Corvis Eralith
"I think we did a good job," Albold said, and I saw him glance at Ashton through narrowed eyes. There was something in his voice I had not heard before, the absence of hostility. A ceasefire, perhaps. Or the first tentative step toward something neither of them had words for. "Even you, Auddyr."
"Yes, we did," Ashton replied.
If he was surprised by Albold's words, he did not show it on his face. His expression remained as it always was—a mask carved from duty and expectation.
I made a half-smile, despite the slaughter of innocent mana beasts around us. At least Albold and Ashton seemed to be getting along better than before we had departed.
"Come on," I said, and I forced my voice to be steady. "The dungeon won't explore itself."
Berna moved closer to me, her great shoulder pressing against my side, and through the bond I felt the bitterness that our last fight had left on me. She was trying to absorb it, to carry some of it herself.
I did not feel exactly guilty about what we had done. The word stuck in my throat, even in the privacy of my own mind. Necessary. At the end of things, the vesperkins were just mana beasts. They did not have names, or stories, or futures that mattered to anyone but themselves. They were obstacles.
But still. A part of me, probably also influenced by my bond with Berna, could not help but feel saddened by this. I felt their deaths in my chest like stones dropped into still water, the ripples spreading outward, touching places I had tried to keep sealed.
I heard Berna's certainty that these creatures were not our enemies, that we were the invaders, that we had come into their home and started killing them for no reason other than that we were afraid. And she was right. She was absolutely right. And still I would do it again.
I heard Albold and Ashton's steps behind me as we stood at the threshold of the Sea Den. The tunnel ahead was dark, the torch casting just enough light to see the first few meters of stone, and beyond that—nothing.
Just the waiting dark, and whatever secrets the Djinn had left behind and the Indrath Clan hasn't managed to wipe out from the face of the world.
"So, what are we exactly going to do as Unravelers?" Albold asked. His voice had lost some of its post-battle lightness, settling into something more thoughtful. "Fighting mana beasts we did, but... well, what is an Unraveler?"
"Explore the dungeons as historical ruins of the Ancient Mages, Chaffer," Ashton said. I heard the particular patience in his voice, the same patience he used when he was teaching me a new form with the dueling cane. "That is the first thing we were told in the headquarters in Zestier."
"Oh, I did not pay attention," Albold said, and I could hear the shrug in his voice.
I rolled my eyes and took the torch from Berna's teeth. She relinquished it reluctantly, her growl a low rumble that might have been protest or might have been affection as if it was a ball and she a dog.
I would have to make some tests later to see how
much her magic was developed.
She had used fire. Fire! What I had searched for in Cherry's Beast Will, what I had nearly destroyed myself trying to claim—and now I could have it with Berna.
I had walked into the Red Gorge seeking power from a dead creature, and the living one had found me in the snow and had chosen me.
But first, I needed to find light on Fate. I needed to better understand REtrocurrent and how it related to me. I had died twice and returned twice, and I still did not know why or how.
We entered the tunnel, my torch illuminating the dark hallway. The walls were barren. Everything that could have been connected to the Djinn was entirely gone—just like in the Red Gorge before the Reset.
Only the accumulation of hundreds of years of sediments creating stalactites and stalagmites dominated the passage, the scent of salt water still present, but suffocated by the smell of ages.
I breathed it in, the taste of time on my tongue, and I thought about all the things that had been lost. The Djinn had built this place. They had walked these halls, spoken in languages that no living tongue remembered, understood truths that the Asuras had killed them for knowing.
And now all that remained was stone. Stone, and darkness, and the slow, patient work of forgetting.
"Was this dungeon ever explored by someone who was not us?" Albold asked from behind me.
I turned and saw that both the Chaffer and Auddyr scion looked around themselves with immense curiosity, the former showing his excitement more clearly than the latter. For two teenagers who had lived all their lives in courts and training fields, a dungeon must feel like stepping into a completely alien world.
"Yes," I said. "The Adventurer's Guild has classified it as B-Class, but it has been left untouched since then. It is not profitable to venture all the way near the border with Elenoir for just a B-Class dungeon."
"Which is fortunate for us," Ashton said. His voice was quiet, thoughtful. "My grandfather has told me tales of human adventurers raiding elven hamlets bordering the Wild East for... free resources."
"Really?" I asked. I had never heard of something like this. But if it was Elder Jarnas who had told it... for all the clear bitterness the old friend of Grandpa had for humans, he was not one to lie or even magnify things.
"Soldiers of House Chaffer have been deployed more than one time to patrol the borders," Albold added, and I heard the bitterness in his voice, the particular edge of someone who had grown up knowing that the world was not safe, that the Alabaster Ring of Zestier was not just for show.
"Let us not talk about this," I said, and I kept walking.
The torchlight flickered, casting our shadows long and strange against the walls, and I thought about Elder Rahdeas and his warnings.
He had made himself very clear when he talked about the Adventurer's Guild and how corrupt and wicked of an organization it was. I had a few proofs from the novel supporting that claim too—namely Lucas Wykes.
He had also warned me about the guild-grandmaster of the Guild of the Adventurer, who managed the greatest guild of Dicathen from the Sapinese city of Blackbend, where the main headquarters of the Adventurer's Guild were located.
Nathaniael Suncore was his name.
From what I knew about him, he was the one who declared the Adventurer's Guild to close in Zestier, recalling Magnus Redson—the former guildmaster in Sprout City—to Blackbend.
And, which was more frightening, he was the one to revoke the exclusive rights House Wykes had on the Red Gorge after what happened four years ago. A man who could make House Wykes yield was not a man I wanted to meet.
After more silent minutes of walking, where the only sound came from the drops of water falling from the stalactites above, we found ourselves at a crossroads.
The tunnel split in two, each branch identical to the other, each one disappearing into darkness that looked exactly the same.
"Left or right?" Albold asked. "Should we split ourselves?"
"Don't be an idiot, Chaffer," Ashton said. I heard the familiar edge in his voice, the particular annoyance of someone who had been taught the same lesson so many times it had become reflex. "Have you not learned that splitting your forces is never wise in unknown enemy territory?"
Albold clicked his tongue. "Military lessons do not apply here! We are Unravelers, not soldiers right now!"
"Military lessons are a lifestyle, Chaffer," Ashton retorted, his posture and expression monolithic. "There is not a right or wrong context to apply them."
"I agree with Ashton," I said, and I saw Albold's face tighten. "Never split the party."
I cringed at what I had said and how I had said it, but it was true. The words had come from somewhere deep, from the part of me that still remembered stories from an Earth that maybe had never existed.
"Berna," I said, turning to my bond. "Do you feel anything?"
The bear growled softly, and through the bond I felt her answer. Nothing. No sense of which path was safer, or shorter, or more promising.
I took a pebble from my belt and shaped it with Ars Terramorph into the form of a coin. On one side, I carved a tail. On the other, a head—both of them those of a bear.
"Heads or tails?" I asked.
Albold and Ashton echoed me, confusion in their voices. "Heads or tails?"
Right. Coinage in Elenoir was different. I sighed inwardly. The saying "heads or tails" did not have meaning here, at least not in Elenoir, where coins did not have the face of the monarch on one side like in Darv.
Why was I calling Darv like it was my home, now? The thought surfaced unbidden, and I pushed it down.
"Lizard or tree?" I asked, and Ashton and Albold understood.
All types of coins in Elenoir—copper, silver, and gold—had on one side the Spring Lizard and on the other a Watchful Tree.
That was the only difference between Dicathian monetary systems. Just like language being common in all three Kingdoms, coins had the same amount of precious metals and weight. It was one of the few things that united us, perhaps.
"Lizard," they said together, and I saw Albold glance at Ashton, as if surprised they had agreed.
I threw the coin. It spun in the air, catching the torchlight, and when it landed on my palm, it showed the bas-relief of the Spring Lizard.
The creature I knew was Windsom Indrath curled in on itself, eternal, patient, waiting for the winter to end.
"Lizard," I said. "To the right it is."
We walked a winding tunnel, the passage becoming narrower with each step. The original architecture of the Sea Den was nowhere to be seen, covered by rock and salt formations that had been growing for centuries, millennia, slowly consuming the work of hands that had turned to dust long before the elves learned to shape stone.
The walls pressed in around us, close and closer still, and I felt the weight of the earth above, the same weight that had buried the Djinn and everything they had built.
Beside me, Berna started to growl. The sound was low at first, a rumble that I felt more than heard, vibrating through the stone beneath my feet and up into my bones.
Then it rose, sharp and urgent, and the three of us stopped dead.
"What's wrong?" Albold asked, his hand already moving toward his Courtblade.
"Berna?" I turned to my bond, and before I could ask anything else, she moved.
She moved with the preternatural speed I had seen her use while she was corrupted by Vritra's poison, that terrible, impossible swiftness that made her massive body seem to fold through space rather than cross it.
She shoved me to the side, her shoulder catching me in the chest, and I flew through the air, my torch spinning from my grip. Then she was moving again, a blur of hazelnut fur, and I saw her hit Albold and Ashton with the same force, sending them sprawling beside me.
Then the Reset hit.
Not the average Resets documented by the Adventurer's Guild. Not the slow, predictable awakenings that the human adventurers had learned to exploit. This was the absolute one. The one that had happened in the Red Gorge.
The realization hit me as the world began to shake, as the stone beneath us began to crack and split, as the centuries of sediment that had been sleeping above us began to wake.
I was the reason for these Resets! The thought crystallized in my mind with terrible clarity, bright and cold as a shard of ice. Me. My presence. My connection to whatever it was that slept in these ancient places.
Every dungeon I entered would wake. Every ruin I touched would rise. And I would be standing in the middle of it when it did.
The narrow tunnel around us began to crumble. The sediments accumulated through who knows how many years started to fall, great chunks of rock and salt breaking free from the walls and ceiling, threatening to bury us alive.
Dust filled the air, choking, blinding, and I heard Albold shout something I could not understand, heard Ashton's voice rise and fall beneath the grinding roar of stone against stone.
But Berna was above us. Her massive frame covered us like a shield, her body a bastion against the earthquake that was shaking the Sea Den whole.
I saw her brace herself, her claws digging into the fractured stone, her muscles straining, and through the bond I felt her absolute, unshakeable certainty.
She would not let us fall. Could not—it simply wasn't in her.
The Titans had forged her for battles that erased them from the map and the memory of elves. She had walked out of those fires standing. So when the dust rose around us, when the weight of it pressed down like a second sky, she didn't even flinch.
Me, Ashton, and Albold were pressed against each other beneath her, our bodies crowded together in the small pocket of safety she had created.
I could feel Albold's heart pounding through his back, could hear Ashton's breath coming in short, controlled gasps.
The noises of large chunks of debris resounded on Berna's body, a constant thunder that should have shattered bone, should have crushed her into the earth.
But for the Guardian Bear, built to stand beside gods, they might as well have been dust.
After a while, the earthquake began to calm. The shaking subsided, the grinding roar faded to a rumble, and then to silence.
Berna moved. Her paw came down with strength—earth magic, I realized, as well as her own strength—and the rocks burying us crumbled to dust.
She did it again, and again, and then there was light, filtering through the gap she had made, and we were crawling out, coughing, gasping, blinking against the sudden brightness.
"Are you fine?" I asked, the words coming out between coughs caused by the dust that coated my throat, my lungs, the inside of my mouth.
"Y-yeah!" Albold exclaimed, and I saw him pushing himself up, his Courtblade somehow still in his hand, his face streaked with dust and sweat.
"I am fine," Ashton said, waving his hand before him, trying to clear the air. His voice was steady, but I saw the way his hands were shaking.
I rubbed my eyes, wiping away the grit, and when I opened them, I found myself in a large oval room. It was tall and majestic, its ceiling lost somewhere in the blue light that illuminated it from above.
The light came from mana crystals that sprouted from the ceiling and the walls, their glow a deep, oceanic blue that made the whole space feel like the inside of a wave, like the heart of the sea itself.
"What is this place?" Albold breathed, and for once there was no challenge in his voice, no edge. Just wonder.
"Are those the same materials of the portals linking the cities?" Ashton asked, and I saw him reach out to touch the wall, his fingers hovering just above the pristine surface, not quite daring to make contact.
I looked around, trying to understand what I was seeing. The crossroad we had seen before was not actually a crossroad. It was just the walls of this room, the rock and stone that had been suffocating it for millennia, pressing in from all sides.
The tunnel that led back to the entrance was clearly visible now, a dark mouth in the blue-lit wall, but the rest of the space—this space—had been hidden.
The whole dungeon was just this room.
We stood there, speechless, admiring the work of the Ancient Mages. Of the Djinn. We walked around the large space, our footsteps echoing in the vastness, and I felt something I had not felt since the Red Gorge. Awe.
Not the awe of a scholar encountering a text they had studied for years, but something older, something deeper. The awe of standing in a place that should not exist, that had been erased from history by the gods, that had been buried so deep and for so long that its very survival was a miracle.
The light came from many mana crystals that sprouted from the ceiling and the walls. Just like in the Red Gorge.
Of course, the Djinn were masters of aether, but they must also have been masters of mana. The dungeons littering Dicathen must be filled with mana just waiting to be awakened. The thought exploded in my head, a cascade of connections, possibilities, revelations.
"Finn," Albold said, and his voice was different now. Softer. "I now understand what you meant about Unravelings."
"Are all dungeons like this?" Ashton asked, and I heard the utter amazement in his voice, the same amazement I felt echoing in my own chest.
"I... I think so," I said, and the words came out rougher than I intended. "They are just waiting to be explored."
Explored by me. The thought was a flame in my chest, bright and hot. But still... the Dungeon Crawlers' first expedition had been an unprecedented success!
"The camp we have settled has all the things we need," I said, the words tumbling out of me as I retrieved a pickaxe, a rope, and other tools from my storage ring, laying them on the floor. "Let's prepare everything! Fast!"
"I... you seem very happy, Finn," Albold pointed out. He turned to Ashton. "Or is it me?"
Ashton shook his head. "No. I agree with you, Chaffer."
"Stop chit-chatting!" I could hear the grin in my own voice, could feel it spreading across my face, and I did not care. "There are so many things we can know from the Ancient Mages! This dungeon is a treasure trove!"
I turned back to the room, to the blue light and the waiting stone, and for the first time in a very long time, I let myself feel it. The joy of discovery.
The thrill of something found. The certainty that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was supposed to do.
The Djinn had left their knowledge here. They had hidden it, buried it, trusted that someone would find it when the time was right. And I was here. I was here.
And I was going to know everything and use it against those who dared to annihilate this beauty.