The group convened for tea, and Riley found himself seated nearest to the fireplace. After so long spent in a frozen wasteland, huddled by campfires in the dead of night, it was nice to have genuine warmth to hand.

  The tea was a nice touch too. It perhaps wasn’t green tea as he knew it, back on earth, but the local brew had a sweet and pleasant aroma to it.

  “So, a plague wizard,” Kenji said, looking to the beak poking from Riley’s pocket. “I have had the displeasure of fighting men from that order in the past. They are... potent. I imagine, in time, your abilities will be dangerous too.”

  Riley shrugged. “Gonna take some time, I guess. But that’s probably the case for most people, right? So, what class did you get?” he asked.

  Smirking, Kenji lifted his gauntlets from his lap and tossed them onto the table with a clatter. The spiked knuckles glimmered in the light. “My choices were... interesting. In my old life, I was a practitioner of parkour. I suppose that influenced me getting the class of a ‘lightning monk.’”

  “Which is?”

  An impish, cryptic smile appeared on Kenji’s face. “A class said to be built for swift, agile attacks, with a peppering of lightning magic. I believe the term would be ‘glass cannon’ in most games.” He pushed himself away from the table as he spoke. “I’ll give you a quick demonstration.”

  Riley watched, transfixed, as sparks of white lightning briefly danced from Kenji’s eyes, forming into a halo of electricity. He rose up fully. In the blink of an eye he zipped from one end of the room to the other, crackling with energy. Then he did so again and again, each burst of speed filling the air with a blinding flash.

  He skidded to a stop after five ‘jumps’, beads of perspiration dotting along his brow. He huffed, a grin fully forming on his face. “A nice trick, wouldn’t you say?”

  “He likes to show off,” Kim said, snorting and quaffing a mouthful of tea.

  “With a power like that, I can’t say I blame him. I’d show off too if I could do hat stuff,” he said.

  Draining the last of her tea, Kim rocked back on her chair and spared a glance to Kenji. “I’m hoping to see the old man. He in the middle of anything?”

  “Stark?” He stood upright, any tiredness in his body swiftly fading. “He went to store some gear, but he should be free.”

  “Thanks for the tea. C’mon Riley.”

  “It was nice to meet you Kenji,” Riley said, nodding firmly to the slender young man.

  “And you too, Riley. I wish you luck in the days to come.”

  Kim led the way from the meeting room at a steady pace, armoured heels clicking with every step. She made her way up a winding staircase, leading up into one of the large towers on the side of the Gaol. “Didn’t see Kenji’s Oracle there,” Riley mused.

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  “Oracles tend to fade out whenever Wardens are chatting. Or, well, whenever they’re not being called upon for levelling someone. Hell, the older Wardens who are so full of levels and can barely level up unless they kill a bunch of strong enemies, you almost never see their Oracles.”

  Riley frowned. He didn’t consider Arubis his best friend forever, or anything, but he liked her well enough. She was one of the few friendly faces he had out here. And it would be a damn sad thing if she vanished from his life entirely.

  Another question briefly popped into his head. “What do you suppose Oracles actually... are?”

  “Hm?” Kim spared him a brief look. “They don’t really talk much about their true nature. And asking them questions never gets you much. Me personally, I think they’re like... angels.”

  “Angels?” Riley asked.

  “Yeah. If the Arbiter is like ‘God’, or at least the closest equivalent, then the Oracles act like angels do. His servants who handle a lot of his daily affairs.”

  “I guess that makes sense. You ever uh... see the Arbiter again? After the first time?”

  Kim shook her head, her expression growing grim. “Not even once.”

  The spiral staircase ended before a sturdy oaken door. Kim rapped upon it, the noise echoing off the stony walls. Silence blossomed in the tower, in which the air sighed and whistled through the ancient walls of the gaol.

  “It’s unlocked,” a gruff voice spoke from beyond the door.

  The two Wardens entered, finding themselves inside a sparsely decorated bedroom. An orange flame crackled in the hearth on one side of the chamber, illuminating a looming armoured figure. He stood dressed in a suit of crimson plate armour, distinguished by what appeared to e a network of pipes and lines that linked the back to the limbs. His face was old and wrinkled, a great grey beard flowing to his collarbone.

  “Hey, Stark,” Kim greeted, a strange note of deference in her voice.

  “Kimberly.” The old man turned, regarding her with steely blue eyes. “Didn’t get to see you before you made for the mountains. And it seems we have another Warden in the great game.”

  Riley snorted and slowly made his way into the room, once more embracing the warmth of a crackling flame. “I guess that’s one word for it. I’m Riley Blake.”

  “Welcome to one of our little boltholes, then. I should say we’re not a united front, like the Band of Brotherhood. More of a... loose coalition of cooperators who want to make life in Kerberos a little less awful. You can call us the Strays”

  “Thanks. I uh, appreciate any help I can get.” ‘Strays’ wasn’t exactly a badass moniker for the group, but Riley wasn’t feeling too judgemental. And he wasn’t about to crack wise in front of Stark. He didn’t need to be able to see the old man’s stats to know he must have been some kind of beast when it came to raw power, and his expression reminded Riley of an old hardass college lecturer he’d had to suffer under.

  Kim cleared her throat. “It’s... good to see you again, Stark, but I had a reason for coming back here.”

  “Figured as much. You usually spent weeks at a time on your own these days. Wouldn’t come back unless it was for something major.”

  “Yeah.” She hesitated, worry flashing across her face. “I... we... encountered a lesser avatar out that way, forced us to retreat. It was in a town called Orespeak. It’s been wiped off the map.”

  Stark’s brow slowly furrowed, the corners of his mouth pulling into a frown. “Worrying news indeed. You made the right call, heading out this way.” His gaze shifted to Riley. “I know this must seem rude, but would you mind giving the room to Kim and myself? I’d like to discuss the matter in privacy.”

  “I... was there too. I saw it myself.”

  “I don’t doubt that. But Kim has been in the game for longer, she knows more of the intricacies of the situation. And... being frank, I don’t want you to hear anything that might terrify you.”

  “That... doesn’t do much to reassure me.” After what Kim had told him, what fresh horrors did he have to learn about? But he’d oblige the man. “One more thing. Uh... do you people have a blacksmith here?”

  “Head to the basement. Hammer the Smith, our resident iron worker, will see you right.”

  Riley left them to it and promptly made his way down to the lower reaches of the gaol. Once underground, the pale light of the windows was replaced by flickering torches that had been planted equidistant in the wall sconces.

  Here, the building’s former nature became more obvious. Manacles left bolted to the wall, thankfully devoid of former residents, stockades and racks left coated in dust and cobwebs, and wall hooks that had once housed all manner of weapons.

  The sound of metal being hammered drew Riley in closer, and he found himself walking into a circular chamber lit by the blaze of an ignited forge. He froze, laying his eyes on the... person operating the forge.

  A short, grey-skinned being with a mop of ashen hair, and golden cat-like eyes. The most striking feature of the being, dressed in a dark tool-stuffed sock, was his long and pointed nose.

  “Aha!” He grinned, revealing rows of sharp teeth, and raised his smith’s hammer high overhead. “Welcome to Hammer’s hammerworks!”