Words were a funny thing. One small choice altered the entire meaning of a phrase. For instance, Suffi had stipulated I couldn’t make plans without telling her once the Contract began, not that I had to tell her all my plans. Plans I made before the Contract were effectively exempt.

So in the moment before the Contract took effect, I made my plans to kill Suffi Halfhand. Not as a weapon I intended to use, but as a weapon to hold in reserve, always poised to strike. I had no doubt she had found a similar way to justify herself so the Contract’s rules would allow her to wriggle through and strike at me.

It would be harder for her, of course. I had been able to include a clause that prevented her from acting against me at all, and she hadn’t known the wording for more than five minutes before the Contract descended.

Five minutes to come up with a plan to kill me- without harming me. Had she managed to do it?

I had touched her mind in the moment we made the Contract, felt the cold-steel intellect and burning ambition there. Yes, I would have to assume she did manage.

Thankfully, I had my own hidden dagger against her now.

The first step of my plan was to shadow her. Moving to follow while she was still in the sewers was too obvious, so I had my rats enter the surface world and move above, waiting for them to emerge from one of the human-sized entrances.

Sure enough, she came up in the market square, clutching a clay pipe from one of her comrades and trying to smoke the smell of the sewers out of her nostrils. She handed it back to the captain, the same dwarf I had granted the first Attunement- the Attunement of Gleam.

We followed her from there, into the town of the dwarves. The buildings here were close-knit, almost running together, with three or four shallow stories stacked together into low-roofed little hovels. For all the dwarves appreciated the finer beauties in metal and sculpture, they were willing to live in cramped, myopic conditions a human would have called a slum.

The only buildings that stood tall were the workshops and alehouses, which were built with posts instead of walls, open to the air and sunlight as the apprentices and masters within sung to the ring of their hammers, as the brewmasters tended their frothing cauldrons and their daughters served up tankards of sweet mead or sour ale. These were the temples of dwarven life, while the lowly houses were merely places to sleep.

I couldn’t help but wonder what it was like in the mountain halls where this strange spirit of industry had hundreds if not thousands of years to grow. Where the stone had been worn down by the passing of generations of dwarves, and carved by their finest sculptors, where the riches of their empire were displayed openly as common treasure- so unlike how the humans hid their wealth away from the light.

Everywhere my spies looked, there were statues. They did not stand alone on pedestals, but were mixed into the crowds, captured in such perfect imitation of life it took a moment to realize they weren’t among the living. They could have been real dwarves frozen into bronze in a common moment of their lives- sitting at a meadhall table raising a glass, or standing sweeping the stoop of their house, in the workshops and even in the middle of the street there.

The dwarves lived their lives this way, surrounded by the memories of their ancestors and the talent of their sculptors. Passing the dead on their way down the streets.

It was oddly inspiring.

Suffi’s house was a sprawling compound, with dozens of individual blocks of dwarven slum arranged in a kind of living wall, surrounding a central gardens and a single, tall house. She was not a normal dwarf, and she didn’t deign to live as the commoners did.

Everything about her ambitions could be seen in how that mansion towered, closer to the governor’s villa than the low rowhouses of the dwarves.

It was there we ran into our first problem. My clever little wallflowers had kept out of sight by moving above, scuttling up walls and peering over the edges of the rooftops. Now, a wall presented itself. A thin barrier of spellwork sat over the mansion and surrounding gardens. One by one, the guards slipped through by presenting little tokens of bone around their neck, while Suffi only needed to press her hand to the web of golden lines for it to briefly flicker and let her pass by.

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I had no such trinket to get by. I was left in the cold, my spies settling down to perches in the surrounding environments, awaiting my further orders. I would need to think on this one.

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My rats descended down the stairs I had left from my failed Descent to the second floor.

The elementals had come out of nowhere to wreak havoc, and it was time I learned where they came from. My senses didn’t extend down into the rifts they’d torn in the foundation of my Dungeon, and so, I was forced to send spies down.

As they touched down into the abandoned second floor, they found it much as I’d left it. The stone tree still stood, caked in jagged arrangements of salt like crystalline snow, the faces carved on their trunks worn and withered with expressions of sorrow.

The grey flowers still grew, blanketing the seven plateaus and extended across the gaps between in interwoven canopies that hid the deadly falls. An adventurer could take a step, expecting the flowers to mean there was solid ground beneath, and plummet to their death on the spikes below.

No, I was quite pleased to see much of the damage was minimal. The elementals had ceased their rampage as soon as we retreated, withdrawing back into their dens.

As I watched, the presence of the rats began to wake them. Stones cascaded out of long tears in the walls, deep rifts in the floors. The stones rolled and bounced and formed, starting at the legs and working up, the imitation of a hound- but with six legs, a back covered in spines of obsidian, and cold cruel eyes of quartz.

My rats scattered. They were light enough to run right over the places where the flower-canopy extended over a hidden fall, scampering over the bridges of roots while the hounds couldn’t follow without tearing through.

Instead, the elemental beasts leapt the gap with huge shows of strength, or came rushing across the glass bridges that connected the plateau tops. That was what I was waiting for. A second team of rats burst from the stairwell, heading directly for the closest of the gaps in the walls from which the hounds had emerged.

One of them carried a rock of glowing stone in its mouth, lighting the way as they dove into the crevice.

It was a tight squeeze, even for my ratty beauties. As they climbed through the twisting, narrow crack in the stone, a strange shiver ran down my spine. Mana. The air was dense with a coiling, powerful Mana completely unlike my own. That was why I hadn’t been able to see in through my usual method- the field of Mana that surrounded me and gave me my vision was repelled by this foreign energy.

A thin glow lit the way ahead, the color of amber.

The lead rat emerged into a widening of the cavern, where the floor pooled with ochre liquid, all of it shining with an inherent light as more dripped, in glowing drops, from the stalactites above.

The walls were made of jagged, rough crystals of a honey color. It was like the inside of an enormous geode, and the light that shone from the little spars of honey-crystal on the walls became solid, condensed into liquid, and pooled in the basin.

That liquid was purest Mana, condensed to physical form.

I could feel my intrusion stirring the beasts outside to a frenzy. The hounds turned back from chasing the decoys, congregating towards the true incursion team. The earth began to shake, tremors I felt all the way up on the second floor, as the enormous rock-lizard began to haul itself out of the grand rift that split the fifth plateau in half.

But I couldn’t turn back now.

I had to know.

At my orders, the lead rat approached the pooling Mana. It reacted at his mere presence, drawing up into ribbons of liquid amber that flowed through the air and reached for him, touched him, ran through his skin as if it had no physical presence.

And he began to change. The rat twitched and convulsed on the ground as his legs gave way in an attack of spasms. Horns erupted from its brow. Tusks crawled from the edges of its mouth, growing in slow motion. Fur froze to rocky platelets, looking like an armadillo with its banded layers of stone, and its eyes took on an amber hue.

The stone-hounds were coming fast.

The rat arose from his baptism, changed. Spurs of bone jutted from his head in a rough crown and tusks curved out from its mouth, and he was now so large I feared he might not be able to squeeze back through the narrow path out. He was armored now, yes, and I could feel his organs had shifted as well, his bones solidifying to crystal.

This raw Mana was precious stuff, and I could have licked my lips with greed as my ratty crew fled, scampering back up the stairs in triumph.

It seemed these elementals were born from natural Mana deposits, and better yet, that these deposits came in two forms - a powerful liquid that changed what it touched, and a crystalline form that unknown properties.

The sooner I exterminated the stone hounds and that damned lizard, the better.

[Stone-Tusk Rat]

Born from exposure to Earthen Mana, this common vermin has been infused with the power to sense gems and precious metals even within the earth, and can tunnel at tremendous speeds to find them.