The next evening I found myself walking down the corridors of the House of Healing.
I had been meaning to visit Hask for a couple of days. I kept finding reasons not to, which I suspected said something about me that I didn't want to examine too closely.
I wanted to ask him about the dungeon. About the battle with the boss. How he was so powerful. Who he was, actually. My brain wouldn't let it go.
I was halfway down the corridor when the door to his room opened.
Alara stepped out. She was pulling it closed behind her with the careful quietness of someone who hadn't planned on being seen, and for just a moment — one unguarded moment before her composure arrived — she looked exactly like what she was. Exhausted. Relieved. Normal.
Then she saw me.
The composure snapped into place like a visor dropping.
She said nothing for a beat. Then, without quite looking at me, "He's not awake yet. But he's getting better."
She walked past me without waiting for a response.
I gave it to her back anyway. "Thanks."
I watched her go. Then I pushed open the door.
Hask was sitting up in bed, perfectly alert, eating what appeared to be a bowl of porridge with focused intensity.
I was immediately baffled.
"Callister." He wasn't exactly beaming, but he didn't seem unhappy to see me.
I spoke slowly, trying to connect some dots. "Hey, foreman. You're looking better."
The big man grunted. "I dunno, this never-ending parade of visitors is likely to stress me out and be bad for my recovery."
I paused. His face was completely deadpan, save for a very slight upward curve at the side of his mouth. "Did you just make a joke?"
"I don't joke, Callister. I make witty observations."
"Fair enough."
I sat down in the chair next to his bed. "Alara said you weren't awake yet."
Hask shrugged. "She doesn't know I am."
"...why?"
His face became serious, almost pensive. "I don't think she'd come to see me otherwise."
I quirked an eyebrow at him. "What does that mean?"
"Have you met Alara?"
I sighed. "Yeah. Fair point."
Hask looked out of the window, seeming to be admiring the sunset; upon closer inspection, I could see he was looking straight past it. "That girl's real hurt. She's different when she thinks no one can see her."
"...really?"
"Yeah. Ain't my business to tell you details, but she's calmer. Gentler. She talks to me for a long time."
"Sounds dishonest."
He glanced at me sharply, and I fidgeted in my seat. "Sir."
He closed his eyes. "Callister. Do you know where the Askar mountains are?"
I shook my head.
"Figured. They're a mountain range to the north. Where I'm from."
He paused, but I could tell he wasn't waiting for a response, so I waited. "When I was a young buck, probably fifty or so - that'd be about your age in dwarf years- I was just setting out as an adventurer. I came to Moorhaven, joined the Guild, yadda yadda."
He continued to stare out the window, and his face looked wistful. "I joined my first party. We had two Fighters. Myself and another guy. He was grouchy, angry at the world. Rightly so. His family was killed in a bandit attack. His whole village, in fact. But it wasn't the bandits that got his parents. It was careless adventurers, firing spells willy-nilly, stylizing themselves as 'saviors'."
His hand gripped the blanket tightly. "He didn't tell me that. I read his file. And I understood him. He wanted nothing to do with me or anyone else in our party. He just knew he couldn't tackle dungeons alone."
This was the most I had heard the Foreman speak since I had met him. It felt like watching a star explode: I might never experience it again. I hung on to his every word.
"After a while I started observing him. Just here and there. Little quiet moments around the campfire, or the aftermath of a battle. He'd always stick his tent spikes in the ground clockwise. Always ate his vegetables first so he could save the meat for last. Small things."
He lay back onto his pillows, eyes staring up at the ceiling. "One day I learned his favorite ale. It was called Stoneguard. Named after my hometown."
"In the Askar mountains?"
"Only two people in the world have ever heard me monologue before, Callister. Don't interrupt now."
"Sorry, sir."
"Anyway. I took some leave to go home and visit my family. I came back with some of that ale. After a real difficult dungeon crawl, we were camped out, exhausted, beat up, and wondering what all of it was for. I sat down beside him with two mugs of that ale. We didn't talk. Didn't even look at each other. Just drank. Cleared the whole keg in silence. He was just a human, so he wound up three sheets to the wind pretty quick. Passed out. I carried him to his tent."
He took a deep breath that told me he wasn't revealing everything. I stayed silent. "He loosened up a bit after that."
Hask shook his head, as though clearing it. "Point is: if you wanna help people, sometimes all you can do is be there for them. Let them feel safe. Learn how to reach out. If she can be herself around me, even just for a little while, but I gotta be unconscious for that, I'll take it."
I thought back to him in the Ebon Maw, radiating magical energy, golden axe in hand. He looked so strong. Looking at him now, he looked equally so. Like he'd taken the world on his shoulders and made his peace with it.
I'd wanted to ask about what had happened back then, but I decided then and there that if I were to ever hear that story, he'd tell me when he wanted to. I was okay with that.
He sat back up and locked eyes with me. It was just a moment, but his gaze was intense. "And I think I'm starting to learn a lot about you, Callister."
I shifted awkwardly in my chair. I didn't dare question that statement.
"You did good in that dungeon, kid. Real good. The Guildmaster is gonna hear about it."
I looked down at my feet to hide my flushed face. "Thank you, sir."
Hask settled back into his bed with a sigh. "Now, get on out of here, before the nurse comes to shoo you away. She's terrifying."
I smirked, standing and heading for the door. "Must be Emily's sister."
Hask allowed himself a small smile. "That's a good one."
Three days. That was how long it took for the guild to respond to a report detailing a premature boss respawn, a dead S-rank adventurer, and evidence of deliberate tampering with a dungeon core. Three days and one page.
I had found the response sitting on Kael's desk when I returned from visiting Hask. I knew he had already read it, because it was sitting exactly where he would put it when finished: exactly flush with the top left-hand corner of the desk. The place where he put things that he didn't wish to think about further.
Reading the letter was disturbing in a way I hadn't felt before.
The language was smooth and settled — not the language of an institution beginning an investigation but of one closing a file. Words like "noted" and "assessed" and "appropriate channels" that mean action is being taken without specifying what action or by whom.
Arren Shadowflash's death was mentioned in one clause of one sentence.
The tampering evidence — the thing that should be the most alarming detail in the entire report — got the same weight as the premature respawn. Just another anomaly. Just another line item.
One phrase in particular kept returning to me. The report had been "anticipated and reviewed by the appropriate oversight committee." Anticipated. Not received. Not processed.
Anticipated.
I couldn't decide which kind of horror was worse: the eldritch abomination in the Ebon Maw, or the bureaucratic burying of something that could get people killed.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
I re-read the letter several times, making sure to memorize every frustrating word. I then set it down, exactly where Kael had put it, and filed that information away for later.________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Two weeks after the Ebon Maw, we took a job to clean the Green Delve. It was a routine job. Low tier, forest environment, well-mapped. The briefing took four minutes. Hask didn't even finish his coffee.
The foreman did let us know, however, that he was insisting on only taking low tier jobs for awhile. He said it was his health. We knew better. He thought we had seen enough trauma for a while.
When asked, Hask told us the Maw had been a direct commission from higher up. Normally we'd pull jobs from the bulletin board.
That explained why we went. We had to. Hask framed it as having faith in us, but the reality was that he was following strict orders.
I was just glad this new job would be easier.
Unlike the last journey to a dungeon, we were able to acquire a horse and cart. The Green Delve was about a day's journey on horseback. This qualified us for the funding needed for transportation. Hask had murmured something about the Guild being "copper-pinchers."
Our journey there was unremarkable. It rained at one point, but being a little soggy was better than bandits, monsters escaping from dungeons, or wild beasts.
I was interested, but not surprised to find that this job-site was also underground, despite being described as a forest. Having swum through a seemingly infinite void of water inside of a mountain, I had apparently burned through my capacity for shock at that point.
Hask explained that very few dungeons were above ground and those were dungeons for entirely brand new teams.
After traipsing through a stone tunnel for about a half an hour, we emerged into the dungeon proper.
The place looked like somewhere you'd want to have a picnic, which made the blood on the moss considerably more jarring. The Green Delve had a false canopy overhead that filtered real-seeming light down through layered leaves, a soft green-gold glow that made everything look peaceful and slightly unreal. Flowers grew along the base of the walls. Something that wasn't quite birdsong echoed from somewhere above the canopy.
It was beautiful in the same way a well-kept graveyard is beautiful.
The adventurers had done thorough work. You could tell because of the thorough mess they'd left behind.
We wasted no time in getting to work. I had brought some extra Grime Reaper and was glad for it: there were monsters of all shapes and sizes lying dead all over the forest floor.
Thornbacks — large tortoise-like creatures with spike-covered shells. Their remains were awkward to dispose of, the spikes still dangerous even in death.
Alara had to patch me up, but she made no snide comments this time. Only professional instruction and silence otherwise.
Then there were the spore elementals — creatures made almost entirely of magical fungal matter.
When they dissolved they spattered large amounts of dangerous magical residue that Tessa had to treat very carefully: apparently it could infect and kill much of the plant life in the dungeon if not handled properly.
The creatures I hated most were the Canopy Stalkers. Kael informed me that these guys were tree-hunters. Long-limbed, agile, always attacking from above.
We had to get creative with these ones, as most of the corpses lay draped over branches or stuffed into large knots.
In death they just kind of looked like humanoid trees. But I was told that when "night" fell, Canopy Stalkers were most active, and I definitely wouldn't want to have them following me through the woods in the dark. Gave me the shivers.
As far as traps went, there was nothing mechanical, but Kael was just as much in his element.
He was more than eager to explain the workings of Vine Snares and Thorn Curtains. They were natural plants that acted as "biotraps", which was a term Kael had apparently coined..
But what got him most excited were patches of Pitfall Moss. This was apparently sentient plantlife that grew over holes in the ground. Something falls in and becomes food for the ooze monster that creates the moss.
The moss patches were all torn asunder and we found pools of slime at the bottom. An interesting thing to clean. A combination of trap and monster.
Kael mentioned that unlike mechanical obstacles, any untripped traps had to be disarmed and left rather than re-armed — the core reset would fix them naturally, and leaving them untouched beforehand would cause problems. This process took an excruciating amount of time all on its own.
SCRUB was adorable and eager to help as always.
What struck me most about all of this was the environment itself. The light filtering through the canopy seemed muted and dim. Tessa's Mana Sight ability showed us that this was due to magic build up in the air, both that of the dungeon, and left over spell energy from the adventuring party. As she was cleaning, Tessa would often stop to jot something down in her note book. I noted that she always had a frown as she did this.
Once we cleaned an area, the light got brighter and more natural. The place was almost lovely. Almost.
And the smell. Very different from the Ebon Maw. Blood and magic mixed with dirt and growing things, all with the undercurrent of natural decay.
The biggest obstacles were the streams and ponds. The streams carried mana downhill with the water, which forced us to work uphill a lot.
After hours of sweaty, tiring, but uneventful work, we finally reached the core.
It was nothing like the Ebon Maw's. That one had felt like something built — dense and crystalline and faintly hostile, the way a fortification is hostile even when empty. This one felt like something that had happened. Ancient root systems had grown around it over centuries until the crystal and the wood were one continuous thing, inseparable, the core pulsing with a slow warm green-gold light that made the whole chamber feel like the inside of a lantern.
It was the most peaceful thing I had seen underground, which, given my recent underground experiences, wasn't saying much. But I meant it as a compliment.
The cleanup and reset went about as planned, with one glaring exception: Tessa found those same signs of tampering in the mana. Exactly the same.
Tessa showed us her notes from the Ebon Maw compared to this core. The signatures were, in fact, identical. Not similar. Identical.
This worried all of us. Someone was definitely messing with the dungeons, big and small.
Hask noted it for the report, grumbling about how it wasn't going to matter.
I was grateful for this job: no near-death experiences, no vampire clowns, no boss respawns.
By the time we returned to the city, we were fully spent but not much worse for wear. Through the city gates and down winding streets we trudged, eager for a hot meal and bed.
The streets of Moorhaven's guild district were busy at this hour — adventurers coming off jobs, merchants moving inventory, the general productive chaos of a city whose economy ran on dungeon work. In our gray jumpsuits with our gear packs and our mops, we were part of the scenery. Nobody's eye lingered.
Which made it easy to notice the ones that did draw eyes.
We were four blocks from the guild when a group of people rounded the corner. I could tell that they were important.
There were five of them in total.
A lithe, vascular man whose shirtless muscles glistened in the sunlight. He wore the frustrated expression of a man who had run out of skin for tattoos.
Beside him was a woman in plain leather armor. She walked with practiced ease, ebony hair flowing in the sunlight. She was practically covered in daggers – in her boots, strapped in excess to her chest with belts, on her gauntlets; everywhere.
Next to her was a squat dwarven man in dangerous looking plate armor, covered in ridges and spikes. His beard was divided into three braids and decorated with jewels. A large hammer was strapped to his hip.
Walking ahead of them were two much more pompous looking figures.
One was an elven woman, her long, pointed ears poking out from beneath long, blonde tresses. She wore a leather breastplate over flowing white robes. She walked with an intricate and clearly magical staff. She looked strangely familiar, but in a way that was adjacent to any connection I could make.
But the man who was clearly in charge was, in my estimation, the biggest fop of the whole group.
He wore an enormous suit of silver plate, every edge and curve stylized with gold. A black cape flowed behind him in a way that didn't seem to match the breeze. He too wore an amulet: a fearsome-looking snake poised to strike. Strapped to his back was the biggest two handed sword I had ever seen in my life.
I didn't even have to question if it was magical in nature. Based on the hilt, pommel and the bottom end of the blade that I could see, it almost seemed ceremonial. The blade was not the colour of steel, but a deep metallic purple that shone brightly in the sunlight. Unnaturally so. The hilt was ornate and meticulously crafted from pommel to guard.
Once I was finished being dazzled by the shiny man and his magic sword, I got a look at his face.
It was stern, with sharp features. Almond-shaped eyes scanned the streets with intent. A perfectly trimmed goatee and immaculately coiffed hair rounded out a very handsome but unpleasant face.
Despite my jokingly judgemental thoughts, the closer he got, the only thing I could tell for sure about this man was that he was intensely dangerous. I had the distinct feeling that he walked with a swagger because it was earned. That he was not afraid of anything in this city. Maybe nothing at all.
The whole lot of them were actually rather fearsome, as they parted the crowd to pass. They occupied most of the street and weren't going to change that for anyone.
As they got within twenty feet or so of us, Hask bid us to move out of the way as well. We obeyed, watching the adventurers stride by. As they did, the dwarf turned his head and locked eyes with me. In a gruff voice, he said something in a language I didn't understand, but in a tone that was definitely insulting.
But what really caught my attention was a moment that passed as soon as it arrived.
The man with the greatsword made eye contact with Hask. Hard eye contact. Hask stared back calmly, but his eyes were equally intense. He also stopped walking.
I'd seen Hask calm, I'd seen him frustrated, angry, wistful and sad. I'd seen him covered in blood; I even knew what he looked like when he was almost dead.
One thing I had never seen Hask be was rattled.
And while most people could never tell, that's exactly what it was. Ceasing his stride, the intense stare, the slightest clenching of a fist.
Hask scared me at that moment.
After the shortest eternity I'd ever experienced, the staring contest ended and the adventurers moved on. It lasted all of a second.
Once they had rounded a corner, I looked at Tessa. "Who was that?"
She looked troubled. "That's Silver Fang. They're the top adventuring party in the Delvenmoor Empire. Their leader is Varkas Aureyn. He's the most powerful S-Rank adventurer out there."
"A paladin, specifically," Kael chimed in matter-of-factly, looking both disturbed and angry.
Tessa continued. "I don't know the names of the other four, but I know that the tattooed guy is a monk. That is an extremely rare job class to see in Delvenmoor. Usually they stay in the southern nations."
Kael picked back up from her. "The others are a rogue, a Wargrinder fighter, and a cleric."
"What's a Wargrinder?"
"Focused Class. All adventuring classes have them. Wargrinders are fighters, but different. They use their armor as a weapon as much as what's in their hand."
"Appropriately named."
"Yeah."
I could still feel the tension in the air, thick as dungeon mana. "The rogue was the one in spiky armor right?"
I knew full well it wasn't.
Kael snorted. Tessa giggled.
I realized that Alara hadn't spoken up. That wasn't surprising in and of itself, but I would've thought she'd jump in on snarky comments about someone else. When I looked over at her, she was white as a sheet, fist clenched. I could tell she was biting back tears. I knew better by now than to query, but I noted it.
Whatever had just happened, it hadn't happened to just Hask.
We resumed walking, eager to be home, but I couldn't let the conversation go just yet. "Did you guys catch that one moment with Hask and that Varkas guy?"
Tessa nodded solemnly. "They know each other. Uncle Hask never talks about it. But they aren't friends."
I pondered that and promptly filed it away for later.
There was one more thing I was curious about. "What did that dwarf say to me as he passed?"
Hask spoke before either of the others, the first words he'd uttered since we saw Silver Fang round the bend. "He said 'smells like trash out here today.'"
He did not look at us.
I watched the back of his head for a long moment and decided not to ask anything else.
We finished the journey home without another word.