"Alara," Hask said, without turning around. "Now."
She was already moving. She knelt beside the man and immediately opened her kit. She attempted to wrap some of his most grievous injuries, using her spells to enchant the bandages. "It's not working," she muttered, tension thick in her voice. She placed a hand to his chest."Healing Art: Full Restore. Activate."Her magic pulsed through Fenn's body, but nothing seemed to change.Her voice became frantic. "Foreman!"Hask remained outwardly calm, but I noticed his fist was clenched so tight that his knuckles were white. "Keep trying."And she did. Everything she tried failed. Eventually she had to sit back, mana thoroughly drained. She was crying softly. It wasn't often that we had to contend with a person, let alone a fellow Janitor, dying in front of us."I can't save him. He's beyond dehydrated. Bleeding internally. Most of his bones are broken."Tessa, Kael and I watched on, wordless and helpless. Tessa was also on the verge of tears. Kael's jaw was set in the way that told me he was incredibly upset.Fenn's voice came again, "Hask…come here…."The foreman knelt beside his friend, pulling him as gently as possible into his lap."I'm here, my friend."The gentleness in his voice surprised me. I was so used to brisk, gruff Hask, that such a tender statement, short as it was, made me emotional as well.Fenn spoke haltingly, and I knew he was coming up on his last words. "Hask…the dungeon…falling apart…monsters…"Hask nodded, brow furrowed, his facade of calm clearly a struggle. "Don't worry, Aldric. We're gonna get you home. Patch you up."I saw a small, extremely painful smile flicker across the dying man's face. "Always trying…to save everyone…done for…"Hask shook his head. "No."Aldric coughed, and blood splattered both his tunic and Hask's face. "Listen…to me…last night…knocking…it knew my name…"Hask's voice gained a tone of urgency. "What knew your name, Aldric?"Fenn gasped, his lungs rattling loudly enough for us all to hear."The dungeon…it knew me…"I felt all the blood drain from my face. What did that mean? Certainly nothing good.It became clear that Aldric Fenn could speak no longer. He was visibly fading. Hask raised a hand to us."Wait for me outside."We didn't question. All four of us stepped back out into the humid swamp, staring at the empty doorway. It was roughly ten minutes before Hask stepped through it, holding the corpse of his friend and our fellow janitor in his arms. His eyes were dry, but I could tell that it was because he had needed to dry them."Wood. Pyre. Now."It took some doing to find dry wood, let alone enough to make a funeral pyre. But we worked diligently until we had a large pile and began lashing them together with vines.The entire time, Hask continued to cradle Fenn's body. Stock still, he stared blankly into the swamp. I had never seen him like this. He was hurting. I hated it, and was terrified of it. I tried desperately to think of something to say, but reached the conclusion that the only way I could help him was to lay his old companion to rest.Once the pyre was ready, Hask laid the corpse atop it. He gestured to Kael, who pulled a flask of oil from his pack and drenched everything he could in it.Hask used flint and tinder to start the fire. One spark, and the wood erupted into flame. The wood was not completely dry, despite our best effort, and it sent a column of dirty black smoke into the sky.As Fenn was consumed by the flames, we all stood watching, silent. Despite never having met this man in our lives, we all felt his loss deeply through Hask. It was strange to see strength from a man who was clearly broken.It took him a long time to speak."Aldric Fenn was a good man. A good Janitor. I met him before I retired from adventuring. My party, the Strange Brigade, fought off a group of vampires that had escaped from the Black Moon Dungeon and attacked his village. Most of the villagers were killed in the attack, the rest died from their wounds later. He was the only one left, just a kid. I got him to safety, but he decided he owed me a life debt. Followed me on my adventures like a lost puppy. I taught him to fight."I was the only one of the four of us who wasn't crying while listening to him. I wish I had been able to cry. I felt the pain, but couldn't let it out. Hask's voice carried a sorrow that only I knew how deep it went. He had undoubtedly had to do this exact thing many, many times."When I retired and became a Janitor, he left the Brigade with me. I watched him get old. Human lives are too short and the Guild wanted to boot him when he aged out, and he fought it. I convinced them to give him an easy job and they put him out here. Neither of us loved the decision, but he decided to be happy with it. I came to visit him a lot. But not in the last year."I could tell immediately something that made everything much harder: Hask blamed himself. Had Fenn retired, he would have likely died peacefully in a home in Moorhaven. Instead, he met an unnecessary and violent death at the hands of monsters. It was Hask's intervention that put him in that position.
Yet another pain for a man who was already enduring more than just about anybody else.
We stayed with him until the body had been consumed and the flames died down to embers. We extinguished it with swamp water as the sun was going down.Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.We had barely exchanged a single word all day. Eventually, Hask turned to us, his face a mask."Let's get back."
We were summoned to the Guildmaster's office the next afternoon, which didn't leave much time for anything to settle. I wasn't sure anything would have settled given a year. Hask warned us to let him do all the talking, no matter what. We complied, sitting silently in high-backed, cushioned chairs that we were thoroughly unable to enjoy.He offered us drinks before he offered us anything else. That told me most of what I needed to know about how this meeting was going to go.
Osric Wallen's office had a decanter of something amber and expensive already poured into four glasses by the time we sat down, arranged on a side table like he'd been expecting exactly this many people and exactly this occasion. I understood, distantly, that this was meant as a kindness. It landed as something closer to an insult.Wallen was a tall man, silver-haired, dressed in the kind of understated finery that told you he'd stopped needing to impress anyone decades ago. When he had sat and made himself comfortable, which took a frustrating amount of time, he folded his hands on the desk and looked at Hask with an expression that was trying, visibly, to be sympathetic.
"Foreman. I want to start by saying the Guild grieves the loss of Aldric Fenn. He served faithfully for a very long time."
Hask said nothing. His glass sat in his hand but remained untouched.
"Now." Wallen opened a folder on his desk — our report, I assumed, already transcribed and filed with the kind of speed that told me someone had worked through the night on it. "Your account raises some concerns."
"Concerns," Hask repeated. Flat.
"The mana signature you've described. The reset failures. The — " he glanced down, checking his own notes, " — decimation, as Miss Veyne so colorfully put it." He looked up. "I had our classification office review it this morning."
"And?"
Wallen folded his hands again.
"They couldn't produce a rating."
The room was quiet for a moment.
"There isn't a category for what you're describing. Grimwater Swamp is on record as Class One. Every criterion we have for reassessment assumes a dungeon behaving according to known parameters — a Boss, a Core, a predictable reset. What you've described doesn't fit any of that. And all of this happened outside of the dungeon's actual border. The office's official position is that they require further data before they can assign a revised classification."
"Further data," I said, before I could stop myself.
Wallen's eyes moved to me, mildly surprised that I'd spoken at all.
"Yes."
"A man died getting you the data you already have."
Hask's hand found my shoulder. A warning, not unkind. I stopped talking.
Wallen didn't seem offended. If anything, he looked faintly sympathetic, which was somehow worse.
"I understand the frustration. But the Guild operates on established procedure for good reason. Foreman, you have offered the administration some…strong encouragement…on the matter of a joint task force of adventurers and Janitors to clear the dungeon and diagnose it.As he spoke, I could only imagine what Wallen meant by "strong encouragement". I was thoroughly convinced that Hask's brand of controlled fury could move a mountain if he didn't like where it was.After conversing with the Adventurers Guild, we cannot commit Guild resources to an unclassified threat without proper —"
"You're going to commit them," Hask said.
It wasn't a question.
Wallen paused.
"Foreman, I understand your personal stake in this, but —"
"You're going to commit them," Hask said again, "because I'm going to spend the rest of today making sure every person in this building understands exactly what happens when a fifteen-year posting gets forgotten about for twelve months. And you're going to want that conversation to end with me satisfied rather than not."
The silence that followed had a different quality than the one before it.
Wallen looked at Hask for a long moment. Then, carefully, he closed the folder.
"I'll see what…'strong encouragement' I can offer the assessment board."
Hask's grip on his glass tightened.
The glass didn't so much shatter as simply give up being a glass, fine shards scattering across the desk and Hask's own knuckles, a thin line of blood already welling up between two of them.
"My apologies," Hask said, in a voice that suggested he was not, in fact, sorry.
Wallen didn't flinch. I got the sense he'd been threatened much more overtly before, or had simply decided that pretending that it was a small matter was the most efficient path forward.
"Someone will bring a cloth," he said, and reached for a small bell on his desk.
A young clerk appeared almost instantly, as though he'd been waiting outside the door for exactly this kind of summons. He cleaned the glass and the blood with brisk, practiced efficiency, said nothing about either, and left again just as quickly.
Wallen resumed as though nothing had happened.
"I'll have the classification office draft an emergency joint operation order. Given the circumstances, I believe Silver Fang will be amenable to accompanying your team for a full clearing operation. Varkas has expressed —" a small pause, the first hesitation I'd seen from him " — interest in the matter."
I wondered, briefly, what that interest actually looked like from the inside. I decided I didn't want to know yet.
"When?" Hask asked coldly.
"Three days. That should allow time for your team to recover and for the operation to be properly staffed."
"Two."
Wallen considered him for a moment, then nodded once.
"Two."
He closed the folder fully this time, squaring its edges against the desk with the particular satisfaction of a man returning to order after an unpleasant interruption.
"Is there anything else?"
Nobody answered.
"Then I believe we're finished here. Again — my sincerest condolences, Foreman."
Hask stood. The rest of us followed. Nobody touched the drinks.Kael opened his mouth to say something but Hask stopped him."Not here. Scry spell."
He and I were the only ones not visibly startled by that.
We walked out through the Guild Hall's upper corridor in silence, past portraits of foremen and guildmasters who had presumably sat in that same office making the same kinds of decisions for centuries, and none of us said anything until we were well clear of the Guild Hall.
Tessa was the first to speak, once we were outside.
"Two days."
"Two days," Hask confirmed.
"Is that enough?"
He didn't answer that either. He just kept walking, his knuckles still faintly stained, toward whatever came next.