Nick arrived at the Acolyte’s Guild shortly before noon, which, judging by the state of the building, meant the day’s first major magical accident had already happened and the second was being argued into existence with academic confidence.
A thin column of violet smoke curled from one of the upper windows. Nobody outside seemed concerned.
The Acolyte’s Guild occupied a strange corner of Cairel’s central district, wedged between a row of old administrative halls and a chapel dedicated to Secrets that had been converted into a storage annex at some point in the last few decades. The building looked as though several architects had disagreed violently across multiple generations. One wing had been built from pale stone carved with careful runic borders. Another leaned outward beneath a roof of green copper tiles. A third section appeared to have grown out of the rear at an angle that strongly implied someone had expanded the guildhall during an argument and refused to admit the geometry had gotten away from them.
Magic clung to the place.
It wasn’t mana in the way Nick was used to feeling it. This was residue, old spellwork pressed into stone and layered so densely that the air around the guild carried the faint pressure of too many thoughts trying to occupy the same space. Sigils carved along the entry arch shimmered lazily as people passed beneath them, checking for curses, diseases, hostile enchantments, unpaid research fines, and, according to a sign bolted beside the door, unauthorized frogs.
Nick paused long enough to read the sign twice, then glanced toward the violet smoke still leaking from the upper floor.
“These places are always so ridiculous,” he muttered.
Seren would’ve loved it.
A junior acolyte sweeping glass fragments from the front steps looked up. “It might sound ridiculous, but make sure you’re following that last rule. You’d be surprised how often people try to sneak frogs in disguised as toads.”
“No, I really don’t think I would.”
The acolyte considered that, then nodded as if Nick had passed some small test of reasonableness.
Inside, the guild was louder than he remembered. The entry hall opened into a wide circular chamber lined with balconies, staircases, suspended walkways, floating chalkboards, and shelves filled with books arranged according to a filing system known only to people who had strong opinions. Apprentices moved through the space in clusters, carrying scrolls, brass instruments, crystal lenses, bundled wands, sealed jars, and one extremely unhappy-looking chicken whose feathers glowed faintly blue.
A heated argument occupied the center of the hall, where three acolytes stood around a floating diagram of a dungeon core while an older woman in silver-trimmed robes pointed at it with the exhausted fury of someone who had been correcting the same mistake since breakfast.
“It cannot be both inert and actively responding to external stimuli,” she said.
One of the acolytes raised a hand. “What if it’s shy?”
The woman stared at him until his hand slowly lowered.
Nick kept walking.
Thanks to his relationship with Seren, he had spent enough time around magic researchers in his previous life to recognize danger in many forms. Swords and spells were easy. Places like the Acolyte’s Guild presented a different kind of threat, one built from curiosity, arrogance, and people who used the word theoretically with a high degree of confidence.
At the reception desk, a young man looked up from three separate ledgers and blinked. His gaze moved to Nick’s face with dawning recognition.
“Lord Draegan?”
“Nick is fine.”
The clerk shuddered, a flash of nervous indecision crossing his face. “Are you here for the open petition desk, guild registration, artifact identification, curse removal, or a contract review? Or perhaps you’re here for more information on the radioactive chickens?”
“The… what?”
“I assure you, everything is perfectly safe. We have the situation under control.”
“…”
Nick glanced toward the glowing chicken being carried up one of the staircases. The poor creature’s feathers were beginning to emit steam.
“I’m here for a consultation about my research.”
The clerk’s expression changed immediately.
He set one ledger aside and reached for a different book beneath the desk. “Do you have an appointment with a research acolyte, a senior arcanist, or an affiliated specialist?”
“Master Rambalt.”
The clerk’s hand stopped moving. Somewhere above them, a loud pop echoed through the building, followed by applause and someone shouting expletives about frogs.
“You have an appointment with Master Rambalt?” the clerk asked.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Ah.” The single syllable carried an impressive amount of bureaucratic suffering. “Master Rambalt does not observe appointments in the traditional sense.”
“I figured as much.”
“He’s more retrospective,” the clerk added. “If he wished to meet with you, he will later insist that he scheduled it.”
“I can see him doing that.”
The clerk opened the book and began scanning the page. “If you are following up on his anomaly survey, I can request access to the relevant archives while someone attempts to locate Master Rambalt.”
“That works.”
“Would you prefer the public reading room, a restricted reading room, a guarded reading room, a warded reading room, or an extradimensional reading room? Those are ordered from cheapest to most expensive, by the way.”
Nick stared at him long enough for the clerk’s expression to become apologetic without becoming any less sincere.
“Restricted,” he said eventually.
“A sensible choice.”
The clerk marked something in the book, rang a small silver bell, then immediately ducked as a folded paper bird shot across the room from one of the balconies. It struck the desk, unfolded itself, and began loudly reciting a complaint about unethical magnetism. The clerk slapped a hand over it and continued as though this represented a normal difficulty of office life.
“Third floor, east stairs. Ignore the second landing and do not answer if anyone behind the blue door speaks to you.”
Nick opened his mouth.
The clerk’s expression hardened. “Especially do not answer if it reveals personal information about you.”
Nick closed his mouth.
A guild runner appeared a few moments later, a girl of perhaps fourteen with copper spectacles, a stack of notebooks under one arm, and the nervous energy of someone trying very hard to look like she belonged in a building full of people who could accidentally turn her into weather.
“This way, Lord Draegan.”
“Nick.”
She shook her head. “No, my name is Laura.”
“…”
He decided to let that one go.
“This way, Lord Draegan.”
The east stair spiraled upward along the inner wall of the guildhall, giving Nick a better view of the chaos below. From above, the building made slightly more sense. Each floor had its own rhythm. The lower levels handled public services, guild contracts, and minor magical consultations. The second floor belonged mostly to apprentices, who moved with the frantic intensity of people aware that competence was expected long before it was achieved. The third floor was quieter, though still littered with explosions that were somewhat better contained.
The runner led him across a narrow bridge suspended between two balconies. Below them, the floating dungeon core diagram flared bright red while the older woman shouted, “It’s not shy!”
Nick smiled despite himself.
For a moment, he almost felt at home.
A subtle ache reminded him that this could never be the same as it was before.
Seren wasn’t here.
She wasn’t even part of this world.
He wondered what she would think of this place. He stared at the dungeon core diagram, and recent memories slipped through the noise of the guildhall.
The Siege Vault.
The orc children huddling in the dark.
The core fragment recognizing something in him.
The way that place had felt less like a dungeon and more like a wound someone had forced to stay open.
His smile faded before they reached the end of the bridge.
The runner brought him to a narrow room whose walls were covered in maps. There were dungeon maps, regional maps, and maps with lines and diagrams that Nick couldn’t even begin to guess at the meaning of. Thin brass arms extended from the walls to hold parchment, glass plates, and translucent sheets marked with layered inks. Some moved slowly, rotating over one another as if the room itself were trying to compare them.
A table occupied the center, covered with pinned notes and several rocks labeled in careful, illegible handwriting.
Nick stepped inside.
The runner stopped at the door. “Please don’t touch anything unless it touches you first.”
“That happens?”
She gave him an apologetic look. “Less often these days, but it still happens.”
Then she shut the door.
For nearly ten seconds, Nick stood alone in the map room while nothing happened, which felt suspicious in this particular guild.
He approached the central table carefully and found the map Rambalt had given him duplicated across several layers of parchment. Cairel sat near the center, marked in black ink. Roads branched outward. Lake Rovaria spread north in faded blue. The Voskeg Mountains rose southward in jagged brown ridges. Smaller marks clustered around the city, each circled in a different color.
He recognized some of them.
Goblin’s Den. Widow’s Nest. Siege Vault.
Others lay farther out, scattered across old battlefields, abandoned settlements, border roads, and places where the mapmakers had seemingly given up and written things like ‘hostile territory’.
One of the marks near the mountains had been circled twice, though the second circle was not in Rambalt’s messy penmanship. The ink was thinner and recent enough that it sat atop the parchment with a faint sheen when Nick shifted his angle to the light.
He was studying it when a voice behind him said, “That one lies.”
Fire curled around Nick’s fingers before he finished turning.
Master Quincy Rambalt stood upside down near the ceiling, his robes hanging toward the floor, and his spectacles still balanced on his nose despite every reasonable objection gravity might have raised. He held a piece of chalk in one hand and was correcting an equation written directly across the plaster above him.
Nick let the flame stay where it was for another second.
“Do I want to know?”
“Almost certainly.”
“Do I need to know?”
“Absolutely not.” Rambalt added a final mark to the equation, frowned at it, then made the mark slightly worse on purpose. “And before you ask, I meant the mountain mark, not the ceiling. People have a terrible habit of trusting maps once someone has gone through the trouble of drawing on them.”
Nick glanced toward the table. “You’re saying the map is wrong?”
“I’m saying maps are arguments pretending to be facts.” Rambalt tucked the chalk behind one ear and drifted down from the ceiling in a slow, dignified rotation that ended with both feet touching the floor and one sleeve catching briefly on a brass instrument near the wall. He freed himself with a sharp tug. “Very irritating instrument.”
Nick let the flame fade from his fingers.
Rambalt’s gaze dropped briefly toward his hand, then returned to his face. “You’ve grown.”
“It’s been a few days.”
“I meant spiritually.”
“I dunno if I would agree there.”
“That’s fine.” Rambalt swept past him toward the table, scoping up three loose pages, one glass lens, and a dried piece of fruit that he inspected with visible suspicion before placing it on a shelf. “I was wondering when you’d come back.”
“You gave me a map of anomalies.”
“I did. I expected you to either follow up, die, or become distracted by something violent enough to delay both outcomes.” Rambalt looked him over once with a quick, unsettling assessment. “You seem to have chosen the dullest of the three.”
“I cleared the Siege Vault.”
“Yes, I heard. Very inconsiderate of you.” Rambalt began rifling through a stack of notes. “Do you know how many people had theories about that place? Entire papers rendered obsolete in one afternoon. One woman cried in the archive. They were beautifully structured tears. Excellent grief, but such terrible scholarship.”
“There were orc children in the dungeon.”
Rambalt’s hands slowed.
Then he pulled a page free from the stack and set it on the table.
“Yes, I’m sure there were.”
The words landed differently than the rest of him, stripped of almost all theatrical excess.
Nick watched him more carefully.
Rambalt adjusted one of the map layers with a brass weight. The movement brought the Siege Vault mark into alignment with several smaller symbols around it.
“You knew?” Nick asked.
“I suspected.” Rambalt looked up. “Suspicion is not knowledge, however much priests, kings, and young men with fire magic often prefer otherwise.”
Nick ignored the jab as much as he could. “The dungeon core reacted to me.”
That got Rambalt’s attention fully.
The old wizard stopped arranging the map and turned toward him with the abrupt focus of a hawk noticing movement in grass. A moment earlier, he had been all motion, distraction, and ridiculousness. Now the room felt as though every map on the walls had leaned closer.
“Define ‘reacted’.”
Nick considered how much to say.
He had come here for answers, but the stillness in Rambalt made his instincts tighten. Rambalt would probably be helpful. He was obviously eccentric and dangerous in the way every high-ranking magical scholar was dangerous.
“It recognized my aura,” Nick said.
Rambalt’s eyes narrowed. “Those words mean almost nothing without context.”
“I have a few passive skills related to fire, and the dungeon said I carried many familiar elements. ‘A hint of nostalgia… old friends, and old hatreds braided together.’”
From beyond the door came the distant, muffled sound of someone shouting something about magnetic chickens. Rambalt gave no sign of hearing it.
“I’ve had a couple special encounters,” Nick said. “And I’ve inherited some titles and skills.”
Rambalt picked up a quill and twirled it once between his fingers. “And the core fragment?”
Nick’s attention sharpened. “I didn’t mention a fragment.”
“No,” he said. “You mentioned a dungeon core reacting to your aura. If no fragment remained, you would have come here asking about the aura. Since you came here asking about anomalies, the fragment is the part bothering you.” He tilted his head, his gaze dropping briefly. “Also, there is a faint dimensional disturbance to your presence.”
Nick looked down before he could stop himself.
Nothing about him looked out of the ordinary to his untrained eyes.
“You can… sense it?”
“I can sense the insult pretending to be concealment.”
“You seem to care a lot about this.”
“I have standards.”
Nick summoned his wardrobe.
It erupted into existence, a monolith of dark, polished wood and shimmering jewels.
It carried none of the obvious malice he had felt inside the Siege Vault, but the wardrobe contained the dormant fragment of the dungeon core, bound by a mechanism that Nick did not understand.
Rambalt did not touch it.
He leaned close enough that Nick could see tiny reflections caught in both lenses of his spectacles, but his hands remained clasped safely behind his back. The caution stood out more than any warning would have.
“This is very ‘hm’.”
“That’s your expert opinion?”
“That was the polite version.”
“Should I be concerned?”
“Almost everyone should be concerned more often. It would improve the quality of meetings enormously.” Rambalt circled the wardrobe once, then the table, and returned to his original position. “A pseudo-dungeon core fragment. Did you know that, academically speaking, those do not exist?”
“I’d heard as much.”
“I’m sure you did. Did you know that pseudo-dungeons are an anomaly restricted to this border region? They do not appear anywhere else on the continent.”
“That part, I didn’t know.”
“Until now, we had no reasonable guesses at how they sustained themselves. If one impossible fragment exists, I become less comfortable assuming it is lonely.”
Nick put a hand on his wardrobe, considering the possibilities.
If all of these pseudo-dungeons had dungeon core fragments…
What would happen if he reunited all the pieces, bound as part of his wardrobe?
“From my research, pseudo-dungeons are built from memory,” Rambalt said. “Trauma and death. They require enough souls screaming in the same place until the world decides to preserve the scream.”
Nick stayed quiet.
He recalled the Goblin Den.
The mass grave full of skeletal remains.
The Siege Vault and the children waiting behind the final door.
“Inherently, dungeons imitate historical intentions. That is what makes them so dangerous.”
Nick heard the shape of the answer before Rambalt gave it. “But?”
Rambalt looked pleased. “Good. You heard it.”
“You were practically shouting it.”
“True. A core should not choose. It should respond according to the parameters of its creation. Intruders enter. Monsters manifest. Clear conditions resolve. Reset follows. In pseudo-dungeons, the rules are messier, but the principle remains. Cores are not sentient creatures; they are programs.”
His gaze shifted to the wardrobe.
“They should not ‘feel nostalgic’ or recognize auras outside of their preset parameters.”
Nick ran his hand along the wardrobe, feeling the warm, knotted wood.
“You gave me the anomaly map before I found the fragment,” Nick said.
“I did.”
“Why?”
Rambalt’s gaze drifted toward the layered maps across the table. For once, he did not answer immediately, and that alone made Nick pay attention.
The old wizard reached out and tapped the Siege Vault mark with one fingernail. “Because Cairel has too many old wounds for a border city of its age.”
Nick followed his hand as Rambalt moved to another mark, then another.
Widow’s Nest.
Goblin Den.
A burned-out mill north of the west road.
A collapsed watchtower near the southern foothills.
“Places where a large number of monsters died badly,” Rambalt said. “That happens everywhere. But here, they linger and develop structure when they should fade into history like civilized atrocities.”
“Civilized atrocities?”
“The kind people put plaques over and pretend to remember on holidays.”
Nick looked at the map again. The marks seemed awfully close together when marking them as the sites of terrible events. The shape of them had changed, the separate locations starting to look like a larger pattern.
“What causes these events to linger? Is it some form of magic spell?”
“Nobody knows.” Rambalt lifted one transparent overlay and let the lines beneath it shift. “Geography, mana density, poor burial practices, divine negligence… there are all sorts of possible explanations, but all we’ve figured out so far is that there is a pattern.”
He pulled open a drawer beneath the table and withdrew a narrow case of black wood. Inside sat several small pins, each tipped with colored glass. He selected one marked in pale green and placed it south of Cairel, near the lower edge of the map where the plains began rising toward the Voskeg foothills.
Nick leaned closer. “Another pseudo-dungeon.”
“Possibly.”
“I’m sure that means ‘yes’.”
“That means ‘possibly’. Words have meanings for a reason, even when adventurers try to beat them into submission.” Rambalt adjusted the pin slightly. “This site was formed fairly recently, after a research initiative led by Dr. Elias Rathmore. Recently, roaming livestock have gone missing in the area, and investigations report the appearance of a wandering village.”
“That could be a new dungeon.”
“Well, it could be six different things, four of them highly embarrassing.”
“…and the other two?”
“One is a dungeon.”
Nick waited while Rambalt picked up the dried fruit from the shelf again, remembered he distrusted it, and put it back down.
Nick looked from the green pin to the Siege Vault mark. “Why this one?”
Rambalt placed another overlay across the map. Thin red lines connected several older incidents across the region, most faint enough that Nick could barely follow them. “I despise that woman, but I have to acknowledge her results in this matter. Considering recent events surrounding you and your infamous nemesis, I suspect you’ll find this dungeon… interesting.”
Nick studied the green pin. The foothills south of the city were near enough to reach in a day, but far enough from the main road that most patrols would ignore the place unless something dramatic happened.
“When did the last report come in?”
“Three days ago.”
Nick looked up. “And you didn’t mention it before?”
“You had other things to worry about.”
“…Right.”
Rambalt watched him with the mild patience of a teacher wondering whether a student had noticed the answer written on the board.
Nick pulled his hand away from the wardrobe. “You think this is connected to the Siege Vault?”
“I think ‘connection’ is a word people use when they want the world to make sense.” Rambalt tapped the green pin. “The world is rarely tidy and becomes actively hostile when forced to pretend otherwise.”
“So ‘yes’.”
“Pretty much.”
Nick almost laughed. He waved his hand and dismissed the wardrobe.
Rambalt winced as if personally offended.
“Really, who designed such crude magic?”
“It works.”
“It leaks.”
“Leaks what?”
“It’s like you’re trying to use a blanket to hide a corpse in a dining room.”
“Y’know, that works pretty well if the body is fresh enough.”
“Speaking from experience?”
“…No comment.”
Rambalt moved away from the table and began searching through one of the wall shelves. Books shifted aside as if trying to escape him. Several notes fluttered to the floor. One folded itself into a bird and attempted to flee before he slapped it flat against the shelf without looking.
“Aha.”
He returned with a small metal disk carved with concentric circles.
Nick eyed it. “Is that going to explode?”
“Eventually.”
“Rambalt…”
“Not today, at least. Unless you do something stupid.”
“That isn’t much better.”
Rambalt tossed it to him.
Nick caught it carefully. The disk hummed faintly against his palm.
“If you incorporate this into your wardrobe, it will hide it better.”
Nick slipped the disk into his pocket, then looked up.
“Why help me?”
Rambalt’s expression brightened with theatrical offense. “Because I am a pillar of civic responsibility.”
Nick waited.
The old wizard sighed. “I would prefer someone with unusually high survival prospects bring back observations instead of receiving another missing person report. Truthfully, I was beginning to question the future of civilization.”
“That’s it?”
“That is plenty.”
Nick studied him.
Rambalt held his gaze for a few seconds before turning back to the map.
“Also,” he said. “You asked.”
The words were almost casual, which somehow made them feel more meaningful.
Nick had spent a long time surrounded by people who wanted things from him. The gods, the armies, the guilds, and the nobles. Even his friends and family, though their wants were easy enough to forgive. Rambalt almost certainly wanted something too. Everyone did. But the answer still made him pause.
‘You asked.’
As though asking mattered.
As though help could begin there.
Nick pushed the feeling away before it became inconvenient.
“When should I investigate the site?”
“As soon as you can. Preferably before someone else decides it is interesting.”
Nick looked at the map again. The green pin seemed small compared to the others.
“Has someone else been investigating these?”
Rambalt’s hand paused over the map. “Rathmore is almost certainly aware. This was her project after all.”
“And it’s okay for me to jump in and mess with it?”
The old wizard smiled. “If you find another core fragment, do not give it to anyone else. Also, you may want to bring your friends along to this one.”
His ‘friends’…
Ray and Lexi?
“You said not to give it to anyone else. Does that include you?”
“Especially me, if I ask too quickly.”
For one, blessed, horrible second, Rambalt looked entirely serious.
Then he clapped his hands once, and the room seemed to release the breath it had been holding.
“Well. That was appropriately ominous. Excellent work all around.” He gathered several notes and shoved them into a folder before handing it over. “Directions. Take Ray if you want to survive, and take that catkin if you want to feel like a decent person.”
Nick paused. “What does that…”
“The city talks, Lord Draegan.”
Nick took the folder. “I’m starting to dislike how much you hide behind that mask of yours.”
“A healthy instinct.”
Nick tucked the folder beneath one arm and turned toward the door.
Behind him, Rambalt had already returned to the map. The old wizard adjusted one of the overlays again, sliding it half an inch to the left. Several marks that had seemed unrelated drifted into loose alignment before shifting apart as the transparent sheet settled.
Nick stopped with his hand on the doorframe.
For a heartbeat, the pattern had almost looked like a shape he’d seen before.
The detested mark of Ascendence.
But it wasn’t quite the same.
Rambalt glanced over his shoulder. “Something wrong?”
Nick looked at the map, then at Rambalt.
“No,” he said slowly. “I thought I saw something.”
“That’s a dangerous practice.”
“Seeing things?”
“Thinking they stop existing when you look away.”
Nick didn’t have an answer for that.
Rambalt smiled brightly and pointed toward the door. “Do close that on your way out. The room gets loud when exposed to other opinions.”
Nick left the map room with the folder under his arm.
The door closed itself behind him.
The sounds of the Acolyte’s Guild returned all at once: apprentices arguing, glass chiming, someone shouting that the chicken deserved to be considered an apprentice. Nick stood on the third-floor balcony for a moment, looking down into the strange, bright madness of the guildhall below.
He started down the stairs, and by the time he reached the second landing, violet smoke had stopped leaking from the upper window.
Blue smoke had replaced it.
Nick decided that probably meant progress, though he found himself looking back toward the third floor before he reached the next set of stairs.
Project Knightfall 