Dragonheart Core

Nicau had a darling of a time sneaking out of the dungeon, thank you for asking.

League after league of water-drenched, water-flooded, and vine-choked tunnels, only a flickering quartz-light for any kind of comfort, and the vague, half-focused attention of the dungeon to keep threats from gnawing his face off. But he'd survived, and made it out, and now he was crouched in the hollow entrance to the Alómbra Mountains and tearfully wishing he was anywhere else.

No shadowthief rat this time, shoulders uncomfortably bare—but that was just for today, as he found an entrance point, and then she could come with him every time he left without worrying about losing her in the process.

He could do almost anything, after the new tunnel.

It was an odd thing, being excited and terrified in equal amount. If the dungeon made the entrance, then his freedom would bloom; he could sneak out to Calarata for a perusal rather than a whole event, could come back without the dungeon having to coordinate layers and floors and be prodded into remembering that he tended to need conversation and interactions beyond trying to murder each other.

And if the dungeon made the tunnel and was immediately found out, that was Nicau's fault, and he, ah, wasn't thrilled at that idea, either.

But a greater pigeon's corpse some months ago had doomed him to this life, and it was just where he was, now. As all great things happened, perhaps.

Nicau tightened his grip on his dagger and slipped out of the shadows.

Calarata in the evening was a muggy, unpleasant thing, made fierce by cove winds and insufficient shadows of the frontcast Alómbra Mountains. Distant sounds of life and living echoed over the water, hawking merchants and bawdy chanties, alongside the creak of old timber from ships docked in the bay. The boardwalk, spidering over the pebbled beach, a web strung with trapping fineries.

And one young boy, extremely out of his depth, walking from the cave and trying to pretend like he had been anywhere else.

A difficult prize to pull off, particularly with the Adventuring Guild a stone's throw from his nose.

The last time he'd seen it, there hadn't been much to see—just a cluster of materials and disgruntled working mages. Now a sturdy thing protruded from the grey, flagstone base and hammered wood above, a gabled roof and terracotta sweeps. A rich building, because of course it was, one both in harmony with Calarata's architecture and dashingly separate, a gleaming pearl amidst the slum backdrop. Which.

Nicau elected not to think about the particularities and just marched forward, plugging up anxieties with the veneer of reckless confidence. Shoulders back, eyes up, and a hand white-knuckled around the blade in his pocket, sharpened as best he could manage lacking both proper materials and knowledge.

The plan of unabridged assurance lasted about four steps closer to the building.

Doing a wonderful job of being an insurmountable obstacle, a Dread Crew member stood guard outside the dungeon entrance, line of sight encompassing the entire beach. Lazily picking her teeth with the broad side of a curved dagger as she leaned against the flagstone wall, she flicked him a bland look, one eye yellow and the other clouded under gaze-weed. "Oi," she gruffed, voice like an avalanche of boulders. "Where'd you come toddlin' from?"

Fuck. Genial? Offended? Challenging? Which one would keep him unstabbed?

"The jungle," Nicau said back, flicking his shoulders in a movement that did absolutely nothing to remove all the actual dust there. "A scrap with a scorch hound and mottled scorpion, merely testing my mettle."

Was that pompous enough? At least he could pull creature names to give some credentials to his tale, tall as it was. Nicau broadened his shoulders as best he could, as if that would hide the fact she could see his mana as being Unranked.

Well.

Could she? His magic was fed by a different wellspring now, no longer dictated by the rules of humans; he still wasn't particularly strong, somewhere around Bronze if he had to guess, but for anyone looking at his mana, all they would see was the markings of an Unranked. An easy target. Maybe that was why he had been dragged into an alley on his last visit here.

But he wielded magic, and at least did his best to speak and dress like a powerful noble. A walking contradiction.

Would that garner him more or less respect?

The Dread Crew member frowned, head cocked to the side, bird-like. She adjusted her grip on her dagger, flicking it back and forth. "Not much of a scrap," she said. "No injuries, and lookin' a mite closer to the dungeon than the jungle, there."

Nicau had, at least, seen how the aspirant street gang leaders not yet grown into a deeper voice would have handled such an insult. He dragged himself upright, flaring the hand that wasn't clenched around his blade. "The Pirate Lord doesn't get injuries."

Hard to defend against why he'd been near the dungeon. Better to deflect.

And using his lovely epithet that he had absolutely no regret over choosing felt like something distracting enough to draw attention.

She raised a notched eyebrow. "Funny," she scoffed, clicking her teeth together like fangs. "Think I could carve ya up without much trouble."

Lovely. Lovely, really, wonderful, great, glorious. Gods, why did he ever leave the dungeon, where he was protected, to a city where she very much had the rights to kill him? If anyone in Calarata even had rights.

"As it were," he said, because that seemed like an appropriately dramatic turn of phrase to plug the hollow, "I have a vested interest in delving your dungeon. I go to the Guild now."

Nicau would have needed a far sharper knife to peel the disbelief from her face. She grumbled something intelligible, a fleck of pure white in the corner of her eyes, and tapped her heel against the wall she was leaning on. "Be my fuckin' guest."

"I shall," he said, and added a sniff for good measure. Because he had been planning to go in, after he, you know, spent the day exploring the market for knowledge and schemas. Not the second he got to Calarata.

But the Crew member had a knife and an expression that said gaze-weed wouldn't throw off her balance enough to stop her from killing him, so Nicau tucked his coat tighter around his shoulders and marched into the Guild.

It was even more raucous than its distant backdrop; what served for an entrance was a sprawling beast of a room, riddled with empty space and mockeries of seats, a cooling place of corralling over any real offerings of comfort. Today's group had already been sent inside but adventurers swarmed about, hunting for the chance to invade tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day, or anything they could get their paws on. An exhausting mess, really.

Nicau, very suddenly, stopped moving.

There was a particular edge he had learned over his short life, when he had watched what parent he had left wither to a blank-eyed hull and thrown himself onto a ship with nothing more than the desire to be elsewhere, when he had scraped and scrounged for magic to see mana trails through the air, when he had hurled himself off rooftops to grab fluttering birds for a scrap.

He didn't know letters, though he was trying, and he didn't know how to blacksmith, and he didn't really know what he was doing in his batshit decision to serve a dungeon—but streetrats were prey, and they knew how to spot predators.

As Nicau entered the Adventuring Guild, pushing through the throngs of people bustling for hunger and action, his eyes snapped to a woman standing in the back.

She was tall in a way that seemed effortless; an odd connection, but it was the first thing he thought of. Too many people clamoured for presence, built themselves up like towers, like mountains, a shouting match of power. For her, it seemed inevitable. A forest, spreading no matter how many trees were cut down; inescapable.

He was a room away, and his hackles raised.

Dark skin, a coil of hair knotted down her back. Fingers curled around a quarterstaff of unpolished wood, sprigs protruding from the top and moss clustered in its crevices. Golden eyes that flashed like a cat.

Oh, Nicau was the first to know that adventurers chose odd accouterments; he'd seen dozens upon dozens wearing flashy robes and stupidly spiked armour and in one memorable case, a floral-painted guitar the kobolds had smashed before he could rescue it. The more power you got, the more you felt determined to showcase it. Hells if he didn't prove it himself, with the dark blue leather flaring out around new boots and as prim a shirt as he could manage in a dungeon.

But she didn't feel like an adventurer, despite standing in the Guild and her magical staff. Older, past thirty summers, without rippling scars or trophic fineries. Perhaps a nightmarketer, even of the famed Silent Market? But why was she here?

Nicau realized, a touch too late, that perhaps he should have spent the time thinking about how dangerous she was without his eyes locked on her.

Particularly so when she met his gaze, a single eyebrow raising, and started walking over.

Fuck. Fucking shit hells, he was done for, he was ruined, he was going to have to ask her politely to drop his corpse off at the dungeon after she murdered him so at least Chieftess wouldn't think he'd just ran off. Nicau stiffened, tightening his grasp on his shitty little knife, still tucked into his pocket, like it was going to do anything.

She was extraordinarily gorgeous, in a way he hadn't really taken the time to notice before the terror had set in, and other adventurers clamouring for their turn to convince the Guildmaster to let them in shot him looks ladled in resentment. Nicau would have given his left arm to trade with them. High cheekbones, braids framing her face, a golden tint to her lips and eyes. Fascinating. Truly remarkable. He was going to die.

In a display of unparalleled kindness, she stopped an arm's length away from him, and even in the thicket of movement of the bustling crowd, some part of their subconscious kept them from bumping her, a gentle circle sprouting around their feet.

Nicau swallowed.

"It isn't often someone Unranked enters a dungeon's Adventuring Guild," she said, in a voice thick and rich, a faint accent bouncing off her vowels and adding a harmonic lilt to the ends of words. Familiar, actually, though his nerves were quite keeping him from placing it. "Particularly one without a group."

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Ah. Maybe it hadn't been just him staring at her from across the room that had dropped him into this hell. Lovely to know. He choked around what should have been an answer and managed a cough.

"I am the Marquesa de Wolf," she said, all teeth in a smile. "And yourself?"

What?

Leóro had particularly gruesome laws for any who dared call themselves lord, lady, or liege without being one of their dungeon-owning nobles, but Nicau hadn't exactly gathered a list of all the replacements that people went by or their rules. Or, rules, considering they were in Calarata and it was almost easier to make up an epithet than try to use your real name, and rules had little to do with pirates.

Was it basic to call himself something else? He'd thought he had been deliberately unique there. Damn.

Calarata had always been a particular world of deceit and deception; just, well. As a pigeoncatcher, he'd never been too involved in all of the madness. Oh, he'd imagined it; in the cold alleys, huddled beneath bowing eaves and collecting rain drip-off that was never enough in the dry season, he and the other orphans had played for any fallacy of luxury. Chipped cups of boiled sea water, plucked feathers spread like a placemat, excess rags draped over shoulders. Oh, High Lady Romei,surely you must eat more of the angulas—the elvers are positively scrumptious this time of year!

That was. Probably accurate. Right.

Nicau tilted his head in a remarkably innoble way, considering she was some hands above him and not stunned stiff with nerves. "And I am the Pirate Lord."

Gods. Why had he chosen that? Why had he chosen that?

The Marquesa de Wolf hummed, a soft, ambiguous sound. "Pirate Lord," she said, like she was testing the word, tapping her fingernails on her staff. "Well met."

Nicau nodded again. It felt right.

He, the Pirate Lord, her, the Marquesa de Wolf. Hells of a duo, met only because he had a wild and dramatic inability to not lock eyes with the most dangerous person in the room. Did she have a shorter name? Did he have to call her the Marquesa de Wolf every time? That seemed exhausting. And pointless. And annoying.

Politics.

Right, she'd asked him a question. "Guilds are free to all," he said, a baldfaced lie, because one click of Lluc's fingers and it could very quickly become closed. "What brings yourself here?"

"I have an academic interest in dungeons," she said, lightly. "Particularly so when one has been available for so little time yet the streets are already filling with bodies."

Nicau frowned. Dozens of invaders had perished in their attempts to delve, but, well, striving for bland apathy, that was rather the point of a dungeon. Those that lived made it out with wealth; those that didn't, didn't. "What?"

"Oh?" She said, one hand raised to her throat. "My, you haven't heard? Nine people, dead, throats open. Thrown to back alleys, I believe, not a word of the killer."

Something in the mana of Nicau's chest thrummed.

She was telling him this.

And not just in the manner of opening her mouth and letting words out—no, she was telling him this, with the explicit idea not of common knowledge she was surprised he didn't know, but being something that wasn't known, but she was trying to make it so. She wanted him to know bodies were piling up in Calarata's alleys, and there was a reason for it.

Nicau's mouth moved to keep up, polite interest. "Many people die in Calarata. Maybe they stole from the Dread Pirate."

The Marquesa de Wolf flicked up an eyebrow, some expression of perfectly amused apathy. "What need has he of hiding his deeds, then? He is your king."

King.

What an odd phrasing for Calarata, who had no crowns.

Strings connected—her accent was Leóran. Faint, but everyone's accent was faint coming from Leóro to Calarata—Viejabran was but a mild mirroring to Leórenthan, a language shift made by decision rather than altering time.

Well. Nicau smiled, thin enough to peel back from his teeth. "I suppose you could call him that."

The Marquesa de Wolf tilted her head to the side, much like her namesake. "He believes he can control a dungeon with little more than words," she said, words flicking up in a leading expression. "Surely that makes him a king more than a man."

Varcís Bilaro was many things, and none of them were human.

"Perhaps it works," Nicau said, because that was a realm of destruction a childhood of murders had built for him. "A dungeon without shackles can create more." Right, talk like a non-dungeon-sworn-servant– "And when I delve it, I will see how a free dungeon functions."

Her eyes sharpened to a dagger's point. "Delve?"

Nicau blinked. "Yes?"

"You are not the Scholar?"

What?

"What?"

The Marquesa de Wolf wasn't smiling now. "You are tainted by a dungeon's mana. Your coat is covered in black rat fur and there are kobold scales in the pocket, both creatures known to be held by the dungeon here. Unranked, entering a Guild without a group, dressed in fineries. Attempting to play quiet while the fool in the front masquerades to draw attention. Are you the Scholar of this Adventuring Guild?"

Was he the bloody what?

He blinked at her, genuinely bewildered. That seemed like answer enough.

She brought her smile back, an empty thing only to keep others from listening in. Moss crept up the base of her staff and something wriggled in the pocket of her doublet, the rustle of cloth and an odd, clicking sound like bark against bark. Her eyes were twin suns.

Nicau didn't consider himself particularly smart, but even he could see it was time to start playing defense. Twice today had he needed to switch conversations to keep from losing his guts over crowded shores. If this was becoming a habit, he was invested in switching.

Whatever was in the Marquesa de Wolf's pocket shifted again.

Okay. Why was she here?

She had come over to him with the expectation he was the Scholar in disguise—and she had wanted to tell the Scholar that people were being killed in the street, and find out how the Dread Pirate controlled his dungeon. She hid her Leóran roots under an adventurer's eccentricity. But instead of staying in the shadows, burying her past under anonymity, she was seeking people out. Important people.

She was here for information. Information he very much didn't have, but she wanted.

So he had to give her a mystery.

Nicau rocked his weight back, letting his coat flare around his ankles, and deliberately removed his hand from his dagger. It wouldn't do anything for him if she wanted to kill him, only his voice would do that—and if he used his Communer abilities here, then everyone would see, and he would have even more problems than he currently did.

"I have an academic interest in dungeons," he said, just as lightly as she had. Not enough. More. "And while I am not the Scholar, I am interested in meeting him."

She looked at him. It was a kind of look he had never quite experienced before; sharp and burrowing, old roots into soft loam. "You are also studying the dungeon."

The fuck did she mean by studying? Nicau had heard of cutthroat Scholars, who killed the previous one of a Guild and took over; that could explain why she had sought him out. But that wouldn't explain telling him about the bodies, which would just scare the Scholar into being more defensive, rather than making him easier to kill.

No. He didn't think she was an aspirational Scholar.

"I am," Nicau said, biting down before the word could waver in his voice. "And I do think I've found out more about it than this Guild has."

She hummed. "You have?"

In lieu of an answer, he reached into his pocket and pulled out one of Chieftess' scales—how the hells had she seen it in there, even he'd forgotten he'd had it—and tapped its center. "This is no mere kobold. The dungeon has created far greater dangers than what the Scholar here will say."

Her eyes flicked back to him. "My area of expertise lies more within Guilds than the dungeon itself, I'm afraid."

What?

Gods, every fucking thing she'd said had caught him entirely off guard.

But despite himself and the large, screaming part of his brain devoted to self preservation, Nicau couldn't help but perk up. The Marquesa de Wolf—whoever she was—had what he didn't. Over time, he could learn how kobolds worked, how draconic monitors spread their aura far past their body, how Names and boons and blessings came to be; but he had been little more than a rat scurrying through the underbrush of Calarata, and he couldn't figure out what they were doing.

But perhaps she could.

A mystery for a mystery. And that wasn't to say she wouldn't kill him, because whatever mission she was on, him knowing anything about her more than the façade she used was dangerous, and she didn't seem the type to suffer dangers. Perhaps she wouldn't slice him open in this Guild, surrounded by this many people—but that didn't actually help him. He'd made it out of the mountains because, to the Guild's understanding, that was rather what people were supposed to do. Adventure in, run out. A good-luck process that also relied on those put on watch being smoked under with gaze-weed.

Doubtless he would not be able to go in quite so easily. No, she would have plenty of time to kill him before he could conjure a plan to get back inside.

…surely the dungeon would accept this.

"A trade, then," Nicau said, light, open, like he wasn't shaking down to his boots. "I can provide you information about the dungeon, and you information about the Guild." What sort of pompous bullshit would someone else say here? "Things no one else has managed to obtain, I can assure you."

Her brows pinched in.

That old, streetrat instinct churned in his chest, alongside the tuneless melody of the Otherworld.

She was talking about information, about gathering, about Guilds. She was here for knowledge. She was hiding something.

Long ago, there had been another orphan who'd had the distinct unluckiness of watching his parents die. He'd been furious, as people often are when their family shrinks to two cored-out bodies with shadows for eyes and one still chubby with baby fat on the streets, and he had voiced it—had said how he hated this city-state, this city, this world, this land, this sea, this cove, this anything he had the vocabulary for—and this ruler, Varcís Bilaro, for the part he had played in it.

The next day, he was dead.

Everyone in Calarata hated the Dread Pirate, because he was, at the end of all things, a rather easy man to hate. With the taxes and the murders and the lawless freedom that was only so in name, he was a tyrant with a mythril fist and ferocity that leveled mountains.

But hate was a thing to swallow. It was a thing to whisper in the security of your own mind, to curl up and bury beneath gravedirt—because the Dread Pirate would hear you if you said it, and those same murders you hated him for would soon become your own. For years, decades, however long he had ruled Calarata for, he had been untouchable.

But the Adventuring Guild was new. It was open.

It was fragile.

Fucking hells, she was going after the Dread Pirate.

Nicau's mouth moved before he gave it permission. "Knowledge should have no crowns," he said, light, like any other phrase. "Particularly not for the things that raise them."

She looked at him. He looked back.

The Marquesa de Wolf's eyes flicked around the room, the dozens of talking bodies, of living ears to overhead. The thing in her pocket shifted again, another click, the rustle of movement and rasp of old wood.

"Tomorrow," she declared, in fact instead of statement. "Thinkers should work together, I believe, to talk and share our information. Why, I believe it will prove quite insightful. Not here, but over the Overlook, if you are willing to make the climb."

Nicau felt remarkably like a sandfly caught in a lacecap, corroding down to a pitiful end.

The dungeon had told him to gather information, to figure out what the Guild was doing. But perhaps the Guild wasn't the only threat, though Nicau rather doubted the dungeon would give a hag's promise about pirate murders. If someone else was sticking their dagger into the cracks of Calarata's armour, particularly with the Adventuring Guild being so newly open and inviting, there was a chance their ire spread to the housed dungeon—and that was if the deaths were even real, or if this Marquesa de Wolf wasn't sinking her fangs into an even greater façade he couldn't peel back.

But she was doing something.

"Tomorrow," Nicau agreed, and, under some act of fervent insanity, stuck out his hand to shake. The Marquesa de Wolf looked at it, faint amusement, and returned the motion—a hand, warm, solid. Some part of him had expected her to be ghost-like or perhaps scaled. Nothing. Seemingly a regular human.

"Tomorrow," the Marquesa de Wolf repeated. Then she spun on her heel and disappeared back into the thick of the Guild, staff clicking on the ground.

Nicau kind of wanted to cry.

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