CHAPTER 12: PRICE OF KNOWING
The guild board stayed quiet for three days after Duskmire Cross. No new D-rank contracts. No whispers. Just the usual E-ranks arguing over goblin ears and escort pay.
Kael used the lull.
He took the oilcloth sack of mirror shards to the smithy behind Branch 17, paid the forge-master two silver to use the anvil after hours, and started breaking glass into something useful.
Each shard still carried a ghost of its death-vision, but the images were weaker now flickering like bad lantern slides. He laid them out on the workbench, studied the angles, the way the runes had twisted when Hollis smashed the frame.
Torven watched from the doorway, nursing a mug of something that smelled like paint thinner.
"You planning to stare it to death?" he asked.
Kael didn't look up. "Planning to make it talk."
He picked up the battlefield shard the one that had shown his decapitation and pressed it against the flat of his palm. The glass cut, shallow, deliberate. Blood welled, soaked into the surface.
The vision flared: older Kael, battlefield, blade flashing.
Kael held the cut open until the blood stopped flowing on its own. Then he closed his fist.
The vision stuttered. The headless body stood, picked up the head, and kept walking. Same as on the roof.
But this time the glass didn't crack.
It drank the blood and went dark.
Kael smiled.
He spent the night grinding shards into dust, mixing the powder with forge soot and a drop of his own blood. By dawn he had a palm-sized disk of black glass, smooth on one side, etched with a single rune on the other, the same open-eye sigil Veyra wore, but twisted, inverted.
He held it to the light. No reflection. Just depth.
Torven whistled low. "That legal?"
"Probably not," Kael said. "Good thing we're not asking."
He slipped the disk into a leather pouch on his belt, right next to the guild badge he still hadn't decided whether to keep.
That afternoon the board finally coughed up something new.
Contract 17-D-29
Task: Clear the Hollow Mine of "echo wraiths." Recover any lost survey team.
Location: Old iron workings, three days northwest.
Threat: D (spectral, sonic)
Reward: 500 silver + salvage rights
[Note: Earplugs mandatory. Do not speak aloud inside.]
Torven read it twice and groaned. "Sonic ghosts. My favorite."
Lysa was already waxing her bowstring. "Echo wraiths mimic voices. Lead you into pits. Drive you mad with your own words."
Dren just sharpened his knives and smiled.
They left at first light.
The Hollow Mine sat in a valley that swallowed sound. The entrance was a black arch carved with warnings in three dead languages. The survey team's cart lay overturned fifty paces in, wheels still spinning slow.
Kael stepped inside first, just like always.
The air was cold, thick, tasting of rust and old screams. The tunnel sloped down sharp, walls slick with condensation that dripped upward.
Ten paces in, the first wraith spoke.
It used Torven's voice, perfect down to the cracked laugh.
"Turn back, mate. Nothing down here but teeth."
Torven's real hand went to his axe, knuckles white.
Kael raised a finger to his lips.
They moved in cautious silence, earplugs in, boots stepping softly on stone.
The wraiths followed.
They spoke with Lysa's voice, begging for arrows that would never come. With Dren's voice, counting coins that turned to screams. With Kael's own voice calm, flat, telling them exactly how they would die.
Kael listened.
'Is that how I sound? I mean, I have been pretty reserved since I came to this world.'
He learned the pitch, the cadence, the way the sound bent around corners before the source appeared. Learned the half-second delay between mimicry and attack.
At the first junction he stopped, pulled the black glass disk from his pouch, and held it to the wall.
The wraiths went quiet.
Then they screamed all of them, every voice at once, a wall of sound that cracked stone and brought blood to their ears even through plugs.
Kael didn't flinch.
He pressed the disk harder. The rune flared, drank the scream, and threw it back twisted.
The wraiths shattered like glass.
Silence rushed back in, thicker than before.
Torven pulled his plugs, stared at the disk. "You made a scream-eater."
"Borrowed the idea," Kael said. "Hollis had style."
They found the survey team in the third chamber, five bodies, throats torn out, eyes wide, mouths open in perfect O's. The wraiths had used their own voices to do it.
Kael closed their eyes, one by one.
On the way out he stopped at the cart, pried open a locked chest, and found the real prize: a fist-sized crystal pulsing with soft blue light. Sound made solid. Worth more than the contract ten times over.
Torven whistled again. "Salvage rights, eh?"
Kael tucked it into his pack. "Finder's fee."
They emerged at dusk three days later, ears ringing, pockets heavy.
Captain Rhen met them with a new armband (deep blue, three white stripes).
"D+ provisional," she said. "Guild's still arguing about the mirror. This buys you time."
Kael tied it on without comment.
That night he sat in the common room, crystal on the table, disk beside it.
A bard in the corner was singing about Cragmere's End and the fire that couldn't burn him.
Kael listened, drank, and for the first time in weeks felt the weight of eyes that weren't afraid.
A woman approached, C-rank, scar across her throat, voice like gravel.
"My party's short a front-liner for a B-rank delve, don't worry it's much weaker than even your typical B— expedition." she said. "Heard you don't follow orders well. That true?"
Kael looked at her, at the crystal, at the disk.
"Depends who's giving them," he said.
She smiled, crooked. "Good. Meet us at dawn. Bring your toys."
She left.
Torven slid into the seat across from him.
"B-rank?" he asked. "We're D+ on paper."
"Don't worry about it, she said it's only B rank on paper, it's really only slightly more challenging than C+" Kael said.
He picked up the crystal, felt the sound inside it hum against his palm.
Tomorrow he'd learn what B-rank threats tasted like.
With something akin to a grin Kael thought, 'Why am I getting a little excited, isn't this supposed to be dangerous?'