I was happy, for a little while.
I didn't know yet how little a while that was going to be.
It had been five months since Grimwater. Five months of routine jobs, quiet evenings, and the strange, unfamiliar experience of days that ended the same way they started — without anyone almost dying. I'd stopped flinching at loud noises somewhere around month three. By month four I'd started sleeping through the night again.
Somewhere in there, without really noticing it happen, I realized I'd been at the Guild for over a year.
A year. I sat with that thought longer than it probably deserved. Over a year of mop handles and cleaning supplies and Hask's fists finding my ribs and Tessa's laugh carrying through every hallway she walked down. Over a year since I'd woken up in a bed I didn't recognize with a name I couldn't confirm was mine, and now here I was, comfortable enough in my own skin that I'd started taking mornings like this one for granted.
This morning it felt like the fist to the ribs.
Hask came at me low, the same feint he'd used a hundred times before, and for the first time in as many attempts, I caught it. I turned the angle, drove my mop into his side, and felt him actually grunt.
That was three today. Three real hits, landed clean, in a single session. A year ago that number would have been zero, and I would have counted myself lucky just to still be standing.But now, with the help of my Skills – Night Step and Threat Assessment – I was faster, more evasive, and was learning to think on my feet in ways I'd never imagined I could.
"Good," Hask grunted approvingly.Despite the victory of landing strikes on him, the aching of my bones and the angry bruises I was collecting all over reminded me that I was still hopelessly outclassed. For now.I made a face. "Ready to call it?"Hask's response was to spin and drive an elbow into my chest, sending me sprawling."Yeah. Good work today."I lay in the dirt for a moment, staring up at the false blue sky, catching my breath.
"You're getting predictable with that elbow, you know."
"Only when you get cocky enough to ask if we're done."
He extended a hand and pulled me up like I weighed nothing. I rolled my shoulder, testing it, and found the whole thing sore rather than actually damaged, which these days counted as a good outcome.
"You've been using the Skills more," Hask said. Not a question.
"Feels less like cheating than it used to."
"It's not cheating. They're yours." He collected his mop, untangling a knot in the head out of old habit. "Only felt like cheating because you thought you had to earn it the hard way. Do it all alone."
I didn't have a response to that, so I didn't try to find one.
We walked toward the bleachers together, the morning still cool enough to be comfortable, the training yard's illusory sun doing its usual convincing impression of a real one."Heard from the Guildmaster's office yesterday," Hask said, in the tone he used when he was about to tell me something he found irritating and had decided to be calm about anyway. "Varkas got his formal reprimand. Letter and everything."
"That's something."
"It's nothing."
I waited. He didn't offer more right away, which was its own kind of answer.
"He still leads Silver Fang," Hask said finally. "Still gets asked his opinion first in every room. You don't discipline a horse by pulling steady on the lead. It'll test you. Figure out it's stronger. Stop listening entirely."
"So what do you do instead?"
"Jerk it. Sharp. Fast. Before it has time to find out how much strength it's actually got." He shouldered open the shed door. "Guild took months deciding on a letter. Gave him all the time in the world to feel out exactly how little weight was behind it."
"So nothing changed."
"Officially, plenty changed." He settled down onto one of the wooden benches. "Practically? No."
I pondered my response. "Is he at least being less of an asshole?"Hask snorted derisively. "Hardly. He's leaving us alone for now, but he's back to being surrounded by yuppies who treat him like a god. He'll be back to normal in no time."
I thought about Alara — not fully open, not fully closed either, somewhere in the slow work of figuring out which one she was allowed to be. She laughed sometimes now – actually laughed – and came with us to the Final Yak more often than not, and none of that meant the anger or the fear had gone anywhere. It just meant she'd found room to carry both.
"You still mad about it?"
Hask considered that.
"Every day."
He didn't say anything else. He didn't need to.We sat there for a while in the kind of quiet that didn't need filling.
"Kael still working on SCRUB?"
"Every spare hour he's got." I picked at a splinter in the bench. "Hasn't gotten him talking again. Says he's close. He's said that for two months."
"He'll get there."
"I know." I did, mostly. "It's just strange. Guild hall doesn't feel quite right with him quiet."
Hask grunted in agreement and said nothing further, which was as close as he ever came to admitting something bothered him too."You gone to see Nicks, yet?"His question didn't surprise me; I'd been thinking about the Silk Runners and their mysterious job a lot. They wanted me to steal something. Not only that, but they wanted me to steal from the man who was apparently orchestrating all of the dungeon chaos: Eversley LeGrange. It sounded insane, but Stevie had made it clear she knew things about me. Who I was before I woke up in Stonewall. And the job was how I got that information."I haven't," I responded reluctantly."Should do that soon. Don't want her to pull the offer off the table.""I know." I stood, testing my ribs one more time, and found them tender but functional.
"Same time tomorrow?"
"Same time tomorrow." He was on his feet, stretching. "Go find your girl. Tell Tessa I said hello."
I felt my ears go warm, which happened less than it used to but apparently hadn't stopped happening entirely.
"Will do."
By the time I made it to her room, Tessa had already left the door unlocked, which had stopped meaning anything specific months ago and had just become the way things were now.
"Trouble," she called out, not looking up from whatever she was doing at her workbench. "You're late."
"I was getting my ass handed to me. In your uncle's defense, I landed three hits today."
That got her attention. She spun on her stool, eyes wide. "Three?! Real ones?"
"Real ones."
She made a sound somewhere between a cheer and a squeal and abandoned whatever concoction she'd been mixing to cross the room and throw her arms around my waist. I'd gotten used to the unique quality of a Tessa hug — full commitment, no half measures — and I wrapped my arms around her without hesitation.
"I'm so proud of you," she said into my chest. "You're gonna beat him someday. I can feel it."
"Let's not get ahead of ourselves."
"I'm not! I'm exactly the right amount ahead of ourselves." She pulled back, grinning up at me, a smudge of something green on her cheek that I decided not to mention yet. "How are the ribs?"
"Surviving."
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
"Want me to look at them?"
"I want you to tell me what you're making that smells like that."
She brightened immediately, already towing me back toward the workbench by the hand. "Oh! Okay, so, this is a stabilizing agent for—"
She launched into an explanation I only understood about half of, the words tumbling over each other the way they always did when she was excited about something, and I let myself just listen, not for the content exactly, just for the sound of her voice filling up the room.
I realized, somewhere in the middle of it, that I hadn't thought about the Silk Runners once since I'd walked in.
That felt like its own small miracle.
"—and that's basically it," she finished, looking immensely pleased with herself. "What do you think?"
"I think you're incredible and I understood maybe forty percent of that."
"That's a passing grade around here." She bumped her shoulder against my arm. "I don't grade on a curve for anyone but you."
"High honors, Red."
"The highest."
I watched her turn back to her work, humming something tuneless under her breath, completely at ease in a way that still occasionally caught me off guard — that this was just normal now, that I got to have this, that somewhere along the way she'd stopped being something new and started being something like home.
I didn't say any of that out loud. I wasn't sure I had the words for it yet.
Instead I just stayed, and watched her work, and let the morning be exactly as uncomplicated as it was.
The library felt different without Alben in it — quieter in a way that had nothing to do with volume, like a room that had temporarily forgotten its own purpose. He was off cataloguing something in another wing, according to the note taped to his desk, and wouldn't be back until evening.
Alara was there anyway, which had become something of a habit for both of us since Alben started disappearing for hours at a time chasing whatever new obsession had taken hold of him that month.
She was reading when I found her, which wasn't unusual. What was unusual was the letter sitting unopened beside her, like she'd been staring at it longer than she'd been staring at her book.
I sat across from her. "Hey."She looked up quietly from whatever page she was reading. "Hey.""Another letter from Veyla?" I asked, gesturing to the envelope on the table.She shook her head. "No. Ever since the hearing, Varkas lets her talk to me.""That's amazing!""It is…but there's still a lot that we have to work through." Her expression became wistful for a moment.
"So what's the letter then?"She shrugged. "Probably more correspondence from the Enclave.""What do they want?" I queried, puzzled."They want to know about the Core in the Grimwater Swamp," she said simply, her voice somewhat flat. I smirked. "So now they come crawling to you for answers after what happened.""It's not funny," she said, frowning. "What happened in that dungeon has never happened before. The Enclave is stumped. Their reaching out to me is a sign that they're desperate."I let that sink in for a moment before speaking again. "What does that mean for you?"She shrugged. "Could be a bargaining chip.""You mean…" I spoke slowly, wanting to find the correct words. "You want to try to go back to them?"She gave a short laugh. "Not a chance. The chip would be for Hask. I don't know the details, but I know the two of you are digging into the core situation."I went red in the face. "That obvious?""No, I'm just really smart.""True…I'm sorry I haven't told you anything."She shook her head. "Don't be. I feel like it's probably pretty dangerous. I trust you to tell me when the time comes."
"You'd tell me too, right?" I asked. "If something happened. If you needed help with any of this."
She was quiet for a moment, turning the unopened letter over once in her hands.
"I don't know yet," she said finally. "That's the honest answer. I want to say yes. I'm still learning what yes actually looks like, day to day."
"That's fair."
"It's not fair. It's just true." She set the letter down. "I've gotten used to doing the emotional things alone."
I understood that better than I probably should have. I watched her closely as she paused, running her finger contemplatively over the rim of the tea cup. After everything that had happened to her, her focus, and her dry wit under pressure made me admire her. I realized I was staring a bit too hard and I had to look away for a moment.
"Well." I nudged her book with one finger. "For what it's worth — I'm around when you're ready.
Something crossed her face that wasn't quite a smile, but was close enough to count.
"Noted."
She picked the letter back up, finally breaking the seal, and I watched her expression shift into something more focused as she read — the particular sharpness she used to wear all the time, back before I knew what it was covering.
"Well," she said after a moment, scanning the page. "They're desperate. This is genuinely fascinating, and they have no idea what they're looking at."
"You going to help them?"
She considered it.
"I'm going to make them ask nicely first."
I laughed — a real one, unplanned. "That's very petty of you."
"I've earned petty." She folded the letter and tucked it into her book like a bookmark. "I'll answer it tonight. Properly. It's an interesting problem, whatever else it is."
"You miss it. The work."
"Sometimes." She said it simply, without drama. "Not the people who made me leave it. But the actual work, yes. Sometimes."
I didn't push further. Some things you let sit exactly where they landed.
___________________________________________________________________________
I found Kael in our dormitory that evening, hunched over his desk, a single lantern burning low beside a field of scattered components. SCRUB's outer casing sat open in front of him, wires and small brass fittings exposed where his chest plate used to be, two legs reattached but the other two still lying disconnected off to the side like something waiting to be finished. He looked less like a wreck than he had five months ago — the dents mostly hammered out, most of his frame reassembled — but he sat there dark and silent, no boop or beep, no small blinking light behind his optic lens. Progress, but not yet anything you could call alive.
"Any progress?" I asked, the same question I asked most days, already half-expecting the same answer."Actually — yeah." He didn't look up, but something in his voice had more energy than it had in weeks. "I think I finally cracked the resonance matrix."
"The what?"
"The resonance matrix. It's — okay, so SCRUB's consciousness isn't stored in one place. It's not like a book you can just read. It's distributed across a lattice of memory crystals, and each one only holds a fragment, and the fragments only make sense in relation to each other, the same way a single word doesn't mean anything without the sentence around it." He held up a small, faintly glowing shard between two fingers, no bigger than a fingernail. "Problem is, when the Boss smashed him into that boulder, it didn't just break his body. It fractured the lattice. Scrambled the alignment. I've had all the pieces this whole time — I just couldn't get them talking to each other again."
"And now you can?"
"Now I think I can." He set the shard down with careful reverence. "I've been running a thaumic resonance cascade through the array — basically feeding a small, steady pulse of raw mana through each crystal in sequence, trying to get them to re-synchronize their vibrational frequency. Like retuning instruments that used to be in the same key and drifted apart."
"And that brings him back?"
"In theory, once every crystal's oscillating at the same frequency again, the lattice should reform. Consciousness isn't really data, not the way a book is data. It's pattern. If I can restore the pattern, everything that was him should just... slot back into place." He rubbed his eyes, exhausted. "I've gotten four of the seven crystals synced tonight. Three more and I think—"
He stopped himself before finishing the sentence, like saying it out loud might jinx it.
"I think we might actually get him back."
He was quiet for a moment, turning one of the still-dark crystals over in his fingers.
"Once he's back online, I'll need to go through his memory logs properly. Piece by piece. Make sure nothing else got scrambled in the fall — dates, locations, all of it. Could take a while." He said it like a technical afterthought, already half-focused on the next crystal in the sequence. "But it'll be worth it. I want him back exactly the way he was."
I nodded. "I'm surprised it took you this long.""Agreed," he sighed. "But with the supply shortage, getting the materials I need has been rough going.""Supply shortage?""Ever since Grimwater, all the guilds have been funneling every gold piece and every bit of raw material into trying to suppress the dungeon core. That screws up infrastructure elsewhere. Supply chains and whatnot."That made sense. "I guess I haven't been keeping up on current affairs very well."A clipped chuckle from Kael. "You've been busy making out with Tessa."I felt my face go beet red. "I suppose so."
Kael set the shard down and stretched, his spine popping audibly enough that I winced on his behalf.
"That's enough for tonight," he said, more to himself than to me. "Crystals need to rest between cycles anyway. Push too hard, too fast, and you get bleed-through — fragments overlapping wrong. Learned that the hard way in week two."
He covered SCRUB's open chassis with a soft cloth, the same careful motion every night, like tucking someone in.
"Four down. Three to go."
"You'll get there."
"I know." He said it plainly, without needing to convince either of us. "Just a matter of time now."
He blew out the lantern, and the room went dark except for the faint, residual glow of the four synced crystals, pulsing gently in unison on his desk — a small, patient rhythm, like something breathing very slowly in its sleep.
I lay back on my own bed and listened to it for a while before I fell asleep."Earplugs, please.""Yep."
It was, all things considered, a good day.