"Wow…" The one word carried a lot of weight in Kael's voice."I'm really sorry, Kael. I really am. Things are getting dangerous. Hask asked me to help him protect you guys, and I really did feel like telling you any of this would drag you into it."Kael's brow furrowed. "We're already in it, you ass. We just didn't know it. You understand how much more dangerous that is for us, right?"I felt a pang of guilt. "Yeah…yeah I do. Guess I didn't think of it that way.""Guess you didn't."I watched his jaw twitch. "Did you say Hask is already in on this?""I am." The Foreman's voice came from the other side of the bars.We both jumped. Hask stood behind the girls, watching us intently. I had no idea how long he had been there.Kael's look of frustration returned. "Why didn't you say anything?""The dungeon situation has a lot of moving parts. I wanted to get a better picture before I let you all in." Hask's voice had a somber tone, as though he too was having regrets."Then why does Lorne get to know?!" Kael's voice rose slightly.Hask grunted. "Because he got nosy on his own and then found good intel.""And you knew about his Skills too? His past?""I know about as much as you do. But that ain't my place to tell you. It's his."Kael fumed silently.Tessa finally spoke. "Don't be too mad at Lorne, Kael. He made mistakes. We all do.""They're pretty damn big mistakes, Tessa.""Big ones, sure — but you know how this works. It's like your inventions. One little thing goes wrong, and you don't catch it right away, and then that wrong thing makes the next thing harder to fix, and then that makes the next thing worse, and by the time anyone notices, it's not one small problem anymore, it's ten problems standing on each other's shoulders. He didn't wake up one day and decide to lie to all of us.""Sometimes a secret gets so big, you feel like letting someone in on it would destroy them." Alara's voice was quiet. So quiet it was painful to hear.Kael stood up from the floor and began to pace. "Aren't you guys pissed at him?"Tessa frowned. "Well…I'm not thrilled. But Kael…it's Lorne. Our Lorne. Think about everything we've been through. Everything he's done for us. Everything he has trusted us with – including his life, mind you – that makes our team kick so much ass.""We have to trust each other," Alara added simply. "I'm unhappy with him, but Lorne wouldn't let anything bad happen to us. I believe that."As I sat there, listening to them come to my defense after hearing everything, knowing all of the lies and the hiding, I felt overcome by something I wasn't particularly familiar with. I felt tears well up in my eyes and blinked them away quickly. My chest ached.Kael's hands, which had been clenched into tight fists, relaxed. He fixed me with an exhausted stare.He sighed. "I'm beyond pissed at you for hiding all of that…but I think I understand why you did. I didn't expect it to go so deep."I fidgeted, not knowing what to say.Hask knew. "Lorne did the best he could, messing up royally the entire time," he sighed, "but the same goes for me. I should've let you kids in sooner. That was my failure as a leader."Tessa hugged her uncle tightly. "Just stop hiding. Let us help."Hask nodded. "You lot are in on this, starting now. We'll have a proper discussion when we get home. For now…" He tapped the bars. "Let's finish the dungeon."Kael went back to the trap mechanism and lifted the bars. Tessa rushed to him and hugged him tightly. He scrubbed at his eyes with his sleeve before returning the embrace. When she broke free, she ran to me, where I still sat on the floor, and she kissed me for a long moment. "I love you, Trouble. But if you ever hide anything like this again, I'll punch you in the balls. I have more access to them now."I laughed, only a little nervously. "I love you too, Red."
The rest of the job and the Core reset was easy. Routine. No Boss respawn (I was glad. It was a nasty-looking trio of ogres that I wouldn't have relished tangling with). We were all exhausted and after everything that had happened, we could not have been happier to hear the disembodied voice of the Core counting down to the warp-out.The ride home was somewhat awkward. Nobody quite knew what to do with the silence that followed a conversation like the one we had all just had. We'd all said the important things already, back in that treasury with the bars still down, and now there wasn't much left except the long, jolting ride back to Moorhaven and the discomfort of sitting across from people who now knew things about you that you'd spent a very long time making sure nobody did.
Tessa had curled up against my side almost immediately, which helped. Alara sat across from us, quiet, watching the countryside go by with an expression I couldn't quite read — thoughtful, maybe, or just the kind of tired you feel after holding a lot of space for other people.
Kael sat apart from the rest of us, arms crossed, staring at nothing in particular. Not hostile anymore. Just processing, the way he processed everything, by going somewhere quiet inside his own head and turning it over until it made sense.
Hask drove. He hadn't said much since the dungeon, which was fairly standard for him, except that today it felt like a poignant kind of silence rather than his usual economy of words.
"You okay?" Tessa asked eventually, her voice pitched low, just for me.
"I don't know yet."
"That's honest."
"I'm trying that. Honesty. New hobby."
She smiled, small and a little sad, and squeezed my hand.
It was Kael who finally broke the silence properly, somewhere around the halfway point, his voice startling me slightly after so long without it.
"You've got three skills now."
I looked over at him. "What?"
"On your console. Back in the treasury, when you showed me — I wasn't really looking at the array itself, I was listening to what you were saying. But I noticed it. There were three. You only mentioned two."
Something cold moved through my chest.
"Console," I said quietly.My skill array appeared as it always did, the shimmering display hovering above my hand."NAME: LORNE CALLISTERAGE: 19GENDER: MALEPLACE OF ORIGIN: UNKNOWNCUSTODIAL DESIGNATION: FRONTLINERThis novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.SKILLS:-MOP PROFICIENCY I-SHADOW ART: NIGHT STEP IV-SHADOW ART: THREAT ASSESSMENT III"I noticed that "Mop Proficiency" had almost faded entirely. Beneath Threat Assessment was a new line I hadn't noticed when I showed Kael my Console."Sentinel Art," I read aloud. "Interpose One"
"That's not one of your others," Kael said, leaning forward slightly despite himself, old habits winning out over whatever was still unresolved between us. "Different classification entirely. What's it do?"
"I don't know. I've never used it. I don't even know when it—"
I stopped.
I was staring at the top of the display, at the one line that had never changed, not once, not in over a year of checking this exact console after every job, every close call, every strange new thing my body apparently knew how to do without asking permission first.
NAME: LORNE CALLISTER.
Except it wasn't sitting still anymore. The letters held for a second, solid and certain, and then flickered — barely, just a fraction of an instant, like a candle catching a draft — before settling back into themselves exactly as they'd always been.
I blinked. It happened again.
"Did you see that?"
Tessa leaned forward, squinting at the display. "See what?"
"My name. It's—"
It flickered again while I was saying it, and this time Tessa caught it too, her breath catching audibly beside me.
"It did something," she said. "It definitely did something."
Kael was very still, watching the display with the intensity he gave any mechanism behaving in a way he couldn't immediately explain.
"Has it done that before?"
"No." My voice came out quieter than I meant it to. "Never. Not once."I had known from my conversation with Hask that my entire console could have been falsified, including my name, but it had just been a theory. Now that theory had more weight than I wanted.
Hask's eyes found mine in the small mirror mounted above the driver's bench, and for just a moment, before he looked back at the road, I saw something there I didn't have a name for.
Concern, maybe.
Or recognition.I gulped and looked at the others. "Tomorrow…" I started slowly. "I'm going to go see Stevie."Kael glanced at me, with no small amount of suspicion. "You're taking the job?"I nodded. "Yeah. And I'm going to need you guys to help me."Tessa beamed and kissed me on the cheek. "Like you could do it without us."Alara smirked and said nothing.Kael fixed me with a deadly serious expression. "I'm still angry at you. But I bet this LeGrange guy is gonna have traps."I nodded, unable to express the knot of emotions that sat in my stomach."Tomorrow."
Hask caught me in the corridor just as I was pulling on my coat, the Tangle already sitting heavy in my thoughts. I'd told the team I was going. They had refused to stay behind. I'd hoped that wouldn't complicate things, but I wasn't going to say no to them being there. I was just waiting for them.
"Callister. Before you head out."
"Something wrong?" I asked.
"No." He said it plainly, but I knew a classic Hask understatement when I heard it. "Come with me a minute. Won't take long."
I followed him through the guild hall, past the corridors I knew well, into a wing I'd never actually had reason to enter — narrower halls, quieter, the kind of space that clearly belonged to someone who valued privacy over comfort. He stopped at a plain door, unremarkable except for the fact that I was overwhelmed with curiosity about it.
He opened it and stepped inside without ceremony.
Hask's quarters were smaller than I expected, and sparser — a bed, a writing desk, a single chair, nothing on the walls except a worn tapestry that looked older than the building itself. The whole room felt like a place someone had lived in for a very long time without ever quite letting it become home.
At the foot of the bed sat a wooden chest, iron-banded, the kind of thing built to survive centuries rather than decades.
Hask knelt beside it and opened the lid."I'm going to give you something."
I saw, in the brief moment before he started moving things aside, a scattering of items that clearly hadn't been touched in a long time — a folded cloak, a few scrolls, and, resting near the top, a mace. Simple, unadorned, the kind of weapon a healer might carry more out of necessity than preference. Something about the careful way it had been placed, and the layer of dust that had settled undisturbed around it, told me exactly whose it had been before I could ask.
I didn't ask.
Hask reached past it without comment and lifted out a cloth-wrapped bundle instead.
"No one's touched these in a very long time."
He unwrapped the cloth slowly, carefully; reverently.
The daggers underneath were dark — a deep, matte grey-black that seemed to swallow the lamplight rather than catch it, twin blades with an asymmetrical, jagged edge running along the spine of each one, like something that had been carved rather than forged. Simple wrapped grips, worn smooth by a hand that wasn't mine.
"These were Delvin's," Hask said.
"Delvin?"
"Thunder Hawk's rogue. Before Arren. Before any of the ones you'd have heard of." He turned one of the blades over in his hand, studying it the way you study something you haven't looked at directly in a very long time. "Fast. Quiet. Damn near impossible to hit if he didn't want to be hit. Used to say a good blade shouldn't need to shine. Just needed to work."
I didn't move. I wasn't sure I was supposed to yet.
"He died in the same dungeon as the rest of them. Same job that took Ilysa." His voice didn't change registers saying her name, but something in his hands went very still for a moment before he continued. "These went dormant after. Whatever made them special died with him. Been sitting in this chest ever since, waiting on someone worth handing them to."
He held them out to me, hilt first, both at once.
"You're a janitor. Ain't no mistakin' that." His eyes held mine, steady, the way they did when he meant something all the way down. "But you're also more. And you need something that suits that."
I reached out and took them.
They were lighter than I expected. Perfectly balanced, like they'd been made for a hand exactly my size, even though I knew for a fact they hadn't been. Before I could even fully register that I was holding them, my fingers spun them with a skill I didn't know I possessed. The flitted around my hands, rolling over the back of my fingers, before the grips settled firmly back into my palms."Looks like they suit you just fine."I was overwhelmed with emotions, among them, guilt. "Foreman…I can't accept these.""And why not?"I felt my voice break slightly as I answered. "After all this. After everything I've put the team through…these are a hero's blades. I'm not a hero."Hask chuffed in mild amusement, gazing fondly at the weapons in my hands. "Delvin Lightstep wasn't a hero. He was a vicious drunk and an insufferable playboy. Knew where every brothel on the continent was and was on a first name basis with all of them."He looked back at me, gaze intense. "But he was, at his core, a damn good man. Cared about people. Always tried to do the right thing – fucked it up constantly, but always tried – and that part sounds like someone I know."I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. "As for what you did…Kael's pissed at you, sure. But that's the thing about family, Callister. You watch the people you love make stupid mistakes and you choose to love them anyway. I ain't giving you these because you 'deserve' them, or are 'worthy' of them. I'm giving them to you because they belong with you. You're gonna take those daggers, and you're gonna use 'em. You're gonna use 'em to protect your family. And possibly more than just them."I blinked back tears yet again, words still failing me."Gotta get new sheaths for 'em. The ones they had rotted two hundred years ago."I gave a short, choked laugh."We did just get paid for the Chattering Keep. I'll go buy some."
"You do that."