Duskbound

The parlor looked a lot like the common room, with an old, scuffed table in the center flanked by six chairs. A fieldstone fireplace dominated the back wall, and there was a faded painting of a young farming couple in front of a log house on the left wall. Whoever had done it wasn't terribly talented, and years of neglect had left the paint flaking off around the edges.

"First of all, here's this," Torwin said. He handed over a pouch similar to the one that already hung from Velik's belt. The primary difference was that the inside had been fitted with some sort of padded wooden framework, sized to slot up to ten potion vials into. All of them were full. "Healing potions, at about fifty decarma a piece. They're not as good as the system store's, but they're far more affordable."

I can't believe I wasted so many thousands of decarmas buying directly from the system over the years. I don't even want to try to figure out how many I've used.

"Thank you," Velik said woodenly as he accepted the pouch.

"Your compass, fully repaired, and with a field guide explaining how to use it," Torwin said, passing him a small wooden box.

Inside was the promised compass and a folded over slip of paper. Velik skimmed it and saw it had directions for how to change settings, what each setting did, the maximum range, and warnings about various skills or natural phenomena that could block the compass from detecting things.

That would have been useful a week ago, but better late than never.

"And with that, I'd like the return of my compass," Jensen said, holding out a hand. "And, er… I wouldn't say no to copying those instructions, if you don't mind."

"No need for that," Torwin told him with a chuckle. He pulled out a duplicate sheet of paper and slid it down the table to his apprentice. "I had the tinkerer make a second copy for you."

It was good to have the compass back, and even better to finally know how to use it. He still didn't understand the symbols, but he could match the drawings to the compass itself. That was good enough. Probably the most exciting setting he hadn't realized existed was that the compass could extend its range in a specific direction by foregoing scanning everywhere else. That would allow him to focus his search to make sure he kept moving deeper into the wilderness as he hunted down the champions there.

"Now, as to the gear, here are some things that were sorely lacking from your kit," Torwin said. He set a pack on the table and opened it up. "First, a shirt enchanted with [Mending] and [Warmth]. Obviously, you don't want to wear it during the summer days, but I'm sure I don't need to tell you how nice it'll be to have in a month or two when the weather turns."

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That was all well and good, but it was a light blue that really didn't blend in well with the shadows. [Stealth] might be gone, but it lived on in [Apex Hunter], and the skill was telling him in no uncertain terms that he wouldn't be doing himself any favors if he wore it. Something to wear when I sleep, I guess.

"Weather-resistant cloak," Torwin said, passing over the next piece. "Also enchanted with [Mending], and sealed with oils to keep the rain off. Those aren't magical, and if the cloak gets too damaged, you'll need to reapply them. You know how to do that?"

"I do," Velik said. He didn't have the supplies for it, but he could get them locally when he needed them. More importantly, the cloak was a dark, mottled green that would blend perfectly with the forest right up until the snow started falling. After the season turned, he'd need new clothes anyway. His old set had barely survived last winter, thanks mostly to a frostfang howler that had ambushed him right about the same time the snow started to melt.

"As far as the fun stuff goes, I got about forty thousand decarmas for those two champion seeds. Most of that went into these two pieces. You said you wanted something that would boost your mystic stat up, and this is it." It was an earring, a white gold cuff that had been burnished to keep it from reflecting light. Torwin handed it to him and said, "I recommend using something else to pierce the hole. If you try to use this, you'll probably break it."

"I will," Velik promised. "What's the bonus on it?"

"+15. And that's all it's got. It won't resize or repair or clean itself. It's pure stats, and it's delicate. Watch you don't take any blows to the side of the head or it might just break."

That would certainly give him a sizable boost to the stat. More importantly, it would let Velik get a feel for exactly how useful mystic was with his new skill so he could decide if it was worth it to keep investing his free points into it. As long as the gains were enough to allow his phantasmal spears to pierce through the hides of deep wood monsters, he'd consider it worth the time and effort.

"You said there was a second piece?" Velik prompted.

"Yes. This is actually what I spent most of your money on. It wasn't something you asked for, but once I explain what I learned, I think you'll agree that you want it. Here, it's an amulet that increases your resistance to mental intrusions."

"Why would I need something like that?" Velik asked flatly as he eyed up the amulet Torwin was holding out to him. It looked like an old coin, an inch across and with a circle of the same kind of symbols the compass had. The coin sat inside a little steel wire mesh that was braided into the chain, itself also steel. He made no move to accept it.

"Correct me if I've made any mistakes in this sequence of events. When you were a child, you and your friend went into an old, destroyed dungeon and found a class orb. It granted you your unique class and changed your race, and your friend… If I'm understanding things correctly, you thought your friend died, killed by a monster."

"He may have survived. The champion seeds were his before I killed the monsters that grew from them," Velik said. "More likely, the class orb turned him into whatever that monster was just like it turned me into a duskbound."

"My thoughts exactly, except for one thing. I found the orb after you came to the dungeon the other week, and it's not a class orb. It's way too big, class orbs don't change races, and they don't work on two people, then break. I took it with me and asked the guild archivist to look into it. If he's right, what you two found was actually a dungeon seed.

"Normally, the seed grows into a core, and when that core is destroyed, the seed is destroyed with it. My first thought was that the team who'd originally broken the dungeon had made some kind of mistake, but when I looked into things, that theory doesn't really fit. This thing looks like a dungeon seed, but it shouldn't exist and even if it did, it shouldn't have done what it did to you two."

"It was from the dungeon core," Jensen said. "You just told us that."

"No, you don't understand. You can't get a seed back out of a core. That's like prying an acorn back out of a fully grown oak. It just doesn't work that way. It looks like a dungeon seed, but it can't be from the dungeon."

"What are you saying?" Velik asked. "That someone came to the dungeon after it was destroyed and put a new seed in it?"

"That's a theory. Dungeon seeds are incredibly rare, but apparently, it's possible to revive a dungeon by planting a new seed in the broken core. It wouldn't be the same dungeon as before, but the new dungeon could cannibalize what's left of the old one to speed up its growth. That explains how the seed got there, except that, again, a dungeon seed cannot do what happened to you."

"Why not?" Jensen asked. "Other than that the guild doesn't have any evidence that it's happened before, what's stopping it?"

Torwin shook his head. "I don't know. I'm just repeating what they told me. It looks like a dungeon seed, and we have a possible theory as to how it got there, but nothing should have happened when you picked it up. Everybody I described the situation to agreed that it should have been harmless to pick it up. Whatever caused your race to mutate into that subtype and granted you a class, it wasn't the dungeon seed."

"It has to be involved, right? I mean, this whole thing is too much of a coincidence otherwise," Jensen pointed out. "No way something else transformed them at the same moment they find an abandoned dungeon seed inside an old, dead dungeon."

"I agree, which brings me back to the amulet." Torwin held it out again, and this time Velik hesitantly reached out to take it. "While I don't think the dungeon seed is directly responsible for all of this, I do believe it influenced the change. New dungeons invariably have one thing in common: they have a core and they have a guardian. I think that your friend gained a class akin to the core, and that you gained one to fulfill the role of its guardian.

"If I'm right, then it's entirely possible that the 'core' part of your bond will be able to control you should you ever get close to it. Gear that makes it harder to take over your mind can only help in a situation like that, no?"

Velik wasn't sure he believed everything Torwin had just told him. There were a lot of guesses in there, and even if he accepted it all as fact, it raised even more questions. But if the veteran hunter had the right shape of things, then he'd made a good call with the amulet. Velik needed answers, and now he had the tools to find them.

He slipped the chain over his head and tucked the old coin under his shirt. "Thank you for sharing your theory with me," he said. "I have work to do."