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After debarking from the ferry, Fabulosa retired to the battle college to hang out with Dino. Her departure left me to oversee the integration of the soldiers into the town guard and show the merchants about town. As it turned out, I didn’t need to do either.

Hawkhurst’s first inn awaited halfway to the town hall. The building seemed staffed, yet I couldn’t say if citizens privately ran it or if it counted as another Hawkhurst structure. Judging by the number of hosts showing off its amenities, I eschewed the kerfuffle, being too tired from the trip to answer ownership questions. Our visitors seemed in good hands, so I let someone else arrange their rooms.

Despite the creature comforts we offered, the merchants yearned to reach Western cities, leading me to believe more promotion for our venture wasn’t necessary. The hype genie had left the bottle—the cross-continental trade route succeeded. I only regretted that Charitybelle couldn’t witness it coming together.

The public house stood next door to the inn, far enough away from the roundhouses and town hall to dissuade workers from spending all their time there—perhaps the distance made a fruitless gesture.

While watching the animal handlers take the torodons to the livery stable, I mentally counted the number of things we needed to build. We needed storehouses and sheds. Greenie hankered for a workshop, probably to indulge his engineering fancy. When traffic increased, we’d need a cooper to manufacture barrels. Specialized tasks like barrel-making would be part of Hawkhurst’s next stage of development.

Iris bonded with the soldiers during the trip, so she showed them around Hawkhurst. She flaunted the barracks and her guild house, offering each a choice between a mercenary life and the militia. Even Thaxter went along. Knowing she played host gladdened me, for she spoke their language, and despite contentions at Fort Krek, they trusted her. It amused me that they considered me a mere officeholder, an academic handshaker with judgment. I didn’t mind her playing host. It allowed me to withdraw and decompress from the journey.

The lateness in the evening meant I could safely enter the manor without Ida hassling me with things to do. I had decisions to make but wanted to flop down in my bed and take some time off, perhaps with my trusty griffon by my side. I looked around my room for him.

“Beaker? Where are you?” I sent a mental command and opened the windows. Calling him through telepathy seemed less draconic than re-summoning him to my location, and I wanted him to learn to come. A minute later, his beating wings heralded his arrival. His silhouette darkened the window sill. My pet looked nearly too big to fit through the window anymore, something we hadn’t considered when constructing the building.

“Good boy, Beaker.” I fed him strips of talax ram to reward his obedience, which he greedily accepted. I fluffed the straw in his nest while he watched. “Go to bed, Beaker. We’re hitting the hay a little early tonight.”

The griffon hopped onto my bed.

I sighed. “The bed is getting too small for us, and I’m not sleeping in your nest. Move over, you big turkey.” I peeled off my armor and equipment, went to the opposite side of the bed, and lay down.

Musing about our return, I couldn’t help but wonder if Thaxter would find a place in town. Over the six-day journey, he gradually shrugged off his melancholy and socialized with the troops. At first, I worried that if the old commander wouldn’t shake out of his funk, he might leave, taking soldiers with him. We needed to chat tomorrow about his role in the town.

The more I thought about my role as a leader, the less confidence I felt in swaying anyone about anything. Living up to Charitybelle’s example seemed a dubious prospect. She’d helped Yula mix in with the soldiers. If she had survived, she’d already have Thaxter squared away. I possessed no instinct or desire to play the host.

The situation’s irony hadn’t eluded me. As governor, I sat by myself, resting in an otherwise vacant manor while the rest of town bonded with the new arrivals.

Much to his annoyance, I nudged Beaker over to make room for me. When he grudgingly surrendered enough room for me to relax without falling out of bed, I pondered recent events.

A week ago, Thaxter nearly tore apart his military command over hallucination of being inside a giant prison. Tonight, he seemed right as rain. The old boy threw back drinks with his people at the pub. Even though he’d been through a lot, he’d come out okay.

I pulled the Archon out and paged through its contents. Having used the book to solve the command crisis at Krek, I supposed I should return it with the book of Irrogean translations. They belonged in the capable hands of Hana Bakir. The luxury of sitting on a trade route included deliveries to distant lands. For a delivery fee, merchants could return the books for me.

I awoke at night with a stiff neck and something poking in my side—the Archon. I fell asleep paging through it. Beaker dozed next to me, still hogging the bed. Traveling for days and awkward sleeping postures made a deadly mix. I sat up, stretched my sore limbs, and hefted the Archon onto the shelf above my bed. I’d go through it tomorrow when I had daylight.

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That strange feeling of forgetting something returned, yet I couldn’t imagine what loose ends I missed. Had I failed to accomplish something regarding our Fort Krek trip? The old itch tickled me like a mosquito bite on my back.

My thoughts turned to Thaxter. With the clarity one gets waking at night, I realized he seemed like the key to whatever felt wrong. Had there been any sense to the commander’s delusion that we occupied an invisible prison? I considered the glyphs in Thaxter’s room and the ward worm’s core strange bonuses—bonding, protection, and seismic. The last involved the worm’s principal traits—detecting prey from vibrations. What had the ward worm protected? And how was bonding involved?

The bonding bonus gave us a free prison. It didn’t imply social bonding but that of a bondsman, like how bail bonds companies worked with criminals. It sounded very close to Thaxter’s rants about how everyone in Miros lived in prison.

What did that mean? How was Miros a prison? I suppose anyone who knew about Crimson’s dream interface might argue it trapped players and NPCs in a fantasy world. But it made no sense. Players played The Book of Dungeons voluntarily, and NPCs prospered. It wasn’t a dystopia.

I opened my map interface and looked at the crypt coordinates, -65, -23 and 65, -23. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that their positions mirrored one another.

My world map interface looked woefully incomplete. I wanted to see where these coordinates stood on the table map in the orrery. Maybe they featured similar topography or other geological features.

I couldn’t go back to sleep.

I slid out of bed, tossed on my robe and boots, and stomped outside. Beaker’s response to his master leaving involved stretching his legs over the warm spot I’d made.

The distant chatter of townspeople emanated from the town hall. The pub and inn lights showed occupants, but they looked quiet.

Greenie returned to his desk while I slept, his unusual routine. His goblin inclinations kept him nocturnal. He worked all night and napped throughout the day between meetings. He silently worked on letters while witnessing me scamper down the stairs and out the door. We nodded to each other as I passed. He didn’t inquire about my business, and I didn’t say.

Since the manor stood near the orrery on Hawkhurst Rock, I didn’t need to walk through the dewy grass and soon found myself indoors again. The globe and table map softly glowed, making Presence unnecessary.

I gave the interior a quick once-over to confirm my privacy. No revelers strayed into the settlement’s most peculiar building. I approached the table map and zoomed it out to the continent, and doing it felt like scratching the mysterious itch.

I zoomed out the interface and considered how far I’d traveled. I’d been from Arlington on the west coast to Malibar on the east. Panning the map view over the landmass showed us settling Hawkhurst in the very center of the island continent.

Mathematics wasn’t my strong suit, but I once read about the Greeks calculating the earth’s circumference within hundreds of miles by measuring shadows from the sun. I wondered if plotting out these coordinates might reveal something.

Beaker, hyperaware of everything around him, poked his head into the orrery.

“Hey, there, pal. Sorry to abandon you, but you looked comfortable.”

The griffon padded across the floor to the table map and hopped up with a great flap of his wings. Before I could ask him to leave the table, he preened his feathers and settled himself. He lost interest in the illusory landscape and focused on me, indignant that the table map competed for my attention.

“You’re a big help, pal.” As intrusive as he was, I could still see plenty of details around his stretched-out form, so I panned the more interesting terrain around him. The world’s topography slid through him like a ghost. He’d gotten so much exercise today that I couldn’t blame him for not caring. Soon, he softly hooted and clucked to himself, the sounds he made when falling asleep.

The table map supported coordinates, so I plotted the crypt locations -65, -23 and 65, -23. Hawkhurst’s settlement flag stood at -1, -14, so I plotted it too. Last, I located the 0, 0 coordinate, the origin, to see where it appeared. A chill ran through my limbs as I located the itch that had been bothering me for so long. The 0, 0 coordinate fell on the ward worm’s lair.

Both relic crypts lay equidistant from the ward worm’s lair. And they shared its architecture—the opalescent resin created by the lobster-looking aquatic creatures, the anomalocari. What connected them?

For whatever reason, the lizardfolk had built astronomy temples around the crypts thousands, perhaps millions of years later. I’d seen the lizardfolk in Mineral Communion visions. They weren’t an aquatic species. And the anomalocari undulated through the water on fins too small to support ten-foot-long creatures on dry land. The helplessness of the mummies proved as much.

Sounds of the town hall revelry wound down as workers retired for the night. The crew stood two days away from building a market, a building that Greenie promised would bring sweeping changes to Hawkhurst.

It felt like I had enough pieces to make connections in this puzzle, but I needed tools to fit them together. I returned to the manor and visited Greenie. “Whatcha working on?”

The goblin looked up from a scroll. “The salt merchants have contacts in the lower continent’s torodon ranches. I’m writing a letter explaining our need for draft animals. It’s too late this year, but I hope to drive a couple dozen head to Hawkhurst next season. Torodons will entice farmers to settle here.”

“Do you mind if I borrow your drafting tools? I only need a compass to measure something in the orrery.”

“Of course, Governor.” He feigned disinterest, but I could tell his mind worked overtime to imagine why I wanted his tools. I’d never shown an interest in them before. It further confounded him when I left the manor with them, and he possessed none of the impertinence it would take to inquire why.

For once, I’m glad he didn’t ask. I wasn’t sure how to answer him until I monkeyed around with the orrery’s map. I wasn’t good with geometric equations, but compasses could make circles and quickly compare distances. A compass might help me discover geometric shapes, right angles, or patterns.