Olfred Warend
The Twin Horns. The name meant little to me beyond a line in a dossier, but Elder Rahdeas had selected them.
Their recruitment, I understood, was a chess move in a game I preferred to play with blunter pieces. Two reasons dominated this choice: first, their reputation for being comparatively free of the virulent, low-grade racism that festered in so many human parties—they were professionals, their prejudice reserved, it was said, for monsters and bad pay.
Second, and more strategically, there was the young woman, Jasmine Flamesworth. Her very presence was a subtle counterweight, a living slight against House Wykes and their monopoly. It was a typical piece of political fencing.
However, I hated working in teams.
Coordination meant exposure, reliance meant vulnerability, and chatter was a distraction. But Rahdeas had willed it, and so it would be. There was a third, unspoken reason they'd been chosen, one that settled in my gut like a cold stone: they were deemed unlikely to complain about the presence of a child.
The fact that such a qualification was necessary spoke volumes about the insanity we were embarking upon. If Rahdeas vouched for their discretion, I would endure their company.
I took my seat first, the rough-hewn bench groaning under my weight. The little elf—no, Finn, I had to remember that, even in the privacy of my thoughts—scrambled up beside me, a small, warm presence at my right.
My eyes lingered on him a moment longer than necessary. The disguise was holding perfectly, a testament more to my meticulous craft than any comfort with deception. But it wasn't the makeup I was checking. It was the boy beneath.
This four-year-old had been… an unexpectedly tolerable companion. The realization curdled in me, a sour taste of self-betrayal.
I was Olfred Warend, Lance of Darv, a sixty-year-old dwarf forged in duty. And yet, I had found a grim, quiet contentment in these days of travel with a toddler. The disgust was a familiar cloak. But it was complicated.
Corvis had his childish moments: the wide-eyed staring at the desert sky, the fumbling attempts with the stoneflute, the endless, whispered questions.
Yet, there were other moments, stretching long in the saddle or across the fire at night, where the child seemed to recede, leaving behind a gaze that was far too old, too heavy, like a canyon holding the shadow of a coming storm. He was a mage at four.
That fact alone was a tragedy, a theft. No child should wield magic. It meant his childhood was already a casualty, sacrificed on the altar of whatever desperate purpose drove him. I recognized the sacrifice; it was a language I understood all too well.
"Damien Malaisson in the flesh!" The voice, bright and sharp, cut through my reverie. Helen Shard, the half-elf leader, extended a calloused hand across the table. Her grip was firm, assessing. "Helen Shard. This is the rest of the Twin Horns."
She gestured with her other hand, a commander introducing her troops.
"Adam Krensh." The red-haired man puffed his chest out. A pure augmenter, I sensed immediately, all brute force and no elemental finesse.
"Angela Rose." The blonde woman offered a smile that seemed genuine, its warmth directed not at me, but at the boy beside me. "And who might you be?"
Her tone was gentle, the kind used for skittish animals or lost children.
"Finn... Warend." The prince's voice was small, and it wavered. Was it the performance, or was it a genuine tremor? Facing a room of hostile humans was one thing; facing a table of kindly, curious ones seemed to unsettle him more.
"Durden Walker." The large conjurer's voice was a soft rumble, completely at odds with his formidable, two-meter frame. His smile to the boy was paternal, unthreatening. "Nice to meet you, Finn."
"Jasmine." The last woman's introduction was a clipped exhale. She did not meet anyone's eyes directly, her gaze fixed on a knot in the wood of the table. "...Flamesworth."
A beat of awkward silence followed, filled only by the crackle of the distant fire and the muffled tavern noise. Then the boy, with his relentless, inconvenient curiosity, pierced it.
"W-what did you mean by 'Damien Malaisson in the flesh'?" Corvis asked Shard, his naturally teal eyes—now muddied by my art—wide with inquiry.
This boy and his tendency to want to know about me. It was unnerving. People either feared Damien Malaisson's reputation or sought to use it. They didn't ask about it like a scholar puzzling over a text.
"Damien here is quite famous across Sapin," Krensh interjected, leaning forward with a conspiratorial grin. His breath smelled of cheap ale. "After all, every adventurer with two silver to rub together buys supplies from Elder Rahdeas nowadays. Damien's the one who makes sure those caravans get through, no matter what's in the way."
"Speaking of that..." Angela Rose picked up the thread, her eyes softening again as they returned to Corvis. "Are you related to Elder Rahdeas, little Finn?"
The boy gave a mute, hesitant nod. It was time to rein this in. We were not here for fellowship.
"We are here to talk about business," I stated, my voice flattening the cheerful atmosphere like a heavy press.
Among all the things Rahdeas had drilled into me the cold, clear art of commerce was perhaps the most frequently used. It was a language of limits and agreements, pleasing in its lack of ambiguity.
"Sure, the Red Gorge, right?" Krensh leaned back, his earlier bravado tinged with a professional skepticism. "That's not your average dungeon. But I don't think I need to tell you that."
"Behave yourself, Adam," Shard chided, but her eyes held a similar wariness. "Excuse his behavior. He's blunt."
"Adam is not entirely wrong," Jasmine Flamesworth spoke up, her voice barely more than a whisper, yet it commanded the table's attention. She finally lifted her gaze, and it was like watching frost form on stone. "The Red Gorge is not to be taken lightly. It's not a dungeon you 'explore.' It's a place you survive, and only if you are very, very good or very, very lucky."
"You were already informed of our intentions and destination," I replied, a thread of annoyance weaving into my tone. This dance of reiterated warnings was a waste of the oxygen in this stuffy room.
"It wasn't our intention to question the job," Durden Walker said, his broad face etched with genuine concern. His eyes, warm and worried, settled on the boy. "It was just that... with a kid." He left the sentence hanging, a monument to understatement.
Krensh, never one for subtlety, hammered the point home. "Yeah. What do you need to go to the Red Gorge for, anyway? Rahdeas dealing in fire-crystals now? There are easier mines."
All eyes turned to me, but I shifted my own gaze to the boy. I had my orders: protect him, facilitate him. The 'why' had been deliberately left opaque, a sealed scroll from Rahdeas. And I had obeyed, as I always did.
But in the quiet of the desert nights, watching him struggle with the stoneflute or stare into the flames with that ancient despair, curiosity had begun to itch at me, a faint, unfamiliar sensation. What could possibly drive this elven prince, this child of sunlight and song, into the volcanic belly of a place like the Red Gorge?
"The Phoenix Wyrms," Corvis said, his small voice suddenly clear and firm.
The effect was instant. A collective intake of breath. Helen Shard's professional mask slipped, revealing plain shock. Angela Rose's smile vanished. Durden Walker's concern deepened into outright confusion. Adam Krensh barked a short, disbelieving laugh. Only Jasmine Flamesworth remained still, but her frosty eyes sharpened, analyzing the boy anew.
"You want to hunt Phoenix Wyrms?" Shard asked, the question dripping with incredulity.
"Their beast cores, yes," Corvis answered, as if requesting a specific herb from a garden.
"Between all the things the Red Gorge has to offer," Krensh said, shaking his head, "you want the most dangerous and useless thing?"
He wasn't wrong from a mercenary perspective. The Red Gorge was a multifaceted prize: full of fire-aligned mana crystals, a source of rare volcanic metals, a dungeon that still had many loot left behind.
The Phoenix Wyrms were its apex predators, its natural disaster. They were hunted, occasionally, for specific alchemical components—iridescent feathers that held embers, talons that could channel fire, beaks that could pierce steel.
These spoils were crown-bound, sold at exorbitant prices to the Glayders for their artificers and champions. But the cores? The Wyrms were infamous for their final, cataclysmic act.
In their death-throes, they unleashed every shred of mana in a self-immolating inferno, leaving behind cores that were often little more than brittle, empty husks—powerful foci, perhaps, but not the dense, mana-rich prizes one would risk an S-Class hunt for.
It was considered a fool's errand, the mark of a greedy amateur or a suicidal poet.
"That makes it slightly easier, considering who controls the gorge," Jasmine observed, her analytical mind already pivoting. "House Wykes cares about the crystals and the metals. If we're only after beast cores they consider worthless, oversight might be… lighter."
"What do you mean?" Corvis asked, and for the first time, I heard a note of genuine surprise in his voice. It struck me as odd. He knew of the Wyrms, he sought their cores with this desperate intensity, and yet he hadn't known this basic, grim fact of their harvest? What kind of research had he done?
"The Phoenix Wyrms' cores are almost never gathered intact," Flamesworth explained, her tone clinical, a master tutor to a slightly dim student. "And no adventurer, in any record I have heard or read, has ever found a transferable Beast Will within the remnants."
The boy just nodded, his small jaw clenching, teeth gritting audibly. I saw the hope in him falter, fracture, and then harden into something even more desperate. So it was a Beast Will he was after. A specific, legendary inheritance he believed he could force from those fiery ashes. The arrogance of it was staggering. The sadness of it, profound.
"Finn will obviously not participate in any combat or exploration," I stated, reclaiming control of the conversation. The plan was coalescing into something marginally less insane. "You will guide me to a Wyrm nesting area. I will engage. We will retrieve what we can. We will leave. Quickly."
If he had told me from the start it was merely a hunting trip, I would have gone alone. But now, dismissing the Twin Horns would be an insult, a breach of contract that would reflect poorly on Rahdeas's word. We were stuck with this farce.
"You speak of Phoenix Wyrms like they're Forest Hounds," Krensh snorted, his bravado returning, laced with a veteran's scorn for perceived naivete.
To him, they were legends of danger. To me, they were math. The strongest adventurers the Guild could boast, the mythical SS-ranks, hovered at the initial stages of silver core.
They could, with preparation and skill, handle a single S-Class beast. I was a white core. The gulf between us was not a gap; it was a continental divide. Ten high-silver mages working in perfect unison might give me pause. A flock of instinct-driven beasts, for all their fiery majesty, were a problem of scale, not of existential threat.
"I have your payment here," I said, cutting off any further debate. I placed the heavy pouch on the table. It landed with a solid, muffled thump. The sound alone spoke of weight and quantity. "Fifty-eight silver coins. The standard Guild rate for a guarded Red Gorge expedition is twenty-five. House Wykes pays its licensed hunters thirty. This is double."
I let the offer hang in the smoky air. This was Rahdeas's other lesson: money as a psychological tool, a calibrator of risk and loyalty. The Twin Horns' reactions were a study in controlled avarice. Shard's eyes widened a fraction before her professionalism slammed down. Krensh's disdain evaporated, replaced by a calculating gleam. Rose looked astonished, Walker concerned by the implication of such a sum. Flamesworth's lips thinned; she understood the price was also a measure of the expected danger.
"We already gave our word to Elder Rahdeas," Helen Shard said, her voice regaining its steady captain's tone. She did not reach for the pouch. "A contract is a contract. But we are… sincerely grateful for the Elder's generosity."
I gave a curt nod. Rahdeas always said money had the unique power to make all races, all stations, suffer each other's company. Humans, elves, dwarves, commoner, noble—all bowed to its weight.
But I had seen the difference between my foster father and a true miser like Dawsid Greysunders. To the dwarven king, gold was a god, a destination, a coffin he hoped to be buried in.
To Rahdeas, it was a lever, a chisel, a key. It was a means to move the world, not to possess it. This pouch on the table was a lever, carefully placed to shift the loyalty and tolerance of these five humans toward a mission and the strange, determined child who was its cause.