Chapter 8 Chapter eight

Chapter Eight

He left at dawn.

Sela was already in the courtyard when Ethan came down, standing beside a brown horse that was larger than he had expected and regarding him with the calm, faintly judgmental expression that horses seemed to reserve specifically for people who didn't ride regularly. Which described Ethan perfectly.

He had never been on a horse in his life.

This was information he had decided not to volunteer to anyone.

Sela handed him a wrapped bundle without a word — more bread, dried meat, a small block of the sharp cheese from yesterday, and something wrapped separately in wax paper that turned out to be a dense, sweet cake of some kind. She had clearly packed it herself rather than leaving it to the palace kitchen, which did something to the food that made it taste slightly better than it probably was.

"The guide is waiting at the north gate," she said. "His name is Corvin. He knows the road to the Ashfen Mountains better than anyone in the city." She paused, then added, almost reluctantly, "He is not the easiest person to travel with."

"What does that mean?"

"It means he will tell you things you don't want to hear in ways you don't want to hear them, and he will do it constantly, and he will not stop if you ask him to." She said it with the flat delivery of someone summarizing documented fact rather than offering an opinion. "But he will get you there safely. He always gets people where they need to go."

"Has he guided anyone to the Ashfen Mountains before?"

Sela hesitated just long enough. "Not to the dungeon specifically. But he has been to the mountain base several times for other purposes."

"What other purposes?"

"He collects things," she said, in a tone that very clearly indicated she was not going to elaborate further.

Aldric appeared from the main doors as Ethan was attempting to figure out the logic of mounting the horse without making it obvious he had no idea what he was doing. The old mage watched him struggle for approximately four seconds before stepping forward and wordlessly adjusting the stirrup length, then gesturing at it with his staff.

Ethan mounted without further incident, though the horse shifted its weight in a way that felt specifically like disapproval.

Aldric looked up at him from below, one hand resting on his staff, the pink crystal at the top glowing faintly in the pale morning light.

"The map will not account for changes inside the dungeon over two centuries," the old mage said. "Treat it as a guide, not a guarantee. Trust your instincts when the map and reality disagree."

"Any other advice?"

Aldric was quiet for a moment. Then, "The soul stone will be protected. Not just by creatures. The dungeon itself will resist you the closer you get to the core. You may experience things that are not real — memories, fears, doubts. The dungeon feeds on hesitation. Whatever you see on those lower levels, keep moving."

Ethan nodded slowly. "Keep moving."

"And sleep when you can. Fatigue will kill you faster than any creature in that place."

It was, Ethan thought, perhaps the most practical piece of advice anyone had ever given him. It sounded exactly like something Marcus or Malik would have said, stripped of any fantasy framing — just the plain, unglamorous truth about how staying alive actually worked.

He thanked Aldric. The old man nodded once, then turned and walked back inside without looking back, which somehow felt more like a sendoff than anything ceremonial would have.

Sela raised one hand briefly as Ethan turned the horse toward the gate.

He raised one back.

Then he rode toward the north gate, where Corvin was waiting.

Corvin was not what Ethan had pictured.

He had expected someone weathered and lean, the kind of wiry, sun-darkened traveler that populated every fantasy story he had ever read — quiet, competent, and economical with words in the way that serious people in serious professions tended to be.

Corvin was weathered and lean, that part was accurate. He was perhaps forty, with a deeply tanned face, short dark hair going grey at the temples, and sharp green eyes that moved constantly, cataloguing everything in their path. He sat easily on a grey horse that was noticeably calmer than Ethan's.

The first thing he said was, "You've never ridden a horse."

"Good morning to you too," Ethan replied.

"Your posture is wrong, your grip on the reins is wrong, and you're sitting like someone waiting for something bad to happen, which means something bad is more likely to happen." He said all of this in a conversational tone, as though commenting on the weather. "By the end of today you'll be competent enough not to fall off. By the end of tomorrow you'll be fine."

"And if we need to move fast today?"

"Then hold on and don't panic." He clicked his tongue and his grey horse began moving. "Keep up."

They passed through the north gate as the sun cleared the palace walls and proper daylight arrived over the city of Valdris. Ethan got his first real look at it from the outside — stone buildings in varying states of upkeep, wide streets in the center narrowing to tighter lanes toward the edges, market stalls beginning to open, people moving with the purposeful, slightly distracted energy of a city starting its day. Children ran between legs. A cart loaded with barrels rumbled over uneven stone. Someone was frying something nearby that smelled extraordinary.

It looked, Ethan thought, surprisingly normal. Not so different from the world he had come from in the ways that actually mattered — people just trying to get through their days, carrying whatever weight they had been given to carry.

They cleared the city inside twenty minutes and the road north opened up ahead of them — wide, unpaved, cutting through open farmland on both sides that stretched toward distant tree lines.

Corvin rode slightly ahead, eyes moving across the landscape in steady sweeps.

"Four days to the mountain base," he said without turning. "Assuming no complications."

"What kind of complications?"

"The kind we won't know about until they happen," Corvin said simply. "That's what makes them complications."

Ethan adjusted his grip on the reins the way Corvin had indicated and looked north, where the road narrowed to a pale line before disappearing into the distance.

Somewhere beyond that line, past four days of road and the dark edge of the Ashfen Mountains, someth

ing ancient was waking up.

He kept riding.