Chapter 21. The Man from the Capital

For weeks, Greyfall had spoken of nothing else.

In the taverns, beside the well, in the queue outside the smithy, and at the gate, people lowered their voices to discuss the new dungeon. It had opened deep within the Verge, three days west, in country even veteran Seekers usually avoided.

At first, the story was only a rumor. A distant Seeker had staggered back badly injured after losing two companions, babbling about a dungeon that had appeared already old and deep. He spoke of creatures that had hunted his company with purpose, driving them as wolves drove sheep rather than simply attacking for food. No one believed him.

Then another team went to investigate and did not return.

Then a third vanished.

The rumor became fact.

The dungeon was growing. Every week, someone failed to come home. Greyfall spoke of it in uneasy whispers. For the earth to open that way, all at once, had to be an omen. Old people shook their heads and recalled a half-forgotten word: breach.

I did not join the conversations. They contained little of value. When I wanted news, I went to Kess.

“It's bad,” he said when I approached his counter. We were alone in the office. He put aside his pen and lowered his voice, grim and stripped of his usual merchant's ease. “Since you'll involve yourself no matter what I say, you may as well hear the truth instead of tavern stories.”

Then he told me.

This dungeon was unlike the others. A young dungeon normally grew slowly, deepening and becoming more dangerous over years. It began shallow and remained that way for a long time. This one had opened in a single moment—already deep, already crowded with powerful creatures. It was as though it had always existed at some impossible depth and had only now broken through the earth fully formed.

“Dorn calls it a deep breach,” Kess said. “He says people feared them more than plague in the old days. Supposedly, things emerge from such dungeons that have never belonged near the upper Verge. I thought it was an old man's tale. I don't anymore. Three companies have disappeared, Adam. Experienced ones, not novices. And the dungeon isn't stable. It's spreading. Soon it will reach the nearer paths, then the fields, then us. If no one closes a breach, it consumes everything around it until something finally stops it. We need to close this one soon.”

“With whom?” I asked. “Greyfall doesn't have a team capable of it.”

“Greyfall doesn't,” Kess agreed. Something strange passed across his face, halfway between amusement and annoyance. “But a new dungeon—especially a breach—isn't merely a provincial problem. The central Guild tracks such things. I sent word to Korvengard, as required, and expected them to send someone sensible.” He paused. “Instead, they sent… well, you'll see for yourself. He arrived this morning and has spent the day playing hero in the square. Go and meet your new superior.”

I recognized him from a distance, standing at the center of the square, because a small audience of boys had already gathered around him.

He was young, perhaps twenty-four, a good decade younger than I was. Yet he looked so unlike anyone in Greyfall that he might have come from another world.

Clean. That was the first thing one noticed. Clean-shaven, carefully groomed, dressed in a well-made traveling cloak without a single patch. His equipment belonged to the capital and had cost real money: finely woven mail, a sword in an embossed scabbard, and boots no one on the frontier would willingly take through mud. He leaned on his sword with practiced elegance while telling the wide-eyed boys how he had single-handedly defeated a “warlok” in the dungeons beneath the capital two years before.

“…and that was when I understood,” he announced, clearly enjoying the sound of his own voice, “that fear is merely the shadow cast by our weakness. And I have no weakness.”

He noticed me, stopped his story, and gave me a quick appraisal that became boredom almost immediately.

“And who are you?”

“Adam,” I said. “I've been assigned to you for the breach.”

“Ah,” he drawled. “A local.”

His gaze traveled over my patched jacket, worn boots, and bronze badge. A condescending smile appeared at the corners of his mouth.

“Bronze. Well, at least they found someone. I'm Reynar. Reynar, the Bright Blade. Perhaps you've heard the name? No, of course, all the way out here…” He sighed like a man whom fate had treated cruelly by placing him among barbarians. “Silver-rank Seeker of the Guild, Second Blade of my graduating class, personally dispatched to resolve your dungeon problem. So don't worry, Bronze. With me, you'll come back safely.”

Without answering, I directed Analysis at him.

Level Twenty-One. A genuine Silver rank, awarded in the capital. Nothing more. No unusual gift, no magic, not even the shadow of a second number I had seen around Dorn. He was strong, trained, and well equipped—but that was all. He was considerably weaker than I was and, even now, probably weaker than old, lame Dorn. Most of Reynar's power lay in his posture, expensive cloak, and ringing voice.

“I'm sure I will,” I said evenly. “So will you.”

He heard nothing beneath the words. They passed him like empty air, and he turned back to the boys.

When I told Dorn about him, the old man worked his jaw for a while before speaking.

“The Bright Blade,” he said at last, with enough venom to sour a barrel. “I've seen his kind. The capital turns them out by the dozen: pretty, loud, dressed in fine mail paid for by someone wealthier, stuffed with tricks learned in tame city dungeons where even the monsters don't know true fear. Then they reach the real Verge and discover that confidence is not the same as judgment.” He spat aside. “Watch yourself with a leader like that, boy. He'll give the orders. You'll be the one making sure everyone returns.”

“Dorn,” I said, “doesn't any of this seem strange?”

“What?”

“Why send us anyone from the capital at all? Kess says a new breach matters and the Guild tracks it. Fine. But Korvengard is three weeks away. Think how long the message took, then the decision, then Reynar's journey here. And after all that, they sent someone young, untested on the frontier, to a dungeon that has already taken three experienced teams. Why him? Why not someone stronger? It's almost as though…”

I hesitated, uncertain of the thought even as I spoke it.

“As though they sent him not to close the breach, but to get him out of their way.”

Dorn gave me a slow, sidelong look.

“You think strangely sometimes,” he said. “Not like anyone from here.” He shrugged. “Perhaps someone important in the capital is tired of the Bright Blade and sent him somewhere distant in the hope the problem solves itself. Powerful people conduct their business in dark rooms. Or perhaps he was simply the nearest available fool, and there is no plot at all. What difference does it make to us? We close the dungeon and come home.”

He was right. It should not have mattered.

I set the thought aside—not discarded, but stored in the same distant corner where I kept Kess's warning about people who looked beyond the sparks themselves. Something in the picture did not fit. I had no way to learn what it was yet.

Naturally, Finn wanted to join us. I refused firmly enough that the answer could never be misunderstood.

“Only three of us are going, and this breach has already taken experienced teams,” I told him. “I will not take you into it. You stay in Greyfall. That is an order.”

When I saw him fold in on himself, I softened my voice.

“If I'm delayed, train only under experienced Copper-rank Seekers and stay on the safest upper routes. Listen to Brenna. Be careful. Live. That's all I want from you.”

He turned away so I would not see his face. I pretended not to notice.

That night, I lay awake in the shed thinking less about the breach than about myself. I had decided to leave for Korvengard. The decision had felt final.

Yet I was staying.

I was preparing to enter the most dangerous dungeon in the region under the command of a polished braggart, all for a town that was supposed to mean nothing to me. The man I had once been would have continued on his way. The man I had become could not.

I lay there and insisted that I was not staying for them.

Not for Greyfall. Not for Finn with his crooked scar and bright eyes. Not for Brenna, who offered me warmth and warned me against roots. If I remained for their sake, then I was already bound to this place, and I had sworn that would never happen.

No. They had nothing to do with it.

That was what I told myself.

I was staying for my own sake. The dungeon was a deep breach: old, filled with strong creatures and powerful sparks unavailable on the upper tiers. It was not charity. It was opportunity. Stronger enemies meant growth. Growth meant power. Power meant Korvengard, rank, true magic, and beyond all of that, the road home.

I was not descending to save anyone. I was going to take what I needed. Everything I did served one purpose: to grow stronger and return to Mira and Leo. If Greyfall happened to survive as well, that would merely be a fortunate coincidence.

There was also the pull.

When Kess described the dungeon—old, fully formed, wrong—something dull and nameless stirred within me again. It felt as though the breach were calling. As though it knew of some connection between us that I did not. That, too, I told myself, was about me rather than them. If the place was somehow linked to my arrival, I had even more reason to descend and understand it.

Perhaps more than a spark waited at the bottom.

Perhaps it held one fragment of the answer I asked for every night: how had I come here, and how could I leave?

I called it a hunter's instinct. Curiosity. Anything that would make the feeling easier to name.

Three of us would set out for the breach: Dorn, Reynar, the Bright Blade—Second Blade of his graduating class, dispatched from the capital to find glory or become someone else's solved problem—and me. Not tomorrow. Dorn refused to enter such a dungeon unprepared and gave us several days to gather what we needed.

I already knew how I would spend the first.

I turned the ring on my finger and closed my eyes.

Soon, Mira.

First, the breach.

Then we would see.