“So, what do the letters say?”

“Two are from people my brothers owe, acknowledging that I’d be better at managing their debts than they are and putting their mercenaries under my control. Another is from the office of the King’s magistrate declaring my brothers are to be confined to their estate until a thorough investigation can be performed, and a third is from the guard saying they’re sending a garrison here to take control of the estate until things are sorted out. Basically, my brothers are now the ones who are in danger here.”

“I don’t know Kyren. You’ve cornered them, but that may just make them more unpredictable,” said Hrig.

“True, but it’s the strongest hand I have to play. The mercenaries should also be receiving new instructions. Hrig, Stone, you can dress back in your usual clothes if you’d like, there may be some fighting as things shift, and there’s no reason to keep up the ruse now that I’ve shown my hand.”

“Really? I was enjoying trying some skullduggery for a change,” said Hrig.

“If you’d like, you can help me blackmail a noble when we get to the capital. The mercenary that tried to kill Kyren last night told me a very interesting story about how he spends his time away from his wife,” said Stone.

Hrig perked up at that nodding agreement, and then she and Stone went to put on their gear.

“Should we barricade ourselves here until the guard shows up or confront them directly?” I asked.

“Directly, I’d think. They need to know that I beat them and acknowledge it. Otherwise they could get it in their heads to make another attempt.”

“Is it okay if I rough them up a little? I’m a little annoyed with all those attempts to kill me.”

She smiled. “Only if they really ask for it.”

Hrig and Stone returned in their typical adventurer outfits as there was a knock on the door. Hrig, Kyren, and I took positions around the door while Stone opened it. A rough looking man with a scar over his right eye and a shaved head was standing in the doorway. He nodded at Stone, then Kyren.

“Ma’am, I’m Mills with the Howling Griffons. I’ve been told I’ll be working with you now.”

“What does it look like out there?”

“Well, your brothers have barricaded themselves in the reception hall along with the mercenaries still loyal to them, or at least loyal to the idea of getting their employers paid through them. We were thinking we’d just keep them locked in and wait.”

“No, let’s see if we can get them to open up. It’s possible I can convince them to see reason.”

Mills grunted and led us through to the reception hall. The main doors were shut and the mercenaries I assumed were on our side surrounded them.

Kyren approached the doors. “Brothers, there’s no reason to keep struggling like this. If you work with me I can make sure things don’t go too poorly for you.”

“Poorly for us!?” Percy’s voice cracked as he yelled. “You’re just grandma’s pet! We’re the ones who inherited Wyrwind! Who are close to doubling our holdings!”

“Byren? Are you in there? Can you calm him down and let me in? We should be able to have a civilized conversation. Don’t you at least want to hear my terms?”

There was muffled conversation with a few expletives, but eventually things quieted and Byren’s voice rang out. “Alright, we’ll let you in to hear terms.”

After a few moments the doors opened. I led the way in, thoughts of crossbow bolts embedded in my armor giving me a healthy sense of paranoia. Our mercenaries followed, taking positions suited to countering those that continued to work with Percy and Byren. We outnumbered them, but only when Kyren, Stone, Hrig, and I were included. Percy looked almost feral. His long hair was loose and his eyes had a wild look to them. Byren was less disheveled, but even he had more than a few hairs out of place and his vest was improperly buttoned.

Kyren walked forward until she stood directly where petitioners would normally stand and the rest of us stayed close.

“Your terms?” asked Byren.

“You lose all rights to Wyrwind. I marry you off to ensure the continuation of our line and we use the dowries we receive to help pay off the debts you’ve accrued. You live the rest of your lives in relative comfort and I hire back the former majordomo to manage the estate.”

“Reasonable.”

Percy’s eyes bulged at that statement, but rather than say anything he held his tongue and moved to the far wall, looking away in anger.

“You got too greedy. If you’d just curbed your ambitions a little you could have really accomplished some great things. Our parents would’ve been proud.”

“I doubt they would be,” Byren lowered his voice so that only Kyren, Stone, Hrig, and I could hear him, “I had them killed after all.”

Kyren went white, “What?”

“Here’s my counter offer. Percy!”

Percy pushed in a portion of the wall he’d positioned himself next to and suddenly the floor fell out from underneath us. I heard mercenaries unsheath their swords as we plunged into blackness.

…

We landed with a crash on hard ground. The fall was maybe 20 feet and I could hear groans from Kyren and Hrig. The room was pitch black, but I could see that Stone had landed on his feet.

“Stone? Are you okay?”

“Aye lad. Looks like my new boots came with an added benefit.”

I moved over to Hrig, helping her stand. She tried to put weight on her left leg, but collapsed. I caught her gently and let her down. Stone helped up Kyren who seemed uninjured, but shaken.

“Can you make some light Kyren?” asked Stone

“Huh?”

“Light, and some healing for Hrig. I can’t be sure in the dark, but the noise she made sounded like she broke something.”

Kyren spoke a few words in elvish and an orb of light lit the room. We were in a large cell, surrounded by metal bars less than six inches apart from one another. I held Hrig’s hand while Kyren came to her and cast a spell to heal her leg.

Stone moved to the bars, holding his ear to one of them while he rapped a ring on it. The tone of the vibrating metal was high pitched, but oddly musical. He sighed. “Its elyrium.”

“Elyrium?” asked Hrig.

“A very rare, very strong metal. Said to be unbendable once forged. It only comes from one mine deep in Sylfen which has long been exhausted,” I said, letting Pebble’s knowledge flow out of me.

“It must be one of my ancestor’s traps. A trap door in the reception hall, a perfect place to remove some enemies.” She went and ran her hand along one of the bars. “Hrig, Stone, Sevald, I should’ve taken your advice sooner. Next time we see my brothers, let’s just kill them.”

We all let out a chuckle.

“What’re the chances someone saves us?” asked Stone.

“It doesn’t look like there’s a gate. Any rescue would have to be from above. If our mercenaries beat theirs then they’ll probably be able to figure something out. If they lose however… I don’t think anyone else knows this exists. I’m guessing my brothers have been mapping the traps here for a while.” She let the implications of that and what happened to her parents hang in the air, and no one felt comfortable filling in those blanks out loud.

Once her leg was healed, Hrig moved toward the bars. She wrapped her hands around them and pulled with all her strength, the muscles on her back exploding with effort as she did so. After a few moments she stopped, she was slick with sweat and panting, but the bars hadn’t moved an inch.

I stepped forward and tried the same, but the only difference between our efforts was that I wasn’t tired afterward. I tried a different tactic, slamming my foot into the bars, but that also didn’t have any impact. Eventually I just sat back down with my companions and waited.

Kyren tried to climb up the bars and push on the ceiling, but was unable to budge anything. She sat back down too.

After a couple hours Stone spoke up.

“It doesn’t look like anyone is coming.”

No one said anything. I had been thinking about our options and had figured out a way to escape. If I shrank myself a bit, and sucked in my armor like I used to when my master would pretend to crush me, then I could escape. I could then make my way back up, open the trapdoor, and throw a rope down for everyone to climb up. Unfortunately, that would out me as a monster or at least reveal me not to be Sevald. Still, I couldn’t just wait around and watch them starve, even the idea of that made my essence knot up. Perhaps I could extinguish Kyren’s light long enough to get through without them noticing? Maybe if they went to sleep I could rescue them before they even awoke and blame divine providence? I thought through all of these possibilities and at one point realized I was physically shaking, my armor making sounds like metal chimes in the wind.

“Sevald,” said Kyren. She had placed a hand on my shoulder. Hrig and Stone both looked at me with a look I’d never seen before. “Do you have some way out of here?”

“I….how could I possibly?”

Kyren kept her gaze on me steady, her features were as calm and serene as they ever were. Even when she was dealing with her brothers she never completely lost that core of calm. “Sevald, you’ve gotten us out of quite a few impossible situations and yourself out of even more. Would it help you if we all looked away? Nothing has to change between us, we don’t need the truth if you’re not comfortable giving it.”

I panicked, shaking even more as I realized the implications of what she was saying. I looked at Stone, who was giving me a warm, almost fatherly smile, and Hrig who was wearing the only look of worry I’d ever seen on her. Worry for me, I realized, concern for how this was impacting me. “You… you know? You know what I am?”

“Not exactly lad, but we have a good idea," said Stone.

“How?”

“Well, the first thing is that you're about ten times as strong as I remember Sevald being,” said Kyren.

“You’re also a fair amount friendlier, though at first I assumed that was because you’d warmed up to us,” said Stone.

“You killed an army of goblins single handedly, survived a shipwreck in full plate armor, and managed to kill Donyin,” said Hrig.

“It’s not just the big things, lad. You also frequently forget to turn your head towards who you’re speaking to, I’ve never heard you cough or sneeze, you stay completely still without ever shifting the weight of your feet or fidgeting, and you have not once taken the time to relieve yourself in all the time we’ve travelled together.”

Hrig chimed in, “You also resisted my advances, which is a difficult thing for a man to do.”

“I thought I was being subtle.”

“You were not,” said Kyren matter of factly.

“We actually had to cover for you several times. We convinced Jade and Dorsia that your armor was enchanted as a way of explaining why it was never damaged, and we went along with your excuses enthusiastically to dim others' suspicions.”

“How long have you known?”

“I figured it out before we left the dungeon,” said Kyren, “I was going to wait until I could speak to Hrig and Stone privately, but then you went and made a genuine oath to Dur. What really convinced me though was what you did for that old man at the Thirsty Tree." She paused. "You killed his son, didn’t you?”

I looked down, “Yes.”

“But you still took action to make amends. That told me you wanted to do good, even if you hadn’t had the chance to yet.”

“What about you Stone? When did you figure it out?”

He smiled, “About the second week in a row you hadn’t left camp to find a tree for yourself. You’re good company though, so eventually I accepted it as another strange part of adventuring.”

“Hrig?”

“When I saw you fight the goblin chieftain. There was a moment when your faceplate was open. I couldn’t see exactly, but I knew I saw nothing there. Well not exactly nothing, just an absence of anything. I assumed it was just my eyes playing tricks, but then there was the other night when I realized you were still wearing your armor even alone in bed. No one takes holy oaths that seriously, even Dur would probably give you a pass for someone else barging into your room.”

Hrig’s words raised Stone and Kyren’s eyebrows, but they decided now wasn’t the time to go deeper into what she was referring to. Kyren turned to me.

“I have to ask again, Sevald. Do you want us to turn around and let you get out of here without anything changing between us? We can do that if you’d like.”

“No… you can watch.” I stood up and moved to the closest set of bars. I squeezed through the bars, sucking myself in order to get through the narrow gap between them. I looked back at them, their expressions were the same as they always were. I felt a wave of relief wash over me as I returned to my usual shape. “I’m not sure of exactly what I am, but what I do know is that my master created me to be a dungeon trap. Adventurers are compelled to wear me, at which point I eat them. When I eat them I also gain all of their memories and skills. I’m meant to use those memories and skills to integrate with the party and play out a specific scenario that ends with me betraying them and killing everyone for my master’s amusement. Eating people was automatic for me. I didn’t have a perception of right or wrong, only my master’s orders. For some reason eating Sevald was a tipping point of some kind. I started to feel things I hadn’t ever felt before.”

“How many people have you eaten?” asked Stone.

“Four, a dwarf, an elf, and two men. The elf was a woman. I’ve also eaten the head of a goblin and the head of an orc I shipwrecked with. I did that for more information. I can get partial memories and skills that way.”

“Well, it’s not like I’ve never been friends with killers before,” said Hrig.

“Aye, four is actually not that high a number,” agreed Stone.

“What all can you, well, do?” asked Kyren.

“Well, I can adjust my size, as you’ve just seen. I can store things inside myself, I’m bigger on the inside than the outside. I’m stronger and faster than most things, by a pretty significant margin, and I can’t grow tired. I can fire things from my void at high velocity. I can separate parts of myself and control them. I can heal myself and repair any scratches to my armor. There may be more, but that’s all I know right now.”

“That's… a lot for something just meant to be a dungeon trap,” remarked Stone.

“I know as much as you do. Well, now we all know what I know.” I paused. “Can I...can I keep travelling with you all?”

Surprised looks appeared on each of their faces. “Of course,” said Hrig, “I can’t imagine going anywhere without you.”

“Aye lad, you’re one of us.”

“Well it’s my duty to watch over what’s ancient and wise. I don’t know how old you are, but I’ll assume you’re ancient for now,” said Kyren with a smile.