wine in the other hand, though it was empty. “Now then, I know there are many wizards, in the crowd. We all go to a wizard school. But the magic I’m here to show you today is that of your mortal enemy — the sorcerer.”

Mizuki looked out at the crowd, where people were murmuring. “It’s a secret,” said Mizuki. “I’ve been keeping a low profile. There are research efforts.” She would have liked to clap her hands, but both were occupied, so she set her glass down by her feet. “Now, I would love to demonstrate for you. There’s enough magic in the air from all those things you’ve got with you, the necklaces and bangles and bracers and staves and — there’s a lot in this room.”

“Are you in a state to be doing magic?” asked a boy near the front. He seemed mildly worried.

“What could possibly go wrong?” asked Mizuki.

“Death, destruction, maiming?” the boy asked.

“Well, I’ll keep my demonstration small,” said Mizuki. “You really shouldn’t take the bit about mortal enemies so seriously, I don’t think I’ve unraveled anyone’s magic that wasn’t giving it to me willingly, and I have never hurt a wizard on purpose.” She went to take a drink, so she could punctuate what she’d said, only to realize that not only was her wine glass on the ground, it was empty. “To start with, a fireball.”

She had been brewing it in her hand even as she spoke, and it exploded half a second after she was done speaking. It was a little fart of a thing, loud enough to make people jump but not so strong that it could actually hurt anyone, not unless they were basically touching it. There were some yelps from the crowd.

“Just a tiny thing,” said Mizuki. “And you know, the funny thing is, that actually makes the room safer, removes some of what you people call atmospherics, means that all your nice things you’ve made drain out less. Now, if you thought that was too loud, you can put your hands down, there’s no more of that, but I am going to show you something cool, something that a wizard’s magic is bad at.”

She had been weaving that spell while she talked as well, cobbling it together from pieces, but took a moment to make sure that it was solid. Back home, they had a rule that Mizuki wasn’t allowed to do any magic while tipsy, and certainly not while drunk, but here there was no one to stop her, which was both nice and scary.

Mizuki rose up into the air and flew through her own power, just for a bit until it gave out, then landed with a prim little pose that she wouldn’t have been able to manage without her staff. She’d been up higher than intended, and the landing was hard, but she managed a “Ta da!” at the end.

The applause was scattered and weak, and Mizuki found her seat.

“You didn’t ever tell us you were a sorc,” said Willow.

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “I was living a double life. It’s good to get that off my chest, I guess.”

“You can just … see magic?” asked Willow.

“Yup,” said Mizuki.

“And unravel it?” asked Willow.

“Yeah, I should have explained it all better, I guess,” said Mizuki. “Really for a lot of wizard’s stuff, it’s kind of hard to undo it without blowing it all up. But I don’t do that, to wizards, you don’t have to worry.”

“It blows up?” asked Willow. She was frowning.

“Oh, sure,” said Mizuki. “I mean, we get taught that in class, that a well with a defect in it could explode. I mean, I’ve never blown up a wizard’s stuff, but it’s always obvious how it would blow up.”

“I had a professor who said that any halfway decent sorc could kill us with a thought,” said Willow. “I guess I never really thought it was true.”

“I mean, only if you have your stuff on you, and honestly, I know I act tough, but I’ve never killed anyone.” Mizuki frowned. “Unless you count stuff in dungeons, I guess. Besides, you know how really has to be afraid of sorcs? Alienists. I can blow up a wizard’s stuff, but an alienist is carrying around so much power that,” she made an explosion noise with her voice and demonstrated with her hands.

“Man you’re drunk,” said Willow. She let out a laugh.

“Tipsy,” Mizuki declared. “A bit buzzed, mayhaps.” She narrowed her eyes at Willow. “Are we still friends?”

Willow’s eyes went wide. “Why wouldn’t we be?”

“I dunno,” said Mizuki. “The mortal enemies thing.”

“So long as you don’t destroy my stuff, we’re fine,” said Willow. Her eyes had gone to the current performer, a girl who was mouthing all the words to ‘The Brave Knight Gave’ while the machine played the song. “I just think it’s weird you didn’t tell us about it.”

“Is it?” asked Mizuki. “Hey, what did you think I did in the dungeons?”

“I don’t know,” said Willow. She wrinkled her nose. “You seemed to want us to think you were a fighter, with plate armor and a huge sword.”

“Oh, I’ve got those,” said Mizuki. “But mostly I throw fireballs.”

It was, undeniably, a bit awkward between them, but Mizuki was feeling good about herself. It had been something she’d mostly let people remain ignorant about, but she’d practiced disclosure, and she thought that Alfric would be proud.

Mizuki got more wine, then sat in the games room for a bit, watching and having the rules explained to her, which wafted over her like a nice cool breeze. They were betting chits with each other at a table where they were playing cards, and Mizuki wondered how they were keeping people from cheating there too, but it was mostly a friendly game, and there were so many wizards around that someone had to be looking at the aether. Mizuki herself couldn’t see anything suspicious going on, though she was only half paying attention. Harrison was there, stoic as he played his cards, but he gave her a smile when he saw her.

Mizuki had no idea how late it was, but the party had started to wind down, the packed rooms and the din of chatter turning into something a bit more intimate. A few people were passed out on couches or in chairs, and more had gone up into the upstairs rooms, but Mizuki stayed on the main floor, wandering from time to time. The sun had long since gone down, and the night was a bit of a blur. The house was in serious disarray, with glasses, some of them half-full, scattered all over the place, and more than a few spills. The buffet was a wreck, almost all the food eaten, save for a weird dip that no one had been adventurous enough to try and some hard crackers that broke into shards when you tried to put them in your mouth.

Mizuki eventually found herself in a group of people who had made a circle of couches in one of the rooms. A few bottles had been brought in from one of the other rooms, and there was a nice, gentle conversation going on, less raucous than anything that had come before.

“They say she threw a fireball during the talent show,” said one of the men. He had a full beard, but was probably still in his early twenties, like most of the people at the party.

“Wow, that’s messed up, I hope they catch her,” said Mizuki.

“It does seem kind of irresponsible,” said a different man. It took Mizuki a moment, but then she recognized him. It was Garth, the other research assistant.

“Garth!” she said. “You came.”

“I’ve been here, next to you, for fifteen minutes,” said Garth.

“Still,” said Mizuki. “But ‘irresponsible’ like, okay, wizards do that kind of thing all the time, it’s called a what-do-you-call-it, a clapper.”

“Yeah,” said the bearded guy opposite Mizuki, who had a glass filled with some amber drink. “But if we were doing that in a room with thirty people, we wouldn’t just be eyeballing it, we’d do actual math, we’d figure out the amount of pressure, we’d test in controlled environments, it would be safe because we weren’t winging it. Winging it is what a sorc does.”

Mizuki didn’t like the way that he said ‘sorc’.

“I don’t think it’s a fair comparison,” said Garth. He glanced sidelong at Mizuki. “A wizard’s discipline is about planning, engineering, figuring things out, you couldn’t make a fireball ‘on the fly’ if you wanted to, and if you could do it on the fly, you wouldn’t have any naive control of it. It’s different, for a sorc.”

“You’re working with one, right?” asked a woman beside Garth, possibly a girlfriend based on the way her hand sometimes went to his thigh, or maybe a very forward form of flirtation.

“I am,” said Garth. He glanced at Mizuki again. “The very same one who did the fireball, I think. No one hurt?”

“No,” said the bearded man. “That doesn’t mean it’s safe.”

“I hope they string her up,” said Mizuki. “Expel her from school, all that kind of thing. A fireball that didn’t hurt anyone? How dare she.”

“This is Mizuki,” said Garth. “She’s the sorc.”

“How dare you make such an accusation,” said Mizuki.

“Well,” said the man with a beard. “I do think it was irresponsible.”

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “I’ve been a sorc for a long time, it was as gentle as a thunderclap.”

“A thunderclap?” asked Garth.

“Or a regular clap, whatever,” said Mizuki. She set her drink down, then immediately regretted it because it was lost in the forest of other glasses. “Check this out.”

She cast the spell, sucking in the disturbances in the aether. This one was even weaker than the one before, like a loud snap, and it had used so little of what was in the air that she was able to make a second one, almost exactly the size of the first, and then a third. She sat back with a smug look on her face.

“Was that it?” asked a girl. “That was the ‘fireball’?”

“I’d thought there would be some kind of fire,” said Garth.

“I need to do some demos, if you people are so worried,” said Mizuki. “I mean I wouldn’t say that it’s a hundred percent, there’s no math, but even drunk my feel of things is pretty good.”

“It actually wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to do a demonstration,” said Garth. He was sober as a stone, and drinking water. “We have more formal talks from visiting wizards from time to time, scheduled events. I think Arturo would rather you hold off until he’s closer to some findings, but —”

“Can we agree that people shouldn’t be making fireballs in the house?” asked the bearded man.

“What if I need to kill a rat?” asked Mizuki. “Or fight off a burglar? What then, huh?”

“You’d fireball a rat?” he shot back.

“I’d fireball five rats,” said Mizuki, which didn’t really make that much sense, but felt good to say.

“I just don’t think they should be called fireballs,” said the girl who’d asked ‘that was it?’. “Fireball sounds impressive.”

“I could show you impressive,” said Mizuki. “But we would need to go outside, and I don’t want to wake anyone up.”

Someone behind her cleared his throat, possibly for the second time, and Mizuki turned to look.

It was Alfric.

“Alfric!” said Mizuki. She stared at him for a moment. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to take you home,” said Alfric.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. She furrowed her brow. “I was … saying something in party chat?”

“No,” said Alfric. “I’ll explain later.”

“I’ve got the chest,” said Mizuki. “I was just going to sleep in there. Or, in the lute in the chest.”

“Let’s get going, get you some air,” said Alfric.

“You know this guy?” asked Garth. His eyebrow was raised.

“He’s part of my party, I said,” said Mizuki, though she wasn’t sure that she had said. “I trust him with my life. With your life too, actually.” She stood up, but had misplaced the staff and immediately felt unsteady on her feet. Alfric was there almost at once, supporting her, and they went off together while the conversation resumed. She hoped that Garth would defend her from charges of recklessness.

“You can still sleep in the lute, if you’d like,” said Alfric.

“Why are you here?” asked Mizuki. She was leaning on him for support, maybe more than she needed to. She was hoping that he might offer to carry her, which sounded nice. “You said this wasn’t an undone day, you said you’d tell me if it was an undone day for you.”

“We’re past the witching hour,” said Alfric. “It’s a new day. Where’s the chest?”

“Upstairs,” said Mizuki.

They moved together and retrieved the chest, which had been told to stay in one place. The lute was inside, and Alfric whisked them into it, then helped Mizuki into one of the beds there.

“Oh man,” said Mizuki as her head rested against the pillow. “It’s after the witching hour? I should get to bed.” She laughed at her little joke, but Alfric didn’t so much as smile. “Hey, so what happened?”

“You came home and requested a reset,” said Alfric. “You weren’t sure about the timeline.”

“Oh shoot,” said Mizuki. “Was it a fireball gone wrong? That would be very embarrassing.”

“From what I understand, you kissed a guy you wished that you hadn’t kissed,” said Alfric. His words were delivered with a very curt and impersonal tone.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “That’s it? I kissed someone and didn’t want to have done that? I get friendly when I’m tipsy.” But then she saw Alfric’s face, his discomfort, and felt a bit rotten about it.

“We can talk when you’re sober,” said Alfric.

“Do you have a way to do that?” asked Mizuki.

“Time, sleep, water,” said Alfric. He took something out of his pocket. “Also this ring, which will remove the effects of alcohol but has to be paid down at a later date. Taken from the family warehouse.”

“Yes please,” said Mizuki, holding out her hand.

Alfric held her hand and slipped the ring on.

It wasn’t until the ring took effect that Mizuki realized just how much she’d had to drink throughout the night, and when the delightful fog began to lift, she realized that her stomach was hurting and her mouth was slightly numb, or at least had been filled with enough sweet drinks to feel wooly. Her breath was bad, and she felt self-conscious about it.

“Okay,” said Mizuki, blinking.

“We don’t need to talk now, if you don’t want to,” said Alfric.

Mizuki rubbed her face. She was tired, it was very late at night if it was past the witching hour. She also vaguely recollected that she’d had a short nap on a couch or something.

“Who’d I kiss?” asked Mizuki.

“Some guy,” said Alfric. “You didn’t give me a name. You didn’t want to give me a name, because you didn’t want to know.”

“Ah,” said Mizuki. He was sitting a bit further from her than he normally did. “And you’re sure it was … I mean you’re saying that I kissed him? Not the other way around?”

Alfric shrugged. “I got the sense that you weren’t telling me the whole truth.”

“I lied to you?” asked Mizuki. “That doesn’t sound like me.”

“I think you wanted to undo it,” said Alfric. “And I think that in order to undo it, you wanted yourself to know as little as possible, which is why you told me as little as possible.”

“Well I don’t like that,” said Mizuki. “I think this is the first time undone Mizuki has wronged me. Why would I …” She trailed off.

Now sober, there were two thoughts that came to her. The first was that perhaps it had been some boy being pushy with her, that she’d given in without really wanting to, which was the kind of thing that might make her feel a heaping dose of regret. She had run into that problem in the past, had gone so far as to go on a handful of dates with a guy just because it had felt like it would be rude not to.

The second thought was that maybe she had instigated and it had gone further than a kiss. That didn’t sound like her, but if she was drunk, and if the mood was right, and impulsivity had won out, it wasn’t entirely out of character. It was a difficult thing to know about yourself, what you would do in certain situations.

“I wish you weren’t involved,” said Mizuki with a groan.

“You asked me,” said Alfric.

“Yeah, so now I’ve been double wronged by my undone self,” said Mizuki. “Ugh. Couldn’t I have asked your mom or something?”

“She wouldn’t reset the day for you,” said Alfric. “Not for something like this.”

A question burning deep within Mizuki was what Alfric thought. Had those two possibilities occurred to him too? Had he made up his mind on what had really happened, just based on what she had said and how she had said it? Maybe it was the booze, but she was feeling sick to her gut. She’d had way too much wine, and needed to brush her teeth and maybe take a warm bath.

“How are you?” asked Mizuki.

“Fine,” said Alfric.

“You don’t look fine,” said Mizuki. “You look very annoyed and … stiff. All business.”

“You weren’t very straightforward about why I was supposed to get you,” said Alfric. “I think you might have lied to me about the real reason. I missed you at our meal last night, and worried about you, and then when you came home, which wasn’t until after another full day of school, you were out of sorts.”

“Oh gods,” said Mizuki. “And I have school tomorrow, why did we do this on a school night?”

“The upperclassmen don’t have morning classes today,” said Alfric. “You’re due at your first class in about four hours, so it would probably be good for you to get some sleep. We can do full disclosure later.”

“Alfric, what do you think really happened?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “I think it might have been as simple as you said, that you kissed someone and felt bad about it afterward.”

“But you think the worst?” asked Mizuki. She leaned forward.

“What kind of friend would I be if I thought the worst?” asked Alfric. He gave her a weak smile. “You know, I could have forced the issue, could have said that I wouldn’t reset unless you explained everything. I trust you. I like you. I’m going to choose to believe that it was pretty much what you had said it was, though …”

“Though?” asked Mizuki.

“I guess I don’t understand why kissing someone would be such a bad thing,” said Alfric.

There was something in his tone that made that sound like a lie, and his entire demeanor since picking her up from the party had been cold and brusque. This wasn’t the way that Alfric acted when he was doing a favor for a friend, even a favor that he didn’t particularly feel like doing. He was a kind man, compassionate and forthright, and if he was acting this way, it was because he was feeling hurt.

And it was Mizuki who had hurt him, that was clear enough. She’d been thinking about him off and on, comparing other men to him, and she’d talked about him a few times, she was pretty sure, maybe many times.

“Thank you,” said Mizuki. “I guess I’ll trust my other self that this was the right thing to do.”

Alfric gave a solemn nod. “We’ll talk more in the morning, or I guess after you’re done with school. I was going to spend the day in Plenarch, maybe see my aunt. We could have lunch together.”

“Did you leave the lute outside the chest or inside?” asked Mizuki.

“Outside,” said Alfric. “Otherwise we would be racing across the province to return to the others. They’ll send it on a return trip, or we can use the staff to get back.”

“Can I make it up to you?” asked Mizuki. “The hassle, the other stuff?”

“It’s not a big deal,” said Alfric. He didn’t ask what ‘the other stuff’ was. Maybe it was obvious to him. “Slip the ring off, get some sleep, you’re going to have a hard enough time getting through class as it is. You’ll get a one hour nap courtesy of Verity, but I doubt that will be enough.”

Mizuki wanted to confess her feelings to him, to tell him that there was no one she’d rather have shared a drunken kiss with than him. If he was feeling a bit hurt that she’d go off and kiss some other boy, if her non-drunk mind was interpreting that correctly, then maybe there was more between them than she’d been thinking there was. There were reasons why it would be messy and complicated for them to date each other, reasons like them living in the same house and the chrononaut pact thing that kept threatening to rear its head, but messy and complicated had never stopped her before, and if he was going to have these emotions about something happening with another guy, it seemed better for them to just get together.

Mizuki almost went for it right there and then, but it had been an impulsive night, and she didn’t want that to be the precedent, especially not when she was feeling a bit sick and needed to get some sleep.

“Slip the ring off before you fall asleep,” said Alfric. “It needs to be paid down, otherwise no one can use it, and it’s actually a somewhat serious part of our defensive package. You’ll sober up as you rest.”

“Alright,” said Mizuki. She slipped the ring off, and immediately the drunkness returned, feeling stronger than it had been before. She placed the ring in Alfric’s outstretched hand. “You’re my favorite person.” The words just came out.

“Thanks,” said Alfric. “That means a lot. Get some sleep, and we’ll make it through tomorrow together.”

Chapter 167 - All Singing, All Dancing

Alfric and Mizuki were being weird around each other, and Isra didn’t like it. It was undercutting every meal they shared together, and Mizuki was spending more time in Plenarch than before, coming home late, sometimes after dinner had already been concluded. She said that she was busy with school and it was easier to study there, along with her obligation to the research project she was a part of. There was also some ado about fireballs, which was causing no small amount of drama for Mizuki, but that seemed like a reason to spend less time at school, not more.

Alfric, for his part, had his head down. Isra was helping him, as much as she could, both in terms of doing work with him and helping to speak with him about what had happened.

“There’s really not much to say,” said Alfric as they worked together in Lutopia One.

There were, it turned out, many things on the long list of improvements for the place. Alfric had become a big fan of woodworking, and had all kinds of ideas for what the place would look like in its final form. The actual final form would be something provided by the endless entads he seemed to think Verity was close to providing, but the woodworking was a good project, and Alfric had thought that he might sell the racks and shelves when they had something better.

“I think asking Mizuki not to be impulsive is like asking the wind not to blow,” said Isra.

Alfric gave her a puzzled look. “You can stop the wind from blowing though.”

“Only with great difficulty,” said Isra. “And it doesn’t last.”

“You change the weather all the time,” said Alfric.

“I think you’re missing the metaphor,” said Isra. “Or taking it too literally.”

“It’s like me asking the wind not to blow?” asked Alfric.

“Yes,” nodded Isra. “Sometimes the wind will stop blowing, and sometimes that will be just after you’ve asked it to, but the wind will blow again, and the fact that it stopped has nothing to do with you having asked.”

“That’s grim,” said Alfric. He returned to the pieces of wood.

“It is, if you mind that the wind blows,” said Isra with a shrug.

“Ah,” said Alfric. He looked up for a moment. “So the trick, you think, is to find inner peace?”

“Maybe,” said Isra with a shrug. “Though I agree that at the party she was a bit more impulsive than usual. Getting drunk probably didn’t help.”

“She gets drunk here,” said Alfric. “She’s never been that bad.”

Mizuki had sworn off drinking, though to her credit, didn’t place much of the blame on wine and spirits. She also hadn’t kept to it very well, claiming that a glass of wine ‘wasn’t drinking’, which Isra only somewhat agreed with. Isra could feel the effects of a full glass of wine, if she drank quickly, and she wasn’t as short as Mizuki was.

“She broke a window,” said Isra. “Also, we’re constantly trying to rein her in. And even if we weren’t, the standards for this house, which she owns, are much different. She can make her fireballs here.” Isra knew that Alfric wasn’t really that upset about the fireballs, but it was easier to talk about.

“She’s so much older than us,” said Alfric. He was shaving a piece of wood down so that the joint would be perfect, hands steady despite his obvious annoyance. “I just don’t understand how she hasn’t learned some self-control.”

“It’s worked out for her,” said Isra. “She hasn’t been bitten by it too much.”

“She’s lost lots of friends over the years,” said Alfric. “I don’t know how much she’s shared with you, but the way she talks about some of these people she spent every day with, it’s a wonder that she’s been able to hold it together with this party.”

“All because of boys,” said Isra.

“True, mostly,” said Alfric with a sigh. “A few were from putting her foot in her mouth, I think.”

Isra didn’t know what else to say, how to help Alfric to handle this thing. She would have suggested talking to Hannah, but Hannah had decided that she was on the way out, and privately, Hannah was a little annoyed with both Alfric and Mizuki, though for different reasons. Isra had quite enjoyed having a private conversation about the other members of their party, which made her feel cozy in a way that was difficult to describe. From a certain perspective, it was gossip, but from another, it was an intimate chat about people that were important to both of them.

“I like her,” said Isra.

“I like her too,” said Alfric. “I really do. I’m just … exasperated, I guess.”

“You’re jealous,” said Isra.

Alfric paused. It was the sort of thing he didn’t like to talk about or acknowledge. She was wondering whether he would just let it pass, and as he returned to aggressively filing down a piece of wood, she thought that maybe he was done talking.

“If I were jealous, that would be a pretty stupid thing to be,” Alfric finally said.

“Hannah says that’s not a good way to think about your emotions,” said Isra.

“I guess,” said Alfric. “I do recall her saying something like that.”

“You’re pretending you’re not bothered,” said Isra.

“I think I’m more bothered that she asked me to undo it,” said Alfric. “And … there’s a feeling that comes with undone days sometimes, those that other people have taken, not knowing for certain whether to trust their accounting of things. I got that with Lola a lot. I don’t think I expected to feel it here.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. “You could have told her no, when she asked for you to reset.”

“I know,” said Alfric.

“What do you think really happened?” asked Isra.

“I choose to believe that it was what she said,” replied Alfric. He didn’t manage to make the shrug look comfortable. “But part of having to deal with chrononauts is that the undone day is unknowable. If she was hiding something, and I have to accept that she might have been, that puts me in a position that’s no different than the position that the rest of you are in every time I undo a day.”

“We trust you,” said Isra.

“You don’t trust Mizuki?” asked Alfric.

Isra was silent for a moment. “She means well. She’s very nice. There are certain things that I would trust her with.”

“Wow,” said Alfric.

“You’ve planted seeds of trust,” said Isra. “They’ve grown quite nicely. You could tell me almost anything had happened in an undone day and I would accept it as true, even if it seemed outlandish.”

“Shoot,” said Alfric. He was looking down at the joint he’d been filing down. He had taken off a little too much, and the frown of concentration on his face hadn’t been because he was devoting himself to getting it just perfect. He held the piece up to show Isra. “I don’t know how to fix this.”

“Surely we have an entad solution,” said Isra.

“The oud, yes,” said Alfric. “I can reshape it. It’s just … not what I prefer to do. Doing it that way doesn’t build skills for the future.”

“Alright,” said Isra, at a loss for what else to say. “While you think of some other solution, I’m going to tend to my animals. You don’t need me?”

“No,” said Alfric with a wave of his hand. In truth, he hadn’t needed her in the slightest, not from the start, but Isra was glad that she could hold things in place for him or maneuver awkward things with him, and she liked talking with him, especially when that was what he needed.

Isra exited the extradimensional space, taking in a breath of clean air. The air within the space was ‘cleaned’ using a ventstone and voidstone in concert, but the taste of it was a bit off, and fresh air was always better. Isra seemed to be the only one sensitive to it, maybe because it was so much more sterile than ‘living’ air. She felt the same way about water from the waterstones, which had an odd taste to it, or maybe just lack of taste, though that she’d gotten used to when she was quite young. She still felt that water tasted better when it had just a little of what Mizuki called ‘funk’, a taste of life to it.

Isra’s animals were all in a little box hanging off of the side of her room, an enclosure that Alfric had made for her which was what he’d dubbed the ‘bird apartment’, though there were more than just birds in there. The birds and other animals could get in and out through different sized and shaped openings that led into the open air, but the ‘back’ of the cubby faced the room and was covered by a fine mesh net, which could be removed if Isra wanted the animals to come inside.

In one sense, it was like having twenty different small pets, but Isra let them come and go, not affecting them too much except to tell them that this was a safe place with food that was moving west. The animals didn’t seem to care about ‘west’, or to understand the fact that they were in a moving house, but they did understand food and safety fairly easily, and there was some competition for the spaces. Isra had inadvertently attracted too many birds at first, and a few of them had taken up positions under the eaves of the house, where they were less welcome, along with a flock coating the roof, but Isra had spent some time correcting for that, and now the animals were mostly contained to their enclosure, at least when they weren’t out foraging, exploring, courting, or whatever else they had decided to do that day.

A large part of the reason for keeping dozens of animals in her room was that Isra was trying to get serious about being a better druid, and as with most things, from lute playing to wizardry to woodworking, practice seemed to be the key.

Isra pulled back the net, calming the minds of the animals, then called out a squirrel, stopping herself from using her voice. It hopped out, nervous as many of the prey animals were, but Isra was able to wash that away. She replaced the net and focused on the squirrel, pushing more of her soul into it.

Getting animals to do what she wanted them to do had never been terribly difficult, so long as she wasn’t asking them to do anything that was too unnatural for them, or which went against their instincts too much, or triggered their anxiety and fears. She had talked with her guild about some of that, and there had been general agreement that these things were difficult, but conflicting advice on how easy all that was to overcome, and what a ‘proper’ druid was like, some of which went over her head. Dom seemed to think that a ‘proper’ druid treated animals as though they were people, to be treated with respect and care, but there was at least one druid, Corm, who took a more cynical view on the matter.

Isra had yet to form an opinion, but Corm claimed to be capable of incredible feats, and Isra was at least interested if those feats were possible.

Isra poured as much of her soul into the squirrel as she possibly could, though it was an odd feeling, and not at all similar to pouring. It felt more like a deep empathy, or sympathy, but also like focusing on a little patch of skin at the tip of her finger, or the rhythms of her own breathing.

Corm claimed to have absolute control over animals, as though he was a puppeteer, but so far, Isra had a lot of difficulty getting anything even remotely like that to work. She could make the squirrel go from place to place, but she couldn’t make its paw clench into a fist. The control, to the extent it was control, felt like it was in the form of giving the squirrel instructions, when what she wanted was to move its limbs as though they were her own, like an extension of herself. That was what Corm seemed to be claiming, though Corm was a bit of an odd duck, even among the druids. His messages to the guild were always extremely long and very sporadic, dredging up old conversations a week after they’d happened.

Isra tried again with the squirrel, keeping it calm, keeping herself calm, keeping her soul extended. It was right in front of her, inches away from her hand, and it felt as though it was an extension of her … but when she extended a lone finger, the squirrel didn’t follow suit. Corm had said that it would, or that it did when he tried it. Isra was tempted to send a message to Corm and meet up with him, but he had a bit of unsavory character, at least through the guild messages. Alfric had said that some people were like that, brusque or with disorganized thoughts, even if they were perfectly normal people when you met them in person.

While Mizuki was off rock petting to become a wizard, Isra had found herself squirrel petting to become a better druid. Unfortunately, druids were rare, and there were basically no proper teachers or apprenticeships or anything like that, and it was hard to tell whether all this practice was being done correctly, or might result in actual dividends.

It happened while Isra’s mind was wandering, off to other subjects. She moved her hand, and the squirrel’s paw curled with it. It was startling, and took a moment to do it again, but once she’d done it a second time, it was easy to do it a third. She moved her hand over to the side, and watched the squirrel’s hand move at the same time.

There came a knock on the door, and Isra answered without looking away at the furry creature in front of her.

“Come in,” she said.

“It’s me,” said Pinion as he stepped in. “How is whatever this is?”

Isra moved her hand and the squirrel moved its paw. She lifted her arm, and the paw lifted high, though they had different bodies and were in different positions from each other. It made sense in her mind, which was the important thing.

“Well,” said Pinion. “That’s, ah, a bit creepy.”

“Is it?” asked Isra, though she was starting to feel the same way. It wasn’t like a puppet, nor like gripping the squirrel about the body, she was just sharing her soul with the creature, but it smacked of something unsavory.

“You can’t do that on people, right?” asked Pinion.

“No,” said Isra. “Or I guess … I haven’t tried.” She gathered her sense of soul back into herself and told the squirrel to run off back into the apartments. She pulled back the mesh to let him in.

“It was only a joke,” said Pinion. “Sorry, maybe it was in poor taste, I’m not actually worried. And it was rude to say that it was creepy, I had only meant —”

“It’s fine,” said Isra, though she didn’t mean it. People said that things were fine when they weren’t, everyone did it.

“I was wondering whether you’d like to do something for Verity’s show tonight,” said Pinion. “She’s put me in charge of ‘the extras’.”

“What does that mean?” asked Isra.

“Well,” said Pinion. “I’m actually not sure. I had the idea that there could be some accompaniment to her music of some kind, and she said that it was a lovely idea that she was going to do nothing with unless someone else took care of it. I offered to see what I could do, and she said that she’d have veto power, which wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of her faith in the plan.”

“And what were you thinking?” asked Isra. “She plays the lute, what would you add to that?”

“Well,” said Pinion. “The lute is good, and she plays it masterfully, but it’s a feast for only one of the senses, or I suppose more if she’s leaning into the magical aspects. People usually have food and drink, but … well, I was thinking that we might have something of a show. You and Mizuki are both suited to it, in terms of your skills, and I had thought that before I saw you moving the mouse around.”

“It’s a squirrel,” said Isra.

“Was it?” asked Pinion. “It was so small, and with such a short tail.” He moved over to the animal apartment, and Isra calmed the animals down as they sensed the movement and the looming of a new creature.

“Stub-tailed squirrel,” said Isra. “It’s native to these parts, I think. I’ll tell it to leave before we get too much further, I’m worried that it’s not going to like the trees further west, nearer the ocean.”

“And what is this project?” asked Pinion.

“It’s … druid training, I suppose,” said Isra. She was watching him. There was something excitable in his nature that she liked, which helped to take her mood in a different direction from where it had been. “I’m trying to be ‘of Qymmos’ a bit.”

“Are you now?” asked Pinion as he looked in at the creatures. “In the sense of … ?”

“Knowing the animals,” said Isra. “There are certain things that are easy, and other things that are hard. I can know what they’re thinking, feeling, the kinds of foods they like, what they need … but it’s harder to know other things, like what their lifecycle is like.”

“When they’ll lay eggs?” asked Pinion.

“I know that if it’s close,” said Isra. “But if it’s seasonal, if the mating season is far on the horizon, then I don’t always know.”

“Ah,” said Pinion. “And … this is something that’s relatively unstudied?”

“I don’t know,” shrugged Isra. “Are there druid researchers?”

“There are,” said Pinion. “I don’t know any personally, but I know that they exist. Druids are enormously helpful for agriculture and other, less important things. Inter would like to have as many druids as possible — sorry, is this new for you? I like talking, but you’re the druid, and I wouldn’t want to explain things you already know.”

Isra shrugged. “I’m in a guild of druids, a local one. I talk to them about these things. Most of us weren’t given our gift through any kind of scheme but the foresight of our mothers.”

“It takes a considerable amount of land,” said Pinion with an excited nod. There was something of Alfric about him, though perhaps Isra only thought that because Alfric was the only boy she knew well. “You need either natural isolation or a dedicated space to be cleared, or an area that’s relatively inhospitable. At any rate, you’ll have to let me know your findings.”

“You could probably speak with a researcher who knows already,” said Isra. “Maybe a druid researcher who was a druid herself, along with also being a cleric of Qymmos.”

“See, that I’m not sure exists,” said Pinion. “There might be a druid researcher who’s also a druid, but I’d think that it would be a game of numbers, and I don’t think the numbers are there. When you start to get into specialities, there are some real problems with with actually having enough people. I was actually talking to Mizuki about it, how she might be one of only a handful of sorcs who ever became wizards.”

“They used to fight though,” said Isra.

“Well, yes, that did come up,” said Pinion. “But even outside of historical tensions, sorcs are somewhat rare, even if their rarity stems from different sources than druidism. It’s something that I find particularly interesting because I have no special power of my own. There’s an enviable bevy of powers in your party.”

“You were asking about a show?” asked Isra. “Using … animals?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Pinion. “Something like that, yes, something novel that would add to the experience of the music rather than take away. I don’t know what that would be, exactly.”

Isra shook her head. “We would need to rehearse it.”

“There’s time today?” asked Pinion. “But otherwise, yes, you’re right, having it be tonight is probably a bit ambitious. I was going to ask Mizuki when she got home whether she might be able to do some kind of light show, but perhaps with her current controversies at school it might not be for the best.”

“She would like it,” said Isra. “I think she’s a natural performer, even if she doesn’t use that talent.”

“The nature of sorcery is such that it would probably only be good for the finale,” said Pinion. “She’d drain the room quickly, if I understand it right.”

“And in the meantime, you’d want … birds?” asked Isra.

Pinion gave a happy shrug. “We’re at that wonderful part of a project where we can scrap it and lose absolutely nothing. If we run into a wall, if we don’t enjoy what we’re doing, we can say ‘you know what, I would rather not’ and then there’s absolutely no consequence. Verity expects nothing from us, we’ve wasted no time — there’s something nice about that, isn’t there? It’s very freeing.”

“So I could do … whatever I wanted?” asked Isra.

“Exactly!” Pinion exclaimed. “Maybe some birds doing a dance, or mice doing acrobatics, or … you know, I don’t know, snakes wrapping themselves around Verity’s limbs. I guess you’d need to coordinate on songs, but it’s the sort of thing that feels like a nice gimmick.”

“Verity isn’t a huge fan of gimmicks,” said Isra.

“Isn’t she?” asked Pinion. “I didn’t get that sense from talking to her.”

“You’re fast friends,” said Isra.

Pinion frowned, just slightly. It might have been because of the way that Isra said it. “I think her view on gimmicks is that they should elevate the work, but that by itself a gimmick isn’t a bad thing. You don’t knock a work of art for having a gimmick, you knock it for leaning on that gimmick for too much support, leaving out all the details of proper execution. Some of the most treasured songs have gimmicks, arguably. A number of the religious canticles are built around a gimmick, or at least with a constraint that’s like a gimmick.”

“So Verity does like gimmicks?” asked Isra.

“I think everyone likes a gimmick, except maybe traditionalists, and for them, you just have to give them twenty years or so.” Pinion smiled. “Can you make birds dance?”

“Birds like to dance and hop around,” said Isra. “Doing that to the tempo of a song … I’m less sure about.” She looked in on the apartment, and all the birds she’d gathered. Many of them were out for the day, finding food as the house marched on, or just riding the house and enjoying the mild wind of its passage. She had never thought about whether birds had a sense of timing and synchronization, but they had flocks, didn’t they, and moved in concert with each other. “I really don’t think that we can put this into practice tonight.”

“All good,” said Pinion. “There’s no pressure to do it. In fact, there’s no pressure on Verity to give a performance, that’s something that she’s put on herself. And I suppose I’m just putting in a request, because obviously I’ll be of absolutely no help whatsoever, not unless you need someone to bounce ideas off of.”

“I suppose I would like that, yes,” said Isra.

They ended up spending the next hour together, which was mostly playing with the animals rather than doing any actual work. Pinion was apparently eager to get to the next dungeon so he could continue on with his studies, but he seemed pleased to spend time with her. Isra, in turn, found herself pleased that he had sought her out, even if they ended up making no headway on making some birds into accompaniment. Their conversation had started on the topic at hand, but quickly drifted in other directions.

“No,” said Pinion. “See, Qymmic jokes aren’t about wrong definitions, they’re about definitions and categories that aren’t strictly wrong. That’s what makes them funny. Saying that a cat is a dog isn’t a Qymmic joke, explaining why a cat is a dog, that’s where the humor comes from.”

“That doesn’t seem that funny to me,” said Isra.

“How do we define a dog?” asked Pinion. “It’s furry, it’s got a tail, walks around with four legs, right? So obviously a cat is a kind of dog.” Isra frowned and Pinion laughed. “Alright, maybe that’s not a good one, but the point is that it’s ridiculous. There’s a stock character in Qymmic jokes, the well-meaning novice, named Branson, who gets asked to do some task or bring some item, and goes off and brings back something unexpected, or does the task in a way that wasn’t intended.”

“Alright, I have a Qymmic joke,” said Isra.

“I am so ready,” said Pinion.

“A man goes to the store,” said Isra. “He asks for nails. The storekeeper gives him fingernails.”

“The concept was solid,” said Pinion. “The execution was, shall we say, a little lacking. I studied jokes in the seminary, believe it or not. We can work on it though.”

“Oh yes,” said Isra. “That’s what I want to do, workshop a joke.” She rolled her eyes and gave a little laugh.

There was a knock on the door, and Isra looked at the door with a frown. “Come in?”

Verity slipped inside and appraised the situation, which was maybe two dozen critters lined up.

“How is … it?” asked Verity.

“It’s well, I think,” said Isra. “We’re mostly just chatting.”

“I’m done with practice, and have had my fill of watching the road roll by,” said Verity. “Any chance that either of you would be up for something more interesting?”

“I can’t imagine what would beat this,” said Pinion, gesturing at the arrayed animals. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor.

“We could take the ship out,” said Verity. “We can meet up with the rest of the party later on, but the bird boy says that we’ll be crossing close to a lake soon. I was thinking that we could do a late picnic, unless either of you have eaten.”

“I could always eat more,” said Pinion.

“And I haven’t eaten,” said Isra.

“I’ll make some sandwiches, and then we’ll disembark,” said Verity.

“I’ve seen your sandwiches,” said Isra. “I’ll make sandwiches.”

Verity stuck out her tongue and left.

“You’ll make a sandwich for me too, right?” asked Pinion as he got to his feet. “I can make my own, obviously.”

“It would be my pleasure,” said Isra. She held out her hand for some help up, even though she didn’t really need it.

There was something about the way that Verity had come in that was bothering Isra, and kept bothering her as she was making ham on rye, which were wrapped in napkins and placed into a small basket. It took quite a while to identify where the discomfort was coming from though, until Isra realized it was the thing that started it: the knock. Verity never knocked on the door.

Maybe Isra wouldn’t have thought twice about it if Verity and Pinion weren’t friends, but that Verity thought she was interrupting something, or might be was causing Isra to have some thoughts. Pinion was fun to be around, had lifted a somewhat melancholy mood, and had made her feel good. He had pretty eyes and nice forearms, and there was something about him being short that Isra liked as well. There was, sometimes, something almost threatening about a big man like Marsh.

It was the thought that maybe Pinion was going to make a move, or that Verity thought Pinion might make a move, that made Isra’s stomach do a little flip. Her emotions were confused, harder to read than a sparrow’s were, and she found herself pushing more of her soul out around her, which did help to keep her from being overwhelmed by second-guessing either interaction she had with either of them.

She was second-guessing the boat ride as they left, and almost bailed out, but Pinion had become Verity’s friend, and Isra felt an urge to be a part of it.

Chapter 168 - Sugarweed Lake

The boat marched down into the water on its many hands, and walked, for a moment, with its fingers in the silt and muck. The boat didn’t quite move of its own volition, instead working on the ‘collective will’ of the party, which was apparently somewhat novel, though still within the bounds of plausible behavior for entads. It made sense that an entad taken from ‘Verity’s’ dungeon might be different from the normal ones, but it was still an interesting thing to have confirmed, and it created the possibility that they might find something that was wholly unique among entads, beyond the normal bounds. Even if Verity could cause the creation of an entad that was at the boundaries rather than crossing them, that would still be quite the win.

She rather liked the idea, and had been happy to talk about it, which had put her into a good mood on the trip to the lake.

“The weather is nice,” said Pinion with a glance at Isra. There were a few spotty clouds in the otherwise blue sky, occasionally crossing the sun, and a mild breeze was bringing them the scents of late summer. It was just the three of them, as Alfric was driving the house, Mizuki was at school, and Hannah was away.

“I’m not sure that I agree with the position that there’s non-nice weather,” said Isra. “I like storms, personally. I like drizzle, cloudy days, days where the sun is beating down hard and your clothes get stuck to you with sweat. There’s something to love in every day, even when the wind is a cold whip across the water.”

“That’s a very positive way to look at it,” said Pinion.

“When I was little I caused a drought,” said Isra. “I was … eight or so, I think. I had wanted sunny days, so I kept the clouds away, until everywhere I went I felt like the trees and grasses were screaming for water. It was horrible, and when I realized, I brought the rains back for so long there was nearly a flood.”

“I don’t think you ever told me that,” said Verity. She’d taken her shoes off and was wiggling her toes as the boat paddled out. None of them knew how to do the rigging, so they weren’t using the sail, just trying their best to direct the boat with their minds as much as possible. With only two fifths of the party, it was somewhat slow going.

“It’s embarrassing,” said Isra with a shrug. “I was so worried that my father was going to yell at me, or that we were going to get in trouble with the police.”

“I don’t think you could get in trouble for that,” said Verity.

“You could,” said Pinion. “Interfering with crops is actually a pretty serious crime, and I think it would fall under that.”

“No one really worries about food these days, do they?” asked Verity.

“The government does,” said Pinion. “It hasn’t been a major concern for at least a century, not when it comes to the staples, but it’s something that the government keeps an eye on, yes. It’s just low visibility. I had friends at school who were going to go into government work. Some of them on dungeons, in fact!”

“That sounds incredibly dull,” said Verity. “Also, isn’t the League in charge of most of it?”

“The League is effectively an arm of the government of Inter,” said Pinion. “But they need scholars to advise them, where possible. I think they prefer seasoned dungeoneers who also happen to be scholars, but those are in short supply.”

The hands of the boat were moving them along, and Verity leaned over the side to watch them in action. They were, as Mizuki had pointed out, the hands of women, very feminine, and that did seem like it was possibly Verity’s influence shining through. The movements of the arms were calm and slow, and the resulting motion of the boat was also slow, nice and sedate.

“I think you’d look good with long hair,” Verity said to Pinion, unprompted.

“Would I?” asked Pinion. “I think you’re actually the second person to tell me that.”

“Who was the first?” asked Verity.

“A girlfriend,” said Pinion with a shrug. “We were more friends than partners though. Very little, ah, kissing.”

“Why’d you say it like that?” asked Isra. “‘Ah, kissing’?”

“Kissing and other things,” said Pinion. “There were a few times, but it was always … I don’t know. Unsatisfying for both of us. Eventually we stopped trying, and we were still partnered, but as I said, it was like having a friend more than having a partner. She liked my hair long though, was the point.”

“I like long hair generally,” said Verity. “I like hair you could make a nest in. Hair you could drown in. Though it is quite a bit of work.”

“I think it makes me look weird,” said Pinion. “Weirder, I guess.”

“I wouldn’t say you look weird,” said Isra. “Odd, maybe.”

“There’s a difference?” asked Pinion.

“Typical Qymmos question,” said Isra with a cluck of her tongue.

“Weird has negative connotations, odd has positive,” said Verity. She reached out and dipped her hand into the water. The boat was moving faster now, though with no particular destination in mind.

“Is that a fact?” asked Pinion.

“It’s my opinion,” said Verity with a shrug.

“I think it’s neutral,” said Isra. “If I’d meant it as a compliment I would have said that you looked eerie.”

“Ouch,” said Pinion.

“Ouch?” asked Isra.

Pinion waved a hand. “I’m feeling self-conscious now, but that you didn’t mean it as a compliment is … well, the reason I say ‘ouch’.”

“Is that how it works?” asked Isra. “If I try to stay neutral, that ends up as an insult?” She was using her typical blunt and somehow charming curiosity on him.

“Hmm,” said Pinion. He tapped his chin. “It depends on why you were trying to stay neutral.”

“If you went up to a girl and said ‘that’s an odd-looking dress, and I don’t mean that as a compliment,’ there would be blood,” said Verity. “It would be an unbelievably catty thing to say.”

“Mizuki told me that paying a compliment to someone was a way of flirting,” said Isra with a frown. “I was trying not to flirt.”

Pinion gave her a raised eyebrow at that, and the obvious ‘but why’ question seemed like it died on his lips.

“Let’s have lunch, shall we?” asked Verity. “I’m eager to see what our sandwich master has made.”

In truth, the jokes about Verity’s inability to cook were starting to wear a little thin, and Verity was taking seriously the notion that she should learn how to cook to at least a level of competence where people couldn’t make fun of her. That she wasn’t trusted to make a sandwich was going too far, in her opinion, and while Isra had been able to point out specific points where Verity’s sandwich-making was lacking, it did feel like a bit that had gone on too long. Verity had picked up all kinds of skills through the course of her life, the womanly arts as Society was fond of calling them, but cooking wasn’t one of them. Unfortunately, Verity’s approach to learning things was to sit down and practice until she had it perfect, which you couldn’t really do with food, not unless you were willing to waste a lot, or you had lots of hungry people to feed.

The sandwiches that Isra had put together had been made with cold chicken that had been cooked the night before and stored with a rich and pungent spice blend that had turned everything a muddy orange. The leaves were from a plant that Isra didn’t know the name of, but they were minty and mild, fresh in comparison to the spices, and there was also some kind of unidentifiable sauce, something creamy. The bread was Hannah’s, though Hannah had been baking less bread since deciding that she was going to transition to being a wandering minister.

“This is amazing,” said Pinion. “I think I’ve underestimated sandwiches. Is it a Tarbin classic?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. “The spices are. It’s a blend that I had tried in a dish in Plenarch. There’s much more of this chicken.”

“You spend a lot of time away from the house,” said Pinion. “I’d be envious, except that I’ve been enjoying our leisurely stroll through the countryside.”

“We’re going the wrong direction for Tarbin food,” said Verity. “This sandwich is delicious though.”

“I’ve been seeking them out,” said Isra.

“Them?” asked Pinion.

“People from Tarbin,” said Isra. “I’ve been testing the waters a bit.”

“Ah,” said Pinion. “And, er, how does that work?”

“I go looking for people who look like me,” said Isra with a shrug. “It’s been a very idle pursuit. Nothing too serious.”

“I could mistake you for Chelxic,” said Pinion, squinting at her a bit. “I didn’t mean that as a compliment.”

Isra gave him a smile. “You see, I think that’s flirting.”

“You’re very much out of my league, I’m well aware of that,” said Pinion with a little laugh. “Druid dungeoneer extraordinaire, looking like you do?”

“Why do you think it’s flirting?” asked Verity.

“Jokes are flirting,” said Isra. She gave a little ‘so it is said’ nod like Hannah did sometimes.

“Let me guess,” said Verity. “This is from a conversation with Mizuki?”

“A bit,” said Isra. “With Hannah too though. Not just Mizuki.”

Pinion was holding up two fingers. “Jokes are flirting, compliments are flirting, what else?”

“Touching is flirting,” said Isra. “Paying attention to someone, spending time with them, noting aspects of their appearance, finding their jokes funny … there were others.”

“So everything, basically,” said Verity.

“Yes,” nodded Isra. “But those are just signs. We have wine, right?”

“I took care of the wine, yes,” said Verity. She pulled a bottle out of a bag, one of two, which felt like it would be plenty, then got out the cups. They were, unfortunately, not glass stemware, but that didn’t feel quite appropriate to the boat. She poured a cup for Isra, then one for herself, and the final to Pinion when he gave her a hopeful look.

“I was talking with Mizuki about how to flirt with people and how not to flirt with people,” said Isra. “For me, flirting had always been sort of a … mood more than anything else. It was a character that I would play. But I ran into some trouble with a man who thought that I was flirting when I wasn’t, or thought that I would respond well to his flirting, or something.”

“Were you okay?” asked Verity.

“Fine,” said Isra. “It was annoying, nothing more. To be honest, if I hadn’t slept with Xy, I might have been interested, but … I don’t know. I feel a bit different about flirting now.”

“Ah, and that’s why you stopped,” said Pinion.

“It is,” Isra nodded. “But as I said, it was more of a mode for me, but sometimes I would end up flirting without meaning to. Paying a compliment to someone and having them think you’re flirting can cause problems, I think.”

“I think I don’t know how to flirt,” said Verity. “Flirting mode … maybe I should try that.”

“You’re too self-serious, that’s a large part of the problem,” said Pinion. “You prefer dry humor, which doesn’t come across like flirting.”

“Isra, you’d know, am I bad at flirting?” asked Verity. “You can be honest.”

“It’s hard to tell when you’re interested,” said Isra after a moment. “I do think you default to business talk. It’s what Alfric does too. He’s also bad at flirting.”

“It’s an interesting question, whether flirting always has to be fun,” said Pinion. He’d finished his sandwich and sat back with his cup of wine in hand. “I’m very tempted to say ‘no, it doesn’t’, but then again, I’m a contrarian.”

“Not every question is a Qymmic question,” said Isra.

“Well,” said Pinion. “The contrarian in me wants to debate that, but you’re right, of course.”

“Am I?” asked Isra.

“I think the sun and wine is getting to me,” said Pinion, “Because for once I’m not up for a Qymmic argument. You know, I think the best thing about Qymmos is the arguments? And that you can have them with people who aren’t experts?”

“I don’t like arguments,” said Isra.

“You do, a bit,” said Verity. “I think you just don’t like arguments where you feel like you’re missing a piece of the puzzle, and because of your upbringing, that happens to you a lot.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. “Possible.”

“It’s nice and warm,” said Pinion, looking up at the sky. The clouds had parted, and the sun was beating down. The boat had slowed its paddling, and was drifting across the lake. “There’s something about wine on a day like today that settles well in the stomach.”

“Do we have dessert?” asked Verity, feeling hopeful that the answer was yes.

“There’s seaweed,” said Isra.

Verity stared at her for a moment. “You’re joking.”

“No,” said Isra, shaking her head. “It’s one of the things this particular lake is known for. They call it sugarweed, it’s apparently very sweet, and possibly a dungeon escape, because it can’t be found elsewhere. Hannah asked me to gather some, while we were out, but you can eat it raw.”

“Does it … taste good?” asked Verity.

“I’ve never had any,” said Isra. “I’ve only heard about it.” She leaned over and looked down at the lake. “It’s down there somewhere.”

“And how are we going to get it?” asked Verity.

“Swim?” asked Isra.

Verity looked down at her dress and frowned. “I’d have brought different clothes if I thought there was a chance for swimming.”

“You’ll dry quickly in the sun,” said Isra. “Or you could go without clothes. That’s what I was going to do. We’ll see if there’s a place where we can just reach down though.” She turned to Pinion. “Do you know how to swim?”

“I do,” said Pinion. “I hadn’t thought that the day would turn in the direction of skinny-dipping though.”

“I used to do most of my bathing in a nearby river, so long as the weather was nice,” said Isra. She looked at Verity. “Is this weird?”

“A bit,” said Verity. “Nudity is … I mean, if you wanted to make sure that you weren’t flirting, then I think being naked in front of someone is … not something that my mother would approve of.”

“But we don’t care about what your mother thinks, do we?” asked Isra.

“No,” said Verity, feeling a bit of hesitation. If it were just the two of them, it would be so much easier to be cool and collected about it, or to treat it as mere flirtation, a possible sign that Isra wanted to rekindle things. With Pinion there, it felt different, threatening somehow.

“Is it fine with you?” asked Isra, turning to Pinion.

“If you’d like to preserve your modesty, I can be the one to dive down,” said Pinion. “Though I’m a mediocre swimmer.” He looked down at his pants. “These would be fine to dip in the lake, but I don’t have all that many sets of clothing, so I’d need to do laundry when we got home.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” said Isra. She was wearing a dress with thick straps, which she put her thumbs under, and before anyone could say another word, she had slipped it off. She was wearing a shift underneath, and this she slipped out of as well. She folded it and set it aside, then leapt from the side of the boat.

“Well,” said Verity. She felt like she should have looked away, but she hadn’t looked away. There was, in the abstract, nothing inherently sexual about nudity, but it didn’t feel that way when it was her former girlfriend. She looked over at Pinion, who also hadn’t looked away.

“Hmm,” said Pinion. He looked at Verity. “We should join her, shouldn’t we?”

Isra came up for breath, handed wet clumps of seaweed to Verity, then descended down into the lake again, kicking her feet hard.

“It doesn’t seem like a job for more than one person,” said Verity.

“Yes, but,” said Pinion. “You’ve said that she sometimes feels odd about things, like she’s weird, and it would help her to feel like she’s not weird, that’s all I meant. It’s a normal thing, to go for a dip, to spare your clothes from getting wet. Normal enough, I mean, though I can’t say I’ve ever done it in mixed company.” He stood without waiting for a response and began taking off his clothes, first his vest, then his shirt, and finally, his pants. Isra had made two more trips in the time that this happened, and then Pinion splashed down next to her.

Verity followed soon after, mostly so as not to be the odd one out. She was thankful that the dress she’d worn was easy to take off, not one with laces or many buttons, and then she was standing in the summer air, which suddenly seemed much colder. She looked around, which was something she really should have done before taking her clothes off, then leapt into the lake with the others.

The water was shockingly cold, seeming to sap the strength from her, but she kicked her legs and slowly adjusted to the chill, which wasn’t quite so bad once she’d had a chance to adapt. She became aware of something brushing against her leg and nearly yelped, but when she looked down, it was only some of the seaweed that they were meant to be gathering.

Verity spun up a song almost without thinking, one that played mostly in her head, which was more difficult to do and not nearly as strong. She kept herself warm, or at least not feeling the cold, then worked in a somewhat novel bit of breath-holding magic. It wouldn’t actually give her more air to breathe, but it would make it easier to suppress the part of her that would scream for the power to move.

Gathering the seaweed was tougher than Verity had thought, and she immediately wished that she had goggles, gloves, and a knife. It was harder to tear the seaweed stalk than she’d expected, the surface of the plant rough and slimy in the water in a way that it wasn’t as much when she’d been pulling it up. She got it apart by twisting sharply just as she was starting to run out of air, and she took in a deep gasp of air as soon as she had breached the surface. Her lungs were burning, and she clung to one of the outstretched arms of the boat for a moment to collect herself before lifting herself up and throwing the seaweed onto the pile they were slowly collecting.

Verity felt that her own contributions were minor, but then she watched Pinion, who had understated how poor of a swimmer he was, and felt a bit of relief. He was quite slender, but had very little fat on him, and while he didn’t have much in the way of muscles, the thing that seemed to be stopping him from swimming was a sheer lack of technique. He was floundering more than swimming, and keeping a close grip to the ship’s arms, grabbing only a few leaves rather than entire stalks like Verity had done.

The seaweed gathering didn’t go on for all that much longer, since they soon had a sizeable pile in the boat, but once they were finished with that, they stayed in the water for a bit, with a fair amount of splashing and fun between the three of them. Isra momentarily floated up onto her back and swam away, with a smoothness and fluidity that put both the others to shame, and Verity swam after, struggling to maintain the proper form that she’d been taught. Dondrian was on the ocean, and beach days were relatively common, especially at the house of someone rich enough to have a private beach, but all Verity’s experience couldn’t even come close to matching Isra’s natural grace. Verity had never been terribly athletic, and hoped that she wasn’t making a fool of herself. Eventually, Isra allowed herself to get caught.

“Hi,” said Isra. She was smiling as she treaded water. Her hair was pulled back, sopping wet. “We should go swimming more often.”

“You should mark some lakes on the map,” said Verity. She was treading water too, and felt like she was using a lot more energy to do so. The boat was some distance away, and as Verity looked at it, she saw Pinion climbing up the arms to haul himself into the boat. He looked funny, clambering up, all limbs.

“It’s not weird, is it?” asked Isra.

“It’s a little weird,” said Verity. “But Pinion was right, we should all be a little weird together.”

“He said that?” asked Isra. She spat a bit of water out, and for some reason Verity found that very fetching.

“Something like it,” said Verity.

“Does he think I’m flirting with him?” asked Isra.

“Are you?” asked Verity. She wasn’t going to last much longer, and still needed to swim back to the boat, but having a private conversation in the water felt so right to her.

“I wasn’t,” said Isra. “I don’t think I’m ‘out of his league’ though. That’s a sporting thing?”

“He thinks you’re pretty,” said Verity. She was pretty, in a specific way, a cat-like prettiness that probably didn’t appeal to everyone.

“Hmm,” said Isra. She was looking at the boat. Pinion gave them a wave. “I could see it.”

“See that you’re pretty?” asked Verity.

Isra looked back at her, brown eyes steady even as they were both bobbing up and down. “I don’t want to make the mistake I made with Xy, the mistake of thinking that it doesn’t matter.” She spat more water. They were both breathing a bit harder from the effort. “That it doesn’t matter for me. But I don’t know if I like him like that, if it would be … right.”

Verity tried to shrug, but she had her arms out to the side, keeping her afloat. “He’s a nice boy. I like him. But he’s not going to be with us long.”

“I’m not committed to the idea,” said Isra. She was watching Verity in the way that she did sometimes, intently, as though she could read into every small movement of the eyes and lips.

“I don’t know,” said Verity. “My legs are worn out, I really need to get back to the boat.”

“Race you?” asked Isra with a smile.

“Unfair,” said Verity, shaking her head. She kicked her legs out and started swimming, doing the breaststroke, and felt like she was doing well until Isra sped by her.

Verity was the last up to the boat, and Pinion had already put his pants back on, though his hair was still wet and his pants were slightly damp. Isra was turned away from them, bent over so she could wring her hair out, and Verity tried not to stare. Verity had been in changing rooms before, especially for those aforementioned beach days, but this didn’t feel quite like that, and it made her feel like perhaps it was indecent. It hadn’t felt like that when they were in the water.

“We’ll dry off, then go back?” asked Verity. Her teeth were chattering slightly. She’d adjusted to the water once in it, but having gotten back out, she was once again chilled to the bone. Isra threw her a towel, then grabbed one of her own. Verity’s eyes went briefly to Isra’s tan lines.

“We had towels?” asked Pinion.

“Of course,” said Isra. “It was always the plan to go for a dip.”

“I could have worn a swimsuit then,” said Verity. “Though I don’t think I have one in the house. It wasn’t a priority when I left Dondrian.”

“We did fine without swimsuits, didn’t we?” asked Isra. She was slipping back into her shift.

“Mizuki will think that you were flirting,” said Verity. “Because if she had done it, it would have been flirting.”

“She’s gotten changed in front of me,” said Isra. “I doubt that was flirting.”

“This is why I think she’s a bad person to get romantic advice from,” said Verity with a laugh. “Especially with her current troubles.”

Pinion was drying his hair, and when he finally finished, he put his shirt back on, buttoning it carefully. “Alright,” he said, looking at the pile. “This is good to eat raw?”

“Only one way to find out,” said Isra. She reached down and tore one of the seaweed leaves, or whatever it was you were supposed to call them, and tasted it with care. “Mmm,” she said. “Interesting.”

Verity took her own piece, and slipped it into her mouth, holding it on her tongue for a moment. It was almost painfully sweet and slightly sour, with a grassy flavor that the sweetness nearly overpowered.

“It’s good,” said Pinion as he chewed on his piece. “I think I need some time to acquire the taste, but if this were mixed into something, dried out and ground down … used as a spice, maybe?”

“Mizuki uses seaweed in her cooking all the time,” said Verity. “Different kinds. She might like this, if she were cooking more often.”

“We’ll go catch up to the house,” said Isra, and even as she said it, the boat’s arms began to move once more, swishing through the water and bringing them to shore.

It was a longer trip than Verity had thought it would be, but one that was done mostly in silence. Verity drifted off to sleep under the hot sun as she completed drying off, but her first thought on waking was that she was going to have to take a proper shower as quickly as possible to get the lake water off her: there was nothing that beat the purity of a waterstone.

Isra and Pinion were talking about Tarbin, and Verity caught only a bit of it. It seemed to be mostly things that Verity already knew, things about Isra’s father, the people there, what Isra had seen around Greater Plenarch of ‘her people’. It was a phrase that Isra had been using more of recently, and while Verity had pledged her support, it wasn’t clear what form that support would or could take.

When they got to the house, which was halfway down the road, they had a brief handoff as they departed the boat. The whole excursion had brought them practically up to dinner, though much of that was travel time. Verity had just enough time to squeak in a shower, and was in the middle of it when she heard, from downstairs, Mizuki’s loud voice.

“You went skinny dipping!?” she asked. “Without me!?”

Chapter 169 - Now Museum, Now You Don't

Vertex went in first, as they’d discussed the last time, and the Settlers followed after. As before, they had Bib and Pinion waiting outside, though technically speaking there was nothing for Bib to do, and he’d have been free to run off about the countryside, as was his way.

Hannah hadn’t told the others yet, but it was very possible that this was going to be the last dungeon she did. She’d been sending letters across Greater Plenarch and had even rejoined the guild, and she was feeling the itch to go get some of those things done rather than spending too much time cooped up in her entad. Marsh was quite supportive, even if it meant that they would be geographically separated from each other for a bit, though he also seemed to think that they’d find some entad solution for that. It had worked well enough when there were two hexes between them, but she thought it would work better when they could return to the same home at night.

There was a piece of Hannah that worried this was part of a long pattern that was hard to see. She’d itched to get out of the seminary and into actual clerical work, itched to get out of the temple and go do dungeons, and was now itching to speak with people again in the clerical way. Looking at herself from what she hoped was an objective point of view, it seemed possible that she would just never be satisfied no matter where she landed, that she was setting herself up for a life of flitting from one thing to another, never bringing anything to proper completion. It was too early to say for sure whether this was a true pattern, and she didn’t know whether it would even necessarily be a problem. She’d resolved to keep a watchful eye on it though.

The dungeon was by a river, in a nicely scenic location, which dungeon entrances often weren’t. It was in a hex that had only a small town, and one that was fairly far from the dungeon entrance. They hadn’t selected it at random: it had been picked because Verity had some sense that she would be able to make something she wanted to make there. As before, she hadn’t told them what it was she wanted to make, but they’d decided to be a bit less strict about it this time, in part because it was annoying to talk around the lack of information, and potentially deadly.

The dungeon opened up into a small room, which seemed, to Hannah, like such a common dungeon feature that there must have been a bias towards it. It was white and gold, though almost assuredly not actual gold, as it didn’t have the luster and dungeons weren’t supposed to make real gold. Double doors stood before them, fifteen feet tall and narrow enough that even with both open they’d have to go one at a time.

The lute that would start playing for danger wasn’t playing.

<Well> said Alfric. <We’re thinking no monsters?>

<I tried not to have traps, living things, animated things> said Verity. <Er, nothing that would hurt us passively or actively. I had a session with Pinion where we tried to hash it out, so I have Qymmic guidance on all the ways that I might have failed>

<I wish I’d been a part of that prep> said Alfric.

<I think we’re relatively safe> said Verity. <If you see statues though … it might be time to run, or to smash them>

When everyone was ready, Alfric opened the door.

There was a long hallway filled with alcoves, and in each of them, a statue.

<Welp> said Mizuki. <Time to smash>

<Are they magical?> asked Alfric.

<No> said Mizuki. <But I mean … I wouldn’t necessarily be able to see, if the magic was inside them, or outside them, or whatever>

The statues were all female, and most of them were nudes. There was an enormous variety of poses, clothing, facial features, expressions, and ethnicities, though that was harder to tell without skin color. The stone used for the statues came in wide varieties, pinks, blacks, whites, grays, and a few that were the green of jade.

<All women,> said Mizuki, shaking her head. <Typical.>

<I don’t think it’s lurid,> said Verity. She was gazing at the statues.

<Most of them aren’t,> Isra agreed.

<But they are all women,> said Mizuki.

<The female form is, aesthetically, superior to the male form,> said Verity.

<I’d say that’s slander, but I don’t want to get off track here,> said Alfric. <Right now, we’re in an enviable position to retreat. We could do that now, if we’re worried that the statues might come alive.>

<I think we’re fine,> said Verity. She was frowning somewhat. <Can’t we just collect the statues as we go, so we don’t get flanked?>

<I … suppose,> said Alfric. <Given the nature of stone, a single blow to the head from one of these might kill one of us outright, and brain injuries are notoriously difficult to deal with.> He gave a glance at Hannah.

<Come on, get the lute then, we’ll stash them away,> said Mizuki. <I’m about seventy percent sure that they won’t attack, unless they do attack, in which case I’m only twenty percent sure.>

They began transitioning the statues into the lute-space, which went surprisingly quickly given how heavy the stone was. None of the statues showed any signs of moving, and eventually the strumming to get them in was going quite quickly. There were forty of the statues in total, each with its own base to allow for poses that would otherwise tip the things over, and the party talked about each of them as they went into storage.

<I thought that one was quite pretty,> said Mizuki. <Prettiest we’ve come across, anyway.>

<They’ve all been pretty,> said Verity. <Now that I know they’re not going to kill us, I quite like this hall. And we should be able to sell these, shouldn’t we?>

<They’re of decent quality,> said Alfric. <But statues are very large, which means they don’t fit into small homes, and the bigger homes will have plenty to pick from. I’m not sure that in terms of subject matter or artistry these are really anything special. Henling artwork often sells poorly.>

<We could keep one in the house, if it stopped moving,> said Mizuki. <I’m not sure that we could secure a statue?>

<No,> said Alfric.

A white marble statue in a silk robe that clung to her and left nothing to the imagination was whisked away, and they moved on to the next, this one a nude.

<Must have been cold,> said Mizuki as she looked the statue up and down. <Hey, she kind of looks like me.> The stone was a mixture of colors, black and white going through it without respect to the geometry of the body. One hand was outstretching, pointing, and she had a faint smile on her face.

<Kiromon?> asked Hannah.

<Yeah,> said Mizuki, peering closer. <My height, my build, it’s weird.>

<She’s got the same expression,> said Alfric, who was standing back somewhat.

<What’s that?> asked Mizuki, narrowing her eyes at the statue’s face.

<The mischievous one,> said Alfric. <Like you’re about to do something … impish.>

Mizuki turned to look at Verity. <Is this me?>

<I don’t know,> said Verity.

<Historically, you have made statues of people you know,> said Mizuki.

Verity shrugged. <I think the cheekbones are more prominent and the nose is more narrow.>

<I love statues,> Mizuki said with a sigh. <Like a moment frozen in time.>

Among the statues they collected there were none others that so much as suggested a resemblance to anyone they knew, though the range of body types and ethnicities meant that you could stretch it a bit, if you wanted to. By the time they finished, Verity had a theory.

<I think this might be the result of me trying to prevent what happened last time,> said Verity, frowning a bit. There were now empty alcoves on either side of the hallway. <I was trying to weave in the opposite of that, and this is, I think, some of the influence of that leaking in.>

<Does that make sense?> asked Mizuki. <You made some lady statues because you were thinking about not making lady statues?>

<It makes sense to me,> said Hannah.

<Are we expecting to see anything else?> asked Alfric. <Things you were focusing on not having?>

<I don’t know,> said Verity. <It’s influence, not control. It’s taking a suggestion of a dungeon that I get from what I know, and in that split second we cross through, trying to weave in my own ideas about what we should find. I’m not even really sure how it works, to the extent it does.>

<Sometimes when you push against somethin’, it pushes back,> said Hannah. <Most things, if I understand physics right.>

<I don’t think it’s like that,> said Verity. <I think it’s like … if you avoid certain things, it becomes obvious?>

<Does it?> asked Mizuki. <Man I hate talking about this.>

<It’s important,> said Alfric. There was a touch of annoyance in his voice.

<I’m just saying that Verity hasn’t succeeded in making sense,> said Mizuki.

<It’s like if you wrote a book that didn’t do a thing that books normally do,> said Verity.

<Um,> said Mizuki. She had gone up to the next door, which wasn’t how they did things. Alfric had said that they were supposed to treat these dungeons as proper dungeons, with all that entailed, and Mizuki going forward to inspect doors wasn’t a part of that. Alfric said nothing though, and Hannah held her tongue. <I still don’t know what that means.>

<A book without people?> asked Isra. <Usually when people try to write those, they end up writing books where animals fill the roles of people. By trying to avoid people, you twist things that aren’t people into something similar.>

<Ah,> said Mizuki. <That makes more sense, I guess. Like a big book titled ‘This is Not About Bats!’ It’s kind of got to be about bats in order to not be about bats.> She was staring at the door, which was the same white and gold, though with a relief on it. There were skulls at the bottom, which trees were growing out of. <Are we ready to go on? I’m hoping it’s not more statues.>

<Let me go first, just in case,> said Alfric. He moved to the front and made sure that everyone was in place, then pushed the door open.

They were faced with a long, sunlit room with a few hundred pedestals, all lined up in rows. Each was affixed with a small label, made in brass. The place had a nice, rich glow to it, helped by the dark hardwood floors that reflected the light back warmer. The sunlight was coming in from holes in the roof high above them, a grid of windows on the ceiling that made spots of light in exactly the places where the pedestals weren’t.

<Is this … an entad museum?> asked Alfric. Each of the pedestals had something on top of it, the objects seemingly random, tools, implements, books, pieces of art, tchotchkes and knick-knacks, each of them with a label.

<It is!> said Verity. She was beaming. <I took some inspiration from that dungeon we went through, the one where Alfric got turned to stone — though come to think of it, perhaps that dungeon had some of these same influences.> Her eyes were moving over the entads, quickly hopping from one to another.

<Just one problem,> said Mizuki. <Which is that these aren’t all entads.>

Verity turned to her. <They’re not?> she asked.

<Nope,> said Mizuki. <I count three.> She looked sheepish. <Sorry.>

<Oh,> said Verity. She frowned. <Well, it’s still close to what I was trying for, I suppose.> Her bright mood on coming into the room had suddenly been swept away.

<It’s still three entads we have that we didn’t need to fight for,> said Alfric. <If we could do this every time, we could do ten dungeons a day, scoop up thirty entads, and have virtually no risk.> He placed a hand on Verity’s shoulder. <You’re doing remarkably well.>

<Thanks,> said Verity. She sighed and looked up. <There are other doors. I suppose there would have to be, if I ended up draining the magic stored in the dungeon again.>

<Let’s take what we can,> said Alfric. <And a selection of the others, so Pinion can see, not that I think he’ll be able to help much.>

They moved through the room, somewhat slowly, following Alfric’s lead. It did feel a little bit ridiculous that his sword was drawn, but there was a chance that something might happen. Of all the things they thought the lute might not immediately warn them of, poison was the one that Hannah was most worried about. They had been poisoned once before. The second problem that they might not be warned of was, of course, shifting rooms, which they’d also encountered before. Especially if the things Verity was trying to avoid could seep in sideways, there was some cause for concern.

<Aw man,> said Mizuki as she read one of the plaques. <This one would have been so cool.> She was standing next to one of the pedestals, peering down at the plaque beneath a tea kettle. <It says that it was an attack kettle that would create huge clouds of steam to attack your enemies, with a secret word and everything.>

<This sword would have cut cleanly through metal but not flesh,> said Alfric. He had picked it up and was looking at it. <I suppose we should be taking these things, but I see more doors, and want to get a good sense of the place, just in case it’s large.>

<We can just take everything,> said Hannah. She turned to Verity. <What do you suppose is beyond here?>

<This was all it was supposed to be,> said Verity. <Beyond those doors … I don’t know. I was trying to keep it small, to not drain the dungeon completely, but I wouldn’t put money on that having worked. It didn’t feel like it worked.>

<Is that a thing now?> asked Hannah, arching an eyebrow. <You can feel whether or not it worked?>

<I don’t really know,> said Verity. <I think so? It’s such a small bit of moment though, as we come in.>

<We could try slowing it down,> said Isra. <As with my bow?>

<I’m not sure that would work,> said Alfric. <It’s worth trying though, if it’s something that would actually help.>

Mizuki was the one who went for the three entads, which were spread out across the room. Among them was a salt shaker, a small silver spoon that Mizuki seemed enthused about, and an ice pick that came with a sheathe. Each had their own description, but Alfric was adamant that they do no testing of the entads, since if the plaques were wrong, they might be in some real trouble.

They didn’t end up taking all the henlings, just twenty or so for the sake of comparison, and particularly those that looked valuable. Alfric had said that if the other doors had nothing, they might grab the rest on the way out.

He still seemed to be stuck on the idea of stripping everything out of the dungeons that they could, but to Hannah’s way of thinking, that wasn’t very sensible in the long-term. If Verity was able to get this under control, the group wouldn’t want to spend most of their time ‘stripping’ dungeons, which was something that a lot of dungeoneering groups did if they were trying to minimize their risks. Going in with a crowbar wasn’t a good use of time when you could get entads with no risk of combat, and they’d had their fill of removing valuable bits when they’d taken most of the theater.

Hannah wasn’t sure how the party would get on without her. She was going to stay in the house for as long as possible, but this new era would surely mean changes. Hannah had always been Alfric’s second in command, right from the start, supporting him when it came to getting the party in order. There was a good chance that Hannah would keep doing dungeons so long as they were being dripped out over the course of many days, but if she eventually devoted her efforts elsewhere, Alfric would have to manage everything all on his own. He could easily handle all the logistics, but the personal matters were something else entirely, the easiest place where he might let himself — and the others — down.

Marsh was of the opinion that people didn’t actually need her as much as she thought they did. He was gentle about expressing that opinion, but it had still stung a bit. Of course, Marsh was also nearly blind to the total dysfunction within his own party, which he considered to have been resolved with the removal of Lola, but he had a point, and Hannah had spent some time pondering it. That pondering hadn’t actually led anywhere.

When they opened the doors at the end of the ‘museum’ room, Hannah had expected that they would find another room of some kind. Instead, they were met with sunlight and the smell of the sea. Thick, worn cobblestones went in front of the building they’d been in, and there was a village beyond the fountain that sat directly in front of the building. Any question about the scale of the dungeon was almost immediately answered, as they had an expansive view, and the village they were around seemed fairly large. Ships were in the harbor, and large, puffy animals floated in the sky with small pellets dangling down beneath them, almost like dandelion seeds.

<Oh no, people!> shouted Mizuki.

<Hold,> said Alfric. His sword was drawn, but it took him a moment to see what Mizuki had seen, which was a woman slumped over on a balcony. She had long black hair and a dress with silver stripes, and wasn’t moving at all.

<I was trying to avoid people,> said Verity. <There shouldn’t be people, it should be deserted.>

<I’m going to check it out,> said Alfric. It was good he’d said that, because Mizuki was clearly itching to go.

Hannah held back, waiting, mostly to defend the others if some kind of danger reared its ugly head. The lute would warn them if there was anything like dungeon madness, but it wouldn’t immediately start up if there was a trap or some other kind of danger they were walking straight into. This had something to do with what the lute actually considered to be ‘danger’, with intent counting for a lot, and something that didn’t have intent, like poison, counting for a lot less.

Hannah glanced at the building they’d come out of, the ‘museum’. It was sitting on the top of the hill, in a place of prominence in the village, but it was so large that it looked a bit ridiculous in this context, and the lack of windows was decidedly odd. The exterior had murals on it, wide ones that were sparse on details, depicting an island village which was presumably this one. Yet all the things inside the museum had been random entads with no mention on their plaques of where they had come from.

<It’s not a body,> said Alfric. He had gone up a stairwell and was inspecting the slumped over woman. <It’s … something else.> He lifted up one arm and then set it back down. <The whole body is five pounds, if that. Realistic, it’s got pores, the appearance of muscles, but nothing moves right.> He straightened up. <There are more of them around here. A lot more.>

<I really didn’t want to make people,> said Verity. <It’s one of the things I was worried about. But she’s not a person?>

<I’m going to make a cut,> said Alfric. He was up on the balcony, close enough for them to watch him. He poked at the body gingerly, with as much finesse as possible with a dagger. Hannah frowned, hoping that he was right that it wasn’t actually a person, because desecration of a humanlike corpse was … not strictly wrong, but made her feel ill at ease, even if these were in some sense dungeon creations. <It’s hollow.>

<Hollow?> asked Verity.

<I don’t know the material it’s made of, but yes, it’s hollow, fractions of an inch thick, pliable, with a pure white interior,> said Alfric. <The clothes are normal clothes, as far as I can tell.>

<Is she my size?> asked Mizuki.

<My guess is that there are hundreds of these things,> said Alfric. <There will be clothes everywhere. We should take samples for Pinion, at least a few of the … I don’t know what to call them.>

<Bubblefolk,> said Mizuki.

<No,> said Alfric.

<They don’t need a name,> said Hannah. <We can just call them bodies.>

<It’s unsettling,> said Isra.

<It’s more unsettling than just a village with no one in it,> said Verity. <I don’t want to be here, with these fakes. Can we go?>

<We’re here in the name of investigation,> said Alfric. <We’ve come across surprises, places that have your obvious influence, we want to learn as much as we can. I don’t want to waste the opportunity.>

<You think it’s a whole dead village?> asked Verity. <I would rather not see dead children, even if they’re just exact replicas. It makes my stomach churn.>

<It’s really not that bad,> said Alfric. He had made a second cut in the body, and was using his fingers to open it wider, tearing through the skin like it was paper.

<We don’t need to go further if you don’t want to,> said Hannah. <You were tryin’ to avoid livin’ people, and that’s more or less what you did, but if it looks like a village filled with the dead, that’s understandable that you don’t want to see it, ‘specially if you feel yourself responsible.>

<Thank you,> said Verity. She let out a sigh. <This whole village wasn’t supposed to be here, I was trying to keep it small.>

<You’re doing well,> said Alfric. <No danger yet.>

<It’s just creepy,> said Mizuki. <Like there might be danger at any moment. Like we’re being watched, actually.>

<Watched?> asked Verity.

<Just a feeling,> said Mizuki with a shrug. <Probably nothing.>

<No, I have that feeling too,> said Isra. <This place feels dead, sterile, no animals, plants that don’t know they’re dead yet, but also … something watchful.>

<I think that might just be your imagination,> said Alfric. <And I would like to explore, to see the extent of this place, get a better sense of what’s going on. We don’t know what’s relevant and what’s not, and anything we can do to refine our understanding will help.>

<If the party doesn’t want to go further, then we should retreat,> said Hannah. <There might be danger here, and the more we push, the more likely we are to find it.>

<A survey of buildings then?> asked Alfric. <We pick a single street, I go in and clear houses with the rest of you for backup, possibly with Mizuki to check for entads, then we leave. Could we agree to that?>

<We can,> said Verity. <I think I’m going to have nightmares about this anyhow, they won’t get worse from going down a single street.>

They regrouped and Alfric took a moment to look down the streets around them. They were high up on the hill, which seemed, from this vantage, to actually be part of a peninsula. Alfric considered carefully, then had them set off in what was, according to the position of the sun, probably east, not that cardinal directions needed to be followed here.

They saw more of the bodies as they went, all of them dead, or sleeping, or just having been created in the positions they had ended up in. Hannah didn’t have the same curiosity as Alfric did, and mostly stayed with Isra and Verity as Alfric and Mizuki went into the houses and shops. All of the bodies she saw were just people in the midst of their daily life, as though this village had been going about a normal day when something had swept through and killed absolutely everything in it with a swiftness and silence that nothing in the world could ever have matched. A man’s body lay dead, hands still clutching a bundle of flowers. It was like he’d been walking down the street and just … stopped living. That the bodies weighed five pounds, that they were shells only painted to look like bodies, wasn’t entirely comforting. Hannah had always found something mildly creepy about dolls, and that was what these were, at least approximately.

<It’s too quiet,> said Isra. <Where are the animals?> They were waiting outside while Alfric and Mizuki went into another house.

<I wasn’t trying to do animals,> said Verity.

<But these people … you were trying not to do people?> asked Isra.

<I wasn’t thinking about animals,> said Verity. <I really just wanted the entad museum, but it only had three actual entads. It just looked like the thing I wanted, it wasn’t actually it. And here, these people, they look like people, but they aren’t people, which I suppose is better than the opposite.>

<Things that don’t look like people, but actually are?> asked Isra. <Is that … possible?>

<Should be,> said Alfric. He was inside the house, but his voice was clear through the party channel. It was sometimes easy to forget that the party channel extended a conversation to people that were out of earshot. <Dungeons can create bastlefolk. I assume that Verity can create bastles that don’t have dungeon madness. There shouldn’t be anything stopping her from making people, and shouldn’t be anything that stops her from making people that don’t look like people.>

<A girl that looks like a bookshelf, a boy that looks like a dog,> said Mizuki. <Definitely possible.>

<I will do anything to prevent that from happening,> said Verity. <Though I guess we could undo it.>

<Would that be better?> asked Alfric. <Whether we left them in the dungeon or undid the day, they’d be gone either way. We’d be unmaking a life. It would arguably be equivalent to murder.>

There was a bit of silence after that. Verity had a frown on her face. Hannah had no idea what to say, because she wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t murder. And if they did find something alive within the dungeon, something that was approximately a person, it seemed as though they would have no choice but to pull it out and hand it over to the government. Creating entads was one thing, but creating life was something else entirely. And given the scale of the village, creating that much life was a real concern. Three hundred people uprooted from a life they thought they had been leading was a far, far more thorny problem than the bastlefolk had ever been.

<Found another entad,> said Mizuki. <That makes seven total, it’s a good haul. A bucket this time.>

<We should head back,> said Hannah.

<We’re getting an entad every ten houses or so,> said Mizuki. <If you multiply that out over the whole village, that’s … a lot, probably.>

<This was meant to be research, not exploitation,> said Hannah. <There’s every reason to think that we can do this again, better. We don’t need the money.>

<Hannah is right,> said Alfric. <As much as I would love to pick up ‘free’ entads all day, we’re still refining our approach. I think I might take out a loan to buy some entads that will help us with gathering and reconstruction, since these buildings seem pretty solidly constructed. With the right setup, we could gather up this entire village into usable lumber, bricks, and other things in a matter of eight hours or so.>

<But, entads,> said Mizuki.

<You said you had a bad feeling,> said Isra. <I do too.>

<I don’t, for what that’s worth,> said Verity.

<But entads,> said Mizuki.

<We agreed on a single road’s worth of houses,> said Hannah. <You’re almost at the end of the block, and it’s more than I expected us to do. Dungeons are an all-day affair, but there’s somethin’ uncanny about this place, and if it’s lootin’ that we’re doin’, yes, I’d rather be gone so we can regroup and talk it over. This is better than last time, and I’ve every reason to have faith in Verity that next time will be better than this one. All this death, or the presentation of death, doesn’t do wonders for me.>

There was a brief pause, and Mizuki might have been having a conversation with Alfric inside the house. It was hard to tell.

<We’ll get out then,> said Alfric. <It goes against my training, but I’m going to need new training, and we want to have the additional testing of the dungeon we talked about, to see whether it was totally drained again or not. We’re already up quite a bit.>

<Good,> said Hannah with a sigh. It was clear that Verity wanted out, and she thought it best not to press the girl too much, especially with all the unsettling questions that were being raised. Verity was good with death and violence, but this was something else, something that felt like a violation of an innocent place.

They moved, as a group, back up the street, past all the houses that Alfric and Mizuki had gone into.

<We did get lots of stuff,> said Mizuki. <I was basically ransacking, and we’ve filled Lutopia One with all kinds of furniture. The average dungeon is like, ten rooms or something, and this is a thousand rooms. All kinds of chairs, dressers, clothes, whatever. Seems like next time if we get a fancy place, we could make gobs of money.>

<I’ll try my best,> said Verity.

<You’ve been discouraged by the results?> asked Alfric.

<No,> said Verity with a sigh. <It’s good progress, and even bad progress wouldn’t have dissuaded me, it’s just a weight on my shoulders, more than I thought. I’m glad that these people were just shells, but I’m worried that I might screw up and make real people next time, rather than whatever these are. It’s a lot.>

<It is,> said Alfric.

<And the goal is to have other people be able to do this,> said Isra.

<Yes?> asked Verity. <I suppose so, but what are you saying?>

<I’m saying that not everyone will be like you,> said Isra. <Not everyone will agree, or show such restraint.>

<Ah,> said Verity. <Yes, that is something to think about. We’re some ways away, but —>

<But Pinion is writing down all his findings,> said Mizuki. <And he’s going to blab, blabbing is pretty much his job, right?>

<Right,> said Verity. She chewed her lip. <It’s something to think about.>

As they approached the museum, Hannah began to feel a bit of relief. They’d made it through the dungeon, and the unsettling feeling had amounted to nothing. They were clearly going to have to talk about it afterward, but she had a feeling that it would all end with them throwing up their hands and saying that it was weird, rather than having a moral or existential crisis about the whole thing. Hannah was feeling a bit pleased with the party for having been respectful of each other, even if it was clear that Mizuki was far less affected by the dolls than Verity was. It boded well for the future.

They were a block away from the museum when the ground began to shake. Hannah had heard of earthquakes, but never experienced one, and they all froze in place on the road, trying to keep their balance as the ground shifted.

The museum was moving more than anything else. The large building lurched from side to side, unnaturally, then rose from the ground, pulling long legs out of the stone foundation. It looked like a massive spider for just a moment, but then it began to move, and it was much more like a centipede, its steps sinuous and quick. It charged off down the hill, toward the peninsula, having emerged from the rock.

<After it!> cried Alfric. <That’s our exit!>

Chapter 170 - The Halls of Power

Mizuki had the helm of flight. Realistically, she was the only one fast enough to catch up to the museum as it ran away from them. Still, the museum was fast, especially for a building, faster than their house was even at a full sprint. Even with her body drawn into its most aerodynamic form, toes pointed, hands slapped against her sides, she was barely keeping up with it.

Mizuki followed after. The tall, thin double doors they’d come out of swung open, and both the pedestals and all the miscellaneous things that had been sitting on them began spilling out, dozens of henlings ejected out the back. The shape of the museum was changing, growing angled, a funnel that led to the door.

<It’s throwing up,> said Mizuki. <Or pooping, I guess.> She was high above the trail of detritus.

<The dagger,> said Alfric. <I’m going in.>

The dagger was part of their standard kit, a pack of things that had been left at the very start of the dungeon, ideally to give them a way out. The dagger was keyed to Alfric, allowing him to teleport to it — once a day. They’d had it for a long time, since just after the first dungeon, but normally just used it for emergencies rather than fast travel.

With the way that the museum was racing down the hillside, uprooting trees and generally running amok, Mizuki thought that teleporting to the dagger was an absolutely horrible idea. Going into a building that might be seconds from collapsing wasn’t something that she would have done, at least not when she had a little bit of time to think about it. It was all rendered moot when Alfric came hurling out the door along with all the other stuff. He was flailing, trying to find something to grab onto, and he almost found purchase on the doorframe before falling ten feet to the ground and hitting it with a thud that made her wince. A birdcage, part of the museum display, landed on top of him.

<Stay with it,> he wheezed, which at least meant that he was alive.

Mizuki sailed after the museum as it tried to escape, trying to figure out how she was going to get it to stop. She was slightly slower than it, but she didn’t need to worry about terrain, and she was catching up when it stumbled, or where it needed to round a hill. It was smooth sailing through the air, and she more or less kept pace.

She was very conscious of how far they were going and how expansive the dungeon seemed to be. They hadn’t had the opportunity to push at the boundaries of one of Verity’s dungeons, but having them be miles across didn’t seem like it was out of the question. That wasn’t going to be a huge problem, but eventually the museum was going to run up against the boundary of this place, and Mizuki didn’t know what was going to happen then.

You could go up and out of a normal dungeon, at least according to Alfric. Muziki had never properly done it, only peeked a few times, but there was generally a ‘blank’ dungeon there, a flat, featureless expanse of land which sometimes continued on practically forever, and sometimes just stopped at an arbitrary wall. It was interesting to think about, but didn’t seem to be interesting to actually experience, so Mizuki had held off, not wanting the disappointment. Now, she was wishing that she had experimented more, so she’d know what to expect from a place like this. She also wished that she’d listened to Alfric a little more closely, but even he had found the ‘beyond the dungeon’ stuff to be boring.

She was only keeping up with the museum because it was knocking into things and plunging its feet into ponds or rivers every now and then before correcting its course. If it managed to get to the boundary of the dungeon, into the blank space, the ‘nothing’ that was sometimes not nothing, that might end up being a problem.

<Alfric, you okay?> asked Mizuki as she flew in closer to the museum. She wasn’t going to take for granted that the museum was just harmlessly running away and taking their exit with it. The legs were skinny, compared to how big the ‘body’ was, but she thought that a hit from one of them would probably end her.

<Fine,> said Alfric, though he was pretty clearly breathing heavily, at least as much as she could hear from his words.

<I’m going to cut the legs off, okay?> asked Mizuki.

There was a brief pause, and Mizuki spent the time extending her sword to its full length. She loved the sword dearly, and hoped that it would be up to the job. She was going to have to talk to Verity about making terrible things that were wet and squishy enough for the blade to go through with a whisper.

<Go, do it,> said Alfric. His tone was firm, supportive, not at all like he was indulging her in a bad idea, which made her feel better.

The museum seemed to sense her. Maybe it wasn’t alive in the conventional sense, it couldn’t have been if Isra hadn’t known it was there, but it also wasn’t a mechanical thing. Mizuki had been spending time with wizard stuff, which was all very regular and ordered, even when compared to entads, and she’d hoped that the building would be like that, despite its scrambling. Instead, it was reeling back from her, losing its footing again as it tried to escape her.

Mizuki swept in and sliced away at the nearest leg, and was pleased to see that the sword cut well, though there was a fluid that came with it, black as pitch, flowing freely, which she couldn’t figure out. It wasn’t blood, especially because it stopped coming out all at once after a few seconds, like a tap that had been slammed shut.

The museum had entered some marshlands, and it was hard to tell whether the missing limb was slowing it, because the high steps it was now taking were making it go at half the speed it had been before.

<Cut a leg,> said Mizuki, who had only belatedly remembered that she was supposed to be reporting. <The thing’s leg, the treasury or whatever, came off clean, and it’s in some marsh right now. I think I could fly in, but that seems crazy dangerous.>

<That’s our exit,> said Alfric. <We need it. Cut the rest of the legs off, we’ll catch up.>

<I’m tryin’ to be patient here, but what do you need from us, and what’s goin’ on?> asked Hannah. The party had been split when Mizuki had taken off, then split again when Alfric had used the dagger.

<These marshes aren’t going to last forever, only another two minutes,> said Mizuki. <I can go in now, or try attacking this thing more, bring down the building somewhere else. Not sure how deep the marsh is, but I don’t think we want the building flooded.>

<Go in,> said Alfric. <See if you could go out, but don’t leave the dungeon. I just want to know whether the exit is even intact.>

Mizuki pulled back from the walking museum, lined herself up, then swooped in through the wide-open back door.

The place was almost completely wrecked, and the walls had been sloped, funneling everything toward the back. Mizuki flew slowly, not wanting to hit anything, but the museum was still moving, and the helm’s flight was acting all weird. When the building turned, her helm didn’t turn with it, and it almost immediately made her sick in a way that nothing ever had before. She willed herself not to throw up and pushed on ahead, almost slamming into a wall when the museum suddenly changed direction. It was dark, as the overhead windows had shrunk down to pinpricks, which left Mizuki with only her tiny lantern light, worn as a necklace.

She slowed down even more when she reached the long hallway that had held all the statues, but the hallway was still there, even though the museum didn’t seem to have a matching protuberance.

The dungeon exit was still there, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

<Exit is still there,> said Mizuki. <Get in the chest and come to me. I’m going to hurl in a bit, if I don’t respond, that’s what I’m doing.>

<Getting in the chest now,> said Verity. <It’ll get to Alfric, we’ll pick him up, then to you. Be ready.>

It felt odd for Verity to be calling the shots rather than Hannah, and Mizuki wondered what was going on with the others. The chest rides were old hat by now, something they did so often that it was practically second nature, and they had policies and procedures for it, along with special little pieces of equipment, mostly some nice ladders that could be lowered down so that everyone had a place to put their hands and feet. It still wasn’t a good way to travel, but it was fast, and sometimes that was what mattered.

Mizuki waited, then waited some more, and finally, started moving toward the back of the museum. The chest would always go to the nearest person unless it had been told to stay put, and she worried that it would run under the museum rather than going through the door.

<Problem,> said Alfric as Mizuki reached the back door again.

The museum was moving around Mizuki, bumping into her, and it was strangely easier to navigate without flying, as there was no confusion between what the helm was doing and how the museum was bucking and jostling her.

When Mizuki looked out the door, holding on tight to the molding, she saw what the problem was — the museum must have given the chest a hard kick, or accidentally stepped on it. The chest was broken, cracked, and receding into the distance as Alfric climbed up out of it.

They had exited out of the forests, the marshland, and everything else identifiable. The museum had run off into the twilight realm of the dungeon, a perfectly flat expanse of brown. It wasn’t soil, rock, or anything else, it was something called ‘mund’, a useless substance that had no practical function. The museum had sped up, now free from obstruction, and was continuing along at a fast climb. Mizuki had thought that it had gotten less bouncy.

<We got kicked, I think,> said Alfric.

<How broken is it?> asked Mizuki.

<Cut the rest of the legs,> said Alfric. <The chest doesn’t matter unless we get out.>

Mizuki leaned out the door and tried to look at the legs. The one she’d cut was still missing, thankfully, but there were nine others. She didn’t know whether that was more or less than there had been when it started out, given that it was terribly difficult to count the legs of a moving creature. If she could just cut the legs, it would stop moving, which was a sound enough plan in theory. In practice, it was hard to tell how fast the thing was moving, and if she exited the back, she worried she’d be left behind.

Instead, Mizuki moved to the front of the museum, near the throat, or the neck, or whatever she was supposed to think about the hallway of statues as. This was tougher work than she’d thought it would be, mostly due to the movement of the museum and the fact that the helm wasn’t helping her, but she made it eventually.

<You’re way off in the distance,> said Alfric. <We might need to regroup.>

<No,> said Mizuki. She’d gotten to a corner near the front. <I think I’ve got this.>

She extended the sword all the way, a full nine feet, almost twice as long as she was tall. She swung the sword through the air with abandon, cutting the wall, until a giant chunk of stone dropped away, smacking down onto the mund with practically no sound at all. Mizuki leaned out the hole she’d made, and was pleased to see that she was just above the foremost leg, which was moving with a steady rhythm along the flat, featureless area.

Mizuki handled the sword carefully, lining it up with the legs, then at the last second, simply jumped out of the hole and flew alongside the galloping museum. The legs came off one by one as the museum raced ahead of her, a single sword stroke cutting through the bulk on one side, and when the second-to-last had fallen, spilling more of that black fluid, the whole thing began to tip to one side.

<Got it!> called Mizuki.

The museum had collapsed, and was barely holding together its shape. The intact legs were still kicking, as though they expected some movement to be possible. Mizuki circled in the air, looking to see whether more legs were regrowing, or if the museum had more tricks in store for them, but it seemed dead, or at least dead enough.

<We’re still with the chest,> said Alfric. He was far enough away that she couldn’t see him. <Stay with it, make sure that it doesn’t move.>

<Will do,> said Mizuki.

She landed on the mund, which let her sink into it a half inch or so. The museum was wiggling, just a bit, but not actually moving much. Maybe given a half hour it might manage to kick itself in a half circle, but Mizuki wasn’t too worried about that.

She was feeling pleased with herself, which was something that she had only rarely been in the past week. She’d never say it to Alfric, or in front of Alfric, or somewhere that it could get back to him, but dungeons were a place where reckless, bombastic displays of power were rewarded. Back in the real world, people would get mad at you for even something as simple as a harmless demonstration fireball at a party. Even some supposed friends had suggested that maybe it should have been done outside.

Here in the dungeon though, she could fly inside the belly of an unknown creature, or maybe a not-a-creature, cut off its legs, venture into the unknown dead region of the dungeon, and then feel good about it.

Waiting took some time. They had travel entads, but most of them were based on hexes, and they weren’t in a place that had hexes. She checked in every now and then to see whether they were okay, but they were just taking some time to walk.

<The chest seems fine,> said Alfric. <It just won’t close properly, which means that we can’t travel in it. It’s still walking, still holding things.>

<Good,> said Mizuki. <I miss you.> That was impulsive, and teasing, and she was left to imagine whether it was the right thing to say or not.

<We miss you too,> Hannah eventually said.

Mizuki took off her gloves and played with the mund. It was almost like mud, except that it wasn’t actually wet. It held together just a little bit, so you could form it into a ball, but as soon as you weren’t holding it, it would flatten out. Mund couldn’t hold a shape, couldn’t be made into bricks, and since it wasn’t actually soil, you couldn’t grow plants in it or anything like that. It was a nothing material, perfectly inert, not a trace of disturbance to the aether.

In fact, this whole area had so little magic that it was startling. Mizuki was used to leveling out the aether when she cast spells, but this was a pond with no ripples — or only the ripples that she had brought with her — and it was almost as though her magical vision had been taken from her, if only because there was nothing for her to see. It was creepy, isolated, and she decided that she liked it quite a bit, though she was sure that half an hour there would grate at her.

It took some time for the others to arrive, since they had to walk from where the chest had taken its hit. Eventually, Mizuki saw them on the horizon, which was a bit of a relief, and she flew to them, then floated alongside them.

<You know, I enjoyed this,> said Mizuki.

<Yeah?> asked Alfric. His feet sank into the mund a bit with every step, and it was making what should have been a light and easy walk into a trudge.

Mizuki would have offered to throw them into extradimensional space and then carry them to the exit, but they hadn’t suggested that, so she assumed that someone else had thought of that and decided against it. Certainly Alfric had wanted her to stay with the museum, keep an eye on it, but he wasn’t complaining that she was with them now.

<No offense, Verity, but I hope you never fully get the hang of it,> said Mizuki.

<If I squint, I can see what you mean,> said Verity.

<There are other ways to get your kicks,> said Hannah. <Take up a sport, for example.>

<Sports are terrible,> said Mizuki, almost by reflex. <Too many rules.>

<We could make up our own sport,> said Alfric. His eyes were on the museum. <Do you think it tossed the dagger on purpose?>

<It didn’t seem very smart,> said Mizuki. <But I guess it might have.>

<You’re asking whether the museum was deliberately constructed for that exact scenario?> asked Verity. <By my subconscious mind in the moment of dungeon creation, or something like that?>

<I don’t know,> said Alfric. <Just a thought. We’ll talk to Pinion, I guess, but I think this is exactly the sort of thing that he’s hoping to find out, rather than the kind of thing he would actually know.>

<Probably,> said Verity. She had her eyes on the museum too, which was still kicking. <I think I’ve found the dungeons most frightening when we haven’t been sure we could get out, but it’s a different kind of terror from enormous beasts. If it is self-sabotage, or a response to my thinking, that would be bad.>

<I was going to say that next time I should drive a piton into the wall and strap the dagger in place, so it can’t move,> said Alfric. <But if you know that’s a possibility, then perhaps it would be foiled. I’ve noticed, through the history of our time with the dungeons, that we rarely run into the same problem twice. Things that I’ve corrected for, made plans around, don’t seem to show up again.>

<Might be chance,> said Hannah.

<Might not be,> said Alfric with a nod.

<I’m sayin’ that we can’t lay it all on Verity,> said Hannah. <It’s influence, nothin’ more, at least so far as we know. It’s a few things here or there, a certain pattern when she wasn’t doin’ it on purpose, different patterns now that she’s forcin’ it, but you can’t just dip into the same well of explanation for everythin’, ay?>

<No, I know,> said Alfric. <It’s just … two steps forward, one step back. We could easily have lost the museum, or had the entrance collapse. In some sense it’s exciting that this dungeon could even do that, since I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an entrance that gets up and moves on its own. In another sense, the challenging of assumptions include some of the assumptions that make dungeons a safe place to be, which is less ideal.>

<’Less ideal’,> snorted Mizuki. <You know, I think we’re probably going to die one of these times.>

<Verity will get it under control,> said Alfric.

<I’m not sure I will,> said Verity. <This was me trying as hard as I could to pin everything in place, to make sure that we weren’t at risk. It’s possible I can patch the holes, but if there’s something responsive, or if it’s going to draw on my fears … if the dungeons are adversarial, then I don’t think I can make them truly safe.>

<I don’t think they are adversarial,> said Alfric. <Under normal conditions, the only adversarial part are the monsters, and they’re mostly just there.>

They had approached the museum, which was still on its side, still kicking into the mund, where it had dug itself a bit of a hole with the fruitless movements of its legs. It looked pathetic, as much as a building with legs could look pathetic.

<Is this what you felt?> Alfric asked Isra. <When you said there was something?>

<I don’t know,> said Isra. She squinted at the museum, as though that would help. <No, I don’t think so. It’s not alive. It’s also not dead. It’s hard to say. I think I might have been sensing the bodies.>

<The bodies?> asked Alfric.

<Maybe,> said Isra. <Dead things … I’ve never tried to move one, to speak with one.>

<You speak to clouds, to wind,> said Mizuki.

<It seems wrong, somehow,> said Isra. She was still staring at the museum. She held a hand out in front of her. “Still yourself,” she said.

The museum kept up its pointless kicking.

<I don’t think that thing is a creature,> she said. <It might have been the bodies.>

<We took a dozen of them,> said Alfric. <We can test once we’re out of the dungeon.>

<Is that … safe?> asked Verity.

<Why wouldn’t it be?> asked Alfric.

<I don’t know,> said Verity.

<No, I’m seriously asking, if there’s a reason to suspect that it would be less safe than taking a dead creature out, or a henling, or an entad, or anything else, then yes, we need to think about it and talk about it,> said Alfric. <The only reason to take them out is curiosity and research. We don’t need them.>

<They’re not alive,> said Isra. <They’re also not dead … I don’t think. But I might be able to fill them with my soul, make them … move.>

Verity looked disgusted by the notion, but Alfric looked curious.

<They don’t have muscles,> said Alfric.

<Then maybe not,> shrugged Isra.

<Do we take them, or not?> asked Alfric. <If the argument is that they’re creepy, then I agree, but don’t think that’s enough.>

<Let’s take them,> said Mizuki. <We can burn them if we don’t end up wanting them. Or we’ll build coffins to keep them in.>

<Yes,> said Hannah. <That would be much less creepy.>

<I don’t see a principled reason not to keep them, if that’s what you’re looking for,> said Verity. <And I do think the most likely scenario is that they’re simply creepy, nothing more.>

<Alright,> said Alfric. He strode toward the museum, slowing down as he neared it.

Mizuki hung back and looked at the chest more closely. It wasn’t quite a pet, but she was still worried about it. This wasn’t the first time it had been injured, since it had a corner chopped off in a prior dungeon, but some of the wood was splinted and broken on one end of it, and the hinges were bent. Entads could sometimes repair themselves as a very minor power, but the damage looked extensive, and not the sort of thing that Hannah was all that likely to be able to fix with just the power of Garos. So long as it had its magic, there was a good chance for a full recovery, but Mizuki still felt bad for the entad. There was such a thing as an entad doctor, though only in a large city like Plenarch.

<This dungeon was huge,> said Mizuki after she’d given the chest a pat. <Miles across, and not all featureless. We could have spent a week in here and still not seen it all.>

<We could have spent the whole day in the village,> said Alfric. <There were surely more entads there.>

<We’re gathering information,> said Verity. <Iterating on dungeon creation. We’re not here for exploitation. And given the surprises, the convention breaking surprises, I think it’s sensible to get out while we can.>

<Fair,> said Alfric. <Next time, we’ll have plans in place to avoid all this, and I’d like for us to make a proper go at exploitation.>

<Even with the danger?> asked Verity.

They had reached the mouth of the museum, or the butt, as Mizuki had been thinking of it. She wasn’t sure whether to share the point of view with the others, but it had definitely looked like the museum was pooping out stuff as it ran away. That included Alfric, who’d tumbled out of it in a way that would have seemed a lot more funny if he hadn’t been hurt.

<If we go for full extraction, we’ll get more information about the dungeon,> said Alfric. <We’ll come in with better travel entads next time, I’ll buy some to help us cross the large distances. Think of it this way, if we take out fifty entads, we’re not only making a lot of money, we’re getting a good sample that we can look at to see whether the entads we’ve been pulling are better, worse, or just different. If we break the rules of entads … that’s important.>

He was understating it. Entads had a lot of bounds to them, a lot of rules that constrained them, and breaking any of those rules outright might be either catastrophic or whatever the opposite of catastrophic was. Revolutionary, Mizuki supposed, but then again, her grandfather had always said that revolutions were never without their pain points.

The floor of the museum was off-kilter, so they move carefully, and then they needed a ladder to make it to the hallway, where they ended up stepping into and out of the alcoves that the statues had been in.

<On the plus side, nothing actually tried to kill us,> said Mizuki.

<I think the museum did,> said Alfric. <I don’t know how else you explain the condition the chest is in.>

<Maybe it didn’t know people were in there,> said Mizuki. <Maybe it was just trying to squash a bug, on reflex.>

<I’ll try to make sure we don’t run into something like this again,> said Verity. <No promises that I’ll succeed.>

The dungeon exit loomed large. It was still on its side, and Mizuki wondered how they would handle getting through, whether they’d experience a shift in gravity or something like that. It was unsettling to have a dungeon exit move like that. She wondered what they’d have done if the museum had gotten away from them, if she hadn’t been fast enough.

Alfric did the traditional double and triple checks to make sure that they were ready to leave, then waited to be the last one out.

Mizuki found herself unexpectedly nervous as she crossed over the threshold. One of the assumptions of the dungeons, one of the conventions, was that the dungeon exit spat you back out where you’d come in. If Verity could break dungeon conventions, there was a chance that she had inadvertently broken that convention too, that the exit would spit them into a different dungeon, or a different part of the same dungeon, or put them on the other side of the world, or —

But she was still in the middle of that thought when she saw Bib and Pinion, more or less where they’d been left, playing a game with a handful of marbles.

They’d made it out, as they always had before, except for the times they’d died.

Mizuki smiled to herself. There was entad testing ahead of them.

Chapter 171 - Of Calm Skies and Salt Shakers

Alfric had checked the chest over carefully, and satisfied himself that it was probably going to be fine. Entads had a ten percent rule, which was that an entad could lose approximately ten percent of its mass and still be completely functionally fine. The chest hadn’t even lost anything, only had some damage to the lid and one corner. The extradimensional space inside still seemed to work the same as it had before, and they hadn’t experienced a catastrophic vomiting response that extradimensional spaces sometimes had when they failed, where whole interiors dumped out into the world. Alfric had never personally seen it happen, and had never forced it to happen in an undone day, but he was curious about what it looked like. Perhaps now that he had his own extradimensional spaces, he’d try it on a day that he knew for certain he was going to reset.

The party was, overall, in high spirits. They’d made it through the dungeon with plenty of winnings, and Alfric had been the only one that had gotten hurt. It had looked, for a moment, as though they were going to be trapped, but now that they were out, Alfric was the only one that seemed to be taking that risk as seriously as it deserved to be taken.

If a dungeon exit could get up and walk away, the whole enterprise of dungeoneering became incredibly dangerous. Walking away was, in fact, one of the least bad things that could happen if some of the core assumptions weren’t true: the exit could simply vanish, or lead somewhere other than outside, or be suddenly blocked, or … any number of things. The options weren’t infinite, and could be divided up into categories, but they were all problems that normal dungeoneers didn’t have to deal with. Alfric was going to have to speak with Verity about it and possibly draw up a list of all the ways that it could go wrong in the hopes that she could constrain the dungeon exit to be clear, accessible, and immobile.

Having a runaway dungeon exit was, of course, preferable to giant monsters trying to kill them. He was happy with both the end results, and with the prospects of customized dungeons, but Hannah didn’t think he was showing it.

“You need to express it,” she said to him privately.

“Express it?” asked Alfric.

“You focus on the problems,” she said gently. It was a clerical gentleness, practiced calm and reason. “You want to fix those problems, and ay, that’s important. But let’s say you were talkin’ to Mizuki about her food, if she asked how it was. If you only say bad things about it, she’ll think it’s bad, even if you like it.”

“You’re saying that I need to be constructive with my criticism?” asked Alfric.

“No, no,” said Hannah. “Your criticism is constructive already, I’m sayin’ that you need to focus on how it comes across, how it makes people feel, especially Verity. If all she hears are complaints, she’ll think that complaints are all there are. She’s like you in some respects, eager to find faults so they can be corrected.”

“But you’re saying that’s not what I should give her?” asked Alfric.

“Give it to her in a different way,” said Hannah. “Verity focuses on what’s bad more than what’s good, she gets mired in it, and she often ends up thinkin’ that everythin’ she’s done is utter trash, whether it’s music, paintin’, needlework, or magic. Comes from her mom, I think, growin’ up always hearin’ that nothin’ was ever good enough, couldn’t possibly be good enough.”

“But you’re saying that I have the same mindset,” said Alfric.

“For different reasons, ay,” said Hannah. “It’s a breed of perfectionism, a focus on shoring up the weak points, which means all the attention is paid to those weak points. But for people, to manage them, to be a good friend, you need to make sure you don’t lock yourself out of praisin’ what’s good.”

“I do try,” said Alfric. He had thought that he was doing a pretty good job of it. “But I hear you, especially with Verity’s dungeon manipulation, there needs to be more praise, equal focus on what’s good and what’s not.”

“Might be a good rule, if you need a rule,” said Hannah. “These new dungeons, Verity’s dungeons, they should by rights be exciting to you.”

“They are,” said Alfric. “It’s just that the limitations are frustrating, the unknowns terrifying.” He pursed his lips. “I’ll try my best to express my excitement, I hear what you’re saying.”

“It’s one of the best things about you,” said Hannah. “If someone comes to you with a problem, you listen and do your best to address it. I’ll miss that.”

“We should throw a going away party,” said Alfric. “Not that we know when you’re going to leave yet, but if you’re leaving … there’s nothing that I can do to convince you to stay?”

“I think I’ve gotten everythin’ I wanted from dungeons,” said Hannah. “I had never intended this to be my whole life, only a year or two, and while the others seem to have fallen into it, more or less, and while the material wealth does have its enticements, especially with the new dungeons … I want to preach, to help people as much as I can, and Marsh keeps talkin’ about children, which don’t mix well with the dungeon life.” A mild frown crossed her face. “We’d need to get married, of course, and it’s a bit soon for that.”

Alfric wasn’t sure he agreed that children didn’t mix with dungeoneering. His parents had seemed to do okay. His mother, in particular, was one of the greatest modern dungeoneers. She’d had plenty of help and lots of entads, but she’d raised six children who’d all turned out well, at least so far. He didn’t want to say that to Hannah, of course, because the implication that she could keep dungeoneering if she could forgo pregnancy, or hire a nanny, might be taken the wrong way. Those things were true though.

The next day they did entad testing, which Mizuki had clearly been itching for. By general agreement, this was done outside, with the big dining room table and all the chairs brought out for a picnic in the field, just beside the house. Alfric was paying for the use of fields with henlings that they’d otherwise have a hard time selling: in this case, the farmer had taken a mismatched dinnerware set.

The food was relatively simple fare, goat ribs with caramelized onions, salads, and a selection of stone fruits. The ribs were served on a large platter, and Alfric had more than his fair share of them. He was still sore from the hard landing he’d taken in the dungeon the day before, even with Hannah’s ministrations. He was considering going to speak with Mardin before the day was done, as a cleric of Oeyr could clear up any lingering aches and pains.

“You know, I hope that the labels aren’t right,” said Mizuki. Her mouth was practically covered in the sauce on the ribs. “If we can just walk into a dungeon and there are a bunch of entads that come pre-identified, it’s going to suck a lot of the fun out of it.”

“We have seven entads,” said Alfric. “Most of them didn’t come from inside the museum. And if we’d done a full clear of the dungeon, I’m sure we would have found more.” The dungeon had been completely drained after their visit, which had been confirmed afterward, so they would expect for there to be more or possibly better entads. Based on some assumptions that Pinion was running with, there might be as many as two hundred entads scattered throughout the many miles, though the entad density within the village seemed to be higher than the estimates would predict.

“I’m too excited to eat,” said Mizuki. She pushed her plate away. “Does anyone mind if I have first crack at it?”

“Crack away,” said Verity. “I have to admit I’m nervous though.”

“Really?” asked Isra. “The entads we got from the last dungeon were good.”

“It’s very difficult to tell what’s just variance,” said Alfric. “But overall, we’ve had a number of above average entads. That very first bow we got from the very first dungeon was far better than we’d normally expect to have gotten. Maybe that was a sign of things to come.”

“Or it might have been chance,” said Pinion. “Trying to divine anything from entads is like reading tea leaves.”

“Reading tea leaves?” asked Isra.

“A method of divining the future,” said Alfric. “One that notably doesn’t work.”

“It kind of works, it’s just really hard,” said Mizuki. “Takes years of practice, and you’ll still be wrong more often than not.”

“Tea leaves absolutely do not give the ability to detect the future,” said Alfric. “I’m sorry, but if this is some kind of Kiromon thing, it’s not — you understand that reading the future would be incredibly valuable, and if you could do it with the dregs of a cup of tea, it would be a whole industry?”

“Oh, this is brewed tea,” said Isra. “I was thinking of a tea bush. Some plants do know the future, but it’s only things like whether it will be a warm spring or an early winter, or whether it will rain the next day. And they’re wrong sometimes, so it might only be a guess. I’ve never spoken to a tea plant though.”

“Well, for your information Alfric, reading tea leaves is a big business in Kiromo,” said Mizuki. “There’s a tasseomancer in every town, and there are a few that consult with the government at the highest level.”

“They do the same with molten wax in Tarbin,” said Isra. “Though my father was of the opinion that it didn’t work.” She frowned. “He said … I’m trying to remember.” She bit her lip. “He said that they got something wrong about him.”

Mizuki leant over to Pinion, who was sitting beside her. “Alfric had a bad run-in with a future-predicting entad, it’s why he doesn’t believe in time magic.”

“It was a compatibility test with my ex-girlfriend, to see whether we could make for a good marriage,” said Alfric. “She tried to kill us.”

“The infamous Lola,” said Pinion with a nod. “Entad-based future-telling?”

“Yes,” Alfric replied. “But mostly just a bad guess that works out more often than not.”

“Doesn’t that make it a good guess?” asked Mizuki. “I mean I’m sorry for you or whatever, but in theory it’s better to have something that works most of the time than to just wing it, right?”

“I think it’s a thorny question that you probably don’t want to get into right now,” said Alfric. “The entads await.”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. She looked over at where they’d been reverently laid out. “Right. Ice pick first, I guess.”

Alfric resumed eating the last of his meal while she picked up the ice pick. It wasn’t entirely clear what it was, as was often the case with things that came from dungeons, but it had a handle and ended in a pick. It was entirely possible it was just a spike, nothing more.

Mizuki turned the pick over in her hands, looking at the details on it. It was rather ornate for what it was, carved with scenes of battle in lines so thin and with such little depth that they were only visible from just the right angle and with just the right light. They had a general agreement not to test entads in the dungeons, which was, in Alfric’s opinion, unreasonably dangerous and really not likely to be too beneficial. They also had an agreement not to test entads the day they did a dungeon, just because there was some risk involved in it and Alfric preferred to have an undone day in his pocket without having to wipe out a whole dungeon.

There was always some good-natured guessing though, and certain entads revealed themselves just from the handling that was done when retrieving them. It had become a tradition between Mizuki and Alfric to speculate on each of the entads the night before, essentially just making up stories about what these things might possibly do.

They hadn’t done it the night before though. Mizuki had been tired and wanted to spend more time with her mana rock, because she’d still made no progress and wanted to be ‘serious’ about getting to the breakthrough point. Alfric couldn’t help but feel rebuffed by that. It wasn’t like Mizuki to be serious about work she had to do, especially not about work that was elective in nature. Things had been different and uncomfortable since the big party.

The plaque for the pick had said that any hole created by it would fill with blood, which was pretty obviously false within the first few minutes of testing, during which Mizuki stabbed at the ground and peered at the marks she’d left. She seemed happy that it hadn’t worked as advertised.

It took some trials and tribulations, for which Mizuki was mostly silent, but eventually the pick extended, becoming more of a skewer, six feet long. It happened all at once, with a loud sound of metal on metal, and a smile spread on Mizuki’s face.

Her smile was unabashed, with no trace of demure reserve. It was her best feature, Alfric thought.

“Time to poke some stuff,” said Mizuki with a grin.

“Not the table,” said Verity.

“It’s my table,” said Mizuki. She stuck out her tongue at Verity. “But fine, what have we got to poke?”

“Start with something soft,” said Alfric. “Move your way up from there.”

“You know, there’s a chance that it only extends,” said Pinion.

“Or that it does something unrelated to extension, yes, yes, we’ve done entad testing before,” said Mizuki, waving him away, though he was seated at the table.

“Sorry,” said Pinion with a sheepish smile. “I’ll sit back and watch the experts do what they do best.”

“Is he mocking me?” asked Mizuki. She was holding the pick — skewer — in her hand in a vaguely threatening way.

“Only a little bit,” said Verity. She was having wine with her meal, though Alfric thought it was a bit early in the day for it. She’d been pleased with how the dungeon had gone, even with the runaway exit, and Alfric didn’t object to a bit of celebration. Still, she had another of the small town performances coming up that night, and Alfric felt a bit of worry that she wouldn’t be ready. It was the sort of secondhand worry that he’d learned not to voice, and which he’d really prefer not to feel.

When Alfric had turned back to Mizuki, she was holding a rock in her hand and trying to drive the retracted skewer into it. Alfric winced.

“If that works, you’re going to pierce straight through your palm,” said Alfric.

“I’m not stabbing,” said Mizuki. “I’m in control.” She tapped the rock with the pick, frowned, then tapped it again, harder.

“A bit disappointing so far,” said Isra.

“Alright,” said Mizuki. She set the rock on the ground. “A pick has got to be able to pick things, or if it’s a skewer, it needs to be able to skewer things. I refuse to accept that it extends and does nothing else.”

She was thankfully not holding the rock in the palm of her hand when she extended the pick straight through it, but there was a moment of panic all around.

“Wow,” said Mizuki. She held up the skewer, which still had the rock on it, pierced completely through. The more impressive thing, Alfric though, or at least the weirder thing, as that it hadn’t shattered the rock, nor even really moved it all that much.

“Time to test more,” said Alfric.

“You’re volunteering?” asked Mizuki. She had a glint in her eye. “To see whether it goes through flesh, that’s what we’re testing, right?”

“You have flesh,” Alfric pointed out.

Mizuki slowly lifted the pick up and pointed it at her own hand.

“Alright, alright, I’ll do it,” said Alfric. He stood up from his seat and began rolling up his sleeve.

“Veto,” said Hannah with a sigh. “This is exactly the sort of thing that’s best to just ask a cleric of Qymmos about. Unless you’re dependin’ on me to heal your wounds?”

“Kind of,” said Alfric. “Or … entirely.”

“Try it on wood or something first,” said Hannah. “We’ve got henlings galore, surely you can find some glass, some metal, somethin’ to poke holes in, ay?”

“Fine, fine,” said Mizuki. “I think this is mostly just the mopping up of identification though.” She extended the pick, then retracted it, over and over again, making a shink sound. It went to its full length every time, and she was frowning at it. “Is this useful in combat, do you think?”

“Possibly,” said Alfric. “Though realistically, if it’s taking the place of an actual weapon, I think there are some challenges. Poking dozens of holes in a creature would be difficult, and you’d need an entirely different poking-based combat style.”

“Plus we’re hoping for no more combat,” said Verity. She’d finished her glass of wine.

“Yeah, but if someone gets lippy with me at wizard school,” said Mizuki. She retracted the pick and put it in her pocket, which seemed somewhat dangerous without the sheathe. “Maybe I’ll keep it, just in case.”

“I think that one is to sell,” said Alfric.

“Fine, fine,” said Mizuki. She took the pick back out. “I’ll save my dibs for another occasion. It’s nothing world-breaking though.” She looked at Verity. “We want something that challenges the rules of entads, just for your information.”

“Will do,” said Verity with a mild smile. “My turn?”

“Sure,” said Alfric.

Verity picked up the small silver spoon. Alfric was mildly surprised that Mizuki hadn’t picked it up, but Mizuki was talking about the Anyspoon less these days, even if she did still use it for practically every meal, and played with it in her spare moments.

“Oh,” said Verity, almost the moment the spoon was in her hand. She released it, and it floated up in front of her, turning and spinning. She held a hand out, and it went still, then moved her hand, which the spoon followed. “That was easy, I feel cheated.” She swung her hand up, and the spoon rocketed into the air until it was so small that they couldn’t see it. “Fast though.”

“I should have picked the spoon, I knew it,” said Mizuki. “It seems more fun than poking holes in things.”

“Is it going to come back down?” asked Alfric. He watched the sky, trying to catch a glint of silver.

“I think so,” said Verity. She turned to the sky, hand held up to block the sun from her eyes. “There’s a chance that I sent it outside the range where I can control it.”

“A very silly thing to do,” said Isra.

“I wanted to see how fast it would go,” said Verity. “As it turns out, very fast. I really didn’t think that fast.”

“Hey, could that be a weapon?” asked Mizuki. “If you shot a spoon at someone as fast as an arrow, it would have to hurt them, right?”

“It would be blunt,” said Isra. “But a blunt arrow can still hurt. Could kill, if it was fast enough.”

“Wait, it’s coming down,” said Verity. She held out her hand, and the silver spoon shot down out of the sky, landing in her palm with enough force that Verity winced. “Ow.”

“Trade?” asked Mizuki, holding up the pick.

“Nope,” said Verity. She sat back down at the table and began practicing using the small silver spoon on food, which was probably the last thing it was actually useful for, given how comparatively tiny it was. They would need to do a scratch test and see whether it could actually survive the high speeds it was capable of, especially when hitting something, but it had promise as a weapon. That one hadn’t matched its description either, and it was clear now that what was written had nothing to do with the entad’s actual abilities.

Hannah was next to go, and she’d picked the salt shaker, which was bound to her. It had come with salt, which they only knew was actually salt because Isra had identified it as such. Alfric didn’t think much of the salt shaker, at least in terms of form and expected function. There was a chance that it would do something exciting and unexpected, but it was most likely that it had some minor effect having to deal with food.

Hannah tipped the salt shaker over, sprinkling some of the salt on the ground, and then kept shaking, frowning at the salt and then holding out her hand to let the salt gather there. She peered closely at it, then stuck her tongue out to taste a bit.

“Salty,” she said.

“Told you,” said Isra.

“Ay,” said Hannah. “I was just checkin’ to see whether it did somethin’ to the salt, changed it somehow, made it sweet. Possible, you’ve got to admit.”

Isra nodded.

Hannah shook out more salt, and seemed like she was trying to move the salt with her mind, but there was no effect. Once she’d satisfied herself that nothing was happening, she peered more closely at the salt shaker. It was made of glass, with a metal top that had holes in it, and nothing particularly special as far as salt shakers went, though Alfric was more familiar with ceramic ones.

“Hrm,” said Hannah as she shook out more salt. She stared at the level. “I think it might be deliverin’ more salt than is actually in it.” She pressed her thumbnail against a specific line, then turned the salt shaker upside down, letting more salt fall onto the ground.

“Maybe salting the earth isn’t such a good idea,” said Alfric. He was wincing. “We’re just renting this field.”

“Er, ay,” said Hannah. She tipped the salt shaker back up and stared at the line where the salt had settled. “I think it might be infinite salt. Will need to test more. Hand me a plate?”

Mizuki was the one to get up, before Alfric could, and hand Hannah a plate to empty the salt shaker onto. Of course, as it turned out, the salt shaker didn’t empty, and the salt stayed at the level Hannah had marked with her nail, even once there was a considerable pile of salt.

“How much does salt sell for?” asked Hannah. “Not much, I don’t think.”

“You can get a couple of pounds for a ring,” said Mizuki. “I bought some salt last year and it’s still lasting us, though it’s caked a bit.”

“Erm,” said Pinion. “The entad came with the salt? You could possibly try something else with it, if it’s not imposing too much to suggest that.” He seemed sheepish about offering up his thoughts.

“Good idea,” said Hannah. She placed the plate on the table, unscrewed the top, and dumped the salt shaker out, which thankfully did work, rather than just creating an endless torrent of salt. “Now the only question is what we could fill it with,” she said.

“Sugar?” asked Mizuki. “I can run in and get some.”

“I have sand,” said Isra.

“Why do you have sand?” asked Mizuki.

“It’s like you don’t know me at all,” said Isra.

“I’ll be right back,” said Mizuki as she stood up. “Is the sand somewhere obvious? Can I go into your room?”

“I’ll come with you,” said Isra. “We’ll see if we can find other granular things, or powders.”

They left together, and Alfric moved over to the remaining entads, trying to decide which he was going to get for his turn. They had seven from the dungeon in total, and while Alfric was drawn to the two weapons they’d gotten from the houses, a knife and a sword, he found himself compelled by the bucket. The last remaining entad was a dress, one which seemed a bit too small for him, and possibly even too small for Mizuki. There was a chance they wouldn’t be able to test that one.

It took some time for Isra and Mizuki to return from the house, more time than really seemed necessary, and what remained of the picnic engaged in some idle chatter.

“I’m more or less set, as far as finance goes,” said Hannah. “I have Lutopia Two, so I’ll never have to worry about housing again, at least not until I have children, and Marsh has his own extradimensional hoop leading down into a cozy basement, so if we pool them, that’s more or less a full house for those two of us. It’d be better if he could get into Lutopia Two without my help, but it’s a minor inconvenience given he’s got his own space. I’ve outfitted Lutopia Two with its own water tank already, that’s that taken care of. That means clothes and food are the only things to worry much about, and I’ve been saving money, not to mention that I’d probably cash out here.”

“We’ll have to talk about that,” said Alfric. “A lot of what the party has is in the form of entads, which we wouldn’t necessarily want to sell. We’ve got existing contracts as well, which we couldn’t cash out on. Possibly, we’d need to place a value on them and cash out that way, unless you’re fine with waiting.”

Hannah waved a hand. “It’s much less important to me than to you, havin’ everything on the up and up. As I just got done sayin’, I’m set for finances. If I walk away with Lutopia Two, and if this salt shaker is some passive income, I’ve no problem callin’ the rest of my share part of the party funds. It’s been lucrative, there’s no denyin’ that, but money is just money, nothin’ to get too bent out of shape about so long as you’ve got enough.”

“I guess,” said Alfric with a frown. He didn’t particularly like it though. It would feel as though Hannah would be leaving and giving the party a gift, which felt like the opposite of how it should be. If anything, they should give her something in parting. There was still plenty of time, and maybe he would find a good gift for her before she left.

“You’re planning on leaving soon then?” asked Pinion. “Right as things are heating up?”

“Are they?” asked Hannah. “These new dungeons, they’re interesting, but I don’t know that I would call them ‘hot’. A revolution, maybe, if Verity can figure out what she’s doin’ well enough to describe to others. But no, I’ve made good friends here, but the dungeons themselves, I’ve had my fill of, I think. Perhaps because they were too hot for too long.”

“Many challenging dungeons,” said Alfric with a nod.

“I get to go away sayin’ that I fought some of the toughest dungeons that anyone our elevation ever faced,” said Hannah. “Some good stories, some good friends, but,” she shrugged. “Dungeons were never my callin’, never my grand plan.”

Mizuki and Isra returned, Mizuki with a few things from the kitchen, Isra with a number of vials of sand.

“Where’s all this sand from?” asked Alfric.

“I’ve been wandering Greater Plenarch,” said Isra. “Occasionally I’ll go beyond. I have sand from all the Proten Lakes, from near Plenarch, from Dondrian … but obviously sand is different at different points, sometimes different within a mile of coastline, so I always try to think of it as a specific place and time. Also, I have a few magic sands.”

“Magic sands!” said Mizuki, looking delighted. “I never knew there was such a thing.” She’d set her sugars down on the table.

“Glowsand,” said Isra, pointing to a bottle that wasn’t glowing. “Only glows during the twilight hours.” She pointed at another. “Crese sand, which hardens together into something nearly like rock when dry, and dissolves back to sand when wet, taken from a beach on the eastern side of the Gornorian Lake.” She pointed at the final one she’d brought down. “And this is sand from a small bay north of Plenarch, which takes the form of whatever touches it.” The sand was currently in the shape of a vial within the vial.

“Duplicating magic seems unlikely to work,” said Pinion. “That is to say, I’ve never heard of entads being able to do that without major restrictions.”

“We could shrink an entad down to the size of a grain of salt,” said Mizuki. “Then pour it out of the salt shaker and get infinite entads!”

“Probably not, is what I’m saying,” said Pinion.

“Infinite,” said Mizuki.

“We’ll try sugar first,” said Hannah.

Sugar did, in fact, work, which meant that the door was open for all kinds of other things, and the salt shaker was likely to be a fairly substantial moneymaker, at least if it didn’t have much in the way of limits. Of course, entads very often did have limits, but Alfric’s hopes were high.

The salt shaker didn’t seem to be able to duplicate any of the magic sands, but could do any other homogeneous granular substance, if not powders. The exact limits would take more tedious testing, or possibly a cleric, and they had no metals on hand, which seemed like it would be the most lucrative option. There were, in major cities, experts in both entads and trade who could tell you the exact most worthwhile thing to create, and for a fee, would handle the sales. Something like this, even if bound to Hannah, could be worth an incredible amount in the long term, passive income at scale.

Alfric decided that he would take his turn while Hannah was exploring the limits of the salt shaker, and he decided on the bucket, which he’d been quietly eyeing.

The bucket was made of sheet metal, simply shaped, with tightly crimped seams. Alfric had seen metal buckets only a few times, as wood was simpler and more common, not that there were all that many things to use a bucket for. There had been a time, he knew, before widespread availability of ectads, when people had used buckets for moving water from wells, but almost every house had a tank with water in it, usually multiple.

As soon as his hand went into the bucket, a small, pointed bit of metal appeared there, and when Alfric gingerly extracted it, making sure that its sharp point and edges didn’t poke or cut him, another appeared.

“Huh,” he said.

“It’s a throwing star,” said Mizuki. “Pikotane, I think.”

“Kiromon?” asked Alfric.

“We have them in Kiromo,” said Mizuki. “Hand it here?”

Alfric passed it to her, and she inspected it closely. It was only shaped like a star a little, four points coming from the center. As a thrown weapon, he was skeptical that it could actually do any damage. He’d practiced with throwing daggers before, to get a feel for them, and while whipping a dagger at something felt good, the results tended to be unimpressive.

Alfric plucked another throwing star out of the bucket, and it was immediately replaced. An infinite number of throwing stars would be a bit underwhelming, as he thought they’d be somewhat impractical, and melting them down for their metal seemed like it wouldn’t be too worthwhile. Metal was pulled from the dungeons by the ton, and it was the fate of most weapons and armor to be tossed in the crucible.

Alfric needed a target for testing, and pulled one of the bodies from within the storage lute. He made it face away from him, laying on the ground, and frowned slightly. It looked too realistic, he decided, but he threw the throwing star anyway, just to see whether it had any special property. The throwing star missed, since they were horribly inaccurate weapons and he had no practice with them, but the bucket had another throwing star in it, and so he tried again.

Something was different about the second throw, but it was hard to say what, exactly. By the fourth throw, he managed to hit the body, and it was clear what was happening: he was moving faster.

Soon the throwing stars were coming out of the bucket in a blur, the motion of his arm likewise so fast and fluid that he could barely track it. His perception wasn’t any faster, and he was barely conscious of what he was actually doing with his muscles, only that his intent to keep going was still there. The throwing stars weren’t getting any more or less accurate, but they were getting faster with the increased speed of the throws, zipping through the air, and when they hit, they were hitting with enough force to move the body.

Alfric stopped when he’d thrown about fifty of the things, and it was like getting to the top of a set of stairs and thinking you had one more step than you actually did. It felt odd to stop, unsettling, like his hand wanted to keep up with the throwing and was confused about coming to a sudden stop. He had, somehow, not cut his fingers up grabbing and throwing so many sharp objects.

“Huh,” he said. Only a third of the throwing stars had actually hit, but he’d thrown dozens of the things, and if that had been a person, they’d have been well and truly dead. Of course, that had been a stationary target, but it was still fairly impressive. “Maybe thirty seconds to get up to speed?” asked Alfric.

“That’s a long time, in combat,” said Isra.

“That poor body,” said Verity with a cluck of her tongue.

“Looks like they stick around for a minute or so,” said Mizuki, whose throwing star had disappeared.

“I think it might be worthwhile,” said Alfric. “As dungeon weapons go, if you could keep up with the throws, it might outclass other weapons. I imagine it’s wholly ineffective against armor though.”

“Not if you go fast enough,” said Mizuki.

“Needs more testing,” said Alfric. “Maybe later today I’ll get some armor and put it on one of those bodies. If the throwing stars can get fast enough to go through metal, then yes, the bucket might be worthwhile.”

“Usable with the bow, do you think?” asked Isra.

“We’ll test that too,” said Alfric. “We should get through the rest of these though.”

The remainder of ‘basic’ testing took another hour, which was quite a long time for three entads. It was a good collection, all around, though it was only the second-to-last thing tested, the knife, that held real promise of becoming a mainstay. It was able to cut apart any man made thing it touched, cleaving a table apart into planks, or clothing into sheets of fabric. It could do this without touching the joint in question. Isra had lost a shirt in the process, though she’d thankfully been wearing enough to cover herself, and wasn’t left standing naked in the field.

“We’re going to need to be extremely careful with it,” said Alfric. “Keep it from touching the table, keep it from touching the house. In fact, we’re lucky that we haven’t destroyed anything with it yet. It’s very good though.”

“For combat?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Alfric. “Though … yes, except it’s quite short, and probably only good for making armor fall apart. I think I would need to throw it, or have Isra buzz by someone while in a bubble of time. I was more thinking that it was good for taking things apart. There was an enormous amount of bricks and lumber in that dungeon, we could have stood a good chance of taking a majority of it, given a full day.”

“You’re actually excited about that,” said Mizuki. She was grinning at him.

“It’s where most dungeon teams eventually get to,” said Alfric. “They become very good at stripping a place bare. If we can reclaim a few tons of lumber, bricks, metal, or whatever else, we can start affording some better entads, especially if we don’t need to focus as much on combat, if Verity can keep us from running into monsters.”

“I don’t think we should be going into dungeons without weapons and armor just yet,” said Verity, biting her lip. “Give me some time.”

“Yes, of course,” said Alfric.

“That leaves the dress,” said Isra. “But Mizuki can try that on in private. It doesn’t seem to resize, so she’s probably the only one who can use it, unless Pinion wants it.”

“I’m not that small,” said Pinion. “Though I suppose if you’re offering me to test an entad, I wouldn’t say no.”

“Well, I have work to do before we go to the tavern tonight, so you can take it,” said Mizuki. “Have fun in a dress, I guess.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a man wearing a dress,” said Alfric. “My uncle has a dress he uses for dungeoneering. You can’t let a thing like gendered clothing stop you from being effective.”

“I suppose not,” said Pinion. He looked at the group. “I’m not expected to put it on here?”

“No,” said Alfric. “This picnic has gone on long enough, I think. Nothing that shattered our expectations, I don’t think, which is unfortunate.”

“I’m not sure you want your expectations shattered, do you?” asked Verity. “Entads are generally safe, that’s one of the expectations, isn’t it?”

“It is,” said Alfric. “And … fair. These are a relatively strong set, above par, so I won’t complain too much. Or at all, really.”

Alfric helped with the cleanup of the picnic, which largely involved putting the table and chairs back into extradimensional space, making sure they hadn’t made a mess of the field, then putting everything back inside and cleaning up the dishes. He ended up doing most of the work with Mizuki, who had a peculiarly far-off expression on her face. He didn’t question it, at least not out loud, but it was just them together, and eventually, at the end, as he was drying the last dish that she had watched, she turned to him and spoke.

“I’d like to talk,” she said. This followed some twenty minutes of silence between them.

“Alright,” said Alfric. “We can talk.”

“Meet me in my room in five minutes,” said Mizuki.

“Oh,” he said as he watched her go.

Apparently, they were going to have a talk.

Chapter 172 - Negotiables

Mizuki sat on her bed with her hands folded in her lap. She’d said ‘five minutes’ but it felt like she should have said more, because she’d hardly had time to look in the mirror and straighten her hair, and her fingers were still pruny from doing dishes. She wanted to look professional and put-together, which was a difficult thing for her. She didn’t have the demeanor or the training for it. Now Verity, there was someone who could look professional. She could look professional like no one’s business, or maybe like it was her mother’s business. Having long black hair had helped Mizuki, made her look more serious, but she felt a constant urge to put it up in a playful knot, and more often now, the urge to just cut it all off and go back to what she’d had before.

She was still thinking about her hair when Alfric came into the room.

“You wanted to talk?” he asked.

“Er, yes,” she said. She was facing the room’s one comfy chair, and Alfric took his seat. He didn’t have any trouble looking serious, though his seriousness had a different tone from Verity’s, like he was ready to get to work tackling a problem, rather than like he was about to demurely serve tea. She paused. “Do you like my hair?”

Alfric took a moment to consider that. Of course he did, it didn’t matter that she was just saying something for the sake of saying something.

“I think it doesn’t suit you,” said Alfric. “It also seems to get in your way a lot.”

“I think that’s partly because I’m not used to it,” said Mizuki. “Some girls who’ve had long hair their whole lives have twenty different tricks for getting it out of the way, and they don’t even really think about how often they’re brushing it aside or tying it back. I was thinking about cutting it.”

“I did like how it looked before,” said Alfric. “Either way is fine, it’s just a question of whether it goes with your overall style. Same with the robes.”

“You don’t think they suit me?” asked Mizuki, looking down.

Alfric shrugged, then seemed to think better of indifference. “Not really, no. They make you look … like a wizard, I guess, but also a bit bland.”

“Ah,” said Mizuki. “A bland wizard.” That was fair, but it still hurt a little bit. It felt nice to be told that you had a good outfit, and if the outfit that Mizuki was wearing most days wasn’t a good one, that stung a bit.

“I get the feeling that this wasn’t what you wanted to talk about?” asked Alfric.

“Not really, no,” said Mizuki. She moved her hair so it was all flowing down her back. “Things have been weird between us.”

“Mmm,” said Alfric.

“You disagree?” asked Mizuki.

“I think ‘weird’ is a word that … perhaps isn’t the best,” he said. “It doesn’t communicate much.”

“I don’t know how to say what it is,” said Mizuki. “It used to be easy between us. It was like settling into a comfy chair. We had a rapport, you know?”

Alfric considered this, then nodded.

“Now,” Mizuki continued. “I don’t know. I feel like I’m trying, and you’re trying, and we’re not connecting anymore, and I feel like it’s because of whatever happened at the party, or the undone day after the party, or because I’m at school, or something, and I want to fix it.” She spread her hands in front of her. “This is me doing as much as I can to fix it.”

“Can I be forthright with you?” asked Alfric.

“I really don’t know if you know any other way to be,” Mizuki replied. “So yes.”

“I feel it too,” said Alfric. “A sense that we’re … trying.”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. She paused for a moment. “That wasn’t you being frank.”

“No,” said Alfric. He sighed. “I’ve spent more time with you than you have with me. Maybe as much as double or triple the time, because on undone days, you like to be with me the whole day, and when it’s a normal day, we see each other a lot less. So I like to think that I know you, I guess. It feels like there aren’t a whole lot of mysteries left.”

“Okay …” Mizuki said slowly.

“The whole thing with the party, the fireballs, the undone day, the guilt you felt, all that,” said Alfric. He bit his lip. “It wasn’t a surprise to me.”

“It was a surprise to me,” said Mizuki.

“You doing something ill-advised that you regret, that’s … it’s in character,” said Alfric.

“Is it the fireball thing that bothers you?” asked Mizuki. “Or the general drunkenness, which has never been a problem, or … the other thing?”

Alfric was silent for a moment. “It’s the other thing.”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. She’d had a feeling that was it, the source of the weirdness between them, the thing that they hadn’t really talked about, couldn’t really talk about, without talking about other stuff. “You think less of me.”

Alfric considered that. That was what he did for everything, but here, it hurt, because he was searching his feelings. If Mizuki had been asked by anyone if she thought less of them, she’d have answered on impulse, said ‘no’ without even stopping to think about whether or not it was true. She was surprised by how much it hurt. He hadn’t even said ‘yes’, he was just thinking about the question, or the statement, and whether he did like her less than he had before.

“It’s complicated,” said Alfric. “Let me think about how to explain it.”

“Alright,” said Mizuki. She folded her hands in her lap and sat there, in silence, trying to be patient with him. How was it so hard for him to get things out, to think through what was going on in his own head? It made her feel weird, like she had too little going on in her brain.

It took Alfric some time to compose his thoughts, and Mizuki tried not to feel too antsy about it.

“I decided, some months ago, that I needed a plan for if something happened between us,” said Alfric. “There was a time on one of those undone days when you were in a particularly flirty mood, and you seemed like you were on the verge of kissing me, or like you wanted me to kiss you, and,” he let out a breath, “there’s a part of me that thought for sure that it would happen, that it was only a matter of time. One day I made this joke about forks, and laughed and leaned forward, and I thought ‘uh oh, this is it’. So, I started making plans. I started planning for what I would do when that day came, when it wasn’t just flirting anymore, when you took it a step further. I was ready to have that talk with you.”

Mizuki frowned. “What was the joke?”

“It was just the usual one,” said Alfric with a grin. “It wasn’t funny, but you were in a good mood and ready to laugh at anything. ‘Forking and spooning’, that kind of thing.”

“Alright, but this wasn’t something you disclosed, was it?” asked Mizuki. She thought she’d have remembered.

“I can’t remember everything we talk about,” said Alfric. “Certainly not a day’s worth of jokes.”

“Not the jokes,” said Mizuki. “The other stuff, the — I mean, you thought that I was going to kiss you, that stuff.”

Alfric licked his lips for a moment. “It’s a sticky issue,” said Alfric. “With disclosure, there are elements of interpretation, and all that, it was all me trying to read you, making some assumptions about what you were thinking, how you were feeling, trying to work it out on my own. We don’t tell people that, or we’re not supposed to. You tell someone what happened, then they get to have their own interpretation, and if they’re angry, they’re angry, and if they’re not, that’s okay too. You don’t just go up to someone and say ‘on the last time I did this day, you felt sad about this thing that happened’. It’s prejudicial, telling someone how you thought they felt, and if I had told you that, what I thought you were feeling at any given moment, it would be saying more about me than you.”

Mizuki watched him. “You know, I know that stuff, I’m pretty sure we talked about it before. You talk about disclosure a lot, and I mean a lot. But it’s — you had this idea that I was going to slip up or something on an undone day, that I’d think that it didn’t matter to you?” She felt affronted and slightly flushed. “Alfric, I absolutely know that it’s important to you, that it’s something super sacred. I would never violate that, never put you in this uncomfortable position where you’d have to explain uncomfortable things on an undone day. Why would you think that I would?”

“Sometimes you just do things,” said Alfric. “You don’t think about the consequences. That’s … I mean, it’s true, right?”

Mizuki folded her arms. “I guess. But there’s a difference between breaking a window and breaking someone’s trust. I would absolutely break a window.” She felt like throwing something through her window just to prove her point, that windows didn’t matter, but she thought better of it. “I would never make a move on you in an undone day, never, because I know how you would feel about that. I mean, you’d basically be forced not to undo the day, from everything you’ve said about it.”

“I think I misjudged you,” said Alfric. “But to go back a little bit — I wasn’t quite done — I made these plans for when it was going to happen, when you’d have an impulse towards me that you wouldn’t ignore, and the thing was, I was starting to think that it was never going to come, that all these conversations I’d rehearsed in my head were going to go to waste. And then you kissed someone else, and it felt terrible.”

Mizuki had her eyes on his. She had trouble making eye contact now, but he was saying things with those brown eyes, which were boring into her.

“You wanted to be able to give me a speech,” said Mizuki. “And … you’re upset about not being able to give it.” She was deliberately misinterpreting him, she knew that, but it felt easier, safer, to say.

“No,” said Alfric. “No, I wasn’t upset about all my plans being thrown in the fire, I was upset because I’d thought — can I give you the short version?”

Mizuki kept her hands folded across her chest, but she threw one of them up. “Sure, okay.”

“Alright,” said Alfric. He looked up briefly, like he was trying to find his place, and for some reason that annoyed Mizuki to no end.

“So for the sake of this, I should pretend that we’ve just had a pleasant day together, and I just couldn’t help myself, so I planted a kiss, and now you’re saying ‘we need to talk’, and this is your response to that?”

Alfric paused for a moment and looked at her. “Yes?”

“Did you kiss me back, in this scenario you were planning for?” asked Mizuki.

“Um,” said Alfric. He looked up again. “It depends.”

“On what?” asked Mizuki. She was baffled, though in retrospect it wasn’t baffling that Alfric hadn’t just had a plan, he’d had a flowchart, with conditionals.

“On how drunk you were,” said Alfric. “And then also on whether I was drunk, though I don’t know if I would be making my best decisions when I’d had a few. Of course, that’s the time when it’s best to have a plan.”

“Assume that I’m stone sober,” said Mizuki. “We have a beautiful day together, go out on the boat, you teach me how to sail, we have a lunch that I made, a late dinner at some tavern on our way home, and we’re cuddled up together when I turn around, place my hand on your chest, and kiss you. In that scenario, you kiss me back?”

“I — yes,” said Alfric.

“And if I keep kissing you, you push me off and say ‘whoa, hold on, we need to talk’?” asked Mizuki.

“I planned to, yes,” said Alfric. “But I think at a certain point the damage is done.”

Mizuki felt that word, ‘damage’, in the pit of her stomach. She’d been holding out hope that maybe his response would be something more like what she’d imagined that it might be.

Like Alfric, Mizuki had imagined how it might go. She hadn’t been making any plans, she wasn’t trying to map out what would happen and what the optimal thing to say would be, but she’d had thoughts, certainly. Sometimes those thoughts were of kissing him, and sometimes of him kissing her, and one time it was a prepared speech from him, but it was about how he’d decided that he thought he could make things work between them.

In her fantasies, they always held off talking until later, if at all. Sometimes those fantasies were dictated by the moment, when they were together, nestled on the couch or sitting in a field, or sometimes when she was taking a shower, or he was working out in the backyard, back when they’d had a backyard. She had always imagined it as feeling good, like a dam breaking, though of course it wasn’t supposed to be a good thing when a dam broke. It would be like rain after a long drought, or a storm finally passing after the garden was drenched, and she would kiss him, and smile, and press her face against his so that he could feel her smile even without seeing it.

Sometimes, in these fantasies, he would say ‘we really shouldn’t’, and then she would kiss him again, and he’d kiss her back, and that would be enough talking about it.

What she’d forgotten, or maybe just not included as part of the fantasies, was that Alfric was a brick.

“I think,” continued Alfric. “That there’s some level of mutual attraction between us that we’re both aware of and have silently acknowledged. We get along well, we have fun, we enjoy talking, we like spending time together … and I think that trying to make that work, as a relationship, is probably a mistake for a number of reasons.”

Mizuki rolled her eyes. “I mean, okay, I’m sure you have your list ready to go with all these ‘reasons’. But that’s not — I mean, I think yeah, that’s probably why it felt like a mistake with that other guy, whoever he was, and I think that’s why I asked you to undo the day, that I was, I guess, waiting for something to happen between us, but it’s not going to happen, is it? So why do things have to be weird?”

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “I think it’s the death of possibility.”

Mizuki mulled on that. It felt like the kind of sentence that he’d thought up the night before, or even a week ago. She didn’t like that either. If you were going to think something up and save it for the right moment, it should be a joke, or better, a pun.

“Well, for my own sake, can you run through all the things that wouldn’t work?” asked Mizuki.

“Sure,” said Alfric. He seemed a little bit sad. “To start with, we live together and we work together. There’s a risk of making everything awkward for the party, and breaking the party apart entirely once it fails. Courtship is about trying to figure out whether you work well enough to make a marriage, and a failed courtship would be pretty catastrophic in this case, even if it was amicable, especially once we were past the grace period and started seeing other people.”

Mizuki was listening, holding back her disagreements. There was no reason that it should fail, except that every relationship Mizuki had ever had ended in failure. She also didn’t like that framing of ‘courtship’, as though it was because this was some kind of husband-seeking algorithm. It was fun to have a boyfriend, someone you could kiss and hold and pretend would be yours forever, someone to fantasize about, to fantasize with, to tell you that you were pretty and perfect. It didn’t seem like it needed to be more than that, and Alfric was only eighteen. From everything he’d said, he wasn’t actually looking to get married, not in the near future.

It felt like Alfric had started making a list of all the reasons why it was a bad idea, and now he was just going through it, listing them off one by one.

She didn’t want to argue with him though.

“As you know, I’m out of my chrononaut pact,” said Alfric. “But it still places a strain on a potential relationship, and with my family … my mom likes you, you’ve met my siblings, but you’d be an outsider to the chrononauts. And between the two of us, it would be hanging over our heads, a complication every time we had an argument, a moral hazard even if it never actually comes to that.

Mizuki didn’t agree with that either. His family was nice, they wouldn’t treat her differently even with the weird pact thing, and she trusted him, even though he felt like no one ever really truly did. He’d run into too many rumors to be secure about a ‘position of potential power’, and most of that was just Lola, or at least it felt that way to Mizuki. Trust was something earned though, and she thought maybe with another year away from Lola’s influence, and not too many bumps in the road from people who actually did hate and distrust chrononauts, he’d be fine.

“I just think we’re very different from each other,” said Alfric. “It would cause problems, down the line, almost certainly.”

Mizuki was aware that she hadn’t said anything for a very long time, and had kept too many of her thoughts to herself. But Alfric didn’t want an argument, certainly not the kind of argument that she was capable of giving him. Besides, anything that she could think of, he’d have already thought of, he was good at looking through all the angles.

He’d looked at her, considered everything, and decided against it.

“I think I’m going to take off,” said Mizuki.

“Mizuki,” said Alfric, half-rising from his seat.

“I’m just going for a walk or something,” said Mizuki. “I’ll be back in time for dinner, don’t worry.”

“Look,” said Alfric.

“No, makes sense, wouldn’t work, still kind of sad that it wouldn’t work,” said Mizuki. She was starting to cry, and wanted to get out of the room before it started. There was no reason for him to see that.

She moved out of her room, well aware that she was doing a terrible job of hiding her tears, and managed to make her way outside without having anyone ask her what was wrong. That was a relief. Once she was out in the field, she just started walking until she was far enough away that no one could see her, into a bit of woodland that ran along a creek, too steep for anyone to farm.

She cried for a bit. She usually didn’t when she was rejected, but she’d never been rejected by someone that she cared so much for. Alfric had been living with her for what felt like a long time, and she’d held a candle for him for most of that. It was the longest crush she’d ever had, which was something. Maybe she’d just let the fantasies steep for too long.

A large black bird hopped down from one of the trees and landed not too far away from Mizuki. It did a small dance back and forth, peering at Mizuki and twisting its head to get a better look at her.

“Go away, Isra,” said Mizuki. “I’ll talk to you later.”

The bird cawed loudly, then flapped away. Mizuki didn’t have any idea whether that had actually been Isra or not. The idea that she might have insulted a bewildered bird that was now wondering whether its name was Isra did cheer her up a little bit, but there was no one to share the idea with.

If Alfric wanted to talk to her, he could use the party channel at literally any time, but if that was what he wanted to do, he’d have to speak to everyone. She thought that he might, and didn’t really want to speak with him, but she wasn’t going to go so far as to leave the party over this.

“Alright,” said Mizuki. “Get it together.”

She rose to her feet and took a deep, shaky breath, then started walking again, deeper into the not-very-deep woods.

What bothered her, what really bothered her, was that he was attracted to her, he had been a complete flirt, he’d joked and waggled his eyebrows and had possibly been shirtless more often than he strictly needed to be. He liked her. He thought she was funny.

It would have been one thing if he’d just not been that into her. She’d had boyfriends like that, going both ways, either boys that she’d only dated because it had seemed like a good idea at the time, or boys that had just not been all that interested in her. That had been fine, she understood it. If Alfric had said ‘hey, I’m not that into you’ she’d have said ‘oof’ and then moved on.

It was all that other stuff though, the outside factors, or just nebulous worries that maybe it won’t work out. The more Mizuki turned it over in her mind, the more she thought that it was a load of total bunk. She’d sat through enough weddings to know that most people thought the entire point of a marriage was facing things together head on.

And as for being too different from each other, that was also a complete load of crap. Did you make a soup with just seven varieties of onions? No, you added all kinds of ingredients together, ingredients whose differences complemented each other and brought richness to the dish. Mizuki was pretty sure that Alfric wasn’t even under the misconception that two people would get along best when they were similar to each other. In fact, Mizuki thought that if Alfric had ever come across a woman like himself, he would probably have a cold, cordial friendship with her, and if they somehow ended up dating, it would be completely by the books.

She couldn’t imagine that was what Alfric actually wanted. Alfric liked excitement, danger, situations that he could adapt to, and he’d often talked about how a dungeon that went completely by the books would probably get a little old for him. Dungeon Variation 3G would maybe allow him to demonstrate his mastery of dungeons the first time he came across it, but the second time, what would he have? Did he really see himself settling down with a safe, boring, consistent wife?

And really, Mizuki thought as she wandered down what she thought was a trail, wasn’t her being silly one of the things that he liked about her? It didn’t make sense that silliness would somehow disqualify her. She could stop being silly, if she wanted to. She had stopped, more or less, for wizarding school, where they didn’t seem to find any value in humor or spontaneity.

The more she considered it, the more she thought that Alfric was just flatly wrong. It made her a little bit angry, and she imagined some conversations with him where she expressed that anger. She hadn’t really said much in their talk, had only listened and felt sad, but it was clear now that she should have come back at him with something.

In fact, it was kind of messed up that he’d been having all these conversations without her. He’d been tackling the ‘problem’ without her input, even though she was one of the two people who would be affected most. It was almost like he’d had a conversation with her on an undone day — he wouldn’t do that, of course — and then had just made up his mind without her.

Being annoyed felt better than feeling sad. Mizuki was pleased that the tears had dried away, and as she kept walking in what she hoped was the direction of home, she tried to think about what her next steps would be.

If he’d just appeared in front of her at that very moment, she might have just let him have it, rambling through all her disorganized thoughts and rebuttals. It would feel nice, she thought. It had been quite a while since she’d yelled at anyone. Mostly, she liked to get along with people, and Hannah had said she was bendable to a fault.

The more Mizuki walked, the less confident she was that she was going the right direction, which was a bit embarrassing. Normally, she’d just use the warp, but she didn’t know this hex very well, and had no idea whether the warp would take her further or closer to the house. She didn’t actually know how to get to the house, other than following the path she’d taken.

The extra time gave her a moment to consider. She didn’t really know why Alfric was being such a pessimist. She tried playing out the conversation in her head, and ended up accusing him.

“You’re just scared, because last time it turned out so bad!” she yelled at him.

That felt true, at least a little. Alfric was very practiced at his cold-eyed analysis of situations, but it wasn’t a technique that worked all that well on feelings, nor on people. The whole reason he’d struck out before coming to Pucklechurch was that he’d not been considering people as much as he should have, thinking of them as creatures of logic. That it had worked out in the end was mostly luck, or possibly Hannah’s intervention to tamp down on the worst of his schemes.

Mizuki looked around her, and accepted that she was lost.

It had happened much faster than she’d thought it would, and she wished she’d had the presence of mind to grab the helmet so she could fly up into the air. It was always so much easier to navigate from the sky. She hadn’t even brought her bag with her, which normally had snacks and water in it.

Mizuki finally gave in and used the warp, which brought her to a sleepy little hamlet where the church was the largest building around. There was a market, but it was closed down, all the stalls shuttered, so she went to the hamlet’s one tavern and took a seat there before realizing that she didn’t have any money on her.

It didn’t take long to get directions to the traveling house, which had made a bit of a stir, as it often did in places like this. Verity was set to play at that very tavern later in the night, and everyone was excited for it, or at least curious enough to attend, since word of this impromptu tour of small towns had begun to spread ahead of them as they took their path.

The trip back to the house was two miles or so, which was a bit of a walk, but better than traipsing through the woods.

When she finally got back to the house, she was feeling a lot better about herself, though still annoyed with Alfric, and very convinced that he was wrong.

<I’m skipping dinner, won’t be going to the concert, just need some alone time,> Mizuki said into the party channel. It was the first time anyone had used it that day.

<Okay,> said Alfric a few seconds later.

That no one was asking after her was a sign that Alfric had already talked to them, or at least given them some minor kind of warning. She understood that, but didn’t particularly like it.

Once they’d all eaten their dinner and emptied out of the house, Mizuki crept down the stairs and grabbed some of the leftovers. Hannah had cooked, which meant that it was a quietly understated meal, of chicken, potatoes, and asparagus. It was worse after having a chance to cool, but Mizuki ate, even though she wasn’t all that hungry.

Then, she went upstairs to prepare.

She started by cutting her hair, which was really no big deal given that they had a way to regrow it. Haircuts were almost always better done by someone else, but they didn’t have the ability to make clones just yet, and besides, she wasn’t sure whether she would have trusted herself. Thankfully when wearing her hair up it wasn’t all that noticeable, and she put her hair into two messy buns, which had been a common style for her.

She spent some time picking out clothes. At first she went for a more traditional style, or at least traditional for her, but she thought about it some, and decided she’d go for a simple robe with a shift beneath it, which she often wore for pajamas. It was the same thing she’d been wearing that first morning that Alfric had come over and woken her up, minus the shift.

She put on a little make up, though not that much. She didn’t really like the feeling of it on her face, or what felt like the feeling.

Then, she waited.

Admittedly, the waiting took longer than she’d thought it would. She’d underestimated the amount of time it would take for them to walk to the hamlet, have the concert and a few drinks, then walk back. She was missing out on all that, but she had a plan, so she turned on a light, sat in bed for a bit, and read through one of her books, then did more of the rock petting. She felt like her ability to concentrate on somewhat boring things was improving, which she thought was mostly because she was being put in a position to do that more.

Murmured conversation was what let her know that everyone was back in the house. She tried to listen in, even though it definitely wasn’t intended for her, and stayed still in her room as there was more movement of people through the house. The walls were fairly well insulated, keeping conversation from carrying too far, but it was possible to hear other things, like when the faucet in the bathroom had been turned on, or when a door closed. Mizuki had spent much of her teenage years learning the sounds of the house in order to better avoid them when she snuck out or back in.

Alfric was the first to bed, ascending up to the third floor where his rooms were. Mizuki listened in closely to the sound of him taking a shower up there, then brushing his teeth, then getting in bed. Hannah was in her hidey-hole, while Isra, Verity, and Pinion were all downstairs and probably having some wine before bed, or talking about the concert.

Mizuki left her room for the first time in hours, then crept upstairs to Alfric’s room.

“Hi,” he said as she came in.

“Hi,” she replied.

The attic had been the beneficiary of his woodworking efforts, with all kinds of shelves, tables, and other things spread around it. It was all very functional, finished with attention and care, and didn’t draw attention to itself. The lights were shuttered, which meant that they were looking at each other in the moonlight. Alfric was in bed, on his back, shirt off, covered in his blankets, ready for sleep.

“How are you?” he asked.

Mizuki moved across the room, padding along on bare feet, and climbed into bed with him. She got close to him, laying on her belly so that her ribs were touching his. One of her arms was placed on his chest, so that her fingers were resting on the meaty muscle of his pec. It was surprisingly easy to forget how muscular he was. He didn’t give off the vibe of someone muscular.

“I was thinking today,” said Mizuki.

“Yeah?” he asked.

She could smell his breath, which had the spiced tang of the cream he used for toothpaste. It came from Dondrian. Her face was close to his, and he wasn’t saying anything about that, which she took as a good sign.

“You’re wrong about basically everything,” said Mizuki. “Which is tragic, because you’ve got a pretty good track record, aside from the whole dragon demiplane thing.”

“You think so?” asked Alfric.

“Yup,” said Mizuki. “And you know, I thought that I would come up here and give you a lecture about how wrong you are, but then I decided there was something that I needed to do first.”

“Which was?” asked Alfric.

Mizuki drummed her fingers on his chest and looked into his eyes. She was halfway supporting herself on him, and moved over more, so her hip was on top of his, at least on the side, and her shin was touching his.

“You gave me this whole lecture that was supposed to come after I’d been reckless and impulsive and had kissed you,” said Mizuki. “And the thing is, I didn’t even get to kiss you. Which feels very unfair, even just on the face of it.”

She was keeping her tone light and airy, flirty even, but she was starting to get nervous. Alfric hadn’t pushed her away, as she thought he might, but he wasn’t touching her either. She was touching him, not the other way around, and he’d done nothing by way of encouragement.

She went for it, leveraging herself forward, and kissed him before he could say anything. His lips were soft and warm, and he kissed her back, pressing her face to hers as much as he could with her on top of him. It had been a long time since she’d kissed anyone, and she’d forgotten how much she liked it. She liked the feeling of his skin, the wetness of his lips, the smell and taste, which was less of his toothpaste by the moment and more of his particular mild scent.

She kept kissing him. He’d said that he would kiss her back, if she kissed him, and she’d found a clever loophole, which was that if she just never stopped then he wouldn’t stop either. She’d intended to say that to him, then give him her speech about how it was wrong, that actually they’d make a great couple, and any problems they had, they would deal with together.

He didn’t actually stop kissing her for her to tell him that though. His hand — his free one, the one she hadn’t pinned under her — went to her back, and she thought that he was going to push her away, but he only rubbed her back some, touching her.

When Mizuki was finished, it was more because her lips were feeling funny than because she really wanted to stop.

She laid her head on Alfric’s chest and listened to the beating of his heart. It was going as fast as her own. She was waiting for him to say something, to reiterate that this was a mistake, that no amount of kissing or persuasion was going to change his mind, but he moved the arm that she was on top of and placed it on her back, so he was holding her in an embrace.

Mizuki’s heart started beating more slowly as the silence stretched on. It was nice to be with him, to be held beneath the covers, to know that he did like her, that his reservations weren’t enough to push her away.

She fell asleep.

When she woke up, she was feeling warm, the closeness of their bodies too much in the late summer. She was sweaty, actually, but still didn’t want to move, not when she realized that she was still with Alfric, still with his arms around him and her head on his chest. She turned slightly, so she could kiss him.

“It’s just past the witching hour,” said Alfric. She hadn’t known that he was awake.

“Ah,” said Mizuki.

“Sorry if I woke you,” said Alfric.

“I got sweaty,” said Mizuki.

There was silence again, but Mizuki didn’t think that she was going to fall asleep, not laying there with him.

She kept wanting him to say something. She had no idea what was going on in his head. It felt like he was going to say ‘this changes nothing’, but she hadn’t made her ‘everything will actually be great’ argument yet. Maybe he was waiting for that.

“If we break up, I’ll let you say that you told me so,” said Mizuki. “That’s as much as I’m going to sweeten the pot.”

“Hmm,” said Alfric.

“Alright, alright,” said Mizuki. “How about this, if we go the distance, I won’t hold it over you.”

“What does that mean?” asked Alfric. “‘Go the distance’.”

“I dunno,” said Mizuki, though she very well did know. Marriage, children, all that kind of thing. Or maybe just a one year anniversary where she would say something like ‘and you had no faith in us’. She didn’t want to say that though, not when it seemed like things might be going her way.

“Kiss me again?” asked Alfric.

She propped herself up on him and kissed him again. She used her tongue this time, darting it just a bit between his lips, and he made a small noise she found quite pleasing.

After a time, he picked her up and laid her on her back with such startling ease that she had a jolt of surprise. Then they were kissing again, with him on top of her. He was so much bigger than her, so much stronger, and she ran her hands over his arms, feeling his muscles.

When they were done, Alfric laid himself down beside her, and this time he was the one nestled against her.

“Alright,” he said. He kissed her neck. “We’ll give it a shot.”

Mizuki felt electrified, in a good way, and a part of her wanted to go back to kissing, or maybe something more. Instead she just laid there, feeling happy.

Sometimes when you made a plan, things worked out.

Chapter 173 - Answer to the Nebulous

Pinion had mixed feelings on the dress. The party had, in practical terms, gifted it to him, but he wasn’t sure that he actually wanted it. It allowed the wearer to slide between feminine and masculine, and he was currently having breakfast with Verity and Isra, in the form of a girl. Hannah still hadn’t woken, or perhaps was in her extradimensional space with Marsh, and Alfric wasn’t awake yet, which was a bit unusual.

“It’s one of those things that has no downside, right?” asked Verity.

“I suppose,” said Pinion. “As with most entads, there’s still a cost in terms of wearing it or lugging it around. It’s the same reason that if someone offers you a piece of furniture, you wouldn’t necessarily take it.”

“I think you look good in it,” said Verity.

“Yes, well,” said Pinion. “I think you think I look good for the wrong reasons.” He said it with a smile, though he wasn’t entirely joking.

“You look good as a girl,” said Verity. “I actually think most men would look good as girls. Girls look good, generally speaking, better than men.”

“Now, do you say that as personal preference, or because you really believe it to be true in a general sense?” asked Pinion.

“Hmm,” said Verity. She pondered this while sipping on her apple cider.

“I think we’ve had this conversation before,” said Isra. She’d been the one to do the light cooking for them, though Pinion only had a bit of egg.

“Have we?” asked Verity.

“Not about men and women,” said Isra. “But about music and art.”

“Right, right,” said Verity. “The universality of beauty and aesthetics.”

“Surely we must accept that beauty is subjective?” asked Pinion.

“Must we?” asked Verity. She pouted. “I think that’s so boring, such a cop out answer to the question. You get asked whether something is good or bad, and you answer that good and bad are all relative, it’s such dreck. It’s the slime stuck to the bottom of a boot. The answer of cowards.”

“It’s the answer that Qymmos gives to the question,” said Pinion. “Have you read Answer to the Nebulous?”

“No,” said Verity. “And if the answer is ‘really, it depends on your point of view’ then I don’t think I need to read it. Did someone really write such a facile tract?”

“She’s fired up about this,” said Isra.

“I can tell,” Pinion smiled. “Which is nice, but the question of how to bring objectivity to subjective topics is actually pretty well-worn.”

“It feels wrong in my bones to say that my ‘opinion’ on a topic is just as correct as, say, Mizuki’s. No offense to her.”

“I think I’d be the proper point of comparison,” said Isra.

“You have a refinement of your own,” said Verity, briefly placing a gentle hand on Isra’s forearm. “It irks me, that’s all. I’m a musician, how could it not? I spend my time trying to make beautiful things, or at least compelling things. To pour myself into something with all the craft, creativity, and effort I possibly can, and then have someone have unprincipled takes on why it’s bad … hopefully you can at least tell how and why that irks me.”

“It’s funny,” said Pinion. “Or … funny in an ironic way, I suppose. Because what you crave is some metric for success, and you’re in a field that doesn’t provide that. A farmer can be judged on the yields of their crops, a dungeoneer on the money they take in from the dungeon spoils, an ectad engineer by the efficiency of their processes — but there’s no such thing for art.”

“All Verity wants is to be told that she’s done a good job,” said Isra. “That’s the root of it.”

“Is it?” asked Verity.

“Ah, I could see that,” said Pinion. “It’s not the metrics per se, it’s the feedback, and when someone says ‘oh, that song was nice’ your first instinct is to say ‘well, that’s just your opinion’.”

“Wow,” said Verity. “I’m thinking that neither of you know me well enough to be saying that. Though it does have the ring of truth to it.” She frowned. “Is that something that you can unlearn, praise-seeking? Or a preference of the concrete over the ethereal?”

“I’d think, as with most things, it changes with time,” said Pinion. “Your performance last night got applause. Did that feel too transient for you, too subject to being revoked or invalidated?”

“I don’t suppose it did,” said Verity. “Mostly when I’m listening to the audience, it’s about calibrating the songs to their mood, not trying to capture their, ah, love.” She paused on the word.

“I’ve only been privy to a minority of the performances, but you seem quite aloof when you play. Like you’re in your own world,” said Pinion. His voice was higher as a girl, which Verity said had something to do with vocal cords.

“Sometimes,” shrugged Verity. “I like music more when it’s like that. But I think ignoring the whims of the audience is something that you only do when you’re on a larger stage, when managing the audience isn’t really expected. Playing Beruchald is already supposed to have relatively little interpretation, so I’m not even sure what responding to the audience would be. But with these little songs that I’ve been playing, sometimes I’ll hold off on a verse to get to the next song, or go one verse extra, or play more instrumental, and there’s no set list, so I’ll sometimes decide what comes next based on what I feel from the audience.” She paused. “And there’s second-guessing there, not that there’s really time for it. You know, put like that, I’m not sure that I’d like a more concrete understanding.”

“There’s something nice about going with the vibes,” said Isra.

“Yes,” nodded Verity. “But I still don’t hold with the idea that everyone has their own view of beauty which is equally valid. It offends me.”

“Well, I’m going to change out of this dress, as fun as it’s been,” said Pinion.

“Aw,” said Verity.

“Back to looking like an ugly man, I guess,” said Pinion. He smiled at Verity, but the smile she gave him back wasn’t quite right. She really did find men to be unaesthetic in most cases, and there was something about that which hurt a little bit, even if she didn’t intend it.

Pinion had spent the night with Isra and Verity, having used the dress to ‘become’ a girl. He had often wondered what it would be like, in the interests of scientific curiosity, and the truth was, it wasn’t very different at all. Most of what they’d done had been things that he could have just as easily done in a man’s form, like putting makeup on his face and polish on his nails, though he’d done the former before, since it was expected of men in formal events on the eastern side of Inter. Wearing women’s clothes was likewise just as possible when he was his normal self, and so didn’t have much appeal or thrill, except that Isra and Verity seemed to be having fun, which made it fun. He’d put on a few of their dresses and twirled around in them, which they’d seemed to enjoy.

As Pinion looked at the dress in the mirror in his room, he puzzled over it. It was as close as they’d gotten to a ‘broken’ entad, and it had taken Hannah giving a diatribe on the topic for Pinion to realize that she was right.

“The gods don’t give a fig about gender,” said Hannah. “And it’s not baked into the entads either, for whatever reason, which might well have been an Editorial choice.” She held up a hand and began counting off subjects. “No entads restrict gender, no magic is blocked by it, there’s no way to flip a person from one to the other except through general means like copyin’ or replacement or manipulation, there’s no grammar for it, no vocabulary. So in that sense, a dress that can do what this one did was unprecedented.

It wasn’t too useful, especially because it needed to be fully worn. If you wanted to change how you looked, there were other entads for that, and it wasn’t as though it allowed for full customization of the sort that was available for anyone with enough money or through the lottery.

The dress didn’t just ‘flip’ gender, a concept that Hannah in particular rolled her eyes at, it operated on a whole range of features. Pinion could warp just his eyes, making them more masculine or more feminine, at least as the dress seemed to understand these concepts. Pushing at the boundaries of it, Pinion could see why Hannah felt it was so ridiculous a thing, divorced from any ground reality, but there was something that felt compelling about it, a chance to make changes.

For as much as Verity had said that she found women more aesthetically pleasing than men — or more, that women simply were more pleasing to look at in general from the viewpoint of any right-thinking person — for all that, Pinion still spent some time in the mirror, seeing what he’d look like with more masculine features. Pushed to the extremes that the dress allowed, it was a caricature of masculinity, but there was still something that Pinion liked about it.

Once the dress was off, he examined himself, giving a critical eye to his features. It wasn’t something that he did often, in part because most of what he saw were the things he didn’t like.

When Pinion came downstairs, dressed in his usual clothes and with the nail polish taken off, the house was ready to start moving again. It was a part of the rhythm of their travels, the house taking off down the backroads of Inter, though Alfric had said that at least once before they settled into their planned plot in Plenarch, he’d like to take one of the major thoroughfares, just for the experience of it.

Isra was at the dining room table, frowning as she looked through a book. She was wearing her headscarf and conservatively dressed, which seemed to be something that she did with no consistency, depending on her mood. The night before, at their sleepover, she’d been in just a shift.

Of all the party members, Verity had become his closest friend, and perhaps because she shared a room with Isra, Isra had become a friend too. By contrast, Pinion spent relatively little time with Hannah and Mizuki, who had their own affairs away from the house, and with Alfric, it was much more like being colleagues.

“Moving in five!” Alfric called, his traditional warning. He was overly paranoid that the house would end up stepping on someone, or that someone might get left behind, not that they didn’t have a dozen ways of dealing with that.

“What are you reading?” Pinion asked as he took a seat.

“It’s a travel guide for Tarbin,” said Isra.

“Ah,” said Pinion.

“I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do once we get to Plenarch,” said Isra.

“As soon as we get done with this long journey, you’re going to go on another one?” asked Pinion.

“Right now, we’re seeing the sights,” said Isra. Her eyes were still on the book. “But when we’re in Plenarch … there are only so many days I want to spend there, especially if I’m not interested in the shops.”

“You’re not?” asked Pinion. “That’s the best part of a large city, in my opinion. Second best, maybe, after the entertainment. A city has variety that small towns can’t hope to match, and there are things to find in the shops that you’d never in a million years come across in the relative middle of nowhere.”

“I’ve been shopping in Plenarch before,” said Isra. She flipped a page. “It was nice. I don’t know that I need to do it again. Verity said that some people get obsessed with it, having new things, and they enjoy the act of collection more than actual having. I’m a collector, but collecting things that cost money seems like it might ruin me.”

“Ah,” said Pinion.

“Alfric and Mizuki seem like they’re getting along better,” said Isra.

“I think I missed seeing her off,” said Pinion. “She’s at school?”

“She is, or on her way,” said Isra. “She said goodbye to him.”

“Good that the fight wasn’t serious, I guess,” said Pinion. He looked at the book Isra was leafing through, which was open to a map with indexed time tables. “Portals?”

“Yes,” said Isra. “It’s between portals, leycraft, and just using the entads we have. I’m not decided.”

“Alone, or with the party?” asked Pinion.

Isra looked up. “I wouldn’t want to inconvenience anyone.”

“No,” said Pinion. “But you have to realize that they’d come with you, right? Verity would insist, Mizuki would take a break from school, Alfric would try to plan around it … even if Hannah is on her way out, I do think she’d want to be with you.”

Isra sighed. “I know, they would come.”

“I’m a bit envious,” said Pinion. “I’ve never really had anyone in my life like that.”

“It helps that they’re not tied down,” said Isra. As she said it, the house lurched to its feet.

“I suppose it does,” said Pinion. “The mark of a true friend would be following you anywhere, even if it cost them dearly and disrupted their life, at least if the stories are to be believed. But I don’t think that means them coming with you would mean any less.”

“I don’t know I’d need them,” said Isra.

“No, you seem quite capable,” said Pinion.

Isra narrowed her eyes at him. “Not for these things.”

“Finding your family?” asked Pinion. “Your past?”

Her eyes returned to the book. “It’s not something that I’m good at.” After her eyes idly traced the legend of the map, she looked back up. “You can be stubborn and plow your way through a great many things, and you can be willing to make a fool of yourself, but I might be able to find aunts, uncles, grandparents, all from a different culture I’ve known only through my father, through books, and I wouldn’t get a second chance to make an impression.”

“Good people would give you a second chance,” said Pinion.

“They might not be good people,” said Isra.

“I suppose not,” he replied.

He’d been given the brief version of her life story, having been raised in the woods after her mother’s death by a father who kept her hidden from the village. It was certainly odd, and Isra had apparently been flirting with the idea of traveling to Tarbin to find some answers for herself, something that Verity had confided was probably overdue.

People with good lives didn’t typically move to another country to live in seclusion, and it wasn’t out of the question that Isra would find some heartbreak there. She seemed aware of that fact.

“Have you done either of them?” asked Isra. “A portal or leycraft?”

“Both,” said Pinion. “Leycraft feels fast, which is about as much as I can say for it. Mostly, it’s cramped, and there’s a smell to it that I wasn’t a fan of. It’s also expensive, though sometimes the cheapest option for reliably getting from one place to another. You have a pilot, who’s doing all the work of staying within the lane, and all you do is sit there.” He shrugged. “I suppose I would recommend doing it at least once, if only for the thrill of it.”

“And portals?” asked Isra.

“I’ve only taken a portal once,” said Pinion. “It’s a much different experience, mostly because you’re queueing up with other people. And because the portals only open randomly — or not randomly, but at specific times that have their own rhyme and reason — most of the people going through are going with the understanding that they won’t be back.”

“It’s … rich and poor?” asked Isra.

“Hrm, I suppose,” said Pinion. “Most of the people at the leycraft station were people of means, and the ones like me were a rarity. Regular leycraft travel is mostly for government officials though, and I don’t think they’re usually rich. But the portals, yes, it’s people all lined up and ready, most of them carrying what luggage they have. You can’t really do a holiday with portal travel unless you’re willing to wait for an opportune portal back. It’s very different. Which were you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” said Isra. She looked back down at the book. “It seems daunting. I’ve been all over Greater Plenarch, but a longer trip like that, out of the country, to a place where they speak a language that I’m rusty with …”

“I’ve always found the prospect of travel daunting,” said Pinion. “But then when I’m actually traveling, it’s not so bad as all that.”

“Why did you go by leycraft, if it’s so expensive?” asked Isra.

“My great-grandmother had died,” said Pinion. “She was a matriarch and it was something of an occasion. She’d set aside money for travel arrangements for all of what she called her brood.”

Isra tapped her fingers against the table. “I might have a great-grandmother.”

“Was your father young?” asked Pinion.

“I don’t actually know,” said Isra. “Isn’t that strange, that I couldn’t tell you his age? He seemed ancient to me when I was small, but … I think he might have been young, yes. Younger, anyway. He didn’t have gray hair.”

“Common wisdom is that having children young is better,” said Pinion. “You have more energy for them, and you get to watch more of their lives. But I obviously don’t know the circumstances your parents found themselves in.”

“Nor do I,” said Isra.

“Well, I can’t say that I would stop my life to come help you, but you’ll let me know if there’s anything I can do, won’t you?” asked Pinion.

“Thank you,” nodded Isra. She’d returned to maps. “There’s a portal that goes to the heart of Tarbin a month from now.”

“Near to us?” asked Pinion.

“Yes,” said Isra. “Or near where we’ll be. Three hexes from Plenarch.”

“Mmm,” said Pinion. “Then there’s a chance I will go with you, if the whole party is going there.”

“I think I’ve made plans, but I haven’t told anyone,” said Isra.

“Why?” asked Pinion.

“The encouragement,” said Isra. “I like being supported, but the way that they encourage me to do this thing … I feel unappreciative, but it might be better if they weren’t so kind and gentle.”

“Ah,” said Pinion. “So if I say ‘your outfit looks nice!’ you’re happy for the compliment, but if I say ‘I’ll help you in any way I can, whether you decide to find your family or not’ it feels … what, too mushy?”

“They lose their strong opinions,” said Isra. “Because it’s delicate.” She was frowning. She looked up at Pinion. “And you have no strong opinions either?”

“I don’t know you that well,” said Pinion. “And strong opinions are a bit rude, in this sort of case. It would be like having strong opinions on someone’s choice of a mate, or their career, or something like that. And if you say to someone ‘you really should do everything in your power to find whatever family you have, otherwise you’ll regret it’, and then they don’t do that thing, it would feel like a harsh judgment, wouldn’t it?”

“I’d rather people say what they think,” said Isra. She set the book down and stood from her seat, swaying slightly with the movement of the house. “If you weren’t being polite, what would you say?”

“If I weren’t deferring because I don’t know you well enough,” said Pinion, considering that. “I would say that yes, you’re at a point in your life where you can just decide that you’re going to another continent, and if you do have family then time might be wasting away. A great-grandmother might not be alive in another decade. The information about your father might be lost.” He smiled at her. “So yes, unequivocally, with no waffling or caveats, you should make the trip to Tarbin and find what you can.”

“Thank you,” said Isra.

“Not a problem,” said Pinion. “Now, I need to write a letter to my mentor, is there any way that you can stick me in Lutopia One for an hour or so?”

“Of course,” said Isra.

The house, at least as Alfric controlled it, went along steadily enough, but occasionally it needed to make a long step, or there was a rough patch, and that made penning a letter a little sloppy. Ideally, Pinion would have waited until the house was stopped, but the problem was that he didn’t have a lot to do during the day, and once the house came to a stop, that was usually when it was time for them to have fun at whatever destination Isra had picked for them. They’d been going to interesting lakes and hills, and this coming day promised a meadow with flowers that responded to sound, which Isra had scouted for them.

Pinion quite liked Lutopia One, though he always had a bit of fear that he’d get left in there, forgotten. It had a ventstone, which meant that air wasn’t a problem, and there was a makeshift latrine, along with a glass tank with water and some dried provisions. There were bedrolls as well, and apparently the party had made the place their home for a series of days during a previous adventure, but after even an hour it began to feel claustrophobic.

Still, for a brief time it was almost ideal, a hermetically austere place with no distractions, no sounds, and nothing much else to do aside from contemplate the isolation.

As far as the dungeon investigations went, it had been a smashing success and was also frustratingly incomplete. Verity could influence the dungeon, but the last dungeon had been adversarial in some respects, twisting around what she’d been trying to do, and it wasn’t clear whether that was something that was inherent to her, or her efforts, or to the dungeons themselves.

The source of dungeon madness has long been speculated, but we might actually be getting close to something important, Pinion wrote. I’ve been discussing it with Verity, and we might learn something by having her relax her attempted prohibitions on creatures. This does introduce some risks to life and limb, especially given the results of their dungeons before I came along, but the scientific value might be incalculable.

Pinion went on for a bit, giving both a description of the dungeons thus far and his analysis of them, then hesitated on his final paragraph, which he’d intended to give over to more personal matters.

Argya Ham was his mentor and boss, and part of the reason she’d sent him on what had seemed like a wild goose chase was that she thought he needed to see more of the world. In that respect, it had been wildly successful, though there was a part of Pinion that wished they’d stay in one place for a bit more time. Still, they were making stops all over Greater Plenarch, visiting interesting buildings and monuments, a variety of natural wonders, and a number of small towns that were somehow all alike and yet with their own character.

He had been enjoying himself, overall, though the sleepover the night before had raised some confusing feelings in him, not with respect to his self-conception, but with regards to both Verity and Isra. He got along well with Verity, but when he’d changed his appearance to that of a girl, she’d been downright flirty, and he had no idea what that meant, if anything, whether she temporarily saw him as an option to date or whether it was something else. That the entad he’d used was one that she influenced added to the confusion, though it was difficult to ascribe intent.

Isra came to fetch him ten minutes after the letter was finished, and then Pinion had to go to the trouble of figuring out how to post it, mostly because of the difficulty involved in having a return address when the house was moving.

“Oh,” said Isra. “I go back to Pucklechurch fairly often. You can just have the return address be there. Bethany holds our mail for us, she works at the general store there. I’m actually still part of the gardening club.”

“So it’s like you never left?” asked Pinion.

“I’m not sure I would say that, but if you can travel widely at will, why not?” asked Isra. “This trip has been different for me than for the others.”

Pinion nodded at that. Of course, being a druid, it would be different for Isra anyhow. She was seeing more of the lands as they traveled, and would have been even without her travel lute. All the fantastic places they’d visited had been scouted by her, some with the help of locals, others with maps, and a few that she’d found simply by going to a hex and rising high into the air until she found something interesting.

It was around noon when they stopped at the meadow, and the waves of colors were immediately visible, reflecting the sounds of the wind.

They stepped down onto the ground and the flowers nearest their footsteps turned red with white centers, and as they spoke, green bursts happened around them.

“How does it work?” asked Verity.

“I have no idea,” said Isra.

“Not volume,” said Hannah, who was peering at a close-by flower. She hummed, and it pinkened.

“No,” said Isra.

“A dungeon escape?” asked Alfric. “Or something else?”

“The locals didn’t know,” said Isra. “They’ve tried to cultivate them, but there’s something in the soil here that they thrive on. I promised I would try to figure it out. Her hands went down to the flowers, and she gently cupped one, which pulsed blue to the sound of her breath.”

“Would you prefer the mini concert before or after we eat?” asked Verity. She was cradling one of her many lutes, this one an old standby which needed to be played with at least six fingers.

“Before, if that’s alright,” said Alfric. “I had a late breakfast.”

“Mmm,” said Hannah. “You and Mizuki made up then?”

“You could say that,” said Alfric.

“You’ve been in a good mood today,” said Hannah.

“Maybe,” Alfric smiled.

“Did it finally happen?” asked Isra. Her mood had brightened at the prospect.

“Look at his face,” Verity laughed. The laughter sent ripples of red out through the flowers.

“Mizuki and I still need to talk,” said Alfric.

“What were you doin’ last night then, ay?” asked Hannah.

“Hang on,” said Alfric. He was smiling though. “There are some issues that need to be worked out so that we don’t get in the way of the party’s —”

“Well, I’m happy for you,” said Verity, speaking over him.

“We should celebrate,” said Isra.

“Give them space,” said Hannah. “If they worked out somethin’ amicable last night they don’t need friends hornin’ in.” She clapped Alfric on the back. “But I’m happy for you, and so long as you talk things over and work together, I’ve high hopes. I’ve seen plenty of couples dash themselves upon easily avoidable rocks, and I hope that you have the good sense not to.”

Alfric looked around. “The concert?” he asked.

“Fine, fine,” said Verity. “But only because I know that Mizuki will blab once she gets home.”

Alfric seemed relieved, and Verity strode out into the flowers, trying to find a spot on a hill where she’d have the best visibility. After a moment to compose herself, she began a fast song that seemed to go up and down and breakneck speed, her words barely audible over the strumming of the lute.

It was a song of flowers, and it evolved as she played, certain notes that the flowers responded well to coming up more often, the colors growing richer and deeper as Verity learned to play with them. By the time her flower song was over, the colors were coming in waves, a hypnotic pattern emanating from where she was standing, and to cap it off, a gust of wind blew in to make the flowers wave around.

They applauded the display and then set out everything they needed for the picnic, which was a meal of soup in bowls made of bread, something that Hannah had said she’d wanted to share with the group before she left. It was a staple of festivals, she said, and was topped with cheese, which made it more than enough of a meal for lunch, and almost demanded that they have a smaller dinner.

The group was happy and boisterous, and Pinion was happy that he had a chance to be with them, but once they went back inside and got the house moving again, he began to feel a bit lonesome. The summer was fading into fall, and he wouldn’t be with these people forever. He was already feeling bad about having to say goodbye.

Chapter 174 - Honeymoon Minutes

“I should skip school today,” said Mizuki.

She was laying against Alfric’s chest, early in the morning, in bed. They weren’t sleeping in the same bed, but Mizuki had made it a habit of being in his room until the moment she was about to sleep, then coming back into his room the moment she woke up. They were in Alfric’s attic room, which had started spartan and now had perhaps a bit too many woodworking projects applied to it, along with a proper shelf of knick-knacks, all of them either henlings or entads, mementos of their dungeons. Alfric wasn’t normally too sentimental, but he liked having those things.

He was already feeling sentimental about his time spent with Mizuki. They’d been dating for three days.

“You should go to school,” said Alfric.

“You could come?” asked Mizuki. She seemed hopeful. “Spend the day in Plenarch, sit in on a class or two, meet some people, have lunch with me, that sort of thing?”

“And leave someone else in charge of the house?” asked Alfric.

“I mean, yeah,” said Mizuki. She touched his chest. “Or I could skip school and just stay here with you.”

“You can’t skip school,” said Alfric. “You’re ready, get going, I’ve got to start the house.” He didn’t move though, and let her lay against him.

“It’s just … this is that wonderful time at the start of the relationship, when everything is fresh and new, when my mind is buzzing with you, and I don’t want to waste it.”

“The honeymoon period,” said Alfric.

“Right,” said Mizuki. “Exactly.” She drummed her fingers on his chest.

“I don’t think it’s like that,” said Alfric. “I think it’s more … about the time we spend together, not absolute time? So there’s a set number of honeymoon minutes.”

Mizuki laughed and pressed herself against him. “You’re ridiculous.”

“It makes sense though, right?” asked Alfric. “I don’t think we’re using up honeymoon time when we’re apart.”

“You should patent that,” said Mizuki. “‘Honeymoon minutes’. There’s something there.” She reached up and touched his chin. She was touching him a lot like that, as though she’d always wondered what his chin had felt like.

“That’s not really how patents work,” said Alfric.

“Sure it is,” Mizuki replied. “Verity was telling me that all her dad had to do was go up to some guy in the government and say ‘music box’ and that was all it took. I’m pretty sure that was the whole story.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” said Alfric. He ran his fingers through her hair. She cut it, put it back to how it had been before wizard school. He’d forgotten how much he liked it like that. “We could fill a sheet with patent ideas, find the guy, then just yell them all really fast. Lock things down, right?”

“Right,” said Mizuki. “That seems like a much more productive day for me than wizard school.”

Alfric frowned. “Are you just clowning around? Or are you really not going to go?”

“It’s an intensive,” said Mizuki. “A big push day for rock-petting, basically, all day exercises and meditations and stuff. Apparently it helps some people to do a grueling bout of it every now and then, non-stop. I don’t think it’s going to work for me.”

“Do you think it’s ever going to work for you?” asked Alfric.

“Realistically, it’s too soon to say,” said Mizuki. “Emotionally … yeah, I think I could go another two years and never get it.” She paused. “You know, I don’t think we’ve really talked about when you were trying to become a wizard.”

“No,” said Alfric. “There’s not much to tell. I did basically all the same things you did, though I was at a Dondrian school, one which was geared more toward ‘base proficiency’. Less theory, more focus on getting a positive response from a mana stone with as little time and effort as possible.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “But you said you went six months? Shouldn’t a school like that, I don’t know, get results faster?”

“Does, most of the time,” said Alfric. “I wasn’t there full-time, since I was young. The aims are different, the methods different — most of the exercises you talk about I’ve never heard of.” It was a period of his life that he’d mostly forgotten, all the information filed away into some dusty corner of his mind that he never used. He usually held back when Mizuki talked about the wizard stuff, in part because it was so distant.

“Would life be a lot different if you’d made it?” asked Mizuki.

“Ah,” said Alfric. “I’ve caught on to your dastardly plan. You’re stalling, hoping that you’ll be late to school, because eventually you’ll be so late that you can say ‘oh, well I’ve already missed a bit, might as well miss the whole thing’. Well, I’m not going to allow it.”

“I’m going to be honest,” said Mizuki. “You’re giving me and my schemes far too much credit.” With incredible reluctance, she pushed herself off of him. “Urgh. Fine. I’m going.”

Alfric propped himself up on his elbows. She was wearing her robe, which he was convinced got less and less tightly cinched every time she came into his room. He’d wanted to take it slow, and Mizuki was positively delighted by that, because it meant that she could push up against the boundaries.

She turned to the door and then looked back at him. “Hey, can I tell you something?”

“Of course,” said Alfric.

“I like you,” said Mizuki. She flashed him a grin, giggled, and then dashed away as though she’d done something incredibly naughty. Alfric smiled after her.

By the time he got dressed — he’d been in his pajamas — Mizuki had already left.

If this was a honeymoon period, then Alfric was loving it. Mizuki had gone against him, a battle of wills over whether or not they should be boyfriend and girlfriend, and he’d lost, which she took pleasure in reminding him about. In all his planning for a painful conversation with her, he hadn’t imagined that she’d simply bowl him over. It was a sign that he’d gotten something fundamentally wrong when thinking about her, and he was hoping to figure out what, exactly, that was.

Of course, now that they were dating, he had entirely reoriented himself. You could argue against going into a dungeon all you wanted, but once you were actually in the dungeon, the time for those sorts of arguments was over. Alfric couldn’t help but think of the enormous bear they’d fought in their second dungeon, which they’d done only after long discussion. Once the thing was decided, you gave it your all.

Moving the house had become something that Alfric had grown quite adept at, and the longer they spent on the road, the faster he went, since every mile they put behind them meant that he had more experience with the limits of the entad legs and the conditions that determined the risks involved in being on the road. The others had chided him for being slow, but in truth, he wasn’t all that slow anymore, he’d only needed to build up his understanding. He could comfortably set the house at a gallop if need be, though it was uncomfortable for everyone, and required an extra round of strapping things in.

“What’s on the agenda for today?” Alfric asked Isra once they were moving.

“You didn’t check?” asked Isra.

“I checked,” said Alfric. “I’m just making conversation and giving you some leeway to suggest a change in course, or offer some notes about what you’ve scouted. It was meant to be friendly.”

“I had thought maybe it slipped your mind,” said Isra. He was watching the road, but she was watching him.

“No,” said Alfric. “I’m distracted, I’ll admit, but not so much that I’m going to make mistakes.”

“It’s really just a gentle stroll through the province,” said Isra.

“I know, I know,” said Alfric. “But you’ll let me do things my way?”

“Of course,” said Isra.

She looked out at the road ahead of them. There was some shocking similarity to the roads, and while Alfric kept thinking that he’d see a road that he’d never seen before, the varieties were consistent across Greater Plenarch, either dirt, stone, or cobblestone. One of their destinations for the day was actually a road, rather than a proper place, an ancient highway whose stones still stood, though there was nowhere near enough traffic anymore.

“How do you feel about doing dungeons without Mizuki?” asked Isra.

“Um,” said Alfric. “I think she would hate that.”

“Assuming she was okay with it?” asked Isra.

“Assuming that she enthusiastically said that she had no problems with us doing dungeons without us, then … I guess that would allow us to do more. A lot more, maybe.” Alfric frowned. “To be honest, I’m kind of liking the sedate pace.”

“You are?” asked Isra. “Why?”

They were sitting by the front door, the traditional spot for controlling the house as it lumbered down the roads. The scenery was farmland, which was typical, in part because the roads going past farms tended to be more well-maintained than the roads going through forests. The house could handle steep grades with relative ease, and the legs telescoped up to get around shorter trees, but it wasn’t quite as smooth or fast.

The front door had changed, because Alfric had changed it. He’d added a small deck that jutted out from the front door, along with railings to keep people from falling off. The whole assembly was removable, since the house wasn’t planned to be a moving house forever, which had made the design much more complicated. There was something that Alfric was coming to grips with himself about, that he loved the feeling of progression, of evolution, improving things bit by bit. Woodworking had started as a bit of a lark, but it turned out that it spoke to the part of him that always wanted to make improvements.

“There’s a certain feel to dungeoneering,” said Alfric. “Not the actual dungeons themselves, the profession, the traveling, sleeping in strange places, being essentially transient … it always appealed to me.”

“Like sailing did,” said Isra.

“Yes, like sailing,” said Alfric. He sighed, thinking about just how into being a ship’s captain he’d once been. “And there’s still the fact that you’re exploring things that have already been explored before, that have been seen by hundreds of people, but it’s still … I don’t know. A pleasant untethering.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d like sight-seeing,” said Isra.

“Why?” asked Alfric.

Isra shrugged. “It’s frivolous.”

“Sometimes I like frivolous things,” said Alfric. He was thinking of Mizuki, though he wasn’t sure whether she would like being called frivolous. “You want to do dungeons without Mizuki because … you want to get cracking on having Verity break them open?”

“Verity used to be the one holding us back,” said Isra. “I respected that. She didn’t like the dungeons very much, found them too similar to a performance, and we had a brutal string of them.”

“We did,” nodded Alfric. “Not that the last two have been smooth sailing.” He thought about the boat. “So to speak.”

“I was speaking with Verity last night, and she thinks that we’re hitting the dungeons too slow,” said Isra. “It goes against her training.”

“It does?” asked Alfric.

“For practice at something, anything, she thinks that one of the keys is feedback,” said Isra. “This, what we’ve been doing, gives her too much time to stew, too much thinking about what happened and what went wrong, not enough, um …”

“Rapid iteration?” asked Alfric.

“Yes,” said Isra.

“Hmm,” said Alfric. “I assume she didn’t ask you to talk to me?”

“She’s not frustrated,” said Isra. “It was just idle talk on her part. She’s been filling notebooks with songs of varying quality, looking forward to her performances. She likes being on the road just fine.”

“And you don’t?” asked Alfric. It felt like they were dancing around something, and Alfric wasn’t sure what. It wasn’t normally like Isra not to simply say what was on her mind.

“The next adventure for me is in Tarbin,” said Isra. “I don’t know when, or what it will be like, but … I’ve decided that I’m going.”

“Oh,” said Alfric. “You know, we do have a moving house, and travel entads, and even if we didn’t, we have the funds to move the whole party there more or less permanently.”

“I know,” said Isra. “I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

“Obviously we wouldn’t tag along if that’s not what you wanted,” said Alfric. “But it feels like an adventure I’d like to have. I’ve wanted to go both east and west. Mizuki has been talking about a Kiromo holiday.”

“I might do it on my own,” said Isra.

“All on your own?” asked Alfric.

“None of you speak the language,” said Isra.

“That’s not insurmountable,” said Alfric. “Translation entads.”

“We don’t have them, and they’re expensive,” said Isra. She paused. “Which is part of why I thought we might start doing a few dungeons without Mizuki.”

“Ah,” said Alfric. “You want to stock up.”

“I was hoping that Verity might be able to pull out something for me, yes,” said Isra. “It’s a foolish hope, but I’ve talked to her about my plans.”

“I don’t think it’s a foolish hope at all,” said Alfric. “It’s very realistic that she’ll be able to exert some influence on the entads. Personally, I was hoping that we would get a suite of entad-finding entads. Meta-entads are vanishingly rare, so not that, specifically, but wide-area clairvoyance that offers some level of magic-sight would do it. Also, some way of taking apart buildings and storing away the materials. Really, we’re overdue for a trip to Dondrian for the kinds of entad shops that would sell those things, but if Verity can just create them for us …”

“You’re excited,” said Isra.

“You’re not?” asked Alfric.

“With the way things are going, it seems far away,” said Isra. “The next dungeon will be in three days or so, and it might be a step forward or a step back. The dungeon after that will be a week later, and the next a week after that, and we’ll be in Plenarch, which means I’ll have less to do. No more scouting, very little travel, just stuck in a house, in a city I don’t know.” She looked out at the road. “I don’t think I’ll like it.”

“Which would make it a good place for you to leave and do your own thing,” said Alfric, frowning. “I see. Alright, do you want me to talk to Mizuki, or would you rather do it?”

“I think she would take it better coming from me,” said Isra.

“Maybe,” Alfric frowned. “Who would we replace her with? Pinion?”

“We could go in light,” said Isra. “Though Pinion would probably be thrilled to see the inside of one of these bespoke dungeons, at least once.”

“I’m against going in light,” said Alfric. “It introduces a new variable.” He frowned. “Mizuki has ended up being our heavy hitter. Arguably she started as that, but with the armor, the sword, her command of flight … if we get in trouble, she’s invaluable.” His mind was turning. “I’ll think about it. Ideally, we’d borrow a seasoned dungeoneer from somewhere, but Vertex has been committed to doing every dungeon along our path, and swapping between parties is somewhat taboo.”

“I can put in a message to the League,” said Isra. “We could find a floater.”

“Floaters,” said Alfric with a sigh. “Less common than we’d like, we’re dealing with an unusual situation, and there’s very often a reason they’re a floater.” He thought about the year he’d spent in that position, trying to pry his way into a new party or assemble one from scraps. “I say that as someone who was a floater himself.”

“We’re going to need to replace Hannah too, eventually,” said Isra. “She seems dead set on preaching.”

“We’ll have to have a team meeting soon,” said Alfric.

“It would be better for me to talk to Mizuki privately first,” said Isra.

Alfric thought about that. “Why do you think that?”

Isra shrugged. “If we say, as a party, that we’re forging on without her … it would put my hackles up. But if it was just a friend asking permission to get going, for personal reasons … I don’t know. With pack animals, there’s a difference between being surrounded by the pack, sides chosen, and individuals meeting with each other.”

“Well, you have my support,” said Alfric. “I’ll leave it to you?”

Isra nodded.

“And I’m going to ask Verity to try for translation entads, along with something for travel,” said Alfric. “I’m serious about coming with you, even if all you get out of it is someone who can’t understand the language standing next to you looking threatening.”

Isra laughed and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Alfric, you’re a dear friend, but you’re terrible at looking threatening. Really, truly awful. It’s important you know that.”

“Aw,” said Alfric. “What about in Dondrian, do you remember that duel I fought? I thought I was properly threatening there.”

“Maybe,” said Isra. She seemed skeptical.

“And if you don’t want me there, or just in the region, that’s fine too,” said Alfric.

“I’m still thinking,” said Isra. “I haven’t decided. There’s a convenient portal, though with the lute, it wouldn’t take that long to cross the continent on my own.”

Alfric nodded. “Let us know, when you decide. Personally, I’d like to see Tarbin, though they don’t like chrononauts too much.”

“They don’t?” asked Isra.

“We’re settled in Inter,” said Alfric. “We provide our power to the nation in various ways, which is threatening to the other nations of the world, for good reason. But in Tarbin it goes further. The chrononaut clans had North Tarbin, were more or less rulers, and while that made them enemies there, it also made them enemies outside their domain, to the south. The national borders were different then, but there are still stories, old wounds, things like that.”

“Ah,” said Isra. “History.”

“I’ve been told that history can stay strong, even hundreds of years later, long out of living memory,” said Alfric. “Personally, I’d like to see it myself.”

“You’d reveal yourself?” asked Isra.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “I don’t think I would stand out as a chrononaut. Maybe I would have a fake name.”

“You smiled,” said Isra.

“The idea of playing spy appeals to me,” said Alfric. He grinned at her.

“Well, maybe I don’t mind you being with me, if that’s the case,” said Isra. “I had no idea a spy would be protecting me. I’m going to get ready for the cave, I’ll see you soon.”

Alfric’s attention had wavered from the road, and he tried to refocus his attention on it. In truth, the house more or less moved itself, he was just there in case something unexpected came along, like a wagon they needed to navigate around, a building that needed to be squeezed by, or someone trying to flag them down, which happened with annoying regularity.

Bib was still with them, which surprised Alfric, given how far away they now were from Pucklechurch. The ‘scouting ahead’ that Bib did had been getting less and less reliable, and he’d vanished for a day, then came back like nothing had happened. Alfric kept Bib’s parents posted on what their son was doing, but they seemed generally unconcerned. In theory, Bib was supposed to be in school, but there was something to be said for the freedom of youth, and Alfric himself had taken months off schooling. Of course, he’d mostly had tutors, which was much different.

A few hours later, Bib appeared, racing along on his bird, and to Alfric’s surprise, he was followed by another child on a bird of her own. She was around his age, maybe a bit older, still small enough to ride one of the birds.

“Hoy, Alfric!” called Bib as he rode his bird up to the house.

“Hoy, Bib!” called Alfric. “We’re going to stop for lunch soon, have you eaten?”

“What’s eating?” asked Bib.

“Roast bear!” called Alfric. “Mashed potatoes, peas, all kinds of things. Your friend is welcome to join!”

“Girlfriend!” the unintroduced girl called with a smile. Like Bib, her clothes were minimal, just some shorts and a sleeveless shirt. She had sun-soaked skin and sun-bleached hair, and Alfric could imagine that like Bib, she spent most of her days riding around on a bird. It wasn’t clear where the two of them had met, and Alfric didn’t expect that Bib was going to be eager to give much in the way of answers.

“We’ll eat with you,” said Bib. “There’s a town up ahead, half a mile, they’ve got a park to settle in, talked to the mayor and everything!” He turned the bird around and darted off down the road, and the girl raced him.

When the house reached the tiny town, a non-central one some distance from the hex center, the park was waiting for them as Bib had promised, and Alfric settled the house in place, making sure that the attachment on the front door would allow everyone to get down easily and double-checking to make sure that it wasn’t squashing anything. There were some people who’d come out to look at the walking house, and Alfric greeted them, explaining that they’d only be there for a half hour or so before continuing on. He was getting a bit better at that part of the job.

Hannah had been the one to prepare the meal, using Lutopia Two because cooking in a moving house was a bit too dangerous, and as was often the case when that happened, she’d made enough for both parties, meaning that Vertex joined them. Since it was a nice day, as it often was, they took the table and chairs out to have something approximating a picnic. Bib’s girlfriend joined them, but the two children didn’t eat at the table, instead setting out a blanket beneath a tree where they chatted together and let their birds peck for insects.

“She says her name’s ‘Bab’,” said Hannah. “There’s no way that’s right. They laughed about it, but then didn’t tell me her real name.”

“Bib and Bab,” chuckled Verity. “There’s a song in there, probably.”

“It’s endless songs with you, isn’t it?” asked Grig. “Say, did you want to do a duet some time? I’ve caught a few of your performances, and I’m afraid to say I can’t keep up, but I’d be able to do a bassline or something.”

“Absolutely,” said Verity. “I think I’ve been hitting a wall with my songs, and having a second person to play their part would be invigorating.”

“How many notebooks are you up to?” asked Isra. “Three?”

“Three,” nodded Verity. “Most of it is garbage though.” She squinted at Grig. “My father is desperate for me to record more songs for him, any chance you’d want to be a part of it?”

“I’m not sure I understand it,” said Grig. “And … I’d feel it was a bit of nepotism, honestly, or whatever you call it when someone gets a gig only because they’re at hand.”

Verity waved a hand. “You’re too hard on yourself, I’ve heard you play.”

“I’m a workman,” Grig insisted. “And my work is dungeons, frankly, not crowds. Still, to have an opportunity to perform with you, I’ll make a fool of myself.” He grinned at her, and she smiled back. Verity had been in a series of good moods lately, though it was hard to tell whether that was because of her success with the dungeons or because of her rural ‘concert tour’.

“How have the dungeons been going?” asked Alfric.

“Brilliant,” answered Mardin, as Grig’s mouth was full. “Tilde is rock solid.”

“Thanks,” said Tilde. She was sitting next to him, and had eaten quickly, finishing most of what was on her plate before Alfric was even half done. “Alfric’s helped with training more than I’d thought possible.”

“It’s been good to have someone who shares a dedication to training,” said Alfric.

He liked Tilde, overall. She was serious in a way that appealed to him, unemotional and analytical. That she was working with his old team gave them something in common, and they had similar roles within their respective parties. They’d talked about personal things only once, when she’d talked about how her father was disappointed in her, and that had been nice too, in its own way, or as nice as someone talking about something sad could be.

“Any chance you’re heading to Dondrian soon?” asked Mardin. “We wanted to make a trip, sell some of the stock we’ve been building up, and we know you have better travel entads and better storage. We’d make it worth your while.”

“You’re supposed to say that you’ll make it worth their while after they show resistance,” said Josen. He was at the end of the table, and had been unengaged with the conversation.

“We can do it, if you make it worth our while,” said Alfric with a laugh, though Josen hadn’t been joking.

“We’ll work something out,” said Grig. “I wouldn’t mind parting with some trifles, if you’d like to do that again, but we can have a private talk whose point is just this.”

“To Grig, who is an actual leader now!” said Marsh, raising a glass.

“Hear hear!” said Mardin.

“We’ve been making out well,” said Grig. “Doing lots of dungeons, not worrying too much about a full clear, low hanging fruit, that kind of thing …” He looked at Alfric. “You were always so focused on that kind of stuff, and I feel almost guilty for not doing it anymore.”

Alfric wanted to ask how they’d done it under Lola’s turn as party leader, but found that he’d rather not hear more about her. Lola still cast a shadow, even though she was far away and under a more or less permanent house arrest. He’d been thinking about her more lately, largely comparing and contrasting his first girlfriend with his second.

Once the lunch was concluded, they packed everything back into the house again and got on their way. A number of the villagers had shown up to gawk at the house, and Alfric tried to give them a show as it creaked and groaned up onto its feet again. He was no showman though, and wondered whether Verity might have sold the wonder and majesty of this form of entad travel a bit better than he had. She gave them a parting song though, which she’d said would sound lovely as it faded away into the distance.

The rest of the day was rather sedate. They found the ancient roadway and went to inspect the craftsmanship of it. There was a cave with paintings on the walls, which Hannah thought had probably been from landborne dwodo some centuries ago, the place an old dwodo home of some kind. Their third stop was to a farm with exotic riding birds, some of them bastles, others from foreign lands. Normal riding birds were of a few specific breeds that had been enlarged by a cleric of Xuphin, but a few of these were ‘natural’, and the farmer was trying to increase the breeding population to the level he could start selling them. Isra talked with him at length, and Bib and Bab cooed at the creatures, taking a few of them for a ‘test ride’.

The kids were nowhere to be seen after that, so Alfric navigated on his own, which wasn’t too difficult. He really hoped that they weren’t getting into trouble, given that he was sort of Bib’s guardian, if you squinted a bit. Bib was a wild child, and he assumed that ‘Bab’ was as well, but Bib was also self-sufficient and respectful of space and property. Two of Bib might be a bit much though.

The summer was fading fast, faster than happened in Dondrian, where it was still warm and green. The leaves hadn’t begun to turn yet, but Isra said, in dark tones, that they were threatening to.

Mizuki was home late, almost missing dinner, which had been made by Isra and Pinion working as a team. It was a staple dish of Pinion’s homeland, bilberries with fish and cheese, a combination of flavors that Alfric wasn’t particularly in love with, and if it had been an experiment, he might have called it a failure. Coming as it did with some history and cultural lessons enthusiastically delivered by Pinion, Alfric found it a worthwhile experience.

Mizuki was exhausted from the long day, the ‘intensive’ as it was called, and set her fork down having only eaten half of what was on her plate.

“What are the plans for tonight?” Mizuki asked Alfric, yawning slightly. She’d flopped on the couch after dinner and patted a place for Alfric to sit.

“Nothing, if you’re not up for it,” he said. “The intensive didn’t go well?”

“No results, no,” said Mizuki. “Did the intensive, answered questions with the researchers, got called into the bursar’s office for a talk about responsible spell-casting, it was a very long day.”

“I think Verity was going to find a place for a performance,” said Alfric. “Nothing scheduled, but she’s got the Bib and Bab song she wants to try out, and she’s hopeful there’s a tavern around here that’s lacking a bard.”

“Bab?” asked Mizuki.

“Oh, right,” said Alfric. She seemed so sleepy. He reached over and stroked her hair, and she gave him a tired smile. “Bib got a girlfriend, apparently. She called herself his girlfriend, anyway, and he didn’t disagree.”

“Bab,” said Mizuki. “That’s … a nickname?”

“We don’t know,” said Alfric.

“I think I’m going to bed early,” said Mizuki. She yawned. They’d had dinner late, in part because of her, and the sun was low on the horizon.

“Alright,” said Alfric. “We’ll see each other tomorrow.”

“Mmm,” said Mizuki. She was looking at him. “You know, we could see each other today, if you come to bed with me.”

“Is this a ploy?” asked Alfric.

“No,” said Mizuki. “I’m just tired, and haven’t seen enough of you. This is how I want to spend my honeymoon minutes.”

“Okay, I’ll lay with you while you fall asleep,” said Alfric.

“Carry me up?” asked Mizuki.

Alfric scooped her up. He’d carried her before, but it still surprised him how light she was. He was careful to navigate the stairs so that he didn’t hit her head on the side of the wall, and she hugged him close.

“You know,” said Alfric as he laid Mizuki in her bed. “You’re still going to have to brush your teeth and change your clothes and everything.”

Mizuki groaned. “Why are you so mean to me?”

“You can wait until later,” he replied. He laid down next to her.

“You know, if that was a ploy, you fell for it hard,” said Mizuki. She yawned again. “And you know I could have made it up on my own. I just wanted you to carry me. It seemed fun.”

“I am very aware,” said Alfric.

Mizuki was looking at him, and so he kissed her. He still wasn’t used to it.

“How was your day?” asked Mizuki.

“Good,” said Alfric. “There were some things to see, I talked to my friends, and then you came home, which would have made it a good day even if everything else had been bad.”

“You’re so sweet,” said Mizuki.

“I want you to know that as much as I argued against this, now that we’re doing it I’m going to put in almost overbearing amounts of effort,” said Alfric.

“You sent me away,” said Mizuki. She prodded his chest. “Is that what maximum effort looks like?”

“Yes,” said Alfric. He kissed her again.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, I see.” She kissed him, soft lips, tender and gentle. “You know, I’m not so tired that we couldn’t —”

“Taking it slow,” said Alfric.

“You don’t know what I was going to say,” said Mizuki.

“I do,” said Alfric.

“Alright, fine, you probably do,” said Mizuki. She kissed him again. “Honeymoon minutes.”

“Honeymoon minutes,” he agreed.

“Cuddle me while I fall asleep?” asked Mizuki.

“Teeth first,” said Alfric.

“Mean,” said Mizuki.

Alfric thought that getting ready for bed might wake her up a bit, but when she came back into the room, she seemed even more tired than before. She spent the last of her effort rearranging him so that his arm was around her, and then she burrowed, making herself warm and comfortable.

He thought about trying to have a conversation with her, but decided against it. They’d done that before, with her answers coming slower and less coherent, sometimes trailing off. He’d enjoyed that, but he wasn’t going to talk to her when she was half-asleep just for his own enjoyment.

“Hey,” he said softly after a few minutes.

She didn’t move, didn’t reply.

Alfric smiled to himself. “I like you too.”