B3Ch86-A meeting of Gods (Patreon)

I'm on 24-hour duty so I'm trying to get through a backlog of chapters I have sitting and waiting. Might be able to get one more out today. Hope you all like the lore drop here, though. _______

Harold came off the edge of the plateau running.

Balfiel had a long head start, and he was already far down the slope by the time Harold reached the drop. Harold didn’t stop to think about it. He went over the lip and hit the scree twenty feet down with his legs already braided full of mana, and he kept going. The old elf was a pale streak far ahead in the dark, going down the mountainside like water down a gutter, and Harold put his head down and ran after him.

He had never run like this in either life.

He pushed the mana body as hard as it would go, then harder; the braids sank through muscle and bone and into the cells, cycling through his frame along the path they created. His arms pumped. His lungs burned. The ground went by under his boots so fast he stopped seeing it, and he ran on feel as he spread his mana senses ahead of him. He found every rock and root a breath before his foot came down on it.

And he was barely holding the distance.

The valley fell away behind them. Ahead, a mountain rose up out of the dark, one of the true giants of the Blackjaws, its shoulders lost in cloud. Harold felt Balfiel reach the base of it and keep going without slowing, straight up the slope as if it weren’t there. Then the slope steepened into a cliff, and he felt the elf run up that too.

Snow fell around them, and the temperature dropped.

“Dammit, Balfiel,” Harold panted. “Why are you doing this?”

He hit the foot of the cliff and didn’t stop. He’d felt what the old elf had done there, a flash of mana from the sole of the boot into the rock, shaping a foothold out of nothing in the instant before the foot landed on it. Harold had never tried it, but he did it now, badly. The first one crumbled, and he lurched and caught himself on the next. The third held, and the fourth did too. Then he was running up the face of a cliff in the dark in a rising wind, flashing mana from his feet with every stride, and the strain of it was ripping his concentration apart.

The cliff steepened past anything a man could run.

Harold slowed, flattened himself against the rock, and looked up.

Far above him, a pale shape clung to the sheer face. Balfiel was climbing hand over hand, relentlessly, into the storm. The clouds above the peak had gone the color of a bruise.

“BALFIEL!” The wind tore it out of his mouth. “Get down here!”

“GO AWAY, BOY!”

“Stubborn, angry, old pointy-eared—” Harold muttered, and he started to climb.

He drove his fingers into the rock and the stone gave under the mana like wet clay. He made his own handholds as he went, pulled himself up, found the next one, and pulled again. The Blackjaws weren’t simple mountains. They were great slabs of rock, the kind he remembered from photographs of the Alps and the Himalayas back on Earth. Above him, Balfiel’s mana was pulsing off him in waves.

He was used to being the strongest in a room. His mana eclipsed everyone he met. Next to Balfiel’s, it was a campfire beside a forest fire, and there was no comparing them. The pressure of it came down the cliff face at him, and he shuddered under it, his fingers digging deeper into the stone to hold on. He had never really been sure how powerful the old pointy eared bastard was but now he knew for sure. The margin between him and the elf was massive.

Then Balfiel’s aura exploded off him.

It went up into the storm like a thunderclap with no sound. Something shrieked in the dark. A huge scaled thing with wings tumbled out of the clouds past Harold close enough that he felt the wind pass by. It was already dead, and fell away into the black below.

Harold stared up the cliff in horror.

His soul had shivered under that aura. There was pain in it, the same as his own. But under the pain was something he had never felt from anyone before. It had depth, as if the aura went back and back, and every year of it had laid down another layer on the last. It carried the weight of time, and he knew he would never match it.

“Just how old are you?” he whispered.

He hauled himself up onto a ledge no wider than his boot and stood pressed against the rock, gulping the thin, freezing air. Steam was coming off him in clouds. His head ached from holding the braids together and the footholds and the handholds and warming his body all at once. He had never used his mana like this for so long. Balfiel was right, damn him. He needed to work on his mana control.

He set his jaw, sank his hand back into the rock, and climbed.

Another blast of that aura went up. Another winged shape screamed and dropped out of the sky past him.

Master Balfiel was angry.

After that, Harold lost track of time. The mountain didn’t end. His world narrowed down to the rock in front of his face, the hold in his left hand, the hold in his right, and the next. He fed mana into his skin to keep the cold out, and the cold came through anyway. The storm came down on him in earnest, snow driving sideways into his face, and there was nothing in the world but the wall and the snow and the next handhold.

Then there was a ledge above him.

It was wide, a real shelf of rock in the storm, and there was light on it.  Harold could hear voices up there. Balfiel’s, and one he didn’t know. He was too tired to care whose.

“—betrayed her!” Balfiel’s voice came down over the edge, raw. “My wife! MY WIFE!”

Harold got one hand over the lip of the ledge, then the other. He heaved himself up onto it and rolled onto his back in the snow and lay there, sucking in great ragged lungfuls of air. The snow around him hissed and melted from the heat coming off him, and a moment later it started to freeze on him instead.

“You should not have followed me, fool boy!” Balfiel’s voice was above him. 

Harold managed to lift his head.

There was another elf on the ledge.

He stood a little behind Balfiel, tall and silver-haired, in pale robes the snow didn’t touch. The storm bent around him and the wind didn’t stir his hair. He looked a great deal like Balfiel, though younger, or like someone who had stopped aging at a different point. There was a faint soft light about him that seemed to come from nowhere.

The strange elf looked down at Harold with open curiosity.

“This is the new lord making all the waves?”

Balfiel rolled his eyes. “Yes.”

“Hm.” The elf tilted his head, studying Harold as if he were a rare plant. “He has been marked by the dwarven sponsors. And by the system. Very curious.”

Balfiel flicked a hand at Harold without looking.

The snow stripped off him all at once, and warmth went into him, down past the skin, into the muscle and bone. His whole body unclenched, and Harold groaned out loud before he could stop it.

“Thank you,” he muttered, and struggled to get up.

It took him three tries. The two elves watched him do it without helping.

“An impressive set of perks for only a year into the cycle,” the strange elf said thoughtfully. “He has frustrated the other sponsors a great deal. Prometheus picked well.”

“Bah,” Balfiel said. “You and your games up there.”

The strange elf looked at Harold a long moment, deep in thought. Then he looked back at Balfiel.

“You are set on this course?”

Balfiel looked at him, and his face went serious.

“Oh, I’m sure. I have been gone from the world too long.” Something hard came into his voice. “I think it’s time people remembered why I was feared.”

The strange elf looked at him in silence. Then he chuckled. Then he started to laugh outright, there in the middle of the blizzard, and the light around him brightened with it.

“I have missed you, Balfiel. Brother. How many times have I tried to convince you to return?” He wiped his eye. “This human has been good for you. I helped Prometheus when he made this play, you know, and there were days I regretted it. I’m glad it has worked.” His smile faded. “This may be the last chance any of us have to leave this place.”

“Could I please,” Harold groaned, “be read into this situation?”

The strange elf looked at Balfiel as if this were Balfiel’s job. Balfiel rolled his eyes.Balfiel motioned towards the other elf. "Boy, this is Thalorien. My brother."

Harold blinked, and his eyes went from one elf to the other and back again.

“Hang on.” He held up a hand. “Thalorien? I thought Thalorium was your name.”

“It is my name, and it’s his too.” Balfiel waved the flask. “Thalorium is the house, boy. Everyone born to the line of Thalor carries it, the same way you humans drag your family names around behind you.” He jabbed the flask at his brother. “Thalorien is the name the house gives its firstborn. The heir gets named for the house itself, so every idiot at court knows who’s going to sit in the big chair.”

“And the second son gets Balfiel,” Thalorien said mildly.

“The second son gets a name of his own.” Balfiel sniffed. “You got a title, and I got to be my own person.”

Harold opened his mouth and shut it again as it dawned on him.

“Wait a damn minute. Thalorien’s balls. What in Thalorien’s name.” He pointed at Balfiel. “You’ve been swearing on your brother’s nuts this whole time?”

Balfiel grinned at him like a fool.

“He has done it since we were children,” Thalorien said, with the patience of a very long life. “Our mother washed his mouth out with soap for it more times than I can count, and it never took.”

Harold looked at Thalorien and rubbed his temple. “Well, nice to put a face to the balls, I guess.”

The strange elf turned to Harold and bowed his head gently. “It is a pleasure to finally meet you, Harold Calder. It is not often I get to descend and do this.”

“Stop that cryptic shit,” Balfiel snapped. “No need to speak in riddles.” He turned to Harold. “Boy, this is my brother. When I told you my race was stuck here, it was true. But not completely.” He jabbed a finger at the sky. “At certain points, individuals of a race who have earned enough are given the chance to go up and become a sponsor for their people. There’s some complicated court nonsense up there where they all compete for recognition for their race. They’re generally the ones setting down the challenges down here. Disrupting things. Encouraging growth, in their own race and others.” He scowled. “All in the hope that if they keep pushing us, their race as a whole will rise up out of Gravesend.”

“Just as my brother says,” Thalorien said mildly. “I am one of the elven sponsors.” He smiled at Harold. “And you have raised quite a fuss up there.”

Harold stared at him.

“Jeez,” he said. “Okay. This is not the conversation I was expecting to have tonight.”

Fire flashed beside him.

Harold flinched away from it. When he looked back, a man was standing in the snow at his elbow where the flame had been, and the flakes hissed to steam as they landed on his shoulders. He was an ordinary man in an ordinary coat, with a face Harold would have forgotten before he finished shaking his hand, and under all that plainness sat the same immense power that had made Harold recoil the first time. 

The last time he’d seen those kind, exhausted eyes, the man had knocked on a door in his mind during his trial with the nail.

“Prometheus,” Thalorien said, and inclined his head. “Good to see you. With how this war is going for you, I’m not surprised you have the strength to appear down here.”

The man grumbled something. “And I wasn’t trying to spend it just yet.” He turned to Harold, and his tired face went warm. “Harold. It’s nice to finally meet you properly this time.” He reached out and tapped one finger against Harold’s chest, right over the nail. “Glad you got that sorted out.”

The nail shrank down into Harold’s chest like a dog that had been kicked.

Harold looked from the man to the elf and back again. “I am so confused right now.”

Balfiel rolled his eyes. He pulled a flask from his belt and waved his free hand at the ledge, and the snow rose up and packed itself into a chair. He sat down in it, unscrewed the flask, and drank. Prometheus and Thalorien both frowned at him. Harold just kept staring.

“Well, go on,” Balfiel said. “Explain it to him.”

Thalorien tipped his head toward Prometheus. “He’s your man. You go ahead.”

Prometheus nodded his thanks to him, and then he looked at Harold for a long moment as if trying to decide where to begin.

“It’s just as Thalorien said,” he said finally. “This is all a great big game, and we are just as stuck in it as you are. We’re not gods. We’re the result of our races failing to ascend out of here. Instead of our race rising, we rose, to become sponsors for our own people. To try to drive them to grow until they can get out.” He spoke slowly and with some reluctance. “It isn’t an easy job. I am responsible for more human suffering than any other person in the history of our race. The better you all do down here, the more you accomplish, the more—” he waggled one hand “—power we get to work with up there. To make more challenges for you all to get you all to ascend and escape from here.”

Harold frowned and turned that over. Then he turned around and held his hand out to Balfiel.

Balfiel looked at the hand. “What? No. I’m not sharing. You should have brought your own.”

“I followed you up a mountain in a blizzard,” Harold said. “You’re sharing.”

Balfiel grumbled something in elvish, but he handed it over. Harold took a long swallow, and it was wine, dark and rich and old, absolutely fantastic. He held it a moment in his mouth before he let it go down. Thalorien was looking at the flask with naked envy.

Harold handed it back and turned to the man in the coat.

“Okay,” he said. “You’re Prometheus. As in, from Greek mythology?”

“Just so.” Prometheus nodded. “That’s why all of us old gods disappeared from Earth, back then. The system came and took us. Though I cant explain how happy it makes me that you know who I am.” He shook his head with something like regret. “I’m the only one left. This place was a much, much wilder world back then.”

“Prometheus is the eldest of all the sponsors up there,” Thalorien said. “And, regretfully, one of the weakest.”

“So you aren’t gods,” Harold said slowly.

“Well. On Earth, that would have been accurate.” Prometheus shrugged. “Here? Not at all. There are beings out in the universe who would make me quiver in fear.” He looked out over the edge of the ledge into the storm. “Think of Gravesend as a recruitment hall. The universe uses planets like this to grow new factions. When a race grows powerful enough here, it’s moved out into some unoccupied section of the universe to settle and grow. Sometimes the established factions out there take an interest in these games and sponsor a race. Support it.” He grimaced. “Unfortunately for us, humans are rather hated out there.”

Harold’s brow came down. “What? Why?”

“Because of your system of power,” Thalorien said.

“They cheat,” Balfiel said from his snow chair.

“It’s true.” Prometheus almost smiled. “There used to be a whole pantheon of us old gods up there. Zeus was there, and Odin. Coyote. Hecate. Humanity had a great many sponsors. But where we’d been gods on Earth, the human cycles that came after us didn’t have the advantages we had.” He was quiet a moment. “They all lost. And every time a cycle lost, we lost influence.”

“So Odin came up with a plan,” he went on. “We would expand the system of power humanity had. All of us old gods came together, and we built what the human system of growth is now. Accomplishment becomes perks.” His voice dropped. “It was a fantastic achievement, Harold. But it cost the lives of the gods who made it. The System needed a balance for something that powerful, and humanity was dear to every one of us. We wanted you to succeed.”

“But it made humanity too powerful,” Thalorien said quietly.

Prometheus looked at the elf, and there was gratitude in it. “Yes. It did. The human cycles that followed were able to ascend. They made factions of their own out there, and they rose to the top quickly.”

“CHEATING,” Balfiel said, louder.

Prometheus smiled a little. “Essentially, yes. You gain power very quickly compared to other races. The other races have to rely on understanding. They have to come to understand an element or a concept before they can use it, a lot like the cultivation novels from your world. And on top of how fast humans can have children.” He nodded at the ground under their feet. “The dwarves have to do a thing over and over and over until they understand it, and then they gain power and influence over it. Every time they work a thing, they gain a little more insight into it. They’re naturally attuned to the earth, so anything to do with earth comes to them a little easier.”

“And elves.” He pointed at the other two. “Elves are naturally attuned to magic as a whole. There are variations, some more attuned to nature, or to one element or another. But mostly it’s magic. They gain power over whatever they have an affinity for as they age, and how much power depends on how deep the affinity goes.”

Harold’s eyes went wide, and he turned and looked at Balfiel.

“Yes, boy,” Balfiel said without looking up from his flask. “I’m old and powerful. For someone stuck in a prison.”

Thalorien rolled his eyes. “Don’t let him fool you. He could have ascended to become a sponsor himself. He chose not to.”

Balfiel said nothing.

“But humans,” Prometheus continued, “because of the width and breadth of the system we built, can have an enormous variety of powers and abilities. You can counter nearly any other race. You can connect to any concept, any elemental power. There’s no limit to what you can become, except what you can accomplish.” His face went hard. “So the other races came together to limit humanity. Our factions out there are nearly always under siege. Nobody dares support us here. And the other factions help the sponsors here try to keep humanity down.”

He was quiet for a long time as he tried to reconcile all of this with what he knew. When Prometheus spoke again, it was very softly.

“Your original cycle would have been humanity’s last. When you all died, we sponsors would have died with you.” He looked at Harold, and the grief on his face was plain. “My wife, Ananke, gave her life to create the perk that brought you back. You are humanity’s last hope on Gravesend, Harold. The last chance for a human faction to rise out of here and help us out there, or eventually they will all likely die.”

The ledge groaned under Harold’s boots.

The rock face beside Balfiel’s snow chair bulged like rising dough and split along a fresh seam. A dwarf stepped out of the mountain. He was thin for a dwarf and stooped, his beard gone the gray of old ash and tucked through his belt, and his hands were stained dark to the wrist. He leaned on a cane of black stone. Harold had seen the dwarf before, in his office, the night Bram swore his oath. Two cold sentences had come out of this dwarf and gone through every stone in the keep: Oath accepted. Do not fail us. Vargrim, the Long Ledger.

Thalorien’s eyebrows climbed. Prometheus straightened up out of his slouch with a startled grunt. Balfiel lowered the flask from his mouth and went still in his snow chair, his eyes on the dwarf and his free hand flat on his knee.

“Vargrim.” Prometheus sounded honestly surprised. “You came down.”

“Long Ledger.” Thalorien inclined his head, slower and deeper than he had for Harold. “This is unexpected.”

The dwarf grunted. He squinted up into the storm as if he could see through the cloud to whatever sat above it, and his jaw worked under the beard. Then he raised his free hand and turned it palm up.

The air shimmered. It closed over the ledge from the lip to the rock face like heat off a summer road, and the howl of the storm dropped to a murmur, as if someone had shut a window on it. Outside the shimmer, the snow still drove past sideways, and none of it came through.

“There.” Vargrim lowered his hand. His voice sounded like gravel poured slowly down a chute. “Any of them that look now will see you two climb back up where you belong, and me down here having words with the exile and the boy. That alone makes waves enough.” His eyes went from Prometheus to Thalorien. “I hope the pair of you have a better plan for the quakes this will set off than you had for the last ones.”

Thalorien glanced at the shimmer, and then back at the dwarf, and one eyebrow stayed up. “Are we in agreement on this course, then?”

“I am not,” Balfiel spat.

He came up out of the snow chair with the flask forgotten in his fist and leveled a finger at the dwarf like a blade.

“I know how it went last time. It happened with the dwarven sponsors' blessing. You wanted the damn fighting to go on as badly as any of them.”

Vargrim shifted his weight onto the cane and drew his stained fingers down through his beard, root to belt.

“Aye. We wanted the fighting to go on. We did not want the Gemheart slaughtered. They were the greatest of the clans, and they always will be. The Mithrilmind were never fit to lead the Dawi, and you can see what they’ve made of them. Scattered and kingless, every hold squabbling over its own scrap of mountain.” His mouth moved under the beard. “They need to come together as family again.”

He turned his head toward the brothers. “The elves sit in their hidden cities. Mighty one at a time, aye, but we both know how fractured your people are, Thalorien.”

Thalorien said nothing to that.

Vargrim tipped his chin at Prometheus. “And the humans are locked in their wars with every beast and monster race on the face of this world. They hold back the hordes that used to sweep the planet clean, and every other sponsor up there works to slip those hordes off the leash. Only this one, spending what little he has left, has kept them penned.”

Prometheus looked down at his boots.

“We have been in decline long enough,” Vargrim said. “With this boy, we can change that.”

“Can I stop being called boy, please?” Harold said. “I feel like I’ve got a little life under me at this point. Two of them, actually.”

“Shush, boy,” Balfiel said.

Harold sighed through his nose and let it go.

Vargrim turned and looked at him, and the weight of that gaze went down through Harold’s soul and sat on the bottom of it.

“Thank you for not killing the Bronzeshoulder.”

Harold blinked at him.

“You had the right of it,” the dwarf went on. “The Dawi would have called it justice. You sent them to the Gemheart instead.” He gave one short nod. “I have seen to it they will arrive. With some difficulties along the way.”

Harold eyed him sideways. “What the hell does ‘difficulties along the way’ mean?”

“It means he’s made sure they get lost,” Balfiel said, “or get jumped in the tunnels, or lose half their supplies in an underground river. Something to make it harder.” He waved the flask at the dwarf. “It’s what they do, lad.”

Thalorien winced at his brother.

“Crudely put,” Vargrim said, and nodded. “But accurate. Only through overcoming challenges do our peoples grow, like ore under the hammer. Our charge is to forge our races until they can ascend from this place.”

“I’ve been hammered plenty of times,” Harold said. “Usually it’s a lot more fun than this.”

Prometheus snorted, and Thalorien’s mouth twitched, and Vargrim just looked at him but eventually began to laugh as well. 

Harold started to pace. The ledge gave him five steps one way and five back, and the shimmer kept the snow off him, and the four of them watched him go back and forth with varying degrees of amusement. Balfiel had dropped back into his chair and was drinking again.

“Okay.” Harold turned at the rock face and came back. “I’m still missing something here. You all want something from me.”

Balfiel snorted into his flask.

“They want to remake the alliance,” he said. “The one we had. Every one of our races has failed its crucible, boy. The only way left for them to ascend is to join with another race still undergoing its own.” He tipped the flask toward Harold. “So they want to join yours.”

Harold stopped pacing and turned to face them. He tried to meet their eyes one at a time, Thalorien’s, then Vargrim’s, then Prometheus’s, and each time his soul shuddered under what sat behind them and his gaze slid off, however hard he set his jaw against it.

“You’d have me declare war on the whole world,” he said. “Let’s not bullshit each other. That’s what this is.”

He pointed at Balfiel. “Even if he went back and took control of Ism Thalor, which I’m assuming you could—”

Balfiel snorted again, but he waggled his free hand side to side.

“—and I gathered every dwarf left alive to Bram, we still couldn’t stand up to what’s coming.” Harold counted on his fingers, and he ran out of them fast. “The krakens rise. The beast hordes get let off the leash. The dragonkin sweep the south. The races on the other continents come across the water, and whatever’s down in the deep dark comes up to meet them.” He dropped his hand. “There are too many threats.”

Thalorien stepped forward into the middle of the ledge.

“That is where we still step in,” he said. “We will have no need to create challenges for you anymore. The world will hold more than enough, and to be frank, the other races will be very motivated to kill you.” His voice stayed mild. “Our role becomes ensuring those challenges arrive on a timeline suited to your growth. To push you, but not break you.”

“It will still be hard,” Vargrim said. “It must be honest growth. You will be pushed, and you will bleed for every step of it.”

Harold was quiet for a long moment. He looked at the elf, and then the dwarf, and his eyes came to rest at last on the ordinary man in the ordinary coat.

“Why me?” he said. “Why’d you bring me back?”

Prometheus laughed loud and honest, and Vargrim actually jumped.

“Hell, Harold.” Prometheus wiped his eye. “You think we had a lot of options?”

He shook his head, still smiling. “Almost no other human alive at the time of our choosing had traveled as far as you had, or knew as much about how the events of this world played out. You were the one best placed to use a second start, more than anyone else could have been.” He spread his hands. “And for that perk to be awarded at all, somebody had to accomplish a great deed. You made the first legendary potion on Gravesend for the cycle.” The smile went wry. “I’ve always been partial to crafters. I stole fire for a bunch of them once, after all.”

He cracked a smile at that. Greek mythology had always interested him. His interest in the mythology had only expanded since his return. Now he knew why so much of the lore of this world was based on it. If all the old gods had been brought here by the system. Something in him firmed up, and he nodded. Harold scrubbed the cold out of his face with both hands. “Okay,” he said. “Fine. I can agree to all of this.” He dropped his hands. “But let’s get one thing straight before anybody shakes on anything. This isn’t a democracy. If you’re joining my faction, you’re joining it under me. Not above me, and not beside me.” He looked from Thalorien to Vargrim. “I’m confident I can do this without your help. I want the elves and the dwarves, but I don’t need them.”

The shimmer dimmed.

Vargrim’s knuckles went pale on the head of the cane. “Careful, human.” The gravel in his voice ground lower. “I am grateful to you, but gratitude only stretches so far.”

The weight of him came down on Harold as if the mountain had shrugged. Harold’s aura flared on instinct to push back, and it buckled at once.

So he stopped pushing outward. He pulled the aura in instead, down through the skin and into the braids of mana already sunk through his muscle and bone, and wound the two together. It slipped on the first try. On the second it caught, and he locked it in place, and his will sat inside his body like rebar set in poured stone.

Harold lifted his head and met the dwarf’s eyes, and this time he held them.

“No, Vargrim. You be careful.” His voice stayed level. “I know a great deal about the dwarven clans. I know where they bury their grudges and which of them owe blood to which. I can be the worst monster this world has ever turned loose on them.” He let that sit. “Or I can be the most gracious monster they’ve ever had at the head of them.”

“I will not subordinate my entire race to you, human.”

Prometheus opened his mouth.

Harold raised a hand without looking at him, and Prometheus shut it again.

“If you want my help, that’s exactly what it costs, and you’ll all have to trust me.” Harold kept his eyes on the dwarf. “The only promise I’ll make is that I won’t discriminate. I’ll treat every one of them fairly and equally, the same as my own people. That’s already more than any other race on this rock would give you.” His jaw set. “And I’ve already agreed to put your family back together.”

Vargrim stomped his cane on the ledge, and the mountain answered with a crack that ran off into the dark.

“I’ll agree to that,” Thalorien said.

He said it while looking past the shimmer. His lips were moving fast with no sound, and whoever stood behind him up there was giving him an earful. He glanced at Harold, then at Balfiel, and went back to arguing with the sky.

Prometheus was beaming at Harold like a man whose horse had just come in at forty to one.

Vargrim huffed through his beard and glared at each of them in turn, his fingers working the head of the cane. Finally he gave one short nod.

“As long as you keep your word.” He tapped the cane once against the stone. “I am called the Long Ledger for a reason, human. I keep accounts.”

Harold nodded back. He let the aura ease out of his body slowly, and his knees wanted to shake when it went.

Thalorien finished his silent argument and turned back to them, smoothing his robe. “My race is broken and scattered under a dozen elven lords, each of them certain he should be king. You will have your work cut out gathering them.” He grimaced. “The other sponsors and I can’t make them join you. To be honest, we’ll be using you as a challenge for them, and hoping they fail it.”

“Lovely,” Harold said.

“Same goes for me and mine kin,” Vargrim said, and planted the cane. “We’ll stand with Prometheus against the other sponsors, up above.” He squinted at the man in the coat. “Though he seems to be recovering well enough on his own.”

Prometheus bowed his head to the dwarf in thanks.

Vargrim stepped back toward the rock face. “The barrier holds another twenty minutes. You have that long to be gone from here.”

He stepped backward into the mountain, and the stone closed over him like water over a dropped coin, and the seam sealed smooth behind him.

Thalorien watched the spot for a moment. “It’s good you have him on your side,” he said. “The dwarven sponsors are notoriously difficult to work with. A few of the sponsors up there have never even laid eyes on them.”

Harold turned and held out his hand for the flask again.

Balfiel handed it over without complaint and gave his brother a sly look as he did.

Harold drank, let the wine go down warm, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Okay. What do I need to know?”

“We can’t tell you much,” Prometheus said. “There are a great many restrictions on us down here. You’re on the right track, though.” He nodded at the snow chair. “And I’m sure Balfiel can help you in the places where we’re bound.”

Balfiel looked at his brother from the chair. “And you were furious when I refused to join you up there. Now look at me, useful again.”

“Brother, you were always useful,” Thalorien said. “I just wanted my brother with me.”

“You just wanted my wine.”

Thalorien smiled. “That’s what I said.”

Prometheus chuckled, and his face gentled as he turned to Harold. “I’m going to head back. I’m burning what little I have to stay down here, and I don’t have the reserves he does.” He jerked a thumb at Thalorien, and then he held out his hand. “I’m glad my wife’s sacrifice wasn’t for nothing. Thank you.”

Harold took the hand. It was hotter than any hand should be.

“Thank you,” Harold said. He looked around the ledge helplessly, at the storm and the elves and the snow chair. “For everything, I guess. For a second chance.”

Prometheus smiled at him. “Nothing worth having comes easy, my lad. I carried fire down a mountain in my bare hands once, and Zeus was a dick about it too. He apologized eventually, though.” He squeezed once and let go. “I’d do it again. Remember that.”

His edges began to waver like breath on cold glass, and he went from the inside out. In the last moment, as the light thinned, words drifted out of it.

“Beware the traitors, Harold.”

Harold barely caught them. He stood staring at the empty patch of snow where the man had been, and figured that was as much of a warning as he’d ever squeeze out of the old god.

Behind him, the brothers were talking in elvish, fast and low, and Harold caught maybe one word in five. Balfiel’s voice went rough once, and Thalorien’s went soft in answer. Then they both raised their right hands and traced an intricate sign over their own hearts, and each laid a palm flat on the other’s chest and held it there.

Then Thalorien was gone, and snow drifted down through the shimmer onto the place he’d stood.

Balfiel came back over to Harold and reached for the flask in Harold’s hand, and his fingers closed on empty air. He looked at the hand, and then up at the sky.

“You bastard! Come back down here!”

A laugh came down to them on the wind, thin and very pleased with itself.

Balfiel grumbled something vile in elvish and kicked his snow chair apart.

Then he turned to face Harold fully.

“I owe you a debt I can never repay,” he said. “I knew you’d saved a dwarven clan. I didn’t know it was the Gemheart.” His throat worked. “Durrack was a dear friend, boy. I— I can never repay you for saving his family.”

Harold stared at him. “That’s what you were so upset about?”

Balfiel looked out past the shimmer. Far below them, a scatter of orange pinpricks marked the legion’s camp in the valley, faint through the snow.

“I never arrived in time to help him, or his family.” His voice dropped. “You did, and you had no need to. I followed their trail for three hundred years, and it ended with me standing over their graves.” He stopped, started, and stopped again. “I just— I just—” He let the breath go. “Thank you, boy.” He paused and looked at him. “Harold.”

Harold nodded slowly. “You’re going to have to explain why the Gemheart coming back is such a big deal. Everyone keeps acting like it’s the second coming.”

Balfiel snorted, and some of the old sourness crept back into his face. “Boy, there was a reason Durrack and his clan were so powerful. You heard Prometheus. Dwarves gain power by doing a thing over and over, a little more insight every time.” He held up a finger. “Dwarves are already prone to obsession. Now imagine a dwarf who feels passion as strongly as the Gemheart do, with that relic curse burning in their blood. Put the two together, and you get a whole clan that’s passionate and obsessed at once.”

He shook his head. “They were fearsome in their day. It took three clans to bring them down. And they walked a path only their clan ever had access to, the Gemstone Imbuer.” He tapped his own finger where a ring would sit. “You remember the ring I used on you to go through your memories? Durrack made that while we were delving the deep dark together. Their path lets them take a monster’s core and imbue its abilities into a gemstone. There are other uses, but that’s the big one.” He waggled his hand. “They come out as consumables, one use or a handful. But they’re powerful.”

Harold sucked in a breath. He pictured legionaries walking into a fight with a troll’s regeneration or a Rampback’s hide in their pockets, and his mind was already running numbers.

“Okay,” he said. “I think I understand now.”

He hesitated. “What are you going to do about Bram?”

Balfiel was silent for a long, long time. The wind moaned past the shimmer, and the snow ticked against it.

“I’m going to go meet him when you return to the Basin,” he said finally. “Bram is Durrack’s great-nephew. I was there for his birth.” He sniffed. “I’ll go and beg his forgiveness. And then—” He paused and drew a breath. “Then I think I’ll go speak to my grandchildren.”

Harold’s head snapped around. “They’re still alive?”

“Yes, they’re still alive.” Balfiel’s mouth twisted toward a smile. “They’re the children of half-elves. They have another few centuries in them yet.”

Harold nodded. “Family’s important.”

Balfiel turned to him, his face open and tired and old.

“Cherish every moment you have with Adeline, Harold. Life goes by so very fast.”

Then he stepped off the ledge.

Harold lunged for the edge as wings of mana unfolded off the old elf’s back, broad and pale and shining, and caught the storm. Balfiel tipped into a long glide and swept down the mountain with the grace of a hawk. Another blast of his aura went out, and somewhere in the dark, another winged monster shrieked and dropped from the sky.

“Damn,” Harold whispered. “That’s cool.”