"Ruhna, is it? That's a much better name than that Shadowface nonsense."

"Shadowmask."

"Look, it really doesn't matter. What you do with your own name is none of my business. That said, I'll just stick with Ruhna."

Olivander sat in a cozy sitting room on a conjured chair with a pipe in his hand. Gloria was sitting in a similar chair nearby, but the brothers, Raz and Ruhna Hafsen, were sitting in dark upholstered furniture that didn't look uncomfortable, but Olivander's opinion on furniture was that if you're used to the best, why settle for less?

"Now, I understand that Burtrum promised I would come talk to you. I'm here to fulfill that obligation, so please, do ask any questions you have for me."

"Thank you, Arch-magus."

"Ah, sorry. No longer Arch-magus. Just call me Olivander."

Ruhna nodded and continued. "As you know, I am a dealer of information and match maker. I help those with knowledge connect with people who might need their services, or simply share information that I have purchased. I would propose an exchange of information. I desire some secrets, and would offer my services in exchange."

"I'm not opposed, Ruhna, but why don't you go ahead and ask your questions. I may not be as tight-lipped as you assume."

Ruhna pulled out a small notebook and a pencil to take notes.

"First I would ask about the secret to becoming a Magus. It is something many seek, but very few know the mechanisms."

"Few know because most are afraid to ask. Some other Magi might be reticent to share, but I have no qualms with it. If someone is strong enough and has enough fortitude to become a Magus, then that is a path they should be free to walk. It is not easy, Ruhna. People die on the path to Magus.

"That said, it's not complicated. There are three requirements. You need to be at least standardized level one hundred and twenty, with a class that specializes in magic. Next, you need a grimoire. Finally, you need a Planar Stone, such as an Eye of Madness. You bind the stone to the grimoire, and the Magus class will unlock."

Olivander puffed on his pipe and Ruhna finished writing some notes.

"Forgive me, Olivander, but that explanation lacks some detail. Where does one get a grimoire or an Eye of Madness?"

"Grimoires can be crafted by skilled craftspeople. I will use my own grimoire as an example," he allowed the book to manifest in the air next to him.

"This was crafted by the Cult of Madness in Castleton. I needed to prove my worth by completing some tasks for them and gathering the materials for the book. Not an easy task, but not particularly challenging either. At least by my own standards."

He flipped the cover towards Ruhna and revealed the Eye, which had been obscured by chains that wrapped the book.

"The Eye is more difficult…usually. You could just luck into one from a dungeon, but I've only ever seen that happen the one time, so probably don't count on that. Once my grimoire was complete, I needed to bond it completely. This was accomplished by traveling with it and completing guild contracts or other great deeds. Not complicated, but a little time consuming. Once bonded, the Cult of Madness granted me access to the Pits of Madness."

Olivander dismissed his grimoire and thought for a moment.

"This is the hard part. I needed to enter the Realm of Madness to attune myself and my grimoire to the power there. It took about a week, but it felt like years. It's a harrowing experience. Once that attunement is done, bonding an eye to the grimoire is easy. As soon as that is done, the Magus class will unlock."

"But how do you get an eye?"

"Ahh, that is one secret I will not share. Suffice it to say that if you go to the Realm of Madness with a bonded grimoire, you will be presented with an opportunity to get an Eye. I cannot speak any more about that, I'm afraid."

Ruhna nodded and finished up his notes.

"Wonderful. What about the Dungeon Spirits? Where do they come from? How powerful are they?"

Olivander leaned forward in his chair. "I love your curiosity, Ruhna, excellent questions. Dungeon Spirits are one and all just people. They were once mortal and became spirits. I don't know the mechanism myself, but they can create new spirits from willing volunteers. They will approach people to become new spirits periodically. I have been asked, but I don't care for many of their restrictions, so I have always refused.

"It is hard to quantify the power of a Dungeon Spirit because it varies wildly, between individual spirits and even between the same spirit at different times. They gain power when they're connected to a dungeon. When they are apart, the weakest are probably around level four hundred, or four hundred and fifty. You should know that as you become more and more powerful, level differences matter less, so I would just classify them as one rank above platinum, if it had a name."

"Fascinating."

Ruhna continued taking notes.

"Anything else? These haven't been too hard. You should ask me something only I would know!"

Ruhna thought for a moment, almost starting a question, but then thinking better of it. Olivander knew he would ask it if the first question went over well.

"How did you kill the Dragon Warlord Gravenar? There are stories, but I am curious to hear from you directly."

"Something I have thought about very recently indeed. This is something of a secret. I am uncomfortable with what I did. I'll tell you what, I'll answer that if you can look into the origins of something for me."

Olivander pulled a book from his library and removed a loose sheet. The mysterious cult symbol from the tile he found was drawn on it. He passed the page to Ruhna.

"What is it? And where is it from?"

Raz and Gloria leaned in to get a look at the symbol.

"A colleague thought it was a cult symbol. I found it on an odd token that was corrupting a dimensional space."

"I will have my people start on it immediately. One moment please."

Ruhna left the room with the paper.

"I think I've seen that before…" Raz said, searching his mind.

Olivander was interested, but he let the man think.

Raz reached up and pulled a coin from the air. He flipped it to Olivander.

The coin was gold with fine detailing. One side had the cult symbol stamped on it, identical to the symbol he had just handed to Ruhna. On the other side was a series of three interlocking triangles — the symbol of the City State of Emenicost.

"You got this in Emenicost? Why would you travel all the way up to the northern sea? The island city is rife with pirates ever since their revolution."

"Ahhh, yeah," Raz agreed, scratching his head. "I wasn't exactly engaging in any piracy, but I wasn't a victim of it either."

"How did you come across the coin?"

"I was helping a crime boss in Emenicost smuggle magic artifacts off the island. He gave it to me as part of my payment. I have a note in my contracts about rare coins being accepted in lieu of partial payment."

"You have contracts?"

"Of course, Olivander. Seeing as we're criminals they're mostly done on an honor system, but if you break too many contracts, even criminals won't want to work with you."

"I see. Who was this crime boss?"

"I don't know his real name. He's known on the streets of Emenicost as 'The Chameleon.'"

A man named after an animal that is a mimic in its own right handing out coins with a symbol he found in a mimic domain. Olivander was a firm believer in coincidences, but he would follow up on this one.

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Olivander didn't get anything else from the coin, so he tossed it back to Raz.

"Thank you, Raz. Between that and whatever your brother can dig up, I should have a decent start at figuring some things out."

Raz nodded and pocketed his coin.

Ruhna reentered the room and sat down. "I have started my network on collecting information about this symbol. I overheard Raz's story and included that in the notes. I expect results soon."

"Very good, Ruhna. Now, bear with me as I tell of the 'End of Dragons.' It's not a long tale, but parts of it are difficult for me. It all started with our counteroffensive against the dragons."

* * *

The next day, Olivander retrieved everyone from the Temerin ranch and they spent the day watching some runs in the dungeon.

Gloria raced against a stranger who had some kind of bow class. The man died halfway through his run and Gloria only had to complete the dungeon to win.

Fezzic, Jeremy, and Timothy opted out, none of them having anything more than the most basic combat class. Helga and Zeke both went into the dungeon to compete against each other.

They were Silver rank by way of non-combat classes, but they were no less skilled than any average combat specialist. Helga fashioned nets, traps, and defensive measures on the fly with an ability that conjured magically reinforced thread. Zeke blew his way through most of the course. He had the ability to summon several fire elementals, and they did most of the heavy lifting. He had a slight disadvantage due to his elementals being weak to most of the things in the water based trial.

The disadvantage was too much and Helga beat him handily, finishing before he had even attempted to climb the wall at the end of the dungeon.

Burtrum went last. He had gone to the guild to find someone to race against. It was another Gold ranker who was in many ways the opposite of Burtrum. Fast, lean, and a wielder of magic and daggers, the race started similar to the race between Gregory and Cooper, with the nimble man pulling way ahead of Burtrum early.

Butrum had a huge advantage in knowing about the traps, and what varieties there might be. He saved his traps until the midpoint of the dungeon. Unlike his son, he didn't trigger them all at once, but one after the other, with just a handful of seconds in between. The result was that as Burtrum blasted through the later combat with brutal efficiency, the rogue magician was constantly bogged down by traps as he put down threats more slowly.

"Good job, Dad!" Gregory said when Burtrum returned, victorious. "I should have done what you did, and used the traps more spread out instead of all at once."

"You figured out the wrong way to do it for me, thanks son."

Once Burtrum was cleaned up after his run, Olivander opened a portal once more. "Come on everyone, we can say our farewells at the ranch. I have some things I need to do there."

A short time later, Olivander was in Fezzic's lab. He leaned on the comically large alchemy book he had left the goblin and waited for Fezzic to retrieve things from a cauldron that served him as a dimensional storage space.

"Alright, Olivander. I have a few things for you. First, the blood and flesh you left were just regular tissue. Magically enhanced, sure, but still just tissue from something living. Or once living I guess."

Olivander looked at the tubes Fezzic retrieved. A few of each had been used for experiments, but several were still sealed.

"I was honestly expecting it to look like it was from some sort of summoned monster or a conjured creature. That was one of the reasons I sealed them with that stasis script. I thought they would dissolve."

"Nope. I left one out for a few hours and there was no change. What is this stuff from though, it has some crazy properties."

"Oh?" Olivander perked up. Any new information was valuable.

"Yeah, I extracted and isolated the inherent magic of the blood and used it to create an alchemical solution. Depending how it is mixed, it can produce a variety of results. As a weapon, I could make something to temporarily suppress magic in an area. As a potion, I could create something that gave the person drinking it the ability to use an ability that was just used against them. It's kind of crazy."

Olivander nodded. "That's exactly what I would expect from the mimic blood. Would you like to keep the rest? Since I was wrong about a few things, I won't need it."

"Sure, I can always put something together with them. Besides, refining them is great experience."

"What about the tile, anything there?"

Fezzic smiled. "I think you're going to like this. Or hate it, but it's interesting either way."

Fezzic unlocked a chest with a magic token. He pulled out a smaller chest that unlocked with a key he kept in his shirt. Inside that chest was an even smaller chest that he whispered a word to. Finally, he pulled out a small pouch and dumped the tile into his hand.

"Very secure, I approve."

"Yep! This pouch is interesting. It actually prevents itself from being placed inside any dimensional bag or space. That way someone couldn't just scoop the entire thing into a large storage space and cause problems."

"Ingenious Fezzic. Now, what have you found?"

Fezzic set the tile on the table. "This is probably wildly dangerous, but I stopped it quickly, and I'm sure it's safe with you here."

"No sentence has ever made me more interested. Carry on! The suspense is killing me."

Fezzic pulled out a vial of blue liquid. It wasn't quite the same color as the blood, but it was close.

"The refined blood. In this state it isn't quite ready for use in alchemy, but it's shelf stable."

He unstoppered the vial and carefully poured a single drop onto the tile.

The blue liquid immediately turned back to its original color and then started to change. Flesh grew from the tile, quickly surrounding it. It grew very quickly, but it reached a point of slow growth relatively quickly and seemed to stop shortly after that.

Olivander didn't hesitate. He poked the blue flesh.

"Hmm. It's not enough of anything to tell me what it is, or what it might be."

"I don't know a lot about this," Fezzic said. "But I think this might just act as a catalyst for it. It says it will turn a dimensional space into a domain, but that doesn't mean it can produce the mimics, right? It needs a blueprint."

Olivander rinsed off his hands in a basin, and then rubbed his chin. "I like that theory, Fezzic. The fact that it seems like this flesh has stopped growing supports it I think. A domain heart could only grow inside a domain. This tile is far too simple to do something like turn the world into a domain."

Was that…possible? Could a large enough tile be crafted to change the very fabric of their world? The thought sent a chill up his spine. An act like that would be pure lunacy. If the world could even be changed that much, the first dungeon to spawn would rip the world apart. A domain, he suspected, needed to be closer to the void between Realms. It wouldn't be able to handle a wound like that.

"This is leading me down some dark speculation. Do you have anything else?"

"I do…would you mind cleaning that off for me?"

Olivander's cleaning spell wouldn't scrub away the flesh, it was specifically designed to not do that. Instead he used a simple spell to burn the flesh away. It wasn't part of something truly alive yet, so it didn't have any resistance to his power.

When the tile was clean, Fezzic washed it off and returned it to the table.

"It was extremely difficult to get a sample from this stone. I had to have Burtrum come use my extraction tool, and it ended up breaking. That got me thinking about what stones could be so hard. Any guesses?"

"A Planar Stone."

"Bingo. I'm ninety percent sure this is a Planar Stone connected to either some Elemental Plant Realm, or some kind of Life Realm. The texts I had available didn't give me a lot of options on that front, but I figured that was the kind of thing you'd have more expertise on anyway."

Now that he was looking at it in that light…yes, Olivander could see that this was a Planar Stone, like his own Eye of Madness.

Olivander summoned his grimoire and began manually paging through it. He summoned another two books from his library.

"Fezzic, can you find any sections in this book on Realm Locating? It's a long abandoned theory that different Realms lie in specific cosmic directions from our own, and by using the connections between Realms, we can build a map that would allow us to access any power."

Fezzic opened the book and started looking, but asked, "if it's long abandoned, why do we need to look it up?"

"It had some fallacies during the initial assumptions that were later proven false, but many people don't look at the deeper truths here. There are connections between Realms that we can make use of, even if we can't draw a map of the cosmos."

Olivander began constructing a small ritual. He conjured a tool that he used as a focus to paint the lines into the air. It was a delicate operation.

"I found it. What do you need?"

"At the back of that chapter I sketched out my own version of a ritual for Realm Linking. Just find that and slide it over."

Fezzic found the handwritten notes with a ritual and slid the book over. He grabbed the other book.

"And from here?"

"Hmm? Oh, I just thought you might enjoy that one."

Fezzic glanced at the cover, where the book was titled A Goblin's Guide to Navigating Human Society: Bones are Bad.

Fezzic casually tossed the book into a vat of orange liquid. The book burst into flames.

Olivander chuckled and continued working on his ritual.

"So what's this going to do?"

"It's going to point me to the location where this stone entered our world," Olivander said, finishing the ritual.

"What good will that do? That could be anywhere right? People can summon things from other Realms."

Olivander activated the ritual without a command and gently lowered it onto the stone. The stone glowed more brightly for a moment, then an invisible lance of magic shot into the distance.

"There we are!"

Fezzic looked around. "What?"

"Fezzic, have you been neglecting your magical senses? There's a beam of energy practically screaming in that direction!"

"How do we follow it though?"

Olivander traced the magic and used it as an anchor. He opened a portal.

"Never fear, Fezzic. I am both powerful and cunning. Have you ever been to the other side of the world?"