Dragonheart Core

It was done.

Lluc Cardena Ferré stood before the Adventuring Guild, and knew it was done.

Flagstone walls loomed high over the pebbled beach, wood struts binding it all together and a terracotta roof curling over the edges—all the weight of Calaratan architecture, with asymmetry and bold, dynamic shapes that rooms were forced to fit inside rather than being the initial base. This was Calarata's Adventuring Guild, not Leóro's inelegance, brutish styles, and its white-stone walls and gleaming curves wouldn't be out of place as a centerpiece.

Already, a crowd gathered and swarmed, baying in excitement; only a fraction were actual adventurers, others merely coming to see the thing that had gathered mysteries in its gravitational pull. The construction had been fast and with only secrets to smooth its path; they understood the basics, nothing more. Still gathered on the dock, since they wouldn't risk his ire to come too close to the building before it opened, but they gathered, a horde of watching eyes and moving mouths.

Lluc, in his crow-tail coat and a swirl of mana to keep him from eyes, looked back, and felt something settle in his chest.

It was Varcís' hand that had commanded this, but it was him that had built it, and it was him that was Guildmaster.

With that, he turned, nudging open the door and strolling in—dispelling his camouflage at the last second, so the crowd would see movement, but not understand it. The noise redoubled as he clicked the wood closed.

The entrance hall was large and sprawling, something to fill the hungry beasts that adventurers were, and there stood a desk for him—not like Varcís' borwood desk, because he valued his life and that accursed wood would never be worth it, but impressive in its own right. Morning sunlight snaked through the windows, over the freshly lacquered wood, over the best that gold could buy in Calarata.

He hummed, raising a hand—with a click of his fingers, a curl of mana shot into the building, snaking under the various doors and alerting all those inside. From the guards stationed at each entrance point, the guides studying feverishly to have a chance to be useful, to the one at the end of the extended hall.

At the viper's bite of Lluc's mana, that door opened, and the Scholar of the Adventuring Guild crept out.

Baron Ealdhere Darlington—a pompous name for what had been a pompous man, but Calarata had rather scraped those more annoying edges off his personality—shut the door quietly behind him, fingers speckled in ink and sleeves bunched around his elbows. There were bags under his eyes, heavy things weary with exhaustion, and his red hair could hardly be called that, sun-faded for all he hadn't actually been outside. Probably for the best. His white skin already made him stick out like a sore thumb—the red was even more blatant. Best he looked less like a commodity stuck in the Adventuring Guild.

He was, but that wasn't the point.

"Darlington," Lluc said, and the man's eyes snapped to him.

"Oh," he said, voice nearly lost in the bleariness. "First Mate—ah, my apologies, I thought I would be ready." He shifted, tugging his sleeves back down, adjusting the cut of his new clothes. Calaratan clothes, but with the odd style that Scholars wore—Lluc didn't know and didn't care, but apparently the open-faced robes helped for writing, and there were several pouches strung over his chest for him to gather samples. Not that he could. Ealdhere looked thin enough to crumple with a stray gust of wind, and he was Unranked beyond. "We open today, then?"

We. An incorrect phrase. Lluc nodded regardless.

Ealdhere exhaled, a nervous, flighty little thing. "I will be ready," he said, looking like the opposite was true. "I'm– ah, I apologize for the question, but what will I be doing?" A pause. "Not that I'm not grateful for the opportunity, but I wish to do it with my best."

You could hardly tell he had been a royal. His words, while shaky, were with the confidence of someone who knew what to ask when it was required.

"Analyzing things that come from the dungeon," Lluc said, gruff, because the damn fool should know what a Scholar did. He knew Abhalón had a dungeon, had multiple, and this little Unranked man should have poked his nose into at least one with all the guards his money could afford. He'd certainly felt confident enough in his skills to try for Calarata's dungeon. "Figuring out what they are, how they can be defeated, what they can be used for. You earn your keep by what you discover."

Earn the comfort of his keep, more accurately, because Ealdhere was little more than a prisoner here, and if he performed terribly he would not be losing this role but merely the amenities that came with it. Calarata had precious few that could fill the role of Scholar, and even fewer that would be willing to chain themselves to an Adventuring Guild and all the dangers that came with it. Not that Lluc necessarily needed people willing, but it did make it easier.

"Of course, of course," Ealdhere said, like he'd known that all along. Maybe he had. Lluc didn't fear his strength—he could sneeze and kill this man—but there was a reason he was keeping him locked inside the Guild. No reason to let a brain with more diligence than the many rats around Calarata loose. "I'll, ah, finish getting ready. The guides should have my current diagrams."

Drawings of stone-backed toads, luminous constrictors, cave spiders; points about their weaknesses and uses of their bodies, the most basic of the dungeon's creatures. Lluc would sell those, and for a pittance compared to what he would sell for the diagrams Ealdhere was still working on, those of the strange, white-scarlet mangroves and the beasts lurking in the depths of the third floor. An Adventuring Guild had ample opportunities to make money from their chosen adventurers.

One in Calarata had even more opportunities.

Lluc nodded at him, which Ealdhere took as an opening to slip back into his room, the plague above it like a reminder, and disappeared. Fitting. He wouldn't be seen by the public unless they were paying him for specific analysis, which would be rare, because Lluc was uninterested in him having any sort of open doors for the foreseeable future.

His fault, really, for coming to Calarata. This wasn't the place for those that wanted to scamper loose and free, not when you had value.

Lluc's mana swept through the Guild, through all the fine wooden trappings and flagstone paths; to the deep, dark rooms buried beneath the beach for storage, with rune-covered walls for holding in living creatures; to the ritual romes, made of pure amplification materials; to the healer's rooms that would require a weight in gold just to get through the door. Weeks it had been, and weeks had concluded; now it was time for it to take flight.

And what glorious flight it would be.

There was a knock on the door—a faux politeness, because before Lluc could even walk over, it clicked open, and Varcís Bilaro walked in.

Lluc stiffened, an animal caught in the grass when a predator arrived.

He had protective wards out the ass around the building. He should have known Varcís was approaching. He didn't.

"Lluc," Varcís said, warm, a greeting between friends, and strode inside.

They were not friends. Lluc bowed, a deep, pressing thing, and moved backwards, clearing the space between them; he had thought the entrance room to the Guild was large but now it seemed cramped, walls creeping in with immovable indifference. He swallowed.

Varcís strode inside, heels clicking on the stone. He was in orange today, the long, flowing coat pinched tight at his waist and wrists, limbs free to move, laced in gold and black beneath. One ring over his gold-tipped fingers, a sea-green scale set in the metal. Black hair pulled back into a loose tail at the nape of his neck, head tilted to the side in apparent curiosity.

He looked like a noble. He was the most dangerous man in Calarata.

"Sir," Lluc said, hands clasped behind his back. He didn't know anything else to say.

Varcís hummed, a light, ambiguous sound. "I'm surprised at you, Lluc," he said, light, eyes trailing over the building. The words were said without inflection, barely a cause for concern—except Lluc was very concerned, and there was a rising sickness in his chest, something that pulled feverish sweat down his back and pulsed oddly in his fingers. "With all the gold you took, I thought it would be bigger."

The amounts lined up. He knew they lined up. He'd lost sweat and sleep and safety to make sure they lined up.

"It's sturdy, sir," Lluc said. "I wanted it built to last."

Varcís nodded, blasé, and tapped the flagstone wall with one gold-tipped finger. The stone trembled all the way down to the foundation.

"Sturdy," he repeated.

It was sturdy. It would weather a hurricane. He had designed it for that. Lluc nodded, because there was no other response, and stayed in that horrible half-bowed half-upright position he seemed so often to take around this man.

It was easy to plan against Varcís in the shadows, to make plans with distant displaced mercenaries, to spread his name, to gather gold and funds and lesser, crawling things. It was very different to do that before the man, to search for the strength of his soul despite knowing he wouldn't find anything, to quail beneath his void-black gaze and know, with bone-deep understanding, that he was rebelling against the Dread Pirate, and what that entailed.

Lluc Cardena Ferré would not disappear.

But if Varcís ever discovered what he was doing, he would wish he had disappeared, instead.

"To the gates, then," Varcís said, still smiling, still uncaring. His eyes flicked back to the door, where Ealdhere was hiding, to the guides in the far room. Everyone was waiting for when the doors would open, when Calarata would gain access to the treasure beneath their surface, when the inaccessible would become the destination.

Lluc nodded.

The door swept open with a curl of shadow, something intangible that shouldn't have worked, and Varcís strode through—he was smiling, and in the morning light, his gold-tipped fingers gleamed like the sun. The crowd, so distant, huddled on the dock, erupted in a hazy roar.

Lluc followed him, his own mana spiraling out; he harshened the sunlight into a circle around them, lighting up like the moment before an eclipse, for all he stayed behind Varcís. Calarata howled anew.

They were looking, watching, wondering, and Lluc could almost fool himself into thinking they were looking at him; at least until Varcís raised a single hand, and the hundreds of people fell still. The last of their conversation died and was ground underfoot, buried beneath the avalanche of the Dread Pirate.

"Good people of Calarata," Varcís said, voice low, casual, nonplussed. He so rarely spoke before them and they were whisper-silent, hanging on his every word. "I am Varcís Bilaro, and I come with a gift."

Only ever Varcís Bilaro—no mother's last name, only his father's. And he was the Dread Pirate; if anyone should know their lineage, it was him. So he had erased half of his history and made himself anew. It was a choice.

Varcís was made of choices. Lluc didn't know any of them.

"The Adventuring Guild of Calarata is open," he said, bright, and there was a bite to his words that fit alongside a wolf's fangs and the impersonal, uncaring destruction of a plague. "Test your might, grow your strength. Leóro has no say here. The only rules are mine." His smile widened. "And I have never been fond of rules."

Good going, Lluc thought, a little weakly. Now they would be baying for any power they could scrape from the dungeon, and they would die for it, because Varcís did have rules, and he cared very strongly for them.

The crowd murmured something, soft and sibilant. He could see the twist to their expressions, even from here; that poison in their gut they couldn't place, the raw bite of something that wasn't power, wasn't anything that could be sensed, but was felt nonetheless. Varcís had a presence. He always had.

But people were here, and they were listening. Within them was Ghasavâlk, accent still thick and garbled, but in Calaratan dress and mannerisms. His men were spread out, preparing to begin delving into the dungeon, to carve a name for themselves when they had previously been little more than ghosts. To carve a name for themselves and for Lluc, to smooth over an appreciation for the First Mate, for the Guildmaster.

A rebellion.

"Don't lose your face now," Varcís said, and though he sounded the same, Lluc knew these words wouldn't extend past the two of them. The world had always bent its knee to cater to Varcís' commands. "The Guildmaster must always be ready, shouldn't he?"

Ready? Ready for what? What did he know?

"Sir," Lluc said, a little helplessly. He hated this. He hated everything, hated this facsimile of power, hated knowing he was Guildmaster and that didn't matter, not to Varcís, not to the Dread Pirate.

"You're a hunting dog," Varcís said, still smiling, still facing the crowd. There was nothing human in his void-black eyes. "Bite me, and I'll take your teeth."

Lluc swallowed. There was bile, oil-slick, in his throat.

"Of course, sir."

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