We took seats at the bar. Tessa was still vibrating. Vlod returned with mugs on his fingers, one per hand, and distributed them without ceremony. Tessa, Kael and I drank deeply. Alara took a careful sip and I watched her work very hard not to make a face. Vlod didn't notice, or pretended not to. "You all look like you just came from a Class Five." He set his own mug down. "What did I miss?"
We looked at each other. Then at Hask. "No guild talk today, Vlod. You and I can catch up later."
"Say no more."
A beat of comfortable quiet settled over the bar. Then Tessa, standing on her stool to be at eye level with the conversation, looked up at Vlod. "Have you been home to see Hulda?"
"You think I'd come back after three months without visiting my wife?"
"You came here first, didn't you?"
It wasn't a question. Vlod scratched the back of his neck. "She stopped by earlier. You know how it is. Can't be away from work too long — this place falls apart without me."
Behind him, Trini was reaching past to retrieve some glasses. She hit him with the dish towel without breaking stride. "This place has never run more smoothly than the last two months, you old goat."
Vlod grinned. "I don't doubt that."
"Go home and see your wife. You've been here all day."
"But—"
Trini stopped moving and looked at him.
Vlod, eight feet tall and built like a small fortress, became noticeably smaller. Something about his posture suggested he had been here before and knew exactly how it ended. "Yes, ma'am."
He untied his apron and draped it over the bar. "Good to see you all. Lorne, Alara — pleasure. Hask, stop by soon. We have catching up to do."
We said our goodbyes. He stepped heavily out of the tavern.
The door swung shut behind him and the five of us looked at each other, not entirely sure what had just happened.
We took our customary table, ales in hand and Hask requested that Trini fill the table with food and drink, all on him. For a while, nobody said anything of substance. We ate. We drank.
Trini kept the table supplied with the kind of efficiency that suggested she'd done this before and knew exactly when to appear and when to disappear. The food was good — better than good, actually, the way Trini's food always was at the end of a long day, like it understood what you needed.
It was Tessa who broke the silence first, which was always how it went. Not about the assembly, not about the report, not about any of it. She started talking about something completely unrelated — a halfling festival she'd read about that was apparently happening in the lower city next month, something involving lanterns and terrible singing that she seemed genuinely excited about.
And just like that, the evening shifted. Not because the assembly hadn't happened. Just because the Final Yak had a way of making the present feel more real than everything else, and right now the present was warm and loud and smelled like Trini's cooking.
Hask sat at the head of the table and said very little, which was normal. But he ate, which was not. I watched him work through a full plate of food with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had skipped too many meals and was finally doing something about it, and I decided not to comment on it.
After some time with our faces buried in food, Tessa swallowed a large bite. "Did you guys see the flyers for the Swiftfoot festival in the Southern District?"
Kael mumbled something around a mouthful of food that sounded like he was asking her to clarify. Tessa understood him instantly. "It's a celebration of halfling culture! There's going to be food, dancing, vendors selling traditional scrimshaw, it sounds amazing."
I finished off the last bite of a biscuit. "What's scrimshaw?"
Her eyes sparkled. "We have a tradition of carving animal and monster bones into sculptures. It's super cool and difficult to do!"
"That does sound cool."
"Do you want to go with me?"
I looked up. I thought she had directed the question to the group, but she was looking straight at me. I felt my face get hot. "Yeah. Absolutely."
Kael looked between us. "Aaaand the rest of us, right?"
Tessa realized what had just happened and shrank in her seat awkwardly. "Yeah! Of course! We can all go. It will be super fun!"
I focused my attention back on my food. That question had been for me specifically. The idea of spending time with Tessa wasn't new – we'd been hanging out a lot. But this was the first time she had pointedly asked me to go somewhere. Usually we just walked and ended up where we ended up.
Hask must have picked up on the energy at the table and looked at Kael. "Lithwell. That spring trap in the Lower Works. That was a tough one."
Kael perked up. "Yeah, it was a challenge. Spring loading is pretty standard, but it used a dual-compression coil system instead of a single mainspring. Two coils wound in opposition — when the pressure plate depresses, the tension differential between them creates a rotational force rather than a linear one. So instead of a spike coming straight up, you get a sweeping arc. Much harder to dodge. Much harder to disarm without triggering, because releasing one coil just transfers the load to the other."
He turned his mug in his hands thoughtfully. "The release mechanism was the clever part. It used a torsion bar linked to a quicksilver switch — when the plate depresses far enough, the quicksilver shifts, completes a circuit through an embedded rune, and fires both coils simultaneously. The rune was doing double duty — triggering the release and briefly reinforcing the coils at the moment of firing so they couldn't be manually arrested. Whoever built it didn't want anyone stopping it halfway."
A pause. "I've never seen quicksilver used in a dungeon trap before. I wish we could have harvested some."
I'd spent enough time with Kael that I was beginning to follow his technical jargon, and I was proud of that. I had a follow up question. "So there's no way to disarm it without triggering it. What do you do with a trap like that?"
Kael beamed at my salient question but also answered my question with a question. "Weren't you watching?"
I shook my head. "I was mopping up mutant kobold guts."
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"Fair enough. Honestly? You don't. Not directly. You trigger it deliberately from outside the arc radius — get something non-essential in the pressure zone and let it fire. Once both coils have discharged, the mechanism is spent and you can dismantle it safely."
He paused. "The problem is knowing what the arc radius actually is before you test it. Get that wrong and whatever you put in the zone isn't the only thing that gets hit."
Another pause. Shorter. "I used SCRUB."
I snorted. "That explains the new hole he has."
Hask nodded slowly. "You did good, Lithwell. SCRUB too."
"Thank you, sir."
There was more silence as Trini returned with more fried potatoes and steamed dumplings and we tucked in.
I tried again to kick off the conversation after a while. "Alara…do elves have festivals too?"
I watched Alara stop eating, not looking up from her plate. She didn't respond right away. "Yes. Usually for the equinox in the spring and fall. Solstices too."
Her answer was flat, but that was what shocked me. No vitriol. No impatience. Just an answer.
Alara nodded and returned to her food, indicating the conversation was done. But even Hask looked caught off guard. That was the most any of us had ever gotten out of her.
The foreman seemed to see an opportunity. "I saw that wound closure spell you used on Callister in that dungeon. It was pretty advanced."
She shifted uncomfortably. "Thank you, sir. I wish Lorne would stop getting himself hurt so much."
The snide comment arrived on schedule. But it landed differently than usual. Her statement seemed to have two meanings.
I let it go.
An hour had passed before Hask stood and stretched, a hand on his stomach. "I should get going. Work to do."
He tossed a pouch of coins on the table. It wasn't bursting with coin, but the thunk it made on the table was significant. "That's for Trini. Should cover you kids for the night and leave her with a nice tip."
Tessa grumbled. "You really have to leave so soon, Uncle Hask?"
"Yeah. All play and no work makes Hask a dull boy."
He paused as he turned to go. "Oh. That reminds me."
From his utility belt he pulled another satchel. He passed it to me. "I got you guys a gift. Matching pendants. Team spirit or something. They're mandatory uniform now."
Hask's voice was light, but I could tell there was something else there.
I emptied the pouch on the table: the pendants were relatively plain, copper half circles on thin but sturdy chains. They were elegant in their simplicity. "Ooooo they're so pretty!"
Tessa put hers on immediately, smiling brightly.
Hask grunted. "Glad you like it. Make sure you all keep them on. I'll see you at breakfast."
Without another word, he turned on his heel and left the Yak. Kael peered into the coin pouch and I watched his mouth fall open. "There's like, fifty gold in here!"
Trini would be very happy. On a busy night, she probably brought in two hundred gold total. Based on what I'd learned about how gold worked, if you spent this much all at once in a smaller town, you could throw their entire economy off balance.
I waved to Trini, and she came to refill my ale. "Well let's make use of the foreman's generosity."
Trini was indeed a very happy barmaid that night.
Once Hask had left, the group loosened up a little bit. Tessa was drunk again. Kael was getting there. Even Alara had a slight flush to her face, though the wine she had been drinking seemed to just make her sleepy, not talkative. She was nodding off in her seat.
I was listening raptly to Tessa as she regaled us with an intensely-told story of how a halfling in her hometown once fell down a well and had to be rescued. Those were all the pertinent details, but Tessa really dragged it out, making it into a vivid production in a way only she could do.
When she finished, Kael and I clapped and she bowed, grinning.
I sipped my ale. "I really wish I had some interesting stories to tell. Having no memories makes conversation more difficult."
"It's okay. I love listening to you talk anyway."
Tessa's blurted comment made her cheeks flush intensely. She buried herself in her own drink.
Kael hadn't caught that one. I was glad for that.
Trini let us stay after the tavern closed. She put chairs up on tables and swept around us without complaint, and I looked around at what remained. The Final Yak was our place. I didn't think I'd ever had a place before.
The walk home was quiet. Not because there was anything wrong — quiet because we were comfortable in the silence. The city at night had a different quality to it than during the day. The guild district emptied out this late, the usual bustle replaced by the occasional cart, a few late workers heading somewhere, the distant sound of music from a tavern a few streets over. The lanterns along the main road cast long orange pools on the cobblestones. It was peaceful in the specific way that cities are peaceful when they're not trying to be anything.
Alara stumbled along with us, slumped against my shoulder with the boneless ease of someone who had stopped fighting gravity. She said nothing on the trip back, except to drunkenly murmur at one point that I was an idiot.
It was fine.
We made it back to the guild hall without incident. The corridors were empty and dim, the overnight lamps burning low. Our footsteps echoed differently at this hour — softer, somehow, like the building itself was trying not to wake anyone.
We parted ways with Tessa and Alara at the women's corridor. Tessa's parting hug was warm and familiar now, the kind that happens without thought. Alara said nothing, but her eyes lingered on me for a moment before she drunkenly tottered away after Tessa.
I watched them go.
Kael and I returned to our room. He collapsed into bed in his civilian clothes without a word — face down, one boot still on, asleep before I'd finished changing. I pulled my blankets up and lay on my back staring at the ceiling.
The dormitory was quiet in the way it always was this late. SCRUB was in his box under Kael's bed. The chalkboard across the room was covered in Kael's cramped notation, visible even in the low light. My side of the room had accumulated things over the months — a few books from the library, the gear I'd organized into a system that actually worked now, the small box the earplugs had come in that I'd never thrown away for no particular reason. It looked like someone lived here.
It looked like my room.
I wasn't tired. I was thinking.
The Guild was not only burying reports but actively erasing any trace of the anomalies we'd been documenting for months. Nobody was saying anything. Nobody was doing anything. Except Hask, who was running counter-surveillance in his own guild hall because someone inside it was watching him.
The pendants sat against my chest. I turned the chain between my fingers — a habit I seemed to be developing — and thought about the specific way Hask had said "make sure you all keep them on." Not a suggestion. Not a piece of friendly advice. An instruction, delivered lightly so nobody would examine it too closely.
Protection. Tracking. Something. Probably both.
The gravity of it settled on me in the quiet of the room. Someone with access to ancient magic and deep government connections had been systematically compromising dungeon cores across the empire. They had the guild's reporting infrastructure in their pocket. They had people running surveillance on a five hundred year old former adventurer who was trying to expose them.
And somewhere underneath all of that — a detail that kept surfacing no matter how many times I pushed it back down — our team had been specifically assigned to the Ebon Maw. Not randomly. Deliberately. Someone had wanted us in that dungeon.
I had to do something. That much had been true for weeks. But Hask was confiding in me because he trusted me to help protect the others, and whatever I did needed to be careful. Whoever was running this had contingencies. Layers. The kind of operation that had been running smoothly for years didn't leave obvious loose ends.
I couldn't walk into the guild administrator's office and demand answers. I couldn't file another report. I couldn't go back to the Ebon Maw — it was enormous, dangerous, and hadn't been cleared since we left it.
What I needed was information. The kind that didn't come through official channels. The kind that moved through the city's hidden infrastructure, between the cracks of the guild system, through people whose entire business model was knowing things that other people wanted kept quiet.
The Silk Runners.
I had read their entry three times in the library records and hadn't known why. I knew why now. Openly clandestine, deeply connected, dangerous. They knew everything that happened within Moorhaven's walls. If anyone had information about what was moving at the upper levels of the empire's guild system, it was them.
I didn't know exactly how to find them, but I knew where to start looking.
I rolled onto my side, a plan formulating, and stared at the wall until I fell asleep.