Once they had a plan in place, the drakus didn’t waste time putting it into action.

While the logistics team would be staying at the apartment building to monitor for signs of its discovery, the other three security teams scattered to different parts of the building. They agreed to rendezvous out on the street in five minutes, which gave all of them just enough time for everyone to grab what they variously referred to as go bags, bug out kits, and so on.

Aaron had everything he would need on him, as far as he knew, but he thought of a good use for the extra time and quietly asked Tia to join him downstairs before they left. Since their schedule had been pushed up so dramatically, he wanted to make sure Baby Bear was relocated to her apartment before he left for however many days the delve would take.

Tia agreed easily enough, of course, but Bear huffed a bit about the whole thing. He wasn’t happy at the whirlwind of morning activity, especially after being launched into a window and not getting any morning snuggles. Aaron let him vent for a minute or so, but then he knelt by the bed and gave his bear a hug. It only took a few somber words about the severity of the situation after that to convince Bear to hop into a bag and accompany Tia down to her apartment.

Aaron went downstairs as soon as that was handled and loitered near the building’s front door, waiting for the security people to step out onto the stoop. Instead of everyone coming together all at once, it was only the three delvers who met him there.

They had to stay there for a couple minutes, with Griffin and Albert both keeping eye on the road outside.

They waited there for a couple minutes, keeping an eye on the road outside. When a black SUV, white panel van, and two large motorcycles pulled to a stop outside, blocking the parking space where their sedan waited, the drakus made their way out to the car.

“Our convoy is too big not to draw attention on the Byways,” Griffin explained as he pulled onto the road between the van and SUV. “It’s early enough that traffic shouldn’t be too terrible and we should make it in thirty to forty minutes.”

“How far are we going?”

“All the way Downtown,” Griffin replied.

Griffin’s prediction turned out to be spot on. There was some traffic — it was still New York City, after all — but since it was barely past six o’clock, it wasn’t much.

They cut through Central Park, following a narrow, two-lane transverse road bordered by brick walls with the canopies of trees peaking over their lips. Knowing there might be people tracking Aaron down with unknown magics right at that moment made it feel a bit claustrophobic, but they passed through the park quickly enough.

After emerging from the park, they stayed on the same road for another mile. The neighborhood they passed through was very New York, to Aaron’s sensibilities, but he didn’t see any landmarks that stood out to him from the back of the car.

When they turned south, he got a better sense of where they were. The signs announcing FDR Drive helped, but once they were on the highway, Aaron could look across a few lanes of traffic to see the East River a couple hundred feet away, if that. It helped him get his bearings in a more tangible way than some road markers could, considering he still didn’t have a ‘feel’ of the city yet.

There were doubtlessly any number of fascinating things to see in Manhattan between where they turned onto the parkway and their destination, but the FDR didn’t provide a very good view of much of it. In fact, a good deal of their time was spent in covered passes and tunnels until they were somewhere around Midtown.

At one point, after passing from one tunnel to another, Albert pointed to the ceiling above them and said, “We’re passing under the United Nations right now. What a view, am I right?”

“And here I am without my passport,” Aaron said wryly.

Somewhere around 23rd Street, they finally managed to escape the endless covered streets. It might have been earlier, but 23rd was the first sign Aaron saw on the highway after realizing they’d been out in the sun for a couple minutes.

Even still, there wasn’t much to see but red brick buildings and the occasional flash of the river off to the left. At least the buildings were kinda tall, standing around ten storeys on average. They were nothing to write home about on their own merits, but being larger than almost everything back home in Sacramento made them remarkable nonetheless.

As much as he was trying to do a bit of rubbernecking this morning, it hadn’t escaped Aaron’s notice that the three delvers were on high alert. He’d seen them when they were expecting trouble before. He’d also seen them in the lead-up to and aftermath of a deadly fight. This wasn’t that.

Maybe it was the unknown nature of the threat that had set them so on edge. Or maybe it was the exposure of being out on the city streets. Maybe it was having the other two security teams active in the field. Or maybe it was something else altogether. Whatever the case, he’d never seen them so tense and he couldn’t think of a productive way to lighten things up.

Hopefully things will be more comfortable for them once we get into the dungeon, he thought, having practically forgotten his own anxiety about the imminent delve.

Once they passed the Williamsburg Bridge, the view improved significantly. The waterfront of Downtown floated above the expanse of the river, great pillars of glass and steel jutting into the sky, framed by the piercing blue and granite gray of the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges.

That was a sight to see, especially for the first time.

Griffin actually took the off-ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge, but took a left onto a street that passed beneath its foot on their side of the river. A few blocks later, they were deep in the guts of Downtown.

They didn’t stay on the main roads long, turning down a series of single lane one-way streets that were little more than alleys. After several blocks wending their way through a route the security people obviously understood, they crossed a major road and pulled up to a wedge-shaped building at the intersection of three tiny lanes.

Aaron had to blink several times when he saw the building to make sure he wasn’t imagining things. It reminded him of another iconic building in the city, but he was pretty sure that one was quite a bit further north.

“Is that a smaller version of the Flatiron?” he asked.

“It is,” Kiara replied. “It’s the old Cocoa Exchange.”

They drove along the right side of the building, the convoy rolling to a stop at the rear corner of the structure where it abutted a much smaller red brick building that housed an Irish pub. One of the suited paramilitary types stepped out of the SUV and approached their car while Aaron scrambled to follow the delvers as they piled out onto the sidewalk.

The suit hopped into the driver’s seat of the sedan and the convoy started to pull away again. They hadn’t even been stopped for a full ten seconds.

As Aaron got his bearings on the little street, he saw a familiar figure leaning against the wall beside glass double doors at the foot of the building. He was dressed in a more public-friendly version of the outfit Aaron had first met him in, but nothing could deter the wiry man from exuding the inexorable aura of an otaku edgelord.

Masters had a large black duffel bag hung over his shoulder. He swung it down and held it out to Griffin, his leather trench coat flapping as he did and revealing the handles of several Japanese swords concealed beneath it. Somehow.

I think he’s used spatial magic to create straight-up Highlander-style hammer space, Aaron thought.

“Everything you should need for your delve is in the bag,” he said, then fixed his beady eyes on Aaron. “I wouldn’t normally have armed you this early, but the steel in there is barely more than a child’s toy, so I made an exception due to the circumstances.”

Aaron nodded his head in thanks. “I appreciate it, instructor Masters.”

“Now get inside. I’ll keep an eye out here until our people are in place. You need fear no enemy for at least another hour as I stand my vigil.”

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Albert snorted derisively and pulled open the door to the building. Griffin went in first, then Kiara motioned for Aaron to follow.

Within was a small, tasteful vestibule. The floors and a staircase on the right wall were made of marble — real or fake, Aaron had no clue — and a panel of metal mail slots was on the left. There was another door under the stairs, one beside the mail boxes, and a hallway leading past the rear left wall.

Griffin slipped an ingot of silverish metal into the door next to the mail slots, which swung open with a click. As they passed through, Aaron glanced down the hallway and saw it was a small elevator bay with two cars and passed through to the other side of the building.

Once everyone was through the door, Griffin brought them to a stop. They were in a small lobby of some sort. The decorations and furniture were bland and forgettable, but it was empty and that seemed to satisfy whatever Griffin was looking for.

While Albert and Kiara took positions physically blocking the two doors into the room, Griffin set the duffel on the ground and unzipped an external pocket. From it, he withdrew several necklaces. They were made of leather thong cord and a medallion of some dark metal hung from each one. He distributed one to each of them.

“What’re these for?” Aaron asked, examining his own necklace.

“Disguises,” Kiara said, slipping hers over her head and tucking it away under her shirt.

Aaron followed her example and the necklace settled into position against his chest. Something like a cool mist washed over his entire body. He didn’t see any difference when he looked at himself or the others, but Kiara and Griffin were giving everyone in their party the once over and they seemed satisfied with whatever they found.

“Good. Let’s move,” Griffin said, shouldering the duffel again and pulling open the next door.

They stepped through into a spacious room with a tall ceiling. Autumn morning sunlight shone down through a skylight, bright and clear, onto the only other feature in the room — a massive tree.

Clad in grayish bark with lighter brown wood beneath, the tree had to be quite old. Well over a century, at least. The trunk was twenty feet tall and wide enough Griffin couldn’t have reached across its length if he laid down and raised his arms over his head.

At the top of the trunk, the tree split into half a dozen nearly-vertical branches each thick enough to qualify as the trunks of lesser trees in their own right. The branches climbed to a height well more than double the trunk base, leaning out slightly and spreading into their own impressive sub-branches.

Aaron found himself staring at the tree, which simply could not exist. The room itself was too large to feasibly be located where he knew it to be and the skylight only reinforced that conclusion. But neither its size nor the room housing it were the oddest thing about the tree — a gate was set into the base trunk of the tree itself. The gate was made of wrought iron pickets crawling with ornate filigree shot through and tipped with highlights in gold.

After a quick scan of the room, Griffin set the duffel bag down and began to root through it. He left most of the contents inside, but pulled out several items before zipping it back up and slinging it across his back once more.

The first was a short rod made of some pale blue, opalescent stone. It was carved into several intertwined snakes, similar to the caduceus, except where the wings would be at the top were leaves bearing a bundle of grapes. Griffin passed this strange device to Albert, who slid it into a pocket.

Next was a pair of kama, the blades sheathed in leather holsters with several long leather straps hanging from hardened scabbards. These were passed to Aaron, who picked them up and found his attention drawn from the tree as he tried to puzzle out what the straps were for.

Finally, Griffin pulled from the duffel were four fist-sized pouches, each with drawstrings to cinch them closed. They looked like dice bags to Aaron, but the clinking of metal and obvious weight as Griffin distributed them suggested they were proper, ye olde thyme-y coin purses.

Albert sidled over to Aaron and showed him how the leather straps could be tied in different ways to secure the holsters on his person. At his urging, Aaron tied them around his shoulders so the blades would lay across his shoulder blades under his hoodie.

The handles hung down, framing his spine, and Albert took a couple minutes to explain how he should draw them. He told Aaron to pay special attention to not drawing them at the same time, which could cause the blades to tangle or wind up slicing his own arms. Not much of a concern with simple steel, but the smaller rogue assured him it was better to avoid bad habits from the start.

With everyone set to go, they gathered around the metal gate in the tree trunk. Everyone except Aaron, who eyed the odd passage dubiously.

“How is this a buttonwood gate?” he asked. “It’s clearly made of iron and that looks like a big ass old sycamore, not a- a buttonwood tree, which I’ve never even heard of.”

Griffin chuckled and knocked on the tree’s thick bark. “Buttonwood tree is an old name for the classic American sycamore, like this bad boy, and the name is about as literal as it gets — they used to make buttons for shirts and pants out of wood from these trees.”

“This particular tree,” Kiara said, “has been protected and nurtured for more than two hundred years. Even though it started its life less than a thousand feet from where we’re standing right now, it needed to be moved several times before it wound up here a year or two after the Cocoa Exchange was built.”

“That’s kind of cool but, like… why? What’s so special about this tree?”

“It’s not the tree itself, it’s what happened under its branches in 1792 and what that has come to represent,” Kiara said.

“Spoilers,” Griffin complained, bumping Kiara gently with a shoulder.

Kiara turned a cocked eyebrow on him, then gave him a one-armed shove the big man clearly allowed to send him stumbling a few feet away.

“Anyways,” she continued, as if there’d been no interruption. “This is a conceptual dungeon, as we’ve said, so it won’t be filled with monsters and traps in the way you might imagine it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not without its risks. You’ll have to pay attention, think on your feet, and do your best to avoid pitfalls and other dangers.”

“Well that’s not vaguely ominous and ominously vague or anything,” Aaron groused.

“I know right,” Griffin laughed, clapping a hand on Aaron’s shoulder. “Now let’s sort out our admission and get down to it.”

Aaron watched as the other drakus stepped up to the side of the iron gate in the tree trunk, fishing a silverish coin out of their purses. Aaron stepped up beside them and followed suit, sticking his fingers into his own pouch. From the way a single coin immediately presented itself, the purses had to be dimensional storage.

The coin he pulled out had a single line engraved into its face, like Albert, Griffin, and Kiara’s coins, but it wasn’t nearly as lustrous. He held it up beside one of theirs to compare them.

“You’ll want a plat, not a silver,” Albert told him.

After reaching into his purse again and swapping coins, Aaron could definitely tell the difference. The platinum coin shone brightly in the sunlight spilling through the boughs of the great sycamore. Aaron wasn’t sure if shininess was the only easily spotted difference between the two metals, but it was probably going to be easy enough to remember.

Despite still being fairly new to all this eidolon stuff, Aaron felt like he had a decent grasp on how much a single platinum coin was worth, and not just in the sense of doing the math to figure out how many lumens it held.

Seven hundred twenty… nine, thank you very much, Aaron thought, with a good deal more smugness than was probably warranted for memorizing what nine cubed was.

Passage into the Goblin Market had only cost a single lux per person — just one copper coin. Entry into Ekwiyakink had cost them an aethril each, but either Albert or Griffin had complained that was nine times the usual rate, which meant it usually cost a single gold. Their pocket dimensions had cost a little more than a platinum apiece. In fact, the only things Aaron could think of that had cost a good deal more than a single platinum were the wands Kiara’s friend, Mack, sold.

As far as he could tell, that put the value of a single platinum at somewhere between fifty and several hundred magical bucks. The wands were a real outlier there. So a not-so-cheap coin to get through a gate made of gilded iron that was set into a tree roughly as old as the United States which was, itself, housed in a fancy, impossible room located in the heart of the Financial District of Manhattan.

It painted a picture of wealth and history that had Aaron thinking this so-called Well was probably some kind of finance or commerce-oriented dungeon. He couldn’t really wrap his head around how that would even work and he didn’t get the time to consider it further.

Griffin stepped up to the gate and pressed his coin into a faint, rounded depression in the crossbeam of the gate. The space was easy to overlook until you knew to look for it. Then Albert and Kiara followed suit, holding their coins against the gate like quarters in an old arcade machine or jukebox.

Aaron stepped forward and found a slot of his own, setting his coin and holding it in place with a finger like they were. One after another, they released the coins, which slid down into the metal plate with the clatter and clink of precious metal on wrought iron.

The gate swung open, the dark metal of its two halves nearly invisible in the featureless darkness of the hollow tree trunk.

I’m pretty sure there was no gaping maw of the void behind that gate a second ago, Aaron thought.

He nearly startled when Griffin slapped a meaty hand on his shoulder. The big man gave him a reassuring smile and stepped through the gate, immediately vanishing into the impenetrable shadows of the hollow.

“No dawdling,” Kiara told him, gesturing at the horrifying portal as if it were no more exciting than a McDonald’s.

Maybe it isn’t, Aaron thought, shrugging. Well, what the hell. Let’s find out if this ‘Well’ is what I think it is.

He stepped forward and through, finally passing through the Buttonwood Gate, with only a moment to reflect on what a goofy-ass name that truly was.