One day, Gothica was sitting in front of the door to Cormeng’s shop, staring out the window. It showed the street outside where he lived, mostly. But for a moment, when people left, she could see Mudhole.

Miserable. Rain again, that damn muck, and a rising area where they were building what would be the City Hall of the town. Just flickers. Gothica was a Level 27 [Midnight Goth] these days, but she was also something else.

A [Window Watcher]. Level 4. She had gotten it in Cormeng’s, watching people go by. Staring at her friend’s cities. At all the places she would probably never be allowed to go.

One of her only Skills was [A Longer Glimpse]. So she could see a bit more into that second. A bit more of Mudhole. Ramshackle housing, a bit improved with Doren’s materials. People in more organized lines, fishing, hauling catches up. A bit less starved, maybe. A crude rope pulley system that let people haul goods across the boardwalk by pulling on wet ropes.

Still terribly shitty compared to Goblinhome—literally, they had no latrines. But Goblins might have thought it a good home.

Gothica knew she wasn’t very smart. Chieftain Rags was always telling her she had to be better. She expected Gothica to be something. That was the scary part. Gothica was just someone who liked being spooky, in touch with her darkness. Saying ‘up yours’ to important people. But sometimes she and Redscar and the others watched her like—like they knew something.

Mrsha did too, but Gothica was afraid of her. She wasn’t sure she could be that person. Sometimes, the other [Goths] asked her questions about whether they’d ever fit in, what to do when people were mean to them, and Gothica never knew if she said the right things.

She was afraid of her class. Of letting it down. And she knew she was a silly Goblin. But even she got things.

It was today. What day? Gothica didn’t know, the summer. What was she, a calendar person? It was bright and sunny in the Unseen Empire. Raining slightly in the mudflats. Today, at exactly this hour, Gothica realized it.

Before anyone else. She thought even Chieftain Rags didn’t get it. Even Shaman Theikha, for all her big smarts, hadn’t quite gotten it. But she, Gothica…she gazed at a Human man who was a bit flabby.

In a respectable Goblin way that said he had enough to eat to get fat. And he was balding, but that was cool; Goblins didn’t really lose hair. You had to respect someone who got old enough to lose it. A bit droopy, a bit clumsy, not the sharpest bean in the knife drawer, like her.

But today, she saw Shopkeeper Doren, the Rulebreaker, owner of Cormeng’s Magical Emporium of Antiquities and Trinkets, and realized one of the most important Humans in Izril was her friend.

He didn’t even know it. He was so good, beyond even Erin, because he fooled himself. It had been waiting to come out of him. For forty years—he’d hidden it. Until now.

He was running about the store, laughing, holding his back, his usually-dour or blank face lit up with excitement. Eyes shining with magic. Real magic.

Here, in the New Lands, where Gothica could feel her own mana pool diminishing with each passing breath. But Cormeng’s descendant didn’t even seem to realize it was there. When he spoke, it was the language of magic. Words not even [Mages] knew. Not Latin, but something else.

And…he was chasing a little Drake girl around the shop. She was giggling like a kid. Laughing, and no one in Mudhole had ever heard her laugh. Eyes shining as she ran, dodging around him, weaving through the shelves of things meant to help people, that he bought and stocked without ever asking for a compliment.

Two steps—and when he was about to catch her, she ran up onto a third step that hadn’t been there before. A glowing, blue circle of light. It seemed to splash, as if Silppie’s foot were a raindrop landing on water, and she ran higher.

“Careful, careful! Remember, rateík, calcne, don’t stop chanting!”

“Ra-teík, calc-ne, oothün—”

Each word was like a tiny drumbeat. And the girl, with that flawless grace of children, was speaking perfectly on-beat. Each step carrying her on the magical platforms, around the shop, until she nearly bit her tongue. Then she shouted, and Doren dove to catch her, landing face-first on the floor…

Gothica caught Silppie on her aura. The shadows whirling to cushion the Drake girl’s fall. Then she was rolling around, eyes shining.

“I did it! I did it!”

“You did! Remember, it’s a secret. I—I have to teach you other spells! And get you more components. Why, why, you could run across the Mudflats with that! Cormeng said he once chased down a pirate ship with that spell!”

“It’s magic! Magic, Doren! How is it possible?”

He was wiping at his forehead as he got up, checking the door he’s sealed so no one could see him gifting the girl with magic. Gothica just watched him as his face lit up. Then fell a second.

“It’s possible because that’s how magic is, Silppie.”

“But no one can cast magic here unless they’re super [Mages], Doren. Alchemist potions don’t work, and artifacts fail…”

He sat down with her on the floor, and Doren gazed around his shop. There was a pride there Gothica had never seen.

“Well, Silppie, this is a secret, but I trust you. So I’m going to tell you something. [Mages] don’t know everything. My great ancestor, Cormeng, found a magic all of his own. And it’s…wonderful. It’s not perfect. He wasn’t perfect. But they should have respected him more. I should have.”

He was gazing down at his hands. Flexing them, and Gothica remembered him talking about his stupid family. His aunt who died of a heart attack which led him to inherit this place.

The only man in the entire world who knew this magic was sitting there. An [Archmage] of one. And why not call him that?

The world had plenty of damn [Archmages] as far as Gothica could tell. The Death of Magic was one, Archmage Eldavin was what everyone called a real one, Chieftain Rags said Az’kerash was still up and about. It felt like every other day someone pulled an [Archmage] out of the toilet.

But there was only one person who knew Cormeng’s magic, and he was right there. And he, like Erin, took a power so few had ever witnessed and gave it to those he found deserving.

“Remember, you have to be very secret, Silppie. I’ll teach you more spells. But promise?”

“I promise.”

He smiled at her, then noticed Gothica watching him.

“Gothica. You—would you like to learn a spell?”

“Me?”

“Only if you want to. I know you know darkness magic, and it’s probably so much better, but I…I should have studied more. I’m sure there are a few you could use. All his great magic is beyond me. I never studied. It’s so hard. But this?”

He was gazing into Mudhole. Gazing, and Gothica could imagine Silppie running across the muddy waters, leaving this hellhole behind. Doren whispered.

“I’ll give it out. It doesn’t cost much. I just need to buy some more reagents and make it easier to teach. It took a whole week, and Silppie was faster than I ever was. Then maybe…there’s so many spells that could be useful out there.”

Magic for the New Lands. Gothica just sat there. Later, she’d probably have to tell Chieftain Rags and stuff. And he’d be important and maybe be too busy to hang out with her. But she saw it and savored it.

She’d seen it first. Gothica was proud of that. Just her…and maybe bonus credits to Lieutenant Capsha. But that was mucky love stuff, and Gothica didn’t truck with that.

——

Doren was highly stressed after that, but Silppie didn’t tell anyone, and neither did Gothica, it seemed. He asked them to give him time to work on the spell and figure out Cormeng’s magic himself.

The thing was, Doren had never looked into battle casting or how to prepare a mobile version of the spell. He’d taken the lazy route like most of Cormeng’s descendants, and he could set up a pre-packaged, static spell, but now he was highly motivated to teach someone a better version.

“The simplest way will be to make a spellbook.”

“Wat.”

Gothica stopped sipping on a boba tea and eyed him. Doren explained.

“You see, it’s simple. You just make a contained magical vessel—it doesn’t have to be that advanced since it’s just the form of the spell. [Mage] spellbooks work the same way. Then you’d flip it open to the right page, activate it while chanting and using the components—”

“So an actual spellbook? That’s so…cool!”

Most [Mages] only used them as refreshers, notebooks, but Doren had read they had been used as spell foci before wands and staves became all the rage. He could just see it now. Flip a page open, grab components, and blam, spellcasting. You’d have to re-etch the rune each time you wanted to cast the spell so what did you do?

Have fifty copies of each spell ready to go. Immensely annoying, but then you could fire them off. True, it’d need a big spellbook for the multi-page runes…Doren bet Cormeng had used belt pouches and probably been able to grab what he needed on the fly. Activate multiple spells simultaneously? That’d give a traditional caster a nasty shock.

“It won’t beat traditional mage magic. Unless you’re being suppressed or there’s no magic about.”

“Yah, can’t imagine where that would come in handy.”

He just grinned at her. He felt like he was flying, over the moon. This would do it! This would save them!

…But what happened when he gave it to Thorssin or Hwalt and they told people where they’d gotten it from? Even if they didn’t, people would see it, and Lyonette had said they were noticing him.

His stomach hurt, but he knew he had to do it. This was his way of honoring Cormeng. This was his deed, the one they could punish him for, but would save Mudhole. Change the world.

“I always wanted to be this kind of person, you know. Someone grand and powerful. I dreamed of being a mage, actually. Of following Cormeng’s example. I even practiced. Then I tried to duel a Wistram [Mage]. Barely Level 15. He put me in the healer’s clinic for three weeks. I just wanted a shortcut, and I thought Cormeng had to have one to make up for not having levels. But that’s not what this is. It’s hard work. It’s just hard work and thinking differently, and what you get is something no one else has.”

He stared at his hands, wishing he’d known this forty years ago. Well, this was good enough. Gothica was just staring at him. Not sneering. He kept waiting for her to make fun of him, but she patted him on the arm.

“You’ll be really important. Then idiots will try to kidnap you. Don’t worry. I’ll shield you with my heart of immortal darkness. Promise.”

He smiled at her. For a moment, despite the stink of Mudhole, a glowfly on the back of his neck sucking up his sweat, it was perfect.

Then the door opened, and Thorssin burst into the room.

“Doren! They’re gone!”

The shopkeeper looked up, and Gothica sighed. For she could see it too.

——

Three events of great importance happened that day. The first was Mudhole in an uproar over the disappearance of six hunters.

Thorssin had seen it himself. They’d been combing the mudflats for larger fish, a kind of crawling catfish which was gross but plentiful in meat and could go above the water or in it.

“It was right across from where the water gets ultra deep. If we’re here, it’s sort of to the left and down—there’s these standing stones. I thought some of ‘em looked even like archways, but no one goes there because it’s so deep. I saw six of the [Hunters] chasing the fishcrawler onto the bank. Then one of ‘em stumbled into a stone archway, and they all—vanished.”

“Vanished? As in they were hit by a spell?”

“No, vanished like…like they were somewhere else. I swear I smelled something different.”

Doren was consulting his journals.

“When they vanished, did you feel nauseous? Did your ears pop?”

“Earholes, and no. I did feel ill, but it was more like, you know, when you miss a step? It was like that, but—”

“In reverse?”

Thorssin stopped. People were in Doren’s shop, gossiping, and apparently the MSF was cordoning off the site. Investigations were being launched by all parties. Lavroisse, everyone.

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

Doren lowered the journal, heart beating too fast.

“Because that’s the sign of a dimensional fold. Not teleportation. Teleportation is air displacement unless it’s done well. If you feel movement, it’s because you’re being shifted and you’re off the ground—but that’s only if you’re in it. It sounds like they activated a gateway. A real portal spell. It sounds…like they ran into the Crossroads of Izril.”

Rikka dropped the harpoon she was cleaning. Everyone, Silppie, Gothica, Hwalt, stared at him. Doren glanced around.

“It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“But—but that’s the <Heroic Quest> that [Innkeeper] posted! That’s not something we’d just find…why standing stones? How can magic work like that?”

“Maybe it spontaneously generated.”

More stares. Doren shrugged, self-conscious.

“That’s how it works. Space wrinkles, and the stones might have literally been yanked into position. If the Crossroads of Izril really are a complete subdimension, that kind of magic is a law that enforces itself on the world. It’s Tier 9 magic.”

“But the passphrase. Don’t you need that?”

Thorssin was grasping at the magical logic of it all, but Doren scratched at his chin.

“Not to open a gateway, necessarily. Unless they were locked to the Passphrase of Imlerith. It could be that’s for something inside the Crossroads of Izril. It might span the entirety of Izril.”

More stares. He held up the journal.

“Look, it’s one of the lost mysteries of Izril. My ancestor had notes on it. If it’s that…”

Then Mudhole had just found a way into one of the most important things in the New Lands. Everyone was abuzz with excitement. And worry; the hunters hadn’t been found, and the MSF was very, very reluctant to get near the gates. They were asking for volunteers to scout it out with ropes.

Thorssin and the others went back to see what was going on, and Doren’s own mind was spinning. He thought this was actually a good thing. Why, the news of the Crossroads might overshadow any odd magic. You could say it was from there. Or maybe it’d get Manus to fast-track Wyverns or a Courier over there.

He was just about to write a [Message] when he realized this might put him on The List for good. What if…he told Lady Rie? Or the Gnolls?

“Er, Cormeng’s. Open a door to the Meeting of Tribes.”

He muttered under his breath. He was about to get up and open the door to get someone’s attention—there was usually someone he could flag down—when the door sprang open.

Hrawr burst into the shop so fast he nearly knocked Doren over. He caught the man, patted him down, and then shook him.

“Doren! Dorendorendoren, how many have you got we’ll buy them all!”

“What? What? What?”

The man was so badly shaken—literally—he was insensible until a second Gnoll leapt in and hit Hrawr.

“You idiot, subtlety! Shopkeeper—is anyone around? Good.”

“They just left. To investigate the Crossroads of Izril. Possibly.”

Doren was pleased to see Hrawr’s jaw drop, but that still didn’t slow the two Gnolls’ roll. Svrei was the second Gnoll, and he had a wand at his side. He was one of the would-be [Mages] training in the Meeting of Tribes, and his fur was standing on end.

“Doren, we just found the most amazing—! You know those bugs, the ones you put in that lovely lantern?”

“Glowbugs? Sure. What about them?”

“They’re—get this, Doren. They’re filled with magic!”

Hrawr was grinning, leaping up and down. Svrei waited. Doren nodded.

“Right.”

The Gnoll threw up his paws.

“They’re more magical than Luminary Fireflies, Doren!”

“I know. Are they useful?”

The two Gnolls exchanged a glance. It occurred to Doren that they hadn’t known. It’d been as obvious as looking to him, but he’d assumed most [Alchemists] could do what Cormeng’s magic did on sight.

Another victory for old Cormeng. He wondered if the bugs would work in Cormeng’s magic, and his heart leapt as Svrei leaned over.

“Doren, we didn’t think the insects had that much magic in them! For the New Lands? Shaman Theikha had a hunch, and she’s having us test every bug. Everything from the ordinary ones on up. But these…Doren, they have so much natural light magic in them that the [Alchemists] think we can use them in countless potions and spells! One of the [Hunters] made a kind of paste and rubbed it on an arrow, and it’s so damn bright! If we concentrate the effect, we could make Flash Arrows or—”

“Or just see in the dark. One cub ate them, and now her pee glows.”

Hrawr put in. Doren blinked. That was pretty powerful. Normally, you didn’t manifest magical effects just from ingesting raw…

“So you want more?”

“We want all of it. And not just dead ones. We want to breed them, but we worry they need something magical in the New Lands. Can you get more? You said people catch them.”

Doren stared at them. Then he went into his back rooms. He came out with the gigantic jar of glowbugs, half still alive. Hrawr fainted into Svrei’s arms. The other Gnoll dropped him. The [Barbarian] leapt up with a grin.

“You’ll be rich, and we’ll have one of the first new great alchemical resources of the era!”

He reached for the jar, and Doren leaned back.

“Absolutely. How much?”

“Excuse me?”

“How much for it? You just told me it’s valuable. It seems to me I’m the only seller around and you really want it.”

The two Gnolls’ jaws dropped. But the shopkeeper was no [Innkeeper] who had no savvy for money. They began laughing, trying to grab the jar, and protesting they’d settle it later—then they ran to get a [Shaman].

Doren was beaming. He was wondering how to work with this—if he told Laniver, then Lavroisse would hoard the stuff. But he had to reward Silppie and get it somehow. Maybe say the lanterns were a huge hit…

More and more excitement. The Gnolls swept back in with a [Shaman] who kept hitting them for jacking up the prices. Doren negotiated hard, then let them have half the jar; the other half was going to Goblinhome. He was waiting for Gothica, who would probably hate this challenge to her authority of the night, when the door opened.

“Hello, Doren.”

Lieutenant Capsha appeared. She paused to wipe her boots and took off her helmet, but she didn’t immediately go over to the counter. She just stood there a second, breathing in and out. Then she walked over.

“Capsha, what a day, isn’t it? I just had some good news—er, just businesswise. How’s…?”

She leaned on the counter, resting her head on his shoulder. He jumped.

“Capsha?”

“I’m…sorry. It’s been a long day. The MSF was up all last night, and then we got word about the disappearances. I’m just—Ancestors.”

Her voice was a bit muffled. Then her head came up, and she was wiping at her grimy face. Rainwater was running down her scales, but she was smiling.

“They never promised us help. You know? Captain Cithoc was pulling all the strings, and I’m—I’m not really in Manus’ army, Doren. I—we weren’t telling the truth. We told everyone, Drakes especially, they were coming. But Manus said it was so far and they couldn’t commit. Same with the Merchant’s Guild. Merchant Lavroisse claimed they were on the way, but I don’t know if he was lying.”

“I…I see. But something’s changed?”

She just shook her head. Smiling as she cried.

“Not yet. But they’ve got to now. They’ve got to, Doren. It was just last night when we found it. In the dredging.”

“In the what? Oh, wait, you dug something up?”

She was nodding.

“We thought it was the sunken wagons at first. But it’s big. Way too big to be just the wagons. So we kept digging, and it was damned hard. We have to clear the muck and put down walls and…but we finally got a good look at it. It’s a huge structure, Doren. Something magical. We can tell it’s magic. Dead gods, there’s even cloth down there. It’s like the muck hasn’t touched it! It must have been on the seafloor! It could be from Tiernas!”

They’d found something under Mudhole. Something so important that Merchant Lavroisse wanted to cover it up, and the MSF was going to report it to Manus right away. Three huge events in a single day.

Capsha just kept leaning against Doren.

“I just…I want to get out of here. Leave and never come back. But this way at least it might be worth something. All the dying and suffering. Doren, don’t tell anyone or I’ll get in trouble. I just wanted—”

She leapt up and saluted when the door opened. Silppie ran in, and Doren beamed at her.

“Silppie! What’s new?”

The Drake girl halted and stared up at him. Her eyes were huge in her head, and her claws were trembling as they held her cloak. Doren’s smile faded, and Capsha focused. The girl spoke.

“They’re all dead. All six [Hunters].”

And then he felt the world begin to slip a bit.

——

Six [Hunters], varying species, four Drakes, one Gnoll, one Human. Each one killed in a moment. A blow from behind had snapped necks or broken backs.

The scout who’d gone into the portal had come back out moments later. They were shaken, Mudhole was shaken, and everyone was on high alert. There were no footprints nor signs of what had been there. But two details made Doren shiver.

“Their belt pouches were gone. Gone…and someone arranged them in a line. There was a word written in the ground. That’s what they said. We think it was a word. It looks like this.”

There was a copy floating around Mudhole. Doren peered at it. It could be…no, it looked like words. But no one knew what it was.

He…had some inkling, but had to show it to the Gnolls, then Gothica when they came by. It was an unsettling night despite the news about the glowbugs. And it was the Goblins who got back to him first.

Goblin memory. Gothica put something on the counter.

“This from Taganchiel. He says it probably accurate. Hurt his head.”

“What? What is it? This is nonsense.”

Gothica shrugged.

“That’s what I said. But he said it what it translates to. He sure it old Drake. Really old, like the kind they find in Liscor’s crypts.”

“The what?”

“Eh, too hard to explain. Old home. I knew it look familiar; they got other words like this. Anyways. This what it said.”

Doren lifted the paper and sounded the word out.

“Ma-ha-dak. That’s…is that a place? A name?”

Gothica didn’t know. The Gnolls came back with the exact same translation, but neither group’s living memory knew what it corresponded to. No Drake settlement. No person.

That was the first oddity. But there were answers to that. Just not the kind Doren liked.

——

He was preparing a few magical spells and teaching Silppie them in secret. She was a good student, and if she got them, he knew others would. Doren was still on the fence about teaching the others.

He wanted to, but there was a lot of attention on Mudhole right now. A lot. Still, he’d bought as many reagents as he could and had to fight some weird Gnoll [Alchemist] and a Stitch-girl in Pallass to get the supply. [Alchemists] were crazy.

Lieutenant Capsha and Laniver were regulars in his store these days. They were running [Messages] to their respective groups, the Merchant’s Guild and Lavroisse’s people and Manus. They were nominally enemies, but both seemed more interested in getting out of Mudhole, and the big discovery of the Crossroads of Izril and whatever they’d dredged up was their ticket.

“If only we’d found one. The damn Merchant’s Guild wants to know what we found. As if the Crossroads weren’t enough!”

Laniver complained loudly over some of Hwalt’s rum. The man was oddly generous today. Perhaps it was the hope in the camp—or the nerves of the Crossroads. Both were in plenty. Capsha was also drinking a shot and nodded.

“The same for Manus. But they want the Crossroads. I was just told we might get a Wyvern flight out…only, there are wild Wyverns and worse in the skies. Plus, now they’re telling us to keep this operationally secret! Secret from who?”

Suddenly, Mudhole got daily updates, and Doren kept getting encoded messages he didn’t know how to properly handle. Lady Rie was sending attractive young women to ask if he’d like to go with them to dinner…and the Gnolls and Goblins were cautiously sending their people around to take notes.

Actually, he’d had a number of Drakes and Humans in his store this morning who’d wanted to stick around. One had even tried to hide before he switched over to Mudhole.

The cat was out of the bag, but hopefully there was a giant pile of catnip that overshadowed Doren. Still, not all catnip was good in this analogy.

Doren had just handed over yet another black paper report Capsha was opening. When all correspondence was marked ‘top secret, do not open without maximum clearance, priority’, it all began to lose value. She was sighing as she got up to ferry this over to Captain Cithoc when she froze.

“That’s…”

“Are they actually flying over?”

Laniver’s head rose hopefully, but Capsha just studied the missive. She hesitated, then handed it to Doren. He blinked and then read it.

There were code words on top of the missive, the [Strategist] sending it, dates, and little symbols worked into the very expensive paper that had apparently been teleported to the Mage’s Guild. But the contents of the missive were actually quite short. They read, in white ink—

MANUS HGH CMMD—

PRIORITY CAPTAIN CITHOC. Disregard all orders to investigate possible ‘Crossroads of Izril’ gateways immediately. 

Crossroads of Izril gateway is now confirmed. Specialist teams will prepare to secure and fortify area. Expect arrival within 1-2 weeks tops. Do not allow other forces to claim gateway.

HIGHER PRIORITY BY ORDER OF THE SECURITY COUNCIL. Do not allow any forces to activate the gateway. They may secure it, but transit into the Crossroads at this time is to be halted at all costs. 

Any suspicion of the being known as Mahadak exiting the Crossroads of Izril must be reported at once. Coordinates will be attempted to be confirmed for possible remote bombardment if mana drain allows. Do not let the portal activate from your side.

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, APPROVAL BY DRAGONSPEAKER LUCIVA. The being known as Mahadak dates back to our records from before the Creler Wars. It was a known phenomenon in the Crossroads of Izril, akin to a ghost story—but one that was known to be extant. We do not know how many Drakes were killed by it until the Crossroads closed. Do not let it out, Captain.

END OF PRIORITY MESSAGE. BURN AND DUST ASHES.

Laniver was reading over Doren’s shoulder. He appeared sick. Doren felt like throwing up.

“Th-that—that’s not a—you don’t just have ancient weapons of war waiting around for thousands of years. It has to be dead. Right?”

“Maybe it is.”

That comment came from Gothica. Doren was about to tell her this was overblown. It might be a coincidence or the words had been there from before, when she looked at him.

Gothica who had grown up with Skinner and Facestealer. Gothica whose tribe had fought a Mortemdefieir Titan. She looked scared.

“I hate Old Things. Worse than [Archmages] in toilets. Keep popping up.”

No one understood that, but the warning…Capsha grabbed the letter, and Laniver ran out into the rain too.

“Well, well, they’re coming to get you all. You’ll be away from here, and it’ll be secured by the Walled City.”

That was what Doren tried to focus on. Thorssin nodded as Silppie nervously played with the spellbook he’d made for her, a slim tome. She stared at the rune she was etching there, and Rikka glanced at it.

It was Hwalt who didn’t join in the attempts to raise spirits. He took a longer drink from his flask.

“The Crossroad’s not the only damned thing here.”

“What do you mean, Hwalt?”

The man hadn’t been in the store as much recently. He was more filled out, healthier from eating better and getting over his illness, but he seemed a bit sick today.

He was also muddier than normal. And sweaty? He rolled his shoulders.

“I’ve been digging, Doren. That bastard, Merchant Lavroisse? He’s hiring everyone to do the damn dredging. It’s good pay. Not that he pays us in more than food and supplies. You even get luxuries.”

“I see. But the job’s hard, or it’s unsafe?”

Doren could imagine the dredging being perilous if the walls let the muck back in. Or just backbreaking, but Hwalt just spat.

“That’s not it. It’s what they’re digging up. You…you can’t see it. But Thorssin, you seen it? Rikka? Anyone?”

Everyone shook their heads, except for Silppie, who just looked up once. Hwalt rubbed at his shoulders.

“It ain’t a building. At least, not one normal. It’s wide as can be. Huge. Bigger than all of Mudhole, it feels like. And there’s some kinda tarp…it’s so damn tough we can’t get through it. So we have to excavate around, and that’ll take ages. Mud don’t stick to it, though. I—I don’t like it, Doren.”

“Don’t like the work?”

“I don’t like what we’re digging up.”

Hwalt’s voice was grating. He took another drink, and now Doren saw his eyes were bloodshot. And he was shivering but not with a fever.

“It’s off. It’s magic, sure, but it makes me uneasy the longer I look at it. Me and some of the seadogs and one of the adventurers—we all don’t like it. Reminds me of wrecks in the ocean. The kind not even Drowned Folk go near. Lavroisse won’t hear it. He says he’s Pheislant’s son, and he knows more about the sea than I’ve ever dreamed. But he won’t bury it where it belongs.”

A crawl went up Doren’s spine. He saw Gothica’s eyes focusing on Hwalt, and if she hadn’t liked Manus’ warning, she was truly unsettled now.

Whatever scared a [Goth]…Doren licked his lips.

“But it’s just some old structure, right, Hwalt? It could be some—some piece of a dungeon? Or building. Any clues of what it was?”

“I don’t know. It’s all fabric. Fabric over wood. A huge…circular, we think. But we don’t know what’s inside.”

Doren stopped reaching for some water to steady the man. He turned.

“Inside? It’s just ruins.”

“There’s no gaps in it. None. We can’t see inside. Maybe it’s filled to the brim with muck, but no one’s found a way inside, not with shears nor sword nor shovel.”

Hwalt was staring over his shoulder, shivering. Lighting crackled down, and for a second, Doren saw the mudflats beyond. Then he felt it.

“Then it sounds like you should stop digging.”

“I’ll stop. I’m quitting tonight. But I’m not the one digging. It’s the MSF and the [Merchants].”

“Then—then they should stop until Manus gets here. Or the Merchant’s Guild. Adventurers.”

“Right. Tell them that.”

Hwalt gestured at the door. Doren hesitated.

“Someone should.”

He glanced around. Thorssin gave him a blank look and nodded.

“Someone should.”

There was a chorus of agreement from around him. Doren saw Gothica shifting. The words came out of his mouth.

“I’ll tell them. I’ll—I need someone to run a message for me.”

Everyone stared at him. Doren pushed himself up. He felt it now, but he was still in denial. Help was coming. All they had to do was—

——

“Stop?”

Merchant Lavroisse was not a happy man. In general? He was ecstatic. Two discoveries! His fortunes might turn around. But he wasn’t happy to be summoned for a meeting with Doren. He kept staring out the window.

“Yes, Merchant. Just until help gets here.”

“Until Manus gets here, you mean. I have no intention of letting their people claim or ‘secure’ either treasure, Shopkeeper Doren. Whatever it is, I intend to claim.”

“What if it’s dangerous?”

The [Merchant] half-turned as Laniver poured a drink. He snatched it, glowering as Doren got one too.

“If it is, we shall address it. Rebury it.”

“Rebury?”

The man waved a hand. Dead magical rings flashed there, some with a hint of magic still. Made well enough. Less well than Cormeng’s shop.

“Of course! Do you think I’m a fool? I know what that drunkard, Hwalt, thinks. Well, I have prepared the walls to collapse if needed. At the drop of a hat, I could have it completely reburied. But I am no superstitious coward, Shopkeeper. Nor do I wish to take instructions from you. Tell me, on whose behalf are you trying to get me to stall? The Gnolls? The Walled Cities? The Five Families?”

“No one, Merchant. I’m just representing—”

“Yourself? Ah, I see. Then you think you can make a claim on this tent, perhaps? You may be owed some share of the fortunes, but mark me, I knew your game the moment you entered my town, Shopkeeper Doren. And I shall accord you a fair share. Nothing more.”

Lavroisse swung around, and his finger was pointing at Doren. The man blinked.

“What—”

“Don’t play games, Shopkeeper Doren. Do you think I’m a fool? Doren’s Outlet. It took me all of a day to realize it was none other than Cormeng’s Emporium come to capitalize on the New Lands. Well…I admit…you have the advantage of me in some regard.”

The [Merchant] breathed in and out.

“It is clear the magical shop is quite powerful to reach into the New Lands. And yes, I note your contributions to Mudhole. A terrible name; I shall have it changed. But that does not give you the power to override my authority.”

He thought this was about money. Doren just stood there.

“Merchant Lavroisse, I’m not interested in the money. I’m worried about what’s in that building. I have a—a guest who has experience with dungeons. She’s quite convinced a monster might be in there.”

“One like Mahadak?”

Doren flinched, and Merchant Lavroisse snorted.

“I see the Drake propaganda machine has touched you. Think, for a second, Shopkeeper. Did that warning really appear there? Or is that a convenient ploy to lockdown the Crossroads of Izril until Manus gets here? The MSF won’t let anyone close on pain of violence.”

He drank from his cup, and Doren stared at him.

“You must be joking.”

“I don’t. Oh, I grant you, it might be some monster and this is all a true threat. If it is, we react. But we did not get here by playing it safe. Do you know what the average level in Mudhole is?”

“Does it—”

“It’s Level 24, Shopkeeper. Level 24. Countless people have breached Level 30. Laniver, here, did it last month. I grant you, no one’s reached Level 40, but I have every hope to hit it before I leave. This New Land is a crucible, and it is forging us to greater levels. We have six thousand some men and women who know how to fight.”

“It won’t do you one bit of good if Facestealer’s down there.”

For the first time, Merchant Lavroisse hesitated, and his eyes swung back to Doren.

“Face-what?”

“Something my fr—my guest knows. I can bring her here to tell you stories, Merchant. It’s a real monster. It fought multiple Named-rank teams and won. It fought the Archmage of Izril and she couldn’t kill it. That’s what’s buried in the darkness. Don’t dig it up.”

For a second, the man’s confidence faltered. He hesitated…drummed his fingers on the table.

“You make some points. But I’m not the only person digging. The MSF is aiming for it. And I won’t have Drakes stealing—”

“You’ve already lodged your find with the Merchant’s Guild. Even Manus can’t steal from you! Don’t gamble your life on chance!”

Doren snapped, and Lavroisse exploded.

“Do not shout at me! I am a noble of Pheislant, and I will not be strongarmed by—”

——

Captain Cithoc refused to meet with Doren, so he spoke to Capsha. She was uncomfortable.

“We have orders to dig it up, Doren.”

“But you’re not a soldier.”

She avoided his gaze.

“You—I told you that in confidence. Don’t use it against me, please.”

He was sitting at his counter as she put down the fruit juice he’d imported.

“I didn’t need you to tell me, Capsha. I knew. The Gnolls I spoke with looked you up.”

She turned crimson under her scales and averted her gaze.

“Well—well, it’s still Manus. That’s the City of War. Dragonspeaker Luciva herself—”

“Was it her who ordered that? Or just someone else? Can you ask for clarity?”

“From the Dragonspeaker?”

She was horrified, but Doren was pressing, pressing like a man on fire because he felt it in his stomach.

“There’s something bad down there, Capsha. Gothica feels it. She’s got a sense for this kind of thing. Hwalt—just leave it.”

“Cithoc will never agree. This is his chance to impress High Command.”

“But you could. He’s not a ranking officer. If you talk to the others—I’ll send a letter to Manus myself! Capsha, I don’t want…”

He took a breath.

“I don’t want you to get hurt or die over something before you make it out. Please.”

She stared at him, fidgeting.

“I—I don’t know, I have to think about it.”

“Capsha—”

“I have to go.”

She strode out of the shop. Doren stared at the door, nearly ran out after her, then punched the counter.

“Are you blind?”

He shouted at the closed door. Lavroisse, Capsha—it was like he was speaking to madpeople!

Or desperate people. He felt it again, like Hwalt’s first visit. This had been fun for Doren. He’d even made money. But for them…

They have nothing when they leave here. Lavroisse is desperate. He needs money. Capsha has nothing but her levels. When they go…

Desperation made you take risks. Like being hungry, only the hunger was gold. A hunger Doren had never had.

“Damnit. Damnit…”

He sank to his knees. Then he felt old, tired, and wished he were younger. Wished he had the youth to—to buy a Flying Carpet and get over there to stop them himself. To go running across the New Lands. Shake Lavroisse and make him stop.

Lavroisse. Just like Doren’s relatives. He hadn’t thought of them for ages. All they respected was money. If they had an idea, he had to do it. It was only when they saw the shop losing money that they panicked and told him to change things back. The same with good initiatives. He had to put gold in front of them. That’s why they’d never gotten Toren. They’d only seen the cost.

Cost…and Capsha was so worried about High Command. Perhaps on being punished for taking Manus’ authority. Neither one had anything from the New Lands, really. They’d lost so much. It was Doren who had the easy life. He was the shopkeeper.

That’s why Lavroisse hates me. He sees how easy it is. He’s cursing himself for being a fool. I’ve got the connections, the money…

Doren’s eyes opened as his head rose. He stared ahead as an idea hit him.

A crazy one.

A stupid one. It’d ruin so much. But—but—

He stared into the darkness, and he could not see this building which they were digging for. But he felt it, somehow. Like it was affecting him, even here. Doren clenched his pudgy fists. Then he did something…

Crazy.

In the darkness, a watching Goblin smiled sadly.

——

The next day, Mudhole was abuzz. People were being shouted out of their homes by Lavroisse’s people. Being hired for food, armed with…

“Nets?”

Thorssin stared at the fine mesh nets, then at Laniver. The young man was panting.

“We need Glowbugs. As many as you can catch. Not—”

A shouting [Merchant] strode past him. Lavroisse’s eyes were wide; he was excited as he ran across the boardwalk, heedless of the muck on his clothing.

“Not all of them! Don’t destroy nests! If we ruin this area…I want to see what they’re eating! As many as you can catch, but leave any huge clusters!”

Glowbugs. Thorssin heard someone whispering to Rikka. She leaned over to him.

“Thorssin—I heard from Doren’s shop. The Glowbugs are an insanely valuable alchemical reagent! They’re worth gold, maybe!”

He gasped, and Lavroisse was shouting. He was pulling everyone off dredging duty. Arming them with the nets.

Very fine, mesh nets. Far too fine for…Thorssin stared at them, then saw Laniver coming out of Doren’s shop with more.

——

“You told them?”

Hrawr was appalled, but Doren refused to be apologetic.

“I did. They want as many of those nets as you’ve got. I’ll pay you twice the going rate out of my own pocket. The secret was going to get out, and Lavroisse is willing to sell to you all if you also help him get them to the Merchant’s Guild.”

Gaarh Marsh had very nice nets. Hrawr sighed.

“You’ve turned down a fortune! And it’ll just go to that greedy [Merchant]’s pockets, no?”

“Maybe it will. But it means he has some money to go after that’s guaranteed, not the dredging.”

It was the right thing to do. Doren didn’t need the gold. He felt bad for the Goblins and Gnolls, but he’d asked Laniver to send Lavroisse a message that morning. The [Merchant] had flipped out to realize the bugs’ value, and Doren’s only condition had been to abandon the digging for now.

Madness. He had five [Alchemists] try to attack him when he left Cormeng’s to deliver [Messages], and Lady Rie almost pressganged him into an audience with the Unseen Emperor. He only got out of it by promising her a share of the bugs—and the [Witches]—and he was pretty sure people were following him back to Cormeng’s.

The thing Lyonette had warned of was happening. It didn’t matter. He had half the digging stopped.

The other half…

Doren just gave away more. It was fine. They mattered more, and it wasn’t his, anyways.

It was his great ancestor’s.

——

“This is called Platform Step.”

“Not…[Light Step]? Or [Platform Step]? It sounds wrong.”

Thorssin tried to say it, but he didn’t understand. Silppie did, and she twirled around, giggling as she chanted the spell. She was running around in a circle, going higher and higher…

“Not too high, Silppie!”

Anxiously, Doren called out. She could fall or hit her head, but Capsha just stared.

“That’s not a [Light Bridge] spell. But she’s just walking on air. Can she…can she run into the sky with it?”

“There’s a limit to how high it goes off the ground. Twenty paces. And you have to keep chanting and casting.”

“But it’s magic. That works. In the New Lands.”

Rikka said it like she was having trouble believing it. She kept pinching herself, but Doren just held up the spellbook. He had a few copies, but the one sitting in front of Capsha…

“It’s the only magic that works. I’ll explain again, about reagents—Manus could use it.”

She gazed at him. Everyone shifted when they heard that. Manus can use this. There were two Goblins sitting under illusions to the side. One was Gothica.

The other was Chieftain Rags. She was taking notes, enduring Gothica poking her. Doren was trembling, but smiling.

This is worth it. He’d invited Chieftain Rags, and he’d tell Hrawr, but this?

It didn’t matter if it was Cormeng’s magic. Let it be known. He turned to Capsha.

“This…if Captain Cithoc agrees to stop the MSF digging, I’ll teach you the spell, and you can teach someone else. At least Platform Step. All of you as well. Just in case you need to leave Mudhole.”

He smiled at Thorssin, Rikka, and even Hwalt. The man was just staring at Doren. They weren’t in the fake store. They were in Cormeng’s, the real Cormeng’s.

“You…you have an [Archmage] for an ancestor?”

“He wasn’t an Archmage. He had no levels. This is my heritage. I didn’t appreciate it until now. I’m sorry for not telling you. But…I want you to leave the New Lands.”

That was all Doren said. He smiled as he put himself forever on the map, a crosshair on the most valuable spellcaster alive. It didn’t matter. He was valuable alive, not dead. He gazed at Capsha.

“Do you think if—”

“Yes.”

She said it, blank-faced, and stood up.

“Are you sure?”

She just stared at him.

“I am. The dredging can be halted, and at worst it’ll just need to be re-dug by another group if it refills. This…excuse me.”

The Drake strode out of the room, and Doren worried he’d ruined his relationship with her. But he didn’t care. He sagged back in his chair, then began to answer questions.

I did it.

He smiled at Gothica, and she wiped at her eyes. Rags just sighed like she were seeing something familiar. He’d done it. He’d actually done it.

——

That night, his first magical students went out to practice their spell. Half got it wrong and produced funky platforms—Hwalt slammed face first into the ground and nearly broke his nose again.

But the magic was there. Gothica was one of the last to go. She and Silppie were yawning, but the Drake girl was all curled up, and Doren said the words he felt like he should have a while ago.

“Let her sleep here.”

“Here? Are you sure?”

Thorssin turned, and Doren gestured awkwardly.

“There’s plenty of room. There’s even beds. She deserves a place to sleep that’s proper. I can’t take her out of here.”

But at least her. Rikka brought the girl to a bed and tucked her in, and they left, promising to keep the secret, wanting to practice it.

It didn’t matter if it spread. Doren was smiling, about to close up for the night and face whatever consequences came tomorrow, be it an [Emperor] or a Manus abduction squad, with grace. Then Gothica pulled at his arm.

“Hey, Doren. One thing.”

“It’s late Gothica. What is it?”

“Just…keep the door open. Okay? You do that. And if you ever tell anyone I was nice, I’ll bite you.”

He eyed her. She glowered, gnashed her teeth, then stomped through to Goblinhome. Doren stared after her. Keep it open for who? Chieftain Rags with more questions?

He turned as the door opened, and Lieutenant Capsha walked in.

“Hello, Master Doren. I—I apologize it’s so late. I just wanted to let you know Captain Cithoc’s agreed to your request. He’s—I—he’s stepped down. I’m Captain Capsha now.”

He stared at her.

“You are? Congratulations. Why…”

“He doesn’t want to upset you. Everyone understands what this means for Manus. For…everything. I just wanted to tell you the MSF has ceased digging. No one’s going near the dredging site. No one wants to. Manus will be informed, and we’ll explain. That’s all.”

She was saluting him. Like when they’d first met. Doren was confused.

“That’s wonderful, but you don’t need to be so formal, Capsha.”

She dropped the salute, flushing again.

“I’m sorry. I just—I feel like a fool. Here I was throwing my weight around, thinking I was fooling you, when you had my number from the start. And you were heir to Cormeng’s. A spellcaster, a—I’m just embarrassed. I hope you don’t think less of me for everything.”

“I…not at all. Why would I think that? You, Hwalt, Thorssin, Rikka, everyone is a friend. Even Laniver, really.”

They had become that, for all their faults. Capsha stared at Doren. She blinked, smiled weakly.

“That’s good. I’m glad. I just—I am embarrassed.”

Now he was uncomfortable.

“Capsha, I’m just Doren. I can’t even stop someone mugging me with a butterknife. I’m…look at me.”

He gestured weakly at himself. Everyone was staring at him like he was someone else. Even Lavroisse. Capsha blinked. Tilted her head. Frowning.

“I am.”

Whatever she saw, it made him so disconcerted he actually glanced behind himself. She was gazing at him like his daydreams sometimes did, but it was such a strange phenomenon to actually happen he laughed.

“Capsha, I think you’re mistaken. I’m an old man. I’m no one. I just inherited Cormeng’s legacy. All of this is his doing. I know I sold food, and I tried to be fair…but that’s all.”

“You did a lot for nothing.”

“I made money—”

“Lavroisse makes money. You just traded our fish for food and goods. I saw you stocking the shop each morning. And you’re giving away magic. Magic so powerful even a Walled City has to—don’t sell yourself short, Doren.”

He stood there, not knowing what to say. Capsha watched him, and he was red-faced, now. He saw her hesitate, then turn after what felt like ages.

“I just wanted to thank you. For all of it. And, um, see you tomorrow.”

“Of course. See you tomorrow. I’ll be happy to teach magic, and thank you. Congratulations on your promotion—”

She was walking for the door when Gothica Nightlady sighed and appeared out of the darkness as two crimson eyes opened. Capsha screamed. Doren screamed. Gothica smirked.

“[Shadow Doppelganger]. I is even more spooky. Hey, dummy. She like you. Hey, dummy, he not get that.”

She poked Doren. Then Capsha. Then she hopped through the door. Doren stared at the door. Then at Capsha. He nearly threw something at Gothica. She was insane! And that was too far for a prank! Then he noticed how red-faced Capsha was. He hesitated, and the pieces, the hints clicked.

Wait, could it be? But it had been ages since he’d…but him? The pieces might just fit together. But—him? He blinked as a realization hit him in the head.

“Oh.”

“Oh.”

That came from the Drake. She blinked at him in the darkness. He looked around, awkward. Did he have a chair or something…?

“I have some fruit juice. Would you care to have some?”

“Yes.”

She said it far faster than he thought. And then Doren blinked, and he almost did believe.

——

Doren was laughing that night. Laughing as a skeleton had once seen him laughing, but not crying with tears. And he was dancing. Twirling around like a man who’d found a new step. Who just…smiled.

But didn’t sing because that’d ruin the moment. It wasn’t beautiful, perhaps, to see him cavort across his shop, but there was something to it that was only for him.

Of course, Doren was never alone. Only, this time it wasn’t an embarrassed [Goth] hiding in her rooms. It was a little Drake girl who woke up from her slumber in a bed like clouds.

Capsha had gone. Doren was wandering his shop, chuckling at the world, as she got up.

“Doren?”

He spun and jumped, then smiled.

“Oh no. We didn’t wake you, did we?”

He seemed worried, but she just shook her head.

“I woke up from a bad dream. But then you were here. Can I sleep here? It’s so soft.”

She patted the bed, and he sat with her.

“You can sleep as long as you want, Silppie. Until you leave Mudhole. I promise.”

She was so happy at that. She hugged him, and he patted her on the place where her two halves met. Then Silppie hugged her spellbook.

“I had a bad dream, Doren. Are they going to stop digging?”

“Yes. Both Lavroisse and Cithoc—I mean, Capsha—agreed. No more digging. Everyone’s too busy collecting bugs and learning magic!”

He smiled, looking so relieved. Silppie nodded slowly.

“That’s good. It’s a bad thing.”

“What is? The building?”

Her eyes were huge and big in the faint light filtering in through the windows. Silppie glanced out one.

“Yes. It’s bad. Hwalt is right.”

A bit of the smile faded from Doren, and he ruffled the top of her head.

“Well, it won’t get dug up any more. I don’t even know what it is. All this worry, but I can’t see it from the shop. It’s fabric and wood or something magical.”

“Yes. It’s a big, round tent.”

He paused.

“A big…round tent? Really?”

He was so dubious, but Silppie insisted.

“I saw it. It looks like the big thing when the Gnolls come.”

“The Gn—oh, the Meeting of Tribes? Wait…you mean that big tent they have?”

“Mhm. Only, different. It’s got a spiky pointy top thing, and it’s different colors. It’s all mucky, but I saw. It’s red and yellow.”

A big, round tent…made of fabric? That made no sense at all. Doren was trying to visualize it, and he muttered.

“That’s sort of familiar. Why is it familiar? You didn’t get too near it.”

“Maybe.”

She shivered, and now he focused on her. Doren put some confidence in his voice.

“Well, it’s not getting dug up, Silppie.”

“Good. Don’t open it. They’re bad.”

“…Who is?”

The girl was staring up at him, and her eyes were huge in her face. Earnest as only children could be.

“Them. The ones inside. I heard them. They’re really quiet, but I put my earhole to the walls, and I heard them in there. They’re laughing at us.”

“Laughing.”

Then Doren’s mind flashed to another connection point. He imagined it. A tall, circular building which would stand tall on flat ground. Utterly misplaced here. A pointed top, two colors, and perhaps, yes, perhaps a wide opening in the center. Thrust open for guests, thousands of guests.

He’d seen that before. A few times. They passed through towns, even cities, entertaining as they went. As transient as his store. It sounded like…

“A travelling menagerie. It sounds like a performer’s tent. Is that what it is, Silppie?”

She didn’t know. But she was shivering, and suddenly, Doren wasn’t so calm. His head rose, and he heard, in that moment, a faint sound.

Ping. Ping. Ping.

He started to his feet. Silppie leapt up.

“What’s that?”

“The Tuning Room. Stay here!”

He ran. There was only one time that sound rang, and that was when the mechanisms were in danger. He charged through the barriers, cursing as he slowed down, and stumbled into the room. There…he saw the floating command instructions glowing, whirled to the dials, checking them. Then saw where the sound was coming from.

The pinging was coming from a single setting at the back. More a measurement than a switch. The brasswork arrow was striking the metal containing it, producing the sound. Doren stared at it and wiped at the brasswork. He stared at the sign.

It was just one word. It simply read—

‘Manifestation’.

He stood there as Silppie called out to him, asking what it was. Growing more frightened. But Doren just waited for the pinging to stop.

It didn’t stop.

Not even when morning came.

——

Doren’s Outlet didn’t open the next day. It was Cormeng’s Emporium of Antiques and Trinkets that opened its doors to Mudhole.

The true shop, filled with both food and resold items. A single shopkeeper waiting for the dawn. Filled with fear.

There was a persistent little ringing sound in the background of Doren’s shop. His skin felt prickled by tiny needles, and his heart was beating oh too fast. His treacherous body gave him no more signs things were wrong. You could ignore it all, put it down to sickness, an uneasy paranoia.

He was probably wrong. It might be something else. It couldn’t be that bad.

Not now.

Not with Manus and adventurers coming. Not when things had gone so well.

Not today.

No one came to his store for a long while as Doren paced back and forth. He nearly tried the door to Mudhole, but his hand flinched away from the doorknob each time. There was also Silppie to consider; she was eating breakfast, largely unperturbed. The girl happily swung her legs at the breakfast table, eating with a will. She was excited.

“What do you think my new class means, Doren?”

“I don’t know, Silppie. It’s wonderful, of course. I’ll get a cake.”

Distractedly, Doren smiled at her, and she grew more excited.

“A real cake? Really?”

“Of course. The Unseen Empire sells them. I’ll get it—later. What’s your class again?”

“[Conjurer]! I told you, and I got new Skills and—”

He smiled and forgot her Skills in a moment of her telling them, to her increasing indignation. Doren was just…waiting.

When the door opened, he jumped, and the pouch of spell components jangled as he lifted his fingers in a curious gesture. Silppie blinked; Doren’s pouch never made sounds. It looked heavy today.

The door to Cormeng’s revealed a short Goblin with black lipstick, eyeshadow, a grumpy expression, and a dress befitting a Noelictan. Gothica walked in, ready to spit insults, then eyed Doren. She lost her glower.

“Oh, it not work out that well. Um…here, heartbreak breakfast.”

She switched bundles and plopped food on the counter. Doren lowered his fingers.

“Gothica. I—what?”

“Sometimes, these things no good. She suck anyways. Manus, peh.”

“Who?”

“That right, who?”

Gothica leapt onto a seat and nodded energetically at Doren. She scowled around until Doren shakily lowered his hands.

“Wait, you mean Capsha. That was fine. Wonderful.”

“…Huh.”

Gothica’s brows rose, and she peered at Doren, tilting her head back and forth. She opened her mouth. Raised a finger.

“Then why you look like that? Also, what that annoying sound?”

“That’s the Tuning Room.”

“That place I can’t go even when I try hard? Bleh. You gonna do something about it? Hey, Silppie.”

“I got a new class! But Doren’s worried.”

The girl piped up, and Gothica stopped unwrapping Doren’s breakfast which was her breakfast. She glanced at Doren, then felt at the back of her neck.

“Why? Also, why it so heavy in here?”

She rolled her shoulders, and Doren whispered.

“Something’s happening in Mudhole, I think. Manifestation. I…I don’t know what that means. It could be an aura. Or a Skill. Or the portal’s activated and the Crossroads of Izril is spilling out. Something is warping reality, and it’s broken past Cormeng’s defenses.”

The [Goth] put down her burrito. She slowly reached for her side-umbrella. Rose.

“This some kind of joke, Doren?”

“No. No, it’s not, Gothica.”

She was on her feet faster than he expected. The [Goth] took two steps to the door.

“Why we here, then? Come on, everyone to Goblinhome! Come…”

She turned and realized the law of Cormeng’s was in play. She eyed Doren, focused on Silppie. Then began to rattle off curses in Goblin.

“Did you check?”

“No. I’m waiting for people to wake up.”

“The first thing you do is check, idiot. No, first we get…hold on. I tell Chieftain Rags. Maybe…maybe…this a bad place to fight.”

Gothica dithered, then snapped at him to stay here and not open that door until she came back. She ran into Goblinhome. Doren’s eyes focused on the door, and Silppie spoke.

“You said it was just a noise. You said, Doren. W-what’s in Mudhole?”

“I don’t know, Silppie. Just finish your breakfast. We’ll wait for Hwalt or Thorssin to show up.”

“Is it monsters?”

“I don’t know. It could be nothing. Do you want Gothica’s food?”

“I’m not hungry anymore.”

Silence. Then the door opened again, and Doren’s fingers rose. He felt like he was over…

No, he didn’t.

The second visitor’s reaction was fast. Hrawr recoiled the moment he saw Doren’s raised fingers. He threw himself back through the door with an oath—then re-emerged to laughter from behind him.

“Some prank, Doren? But my Skill, [Forewarned Attack], it does not trigger for pranks. What’s going on?”

He sniffed the air, then saw Doren’s expression. His hand fell to his axe, a long, enchanted bone weapon with shamanic markings, and Doren spoke. What he said, he didn’t know. But the [Barbarian] just blinked, then whirled.

“Get Shaman Theikha. Tell her there may be a crisis. Monsters or something. Run!”

Then he slammed the door, put his back against the wall, and turned to Silppie.

“Is there a safe room for the child? She’s from Mudhole and cannot leave, no?”

“A saferoom? The safest room is the Tuning Room, but only I can enter. I don’t have another. The backrooms have a door with a lock on them…and the storerooms have a bit of warding against insects. Not Cormeng’s magic.”

“Child, go where Doren knows it is safest. That door won’t hold anything. But perhaps those fake walls?”

“There’s more doors inside. The—the Well Room might be most secure? Silppie, come on.”

“No!”

She was afraid, now. She would have run away until Hrawr snarled.

“Move, child! Now is not the time to argue!”

The Drake girl froze up, then followed Doren. He put her in the Well Room with Gothica’s breakfast and a chair and told her just to wait.

“I’m just going to wait for news from Mudhole. Gothica will be back in a moment, and it’ll all be fine.”

“That’s what they said when it rained. It’s the tent. It’s the tent. Or is it…Mahadak?”

He didn’t answer. Doren locked the door to the Well Room, then the other doors behind him. He thought he heard her start crying, and his heart…it was fluttering. In the shop, Hrawr was snarling at someone.

“No one else! You’re not of enough levels for true trouble. Hold outside, clear the area, and if there is danger, break the entrance or seal it! Can they do that?”

“The door to Cormeng’s? It—it can be broken. It’s just a local manifestation. It’ll rebuild after a while.”

“Good. Did you receive anything from Manus? Anything but your warning-magic?”

“No. Capsha was here last night, and she didn’t notice anything. But she was—she didn’t want to stay the night because she had to write a report for Manus, and—I could check.”

“No. Wait for any Goblins, at least. Or Theikha. Gah, she may be away from camp! Chieftain Feshi’s damn diggings. My father will come if he’s close.”

“Do we need Honored Berr?”

Hrawr turned, and his eyes were pale, almost yellowish. He bared his teeth, and Doren had never been more grateful to have such an imposing warrior in his shop.

“He would make me feel better. There are few things in this world that would stand within arm’s reach of my father when he gets angry. Even Belavierr avoided that. I am no smart Gnoll, though, and if this is aura or magic, I cannot help much.”

He paused, then drew his axe, holding it across his hands. A single-sided battleaxe, the worn leather handle shifting as he rested his back against the wall, ready to push off in a single motion and bring it down.

“…But my father has a saying. The greatest magics in the world, the power of Archmages, the mysteries of the transmundane, the might of Seamwalkers and Old Ones? It is all very powerful. And if you hit it hard enough, it doesn’t matter. But even he cannot split a hill in a single blow. Yet.”

“Oh. W-well, I have some of Cormeng’s better spells ready. Not his advanced magic. I never learned the battle magic. Hopefully, Berr comes.”

“Hrr. Yes.”

“Is there anyone else…?”

“Plenty, but this is not a good place to fight, Doren. Theikha warned you and us. There is only one way out of the shop, and it is the same way trouble comes in. Berr will come because I am here. The rest will destroy the door first.”

“I see.”

They stood there until Hrawr muttered.

“He got half of it.”

“What?”

“Half. A hill. He doesn’t show off. He shows off plenty, but never his true fury. It was six years ago, so perhaps he could do it now. Once he does hills, he’ll move onto mountains. That’s how the greatest [Berserkers] fought. Shattering the mountains themselves when the Giants warred with them. I can do trees and big boulders.”

They talked about Berr the Berserker. Doren went to check on Silppie. He was expecting Gothica to come back first, but it was early morning. When he heard the door open, he fumbled his key and heard Hrawr snarl.

Then the first inhabitant of Mudhole came through to tell him what had happened. And Doren…smiled.

——

Such a relief.

It was fine after all.

You see, it was just his imagination.

“A silly thing. A si-lly thing. I can’t believe I was so afraid. How was your night, Thorssin? I kissed Capsha. I’m almost sure she likes me.”

Doren was beaming around as Thorssin and Rikka chuckled.

She was dreamily polishing a fish she’d caught.

Thorssin was excitedly selling his catches for coins.

Haggling hard.

“We were all worried this morning too, Doren! But never-you-fear! Ne-ver you fear. It’s so grand that Merchant Lavroisse is throwing a celebration! In honor of our new guests!”

“Guests. Hrr. Guests are good, no?”

Hrawr was rubbing at his face, a bit grumpy. He kept sniffing the air, but he had put his axe away and was shaking his head. Tired. He glanced at Silppie, who was smiling with the others.

Doren was just relieved.

He counted out coins onto Thorssin’s palm.

The Drake chuckled.

“Got to earn what I can. Have to. It’s expensive for admission.”

“Have you seen inside? What’re they like?”

“Wet. Wet, but very cheery. I only saw their leader speaking. It’s a huge crowd. Do you think this is worth something? They want coins, but fish will do. They’re hungry.”

Rikka checked the fish again.

Doren thought it was a lovely fish.

Scales sparkling.

“Are they funny? I want to see.”

Silppie went for the door, and Doren hesitated.

“You should stay in here, Silppie.”

“Why?”

He blinked.

Why?

He’d been worried, but he shouldn’t have been.

So—

“I suppose it’s fine. Everyone should see, shouldn’t they, Thorssin, Rikka?”

Both Drakes nodded, and Silppie bounded out the door.

It was raining, but Mudhole was filled with people outside when Doren saw through the door for a moment.

Smiles on every face, excited.

Hard at work trying to collect coins, fish, anything of value.

Of course, of course.

Everyone wanted to visit the new attraction.

“What do they call themselves again, Thorssin?”

The Drake had to think.

He screwed up his face, laughed, turned to Rikka, and then it came to him, and he slapped his forehead.

“I almost didn’t hear. They call themselves a troupe! A travelling circus. The…yes, The Grimless Carnival has come to Mudhole! They played in Tiernas, you know.”

“Tier…nas. Really.”

Hrawr was blinking slowly, but he was beginning to smile and get in the mood. Doren wished he could see it.

He’d tried to get a look at it, but all he’d seen was the tip of the tent poking over the buildings.

The circus.

The circus had come to town.

Wonderful thing.

——

Everyone had nothing but good to say about the new visitors.

Hwalt was there later that day to sell as much as he could.

Even his free rum; he was ruddy-cheeked, excited as Captain Capsha, Laniver.

Merchant Lavroisse himself came by to sell one of his rings, though he was the most cautious.

“I want to make value on the—the visitors. Yes. I’d like an inquiry run into them. Purely so I know how to get ahead. They’re quite interesting. Clearly, valuable partners. I cannot wait to see them open.”

“The tent’s not open yet?”

Doren blinked as he put gold down for Lavroisse’s ring.

It was out of magic, but it might be worth a lot.

A sign of how important it would be to get a good seat inside.

When it opened.

The [Merchant] frowned as he swept the gold into his belt pouch.

“No, of course not. They’re utterly waterlogged. A bit worse for wear…yes, worse for wear.”

He passed a hand over his face and, for a second, shuddered. Then forced a smile.

“Anyone would be after so long in the mud. One cannot imagine…how they survived. But good manners dictate we not remark on the—the changes. They want to put on a good opening act, and that is professional conduct. But yes, the carnival is searching for new recruits, gold; of course, they were disturbed to learn some of their currencies had no value. I didn’t tell them it might be valuable, ha-ha!”

He threw his head back, and Doren blinked as Gothica reached up with a trembling claw.

“Doren…”

Lavroisse brushed away Gothica, annoyed at the Goblin.

“Shining coins made of light. Beautiful, if clearly faded. Wrought steel, the magical kind, ready to be re-smelted. But they’re hungry for food as much as coin. So…I really must be going. I intend to be fully ready for the show.”

There would be a show soon.

How soon, no one was clear on.

Hwalt was explaining to Doren how things were.

“It was mostly buried when they came out. So the rest of us are digging it up. When it’s fully topside, they reckon they’ll be ready. Plenty of questions too. About the way the world is. If anyone’s seen an old Gnoll about. They reckon he’s at sea. But they were happy to know their friends were about.”

“W-which friends? I can’t…it’s too big.”

Gothica was being annoying today, shaking in place.

Maybe she was sick?

Doren impatiently ushered her to the side, and she stood against one wall, meek.

But it occurred to him to ask about the friends.

Hwalt didn’t know, and he rushed out to get back to work digging, but he did come back later with answers.

“The fellow I was talking to laughed a ton when I asked. He seemed impressed. Asked how I’d thought to…he says it’s not really friends they know. More like people in the same business. Most’re gone. But there’s a building in Baleros. A Gnoll. And a [Witch]. They say she’s also at sea, but they reckon that wouldn’t stop her long. They’re all curious about how many cities we’ve got left. Walled Ones.”

“What do they look like?”

Hrawr was relaxing, asking if he could get a seat to watch from the shop, and Doren thought that was a fine idea.

Annoyingly, everyone was so excited no one had thought to tell them about his shop.

That was selfish customers for you.

Hwalt hesitated and had to whisper with Silppie, who’d come back.

The girl piped up uncertainly, but smiling.

“I think they’re Humans.”

“Could be. Could be. Most are wet. Bit of a mess, and they’re still shedding mud. I think that’s part of the charm. We’ll get a good look at them later.”

Captain Capsha was smiling at Doren shyly, avoiding his eyes whenever anyone looked her way.

She leaned over the counter.

“I wish you could see them, Doren. I’ll try to mention you to them, but they’re so busy. I’d love for you to have a chance to go inside, if only…but they were asking me about Manus. Dragonspeaker Luciva and the rest. They recognized her! Or her weapon. Parentkiller.”

“That’s the weapon she has, isn’t it? Capsha, I’d like to visit. Maybe you could ask them to come to Cormeng’s? I’m sure they’d love to see it.”

“Absolutely! I…”

Then she hesitated and screwed up her face. She glanced around.

“What’s that sound? It’s like a…ringing?”

Hwalt had nearly gone out again and tilted his head too.

“I thought I heard it. Damned annoying. You maybe want to fix that?”

Doren was so focused on business that he didn’t have time to fix whatever the ringing was.

He brushed Gothica aside as she clung to his arm.

“Doren…we’ve got to leave. Hrawr, fight it.”

The day was a bustle of commerce, real commerce, as people sold everything they could, and all the talk was of the carnival.

Hrawr left to go see if he could buy tickets or maybe even ride to the New Lands.

Though he’d surely be too late and miss the showing, but there had to be repeat performances.

You couldn’t miss it.

Doren himself was going to check and see if he could catch a carriage to the New Lands.

Gothica kept nagging him, and he started snapping at her.

She was so negative, and this was not the moment.

Everyone would glare at her until she stood against one wall, still shivering like she was sick.

Doren expected Hrawr to be back any moment, but the Gnoll never returned. The door did open, though, and something was pushed through.

It looked like a scrying orb. Though those didn’t work in Cormeng’s.

Next came a wooden totem. Carved with eyes. Doren asked the Gnoll what this was about and began to explain about the carnival. The Gnoll would have stayed, but someone yanked him back out so fast he vanished. For a second, Doren saw a worried face.

He didn’t know why. The totem had a piece of paper attached to it. It was a…confusing message.

Your shop is compromised. Get out of the area of effect. Seal the door. 

Now, what did that mean?

He stopped worrying about it after a while.

Goblinhome was also not sending anyone, and he did get the odd Goblin now and then.

Who cared?

It was the circus, the circus.

Doren would have stayed by the windows, trying to get a peek of the performers, hoping to wave one into his shop, but for one thing.

That damned ringing.

Everyone heard it after a bit.

It was annoying, persistent, and they asked Doren if he could fix it—he eventually tore himself away from the bustle of the shop and headed towards the Tuning Room.

The air felt…oddly heavy around the old wards. When he took his first step towards the rings of protection, the wood seemed to groan and shift. Doren felt like he had something heavy on him, but the ringing was loud, and he took another step.

Shivered as he wondered what was wrong. He’d been in such a good mood, and now there was a rising panic in him. A horror like a scream coming from his stomach and growing louder. He almost turned back to the lovely time, but the ringing was getting annoying.

Step forwards.

His legs urged him. His mind shrieked at him, and he took another step.

Felt himself shedding his good mood, his confidence. Stumbled forwards another half-step, then began to run.

Forwards, not back. Reaching for the doorframe. Gasping, a hoarse scream on his lips.

“Nononono—”

It was only when he was inside the Tuning Room that it left him. Trapped outside. He whirled, and he thought he could almost see it. Like a fog in the air. A giddy, uproariously happy feeling. But also numbing the mind, covering the questions, the concerns he should have.

Manifestation.

He sank to his knees and threw up on the ground. Then his head rose.

The ringing had saved him. The dial marked ‘Manifestation’ was still hitting one end of the brass cylinder. Doren wiped at his mouth.

“What is that? What is that tent? How did they survive? Tiernas? TIERNAS?”

The explanations he had so blithely accepted now came back to him in horror because he knew how he’d felt, how he’d ignored things that would have had him leaping out of his seat in any sane frame of mind.

They didn’t even know what the performers looked like? They wanted to know what had changed? How many Walled Cities were left?

Old Ones.

Or something worse. Doren’s hands shook as he tried to figure out what to do. He almost ran out of the Tuning Room to drag everyone away from Mudhole. Almost…but when he got a few steps out of the protections, he felt himself feeling better.

Felt it—and reversed course instantly.

“My shop. Cormeng’s has been breached.”

That was what the warning was. Even Cormeng’s couldn’t resist whatever was affecting it. If he went out there, he’d be another grinning idiot, and only the fact this carnival had no idea his shop was around had saved him.

No one was immune. Even Hrawr, who was surely over Level 30, had fallen into the effect. Theikha must have stopped him from returning. Same with Chieftain R—

“Gothica.”

She was the only person who had been trying to talk to him. He recalled her shaking in place all day. A terrified Goblin who had been getting on his nerves—

Had she been fighting off the effect? People with auras were resistant to mass-magical effects and other forms of control. Rulebreakers like Doren should have been the same, but whatever was affecting them had clearly beaten both of them.

He couldn’t go out there. Doren listened to the merry voices, a few shouts for Doren to ‘turn off that ringing!’ so they could do business. He squeezed his eyes shut. Then he did the only thing he could.

“Silppie. Is Silppie out there?”

He bellowed. After a while, a confused Thorssin came over.

“Silppie’s out preparing for the carnival. She wants to sell glowbugs. She’s casting magic and dashing across the mudflats.”

“What? Are you mad? There’s predators out there!”

Doren was horrified, but Thorssin laughed.

“Not right now. The carnival keeps away trouble like that. I saw a crocodile coming in for butchering—I’ve never seen one fight so hard! It kept trying to crawl away even while they slit it open! Doren, that ringing really is annoying.”

“Get Silppie. I’m closing the shop.”

“You’re closing the—? Doren, what’s wrong with you? We have to make money for the carnival’s grand—”

Doren screamed at him.

“I’m closing the shop! I’ll pay you gold! Fifty pieces, just get Silppie!”

That confused Thorssin, but the gold Doren hurled out of the Tuning Room at least made the Drake gather it up. He went out, and Doren shouted at Rikka to stay, to get Capsha and…

No one would stay. Capsha herself came by to say she’d love to spend time with Doren—at the carnival. But he was being ridiculous; why close up shop? If he did, she wasn’t staying. He begged her from the safety of the Tuning Room, but she couldn’t get close enough, and it didn’t shield her. After six tries, she left, shaking her head.

Silppie did appear, complaining, forty minutes later. Thorssin put her down, but when Doren told her to stay because he was going to disconnect the door, she tried to bolt. The Drake hurried out, shaking her head.

“No! I want to go to the carnival! I hate you!”

He began to come out to grab her and felt himself wondering why he’d close the store. Doren shouted.

“Silppie, don’t go—”

She was dashing for the door when Gothica tackled her. The [Goth] held onto the struggling Drowned Drake girl and stared up at him.

“Close the door, Doren! Close the door! Close the—”

The door disconnected from Mudhole, and Doren heard the ringing from behind him go dead. Gothica relaxed, and her aura exploded around her. Waves of darkness radiating upwards, filling the air around her and Silppie with pitch blackness…but a comforting dark. It pressed against the Tuning Room’s protections, and Doren saw Silppie sit up through her aura.

Then the Drake girl stopped crying out. Her joyful, ecstatic face turned horrified. She looked at him, at Gothica.

Then she started to scream.

——

Chaos in his store. The door kept opening and slamming shut. Doren was communicating with three different spots. Three powers.

The Unseen Empire, and through them, Manus and the Merchant’s Guild.

The Meeting of Tribes.

Goblinhome, and through them, The Wandering Inn via a Gnoll named Ishkr.

None of them would come through the door. Doren had had to go out into the Meeting of Tribes to tell them he’d closed the connection to Mudhole, and they’d nearly killed him. He’d emerged not in the center of the Meeting of Tribes, but at the bottom of a huge hole. Gnolls with bows had shouted at him to halt as [Shamans] began to cast.

The Gnolls recognized this threat when they saw it. Chieftain Rags and her Goblins had picked up the same warning from Gothica, and Redscar and a huge Goblin named Naumel had been waiting on their end of the door.

A small army of [Witches] had assembled outside of the Unseen Empire’s door. So there were experts and leaders from three different factions, not to mention Manus, all of whom were aware of the situation.

But none of them had answers.

“This Grimless Carnival goes beyond Theikha’s knowledge. We are consulting shamanic memory. Hrawr felt the effects wearing off after about an hour—and after Berr punched him. Do not open that door again.”

Slam. The shop’s door opened, and a [Witch] handed him something.

“This talisman may work. But we believe this group was referencing an individual among our class. Did you say…they knew a woman underwater? Did they say she was a [Witch]?”

When he said yes, the woman paled. She turned to the others, and a woman like a bird called out.

“Then this magic is beyond us and older than any living [Witch] but she. The wards will not hold. Not your shop, nor ours. Open the door and be damned. When this carnival opens, mortal man, you and any there will be damned. This is obvious.”

He stared at Witch Mavika.

“But there are thousands of people in Mudhole. My friends.”

She just gazed at him.

“Yes. They unearthed a horror. Worse, it unearthed itself.”

That was—was what Silppie said when she’d stopped screaming. She’d gone out to ask questions, and she told the others what she’d seen.

A huge carnival tent, still half-buried, but disgorging its inhabitants, the ‘performers’. A troupe whose species she couldn’t tell.

“They’re…wet. Mucky. They have bright clothing on, but it’s all rotty. And they smell bad.”

“What are their features like? Characteristics?”

She shrank back from Witch Agratha’s intense stare.

“Dunno. We can’t see them. There’s too much mud. It keeps falling off. But they have weird…things coming off them.”

“What things, child? Drink your tea.”

Eloise was kinder, and Silppie drank more tea, then spoke through the doorway.

“…It looks like my stuff. Only, spiky. Like…”

She gestured, and the [Witches] muttered until one just produced a pencil and drew. Then Doren’s skin crawled.

“That’s a crab leg. Have they become Drowned Folk?”

“They’re mad about it. It’s coming out here.”

Silppie pointed to the back of her head. The [Witches] glanced at each other, and their confidence faltered. Agratha whispered.

“That’s not how Drowned Folk features manifest. The tent. Describe the tent.”

It was some kind of vast structure that indeed seemed to be half as large as Mudhole itself. That was why unearthing it was taking so long. The fabric was almost completely undamaged, but time had worn it down; apparently, there were a few holes, and that’s how the muck had gotten in. The troupe had been inside.

Waiting.

Two things made the explanation worse. Doren had been cursing himself. He’d tried so hard to keep them from digging it up, but Silppie told him it didn’t matter.

“No one dug it up.”

“But how—?”

“They came out. It was upside down. Now it’s not.”

They’d come out last night and righted their home. When Chieftain Rags heard that, she just sat there with the [Shamans] who were trying to remember this…thing. And her words made Gothica shiver and close her eyes.

“Skinner. Old trick. They were waiting and listening to open their door. Not your fault. Now is only the question of what comes next.”

Each group knew. There was a simple reason they let no one into the shop. Only Gothica was inside; she refused to leave even when Chieftain Rags ordered her out.

Doren knew too. But he kept protesting.

“If you’d just send someone to ward the place. Or Shaman Theikha could speak to them.”

“And if they hear of your shop and come in? I refuse to risk it. This…this is a threat on par with the Witch of Webs. We shall send through what magical protections we can. No more.”

That was from Chieftain Feshi. Each group did begin sending magic into Doren’s shop. He put Gnollish totems up, plastered [Witch] and [Mage] magic onto the walls in the forms of talismans, hanging charms, and even accepted a holy item from the Goblins.

Then he opened the door to Mudhole as he stood in the warded rooms.

——

Thorssin was shaking his head at Doren as the man abashedly swept up.

“First you go off, then you cause a mess. What is all this?”

“Oh, some nonsense. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll clean it up in a second. Did they say when the performance is starting?”

“Tomorrow, I think. They were going to take their time, but the ringmaster moved up the timeframe.”

“Really? Why?”

“He doesn’t like Manus coming. He wants an exclusive performance now. Also, this Crossroads…a few of his people checked it out, and he thinks it’s good to move the timeframe up. Isn’t it wonderful?”

Doren turned, limping, because Gothica was clinging to one leg. He tried to get her off, then gave up. He beamed around.

“Well, if you could mention me—”

“Doren, it’s not about you.”

That was so hurtful. Doren felt his good mood dampen as Rikka snapped at him. He grudgingly forked over some more gold for another fish she’d brought in. Then huffily went to check his store and left Thorssin hanging.

A shopkeeper’s pettiness. Gothica kept begging him to go to the Tuning Room, but Doren just ambled around his shop, straightening items, taking a feather duster to ostentatiously flick over antiques…

He paused in the Twilight Sanctuary. The [Goths]’ private rooms were now a full room draped with black velvet and filled with the most thematic antiques they had.

Bone cutlery, a skull with a candle inside, an old seance table—and fine Noelictan tablecloths. Lovely chairs carved of wood that had been fire-blackened until they seemed like they were made of literal ash. [Goths] had taste.

It felt darker inside the Twilight Sanctuary, even when the window was open and letting in sunshine. Doren paused inside, and his stomach began to hurt. He hesitated and then glanced down at Gothica.

“…Wait, I was talking with the Gnolls, Goblins, and Unseen Empire about something. I was going to close up shop, wasn’t I?”

“Yes!”

He felt at his forehead.

“They…they won’t talk to me unless I close Mudhole off. I…excuse me, I think I need to close up shop!”

“Again? Really—come on. Silppie, let’s get out of here.”

“No, wait—”

But it was too late. The girl left, and Doren lowered his hand. He hesitated, almost recanted his words, but his customers had left, and Gothica was drawing shadows around her. It wouldn’t hurt to just tell the others he had to focus on the carnival, right? He’d tell them, then re-open—

——

He didn’t have much left to puke this time, but the sight of each group reacting to their failed wards made Doren feel a bit better.

The [Witches]’ artifacts, Gnollish wards, Goblin faith-items—none of it had lasted more than a few seconds. The talismans from the [Witches] had exploded. The totems had split or cracked in half. Some had caught fire.

And the ‘holy item’ from the Goblins had just melted. Some kind of image of the Goblin Lord of Dreams carved out of wax. In silence, Chieftain Rags gazed at the wax on the floor.

“Nice to know it has limits. Gothica is one of the few aura-specialists in Goblinhome. If even she can’t hold the influence off, you can’t save the others. This ringmaster is intelligent. If he realizes you’re telling us, he will come for you. My advice is to not open the door.”

She glanced up and saw him standing there, swaying. Rags exhaled.

“…Because I know you won’t, I’ll keep pushing my [Shamans] and searching for information. We should know this threat. Why don’t we…?”

“Can’t you send someone through? If they’re over Level 40, maybe—? We’re running out of time, Rags. The carnival opens tomorrow.”

She sat there.

“We don’t have enough time. I’m tired of fighting Old Ones, Doren. Sorry. I won’t commit until I at least know the level of the threat.”

——

It was already late evening. Doren stood in his store and cursed Cormeng. Cursed him for…for not having the magic to hold this off.

If he just had, Doren could grab Thorssin, Rikka, Capsha, everyone, and keep them here! But he couldn’t. He’d hit them over the head, tie them up, but he was as helpless as everyone. Even Gothica couldn’t do a thing when Mudhole’s connection was active.

“It…it like being squashed by something huge and heavy, Doren. I can’t move. If I don’t try hard, every second, it beats me up. I have to be me. Use all my aura just to hold it back.”

He didn’t blame her. He didn’t waste time arguing with the Gnolls or [Witches] after he got a flat refusal from them. Doren just did the only thing he could. The thing he had learned to trust:

He ran into the Trophy Room and read Cormeng’s journals for the way to save everyone.

For once, his ancestor let him down.

——

Cormeng had fastidious notes on everything in the world he’d ever found interesting—which was almost everything. Politics, trade, how things were made.

He’d been an amateur smith, a mage uncredentialed by any academy, an alchemist, explorer—but since he had no levels, he’d never been considered a famous man. An eccentric at best. He had won accolades for some of his deeds, but here, in one of his later journals, Doren read the limitations of his great ancestor.

Journal #7719, Samal.

…lucky not to be beheaded, I suppose. The Kingdom of Keys has taken every key and exiled me permanently. All for breaking their rules.

Allow me a moment to vent since they barely heard me in the trial. Isn’t it allowed? What’s the purpose of loving keys and these damned doors if you don’t want to see what’s past them? I picked one lock.

If the paradise is so perfect, isn’t this fine? Or does it destabilize their kingdom so much?

It’s done. It’s done, and my name isn’t worth much anyways. But there goes the rest of my chances to experiment with auras. It’s practically only royalty who has them, and it’s a faux pas to even test…I’m hardly ‘valuable’ to the monarchies, anyways.

Well, so be it. Damn them all. This is the constant refrain of my life, and I am tired, tired of it. I, Cormeng, renounce the level-takers. I wash my hands of their arbitrary rules and short-sightedness. I’ve nearly enough capital to finish my project.

Once done, I’ll convert my home into a real place. Somewhere that lets me go where my failing legs can’t take me as easily. But I have a thought. I can’t let all this go to waste, but I refuse to allow…

My family barely pays me any heed, except for the money I make that baffles their understanding of how the world should be since I’m richer than the lot of them combined. I’m not one for wills and legacies, but I have a little twist to throw on those vultures hoping I’ll croak.

Bigger plans. I just wish I could have figured out more about auras. I have one. I surely do; but my sight-spell isn’t advanced enough to see the nuance of it. Can I manipulate it or do I have to have a surplus? Why do the levelled grow theirs so anyone over Level 50 has one?

Is it some change in their bodies? Is it just their class? Animals can have auras.

I wish I had more time.

I shall not end this on a negative note. Let me recount my friends in Samal, even those who turned out to be fair-weather in one last moment, for my memories. Firstly, Baker Zita, who…

He didn’t have answers. Cormeng was a genius, but he had limits—and one of those limits was revealed here along with an answer Doren had always sort of known.

He had never really liked people with levels. How many of his descendants had railed against his requirement they too had to be without levels? It was unfair. Surely, Doren had thought, surely he could learn Cormeng’s magic and level? If he wanted to?

Silppie was an example of that. There was a reward for Cormeng’s magic! An appreciation the man had never felt!

But the bitterness of Cormeng was in the lack of levels. And now…

“He has to know more. He has to have found out a bit—he can tell when it’s manifesting. Surely, he later—”

Doren tore through the journals, but he found no more references to aura. True to his word, Cormeng had focused on what he could do, not the world which seemed so closed to him.

Without Cormeng, Doren was lost. Incapable. He sat there as night fell, and his allies got back to him with news.

None of it good. For they had answers.

Each people, Goblins, Gnolls, [Witches], even Drakes, had long memories. And the Carnival…they knew it.

But that was the problem.

They had chosen to forget.

——

“We found memories of Goblins who’d run into it. In Tiernas.”

“And? Does it have a weakness? What does it do?”

Witch Prixall, Shaman Taganchiel, Rags, and Snapjaw were sitting around. Each one appeared troubled. Prixall had a bloody nose, and she was holding a handkerchief to it. She spoke shortly.

“The memories are broken. A [Shaman] tore them to pieces.”

“Tore the memories—?”

“We didn’t know you could do that. But Velan anchored one; you can make them hard to read. Put warnings up. Some things hurt you if you know them. Like Bogleraums. It’s a—what did Randy call it?”

“Memetic threat.”

Rags nodded as Taganchiel leaned over. Her eyes flicked up to Doren.

“What we know is what the warnings said—”

——

“Don’t enter it. Do not enter, do not let anyone else enter. It is like a plague of the mind.”

Shaman Theikha appeared tired. Older, as she spoke to him. She shook her head.

“That is two, now. Two beings who fight with the mind. A battleground we are ill-prepared for. Selphids are your only hope. If the Minds of Baleros were willing to aid you, they might resist this. But we have not needed to deal with this in an age.”

The [Witches] had the same conclusion as well. Doren whispered.

“So you do remember it?”

“In a list of threats? Yes. A list, Doren. That is all. Just as Drakes have their lists of friends and foes, as we discussed, Gnolls keep a list too. A shorter one. This is simply a record of things we must kill. Not potential allies, not informants, but things we have determined shall end. Walled Cities were upon that list. What troubles me is that this list…”

Her eyes glinted, and the world rumbled at the beating of her heart.

“We thought it was of things we had slain. This carnival was cast into the waters. Was it buried when Tiernas sank, piece by piece, or before the death of the continent? That, I do not know, but whoever did it clearly thought time and the deeps would end them. Perhaps they are weak. But weak from an era of legends is beyond us in the era today. That is all I know.”

“But you have magic. Surely you have a spell or—or?”

She was shaking her head, gazing at the sky.

“If you gave me a full day, Doren, I would cast a ritual. [Shamans] are collecting magic. But there is no time.”

“But it’s tomorrow! You have to do something!”

He shouted at her. Tried to push out of his shop. Cursing her, cursing Cormeng. She caught his hand, and he felt the magic dragging him back.

“Doren. I am sorry. I have marked them again, and all Gnolls of the tribes who enter the New Lands will look for this enemy. But there is a reason the Bloodfeast Raiders haunt Izril. They are striking now and fleeing. That is their nature. A cowardly scavenger that dares not prey upon those stronger. But I have no answers. If Chieftain Rags, myself, the best of each group stood shoulder-to-shoulder in your store…”

She gazed at him and sighed as he tried to hold onto her, and her eyes were sad.

“…I would destroy the store and cast us all into oblivion. Your store is not safe.”

“How can I save them?”

She held onto him.

“If you stood in your Tuning Room and set a trap, you might capture the girl. Perhaps a few of your friends. Then close the door. My question is: can they open it even if you close it when their power is waxing? You have put a connection into Mudhole. Can you sever it forever?”

He didn’t know that, either.

——

There was a way to de-anchor Cormeng’s from an area forever. It was in his notes, and it wasn’t hard—it required precise coordinates that were listed on the map, and it’d erase any possibility of Cormeng’s returning there until it was re-linked.

But that meant he’d have to get Thorssin, Capsha, Rikka, Silppie, Hwalt—no, hundreds of people into his store.

With a trap? Doren tried to imagine one. He had the thought to make one of the walls that Cormeng’s could set up close, seal everyone inside.

…But how? Via a contraption? Maybe a rope trap that hoisted you up.

He was trying to set one up, asking the Gnolls for advice with Gothica, who reckoned she might be able to block the door a second. And it was 9:39 PM.

When did the carnival open? Midnight? Dawn? Doren set up one trap, and Gothica promptly wiggled out of it.

“They could probably cut the ropes. They not stupid, Doren—”

“Shut up! Shut up and help me fix it!”

He screamed at her. Screamed at her and was ashamed. But she just sat there, miserable, until she got up to check the door for him. He was fumbling with ropes when she handed him something.

“Letter.”

He tore it open when he saw it had Manus’ seal. This time, the letter was addressed to him.

FROM MANUS’ HIGH COMMAND TO SHOPKEEPER DOREN OF CORMENG’S—

Your warning has been noted. Manus’ forces are moving to counter and address The Grimless Carnival threat. 

They will not arrive by tomorrow. Every attempt will be made to catch the enemy and recover any inhabitants of Mudhole.

Strategic analysis recommends not contacting Mudhole again. Aura effect is rated at a 50+ specialist on a town-wide radius.

AUTHORIZED BY DRAGONSPEAKER LUCIVA FROM MANUS’ SECURITY RECORDS FOR YOUR EYES ONLY—

The Grimless Carnival is a known enemy of Manus. Information about it is largely expunged due to the nature of the threat. Our records indicate it was sunk in hopes of destroying it or containing it forever. 

It should never have been recovered given the depths, and Drowned Folk would have avoided it at all costs.

I do not believe the opening of this carnival can be avoided. This is a matter for Manus and Named-rank adventurers. Withdraw; you have done all you can. I mourn your loss and that of the brave inhabitants of Mudhole. They will be avenged.

—Dragonspeaker Luciva

——

There was no one coming to help. No miracles. They didn’t want to risk their lives. Couldn’t.

So that was how it felt.

Doren heard the warning again, in his ears. The way the [Princess] had regarded him.

He saw Erin Solstice sailing away and understood the look in her eyes.

But he…

He didn’t even know how to stop it. If Cormeng couldn’t help him, then Doren had nothing.

The traps in his store lay around, broken. They wouldn’t work. He’d searched something else up when he’d been preparing to cast the spell.

The de-anchoring ritual had one catch. It would erase an area from Cormeng’s. Make it impossible to reach the store.

But the warning Cormeng had written into it was that anything, anyone inside Cormeng’s that belonged to that spot would be thrown back where they came from. Fatally, usually.

Objects might not be; they contained the dimensional anchoring for a while, but if they were sold to Cormeng’s and eventually left, they generally just transited to a new spot with ease. But people?

People couldn’t be brought into Cormeng’s and then de-anchored. So if he did capture Silppie, Thorssin—he had to keep the connection. Or they’d die when he cut it.

His only hope was then to capture them, convince them to stay, and what, hope this carnival would pass his shop by?

Madness. He couldn’t even warn them. Doren had thought to tell them to run. If they just ran, they might make it, surely.

But they were all insane with the carnival’s effect. He was staring at the Tuning Room. Trying to hand-copy the protections and knowing they were beyond him. If he could just bring them to their senses…!

Doren couldn’t do it. Gothica was sleeping in his store; she was so tired she couldn’t keep helping. Doren was cursing Cormeng. Cursing him for abandoning levels.

His magic was wonderful, impressive. Important. But if he’d just married it to levels…!

“You weren’t perfect! I thought you were a fraud all my life, even though I knew this place was important. I hated you because no one else could live up to you. Because we had to follow your damn way of life. Now I know you mattered. But you weren’t perfect.”

He shouted at the Trophy Room. At the few sketches of Cormeng that were left, gifts from friends, artists. This looted store…

Maybe, in the past, it could have done it. If his descendants hadn’t sold all his greatest works off. If they’d cared more. Doren glanced at the book of spells he knew from Cormeng’s. Ejection from the store, the one that threw someone back.

If I’d only mastered your magic.

This was the final hour, just before midnight. He sat there, crying.

Waiting for a miracle that would never come.

Not for him. Doren dropped the journal on the floor. Turned, aimlessly, and began to wander through his store.

He wished Toren were here.

——

The Twilight Sanctuary was where Gothica slept. A curled up Goblin lying under the tea table. Snoring softly. Doren stared at her.

He knew she was important. He liked to pretend she was just some funny little Goblin, a strange class. But he’d seen her holding off a threat that scared Manus and the Great Tribes of Izril.

“Someday, you’ll be so important the world will know your name. I knew it. I knew this place would matter. I just pretended I didn’t, because then I could let it exist. But someday, I knew I’d brag that you used to come in here. I wish you were that person I know you’ll be. That’s not your fault. It’s mine. It’s everyone’s fault for needing you to be that.”

Doren turned away, ashamed to need a child to be what he couldn’t. He didn’t see Gothica flinch. He was just gazing around the Twilight Sanctum.

“This place brought me back to my senses. There’s power here. Is that how it works? Cormeng wrote about leylines. Places like palaces where authority-Skills were stronger. Can places matter? Can they…absorb aura?”

It seemed so. The very element of [Goths] was in this room. He could feel the darkness around him, dampening even the moonlight. Like it had an aura of its own.

Doren was feeling at the drapes.

“If only I could make it stronger. Cover the shop with this—it might help. But you can’t make an aura stronger…can you?”

He was thinking. His mind, which encompassed so many of Cormeng’s ideas, which had seen the [Goths] for so long now, was working. Doren squeezed his eyes shut, thinking out loud.

“No? Yes. Yes. A [King] is more of a [King] if he wears royal clothing. The King of Destruction could be naked and still wield his aura, so it’s not a requirement. But if a [Goth] feels more like a [Goth] when she wears black, then it can matter. It’s a boost. But why does the room matter?”

He answered his question as the little figure sat up and two crimson lights opened. Listening to a man without levels explain her class to her.

“…Because you come here each week. Because it matters. It’s ritual. Why do [Witches] cast magic at the Witching Hour? Some of it is magic. But the rest is because they think it matters. The world thinks it matters. But that’s only half of it. Belief doesn’t do everything. For some classes, it might—but you told me that joke, didn’t you?”

What joke? Doren was walking through his shop, now, searching around.

“The one about Erin Solstice. That she can spit blood like an Oldblood Drake. Only, she can’t. She never developed the power despite a lot of Liscor believing she actually might be able to. So why does the Twilight Sanctuary have power? Perhaps because your aura is always filling it? Or the—the ritual.”

He remembered the [Goths] chanting and stealing the [Witch] magic. Then Doren began to see it.

“It stains the ground. Just like how magic can infuse something. Aura…the weapons of the Hundred Heroes are said to be still connected to the royal bloodlines. Cormeng wrote of weapons that were more than just magic. That had qualities unknown to magic. Aura?”

Now, he was standing around his shop. Eyes roaming. And he whispered.

“There’s no time. But this is your place. If you expanded it. If I took this place…”

He walked to the edge of the Twilight Sanctuary. Someone had put down a rug to keep it clean, and Doren pulled it up. Underneath…yep. They’d painted the floorboards black. He’d gotten so mad at them. But right now, Doren was casting around.

He strode off and came back with something as Gothica walked over. When she returned, she saw Doren holding…a bucket of black paint.

“Doren? What are you thinking?”

He hurled the paint bucket across the floor. The black liquid splashed down, and Doren grabbed a mop. Began to swish it across the ground, coating his floorboards with the same color. Gothica stared at him.

“Doren, this not going to work.”

She followed his logic. He could make another room part of the Twilight Sanctuary. Maybe that’d expand the effect, but it had barely worked when he stood in the center. Doren knew it too. He turned to her.

“Gothica, you know all your friends. Don’t you have their names in case you need to change the meeting time? Or for emergencies?”

“Sure.”

“Send them a [Message]. There’s a scroll under my counter. Tell them to come here. It’s midnight. If they can—no, tell them it’s an emergency. What else is [Goth]?”

“I…tons of stuff. Whatever’s dark, mysterious. Beautifully sad or—it’s music. But it’s not strong enough, Doren. Maybe I can be, someday. But the others can’t fight the Carnival. They’re doing it for fun. They haven’t risked their lives.”

She was trying to explain it to him. There was power in her class, but it was only as serious as you took it. And a makeover was skin-deep. He nodded, but Doren was just…

“Then what’s at the center of [Goths], Gothica? What’s the deepest thing to your class?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Being…okay with dying? Loving the things that sometimes scare you and make you frightened? Accepting people who don’t fit in. Anything we find that we love. It’s not original. It’s…being the dark heroines of our stories that are a bit twisted. That’s why, sometimes, the others say it just a phase. Or we give it up. Because it’s not—you can stop if it’s not you.”

The words came out of Gothica as she struggled to articulate what she was. Embarrassing, too personal to say in any moment but this. Doren nodded. He paused in mopping.

“There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“I know that. But I don’t know what my class is when it goes deeper.”

She gazed up at him, and that was it. No one knew. Chieftain Rags, who had great expectations of her, who had seen something—Gothica wished they told her what she should be. Because she didn’t know.

Doren was no [Goth]. Just a somewhat dull man who let them into his store and smiled at them. Who found them unobjectionable except when they broke things. He bent over, patted her shoulder, and smiled.

“Let’s find out together, Gothica. Your class is allowed to steal all it wants. Not even the Hundred Heroes were original. Go get the others.”

He watched her run off, then Doren stood in the room, dark paint on the ground. A man trying to hold off a nightmare with no time left. Clinging to the one thing that might save him, fingers on the edge of the cliff.

Was that gothic? Was that desperate enough for the thing that ruled levels that Cormeng had raged against? Doren spoke up to the ceiling, bitter.

“I will never level. Not while I need Cormeng’s store. But that does not mean I do not exist in this world of classes. I helped give them. I have helped level people. I have read about Cormeng’s life and the many things he saw and envied. In his name, to correct my ancestor’s one folly, or gain the acceptance he was never granted—for Gothica’s shadowed heart and the people who shouldn’t die—this is my attempt. I have never tried hard at anything. But this?”

He peered around at his store. Then Doren calmly drew something from his belt. Just a little dagger he’d been sold. One of Hwalt’s.

“I offer everything.”

He placed the dagger across a wrist and dug the blade in. Then Cormeng’s shivered as its owner changed it.

——

Gothica ran to get the other Cave Goblins who were [Goths] after sending messages to her friends. She wasn’t gone long, but when she returned to the store, she froze.

There was blood on the ground. One of the [Goths], Lady Isby, was standing there.

“G-Gothica? What’s going on? You said it was an emergency and swore on our class—”

“What happened? Where’s Doren?”

When she saw the blood, she feared the worst. But Doren wasn’t dead. He was bleeding, but his wrist wasn’t spurting blood—she knew enough about injuries to know he’d be dead if he didn’t stop that. He’d cut himself deep enough to dribble blood around. Now, Doren walked, paler-faced than normal, and he was like a stranger to the [Goths] who assembled.

So intense it made them uncomfortable. Because he was searching, a man possessed. He was also, coincidentally, drawing something in the room next to the Twilight Sanctuary.

“Doren, what’s this?”

“Blood summoning ritual.”

“Say what?”

“I asked a [Witch]. I’m not going to activate it, and it’s probably wrong.”

He was trying to lay something like a spell circle on the floor. Only, it was a star inside of a circle and…he’d lit candles made of black Noelictan beeswax. Something about it called to Gothica, but the blood—she saw Doren pass by a mirror. He glanced at it, then hefted something in one hand.

A hammer.

He shattered the mirror.

“That’s bad luck.”

One of the [Goths] blinked at the shards of glass on the floor. And a hazard for the feet. Doren nodded absently.

“Yes, it is. Is that goth? Is that gothic? Defying authority. Destroying things?”

He turned, and Gothica didn’t know.

“I—I—I mean, sure, if you had a, like, ruined building or destroyed rooms, that pretty cool. But no one should hurt their feet on stuff. Graveyards are cool.”

Isby, or Isbeth Wellfar, nodded. They’d talked a lot about the aesthetic, and music was important. There were some sea shanties that were pretty good. But the [Fright Lady]—she wasn’t prepared for Doren to turn and hurl the hammer through a series of glass shelves containing figurines. They shattered down, and she covered her mouth.

“Shopkeeper Doren!”

Shadowcat, another [Goth], flinched, and Doren turned. He read their horrified expressions.

“If it’s not [Goth], I’ll clean it up. But if it is…is fire?”

“No. Not unless it’s like a spooky flame.”

“Spooky flame. And you liked [Witches]. Skulls and…”

He wasn’t blank-faced. Doren was, in fact, concentrating hard. He strode over to the door, yanked it open.

“Are there [Witches] here?”

“What’s happened now?”

They peered at him. Alert. But even they weren’t prepared for Doren to point at them.

“You…do you have spare robes? Tools of your craft? Skulls? Even dead birds? Taxidermized.”

He stared at Mavika, who gave him the most affronted, confused look she had given anyone in decades. Doren spoke.

“Sell them to me. Anything black.”

He shut the door, then opened it. The Gnolls. Gnolls had dyes and skulls, surely. The [Goths] eyed each other. And then Gothica began to sense it.

——

What was a [Goth]? It was a question the Blighted Kingdom had asked once. For they had someone who had invented the class in this world, but who wasn’t the be-all-end-all definition of it.

Apparently, to Lord Hayvon’s people, who had headaches over the matter, a lot of what a [Goth] was was what it wasn’t. Misconceptions abounded.

There was some kind of other group with the same name. And the word gothic, which referred to a period of Earth’s culture that, yes, could be appreciated by said [Goths] and was also a style of…everything, but again, not goth necessarily.

Goth culture was also heavily rooted in music, but it wasn’t a pure requirement. Really, it was a vibe, something you didn’t have to be, nor something that benefited from too much purity testing.

You could dabble in being a goth, share other cultures. There was emo, steampunk, related subcultures that had overlaps—at this point, the [Strategists] reached for headache pills—what a goth was was a personal journey.

There were a lot of things it was not. A poseur, for instance, was a shallow reflection of the culture who was only in it for the looks or who wanted to get attention. When one well-meaning person had asked if appearance was not a significant part of the class, he’d gotten a lecture.

It was an open-ended class that made it hard to classify—perhaps by the system of levels itself. But the problem with relying on Beclaire, the only [Goth] of Rhir, and her interpretations was this:

She was being tricked into analyzing [Goths] purely as something from Earth’s lens. The far better question only Doren was asking was this:

What was a [Goth] in this world?

In another world, they could be the counter-culture group who embraced an aesthetic and music. A community whose definition flexed and changed as the world did.

But in this one? The longing for darkness, a fascination with the macabre ran into the truth there were monsters out there. And more crucially—there was a power here. Waiting for this class to take hold of.

What was a [Goth] if it gave you literal powers and magic? What should it then be? It was a question Doren asked them flat out.

Zamathica, the [Goth] of the future, was one of the first to speak. She took an ornamental sword from a display and held it out to Gothica.

“To be a [Goth] is to embrace the night until it is a weapon that consumes even monsters. A darkness so beautiful it makes you royalty of the underworld.”

The promise in her eyes scared Gothica. And it was the Gnollish mother, whose nickname was Ulsine, who argued back.

“We’re not just a combat class. We enjoy tea. We can like simply sitting together and admiring the rain. It should be wider. For the other things that Gothica told us about. Punks, rebels, emos?”

“They can be their own thing. We belong to the darkness.”

The black paint was dripping from the walls as Doren walked past them with dyes from the Weatherfur clan, throwing it across Cormeng’s shop. He was pushing walls into place, draping black fabric from the Unseen Empire higher. It was Gothica who argued back.

“No. A [Goth] does not have to midnight wear. They don’t have to be weapons.”

She locked eyes with Zamathica, and the Goblin from the future, who had known the older version of Gothica, blinked and grew confused. Even worried.

What is a [Goth]? Now it felt like the question had power in the air. It was Sawtail, the Drake boy, who whispered.

“I liked when we did the [Witch] ritual. Can we be friends with other classes or does no one like us? Like [Necromancers]?”

His eyes held a fear of that future, and it was Lady Isbeth who answered slowly. She glanced at Gothica for permission, but then realized she didn’t need it.

She was that class. This was her moment. They all listened as the Wellfar [Lady] straightened her back.

“I think I’d like to have [Necromancer] friends. And [Witches] too. Our class is open-minded. We get that people don’t like or respect us. So we’re the last group who will hate others. We like things others call creepy, macabre, or twisted. But we can also just love good music.”

“That’s not enough. We’re more than just style and a song.”

Zamathica hissed. She pointed at a monster’s skull Doren was dragging into the room.

“When the soldiers break open the doors and come for us. When the monster howls, we do not flinch. We look into the darkness, and it is our home. We are not helpless.”

A shopkeeper listened as they argued. He was shoving curios out of the way. Hurling objects through the door that didn’t fit what they believed in. The black paint he was tracking everywhere seemed to be spreading, but it didn’t make it all black. There were pale outlines in the stain that seemed to creep up the wall. Like silhouettes were being carved out of the night.

A beautiful pattern. A crow hunched over a skull, pecking at mushrooms sprouting from the ground. An umbrella that opened and became a piece of art as water trickled down from above. Doren placed it there, and it hung from a string and seemed to become more than just the individual pieces.

Gothica was gazing at an illustration of a Seamwalker. She whispered.

“Yes, we’re strong. But we should also look into the dark. And if the monster comes out and it pretty cute and has good energy, we might kiss it. If it does terrible things, then it gets this.”

She raised the umbrella filled with razors. Then turned to the others.

“A monster thing is coming for my friends. My heart is black, even if my blood is red. I swear by it—it can’t have them. I’ll become a scarier monster than it is if I have to. Until my cloak covers towns.”

Zamathica and the other [Goth] Goblins sighed, and they saw it for a moment. A grand lady sweeping a cloak across nations, a benevolent—and slightly scary—smile on her face.

It was Ulsine who saw something else. Her head turned, and she spoke as the shadowy paint crept up the walls. And they realized it wasn’t Doren doing it anymore.

Something was growing in the room. Springing from all of them. A combined presence that was a mix of all their personalities. Their class. Their souls manifesting.

Aura.

“Then we’re also where they find out who they are. Anyone who walks past someone with black eyeshadow on and thinks it looks good. People searching for other classes. They could come to us and figure out who they are. Can we protect them, though?”

Shadowcat bent down and felt at the black substance. He shook it off his claws. Then reached up and took hold of some old curtains. They were not black, but a faded royal Terandrian red. He pulled them across the floor, and they whirled; his little costume that had been hand-sewn here seemed to pick up the mood of the room.

As if it were armor.

“We should try. What else is [Goth]?”

Then they were also going to the door, and more answers came. From the inn, a [Wandering Server] brought black flames conjured by an [Emberbearer]. But they were too hateful, so he found an [Alchemist], and she lit multicolored flames instead of purely alchemical substances.

——

The [Witches] and Gnolls were gazing into the shop, and a few seemed tempted to enter. One of them was talking.

“They’re choosing their class. Sisters…shouldn’t we be there to hold their hands?”

“Would we respect that if it were done when we chose, Witch Agratha? Respect is letting them choose. Besides, they are rebellion against authority. Give them their space and hope they become allies. Look. They’re stealing magic.”

Lady Rie had called for what Doren asked for. Spellbooks from Wistram Academy, the Terras faction, that taught new [Mages] a bunch of spells. But the [Mages] holding them were flinching.

Because Doren was opening them and ripping the magic out. He found a [Darkness Arrow] spell and pulled the magic straight out of the spellbook. Then found another spell, [Cloud of Darkness]—handed it to a [Goth] who was binding them into a new spellbook.

“You—you can’t do that. This is magic. It is not so easy as copying a spell and—and pulling it out of a tome. How are you doing that?”

He should have ruptured the magic. Twice, the shopkeeper messed up, and the contained spells malfunctioned. But he just shook his arm away as blisters rose from singed skin. Then he carefully plucked the spells off the book.

“It’s just mage magic. I see where it starts and ends. Now, [Shamans].”

He turned, and his eyes were alight. The shop? Cormeng’s was filled with shadowy figures dancing around a glowing orb that shone like the moon. No one could tell how many [Goths] were in there—and the [Spies] edging for a clear view were trying to see.

But all they saw was Doren.

——

He bought and sold. That was all. Bought and sold what was needed. Room after room took on the energy as the [Goths] performed a ritual they had no words for. They had formed a pile of anything magical they could find and were burning it. It should have belched up foul smoke, but instead, the rising cloud seemed to just join the rest of their authority. Curtains like walls.

Movable walls and furniture becoming grand archways that were infused with aura. A desperate work as the night gave way to day. But even as the sun began to rise and the skies lighten—

Cormeng’s hung dark and gloomy.

That was good. Doren had never felt more welcome in the darkness than this. He kept working until it was 4:22 AM.

Then…he turned to the panting [Goths]. Most could barely stand. It seemed as if they’d spent something in them. Their auras. They were as mundane and tired, makeup running, as the shop had become grand and mysterious.

“Time for you to go. Thank you.”

“But—but what about the monsters?”

Lady Isbeth protested. Doren stood there as Gothica weakly got up. She studied him, and the smile that had grown over her face became terror. Then a calm acceptance. The shopkeeper looked around at the beautiful little group who had started here, who would become something important.

Someday. He smiled.

“That’s my responsibility. Not yours. It will be harder for you to find each other when Cormeng’s is gone, but you know what you are. Thank you. It matters.”

“No. No, we’re staying—”

He didn’t argue with Lady Isbeth. He just lifted one hand.

“Cormeng’s—everyone out. No doors. Aspec, drauthme—”

“Wait—”

A wind blew as Doren flicked his fingers and threw a spell. The lesser of his two expulsion spells. The [Goths] tried to grab onto something, but a breeze blew as soft as a whisper. It sent them stumbling backwards. Arms flailing—through the door.

Gothica tried to grab onto the doorframe. She rasped.

“Doren—”

He prised her claws from the door, and she clung to his hand. Her eyes were huge, and she tried to hold on, but Doren just let go.

“Thank you, Gothica.”

Then the door slammed shut as she shouted. He stood in the darkness and closed his eyes as it seemed to envelop him, as if she were still there, a shadow by his side.

May it be enough. Doren’s knees shook. He was tired suddenly.

Terrified.

But—he smiled, mirthless.

“I was warned.”

Then he turned and called out one last place.

“Mudhole.”

Something blew in. He felt it. A terrible fog. And now, as the day dawned, the faintest laughter. He could hear it. Distant and mocking, rising to greet the advent of an old story. It swirled around him, and he shuddered. Felt his mind growing blank, susceptible.

A moth lured to an inviting flame, an open hand.

Then the darkness pulled him back, and he stepped behind curtains that rustled. The fog halted, twining with the darkness, unable to proceed further. Doren exhaled as Cormeng’s shivered, and that warning chime rang again and again.

“Something so old Gnolls thought it dead. Which [Witches] fear to see and Goblins are tired of. Foes of the Walled Cities. All Mudhole has is me.”

He laughed at that. Laughed, then lifted the pouch of reagents. Cormeng’s magic, what few spells he had, upon his tongue.

“I’m no great man. Not like he was. But it can’t have them without a fight. That’s all. I’ve never brawled properly a day in my life. I’m not strong, but they’ll have to come into my shop. If I closed it on them, I’d be worse than a coward. I just wish I were a [Warrior].”

He squeezed his eyes shut, holding his wrist, rubbing at the closed cut as the darkness seemed to sing around him with [Goth] music. Then a voice rumbled from one of the rooms not fully infected with darkness. Loud—as loud as legends.

Pleased and graceful and strong.

Hrawr stepped out of hiding as he held his axe. He met Doren’s shocked gaze as he nodded to the shopkeeper.

“I see a great warrior, the kind my tribe has always sung of. One Gnoll cannot stay behind. We are the travellers of this world. Defiers of evil wherever it crawls up from. Howl, shopkeeper, and wake them from this madness.”

He shouldn’t be here! Doren gazed at him, wide-eyed, but then peered out that door. He could hear the laughter rising. See a tent through the rain. Feel something shifting.

Cloth moving. Preparing to unveil the carnival’s true nature. He strode to the door and walked through it.

——

Mudhole was filled with people lined up for The Grimless Carnival. They stood on the sinking boardwalks, smiling.

Each man and woman, Drake, Human, Dullahan—every species holding all they had of value. Food, coins. Clothing.

All that the performers desired. They were handing out tickets, encrusted with filth, for admittance, piling the entrance fees up higher. Tribute for the carnival. Supplies to repair, rebuild, re-open the continent-spanning tour.

Laughing, but not in the way of…regular performers.

These folk laughed in a way only a [Clown] would understand. A [Fool], a [Jester]? These classes cavorted and japed to be laughed at.

But this was the laughter of that class who laughed for themselves.

At you.

One of the performers at the head of the line had on bright, colorful clothing, what you could see of it as the rain fell. It washed away the muck, but more was oozing from every worn seam on his body. From inside.

Millennia of mud. Yet there were features visible at times. Teeth turned yellow with age, elongated by receding, filthy-black gums. But the yellow of the enamel was also splotched red at the tips. Sharp teeth.

Was it a Drake whose eyes stared out from under that hood? A Drake alone no longer.

A crab’s leg was sticking out of the back of his head, protruding from his skull. Another stuck out at the side. Twitching like it had a mind of its own. The spiked shell, the long limbs, made Laniver, standing at the head of the line with Merchant Lavroisse, flinch every time he saw it.

But then the [Financial Servant] would gaze at the carnival, and the smile would re-appear. The performers were licking their lips, eying the food.

Not all were—well. They stumbled around, turning half-falls into silly pratfalls. Telling jokes, or trying to. One was attempting to juggle. They were lucky their audience was desperate.

The real act was inside, anyways. You could see it now past the tent flaps slowly being drawn wide. Silppie was being carried on Thorssin’s shoulders to see. And she saw…

Something dragged itself across the floor of the carnival’s interior. Dragging…mouth open in a scream. A far too large mouth spewing mud. And there was no lower half. A tangle of filthy, shiny strings seemed to be hanging from their lower half. They were moaning—and the crowd stirred for a second as they heard the odd, ululating sound.

Silppie froze, and her mind filled with panic—before the tent flaps were closed hurriedly. The sound cut off, and the performers shuffled in front of it.

“People of Izril, pardon the delay.”

A voice broke over the folk of Mudhole. Then he was there, bounding out, doing a flip, and landing.

The Ringmaster.

He seemed a bit better than the others. A bit. Less mud clung to him, perhaps. His costume was not bright red, though, as one might expect, but an unnerving, too-bright yellow. Nor did he have the top hat and coat and boots associated with more modern carnivals.

Rather, his attire appeared to be closer to robes. A top mantle over deeper yellow trailed behind the Ringmaster. He had on a mask of pale yellow ivory, too, which had three openings.

One on the left, one on the right, and one in the center, where a nose might be.

For his eyes.

Did he have…eyes there? It seemed like light might be visible from the openings. Above the mask hung two antlers, only they curved the wrong way, tips pointed down, not up.

He raised one gloved hand and called out; his voice was resonant, not deep but carrying, a buzz in the ears.

“We apologize for the delay. And the less-than-stellar state of our tent. Rest assured, the Carnival has more attractions. Once, our troupe were a thousand tents. Each one bedazzling the eye. Our performers legion, every one of a different name and nature.”

The performers stopped and gazed past the Ringmaster, at that moment in time. Mud dripped down as the Ringmaster’s eyes shone from behind the mask.

“Alas, we climbed too high and were cast down by detractors. Many have tried to echo our craft. None have succeeded. Nor has time kept us from returning to our stage. The show must go on. So be welcome. Your seats await. We must have an audience. And we must have new stagehands.”

Laughter, then. Bubbling up from the performers. The Ringmaster silenced them all as he lifted his mantle, swinging it about.

“The hour is almost upon us. It may be a humbler performance, but we shall begin here, at the bottom. It shall nevertheless be the one that defines your lives.”

His pale yellow mantle whirled as he spun. The Ringmaster held an arm straight out, a six-fingered hand turned palm-up, and bowed.

Then the flaps in front of The Grimless Carnival opened, and there was laughter. Cheering. The people of Mudhole applauded and screamed for joy, and the performers echoed them.

The Carnival had opened! The Ringmaster bellowed as people pushed forwards, and a grinning [Clown] took their gifts and began to admit them in. The Ringmaster’s voice, then, became less chagrined, less weary. Older, grander, he called out as his cadence, even his accent, changed subtly.

“Welcome, strangers. Hail, ye offspring of the listless folk of this world. Ye who know naught but the light o’ empire, stray from thy walls, thine edifices of law and order. Hearken, hearken, good gentles, and witness th’ spectacle of ages. Respite from thy wearisome toil waiteth within. No all-judging light from above shall find thee here.”

A few heads turned to listen as the people pushed forwards. Merchant Lavroisse was too slow and stumbled back from the crowd shoving to get in first. Laniver too, and they turned.

Strange words. Words meant for a different audience, a different time.

Tiernas.

Then no more words were being said from the Ringmaster. He stood back as the first guests of The Grimless Carnival entered the tent. They were handing tickets to the performers and being admitted into the place beyond.

Tickets. Almost all of them were pale and grey, like slate. Small slips that were cheap. Compared, at least, to the larger tickets made of pale, faded bronze. Those looked like actual tickets, and few people had them; those who’d had something worth trading.

There were better tickets, and those still impatiently jostling in line gazed around, searching for one last thing to sell to upgrade theirs. Only one man had a ticket better than bronze.

Merchant Lavroisse had a silver one that blew like a ribbon in the wet air. Yet he kept glancing down at it, dissatisfied. Even he could only afford…but he would be treated better than the others. And entering the carnival was the true reward, anyways.

But what were they seeing? It wasn’t clear. The first few dozen people had gone within, and those standing in line stood on their tip-toes, trying to peer within. There was bright light now. Strangely orange, as if the lanterns that shone within had cloth over them or it wasn’t quite as bright as regular flame.

Orange light, purple, and red—even a kind of yellow, but not from mortal candles. Not the kind that reminded you of the sun. Shadows swirled past the excited figures running inside, and walls of that old fabric formed passageways, hiding the rest from view.

Laughter and shrieks of excitement echoed from within. A couple, two weary, mud-soaked Humans, ran forwards, and they vanished past the smiling performers. One half-turned; a scarf had blown from a young woman’s shoulders, and she thought to grab it. She stumbled, looked back—and her head stopped.

For a second, that excited ecstasy turned to confusion. Then her face twisted up in surprise. Her eyes bulged, and she opened her mouth—before she stumbled and was gone.

Just gone…

A figure interrupted the flow of bodies entering the tent. A performer. Their face was that of a painted Drake’s. Or had been.

The white makeup of a [Clown] was running. Off-white drooping down, and a red orb on the Drake’s face was slightly misshapen. As if melted. The makeup ran down their face, sloughing downwards and forming trails of rounded flesh that dangled as they turned a grinning face filled with rotting teeth.

Then the audience realized the makeup wasn’t running down the performer’s face. It was their flesh. Their face was running down, and the performer pulled at their eyelids, pulling their entire face down. It stretched until their eyes were squished tight vertically, mouth pulled down until it was three times as big as it should have been, and then—then there were shadows behind that face, and you knew it was a mask. But behind the mask lay—

They vanished in a moment, swirling into the shadows. The people closest to the entrance of the tent could only see the tall performer turning. A seven-foot tall figure with a dripping face holding someone by the shoulder.

The young woman, one hand clutching the end of her scarf. She gave up as the performer held out an arm. Her mouth opened again, and a falling curtain covered both. Then they were gone, and there was only the laughter from within.

The forwards rush slowed only a second. Then the crowd was dragged forwards. The Carnival grew louder with each body that entered, and now a second performer came forwards to allow two lines of guests to enter simultaneously.

The rest of the Carnival’s performers stood in a line against the tent walls. They were unable to form a regular line of bodies. They were too tall, too short, too squat or wide—over half had on masks like the Ringmaster or some garment hiding their face. A bag of ruined cloth. Or they just hid their faces, like one man with a hand so huge his fingers easily covered his features.

They were restless. Growing antsier with each passing second. A performer on stilts wearing a ruined [Jester]’s outfit kept shifting, glancing at the Ringmaster. Her face was a smiling slash of black ink on a burlap sack. Two long lines for eyes, a wobbly curved line for a smile—no actual eyeholes or airholes. But when she turned her head, the Ringmaster held up a finger.

Wait.

Wait…

The Ringmaster was counting down. In other times, when the Carnival was flush, they would have taken their time and pick of the best. When they had hundreds of thousands of guests, they could choose one among so many. Or save such occasions like these for a truly important performance. But these were hard times.

Almost, almost. They were waiting for the majority to enter the tent. The Ringmaster kept scanning the crowds as a third performer came to open a third line, physically trembling with impatience as he snatched tickets. But each person with a better ticket, bronze, was deferentially pointed right instead of left. There were rules.

Speaking of which, the Ringmaster’s eyes alighted on a group close to the front doors. A waving Drake. Thorssin standing next to Rikka. They wanted to upgrade their tickets, but they had nothing…

The harpoon the Drake woman carried was worthless, but she had something upon her. An odd little book that glimmered with magic. Hm. It was his job to appraise guests, so the Ringmaster motioned.

“Those two. For better seats.”

The two Drakes jumped and stepped out of line as a performer sloughed towards them, whispering excitedly. The Ringmaster was beckoning when he hesitated. His head turned, and the glowing light in his mask sharpened. He sensed, suddenly, an intruder.

“…Manus? No. This is darkness. Darkness and something else. Music? Noelictus? It cannot be. Who—?”

A man stood in Mudhole as people turned to see that shopkeeper, the ordinary man. Doren pointed skywards. He shouted, words that even the performers didn’t know. He fired something up as darkness leaked from his shop.

A glowing spell. The performers flinched, thinking it was a spell of the kind they knew. An arrow of light that would explode. A comet.

They were poised to jump, dodge, throw themselves between it and the tent. But the strange projectile just flew higher, higher…the Ringmaster’s head tilted back.

“I do not know this magic.”

Then the glowing orb exploded in the sky. The harsh light blinded the performers after so long in the dark. They shielded their eyes, and the crowd shifted, waking up. They looked up—and the Ringmaster saw it too. He saw Thorssin blink. Rikka start. The people around him, in line, seemed to wake for a second and gazed at him in horror until he exerted control. But they still saw it above their heads.

Just words. Words written by magic in the dark sky, through the rain. They said—

Cormeng’s Emporium of Antiques and Trinkets is having a last-minute closing sale! Last chance to buy and sell!

…What?

The little advertisement-spell hung in the sky. Then Doren shouted.

“L-last chance to make a fortune! Anyone who knows me—I’m buying at ten times the going rate! Selling at the same!”

Ten times the—? It was the most insane offer the shopkeeper had ever shouted. Why—Merchant Lavroisse stopped focusing on the tent. He actually leaned over.

“Is that idiot mad? Laniver, go check…”

His voice trailed off. He blinked at the Ringmaster, then slowly stepped out of line. Laniver half-turned.

Behind him, a beaming group of people dressed in Manus’ orange and red colors stirred. Captain Capsha turned to the familiar man she liked so much.

Thorssin and Rikka hesitated. They were in line, but ten times? They might get a better seat.

“Ringmaster. What is this? They mentioned a store, but not that it was magical. Do we go…?”

The Ringmaster stood there as a handful of people stepped out of line. He let them go. Slowly, he smiled behind his mask. Mud dripped down his throat, down his face, out of the bottom of his robes as he spoke.

“No. Prepare to open. Call the Third Act together. Tell them to take the location once the feast begins. There’s a door, and he cannot close it.”

This was going to be entertaining.

——

They entered his store like dreamers waking into the nightmare. One by one. Hwalt fell to his knees when he walked into the darkness. He began to retch, then cry.

“No. Nonono. It’s not fair. Why…how’d we not know? They were among us. A fellow was kissing one of them. He stopped breathing as the muck covered his face, and they took him inside. I just envied him.”

He looked up, and Doren’s blood was chilling. He had one of the daggers that Hwalt had sold him. He held it out.

“Get behind me. Away from the door. You’re only sane in here. Maybe—maybe it’ll stick. Just get over here.”

“The others. My friends—”

“There’s no time, Hwalt. Hurry.”

Thorssin, Rikka, and their caravan were next. They came in, and Silppie screamed again as the truth hit her. Thorssin dropped her and stumbled. Rikka? She just lifted the harpoon.

“I knew it. I knew it. That’s why I was holding this. But they asked us if—if we were hungry. And they said we’d all eat better than anything you could sell us.”

“Rikka—”

Thorssin was grabbing at her. Doren pulled him into the shop. For next came Capsha. He grabbed her, and she froze, cried out, then hugged him.

“No. Manus, no. I’m so sorry. You warned me and—are they coming? Do they know?”

“They know, but it’s only me. Come on.”

It wasn’t just her. More soldiers of the MSF were entering, asking about the sale. Customers he’d only had once. Hundreds. Queueing for the door. Doren had expected the carnival to stop him. But it seemed they were busy with their moment.

Now there was a panic in Cormeng’s. People crying, screaming. Puking, hyperventilating, every reaction their bodies could have to the stress. But the Twilight Sanctuary’s effect was muting the screams. Bringing a kind of dark calm to the world.

This is how it is. Prepare. Prepare—

The gift of [Goths]. A silly thing to put against all of this. Hrawr was waiting. Moving people back, handing them weapons, telling them to draw theirs and form up.

Last of all was Laniver and Merchant Lavroisse. Laniver entered and stumbled. As if struck so hard his body rattled down to the floor, and he lay, a broken man.

Merchant Lavroisse, that bastard, just exhaled and lifted his chin high. Peering towards the ceiling, as if the nobility of his bloodline, Pheislant, the Lighthouse Kingdom, were enough to keep him superior even now.

“I see. I thought it might have weapons, the kind that could kill even Mahadak. Monsters…I do not know monsters. My grandfather was right. The New Lands brought up too much.”

Hwalt seized Lavroisse and drove him against a wall. He was shouting, spit flying from his mouth as he raged.

“You’ve killed us all! You—you and the MSF!”

He was shouting at Capsha. Lavroisse just gazed past him until Doren shouted.

“Hwalt! Enough! Everyone, get away from the doors! We’ll stay in here. Just—shout to anyone else out there! Get them in!”

Rikka rushed to the doors, and they shouted outside, but no one else was coming. Hwalt let go of Lavroisse, and Thorssin looked up from where he was kneeling.

“You can take us away, right, Doren? You’ve saved us. They’re going to open! Cut the connection! Just—”

“He cannot.”

Lavroisse’s voice was flat. The [Merchant] glanced over, and he alone seemed to understand Cormeng’s. The man nodded to Doren.

“…Or he would have already. Cormeng’s is no door of The Wandering Inn. There are a lot of them, but many are dead. Eaten, I think. They had a thousand tents, once. Now, just one. They still number in the hundreds.”

“What do you know?”

Hrawr demanded, and Lavroisse checked himself. He had a rapier of all things, though when he drew it, it was clear he was no duelist. He spoke, shrugging lightly.

“Little more than anyone else. As one of the leaders, the Ringmaster asked me questions. I answered him, but he was careful. I suspect my levels made me resilient. They have levels. That much I know.”

“Levels?”

“Oh, yes. Ranks too. I was told that the opening of the Carnival would be a feast as well as recruitment. The performers are guests who stay forever. So it’s feast or assimilation.”

“Master. We’re dead. Have you lost your senses?”

Laniver finally got up. He had no polished rapier; just a club with a spike on the end, the kind you could use to kill fish that came to the surface. In this room of muddy, desperate people, Lavroisse truly was like the Ringmaster, the least-muddy, the most privileged.

For whatever that was worth. Doren was motioning them all back.

“The archways. We hold the archways and—and pile up furniture. I have some spells.”

“Do you have Tier 6 magic? Can Cormeng’s hold off an army?”

Doren nearly spat at Lavroisse. He knew the answer to that. The [Merchant] nodded to himself.

“Then this place will never hold.”

“He saved us! We—we have weapons. There’s thousands of us! They can’t just lead us into the slaughter. Can they?”

Capsha shouted back. She had a sword in hand, and Doren saw the MSF forming a hodgepodge line. Few had bows; the strings frayed first in the damp. But there were slings, spears—Mudhole was not defenseless. As Lavroisse had said, they had levels. But now there was a great silence from outside. Hwalt panted as he turned to look around.

“Kid. Where’s the Drowned Kid?”

Silppie was hiding in the backrooms. Hwalt went to bar the door as Capsha turned around. She smiled at Doren.

“What’s the plan, Doren? Are adventurers going to come? Wyverns? How long do we have to hold?”

Every head turned towards Doren. He stood there, and then he was Bald Erin. He gave them the weary smile of a man who hated to let down his guests…

“This is the plan. I did my best. Maybe—”

Then he heard the music. Of course there had to be music.

It was no silly clown music. Instead, it was a low voice. Any instruments The Grimless Carnival had possessed had long since fallen to pieces. Nevertheless…it sounded like this had always been how it was.

It was a voice, male and deep, speaking. No real word.

“Diridiridiridiridi—”

A rhythmic utterance, alone, and almost pleasant. It could have belonged to the Singer of Terandria’s music. Then another voice joined the strange singer. Two, then thirteen.

Then hundreds. Broken throats. Garbled lungs spewing muck. All making the same sound.

It ceased to become music at once. Then it was more like a chant. A strange calling that grew less like sounds that could have come from normal lips. Becoming more unnaturally twisted until Doren was positive no vocal cords could have made that sound.

The sound grew louder and louder until the walls of Cormeng’s shook. Then there was a moment of silence. A complete hush in the world where the veil of the Carnival’s lies lifted. Outside, Doren saw figures in line jerk. Look up—but unlike his friends, the people of Mudhole emerged into the nightmare perfectly.

They gazed upwards and exhaled as they reached for weapons. Knowing, in that moment, that the monster had climbed out from the closet and was walking down the hallway. Too late to pretend—

“WELCOME TO THE GRIMLESS CARNIVAL. THOU SHALT NEVER LEAVE.”

A voice screamed it into the silence, not the Ringmaster’s. Younger, wild, and there was a cry from the tent. A braying of voices who shed their pretense at anything like humanity. It rose and rose—and the sound did not lessen. It continued until there was a whining in Doren’s ears as he cowered. Only when a hand seized him and yanked his hands away from his ears did he look up and see Lavroisse’s face, illuminated by the dying light of the sun as the rains over the mudflats obscured the daylight.

And a pale yellow light that shone from the direction of the tent. Shadows crisscrossing—then Doren realized the whining sound beneath the unending howl was screaming.

The people on the boardwalks were fleeing towards the shop, into the mudflats, into houses—running and screaming, and the tent was bulging as the performers came out of the main doors, out of the gaps, leaping down, dragging the people towards the tent, devouring, laughing.

The Grimless Carnival began its celebrations.

——

Cormeng’s shop was filled with people. They stood behind the defenses the [Goths] had built. Armed but utterly silent. Not even the children cried.

They were hoping to be passed by. Outside was filled with noise. The howling continued, and Doren, hiding behind his counter, saw figures leaping across Mudhole. Too big, some of them. Who had said they could be fought?

Who—?

A figure on legs as thin as stilts strode past the door. Reaching down, following a screaming Drake who ran, swinging a rusted sword up, up at—

They were in the muck too. Figures were rising out of the mud, chasing people trying to wade through the mudflats. Their long drowning might have killed many of the Grimless Troupe. But those who hadn’t died had adapted.

This was it.

“Hold. You will hold or die. Fall back only when wounded. Break and we will be overrun. Fall back when I say so only.”

Hrawr’s voice was steady. He held the doors. Staring out them. His axe was raised overhead, almost comically. Ready to chop down.

“This place will not hold.”

Lavroisse said it again. Thorssin turned, the whites of his eyes showing.

“Where else do we go?”

“I don’t know. I’m thinking.”

The [Merchant] leaned against one wall. The Drake opened his mouth, and Hrawr moved.

“They’re already—”

The first figure came through the doors in a charge, so fast it came under Hrawr’s axe. But he got the second figure, hacking it down—but there was a third and fourth. The first one just leapt at the people closest to the archway the [Goths] had set up. They seemed to slow in the air, and for a second, Doren saw them.

Still shedding muck. Mouth open wide, wide. Teeth longer than his fingers. Their gums had receded with starvation into their face, but they were still that long. A bulbous red nose on a leering [Clown]’s face. One eye rotted out of the sockets.

The other—replaced by a thousand tiny ones, each one staring, like an insect had laid a clutch in the eyes. Hands holding blades taken from dead men and women.

The performer slashed through a [Hunter]’s neck. Drove a blade through one of the MSF’s officers, ignoring their armor, laughing, until Capsha’s sword stabbed them in the eye. Then they were snarling.

Snarling as a spear ran them through the chest. Lashing out as Hrawr howled, and more came through. Doren was waving the dagger, screaming at a figure trying to pull themselves over the counter—the performer had no face. Just staring eyes over a face shattered just below the eyes. Yet instead of a skull, a mouth, there were just writhing tendrils, twisting pieces of flesh reaching for Doren.

Thorssin stabbed the performer in the face, and the creature writhed as Doren backed up. He stumbled back as Hwalt grabbed him and thrust him towards the door to the backrooms, then turned.

Caught a glimpse of the room transformed to desperate battle in a moment. The MSF were stabbing the performer that Capsha had blinded. Shouting Drakes driving their blades into the writhing body, which lashed out. Doren saw—

He could see Skills activating. An arc of ruby-red slashing forwards as one of the performer’s arms rose. It cut through one of the Drakes stabbing him. The surprised Drake looked down at her knee that stood there as she toppled over. The rest of the MSF kept attacking the laughing performer.

Stabbing until the snarling turned to giggling.

The corpse kept laughing even when it was dead. The other performers were rampaging forwards. One was running on all fours, a wolf-man. Not a Gnoll. His face was a wolf’s, and he leapt—a Skill threw him over the heads of the people, and he landed in the rear, clawing, biting.

Hrawr tried to make for the wolf-man, but another performer was standing there, tilting her head. She was all twisted up, unable to stand straight. Her spine…she was rotated around three hundred and sixty degrees, and her entire body was curved sideways. She almost twisted herself back upright, and her neck—

Her neck was spinning, twisting, and Hrawr’s own neck was yanking itself around. His tendons bulged as he fought to keep it from turning a hundred and eighty degrees. Raised his axe and charged her as she tried to force him to twist his head off his body.

They were just the first four. The door was open. More performers were coming each second. More and more, each worse than the last.

The Third Act had come for Cormeng’s.

——

They held the first room for two minutes, and only because of Hrawr. His axe never stopped rising and falling. Howling, he carved through every performer he came across. His Skills beheaded the twisted woman, hacked down each foe in turn. He seized another performer and crushed their head with one paw.

But then came something he didn’t understand. The [Barbarian] swung his axe, and the next figure that came through was dressed like another demented clown; he struck their overstuffed body, and they—exploded.

Pieces of round flesh came apart at the seams. Hrawr recoiled, and a grinning head rolled up to him, then leapt at him. He howled, smashing his arm against the wall as it bit him, then gazed down—

More pieces from the exploded body were rising from the floor, morphing into grinning clown-heads. The performer ignored his axe as he tried to hack it to pieces. The biting heads swarmed Hrawr, and he ripped them off his fur. The other heads attacked everyone around them, immune to blades and arrows.

One piece only ‘deflated’ and began oozing entrails when Lavroisse ran it through.

His enchanted rapier had done nothing until the [Merchant] whispered.

“[Restore Magic].”

Then his thrust finally pierced the clown-thing’s head. The other heads turned on him, and he stumbled backwards.

That moment of absence was all it took for the performers to move past Hrawr and close with the first line of defenders in the shop. They charged, and—

“They have Skills.”

Doren’s voice was lost in it all. He was being pulled into a door that led into Cormeng’s backrooms. The others were trying to barricade the door as a performer tried to climb over the counter. But Doren could see what the others couldn’t.

A woman with a pair of hand scythes was dressed like a scarecrow, a cloth mask on her face. She should have been dead as Mudhole’s inhabitants shot arrows at her, and a pair of MSF officers met her striding charge with spears that struck her dead in the chest.

But her muddy clothing was glowing with a color that Doren had never seen except for in a Skill, a ruddy intensity that reminded him of blood, but was neither dark nor vibrant. The spears bounced off her clothing, and the MSF officers recoiled.

A swing from one too-long arm took a Drake across the throat. A second performer just strode into the blades, ignoring his blood showering the ground. He grabbed one screaming Drake’s face and plucked out an eye. Yanking the eyeball out and biting the nerves. He pulled out the other eye. Was dragging a third eye out of a screaming face when he finally stiffened and died. Then the next performer was walking over his corpse, grinning.

“Fall back! Fall back!”

Hrawr roared, kicking away the heads rolling after him. He shouted at the front line, who’d been fighting with him.

The MSF retreated. Half of them. The other half were lying there.

Capsha turned to grab a comrade and saw a Drake staring upwards at the ceiling. Their head was lolling backwards, and their throat exposed red viscera. A performer had nearly beheaded them with a hand-scythe. Capsha raised her sword as she tried to run, but the performer dressed like a scarecrow, mud and straw poking through the cloth mask on her face, didn’t advance.

Gently, the performer caught the dead MSF officer and lifted them up between their arms. Then they turned and strode out of the shop. Capsha saw the empty-eyed Drake twitch as blood streamed down their chest. She raised a claw—

Then the surviving members of the MSF dragged her backwards.

——

A slaughter. They were no match, none at all.

Doren was in the backrooms behind the shop counter, peeking out the door as Hwalt held a dagger in shaking hands, a club in the other. The performers’ onslaught should have broken past Hrawr and the front lines already—except that they kept halting. Retreating.

Not from injury, exhaustion, or fear. No—each time one of the inhabitants of Mudhole died or fell, a performer would halt. Bend over the body and pick it up. Then retreat with it into the darkness. The humming woman with hand-scythes vanished as another performer, a jangling [Fool] with filthy red bells, hoisted another struggling figure over their shoulder. Another officer of the MSF.

Alive. The performer went for the doors, heading back out into Mudhole. Doren saw the MSF officer trying to kick free, shouting for someone to help. Anyone.

He saw the Drake holding onto Cormeng’s doorframe until a finger broke. Even then, he bit the doorway—before those long hands dragged him into the night.

Towards the tent. Then one of the figures turned. Leapt.

Cormeng’s magic tossed the performer across the room, and one of Doren’s spells burnt away. The rest surged for the door, and Doren slammed it shut.

They should have fallen back with the others. But the performers had been too fast. Thorssin, Rikka, Silppie, and Hwalt had retreated into Cormeng’s staff rooms with Doren. Too few of them to hold their position.

Worse, the performers had noticed. Doren backed up as the door began to splinter. A filthy hand burst through the wood and ripped another section away. Then there was a moment of silence before the door exploded inwards.

The first performer hurtled through the doorway in a shower of wood splinters, and Rikka hurled her harpoon.

“[Impaling Throw]. [Harpoon: Jagged Spikes]!”

The spikes exploded out of the crawling horror’s head, and it kept coming as she seized it and tried to rip her harpoon out. Thorssin was stabbing it as it bit at them, and Doren was fumbling for more components.

“Fall back! Fall—”

Hrawr’s howl. Another one coming through the door. Another—Doren stopped trying to stab the one attacking Rikka and looked up.

The tall clown was female. Maybe. She folded herself up, contorting her body to fit in the opening. Then had to do it again.

A tangle of limbs and legs. Her head was poking out of the center of it. And he recognized a Garuda’s feathered beak under the broken mask at last. Grinning at him.

“The Ringmaster wants to meet you.”

She said it in such a conversational tone of voice. Then blinked at the green jar.

The acid jar that Lyonette had given Doren hit the performer, and she began to writhe. Her flesh melted, revealing her limbs had bones in them. A tangle of them.

She kept twitching as her corpse blocked the entryway. That left only two inside the backrooms.

The half-torso that Rikka had impaled kept trying to eat her. A huge mouth swallowed her up to her waist until Thorssin finally dug out its brains. He had to rip it out and hack the strands connecting it to the body to stop its movements.

The last one was all scabbed over with plates of fungal growth. Like a shell. They covered long arms that were reaching for—

For Silppie. The armored figure shambled into the next room as Doren shouted. Hwalt was trying to bash the figure’s head in, and the clown turned as Doren raised his hand.

The explosion of magic cracked several armored plates, but then the performer reached out six feet and lifted Doren up. He rose, struggling, and the hand slammed him against the ceiling.

Dropped him.

Nothing but pain after that. Screaming all around him. He was trying to get up. He’d heard something break, and blood was running from his nose, but he—he had to—

Thorssin dragged him up. Doren was wiping blood from his eyes. He cast around.

“Silppie.”

She was in the Well Room. Cowering and screaming. Cormeng’s was shaking. The last performer was—

An arm was reaching out of the well that stored Cormeng’s magic and the rainwater. It was jerking—and flashes of light were flaring up from within. You weren’t supposed to put anything in there. Doren looked down and saw the body was sizzling.

The raw magic was deconstructing the performer. He had been hurled down to his death, and the claw clinging to the lip of the well was still trying to pull him up.

“We did it. But the main rooms.”

There were so many. He could hear fighting, but before he could grab Silppie, Rikka stumbled out of the kitchen and halted.

“Hwalt.”

Only then did Doren turn and see the man. The [Mooring Master] was lying against a wall. His beard was gone—and throat. He stared up at the ceiling, arms ripped down to the bones. He’d hurled the performer into the well as it savaged him.

“No. Not…”

Doren was still standing there when they pulled at him. More performers were coming, and now Thorssin was shouting they had to get to the others or they’d be cut to ribbons here. They pulled him through the tall-woman’s smoking bones, and his cheeks stung as acid clung to them. Doren was muttering.

——

“It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

They had retreated eight rooms already. The interior walls of Cormeng’s had broken, piece by piece. Performers ripping through the wood, paint, and plaster with Skills, physically ripping out chunks of masonry while they were assailed. Squeezing, slithering through holes that widened as impacts demolished the rest, until the holes looked like a burrow of insects disgorging more grinning shapes.

They had stopped at a final place yet unbroken. For now. The Twilight Sanctuary’s original room was being held—a desperate palisade behind a grinning Goblin in darkness clad. The people in the store had piled the furniture to form makeshift walls, but the performers were just destroying them with each wave.

There weren’t any bodies. They were taking their own back. And anyone else, living or dead. Laughing merrily until they died.

“I was just going to help. I knew I wasn’t going to save everyone. But someone would swoop in, and I’d tell myself I made a difference. There was going to be someone. Someone important. The adventurers would show up, and that would be it.”

Doren stood there as they prepared for the next wave. He was in shock. Someone had struck him—twice—but then they just shoved him back with the others who weren’t able to fight. No one blamed him.

Blame him? They would have all been out there, and Mudhole was far, far worse than Cormeng’s shop. There was nowhere to hide or run to that the performers couldn’t break in. But they kept coming.

“No salvation or end to them.”

Merchant Lavroisse was bending over one of the dead performers. Most had been hacked apart because they refused to die. But the man was still—a kind of composed. Even if that was shock.

Hrawr was clutching at his stomach. He’d been savaged, and the teeth of the last performer he’d killed were still in him. The dregs of the only potion he had weren’t closing the wound.

Capsha and the last of the MSF were so badly wounded they were in the rear. She was staring up at the ceiling, bloody cloths tied around her exposed collarbone. She only moved when Laniver whispered.

“And why’s that, Merchant Lavroisse? We’re killing them.”

“Yes. So they’re adding to their ranks. This is one of my employees.”

They looked down, and one of the performers who’d died faster than the other horrors stared skywards. A grinning half-Elf with an arrow sticking out one eye, but garbed in the same filthy clothing.

“The Ringmaster is surely a hundred times more dangerous than the rest. I say, again, we cannot survive here.”

He spoke to Doren, it seemed. The shopkeeper stopped rambling. Turned and punched Lavroisse across the face. The [Merchant] stumbled against one wall.

Hrawr lifted his axe, bloody paws dripping.

“They come again.”

Another laughing group was approaching. There were only two reasons they hadn’t overrun everything. Hrawr’s axe. The desperate people of Mudhole fighting against a fate worse than death.

The third reason that Doren hadn’t expected was the Cave Goblin.

Gothica stood in the Twilight Sanctum, red eyes glowing in the pitch black. Shadows were still pulling apart one of the performers trying to get away. He’d thought he’d kicked her out.

[Shadow Doppelganger]. When he focused on her, he stopped muttering to himself. Doren checked his pouches.

He had…only two prepared spells left. Cormeng’s magic couldn’t be replenished so fast. He had the shop-expelling spell and the one that would de-anchor Cormeng’s from this place.

And eject everyone inside, possibly fatally. Gothica half-turned as Hrawr exhaled.

“Their best are coming.”

“Yah.”

Doren looked around, and Thorssin and Rikka were holding each other as Silppie clung to Capsha’s arm. Laniver was grimly walking over to stand with Hrawr and the people who could fight. Gothica raised a middle finger as the darkness around her swirled.

“Come on. I seen worse than you.”

Mocking laughter. Doren had a knife, but he was far, far away. He really wasn’t cut out for this. He saw Theikha gazing down at him with sorrow.

A mistake he had to make.

Then she turned into Lyonette, and he heard her.

Your shop will never save them. The door will break.

“Yes. It will. Cormeng never made this place for this. It’s not his fault, but mine.”

There were still nearly a hundred people left alive. The rooms behind the Twilight Sanctum were packed with them, blood, sweat, fear—and defiance as they fought for their survival. There were half a dozen more rooms to fall back through. Lyonette’s advice to Doren to make a hallway meant they could continue retreating if need be.

But once the Carnival finished Mudhole…how many waves would they survive? Maybe not even this one. The Grimless Troupe would just replenish their numbers. If, by some miracle, they killed more than they lost, there was the Ringmaster.

They feared nothing.

Nothing but Manus’ Dragonspeaker. And one other thing.

Competitors. The [Witch] at sea. Some building. A Gnoll?

And—and—Doren’s eyes focused.

“Mahadak. This place is manifesting. It must move. Are the performers willing?”

Some of them, but not the dead man who’d belonged to Lavroisse’s group, surely. Then—then—

“There must be a limit. If you all got far enough away, they’d be unable to chase.”

Capsha was staring at him. Doren blinked rapidly.

But they’d never make it across the mudflats. Not when it was raining. Silppie, maybe, with Cormeng’s magic. Everyone else would be caught, he was certain. There was nowhere. Except—

“Mahadak.”

Thorssin turned, and Merchant Lavroisse’s head rose. The man gazed at Doren, then nodded.

“Yes.”

“What, Doren?”

Capsha whispered, and Doren saw it.

“The Crossroads of Izril are a separate dimension. If the Carnival can even follow…it’s too far. You just have to get to the portal.”

Silence. Rikka half-turned, and someone laughed.

“Go there? To whatever killed the [Hunters]?”

One death to another. Doren knew that, but it was the only place close enough to get to, even wading. Even so—the performers were everywhere. It’d be suicide.

“They have us boxed into the shop. The only way is where they’re coming from. It won’t work, Doren. We’re dead either way.”

Thorssin had given up. He didn’t move as Rikka shook him, then pointed.

“If that’s our only chance, we have to take it.”

“Yes. Yes, that’s what will save everyone. Even the people out there. We just need to get to the doors. I see it now. But—”

Lavroisse had straightened, chin risen again, until they stared ahead.

The rest of the Third Act had arrived. A Dullahan was holding his head. Juggling it. No…three heads. The performer put one on their neck and winked. Maggots crawling from their mouth and plopping onto the floor. Another [Clown] put a thumb in her mouth, and her head began to puff up, bulging obscenely. They advanced at a walk.

Doren didn’t know what to say. He was apologizing to the others. He should have been smarter. Should have figured it out. It was Hrawr who exhaled and seemed to relax. His back straightened, and he nodded at Doren.

“Hope. Defiance against this place. Let it be done, then. Go for the doors. All of you. Don’t stop running.”

He walked past Gothica, and the Third Act paused. Their laughter died down, and Hrawr bared his teeth. He cast a glance over his shoulder at the uncomprehending shopkeeper.

“Doren? Tell my father I died well.”

The [Barbarian] hefted his axe off his shoulder. He held it over his head. Doren reached for him, but the Gnoll didn’t look back again. He locked eyes with the first performer.

He howled as he charged. An earsplitting sound that drowned out the Carnival’s laughter. It didn’t stop, even when he was amidst them, and each blow hacked through another shape.

The Third Act backed away from the Gnoll’s charge. Their smiles winked out, and they retreated—then snarled as he crashed among them. The Dullahan juggling heads lifted one which began to scream, light burning from inside the mouth and eye sockets—

Hrawr’s axe cleaved through the head, the arm holding the body, and the Dullahan’s body. The corpse stumbled and dropped the other heads. The [Barbarian] kept swinging. Blood sprayed through the air as he cut through the Third Act.

To the door. The performers who hadn’t backed out of Cormeng’s shop turned on the Gnoll, and he spun as one leapt on him and planted poison daggers in his back. His axe caught the performer in the chest and turned them into paste as he slammed their body into another member of The Grimless Carnival.

A red bell jangled. Hrawr turned, and a [Clown] holding an estoc ran Hrawr through the chest from behind. The bloody blade didn’t even slow the [Barbarian]. He turned, seized the arm, and ripped it off the body. Brought his axe down and cleaved through the performer.

Kept swinging.

He was a whirlwind of death at the entrance of the shop. The Third Act backed away from him. Hrawr forced them away, clearing a path along the left wall. A gap towards the door.

The people of Mudhole ran. They streamed down that narrow corridor as the [Barbarian] laid about him, still howling. The performers tried to grab them, and the people fought—but the Gnoll [Barbarian] was the only one who stood his ground. A desperate woman was caught by the ponytail. She took off her hair and some of her scalp with a single slash from a dagger and kept running as Hrawr grabbed the performer reaching for her. Escaped.

They were running back out into Mudhole. Towards the portal, though the pouring rain. Doren saw it all, but he was screaming one name over and over again.

“Hrawr!”

The Gnoll had lost an arm. They were stabbing him, but he was still fighting. The gift of high-level warriors, holding death itself at bay.

Rikka grabbed Silppie and shoved her into Thorssin’s arms. The two Drakes were sprinting as she screamed.

“Tell them where we’ve gone! Tell them—”

“Doren! My father! Tell him—”

They vanished into the press of bodies. Gothica was screaming as she tried to fight, her aura dragging one of the performers into a vortex. The shop was emptying.

They were all leaving. The Third Act was trying to depart the shop as well, pursuing the people fleeing Cormeng’s. They had given up fighting the Gnoll. He was slowing, but he still reached out and crushed one of the performers’ skulls. Leaned against the wall before forcing himself upright. The howl had stopped.

The last to go were the MSF. It was almost quiet now. The Drakes advanced into Mudhole, weapons drawn, a rearguard fighting for the only place where salvation lay.

Merchant Lavroisse and Laniver were behind the Drakes. The [Merchant] was fussing with his belt. He pulled off two rings, added his rapier to them, and dumped something else in Laniver’s hands. The [Servant] stood there, blinking at the items. He’d remained with his master on instinct.

“There. I, Merchant Lavroisse du Ordell of Pheislant, appoint you as my sworn heir. It falls to you to safeguard the members of Mudhole.”

“Merchant Lavroisse, what are you saying?”

The nobleman rubbed at his jaw. Then he turned.

“I didn’t see where to go. Nor did I see Cormeng’s worth. I brought us here. I dug up the Carnival. Each one a critical error. We like to think the market weeds out the worst of us. But in my experience, the people who run the market forgive drinking buddies that have the right connections. The New Lands are purer. But this Carnival…”

He limped past Laniver. The world outside Cormeng’s shop was chaos as the performers saw the fleeing people. They were everywhere. Merchant Lavroisse half-turned.

“You have five minutes. Now—[An Irresistible Offer: Caravan of the Hundred Kingdoms]! [Spectacular Attraction]!”

He strode out of the shop, and the sky lit up for a second. A glow, not of magic, but like a spotlight of its own down on the [Merchant] and the moderately better-made houses where his wealth was contained.

He adjusted his coat and bellowed across Mudhole.

“[Hear Me, Commonfolk]! Flee to the portal to the Crossroads! Grimless Troupe, to me. To me, you curs. I demand your attention. I am Lavroisse of Pheislant. Hundred Families witness me. You deal with me before any other. I am a [Merchant], and this is my final deal.”

The man turned at the door and nodded at Laniver. His eyes found Doren’s, and the shopkeeper saw Lavroisse’s knees shaking. Then he was limping onto the boardwalk. Away from the portal.

The performers followed. A wave of them. A few resisted the Skill, but they were flocking to the [Merchant], bound until it wore off. Doren hadn’t been crying. Even as the man left…it was only when the last person stopped that he felt himself breaking down.

“Doren.”

“Just run, Capsha. Run. Keep Silppie safe. She has magic. You can run across the mudflats.”

The imposter claiming Manus’ authority held the dirty bandage over her collarbone. She smiled at him. A bloody claw touched his cheek.

“There’s more people in Mudhole. Someone has to get them to the portal.”

“No. No, nonono…you’re not Manus. You don’t have to.”

“We pretended to be. We promised to protect them. I’ll go there with everyone I can gather. Doren? Can you tell them where we went?”

“I will. I will, so—just run.”

She kissed him. Then turned. Capsha began to sprint towards the door, and then it was just him. The shopkeeper stood there, and the glow of Lavroisse’s Skill winked out. It hadn’t even been one minute.

“Don’t let the audience escape.”

A voice called out. Doren knew it was the Ringmaster. He heard the howling begin again and saw Capsha vanish into the rain.

So.

He understood how it ended. Cormeng’s was almost entirely empty now, and the man walked towards the door. Now, he had done all he could.

They wouldn’t make it, though. Not with the Ringmaster. So he put a hand on the door and flung it open.

“RINGMASTER.”

Doren shouted into the storm. The howling died down, and the shopkeeper spread his arms in the doorway.

“My store is open. Come in, if you can. I’m waiting for you. You’ll never find my store again.”

Silence.

Then a figure leapt into view. The Ringmaster landed in the muck and water past the boardwalk, but he didn’t sink down. He gazed at Doren.

“We accept. Third Act. Take him alive.”

They came for him as Doren ran. Past Hrawr’s body as the Gnoll lay across the floor. Through his backrooms, past Hwalt. Towards the last place there was any safety.

——

The Tuning Room. Doren halted inside the lines of protection, and the Third Act was right behind him. They flooded his shop, abandoning the rest of their ‘audience’ outside. For the man who’d thrown a wrench into their grand re-opening.

They were going to smash his protections. Some were already hurling themselves at the spells, being thrown into the walls so hard bones turned to powder, flesh to paste, but re-knitting. Getting up. Heedless of the cost.

However, the majority were turned on the last protector of the shop. Shadows diced one of the performers, and the others leapt back from the tendrils trying to pull them down into the pool of blackness that shielded her.

A single figure stood before the Tuning Room. The Cave Goblin was grinning as she ignored the blood running from beneath her dress. Her broken umbrella was in one hand, and she swept herself up like some grand lady.

“I am Gothica Nightlady. I will kiss Death on the lips and laugh in midnight eternal.”

She was swinging right, left, when she heard Doren chanting. The [Midnight Goth] half-turned, and her eyes widened. She flung up a hand.

“Doren, don’t—”

He hit her with Cormeng’s expulsion spell, and she leapt, trying to hold on—then wavered out of existence.

Expelled from Cormeng’s. The man sank to his knees. He wished he’d had two of the spell. One for…Hrawr had been dead in the first ten seconds.

He didn’t move as the Third Act threw themselves at the Tuning Room’s door. Nor as they drew back. Only when a slim figure halted did Doren glance up.

The Ringmaster applauded softly.

“Such a sight we have never seen, magician. Shopkeeper? This magic, it is not the kind we know. It is the kind Unicorns practice and Dragons whisper. Where did a man without levels learn it?”

“Th-this is Cormeng’s. Cormeng, who was my great ancestor.”

“Verily so? Prithee, whom art thou?”

The language the Ringmaster had been using, which had seemed so modern, changed as the figure stepped closer. Doren gazed into that mask and saw three glowing, yellow eyes.

“I’m…Doren. Who are you? What are you?”

The Ringmaster chuckled as he bowed.

“I am merely the Ringmaster of The Grimless Carnival. Ye see me, but hwhat thou see-est is naught but thy cloth upon the performer o’ th’ hour. There must be a Ringmaster just as the Carnival requireth performers.”

Doren digested this, then spat.

“So you’re just a function of some…sentient tent. Captives of a living place. Is it a Skill? Or just a place?”

This time, the Ringmaster paused longer, and those eyes flashed.

“Thy wording grates upon the ear. I would not deem myself mere hand nor foot. Nor will yon tricks change the outcome of the performance. Hark, it is silent.”

Now it was quiet. The only sounds in the distance, perhaps, splashing.

“Did they make it?”

“Step outside yon room and see. This, I shall grant ye. A promise before the end.”

Doren gazed at the silent performers and shook his head. He was staring past them.

Hwalt. Hrawr. How many others had made it? Capsha, Silppie? He whispered.

“No.”

“A pity. I thought ye not a coward. Then I shall come to you.”

So saying, the Ringmaster began to walk forwards. Slowly. The world slowed around him and began to ripple. Trying to force him back. But he kept walking. Step by step, crossing through Cormeng’s final protections.

Doren didn’t move. He swayed there, and his eyes were full of tears.

“I tried. I tried my utmost, and now I remember why I gave up. Because trying hurts so much. I’d rather be stabbed. I’d rather spend my life, my entire life, in that miserable state than a single moment of this. But I had to do something. I did my best. I truly did.”

The Ringmaster said nothing. He was reaching out for the doorframe, almost upon Doren, when the man closed his eyes.

“Salvois carniciem issk.”

He lifted the components of the last spell out of his empty pouch. The red crystal salts, the floating, expensive pieces of Chemath Marble—it hurt. He saw pieces of his skin vanish as the components phased out of existence. Blood flowed from the missing pieces of his skin, and his hand tingled before his body registered there should be pain.

Cormeng’s—

Warped.

The entire world seemed to twist around, compress in on itself, then try to pull apart—only everything was being pulled in every direction at once. The shop screamed, and Doren saw all but the Tuning Room was twisting. Inside, every dial was spinning, and the device that powered Cormeng’s howled, a shriek of magic and metal.

The Third Act vanished. Some of them tried to attack or flee, but they were pulled towards where the laws of the world said they should be. The magic that had lied to the world and put them here reasserted—one of them was compressed into something thin as a quill, then funneled back the way it had come.

All save for the Ringmaster. When the shop became un-anchored, the Ringmaster stumbled and grabbed the doorframe of the Tuning Room. The magic was trying to hurl him away, but his form blurred—then stabilized.

“Whoreson. The Devils take ye.”

It was such a strange curse, uttered so flat, that Doren laughed in his face. But the masked face pulled into the Tuning Room, and he backed up.

“A cunning magician thou art. Know this: the Carnival has returned. Tell Manus, tell the Great Tribes of this world that the grudge that buried us shall be repaid. Yet we are a merry sort. We hold little grudges. It shall be a jape upon thine world. And for you, Doren—”

A hand reached out, and the gloved fingers, all seven of them, began to blur harder. The Ringmaster’s mask lifted, and Doren saw sharp teeth for a moment. Orange skin. The Gazer whispered.

“We shall have a seat just for you. Till we meet again.”

Then he let go of the door and vanished. Then the shaking stopped, and Doren heard thunder as rooms began to collapse. Followed by actual screams.

Cormeng’s exploded into the apartment block where he had been living in the Unseen Empire. The newly-built apartments made out of fresh brick and mortar imploded inwards as a second building, made of enchanted wood and covered in gleaming ceramic tiles inscribed with magical runes, displaced the apartments.

Flooring crumpled upwards as the contents of each apartment were shoved aside by the shop. It hung there, suspended amidst the second layer of buildings, still groaning with the damage of entering realspace. Streams of pale light and mists rose from Cormeng’s, raw magic vaporizing.

The shockwave hurled Doren out of the Tuning Room as his shop manifested, threw him and every item in the store into the air, and slammed them down. He crashed into the ground and then lay there as agony sang up his back.

Weeping, that was all, as alarms began to sound and [Witches] swooped around him, shouting alarm.

Not for himself or his store. Nor his strange, beautiful, terrifyingly painful dream.

Just for how it had ended.

——

There was no level up notification.

No new class. No reward nor silver lining after it all.

Not for men like him.

In the days since The Grimless Carnival’s opening, Doren wondered if they had made it. If they had levelled. If anyone had.

They might have all died there, steps outside his shop. He didn’t know. He might never know.

He understood that.

The one thing he did know was that Gothica had levelled. She had been returned to Goblinhome, and she was alive.

The only one. He had given Hrawr’s body to the tribes of Izril. Berr the Berserker had collected his son’s body.

“I taught them too well, my sons. I taught them how to die when a father should teach them how to live.”

“He saved them all. Without him—”

Doren didn’t know what to say to the small Gnoll, who listened and heard everything Doren said. He didn’t blame Doren. Just stood with the shrouded body in his arms.

“It was his choice to come through. You were warned.”

“I’m sorry, it’s all my fault.”

Berr half-shook his head. He looked at Doren.

“He was warned too. That is why he died so well. Remember him, Doren Issk.”

The bodies hadn’t…been teleported away. The terrible irony of Cormeng’s was that only the living suffered that. So there was enough left of Hwalt to bury, too. Doren hadn’t known if he had family. Hwalt had never asked for Doren to send a [Message].

The shopkeeper paid for someone to look it up. A Secret Broker in Invrisil named Bloody Secrets that Ishkr introduced him to. However, he buried Hwalt in a new cemetery in the Unseen Empire.

Then he cleaned up his shop.

——

Cormeng’s was all but destroyed in many places. The inventory gone. The rooms that the [Goths] had decorated smashed to bits. The Twilight Sanctuary was no more.

Sanctuary did end.

It was such a sight to behold the ruined walls, the clear evidence of fighting, and stains that when someone entered Cormeng’s, they halted.

“What…is this place?”

A suspicious Drowned Woman put a hand on her belt knife, but the shopkeeper sitting at the half-broken counter smiled at her.

A fake smile, clearly. The kind a man in his line of work gave to customers.

“Welcome to Cormeng’s. I am Doren Issk, the shopkeeper. Is this Nombernaught?”

“It is. Why would you need to ask?”

She backed up warily for the door, and Doren gestured.

“It’s a magical shop. It moves. Can you ask someone in charge to speak to me? Tell them it’s Cormeng’s. It might be known.”

It was, or at least, the Captain of the City and the [Depth Mage] who entered had done their research before coming in. They heard Doren out as he explained why he was here.

“The Grimless Carnival is back?”

That shook them. Doren’s eyes sharpened.

“You know it?”

“We know where it should have been. One of the proscribed places. Punishable by death to go near, especially for any salvage crews. It’s…it’s back?”

“Yes. I think I know where. It’s in the New Lands, and it has to be destroyed.”

The [Depth Mage] whispered to the Captain of the City, and he nodded at Doren.

“You’ve done Nombernaught a service, stranger. Tell me, did you come to sell…wares?”

He eyed the shop, and Doren shook his head. There were goods there, piled up, but just Yellats. Water. Bandages?

“No, I came to tell you about The Grimless Carnival. If you want goods, I can sell them. I have a supplier with plenty of produce, but Cormeng’s has limits. The only other thing I would like, if permissible, is for you to tell the half-Elves to the north about The Grimless Carnival. Cormeng’s can’t reach there. And, if I may, to speak with Shadeward Doroumata. I know she’s very important, but I would like to speak to her.”

They stared at him, surprised any landfolk knew Doroumata. The [Depth Mage] bowed.

“I am one of Doroumata’s daughters. Why do you wish to speak to her?”

“I’d like her to hear of a new class. [Goths]. And recommend magic or things for them. And to speak to her about The Grimless Carnival.”

Doren waited patiently until Shadeward Doroumata appeared. She was curious about Cormeng’s, and he explained how the shop moved with him; it had returned to realspace for two whole days after the de-anchoring spell. Then it had vanished, seemingly into thin air. A separate dimension tuned to the owner.

Cormeng had been very clever indeed. She was duly impressed, especially when he told her how reagent-based magic worked in the New Lands. Even Doroumata appeared surprised when he offered her a list of spells and how they were cast.

“What do you desire for this, Shopkeeper Doren?”

He looked her in the eyes, and she saw how one eye wasn’t quite focusing right. His arm was in a sling. The [Healers] said he was still concussed. And they’d told him to speak to a Witch Eloise for trauma and good tea. Doren hadn’t, though the [Witches] were on his list.

He was too busy.

“I wish for fewer people to die, Shadeward. And the end of The Grimless Carnival.”

Her aged hand tightened over his as she accepted the bag of reagents.

“You have begun that process, then, Shopkeeper. Nor shall Drowned Folk ever misgauge our debts.”

——

That was one conversation. Doren had plenty. People wanted to talk to him.

Gratifying people. He spoke to Chieftain Feshi and delivered much the same speech, though he owed the tribes more than the Drowned Folk. The Unseen Empire and the blind [Emperor]—Laken Godart was much taken with the man who had been described to him as ‘not very interesting’.

“I would have you in my empire. A position in my court, Shopkeeper Doren.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty. But lodging and trade is enough.”

Doren was amazed, in some vague way, to speak to an [Emperor], but he was a busy man, and Laken Godart didn’t press hard. It seemed he was wary of losing Cormeng’s.

Day after day, the shop was repaired. Doren paid for builders that the Unseen Empire had plenty of. He had them put up walls. Paid for [Enchanters] to reinforce them, but he knew…it’d never really stop an army.

Nor would the big Golem he’d bought from House Terland. It was made of stone and quite good; a very interested [Lord] had effected the sale and mentioned that while she was currently busy in the south, Lady Ulva Terland wished to hear more details about the New Lands.

Doren had arranged to visit her. The Drakes also wanted to talk to him, and he was sure he’d speak to them if they didn’t arrest him for…something.

It all mattered. He wasn’t blind to the consequences. He just didn’t particularly care at the moment. Not about these ones. He only had one important meeting, really, out of all the important ones.

——

Doren’s wandering eye disconcerted the young woman a bit, but she was doing her best to be hospitable because he was a very important guest. He also seemed singularly unimpressed by the new construction, but he assured her he was amazed.

“The [Healers] say I’m in shock, but I have a very unresponsive face, Miss…”

“Um, Montressa, Master Doren. Do excuse the clutter and the chaos. We’re waiting on—there he is. Salamani, Salamani!”

The Mage Runner came jogging over.

“So, so sorry! I was dealing with an infestation of Rockmites. Is this him?”

When she assured him this was Doren, Salamani shook the man’s hand with both of his.

“Everyone will want to meet you. We had to tear Archmage Valeterisa from here with a spatula…she would be here, but she has to move all of her possessions from her home in the north. A huge effort. We could have held off for later, but we need supplies and she has plenty of magical items that will help make the building far smoother.”

He waved a hand around at the flurry of people behind him. [Mages] like a Centaur and Minotauress talking with Antinium, a Lamia…a [Mage] levitating huge blocks of stone towards one wall in progress.

“Don’t mind the Antinium; they’re mostly here as consultants. We intend to do as much construction with magic as possible. Still, as you can see, it’s all a mess. That’s the point though. I’ll have everyone here to see you. They’ll want to hear your presentation. We do have one absent member. He’s off fighting a war.”

Montressa bit her lip as Salamani sighed. Doren blinked around.

“It’s a very grand foundation. I hope I don’t disappoint.”

“Disappoint? Magus, we want you teaching! And we’ll get you rooms as soon as we actually have some…believe me, I may be Wistram-trained, but I’m not an idiot. Several of our founding members are from Wistram, and we all get the ways the academy’s idiotic. But Cormeng’s magic? So fascinating. Do you mind if I ask you questions before we begin?”

“Not at all. Or rather, I hope I will have some time to talk to [Teachers], students, and ask my own questions? I will teach, but I have far more to study.”

So much more. He hoped these people could help him make sense of all his journals and notes. It was all there, but the methods were so alien to [Mages] that Doren would have to teach them all how to think as Cormeng had first.

Yet he needed their help. He had only ever known fragments, droplets of Cormeng’s magic. The true understanding, how the shop functioned, the greater magic, was beyond him. This was a school, a place to learn. For himself and anyone else.

“Of course, Magus Doren! We have rooms for you—not that you don’t have your own—and a budget, of course. We also do plan to have dedicated [Teachers], though the headhunting process is circumspect. We, ah, don’t want to gain Wistram’s attention just yet. You are a special case recommended to us by way of the inn.”

He was flattered by the attention and all these clever, bright [Mages] gawking at his magic as if it were something special. It wasn’t. Doren had been reading Cormeng’s notes, and he knew himself how much of a neophyte he was. He might never equal his ancestor, but the magic?

The magic would be learnt and improved upon. If not by him, then these people. Salamani beamed and gestured around as Doren craned his neck up to stare at the ceiling again. He was going to ask how they planned to dust for cobwebs up there, but a small army of familiars flying up answered that. So the Mage Runner took a breath and chorused with Montressa in a clearly rehearsed manner.

“In that case, Magus…welcome to Izril’s Academy of Magic! Valetress Vilazakin!”

The magical building somewhere in the High Passes was filled with construction materials and more promises than magic. But it made Doren smile. After a second, the two [Mages] stopped beaming.

“How’s the name sound? Not too…off? We tried for ages to get it sounding right. Hedault refused to have any part of his name in it. Where are our manners? Montressa, do we have any water or do we have to conjure it…?”

——

Shopkeeper Doren was an important person. Chieftain Rags sat in her office, reflecting about how useful a magical shop and a man who could cast spells even under an active magic suppression field was.

Obviously, you couldn’t know the caliber of some people until it came out. It was a forgivable mistake, really. The fact that he’d survived The Grimless Carnival was amazing. The revelation of two new threats in the New Lands?

Headache-inducing. But she couldn’t deny that in this one, specific case…she was wrong.

And a certain Cave Goblin had been right. Also—Taganchiel nudged her. Prixall stepped on Rags’ foot, and the Goblin Lord kicked both of them, hard.

She knew she had to be nice.

It was just—

No, Gothica looked different, even after leaving the [Healer]’s. She wasn’t smirking, flipping Rags off, or messing with the papers on Rags’ desk. She looked serious.

You hated to see it. Goblins kept coming over to pat Gothica’s shoulder or hand her things to throw at Rags, but she didn’t. As for her request…Rags sighed.

“What do you want, Gothica? Revenge?”

The [Midnight Goth] finally stirred. She shook her head.

“No.”

“Then you want to find them. They are probably dead.”

Taganchiel kicked Prixall, but the [Witch] was being the bad-Goblin here. Gothica focused on Rags.

“Even if we know what ‘Mahadak’ is, and it is like that Bograms the Horns found…this one kills far faster. The Crossroads is dangerous, even to move about in. The Carnival might have followed them. You must know this.”

Silence. Gothica just stared at Rags, waiting. The Goblin Lord spoke slowly.

“Everyone is telling me to be nice to you, Gothica. I am the Goblin Lord of Change. I don’t get to be nice. Your application to join the New Lands scouting teams is denied.”

She waited for the explosion, the arguments. Anything. Gothica just gazed at her.

“Okay.”

She was turning around when Rags cleared her throat loudly.

“If you try to run away, I’ll send someone to grab you. You’re not ready. You have no tracking Skills. The only way you’ll find them in the Crossroads is with the best team. Through Goblinhome.”

Gothica slowly turned back, and the Goblin Lord tapped the papers on her desk.

“You levelled. But you’re not Goblinhome’s best. You want to go? Prove that you’re better than one of the Trolls or the Redfangs. It doesn’t have to be combat. Stealth. Survival. Magic. Do that and I’ll make the first groups start scouting for entrances to the Crossroads. Not the swamps; Manus is already trying to secure it.”

Besides, she wasn’t getting her people near that damn Carnival until she knew exactly how to deal with it. Gothica gazed at Rags, then she nodded.

“Okay. Got it.”

The Goblin Lord watched her shuffle out the doors. One of Gothica’s feet was broken. Every toe on her left foot. Very painful. After a moment, Taganchiel let out a huge breath.

“That was too mean, Chieftain. She’s all adult now. I hate Goblins growing up.”

“Should we make sure she doesn’t run away? Can we even find her if she runs?”

Prixall was frowning at Gothica’s back. The Goblin Lord of Change put her feet up on her desk. She stared at the ceiling.

“Tell the other [Goths] that if they don’t want her to die, they’ll spy on her. Does she still meet at Cormeng’s?”

“Yep.”

The two Goblins nodded, and Rags gestured.

“Ask him to talk to her. Maybe he’ll get through to her. If she practices…Prixall, you help train her.”

“I’m not a [Goth]. I’ll try…”

They were conferring over how to even help Gothica when Rags received an urgent call to the speaking stone on her desk.

“Chieftain—[Dangersense]. 4th Floor.”

She sat up instantly, and they abandoned their discussion.

“Sentries alerted? How many?”

“Six. Training Room 8.”

Rags queried the sentries, but they were on high alert, and none of them had a [Dangersense] alert. She was telling the group who’d called in the alarm to beware of [Rogues], check for magical projects gone wrong, anything, when Taganchiel tapped her shoulder.

“Rags. Rags. Training Room 8.”

She blinked at him, then her mind connected the dots. Training Room 8? That was…the Redfangs’ barracks. They were training new recruits.

Then her eyes flicked to the door. Rags triggered the speaking stone again, and the tense Redfang answered.

“Stay on alert. But be ready. You may be under attack by a friendly. Report in if so, and watch your back. She moves in the shadows. Treat her like a full threat, but no serious injuries.”

“Chieftain?”

She sat back and nodded at Taganchiel.

“Get me a recording if it’s her. She can’t take on that many senior Redfangs.”

Right? Taganchiel went running as Rags sat there. Prixall vanished too, probably to go see, and Rags ended up telling Redscar that if he wanted to see how his Redfangs may be getting their butts kicked, he should head over. If anything, to keep Gothica from becoming overconfident.

Rags stared at the ceiling. The Goblin Lord of Change muttered after a moment.

“I liked the old one more.”

She should have been allowed to be the other Gothica. Then, sighing, Rags got back to work.

——

Doren knew that Gothica had her own plans. They didn’t talk about it. They didn’t talk about Capsha, Silppie, Thorssin, or anyone.

She was the one person he didn’t need to talk to. Everyone else? Guests came to Cormeng’s. They stared at the pictures on the wall behind him.

Images of Thorssin, Rikka, Silppie, made from [Mages] using memory spells. A map. A huge warning poster that didn’t depict The Grimless Carnival, but explained, without ever saying straight out what it was, the danger.

Memetic threats. Doren was studying them too. Every day it felt like someone wanted him. He was so busy.

They wanted him to teach classes in this new academy. In fact, they wanted him to be one of the first teachers. The Five Families were asking for the same. Lord Deilan El had written Doren to say that they’d love to look at designs of Cormeng’s if any were around, and that the claim on his shop by the Issk family had been looked into, charges dropped across all northern cities.

Doren hoped he didn’t disappoint them. Everyone wanted to go to Cormeng’s, at least, everyone who was a spy or had been told by their kingdom, organization, gang, that if they saw the shop, they had better be in it or they’d be removing the boot from their ass that night.

But that might be hard, because after four days of repairing his shop, talking to people, and reading Cormeng’s works, Doren decided it was time.

He walked back into his store, into the Tuning Room, where the ward-sigils still glowed despite a bit of damage to them. Repairing them might be the hardest thing he ever did—if he figured out how.

For now, it was fine. He entered, holding a wrench he’d bought from Pallass. He didn’t raise it and smash the control pillar and let the glowing liquid spill out onto the ground.

That would have been wasteful. Instead, he carefully placed a bucket down, opened the crystal housing, and let the liquid drain into the bucket. Alchemist Xif was willing to analyze it.

He put the inscribed keystone in a Yellatskin holster as well; it was vital to keep any record of Cormeng’s implemented magic as a resource. And then it was done. Doren turned off the shutoff valve connecting magic to the control mechanism, then did it for the other broken units.

It turned out you could do that. It was just damn fiddly to figure out how. And it was done. He gazed at the piece of Cormeng’s shop he’d deactivated.

Forever. In theory, you could replace the circuit, insert it back in the liquid, and re-integrate its functions into the store.

In theory. But he didn’t know how to cast the spells that would re-link and activate the magic. He had, in about twenty minutes, removed a function of Cormeng’s forever.

“This is the end of Cormeng’s as it was.”

He wiped up the mess, found a City Runner to deliver the materials to Xif, and stood outside his shop for a second, in the Unseen Empire. One of Lady Rie’s people came over to ask if he needed anything else, where Cormeng’s might open if he wanted to buy or sell anything…the Unseen Emperor would love to shop anywhere it opened.

He smiled at the nice young lady.

“I don’t know.”

He walked back inside and sat in his shop.

Cormeng’s Emporium of Antiquities and Trinkets had been made by a genius. It was an invaluable store that no one had ever appreciated, because it had been used so mundanely. Part of its magic, its genius, was that it opened up in any town-sized location or larger. A passing storefront that one might enter and meet with a man who was unassuming, but had great depths.

Just as Cormeng had intended and perhaps longed for. A chance to show the world who he was.

Doren had broken part of that legacy forever.

Oh, the store would still move about, and he set the parameters wide, with a bit of an emphasis on a particular area of Izril. But he was open to all kinds of customers.

The thing was…Doren sat at the counter and waited.

His first guest was a rather bewildered man who opened the door and asked if he had neighbors. He was a farmer, you see, and he knew his area like the back of a cob of corn. But there was this building he knew was new and…

“It’s just a temporary thing, unless I choose to stick around. It’s a bit random, you see. Cormeng’s used to serve every town in Izril’s north and most of the south, but—can I ask how many people live around you?”

Farmer Lupp scratched at his head.

“Around me? Specifically around? There’s Reizmelt and a village ten miles away, but around me, there’s one person unless you count the House of El maybe having a few spies.”

He didn’t get why Doren smiled, sadly but triumphantly. Doren accepted some of the weird corn as Lupp poked around the store.

He’d broken it alright. What Doren had removed was just…one of the logic-circuits. The one that was in charge of figuring out exactly how big a place was. Without it, Cormeng’s might appear in front of a single settlement.

It still searched for places people had stopped a while. It just didn’t count how many, or how long they’d been there. Cormeng’s needed other buildings to squeeze next to, but a Gnoll tribe camped for the night might qualify.

Doren actually ran into one such tribe, who entered his shop to stare around and buy the weird corn. He did business. Not grand business. He just bought what they didn’t want for cheap and sold what he had for a bit more than he’d got it for.

That’s what he knew.

For instance, Lupp corn? Highly valuable. What did the Gnolls have in surplus?

Pemmican. Corusdeer venison. Hides and such. Not very useful to them, so they were happy to let him have it cheap.

Someone else might need it more.

Like, for instance, a wary camp in the New Lands who aimed bows at him. They bought the pemmican, trading him a bunch of scavenged black lizard hides for it. Babbling about some horrific monster that had come and frozen half their friends in the night.

Doren wrote it down, assuring them that if they were here, he’d hopefully see them again. He didn’t miss how they eyed his store. Perhaps they might have looted it, but the giant Terland Golem deterred them. And the way Doren’s free hand was in the bag of reagents the entire time. Not menacingly, but as he told them—ready to cast magic.

Whether or not they believed him, that was how Doren did business.

Day in, day out.

He thanked people for checking in on him. The little Gnoll and [Witch] girls who came by to ask if he was well and with their own gossip of the New Lands.

He added it to a big board next to the Newspaper Exchange. Information for people to look at. Dangerous monsters. The [Witch] came by a lot, actually; she had a bunch of speaking crystals she wanted him to stock. Why not? She called it a ‘Thoughtful Hour’.

Mrsha called it a ‘podcast’, and the two started fighting in his store until he ejected them.

——

With all due respect to Nanette’s outrage over her new class…podcasts weren’t new in any world. There had been [Mages] or [Scholars] saving lectures to be replayed by students magically or through other means in times past.

The Rihal Imperium, in its heyday, had both magical lectures and demonstrations to go with their spellbooks. The crystals had just faded before the tomes.

It did not mean the newest incarnation of such things was bad. The world should reward Nanette for coming up with the idea, even if she’d had help, and it did.

Just like it rewarded Gothica for…surviving. She was now a Level 32 [Midnight Goth], and her class change was coming. What it might be was uncertain. However, she had craved the strength to find the survivors of Mudhole, whom she had become attached to.

Even more than that, though, was the young [Goth]’s understanding that even if she never went searching for them—Doren would. Someday, the shopkeeper might leave his shop and go roaming himself, armed only with Cormeng’s magic and the cleverness he did have in him. So she went first, because she reckoned herself better at surviving.

These were things the [Goth] would never say out loud. That she would deny. Truths that only she and one being knew.

It had been there when Cormeng was born. It had watched him grow, and yes…

It had even given Cormeng levels.

He had not been born that long ago. Merely 974 years ago. Not even a millennia. True, he predated Az’kerash and even Fetohep’s reign. But his era had not been the raging Creler Wars. He had even had, yes, levels.

[Craftslad], [Apprentice Mage], and [Runner]. Three classes, all under Level 10, for a precocious young boy. He’d been thirteen years old when he, trying to learn magic, had seen fit to question why he needed wands, tomes, and the spells that fit in boxes to cast magic. He had experimented with leavings from the alchemist’s shop, with the magic he knew, and come up with a spell on his own.

One that did not fit in his master’s understanding of the world. Upon that one act, Cormeng’s life had changed. He had argued, been punished. Experimented, and found something that levelled folk had no name for. He had learned of the levelless, those called Rulebreakers, and made a choice.

Cormeng had renounced his classes. Given up his levels and embarked on a journey so few did. It had made him a mage unlike any other in his time, respected by his few friends. Mocked, derided, underestimated constantly by many.

Near the end, it had left him bitter despite all his accomplishments. Bitter at a world that was both more convenient and easier, but also lazier and unwilling to think creatively as he did. That had been Cormeng, and his descendants had cursed him for generations until Doren Issk was born.

Now, the Grand Design of Isthekenous watched as the man rested in his shop awhile. A being outside of the Grand Design’s purview. Like Admiral Asale, Ryoko Griffin, and so few others…

Outside of the system, but not unnoticed. The Grand Design had seen Doren’s labors in Mudhole. His madness, his triumphs and despair.

It had…

A gift for him.

[Shopkeeper] was obvious. But he befit a [Conjurer] as well, the closest practical class to Cormeng’s magic. Neither one encapsulated what Doren was, though. The true class that fit Doren was just—

[Heir]. More than Selys Shivertail, who had strayed from Zel Shivertail’s path and that of her great ancestors, the class was just a chance. A chance to reclaim the legacy of old.

Did the Grand Design have the capacity to offer Cormeng’s magic?

Of course it did. It knew all Cormeng’s spells. It could re-create them. Offer them as levels. Even bring back some of his inventions as Skills. It alone had been Cormeng’s distant admirer, his student. Seeing how he discovered magic few like him had ever thought of.

Three classes, and the Grand Design could offer Doren at least one at Level 30. A lifetime of work would let it do that. Even, perhaps…forge a Skill to unlock Cormeng’s shop.

[Inheritance of the Levelless: Cormeng’s Emporium of Trinkets and Antiquities]! And—[Legacy Quest: Restore the Grand Emporium]!

A task to make it as it was. It would not be hard to bypass Cormeng’s protective spells restricting who could use his shop.

It could do this all. If it spoke to Doren in his sleep, the Grand Design could offer it and let him see it all. Take it or reject it.

It had been twenty years since it last spoke to Doren. The last time had been to offer him a class. That was how it worked; if you kept rejecting levels, the classes, eventually the voice would fall silent. The Grand Design would only offer classes and levels when you might gain a new one or had attained some great measure it wanted to award you for.

If your mind was set.

Admiral Asale had not heard the voice in a decade as well. Ryoko Griffin…it would have kept bugging her if it were the first, early days of her time here. Because she hadn’t been sure. But Asale was.

Doren?

He hadn’t longed for levels in the same way as before for ages. He had been resigned to his lot. Today, he might take the levels and classes, especially if they provided him with a key to Cormeng’s shop.

Why not?

It would be so easy.

Didn’t he deserve it?

The Grand Design of Isthekenous was seldom in pain. But in this one matter, it was. It wanted to give Doren the levels. Wanted to reveal to him Cormeng’s abilities. Wanted to…

To make Cormeng’s magic part of itself. And in doing so, defeat the one thing the magician of old had ever been proud of.

That was the rub. If the Grand Design altered Cormeng’s shop to let Doren own it, it would invalidate the only thing Cormeng had ever wanted. In a way, it would also render Doren’s forty years of running this shop meaningless.

It could do it. It could, and Doren would understand that Cormeng’s magic was just part of a larger mystery. That his predecessor had been onto something, but that he’d been too stubborn to take levels. He would draw the conclusion that everything in this world relied on Skills and levels in the end. When the truth was that Cormeng had made magic of his own. Created something from nothing.

To put it in a box was to trivialize it. To make mundane out of something that was hard—harder than regular magic, more creative, more complex!

That was how it had been at the dawn of creation. The might of Gods. The strength of legends encapsulated so mere mortals might touch their infinite capabilities. It was how the Grand Design had been made. Nothing could stop it from doing this.

Except, perhaps, for respect.

Respect for the man who had been Cormeng.

Respect for a magic he had founded and claimed as his own, whose entire value was that it could not be copied with a level, a Skill.

If it made a class, then the Skills and spells would spread. So, the Grand Design did not. It thought about it and held Cormeng’s knowledge within it…and did nothing. It did not record his magic in the library of every spell to ever exist, did not grade it by Tier and nature.

Gently, it adjusted Silppie’s class and levels. The girl had gained [Conjurer], and those others whom Doren had taught and would teach would also gain similar classes. Their Skills would empower them to do wonderful things.

[Components: Reduced Casting Cost]—to save on the supplies. [Faster Inscription] for writing those runes! [Double Chant]—useful for Cormeng’s magic and incantation spells of old. Multi-purpose, you see?

Useful boosts. Nothing that touched on Cormeng’s magic specifically. They would gain other chant-spells, more traditional [Conjurer]’s magic, and if they chose, learn Cormeng’s magic. But the Grand Design would never speak one of his spells to them.

That done, it sat there and watched. A great crafter of its own, who had created wonders the likes of which the world saw seldom. Tipping its hat to the other artisans who had made their own works separate from its great efforts. For the first time, the Grand Design abided.

Regretfully, with all the saudade, the wistful desires for what could be—

Proud in its decision.

Then it watched Doren continue running his shop.

——

More guests. Some made him smile. Some made him duck. Some were annoying, entitled, or desperate, and he dealt with them, not always perfectly. Seldom perfectly, really.

He was just the shopkeeper, and he probably came off as a pretty dour man. Blank-faced, occasionally with a wandering eye.

Quick to remind you that theft was not allowed and who haggled like a [Miser] over prices. Who’d pester you with questions about if you’d seen some standing stones, drag you into a conversation. A pushy, mercurial fellow of a shopkeeper.

Not a bad one. If you were hungry, he’d ask you if you had anything to sell. Why, he’d take some yellow beetles for some food. And if you got him talking, if he liked you, his face would light up a bit, and if he laughed, he’d laugh like a donkey revving up—but then he’d reveal a bit more of the man and shop that was hidden here.

And it was magic all the way down.

However, the thing most of his guests who got to know him came away with was that Doren was a sad man.

Not a ‘sad man’ in that he had nothing going for him. But someone who had suffered a terrible loss. Someone who had gone the distance and seen the cost.

A shopkeeper who had weighed the price and paid it. Who might pay it again.

He fit his store, which seemed to be growing around him, for all it had been so badly damaged and used. The first true heir of Cormeng.

That was Doren Issk. He stood, blank-faced, behind his counter, putting on smiles. Until one day, his door opened.

Then he looked up from sorting coins and paused.

A true smile slowly broke over his face as his guest stopped in their tracks. Doren slowly left his counter and came out, arms spread. He paused to wipe at his eyes as the figure retreated, but Doren didn’t let them run. He smiled at the nervous [Innkeeper] holding a rolling pin behind the guest and the attractive staff ready to let fly with their weapons…then hugged the familiar face.

“Hello, Toren.”

That was how he searched, and sometimes…

Found them.

Author’s Note:

The Grimless Carnival is on a list of mine. Things in the New Lands I knew we’d run into. It’s on a list somewhere else, a shortlist of people and places that you probably wouldn’t want to meet.

We’ll get to that later. This…is a chapter fit for the month of October, I suppose. But it is more than just an introduction to another danger in Innworld.

It’s about Doren. Brave Gnolls—all of Berr’s kids learned his lesson too well—and [Goths]. There are a lot of parallels in Doren’s journey to a certain [Innkeeper]’s, but he is his own fellow.

Balder, but also different in how he tackles problems. Unfortunately, he was up against something that Tiernas couldn’t kill, and so here is Doren’s arc. As I said, I wrote this when I was suffering from a fever, and so it’s not the Horns, Rickel, or other arcs I had in mind.

But Doren was always going to come back; he was on a list of mine, which has people I wanted to talk to, and the idea of him accidentally opening Cormeng’s in the New Lands—it’s not over. Here’s where it begins.

For all the adversity there, for all the misery and strife, there is sometimes a Doren, and it might not be enough, but I hope you see how it might be, someday. I put this chapter out in two parts because I didn’t want it to be the one arc for the month given my new schedule.

I’ll be streaming and writing the other chapter for the month and try to break it down along the same lines. I hope it won’t be as long—this is a big one—but would you prefer me to release a broken-up chapter like this, Tuesday-Saturday, or spread it out?

That was if I cut up my two releases, I’d release them one chapter a week, so you’d get four week’s worth of releases if they work. In short, slower and spread out or two weeks of activity, two weeks off?

Let me know, and let me know what you thought of the carnival and Cormeng’s. I’m back to work, and I’ll do my best this next chapter. Hmm…writing shorter and more self-contained. A new challenge! Wish me luck.

—pirateaba

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