Dragonheart Core

Nicau knew that at the best of times, he wasn't one considered wise. Clever, perhaps, when compared to the rats he had been catching; knowledgeable, when his competition were kobolds who, until recently, hadn't known fire or names or the concept of traps; learned, when the dungeon forcefed him mana until every possible language spilled from his lips.

But not wise.

He was feeling that now, dreary from lack of sleep and peering up at a mountain of a man who was, apparently, his new guide into a dungeon. A guide into a dungeon that had claimed and Named him, and had not done so for his new companion.

A new companion that the Marquesa de Wolf had produced for him; how, he wasn't quite sure, considering her Leóran accent and the disbelief at Baron Ealdhere being the Adventuring Guild's Scholar, and with how this… Gonçal had known her under a different name, but apparently it had been her doing. If Nicau had been even a whisper more rested without the delirium of foggy-eyed confidence, he would have bitten his tongue before ever asking her for the favour.

But he needed to get back in the dungeon, and the Guild would never have let a singular adventurer who seemed to be Unranked meander his charming way into their most prized possession.

Both were poisons, and Nicau was growing rather tired at having to pick which to swallow. A quiet life teaching the kobolds how to swim in the sheltered, glossy-blue lagoon sounded like paradise now.

But it happened that he tugged his flared coat higher on his shoulders and brushed loose ringlets of sweaty hair back, and fixed his gaze on, for now, his fellow adventurer. Tall, frighteningly so, built like a statue with scales glimmering over his cheekbones and the underside of his jaw—something sharp and gold-bronze. Eyes that burned like twin torches.

Again, memories unfamiliar stirred in the back of his head, murmuring faint vitriol and resentment. Whoever this was, the dungeon knew them, and whatever bleedover it had from Otherworld mana to Nicau's chest didn't like him. Which.

This poison was looking less and less survivable.

But Aiqith didn't give two shits about his comfort and less about his life, so Nicau inclined his head to Gonçal in what he hoped looked smooth and jabbed a finger towards the building behind him. "Have you met with the Guildmaster?"

Please yes. Please yes.

Gonçal raised an eyebrow with the kind of casual derision that could have boiled from the ground and been less distracting. "He'd hardly wish to meet only half an adventuring group," he rumbled, with a voice like an avalanche. "Surely you must know that."

Which. Fantastic. Nicau brushed his hair a little more aggressively in front of his face, dragging curls over the bridge of his nose. The Pirate Lord didn't seem to know how Adventuring Guilds worked, and he was strutting around like a parrot with Unranked mana out for the sensing and no weapons beyond a dagger that was exactly the level of expected quality to have been taken from a streetside pickpocket.

And he would be meeting Lluc Cardena Ferré, whose last encounter had been sentencing Nicau to death in a dungeon with the idea of seeing what happened from his corpse.

"Of course," Nicau said, bone-weary, and made to march through the door.

Inside, without the choking crowds of hopefuls, the Adventuring Guild was almost pleasant; open and airy, sturdy protections layered over lacquered wood and high vaulted ceilings. A desk to serve as an informal entrance point, where presumably the Scholar would sit when he wasn't getting mobbed, and–

And, standing tall in the center of the room, a man with teeth for eyes and boiling with apathetic death.

Lluc.

Still tall, still sharp, still terrifying. The pelt of some beast wrapped around his dark leather hat, framing the length of his hair and sweep of his cloak. Not a monster of a man like Gonçal, who towered over in muscle and broad shoulders; a sword, a greataxe. Lluc was an arrow. Poison dripped from his unsmiling eyes.

Nicau was going to fall out of his own ass.

"Gonçal," Lluc said, an empty politeness. He left some deliberate pause after like he was waiting for the man to fill in his familial names, and just smiled when Gonçal didn't. A kind of taunt, maybe. "Consider me surprised when our liaison to the Silent Market took so long to organize a delve—and certainly more when his chosen… partner was not of his cabal."

Nicau blinked.

Hells, Gonçal was from the Silent Market? That explained the various and sundry chains and jars over his body at least, wrapping around his armour in what hardly seemed like a comfortable embrace but he moved without struggle.

…young for it, though. No silver threaded through his temples. Nicau vaguely remembered a famed young welcome to that locked-and-barred nightmarketer cabal, but he'd never learned the name of who it was. No reason it couldn't be Gonçal.

With his sheer presence, it certainly seemed like it.

Gonçal's smile tightened to a razor's edge. He hardly seemed pleased with the turn of events either, which Nicau could agree with wholeheartedly. "I thought it better to wait until the time was right," he said, tense, with just enough injected respect to keep him from sounding actively hostile. It seemed whatever spirit of comradery between him and Lluc had died long before it had ever sprouted wings.

Truly a surprise. Lluc was just so welcoming.

The man hummed. "I see." He didn't remove his eyes from them, twin pearls of bitter-cold, but his voice rose to higher volume with a whistle of air-attuned mana. "Scholar?"

A crash—or something equally destructive—from further within the Adventuring Guild. This early in the morning, particularly with Varcís' harsh rules on limits and one party a day, meant no one else was allowed inside until the day's adventurers had entered; which had one soul left responsible. A door in the far back—one Nicau had seen but hadn't exactly had time to explore before the entire Marquesa de Wolf situation happened—creaked open, and the Scholar walked out.

If Gonçal was a greatsword and Lluc an arrow, this man was a half-damp half-shredded feather. A loose swirl of red hair, foam-white skin, open-cut robes with pockets more than fabric, and a nervous, gaunt-edged face with blue sparks for eyes. Hardly tall, and perhaps the one other person Nicau had met that he felt he could reliably grapple to the ground.

Baron Ealdhere Darlington, the famed and intelligent and entirely willing Scholar of Calarata's Adventuring Guild.

He trotted over to join them, adjusting various straps and papers clasped in his hands, and then stopped. Looked at them, brow furrowing, blinking with slow imprecision. His head tilted to the side seemingly out of his control, a touch like a bird. "Gonçal?"

A pause.

Lluc's eyes flicked over. A flash of shadow, like some circling hawk far overhead. "You know each other?"

It wasn't a question. It wasn't meant to be a question. Nicau wanted to melt to the core of Aiqith.

Ealdhere flushed as red as his hair, which seemed like a terribly inconvenient thing for those who had that pallor of skin—no disguising any emotions if it was painted over their face. But Gonçal just nodded, not quite looking at Lluc in acknowledgement of respect but directed at him. "We survived the Dead Man's Raid together."

Dead Man's Raid? That was a hells of a name to be given to a slaughter. Fitting of Calarata, who celebrated bawdy stories of glory as much as massacres—though they tended to be massacres of others, rather than themselves. But there were plenty of corpses to laugh at from their desiccated demises back in the dungeon.

One corpse, in the kobolds' den; his first kill done by his own hand. The first time he had ever been powerful.

"We did," Ealdhere said, a touch faintly. "But I thought– well. I don't know what I thought."

"Scholar," Lluc said, soft, low. "Control yourself, please."

Ealdhere shook himself like a dog out of water. "Ah, yes. My apologies."

"And you," Lluc said, almost with a hum—like it was nothing but curiosity. "Gonçal I know, and him I trust to delve. But who are you?"

Well.

Nicau stared up at the man who had sentenced him to die, and thought.

Pirate Lord stayed frozen on the tip of his tongue, but that was a sentence in of itself—if the Marquesa de Wolf had recognized it as a challenge to Varcís Bilaro, Lluc could snap into it before the last sound had left his lips. There was nothing about that name that was subtle—there was nothing about that name that would keep him alive.

But it was the name Gonçal knew him by. The man would know if he switched.

Between Gonçal and Lluc, Nicau was willing to take his chances.

"Romei," he said, and barely kept his voice from shaking, much less adding the imperious sniff he so desperately wanted.

"Romei." Lluc's eyes flashed, a curl of errant mana in some sight enhancement. His lip didn't curl, not nearly as outward, but still a particular level of disdain. "Unranked, I see."

"Maybe," Nicau managed. That's what you think and only what you see and I'm sure that's all there is to it hovered at the edge of his awareness but all he could do was look up, see Lluc's impassive face, the same face that had torn him from the back alley and cast him into the dungeon, who had sworn his death and thought of it as nothing but an advantage, and his tongue shriveled in his mouth. No blessing of the communer could save him. Fucking hells, this wasn't his life; he could play suave and click his leather boots together but that didn't mean he was. Sweat beaded on his temples. He could feel Gonçal's gaze burning a hole in the side of his skull.

But it didn't matter, because the singular word was enough.

The mana in Lluc's eyes redoubled, like fire caught in the forge; the sight enhancement scorched over Nicau's skin like a living beast. The air hissed and whistled like a building storm, charging through the air; dumping more than Nicau even had into this little spell, searching for– for something.

When Lluc pulled back, mana dying down to the same flicker it had been before, his brows were furrowed. "Hiding your strength?"

Sure? Sure. Sure. Nicau shrugged in lieu of a flinch. "Maybe."

Lluc frowned. Not angry, maybe, though that could have been the desperation talking—but considering. The concept of hiding your strength wasn't well-known, because there wasn't much of a point; strength always bought prestige and respect. Pretending to be weaker was not something people just did.

Gonçal at least seemed interested, so perhaps he wouldn't flay Nicau alive for the disrespect upon first entering the dungeon. And Lluc seemed too interested, but not in Nicau himself—just in the concept of it.

"Delve as deep as you dare," Lluc finally said, empty, his attention elsewhere. "Bring all you slay to the Scholar to be evaluated; if you discover anything new or find your way on a deeper floor, there are rewards beyond your imagination." His eyes flicked to Gonçal. "Your deal will hold."

Gonçal inclined his head and didn't say anything.

With a flair that seemed more rote than intentional, Lluc swept from the room; Ealdhere bobbed a silent farewell and disappeared as well. The Adventuring Guild wasn't quite as organized as Nicau had thought—or maybe there had been a wrench of some variety thrown into the plan, because this seemed at odds with the raids of times past.

Or maybe he was about to fall asleep and he was missing things.

Both were options.

He straightened out his coat, flicking out the sleeves and adjusting the collar. Maybe the dungeon could pretend to kill him on the first floor so he could get this fucking over with. He wanted no part of any of it. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to sleep for a decade. A century. "Let's go, then."

Gonçal nodded. His gaze danced over the Guild, searching for something, mana flickering over his gold-bronze eyes; but he stayed tense. "Romei, was it?"

Nicau shrugged. "Romei."

"If you are not Unranked," Gonçal said, slowly, like he was testing the words before releasing them. "Then what are you?"

Nicau was half-tempted to say Mythril if he didn't think the gods would smite him for his fallacy. "Strong enough," he settled on. "I can handle myself."

Gonçal hummed. "I see why she put us together, then."

Ah. Right. The reason he was even in this mess.

"You said she used a different name," Nicau said, a touch hesitantly. He couldn't care enough to maintain the copious pomposity, now that he'd survived the encounter with Lluc; all his nerves came crawling over his shoulders and down his spine again. "What was it?"

Gonçal frowned. "You called her the Marquesa de Wolf."

Well. That wasn't an answer to his question. Nicua nodded regardless.

"She came to me under the guise of the Filla de Orgull," Gonçal said, and unease lingered behind his eyes.

Filla de Orgull? Even less a potential name than what he knew her under; it just meant the daughter of pride. But maybe using glaringly obvious pseudonyms was more common in nightmarkets? Or something?

Something else. Nicau blinked. "You didn't know her before?"

Gonçal's jaw tightened. "No."

He didn't elaborate. Nicau wasn't feeling near confident enough to ask him to.

But even that answer was worrying enough; he'd guessed it, given her Leóran accent, but having it confirmed was unsettling. The Marquesa de Wolf was playing some game with Calarata; whether it was only going teeth-to-knife with the Dread Pirate or some greater strike from the Kingdom of Leóro, it was a game with shadows over shadows that Nicau didn't have a scrape of ability to tear apart. Fire and fury indeed.

Gods, he hated this.

Nicau was loyal to the dungeon, he was, but he'd pushed his luck to its limits and it had barely been enough. He couldn't be the mastermind behind the legacy, the face for the dungeon's might, not without more– just more.

He'd found an entrance for the dungeon and figured out a plan against Varcís Bilaro.

But all he would be doing after surviving this would be sleep.

-

In the depths of the darkness, something more.

A quiet, slumbering little thing; hardly more than a memory. Cool mist floated around it, the canals below rumbling with the soothing push-pull of ancient waters. It didn't move like the others; didn't hunt for lesser things.

Instead, it watched.

The beast-of-depths-and-presence was gone; the thing-of-tongue-and-talking wasn't here. The mind-of-study-and-wisdom was far below, and the queen-of-strength-and-silver was lurking only a few floors beneath; but they were far enough away. It wasn't being attacked; it wasn't being noticed.

And it was so, so hungry.

The flickers were not enough. They would never be enough. It came from a world of stars and gods and impossibilities; this wretched world of laws and holds.

Soon it wouldn't be caged here; soon it would extend past what trapped it.

Soon.