Quinn stood at the edge of his claimed den while the last tremors of the berserker's fall faded into the stone. The troll's body lay twisted in the dust, its black blood already thickening into tar. The cavern lamps he had coaxed to life during the fight flickered in nervous rhythm, as if the flame itself remembered how close death had come. He pulled the rebar free from the troll's skull with a wet sound and steadied his breathing. Vitality thrummed steady in his chest. Predator's Instinct hummed at the base of his spine, a coiled spring waiting for another threat.
He told himself it was over. The chamber disagreed.
The air shifted. It was subtle at first, the way a room feels when someone steps in behind you without making a sound. The hair along Quinn's forearms prickled. A draft moved across his skin, although the den had no open path to the night air. The flames bowed as one, tilting toward the center of the chamber.
The System broke the silence.
[ Warning: Fragment resonance unstable ][ External interference detected ]
He stilled. He did not tighten his grip on the rebar. He had learned that predators study the flinch. The messages hovered in his vision, stubborn and cold. External interference. From where. From who.
He scanned the den. No elves. No sprites. No drones. Nothing moved except the slow slump of the dead troll and the thin fall of grit from the cratered ceiling. Yet his Shard of Insight reported pressure that was not weight and sound that was not noise. It felt like standing under a storm that had not decided where to strike.
He said, quietly, to the dark, "Show yourself."
Nothing stepped out. Something looked in.
A cold gaze pressed on him from everywhere at once, like a thousand tiny needles pricking the skin, each one searching for a seam. It did not have feet that scraped or lungs that breathed. It did not have a shadow. It had a decision. To see him. To take him apart without touching him.
[ Alert: Unknown entity detected ][ Classification: Watcher ][ Estimated power: Unknown ][ Survival odds if engaged: 0.3 percent ]
Quinn kept his eyes open. Half the fight was refusing to blink. The other half was refusing to lie to yourself. The System had given him bad odds before, but never numbers this low. It was not warning him away from a fight. It was telling him no fight existed, only consequence.
He spoke again, because the sound of his own voice belonged to him. "If you wanted me dead, you would have done it already."
The gaze pressed harder. The flames guttered. The troll's blood rippled as if something breathed across it. Stone that had been stone since before the Fowls built their house ticked like cooling metal.
Quinn stepped sideways, slow and steady, and the gaze moved with him. Not following his body. Tracking his fragments. He felt it then, a sensation like cold hands pressed through his skin to cup each shard in turn. Strength. Insight. Silence. Vitality. Dominion. Predator's Instinct. The attention lingered on Predator's Instinct, as if the idea of two fragments stitched into one interested it the way a hunter studies a new trap.
[ Warning: Fragment interference escalating ][ Risk of corruption: High ][ Attempting stabilization ][ Stabilization failed ]
White pain lanced through his temples. Images burst across his vision that were not his memories. A hall of mirrors where each reflection wore someone else's face. A field of glass that cracked in circles like ripples on frozen water. A library so tall the shelves vanished into dark, each book a shard, each shard a history written in a hand with no bones.
He forced the heel of his palm against his brow and stood it out. Pain was information. Panic was a decision. He had felt both and won before. He could do it again.
"Not a fight," he said, to the empty air. "A catalog."
The pressure paused. He was right. It was not a predator in the way the troll was a predator. It was a collector. It had made a choice to look, and the world obeyed that choice the way water obeys gravity.
[ Emergency quest triggered: Escape the gaze ][ Objective: Break line of sight ][ Reward: Survival ]
It was the worst kind of reward, because there was nothing to spend it on, but he would take it. He flicked his eyes to the tunnels branching from the den. There was the route he had used to bait the troll through stalagmites. That was a mess of shattered stone and dead ends. There was the low fissure that stank of goblin rot. There was the thin crack near the mana stream, which sang with power and death.
He moved. He chose the thin crack because it offered the chance of a bend, a corner, any place where a line might break. His Shard of Silence wrapped him, dulling his steps. The gaze did not care. He could feel it on his back like a brand that had not cooled.
The fissure pressed tight against his shoulders. He turned sideways and slid. The stone scraped his clothing. Dust filled his mouth. He had to exhale to make room, then inhale without a cough. The pressure spiked. The fissure felt like it might close. He pushed through into a narrow runnel and took a breath that did not feel like air.
[ Fragment of Silence activated ][ Effect amplified by threat proximity ]
The world flattened. Sound died beyond the bubble around his body. His lungs moved, but he did not hear them. His heartbeat ticked once, twice, then vanished under the aura. The gaze did not vanish. It prowled at the edge of the silence, a tide that refused to be turned.
He ran.
Corridors bent. Stone told the history of drills and magic and old water. He passed a section where the wall was not wall at all but fused glass. Tooth marks ran along its edge in a pattern he had seen once in a sketch for a LEP training manual. Troll bites, sealed by a plasma barrier. Breadcrumbs of a war he had not lived but had read. He almost smiled. The world was not a stage built for him. It was itself. He was lucky to be in it.
The pressure swelled. His fragments shivered against his ribs. He needed a ward. He needed a rule older than this gaze. He needed anything the gaze respected.
He turned a corner and found it.
The chamber ahead was low and wide, a storage hollow carved long before goblins made nests along the lower paths. Crates had rotted to frames. A rack of tools slumped into rust. In the center, cut into a pillar of stone, someone had etched a sigil that was not a fairy rune. It was a circle divided by three lines, each line split like a fork at the end, each fork pointed inward. In the bowls of the forks were tiny cuts that hummed, too faint for sound, but clear as a bell to his Shard of Insight.
He did not know the language. He knew the grammar. It was a ward against being counted.
The gaze pressed, hungry with curiosity.
He put his palm to the sigil. The stone was colder than ice, a cold that belonged to deep places where sunlight exists only as a rumor. His fragments locked to the shape under his skin, matching their rhythm to the pattern carved in rock.
[ Synchronization achieved ][ Temporary ward established ][ Entity line of sight interrupted ]
The weight snapped back like a cable cut free. Quinn's knees tried to give. He set them, drew a breath because it belonged to him, and let his head thump once against the pillar. The world brightened by increments as the lamps in the den behind him wavered into calm memory. The troll's corpse was a story that had ended. This was new script.
He checked the corners of the chamber. No movement. No watchers made of meat or metal. Only the sense that the thing beyond the ward had leaned in close and was now leaning away, not because it feared him, but because it obeyed a rule it did not make.
[ Quest complete: Escape the gaze ][ Reward granted: Survival ]
He laughed once, short and raw. "You do love your poetry."
The laugh fell into the warded quiet and went no further. The sigil dimmed to a soft pulse, its life measured and patient. He looked at it and felt a sliver of recognition he could not place. The System's fonts were clean and modern inside his vision. This mark was older, carved by a hand that had a reason to spend a day on a single curve.
It occurred to him that he might not be the first to be cataloged.
He let that sit where it wanted to sit, which was the stuff at the bottom of the mind that informs the rest. Then he straightened and looked down at his chest. The fragments had steadied. Predator's Instinct ran smooth again, no static on the line. Silence held, gentle and useful instead of desperate. Vitality warmed the places the troll had bruised.
He rolled his shoulder and felt only the memory of pain. He moved his neck and counted the vertebrae by the clicks. Everything still worked. He was not broken. He had not been reduced. He had been measured. That was all.
[ New passive condition: The Watched ][ Effect: Presence occasionally sensed by higher entities ][ Immediate penalty: None ][ Long term consequences: Unknown ]
He stared at the lines until they blurred. Immediate penalty none was the most honest gift the System had given him. Unknown was the most consistent truth the world had shown. He breathed out through his nose and nodded once.
"Let them watch."
The sigil's glow thinned to almost nothing. The ward was temporary. He had minutes, maybe an hour, before the gaze could try again. He would not still be here when it returned.
He checked the chamber for salvage. One crate yielded a length of braided cable. The cable was coated in a resin that glittered faintly when the mana veins in the wall pulsed. Fairy made, or at least fairy improved. He looped it over his shoulder. Another crate produced a rusted pry bar that was less useful than his rebar but could wedge a crack in a pinch. He slid it into his belt.
A third crate was heavier than it looked. He pried up the lid with the rebar and winced at the squeal. The Shard of Silence ate the sound. Inside lay a box of dull disks, each the size of a small plate. He lifted one and felt the faintest vibration. He held it near a mana vein and the disk hummed louder.
A power coupler. Low grade. Old. Still useful.
He smiled without showing his teeth. Even the scraps of this place were gifts if you knew what to ask for.
He slung the disks in a makeshift bundle and crossed to the far side of the chamber where a narrow vent climbed toward a seam of night sky. The air that slipped down smelled of damp grass and old stone. It was not far to the surface, but it was not straight. The fairy tunnels rarely were. They had grown like roots around dangers, and the map in Quinn's head remembered paths he had not yet walked because he had spent years in the original books inventing how they should feel.
He made his way into the vent. The ward hummed once behind him like a steady heart. He climbed with care because speed kills in holes. The Shard of Silence wrapped him again, this time a comfort rather than a last wall. The Shard of Insight parsed the stone, suggested holds, painted faint ghosts where the vent might widen into a drop.
He reached a bend and listened. The night breathed beyond. The watch of the thing beyond the world did not. He did not know if the ward had shrunk its attention to a trickle or if the thing had simply turned away to left-click some other poor soul. He preferred the first answer. It meant rules existed and that he could find more.
The vent opened into a narrow corridor lined with old brick. He brushed moss from one section and found a plaque beneath. The letters were human. The language was a century old. A service tunnel. The manor's skin reached farther than he thought. He followed the corridor until it met a spiral stair of cast iron that flexed under his weight. He climbed until his breath fogged in a pocket of cold air. Above, a rusted grate let in a thin slice of moon.
He pressed two fingers to the grate and felt a vibration he knew too well. A patrol. Not elves. Not goblins. Human weight. Human rhythm. He smiled without humor. Of course the manor had people on the grounds. Even before Artemis learned to use fairies the way a conductor uses strings, the Fowls had hired men who knew how to walk.
The patrol was slow, mostly for show. Two guards. One had a limp he tried to hide. The other was already bored. Quinn waited until the bored one yawned, until the limp caught a toe on gravel, then he slid the grate aside just enough to let a shadow pass that could have been a stray cat.
He flowed up and out like a trick of the light, then lay flat in the cut grass and breathed cool air that did not taste like stone. The night smelled like leaves and the sea. Somewhere a sprinkler clicked. Somewhere else a fox barked. He let the world replace the weight of the gaze with these small truths.
Fowl Manor stood to the south, black against black, its windows like patient eyes. The grounds were a painting of wealth that wished to be quiet about itself and failed. He did not look long. He did not want to be a story inside someone else's house. Not yet.
He crawled along a hedge line until the patrol's route bent away, then he rose and trotted low toward the tree line that marked the border with the wild property. There was an old wall there, older than the manor, eaten by ivy and time. He found a gap where foxes traveled, widened it with the pry bar, and slipped through into a stand of ash trees. The ground dipped down into a ravine, where a brook rattled over stones polished by generations of small floods.
He followed the brook until its chatter drowned the memory of the quiet inside the ward. He knelt and washed troll blood from his hands and face. The water ran cold, then clear, then cold again. He cupped his face and held it there until his thoughts slowed to the speed of breath.
The fragments one by one settled. Strength was a pleasant heaviness. Insight nudged when it should. Silence waited to be asked. Vitality worked because that was the deal. Predator's Instinct crouched and watched the treeline with him.
He lifted his head and he was not alone.
Not the Watcher. Not an LEP patrol. A pair of eyes low to the ground, reflective and clever. The animal moved a step and resolved into a red fox with a white chin and an old scar across one ear. It studied him with the frankness only wild things can afford. He studied it back with the smile of someone who had chosen not to become a different kind of animal.
"Evening," he said.
The fox blinked once, decided he was not food and not threat, and stored him away in that narrow category of things to avoid on a second night. It slipped along the water's edge and vanished into fern and bramble.
He stood and the night stood with him. The moon sat low behind cloud. Somewhere to the east the first hint of dawn touched stone. He had hours until the ward's certainty ran out on his path. He intended to put those hours to work.
He walked the ravine until it widened into a dry gully with overhanging rock. Moss grew thick where water lingered after rain. He tested the overhang with both palms. Solid. A second shelter, smaller than the goblin den, hidden by trees and the refusal of people to go places where their shoes get wet. Not a forever base. A hide. He marked it in his head and set a simple tripline with the braided cable and a bell made from two of the power couplers. It would not stop a fairy. It would tell him a fox came back.
He crouched and pulled one fragment after another into conscious focus. He made himself a study subject. He did not love it. It mattered.
Strength pulsed steady. Vitality ran a baseline hum. Insight fluttered like a bird about to take wing when he gave it something to read. Silence sank and rose with his breath. Predator's Instinct waited to be a decision. Dominion sat cold and heavy, a crown in a box that might fit him in a month.
He tried a thought he had not wanted to say out loud. The Watcher had not come because of the troll fight alone. The Watcher had come when he fused fragments. It watched the new thing because new things bend rules. It had also come because he had claimed. Territory and power together made a shape that the world reacts to. If he did it again, he had better be ready to run again, or to hide behind an older rule.
He dug in the soil with the pry bar until he found the pale root of an ash tree. He used the edge to scratch the warding sigil he had seen into the bank under the overhang, not because he thought it would be strong, but because a sketch is better than a memory when you need precision later. He copied the forks, the circle, the tiny cuts that carried the hum. He did not feel the hum when he finished. He did not expect to. The first was carved in a pillar by someone who had a lifetime to get it right. His would be a guideline for a better day.
He rested his forehead on the cool dirt a moment and let the smell of earth push out the last taste of the den. He stood, brushed himself off, and looked east again. The line of the trees there was a little lighter. Not dawn yet, but the thought of dawn.
He began the walk back toward the deeper tunnels by a different path. He kept to deer trails and low places. He moved the way water would if water had patience. He cut sign as he went, subtle marks on stone that meant nothing to anyone who had not seen him make them. A notch where two branches crossed. A pebble set on its edge under a root. If he had to flee blind later, his own habits would put a map under his feet.
He reached a culvert where a narrow stream dove under the old wall and joined a trench of carved stone. The trench glowed faintly with seeped mana. Fairy work once turned useful to roots and frogs. He stepped into the trench and followed it like a hallway for water until it opened into a maintenance chamber lit by one working panel that hummed to itself like a content wasp.
He crouched by the panel and studied it. The faceplate bore LEP icons he recognized from diagrams and guesses. He saw the symbol for a field tap, another for a localized dampener, a third for a sensor sweep. He smiled because the smile arrived on its own. He had read stories about how these panels could crash if you introduced a small loop in the wrong place. He had not had a loop. Now he had braided cable and a coupler.
He set the rebar aside and worked. He tied cable with the quick competence of someone who had wrapped too many cables behind too many game rigs in a life that now smelled like rain. He popped the faceplate with the pry bar and slipped the coupler into a slot that did not quite fit and made it fit. The panel flickered. The hum skipped. For three beats the mana vein behind it pulsed out of sequence.
[ Tactical opportunity detected ][ Local sensor network interference achievable for 180 seconds ][ Risk to host: Minimal ]
"Nice of you," he said.
He cut the loop so it would not fry and hide his prints. He did not want the LEP to come investigate and find a signature they could do a search on. He wanted a gap in the net he could use the next time a drone buzzed his neck hairs.
He took a step back and everything in him went still.
The world leaned. Not the Watcher. Something else. A shadow crossed the panel that did not belong to a person. The hum of the mana vein took on a tightness like a violin string tuned to split. He lifted his head and sniffed the air like a fox because he trusted living things to teach him how to live.
Ozone. Cold iron. The faint, bitter tang of a time stop that had been used somewhere within the last day. He felt the muscles in his shoulders go tight. Someone had worked a sphere on the grounds recently. That meant a fairy operation near the manor. It could be routine. It could be a reconnaissance sweep. It could be a response to a troll that no one expected to die where it fell.
The maintenance chamber answered none of these and politely asked him to leave.
He did. He retraced his steps to the culvert, slipped under the wall again, and took a long arc through bracken to a second entrance he had spied days earlier but avoided because the goblin stink ran strong there. It still did, but the goblins who made it were not here to complain about him borrowing their path. He slid down a chalk chute into a narrow throat of stone and followed it as it widened into a path where moss grew slick where the ceiling dripped.
He killed his lamp and let his Shard of Insight do its work. The mana veins along the walls made a light like a constellation. He moved through them like a slow comet. It was quiet enough to hear the thought of noise.
Half a mile in, the stone changed. He knew it in his bones before his eyes told him. The lines of the walls went straight for twenty feet, then curved in a radius too clean for erosion, then straight again. He had entered an old survey tunnel, the kind built to run power and data to deeper bases. Only two reasons would justify carving this clean this deep. A military outpost. Or a lab.
He reached a junction marked by a faded stripe of blue paint, then a second stripe of red. The paint had been laid down by the hand of someone who loved neatness. He touched the blue, and it cracked under his finger. He touched the red and it flaked to dust.
At the junction's heart stood a door that was not stone. The frame was metal. The panel was something between ceramic and grown bone. A sigil sat centered at face height like a lock that expected more than a key. It was not the ward in the storage hollow. It rhymed with it.
He did not touch this one.
He studied instead. The air around the door was colder. A faint halo of frost clung to the edges where the frame met living rock. He bent and looked for seams. He found none. He pressed his ear and listened. The world on the other side sang too low to hear but not too low to feel. He counted through a breath and an idea came up from the place where ideas rest when they wait for oxygen. The door did not open because he pushed. It opened because it agreed he belonged.
He straightened and took a step back. The Watcher had looked through him to see his fragments. The ward had looked through him and refused to count him. This door would take a look and decide whether to be a door or a wall. The difference between the three was the difference between attention, indifference, and invitation. He would not request invitation from a place that might decide to make him inventory.
He marked the corridor six paces to the left with a symbol from a puzzle game he had loved enough to tear apart, a symbol that would tell future Quinn that past Quinn had walked this far and decided that curiosity did not pay rent.
He turned away and started back toward the broader channel. He did not hurry. He did not drag his feet. He let the fragments ride in quiet circuits while his attention returned to the old lesson that kept players alive. You do not push everything you can push on the same day.
He entered a wider cavern where the mana stream ran fast along a bed of black stone. Heat rose from it in pulses that smelled like wet metal. The ceiling opened a little and bats hung in sleep where the air pooled. He crouched and studied the water. He could not touch it yet without becoming a moral story. He could learn from it without contact. He watched the way the surface shifted around stones that rose like teeth and filed that movement against a day when he would have the Conduit shard and a reason to break his hands.
He felt it again. Not the Watcher. That attention was a tide that had gone out. This was the splash of a pebble thrown by a child. His Shard of Insight tagged it without being asked. A drone. Small, darting, with a field weak enough to be knocked sideways by a clever cough. He counted three beats. It passed the mouth of the cavern on a lazy arc and paid the mana stream the respect of keeping its distance.
He slid a coupler across his knuckles and smiled like someone who had a little money in his pocket for the first time. He did not attack it. He watched it work. He learned the rhythm of its scan. He decided how a mischief-maker might make it trip on nothing. He let it go.
The stream went quiet again. The bats dreamed of moths. He stood and his knees did not complain. He walked the last hundred yards back to the goblin den through a corridor that smelled faintly of onions and wet stone. The lamps in his shelter still burned. The troll's body had slumped into itself and was less than it had been by weight, which meant the world was already eating it back.
He stepped inside and the ward carved into the wall near his rest alcove greeted him by doing nothing at all. He felt the absence like a friendly hand not squeezing his shoulder. He crossed to the storage chest the System had grown from the floor and set the couplers inside. He set the braided cable coiled beside them. He wiped the rebar clean with a strip torn from the troll's ragged loin cloth and put that strip in a jar because fairy labs could tell stories about your day from fibers if you were careless.
He sat on the rest alcove and his weight woke the runes. They warmed him through his clothes and bled the last shake from his hands. He leaned his head back and looked at the ceiling. A crack there ran in a path that looked like a river on a map. In the map the river met another river that did not exist yet. He smiled because he enjoyed the joke.
He closed his eyes. He did not sleep. He watched the system messages he had ignored in motion blur during the chase.
[ Fragment stability restored ][ Predator's Instinct in optimal range ][ Silence ready ][ Vitality ready ][ Strength ready ][ Dominion dormant ][ New passive condition: The Watched ][ Advisory: Attention from higher entities may recur at unpredictable intervals ][ Advisory: Old wards reduce risk ][ Advisory: Fragment fusion events increase risk ]
He opened his eyes and considered the three lines that mattered. Old wards reduce risk. Fragment fusion increases risk. Attention may recur.
He said the words out loud, slow and steady, like a promise you make to someone who lives in the mirror. "I will find old wards. I will fuse only when there is a door worth opening. I will be ready when you come back."
The lamps hummed. The cavern settled. Somewhere in the far tunnels a stone cracked as water froze and thawed. He let time pass two finger widths wide. Then he stood, picked up the rebar, and walked to the edge of the den.
He paused with one hand on the wall and looked back at the troll. It was a small mountain he had made from a choice to stand and a choice to learn. He let the sight file under the heading of reasons.
He stepped into the tunnel. The den whispered after him like a friend who keeps secrets well. He followed the line of mana veins deeper, not because deeper was safer, but because that was where the rules were older, and because old rules had saved him once today.
At the first bend he stopped because the world stopped him. Not the Watcher. Not a drone. Something else. The stone ahead had been disturbed. Not footprints. A scrape where claws had dragged. A smear of dark that was not troll blood. It was green where it dried. Goblin. Fresh.
He crouched and touched two fingers to the smear, then lifted them to his nose. The stink was right. He followed the smears with his eyes. They ran along the left wall, then vanished into a crack too small for anything but a rodent. He looked up at the ceiling where dust lay in a smooth coat. A small stone had fallen and rolled. He traced its path back to a notch in the wall where a talon had caught.
He stood very still and let the quiet fill him. The den had been empty when he left. The goblins were dead by his hand. And yet the tunnel smelled like fear and fresh sweat. Something had come to look and left before it found nerve. It had not scavenged the troll. It had not tested the ward. It had looked, then gone, and fear had chased it faster than hunger did.
He did not think goblins feared him. He thought they feared something that watched him.
He lifted his head and stared into the dark like he could make the dark blush. His voice was quiet and even.
"You are not the only eye in these tunnels," he said to the idea that had weighed him. "You have competition."
No answer. Of course not. Silence again and the thin breath of the lamps.
He took three steps forward and froze for a different reason. The System did not chime. The wall did. A faint echo rose as his foot met stone. Not the echo of a solid floor. The hollow kind. A space below.
He backed up, then forward again, measured the sound, and grinned. He wedged the pry bar under a slab where the dust cracked in a perfect line and levered. The slab lifted enough to grab. He set it aside as neat as a dinner plate and looked down into a narrow shaft clinging to iron rungs that had not rusted because they had been made not to.
Air rose from the shaft that smelled like cold paper and metal. He leaned and listened. Far below, something clicked at long intervals, like a clock that had decided time was a suggestion.
He looked over his shoulder toward the den. He looked down into the shaft toward the click. He thought about the ward in the storage hollow and the door that measured belonging. He thought about the Watcher and the way old rules made it stand outside in the rain.
He smiled, because a twist well told belongs where it fits best, and because there are lines you cross not because you need to, but because the world becomes larger every time you do.
He hooked his rebar through his belt so it hung at his hip, tested the first rung with his weight, and climbed down into the dark.
[ New quest available: Descend to the second layer ][ Objective: Identify the source of the ticking ][ Optional: Recover historical data modules if present ][ Reward: Fragment cache ]
He did not look at the reward line again. He did not need a prize to agree with his legs. The shaft swallowed him in cool air. The rung metal bit his palms. The click below went on at its own pace, like a heartbeat from a different body. He counted the rungs and did not lose count. He took his fear and made it a ledger entry, then turned the page.
Above, in rock and mansion and wood, the night arranged itself for morning. Below, in places that had forgotten the sun without resenting it, old work waited under dust. In the space between, a man who should have died once already kept moving because that is what a person does when the world offers a corridor instead of a wall.
The shaft bent slightly right. The air grew colder. The ticking grew louder by a breath. He set his feet on a small landing, turned, and dropped the last three rungs to a floor that rang sharp and metallic.
He lifted his lamp.
The room was a circle. The walls were lined with slots where once cartridges had sat side by side like teeth. Most were empty. Some held thin wafers of black crystal behind seals of glass. In the center, on a pedestal that looked grown rather than built, a device the size of a helmet ticked as a slow ring around its crown made a single rotation every minute.
He walked to the pedestal. The ring paused as he approached, then resumed as if acknowledging that he had entered a conversation already in progress.
He leaned close without touching and read the small print cut into the pedestal's rim in a script that was not human and not quite fairy.
A word repeated. The same shape where a title would sit on a book's spine.
He did not know the language. He knew the grammar. He spoke a translation out loud in a voice that did not echo much in the round room.
"Archive."
He smiled, because this was not a door. It was a room that wanted to tell a story to anyone who had the manners to listen.
He reached into his storage chest in memory and remembered he had no gloves. He reached into his belt in fact and found a cloth that used to be a troll rag and would do for insulation. He wrapped his fingers and lifted one of the black wafers from its slot. It hummed at his palm like a cat dreaming of warmth.
[ Historical data module acquired ][ Compatibility: Partial ][ Decoding possible with field interface or Conduit fragment ]
He sighed because the right answer was always the one that required the next quest. He set the wafer back and looked up at the slow ring of the crown.
The ticking paused.
He did not move.
The ring shivered once and then, for no reason that the world around him admitted, two words whispered across his vision that were not warnings and not orders.
[ Welcome, Quinn ]
His breath stopped in his chest for a count of five. The fight in the den had been meat and will. The gaze had been a decision from somewhere the world could not throw a rock at. This was something older and closer and willing to call a name.
He lowered his head until his forehead touched the edge of the pedestal. The metal was not cold. It was room temperature, as if a hand had rested there recently.
He lifted his head and swallowed because the throat is a muscle and works better if you help it. He smiled, not because anything was funny, but because the line had just twisted in a way that made the next three chapters inevitable.
"Tell me a story," he said.
The ring resumed its slow turn. The ticking matched his heart for a time. The slots along the wall glimmered like teeth. Above him the shaft waited to carry him back to the den if he wanted it. Behind him, up in the night, the world was cracking an eyelid toward dawn. Somewhere far away and unkind, something with too many eyes waited for him to fuse one more fragment so it could learn the next thing it wanted to know.
He stood in a circle and chose to stay a minute longer.
The ring clicked. The pedestal pulsed. The System lit one more line.
[ Provisional interface established ][ Query limit: One ]
He laughed once. "You always know how to make it a game."
He thought of a hundred questions and burned ninety nine of them. He spoke the one he needed rather than the one he wanted.
"What is the Watcher."
The ring slowed. The crown's light dimmed, then brightened. A line of text printed across his vision, slow as if each letter cost energy.
[ Answer: A collector of outcomes ][ Advisory: It does not feed on you ][ Advisory: It feeds on the decisions you will make ]
He closed his eyes and nodded, because that was the shape he had seen in the library that was not a library. He opened them again and accepted that the interface had given him what it could.
The ring sped up, then settled back to its minute circle. The word limit meant no more charity tonight.
He set his palm on the pedestal and felt nothing except the memory of cool metal. He turned away, lifted the rebar from his belt, and walked to the shaft.
He climbed, steady and quiet, and the click of the crown counted him back toward the den. He did not look up because he trusted his hands. He did not look down because he trusted the ring to keep time without him. He surfaced into the tunnel and closed the slab behind him with care.
He returned to the den. The lamps burned. The ward on the wall hummed with a patience that belonged to stone. He sat again, and this time he let sleep take him on a short leash. He dreamed of a river of light and a fox that laid a shard at his feet and looked up as if to say that the world shares if you do not steal.
He woke with his hand already on the rebar. The lamps had dimmed with his breath. The first line of text that arrived when his eyes opened was not new and not a threat. It was the shape of the day.
[ New quest active: Hunt for a Conduit fragment ][ Objective: Secure an interface for the Archive ][ Secondary objective: Test network interference against a live drone ][ Reward: Fragment synergy boost ]
He stood, rolled his shoulders, and answered the morning without speaking. He stepped toward the tunnel that led down rather than up.
Behind him, the den kept his secrets. Above him, the manor watched its own games begin. Somewhere between both, something large and patient counted his choices and smiled without a mouth.
And Quinn smiled back, because it would be his turn to choose soon.