Everyone was looking at me again, but this time I didn’t have the energy to play it up. For the first time in quite a while I had dropped all of my skills. We’d abandoned the core room for the time being, as it was still covered in black goo. I’d plucked Licane’s scarab from what remained of his corpse then lit the room on fire on our way out. Now we were letting it burn off.

The Unholy had been full of those grub-like things I’d pulled out of Dorian, but most of them had been smashed along with it. The rest were now on fire, and the smell was horrific. Arven had closed the doors behind us and Lucus had sealed them, so if the little monsters were escaping it wasn’t into our dungeon instance, or at least not into this room.

I was still emotionally drained from dealing with Telvarn and I was mostly lost in my own head. I had a lot of notifications to go through, but for the moment I just needed to sit here and not think. There was just too much. I didn’t know where to even start.

A comforting hand patted me on the shoulder, which was weird since nobody was sitting next to me. They were all arranged in a semi-circle around me, as if waiting for my next trick.

“Uh, Tavi. There’s a daemon on your shoulder,” Lucus said.

I glanced over at it. “Oh, hey Havarati,” I said. The spider portion of his body was on the wall behind me. The hand portion was clasping me on the shoulder with a firm, comforting grip. It gave my shoulder a small squeeze, then ruffled my hair, then gestured at the sky as if to say “what can you do?”

I nodded in agreement then went back to staring at the floor between my feet for a few minutes. Dawn eventually came over and sat beside me, opposite Havarati.

“Um, so. Are you ok?” she asked.

Dawn looked frazzled herself. I hadn’t seen her fall or Lucus’ daring rescue, but I’d heard them talking about it as we evacuated the core. I wanted to congratulate them, to hug them both and tell them how happy I was they were alive… but I was so emotionally drained right now that I was having trouble even being glad I was still alive.

“No, not really…” I said. “But I probably will be.”

“Would you like to talk about it?” she asked.

I thought about that and decided that I would. There were too many feelings for me to process on my own. Help would be required.

So I told her, and by extension everyone else, the story of Telvarn Licane. I made sure not to explain Devil in the Details sufficiently for Dorian to unlock it, but I told them what effect it had when I’d used it on Telvarn.

When I finished, Arven walked a little ways away, opened a door into a side room, and then a moment later we all got a notification that he had killed something called “The Unworthy.” He walked back out a second later and shut the door behind him. When he saw we were all looking at him he just said, “Miniboss. I figured something might be there based on the real place.”

That actually made me smile a little.

Savas shook his head. “What kind of man could do that to his son?” He looked at Dawn. “You’re ok with calling that kind of man an ally?”

Dawn closed her eyes. “I know it’s hard to understand, but we do important work. He gives to each of us that which we can bare, but he uses those who are evil and depraved for all the worst things that must be done in his service. For the rest of us, our ordeal is knowing that our actions and inactions may result in the deaths of everyone we know and love… but we know that if we didn’t do it, someone else would do worse, and the world might not be ready for it.”

Sometimes when you feel too much too strongly a nudge in one direction is all it takes to set off a cascade. I’d heard Dawn and others express that same sentiment in different words many times, but now for the first time I had more than an intellectual understanding of what it meant. Her words sparked feeling to life in my exhausted mind, and that spark kindled anger, and then flashed to rage.

“You heard what they were planning! They wanted to set that thing loose in Altria. They wanted what happened to Dorian to happen to every man, woman, and child in the city. How? How can you support that? Is there anything worse than that? What if we hadn’t been here to stop it?”

Dawn sighed. “But we were here, and we did stop it. He never sends an ordeal that cannot be met. The point is to learn and grow, and well… just look at us. Like it or not, the ordeal was always ours to pass or fail… I am ashamed to be the only one who faltered.”

My anger died as quickly as it was born. For all the fire inside me, I was still a husk. I couldn’t bring myself to sustain that level of emotion for long. In a way she was right, we were here to stop it. We did stop it. We’d even been given the tools and information needed to stop it. That didn’t make me happy about it.

“You didn’t falter,” said Lucus. “Not wanting to attack someone you’ve always been told to obey isn’t a weakness on your part.”

“It is though, and it’s obviously why I’m here. The Lord Adversary was testing me. He had me summon Cassara so I would know her, then ensured someone reported my crime just in time for her to escape and for me to be captured. Then he sent Tavi here and placed me in her service so that I would be in a position to work against the very thing I’d helped to start.”

I shifted uncomfortably because some of Dawn’s reasoning echoed my own. I felt like a conspiracy theorist, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that The Adversary and Valera were in some sort of conspiracy involving me. What had just happened with Telvarn was yet another link in the chain.

Richard had told me that Devil in the Details was most likely intended to help a demonologist troubleshoot what a daemon had done. Perhaps that was true, but it was also the perfect counter to Licane’s control over his daemonic son. It was supposed to be a skill that let you see the past, but I’d forgotten that daemons only had a loose connection to time and System’s rules.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the entire sequence of events leading up to Licane’s death might have been a stable time loop. Telvarn had known he was going to crush Licane before he did it, because I knew he would. At first, I’d thought he’d done it despite that, but what if it were the other way around? It was a chicken and egg problem, and I didn’t know which had come first.

Either way, I was going to need to be way more careful about using that skill. It was far stronger than I had believed, and I suspected that it could be dangerous to use on others, and not just daemons. I’d need to do some controlled experiments later. I was also going to need to ask some pointed questions of a couple of gods.

“So… are we going to talk about the daemon?” Savas asked.

“Huh? Oh, you mean Havarati? He’s chill,” I told him.

Everyone just sort of looked at each other, blank expressions on their faces.

Havarati gave them a thumb’s up.

“Why do you say that, Tavi? Weren’t we just fighting him?” Lucus asked, sounding like he was concerned but trying to hide it.

“Oh, you’re wondering if he’s messing with my head or something,” I said. Havarati shook his hand in denial. “It’s nothing like that, I just know some stuff about him because of my time in Telvarn’s head.”

It was a little more than that, but I didn’t want to go into it right that moment.

“I guess we should probably introduce you, huh?” I said to Havarati. “Guys this is Havarati, the Helping Hand. Licane made him to cheese the dungeon but he’s just generally a helpful guy by nature. Now that Licane’s dead he doesn’t have to obey anyone anymore, but he likes helping so he wants to stick around for now.”

Havarati went around shaking everyone’s hand with various degrees of awkwardness. Dawn was gracious as always and Havarati bowed over her hand. I just gave him a fist bump as he returned to his place beside me.

“No one is ever going to believe any of this, you know,” Savas said. “I’ve been here the whole time and I barely believe it.”

Dorian chuckled. “They’ll have to when we show them our titles. I can’t wait to see the looks on their faces. Not to mention all the treasure we’ll be handing in to pay off our sentences.”

That reminded me of something I’d been meaning to ask. “Arven, what are the odds they actually let you out of here? What did you really do to get yourself cursed and tossed in here until you died?”

Arven sighed, “I guess I owe you all the full story, don’t I?” He glanced over at Dorian, “I swear to the gods if you write another song about me, I’ll make you wish you’d stayed dead, understand?”

Dorian threw up his hands. “Fine, fine… I’ll refrain from using you as inspiration for another song, I swear.”

Arven nodded. “Good. The first thing you should know is that I’m not from here. Not just Altria, but all of Etrona. I come from a place far to the south of here, on the other side of the goblin nations. It’s called Cantergate, and it’s a city-state located on top of a large mesa in the Red Hills.

“The mesa has a crack in it that forms a box canyon, and Cantergate gets its name from the defenses erected at the canyon’s entrance. The only safe way on or off the plateau is through the canyon, and nobody gets through the gate without being challenged. It’s a natural fortress in the middle of a barren landscape.

“I grew up in the lower city. The part of Cantergate built into the chasm itself. There’s an entire city the size of Altria in that chasm, carved into the rock or built up around it, and until I was sixteen that was my entire world. That’s when I joined the gate guard.

“For a year I was solidly on gate duty and basic training, but I was always sharp and it soon got me promoted. That put me in a bit of a bind because my new position required me to patrol the plateau’s outer rim, a place I’d never been.”

Arven paused for a moment, obviously thinking. “You have to understand that at that point in my life the sky was always outlined by stone walls. Even the gate itself was inset into the chasm, and so I’d never had cause to leave the protection of the stone. I’d been close to the edge a few times, and it always felt like looking out into the void beneath us here in this dungeon. When I’d been young, I was curious about the outside, but at some point that had turned into fear without me even realizing it.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“I think that’s why my first lift ride up to the top of the mesa affected me as much as it did. Not only was I conquering my fear, but the sight I beheld when I reached the top nearly broke me with its beauty. I could see for miles. The sky was bigger than anything I’d ever dreamed of. Wind blew across me in steady gusts and I wanted to throw myself into it.

“As it turned out, the guard keep an eye out for just this sort of reaction from lower city dwellers. It was a sign they’d learned to look for, and they had me brought before a woman in a uniform I didn’t recognize. She asked me if I wanted to be able to feel the wind’s embrace whenever I wanted, and I said yes.”

Arven paused to take a sip of water from a skin I’d pulled out of my inventory when I realized this was going to be a longer story. Havarati handed it to him, then took it back and held onto it while Arven resumed speaking.

“That was how I got my start, and my class. The skirmishers were Cantergate’s equivalent of a ranger. Our job was to patrol the hills around the city, keeping the area safe for travelers. With them I discovered a freedom I hadn’t known I was missing in my youth, and that feeling eventually made me wonder if the hills themselves were another type of wall, holding me in without my even knowing.”

“I started ranging further and further from Cantergate, encountering strange sights and stranger people. Some of them I fought, others I shared stories with, each according to their own predilections. It was on one of these patrols that I met a man such as myself. He had wandered far from home, and when I asked him why, he said that Valera had inspired him to go out into the world and search for questions.

“Cantergate mostly worshiped Nystral, the stone goddess, for obvious reasons. However, all the prime patheon had their temples and places of worship, though I’d never heard Valera venerated by any other than traders bringing goods from afar. I asked the man what he meant by searching for questions. Should he not be searching for answers?

“He told me that answers were oft-times far too easy to find. The problem was knowing what questions to ask, and how could anyone know what questions to ask if they had no experiences to draw upon to formulate them? How could one ask why the ocean was blue if they didn’t know such a thing as an ocean existed in the first place?

“His words echoed the worry in my heart, for at that point in my life I hadn’t ever heard of the ocean. We made camp together that night and he told me the stories of his travels. In the morning, he headed onward into the hills and I followed the path he had walked to get here, leaving my homeland behind. I was afraid that if I returned to say goodbye, I would never gather the courage to leave again. They no doubt think I died.”

Arven paused again, this time clearly remembering those he’d left behind. We all waited in silence, unwilling to interrupt his contemplation.

“I spent the next several years as a wanderer. I saw many strange and wonderful things, but eventually I realized that I wished to take a different sort of journey. I would occasionally be challenged by local toughs and even guardsmen suspicious of strangers or simply looking for a fight, but my adventures had made me strong, and I rarely found myself outmatched. After one such encounter a man approached me, saying that he’d seen me fight and that if I were interested he had a job that might suit me.

“I wasn’t interested at first, but then he offered to duel me to first blood, saying that if I won, he’d pay for my nights lodging at the inn we’d been drinking in, and if he won I had to listen to his pitch over a glass of ale. I liked a good fight and didn’t see any harm in it, so I agreed.

“It turned out that the man was a Blade of the Zephyr, one of Etrona’s royal guards. They use a two sword style not too different from what I used as a Whirlwind Skirmisher, but where my style was focused on dodging, deflecting, and remaining mobile the Zephyr style is all about the speed of your strikes. I was cut before I knew what had hit me. The smallest nick, right on my cheek. I still have the scar.” He felt at the spot with one hand, smiling slightly.

“He didn’t have to try hard to pitch it to me after that. I returned to the capital with him the next day and was inducted into their order not long after. I remained with the Blades for nine years and would have lived the rest of my life in their service if not for two things.

“First, the man who’d recruited me eventually left their service. He and I had become good friends over the years, and more for a time. He’d become caught up in politics and ended up resigning his commission. As a result, I requested to be transferred out of the capital.

“My request was granted, and I was transferred to Altria. It was widely expected that I’d spend a few years here training the men under me, then return to the capital when the current political climate had shifted again. Instead, I had been here only three months before I became so enraged at the situation that I lost control of myself.”

Arven looked sick as he recalled the events that had led him here. “There is a rot at the heart of this city. I sensed it the moment I arrived. Reign’s influence on the nobility of Etrona has been growing in all the time I’ve lived here, but here away from civilization it had become something even worse. My first clue was the level of the Duke’s son. The Marquess was half my age and only about fifty levels below me. Generally people my level have spent their entire lives fighting, and Reign’s church only allows for the purchase of progression points, not levels.

“Then, I noticed odd behavior from the nobility. It was very subtle, and if I hadn’t been looking into the security of the city I wouldn’t have noticed. One of the guardsmen on the walls mentioned to me that every so often the Marquee would take a hunting party into the woods, and that his captain hated when it happened because no guardsmen would be allowed to accompany the party, only nobles and a few of their personal retainers.

“When I asked about this at the keep, no one would tell me anything about these trips. The staff knew nothing other than that they were usually unsuccessful, almost never bringing back anything to eat. The nobles all claimed it was just a diversion and told me not to worry about it. The Duke himself rarely attended such trips, but the Marquess seemed to live for them.

“I decided to shadow the next such trip, following the party into the woods but remaining unseen. I didn’t have access to Stealth or Hide, so I stayed well back and followed from a distance. My caution was why I was too late to intervene in what transpired. The party traveled for quite some time, occasionally fighting off beasts and monsters, though far less than I would have expected for such a large group traveling through wilderness. They were easy to track for they had actually worn a trail into the ground from the frequency of their passage.

“I’m quite sure that it was only distance and the hazards of the forest that kept their secret for so long, as the location we finally arrived at made no pretense at being anything other than what it was. When I arrived the so-called hunting party had already completed the rite and were celebrating with feasting and drinking. I managed to hold myself back then, barely, though now I wish I hadn’t.”

Arven paused again, a far away look in his eyes. I had a feeling I knew what to expect, but I looked at Dorian questioningly, hoping to have the other man say it rather than needing Arven to explain something that clearly pained him.

“Reign has a forbidden rite, much like The Adversary does.” Dorian told me. “I’m told some places allow it openly, but in most civilized places it is worthy of a death sentence. It is a blood sacrifice and must always be of a sentient being. Doing so can grant Reign’s blessing, and grants bonus experience to participants in the ritual. It also sometimes involves cannibalism and literally bathing in blood.”

I just nodded. That was about what I was expecting. Knowing what I now knew about the nature of spiritual energy, it was obvious that there was a breadth and depth component to it. My own build was heavy on progression points, but I’d had difficulty even damaging Licane.

If Reign’s wealthy followers had easy access to progression points, then they were likely in a similar situation to my own. Access to experience without the dangers of exploring a dungeon or fighting monsters was no doubt very tempting for a certain type of person. The Adversary might be the god of evil, but he clearly had no monopoly on it.

Arven shuddered, then continued. “They’d chopped up someone on a damn stone altar that was so caked in dried blood that it reminded me of the red stone of my homeland. Gold coins were piled around its base. They were… eating, right off the altar like it was a table, using fine silverware and crystal glasses filled with blood.”

Arven choked up for a moment, then pressed on. “I returned to the city and went directly to Astraea’s cathedral. I went to the Bishop and gave my report. He seemed shocked and horrified, and told me he would begin an inquiry immediately. I returned to my room in the keep and feigned illness for the next three days, unable to even be in the same room as the Marquee and his retinue.

“On the third day, a Justicar came for me, saying the Bishop required my presence in the hall of justice. When I arrived, I knew I had been a fool. The Marquess stood with the Bishop, looking smug but trying not to make it obvious.

“Two Lawpriests and another Justicar were present, and I had to listen as all three swore that they had gone to the place where I had seen the rite and found no more at the place I’d described than the remnants of a hunting camp. There had been no cages, no blood soaked altar, no gold, no decorations of bones. Nothing.

“The Marquess began to act angry and insulted that I would ever accuse him of such things. He said he would have his father exile me, that his cousin the King would cast me from his service. I would have no more home in Etrona, and the record of my service would end in disgrace.

“I decided that I was fine with that. What I wasn’t fine with was this little shit living through the day, so I told him that I’d happily accept it if he wished to challenge me to a duel of honor. I know most stories say I challenged him, but in fact it was his pride that got him to challenge me, and his cowardice that made the challenge to first blood.

“I killed him right there, in front of two Lawpriests and the Bishop himself. I had assumed they were all corrupt, but it turns out it was only the Bishop. They testified truthfully that I’d honored the terms of the duel, but I think you know how it went from there.”

Dorian nodded, a satisfied look on his face. “I’ve heard at least six different versions of the story of your duel with the Marquess. I rather suspected that false details were being spread around on purpose to conceal the truth.”

I clenched my small fists experimentally. My perspective on a lot of things had changed since coming to this world. The thought of killing someone for any reason would once have turned my stomach, but now I found myself fantasizing about ripping the throats out of people like Licane and the Marquess with my teeth.

Valera was all about learning and growing through experience, and she’d set both Arven and I down roads that taught us things we might rather not have learned. Despite that, I found myself glad that, for a time at least, our roads had met, and we’d traveled them together.

Dorian read the room and decided the mood needed lightening. “Come on now friends, enough brooding about the past and worrying about the future. We won! We beat all the odds and thwarted mighty foes! We beat a dungeon no one has ever beaten, and we defeated its raid boss all on our own, not to mention The Adversary’s ordeal. Gods, I came back from the dead! Rejoice! This is the stuff legends are made of!”

Havarati made the sound of one hand clapping, and I suddenly found myself laughing. The tension in the room broke suddenly and we all had a long laugh that turned into a round of comfortable silence as we just enjoyed each other’s presence in the moment.

After a time, Arven turned back to me, his face growing serious again.

“To answer your original question, Tavi,” Arven said. “I don’t know if they’ll let me out. In a way, it doesn’t actually matter. You know that dungeon exit we saw in the keep? When we finish here, I plan to go out that way. I’m hoping it exits into the keep. If it does, I’ll kill the duke before he knows I’m there. Then, if they haven’t managed to kill me yet, I’ll go to the cathedral and kill Bishop Armeias. I won’t allow the rot in this city to spread any further.”

“Hold up,” I said. “You’ve had that prisoner title for years. Did you have some way around the stat drain it applies?”

Arven shook his head. “No, it’s going to take months for my stats to fully recover. I can take him by surprise though. He won’t be expecting me. That should be enough.”

“No, it won’t. We’re all marked remember?” I said, using one hand to point at the magical brand on my own arm. “I was told that if I got too far from the prison with this on me, alarms would go off. That will put the guards on alert, and we can’t be sure they don’t already know about the keep exit. Licane and Cassara got in here somehow, and they knew about The Unholy. Somehow, I doubt they used the prison entrance.”

Arven frowned, thinking. “That may be true, but I have to try. I can’t let this stand.”

“Don’t be stupid. You need to win, not to try,” I growled. “You can’t throw away your only chance just because you’re impatient.”

A smile flickered across Arven’s face, and he shook his head ruefully. “You know, I’ve been planning what I’d do if I ever managed to beat this dungeon for years. Somehow, I have the feeling I’m about to throw all those plans out the window, but I’d have to be a fool not to listen to you at this point. What do you have in mind?”

“I don’t know yet…” I said, slightly frustrated. “I need more information. If they let you out, you might be able to recover your full strength before challenging the Duke. If they don’t, you could always go back into the dungeon in a day or two and try the other exit, but either way we’ll have given a bunch of treasure to the guy you’re planning to kill, and if I’ve understood correctly followers of Reign get stronger the wealthier they are. I don’t want to give him anything!”

There was a round of general nods from the others, but before I could continue there was the sound of a throat clearing in polite interruption. Then a new voice spoke up.

“I may be able to help with that.”