Chapter 27: Chapter 25 — Ten Years of Stories
The boss room was quiet.
The fractured floor between them. The dimming crystalline walls. The specific stillness of a space that had just had something very large happen in it and was settling around the aftermath.
Cidd looked at them.
They looked at him.
Sola moved first.
Not fast — not the speed she’d arrived with, not combat speed. Just walking, crossing the fractured stone between them, and when she reached him she put both arms around him and pressed her face against his shoulder and made no sound at all.
He stood there.
Raised one arm. Put it around her.
She held on.
The silence lasted long enough to be real and not long enough for anyone to need to address it.
Then she stepped back. Her face had done something and she had put it back together with the specific efficiency of someone who had been managing her own feelings for a very long time and was very good at it. Her eyes were bright. She didn’t acknowledge that.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," he said.
Then Kira hit him on the shoulder.
Not gently.
"YOU ABSOLUTE—" she started, and then apparently decided the sentence had too many possible endings and abandoned it in favor of hitting him on the other shoulder. "TEN YEARS. NOT ONE WORD. NOT A SINGLE—do you know what I thought? Do you have any idea what I—" she stopped. Hit him on the arm. "I thought you were DEAD. I filed a missing person report with the guild. TWICE. They told me S ranks didn’t get missing person reports and I told them what they could do with that policy and they threatened to flag my account and I told them—"
"Kira," Maren said.
"DON’T KIRA ME I AM NOT DONE—"
"You’re done," he said. Not a question.
She was breathing hard. Looking at Cidd with the specific expression of someone who had been furious for ten years and was discovering that the fury and the relief were the same feeling with different faces and wasn’t sure what to do now that both faces were visible simultaneously.
"You look annoyingly well," she said finally.
"You look the same," he said.
"I look EXACTLY the same because I have been the same, doing the same things, in the same world, which you LEFT—"
"Kira."
"I’m almost done."
He waited.
She took a breath.
"You got stronger," she said. The yelling was gone. Something more direct underneath it. "I felt it when our swords met. You’re — different from before. More than I expected." She looked at him with the assessing eyes she used for things that mattered. "How much stronger."
"Considerably," he said.
She stared at him.
"Considerably," she repeated.
"Yes."
She turned to Maren. "He said considerably."
"I heard," Maren said.
"That’s—" she turned back to Cidd— "that’s a terrifying word from you specifically."
Maren stepped forward.
He stopped in front of Cidd and looked at him with the expression he’d always had — the one that contained more than it showed, that had always made Cidd feel like a page being read rather than a person being seen, except that the reading was never unkind.
"You owe us an explanation," he said.
"I know," Cidd said.
"A complete one."
"I know."
"Not the version where you leave out the parts that are difficult."
Cidd looked at him.
"I know," he said again, differently.
Maren nodded once. Stepped back. Sat down on a piece of the fractured floor with the ease of someone who had decided this was going to take a while and was comfortable with that.
"You’ve gotten considerably more handsome," Kira said, from the side, in a tone that was attempting casual and not entirely achieving it. "Annoyingly so. It’s — it’s a lot. For a face."
Sola made a sound that was not quite a laugh.
Kira’s eyes went to her immediately.
Sola was looking at the fractured floor with complete innocence.
"What," Kira said.
"Nothing," Sola said.
"That sound meant something."
"I didn’t make a sound."
"You absolutely—"
"Should we sit down," Cidd said.
They sat down.
He told them everything.
Not the edited version, not the version he might have told someone he knew less well — the complete version, in order, with the details that mattered. The Halvern quest. The two dragons. The one he killed and the one he didn’t notice until it was too late. The village. The ash.
The four voices in the rubble.
He told them about Ashfeld. About the house he built. About fifteen years of mornings in a clearing and evenings on a step. About four girls who had grown from impossibly small into impossibly real. About the ring on his hand — he showed them — and about Garren and Marta and what the ring meant and how he’d come to be wearing it.
He told them about the workshop and the three dream projects — not in detail, not yet, but enough that they understood what had been occupying the part of him that used to be occupied by adventuring.
He told them about Rhea and Sylvaine arriving at the gate. About Tomren’s conversation and the road and why he was here now, under a false name, at F rank, in a dungeon in Venmoor.
He told them about the daughters leaving for the capital.
He didn’t tell them everything about the daughters. He kept that part general — four girls, grown now, gone to their futures, the house quiet in a way it hadn’t been in fifteen years. The specific texture of who they were and what they’d become he kept close to himself, not because he didn’t trust them but because some things needed to be seen to be understood and he thought they would see it eventually.
When he finished there was a silence.
Kira was looking at the floor.
Maren was looking at nothing specific, which was how he looked when he was thinking hardest.
Sola was looking at him with the expression she used for things she’d understood before he’d finished saying them.
"You found them," Kira said, to the floor. "Four babies in the rubble and you just — picked them up."
"Yes."
"And raised them."
"Yes."
"For fifteen years."
"Yes."
She was quiet for a moment.
"That’s very you," she said. "That’s the most you thing I’ve ever heard. Of course that’s what you did."
"What would you have done," he said.
She looked up. "The same thing," she said, simply. "Obviously." She paused. "Are you — is there anyone. For you specifically. Not the girls."
He looked at her.
"No," he said.
Something moved through her expression.
It was brief. She moved it off her face with the speed of someone who had been managing their expressions around him for years and had a great deal of practice. But it was there, and it was specific, and on the other side of the circle Sola looked at the fractured floor with the specific quality of someone who had seen something and was choosing not to remark on it.
Kira’s eyes went to her.
Sola examined the floor.
"What," Kira said.
"Nothing," Sola said.
"Sola."
"I’m looking at the floor. The floor is interesting. There are cracks in it."
"We made those cracks."
"Very interesting cracks."
Kira looked at her for a long moment with the expression of someone who had lost an argument they hadn’t officially started yet.
"Your turn," Cidd said.
They told him.
It came in pieces, the way ten years came when you tried to compress it — not chronologically but thematically, the significant things finding their own order.
The world had been busy.
A Demon Peer — one of the six most powerful demon entities in existence, something that sat above Demon Lords the way the sky sat above mountains — had apparently decided that the classification system was beneath it and had proceeded to claim the title of eleventh Demon Lord through a process that Kira described as catastrophic and Maren described as methodical and Sola described as deeply concerning for everyone involved. The political fallout from this was still ongoing. Several kingdoms were involved in it in ways they hadn’t wanted to be.
The hero — Aldric Voss — had collapsed. Not suddenly. Gradually, then completely, the way things collapsed when the thing holding them together was removed and nobody acknowledged it was gone until it had been gone long enough that the absence was structural. Kingdoms had stripped his title. There had been incidents. He’d been captured by demon forces during what Kira charitably described as an ill-advised solo operation and Maren described as hubris with legs.
"Nobody knows what they’re doing with him," Kira said. "The demon army isn’t ransoming him. They’re not executing him. They’re just — keeping him. Which is stranger than either alternative."
Cidd said nothing about what that might mean.
"There’s a new hero," Sola said. "Summoned. Young. Different from—" she paused— "different from the last one. We’ve met him briefly. He seems genuine."
"He’s green," Kira said. "But genuine. That’s a better starting position than the alternative."
The kingdom chaos was ongoing — the political vacuum left by the hero’s collapse had been filled in different ways by different powers, some of them sensibly, several of them not. Three kingdoms were in formal disputes. One was in something closer to a civil division. The demon situation complicated all of it because it gave the disputes an external reference point that everyone used to justify whatever they’d already decided to do.
Two new S ranks had emerged in the past three years. Kira gave him brief sketches — young, capable, different approaches, still learning what S rank meant in practice. He filed them.
"And the Holy Sister," he said.
Sola looked at him.
"She asked about you," she said. "Regularly. More than regularly." A pause. "She has a theory about you. About World Gain specifically. She’s been building it for years from the outside, from what she could observe of your early quest records, and she—" Sola stopped. "She said to tell you, if we ever found you, that she was right about the upper limit."
Cidd was quiet for a moment.
"She was right about the upper limit," he confirmed.
Sola looked at him.
"What upper limit," Kira said.
"Later," he said.
She pointed at him. "That’s not—"
"Later," Maren said, in the tone that closed things.
Kira pointed at Maren. Then at Cidd. Then put her hand down.
"Fine," she said. "Later. But I want it noted that both of you do that and I find it extremely—"
"Noted," Maren said.
"—coordinated in a way that feels deliberate and I don’t appreciate—"
"Kira," Sola said.
Kira stopped.
"He left without telling us," she said. Quieter now. The yelling had been the easy layer. This was underneath it. "We looked. All three of us. We looked for a long time."
"I know," Cidd said.
"Do you know why we stopped?"
He waited.
"Because Maren said—" she looked at Maren— "he said that if you’d wanted to be found you would have left something to find. And you hadn’t. And respecting that was the thing we could do since finding you wasn’t working." She looked at Cidd. "He was right. But I want you to know that it was a very difficult thing to decide."
"I know," Cidd said again.
"Are you going to apologize or explain?"
He looked at her.
"Both," he said. "The apology first. I should have told you. I knew where you were. I had ways to reach you. I chose not to and that was—" he paused— "that was about me and not about you and you deserved better."
The silence that followed was the kind that meant something had been received.
"Thank you," Sola said quietly.
"The explanation," Kira said.
"Halvern changed the shape of everything," he said. "The girls needed — everything. All of it. And I was the only one there and I couldn’t—" he stopped. Started differently. "I didn’t trust myself to hold both things. The life I was building with them and the life I’d had before. I thought if I reached back it would—" another stop. "I thought they needed all of me. So I gave them all of me."
No one said anything for a moment.
"That’s very you too," Kira said finally. Her voice had a quality to it that wasn’t quite the yelling voice and wasn’t quite the soft voice and was something that lived between them. "You absolute—" she stopped. "You gave four babies all of you for fifteen years."
"Yes."
"And now they’re gone to their futures."
"Yes."
"And you’re in a dungeon."
"Yes."
"With a false name and a false rank collecting materials for projects you won’t tell us about yet."
"Mostly won’t tell you about yet."
She looked at him.
"You’re impossible," she said.
"You’ve said that before."
"It bears repeating."
Maren, who had been quiet through most of this, said: "What’s in the pack."
Cidd looked at him.
"Materials," he said. "Dungeon-grade. Some of it’s for the workshop. Some of it’s food — the upper floors had edible monsters I wanted to bring back to the village."
"Edible monsters," Kira said.
"The Stonehide Bear on floor three. A Troll variant on seven. Several other things."
She stared at him.
"You were in a ten floor dungeon," she said, "fighting through SS rank territory, and you were also thinking about bringing food home for your village."
"Yes."
A pause.
"I—" she stopped. "I don’t have a response to that."
"There’s a first time for everything," Maren said.
Kira pointed at him again. Put her hand down again.
"We’ll help carry it," Sola said, in the tone of someone moving the conversation forward. "Of course we will."
"Thank you," Cidd said.
He stood.
Looked at the room.
Looked at the place where the Arch Lich had come apart.
Three items on the floor.
He’d been aware of them since the fight ended — World Gain had flagged them the moment the Lich dissolved, the specific attention it paid to things that carried significance. He walked to them now.
The first: a vial of dark liquid that shimmered with the specific quality of concentrated undead essence — sixty years of accumulated mana, distilled. He held it up. The liquid moved inside the vial in a way that liquids didn’t move on their own.
"What is that," Kira said, from behind him.
"Undead army essence," he said. "Concentrated. Enough to—" he calculated— "significantly expand what I can currently summon."
"What you can currently summon," Maren said, carefully.
Cidd pocketed the vial.
The second item: a core. Dense, dark, the specific weight of something that had been processing mana for sixty years and had crystallized the processing into a physical object. He held it and felt World Gain pulse at it with the specific attention it gave to things that fit into existing frameworks.
The dimensional ring.
He turned it over in his hand.
The Liminal Silver was still the primary anchor material — he wasn’t changing that — but this core could function as the processing component, the element that translated between physical space and dimensional space. He’d been planning to synthesize that component. He wouldn’t need to now.
"And that?" Sola said.
"Part of something I’m building," he said. "I’ll explain later."
"You keep saying later," Kira said.
"I keep meaning it," he said.
The third item.
He crouched down.
The egg was approximately the size of both his fists together, and it was not a color so much as the suggestion of all colors simultaneously, shifting as he moved around it in a way that had nothing to do with light and everything to do with whatever was inside it. The shell had the specific quality of something that had been grown rather than laid — not biological exactly, not mineral exactly, something between the two that had no good category in either direction.
He picked it up.
It was warm.
Not room temperature warm. Specifically warm, the warmth of something alive and metabolically active, something that was in the process of being something and had been for a long time.
He turned it over.
World Gain did something it had never done before.
Not a pulse. Not the standard flagging of something learnable. Something else — a resonance, as though World Gain and the thing inside the egg were two instruments tuned to frequencies that had just discovered the other existed and were in the process of doing something with that discovery.
He held it carefully.
"What," Kira said, in the tone of someone who had been watching his face and had stopped finding the situation casual.
"I don’t know yet," he said.
"You always know," she said.
"Not this time." He looked at the egg. "Whatever’s inside this — it’s been here for sixty years. The Lich was incubating it without knowing it. The mana density in this room, accumulated over decades—" he paused— "it’s been feeding something. Something that was already—" another pause. "Something that was already very old when it arrived here."
Maren was beside him now, looking at the egg with the expression he used for things he found genuinely significant.
"How old," he said.
"I don’t know," Cidd said. "Old enough that I don’t have a reference point."
"What’s in it," Sola said.
He looked at the egg.
The warmth of it against his palms. The shifting colors. The resonance still running between it and World Gain like a conversation happening just below the threshold of his ability to follow it.
"Something that used to be very large," he said. "Something that chose to be very small for a while." He looked up. "Something that might choose to be large again."
The three of them were quiet.
"That’s not a specific answer," Kira said.
"No," he agreed.
He packed the egg carefully. More carefully than anything else he’d carried today.
Then he stood up. Looked at his three oldest living friends in the dim crystalline light of a room that was still settling around the absence of sixty years of accumulated mana and the aftermath of the fight that had ended it.
He closed his eyes briefly.
Opened them.
He reached for the Death Sovereign skill — the Arch Lich’s, now his, evolved already in the ten minutes since acquisition in the specific way that World Gain evolved things it decided were important. Felt the shape of what it gave him access to. The souls of things he’d killed that were significant enough, strong enough, to maintain coherence past death.
He reached for one specifically.
The Arch Lich responded immediately — not with personality, not with anything that had been the Lich’s individual consciousness, but with the pure functional power of something that had been SS rank for sixty years and was now available in a different form.
He reached further.
There were others.
The Crimson Dragon he’d killed at sixteen. The various A and S rank creatures from his adventuring years. The black dragon from outside Ashfeld three years ago.
He chose the Crimson Dragon.
The air in the room changed.
Not subtly.
The summoning took four seconds and the result took up most of the remaining space in the boss room — red-scaled, massive, the specific presence of something that had been powerful in life and was more concentrated in whatever this was, the Crimson Dragon rendered in the specific quality of something called back from a state it had been in for twelve years.
It looked at him.
He looked at it.
"That," Kira said, from somewhere behind him, in a voice that had lost most of its usual volume, "is a Crimson Dragon."
"Yes," he said.
"You summoned a Crimson Dragon."
"Yes."
"From — where."
"I killed it twelve years ago," he said. "Near the Ashveil range."
A silence.
"You killed a Crimson Dragon," Maren said. "At sixteen."
"Seventeen," Cidd said. "I was seventeen."
"That’s — meaningfully better," Kira said, in a tone that suggested it was not meaningfully better.
"The Arch Lich is also available," he said. "And several others."
The silence that followed had a specific quality — the quality of three people who had spent years being the most capable people in most rooms they entered encountering information that required a recalibration of their understanding of what capable meant.
"You," Kira said. Then stopped. Then: "You are something else. You are—" she stopped again. "What are you."
"The same person you knew," he said.
"You are absolutely not the same—"
"Fundamentally," he said. "The same. I just had ten years of different work to do."
She stared at him.
Maren, beside her, said quietly: "This monster is still evolving." In the tone of someone making a joke that was also completely accurate. "The implications for the world are significant."
"That’s terrifying," Kira said.
"Yes," Maren agreed pleasantly.
Cidd looked at the dragon.
"Hop on," he said, to his three oldest friends.
The three of them looked at the dragon.
Looked at him.
"You want us to get on the dragon," Kira said.
"It’s faster than the stairs," he said.
"The dragon you summoned from the soul of a creature you killed twelve years ago."
"Yes."
"That you can apparently just — do."
"Yes."
She looked at Sola.
Sola looked at Maren.
Maren looked at the dragon.
"I’ve done stranger things," he said, and got on the dragon.
Sola got on next.
Kira stood for a moment.
"I have so many questions," she said.
"Later," Cidd said.
She pointed at him.
Got on the dragon.
The Crimson Dragon moved.
It was not designed for indoor spaces but it managed anyway, the dungeon passages expanding slightly around it in the specific way that dungeons sometimes accommodated things that were significant enough to warrant accommodation. Through the passages, up through the floors, the dungeon falling behind in layers — ninth, eighth, seventh, the upper floors rushing past, the specific blur of ten floors of hard-won progress undone in minutes.
They came out of the dungeon entrance into afternoon light.
The crowd that had been gathered that morning was gone.
The area was quiet.
The dragon stood in the clearing outside the dungeon entrance and the afternoon light hit its red scales and the three people on its back had the expressions of people who had gotten on a dragon and were processing what that meant now that they were on one.
Cidd stood at the dragon’s head.
Looked at the road back toward Venmoor.
Felt the egg in his pack, warm against everything else, whatever was inside it continuing to be whatever it was becoming.
Felt the ring on his hand.
Felt the specific quality of the afternoon — the light, the road, the three people behind him who had found him after ten years and were going to have a great many more things to say about all of it and were temporarily, blessedly, quiet.
He thought about Rhea saying come back.
He thought about four daughters in the capital.
He thought about the workshop and the three benches and the things waiting on them.
He thought about the egg.
He thought about what came next.
"Hold on," he said.
The dragon moved.
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