Three hundred swords in a single afternoon left Remus's legs refusing to hold him upright a moment longer than they had to, and he sat down hard on the packed dirt outside the Forge's outer courtyard, charcoal stub turning slow circles between two fingers while the last of the newly minted blades cooled in neat racks behind him.
Item Created: 300 x Dark Soul Swords.
He'd finished the order the Council demanded of him, every last one, and it had bought him exactly nothing yet in the way of what he actually wanted, which was a way home.
Somewhere in the same stretch of days, between orders, he'd finally found the hours to push Stone Guardian and Wind Archer past the ceiling he'd first sketched for them outside a campfire on the road to Hollowvale: doubling the complexity of both designs, folding in every hard lesson the Fortress Genesis siege had cost him and Andrea to learn, until the System finally handed back the word he'd been chasing since that very first night with a sword and a sketchbook.
Design Upgraded: Stone Guardian. Design Upgraded: Wind Archer. Tier Increased: Greater Construct!
He allowed himself exactly one private, satisfied breath over it before Master Corvin's voice pulled him back to the next order waiting.
"They've earned their loyalty ten times over and you're all still stalling," Master Corvin was saying, somewhere behind the courtyard's inner wall, his baritone carrying easily even through stone. "All he's asking for is passage to study the wreck. That's a small enough price for what he's already given us."
The Council's answer, relayed to Remus secondhand an hour later by an apologetic acolyte, amounted to a single carefully worded compromise: access to the wreck could be granted, but only once Remus had studied Nature Magic at the Temple of Balance, to counterbalance whatever the "seeds of darkness" already visible in him (the acolyte's phrase, not Remus's) might otherwise be allowed to grow unchecked.
"That's a fair trade, as far as I'm concerned," Remus told Master Corvin that evening, over a meal neither of them had much appetite for. "I'd rather balance the ledger myself than have your Council spend the next decade wondering whether I need watching."
"You'll need an escort," Corvin said. "The Temple sits at the heart of the island, past ground none of my own people have mapped properly in generations. I have three young ones in mind, if you're willing to trust strangers with something this dangerous."
"How dangerous."
Corvin reached into a locked chest at his side and drew out a small, sealed case, setting it on the table between them with the deliberate care of a man handling something that had already hurt someone once.
"A shard," he said, "cut from the broken Dark Soul Sword before you repaired the rest of it. Soul-forged steel doesn't rest easy once it's been cracked open. Carry it wrong, or carry it too long, and it works on the carrier the way it worked on whatever soul first went into the making of it. I want it studied on the road to the Temple, since Nature Magic is the one thing that might tell us how to neutralize it safely. But I won't hand it to anyone who doesn't understand exactly what they're agreeing to hold."
"Bring them in," Remus said. "I'll ask each of them myself."
The first to answer the summons was a girl no older than sixteen, wild dark hair, a small green triangle tattooed at the center of her forehead, moving with the loose, coiled energy of someone permanently half a second from breaking into a run. Remus recognized her instantly: the second of the three faces from the beach, the one who'd argued for ending things quickly before the blue-skinned girl talked her out of it.
"Mira," she said, before he'd asked, and held out her hand for the case before he'd finished explaining what was in it. "Give it here. I've carried worse."
"You don't want to know what it might do to you first?"
"I want to know it's dangerous," Mira said, grinning, already tucking the sealed case into her own pack without waiting for permission. "Knowing it's dangerous is most of the fun. Ask me again if it starts talking to me in my sleep."
The second was blue-skinned, silver-haired, and Remus felt something in his chest ease at the sight of her in a way he hadn't expected, some old animal relief at seeing a face that had already once decided, without needing to be asked, that he was worth keeping alive.
"You already know I can hear whatever you're actually feeling about this," Akira said, before he'd said a word, arms crossed, studying him with a directness that made the offer feel less like a request and more like an examination. "So skip the careful version and just tell me the truth. Are you asking us to carry this because it's genuinely the safest option, or because it's easier than carrying it yourself and watching what it might do to you instead?"
Remus opened his mouth to give the practiced answer, and found, under the pressure of a skill built entirely to catch exactly that kind of practiced answer, that he didn't actually have one ready.
"Both," he admitted. "I don't fully trust myself around anything soul-forged right now. Not after what Daegon pulled out of me to get me here."
Something in Akira's face softened at that, the examination giving way to something gentler and more worried. "Then I'll carry it," she said, "because you asked me honestly instead of managing me into agreeing. But I want your word you'll tell me the moment it starts affecting either of us, and not wait until it's already a problem neither of us can undo."
"You have it," Remus said, and meant it more than he expected to.
The third took the longest to arrive, and came in already talking, red skin, eyes like banked embers, tattoos crawling down both forearms in dark, restless patterns that seemed to shift when Remus wasn't looking at them directly.
"Corvin tells me you want a stranger to carry something that eats souls," the red-skinned man said, without preamble. "I'm Vantor. Before I agree to anything, I'd like to understand exactly what I get out of carrying your problem for you."
"Understanding," Remus said. "Access to Nature Magic theory none of the rest of you have studied firsthand yet, since you'll be walking beside me while I learn it. And my word that I'll take the shard back the moment we're within sight of the Maelstrom, so you're never holding it anywhere near the one place that might make it considerably worse."
Vantor considered that for a long moment, tapping one clawed finger against his own forearm, weighing the offer with the unhurried patience of a man who'd learned the hard way that the first price offered was rarely the real one.
"Add this," he said. "If it starts working on me the way Corvin warns it might, you owe me whatever it takes to fix it, personally, ahead of any other work on your list. Not eventually. Immediately."
"Done," Remus said.
"Then I'll carry it," Vantor said, and something in the flat, businesslike way he said it told Remus this wasn't reluctance so much as a man simply preferring his risks itemized before he signed onto them. "Not out of loyalty, Draymoor. Don't mistake this for that. Purely because the terms are fair."
Three answers, Remus thought, watching the three of them fall into an easy, familiar bickering the moment the negotiation itself was finished, and not one of them had sounded anything like the other two.
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