Glory found Will almost instantly.

“What happened?” He asked, pulling Will from the bush.

“You fucking know what happened,” Will said. His head hurt, and he was madder than he’d felt in a long time.

“I know,” said Glory apologetically, “but it’s still polite to ask.”

Will forced himself to unclench his muscles. Whatever else he felt, they had got what they came to get. Will had saved someone, and he had gotten closer to understanding the Taint.

A frustrating victory was still a victory.

Glory pressed a hand to the unconscious man’s chest, healing him. The stillness was replaced by a sudden, gratingly loud snoring.

“He should wake up well-rested,” Glory said.

Will stepped over the laying form of his fellow earthborn visitor.

It was an extremely weird feeling knowing that there were other people from earth still around. Somewhere in the back of his head he’d assumed he was totally alone.

“I’m afraid for most men, this place is a major improvement over earth,” Glory said. “You may not have much to talk about.”

Will almost said something exceedingly stupid before he remembered that he wasn’t actually the target audience for a fantasy realm like this. “That’s okay. How many people from earth are actually here, in total?”

“I have no idea,” Glory admitted. “It’s not been common or easy for centuries. Sometimes, cracks, for lack of a better word, open up, and people or things can slip through one way or the other. It’s impossible to know how many end up here purely by accident.”

“What about Guile? Do you know anything about him?” Will asked.

“I don’t recognize him. You don’t recall any of his facial features or distinguishing characteristics. I assume he’s the memory mage we’ve been searching for, but as before we’re still grasping at straws.”

“Of course I do, I…” Will started, then stopped. “He looked like… he had hair.”

“Well, I suppose,” said Glory.

“Where are the others?” Will asked, stretching his shoulders to relieve some of the ache from landing on them. “We should regroup.”

Virgil, Dio, Rex, and Skullcrusher were sitting at something like a coffee table, playing cards. Unlike a deck of playing cards Will would recognize, they were labeled and illustrated like tarot cards.

“Exactly thirteen! Prostrate yourselves before me, weaklings!” Skullcrusher said, putting down three cards; a three, a four, and a six from his hand.

Rex whistled something derisively and put down four cards, each a two, from his hand, causing Skullcrusher to bemoan his misfortune.

“We have information,” Glory said, stalling the game as everyone turned to look at him.

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He, in turn, looked at Will, who took slightly too long to realize that he was supposed to talk about it.

“I met the guy who designed the mansion,” Will started. “He’s from earth. Actually, so was the missing guy we were looking for. Guile, the designer, has been trapped here. He wants to go home, back to earth, but he can’t, for reasons he wouldn’t fully explain.”

“He designed or created or unleashed the Taint, I think as a workaround for whatever keeps him here, but he doesn’t seem to control it directly, and he apparently has what he wanted from it now. So that’s something.”

“He doesn’t appear to know or care what’s guiding their behavior,” Glory interjected. “They’ve grown beyond his control.”

“Yeah, so, we have some clues and more questions,” Will said, sitting down at the table. He was more tired than he realized. “I don’t know where we go from here.”

Will kept replaying his encounter with Guile in his head, trying to figure out what he could have said or done differently that may have convinced the strange man to take responsibility, or at least to hear Will out.

He didn’t enjoy feeling like he had been so close to a breakthrough and was only held back by someone else’s stubbornness. There had to have been something he could have said to cut through Guile’s armor.

“Will,” Virgil said, rousing him from his unpleasant reverie. “Do you want to play a round of cards?”

Will almost immediately said “no” without hesitation, but paused. The actual game wasn’t the important part; Virgil was trying to shake him out of his bad mood.

“Sure,” Will said uncertainly. “How do you play?”

The game was called Seven Sigils, with seven suits of seven ranks. A bit like poker, hands of cards scored set amounts of points.

While matching ranks and suits, and the ability to play straights were familiar, another possible hand was any number of cards that added up to thirteen.

Each card was also named and had unique art. One of the cards in Will’s starting hand, the six of horns, was titled The Wild God, and depicted a stylized satyr that looked a lot like a silhouette of Daphnis.

Will played a hand of two sixes and two threes, which lost to Dio’s five-card flush.

The game was fine, but what Will really enjoyed was the cards themselves. There was a lot of detail put into them. The back of the cards had the same diamond flower shape that Virgil’s family put on all their things, so it must’ve been a custom order.

Will paused, examining one of the cards in his hand; it had no rank or suit, and was called The Outsider. It appeared to be a cloaked figure stepping out of a doorway, or perhaps just peeking through it.

“What’s this card?” Will asked Glory, who wasn’t playing.

“The Outsider is like a wildcard. It counts as any rank or any suit, but only one or the other at a time.”

Glory paused, listening to Will’s thoughts. “I don’t know who it’s supposed to reference, if anyone. The Outsider is intentionally supposed to be ambiguous and unknowable, a powerful mage from another place and time.”

“Like Guile,” Will said aloud, which put all eyes on him. It was purely a gut feeling, and so Will suddenly felt very scrutinized.

“You seem quite confident of that,” Glory observed neutrally.

“It feels like as good a lead as any,” Will said, slightly sheepishly. “Weird old unknowable magic dudes from somewhere else? I think it tracks, even if it’s just speculation.”

“Do we even need to go after him?” Glory asked, again flatly, and Will realized he was trying to sharpen Will’s thoughts by offering resistance, like a whetstone to a blade. “He claimed to have no involvement with the real problem.”

Will started to say something, stopped, and thought about it. It was a fair question, but it upset the part of Will that was mad at Guile for getting him into this mess in the first place.

A vindictive part of him wanted payback on Guile more than he wanted to stop the corruption of the Taint.

“I don’t know,” said Will honestly. “What do you guys think? We can vote on it, if you want.”

Glory smiled internally, which was how he typically smiled. Like a whetstone to a blade, indeed.