For a little while, I felt my head spinning, as I tried to make sense of the words that I had just heard.

“How long have you been here,” Roger continued, as we found a quiet, and a secluded place to sit. “And how many people have found out about you?”

“About three weeks,” I said, quietly. “And the only person who knows is a traveler who I met along the way to Westfall.”

That was a lie. But it occurred to me that, if the Interlopers were being killed, then the people who knew about them might be getting killed as well. And even though I felt as if I could probably trust Roger, I didn’t feel like I could risk the lives of everybody else – or at least not until I was a lot more sure that things would be safe.

“Alright,” Roger said. “Well… then I suppose that I know now, too. I’m sorry to spring this on you, but...”

He paused, for a moment, as he thought about what to say next.

“How did you know,” I asked, before he had found his words.

“I found out while I was treating your wounds,” he said. “As soon as I found you, I applied a bit of healing magic to you and Praxa, in order to make sure that you would each last long enough to receive more extensive treatment. But you were each so badly wounded that it seemed likely that I’d have to choose one of you to save… and that I would need to leave the other one to die.”

“As the children and I carried you back to my home, I thought for a long time about what to do. My debt was to you, of course. But, if I had been in your situation – and if it had been the woman that I loved, lying at my side… then it’s her that I would have wanted to save, and not myself. But not knowing your own disposition, I couldn’t truly know what you would want me to do. And so once I had gotten you back inside of my home, I began by applying some rudimentary magic to each of your wounds, in the hopes that one of you would stabilize, and that I could then devote my attention to the other.”

“But then, by some sort of miracle, you stabilized almost at once. After that, I turned my attention towards the girl, and I did everything that I could to save her. But every now and then, I checked back in on you, in order to make sure that your condition was remaining stable.”

“But… every time that I checked in on you...”

“… you were even more healthy than she was. At that point, I looked beneath your glove, in order to confirm my own suspicions. If it had been just a matter of curiosity, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable intruding on your privacy in that way. But, since I was still using some mana to heal you, from time to time – and since I thought that she might require everything that I had in order to recover – then I needed to be sure that you wouldn’t need any more of my treatment, and that you would be able to recuperate on your own.”

“That was how I found out,” he said, as he looked me in the eye.

“Well...”

“… that’s certainly the least objectionable way of finding out that I could have imagined,” I said, with a bit of laughter. “I definitely can’t hold any part of that against you.”

“Well, my motives may not be quite so pure as I just sketched out,” Roger said, with a grin. “I told you that I wouldn’t have looked if it had been just a matter of curiosity… but, that certainly played a part – and who knows whether or not I’m deceiving myself about how large of a part it played.”

“Well, at any rate,” I said, “if you are telling me all of this, and if you allowed me to recover… then can I assume that you do not, in fact, intend to kill me?”

“Not at all,” he said. “In fact, if it were possible… I’d very much like for you to remain by my side for a long time… and to help me to find my way into one of the ancient, and sacred vaults - if you would be willing.”

“Into one of the vaults…,” I whispered.

He nodded, as he turned towards me.

“I’ve wanted to find one of them for a long time,” he continued. “But, since I didn’t know a single Interloper, it’s just been something of an idle dream of mine. But, now that I’ve met you… I would like to try to find one of them, with you – if we could.”

“Why,” I asked.

“Because the Guild of the Pen doesn’t want me to,” he said, with a weary smile. “But, I suppose that that isn’t really much of an explanation – and especially not for someone who’s so new to this world. So, let me take you back about twenty years, in order to give you a bit of context… back to the moment that I was elected to be the head of the Guild of Knights, in the City of the Blue Tower.”

“My appointment to become the head of the Guild wasn’t exactly smooth. At the time, I was quite popular, because I was young, charitable, and famous for all sorts of daring exploits. That had won me quite a bit of popular approval… and that support couldn’t help but spill over into the Guild, as well.”

“And so, once the previous head of the Guild had died, I soon won a very contentious election, in which I received a landslide of the votes amongst the younger members of the Guild, but lost handily amongst the older.”

“Of course, after that, a few of the senior members resigned in protest, claiming that I had not earned my position in the least, nor did I have the wisdom to rule… and for my whole time in the Guild, I didn’t earn much respect from a large portion of the elder members – even though they acknowledged the fairness of the election, and ceded to me as their leader.”

“Looking back on it, I think that what really troubled them was the awareness that they wouldn’t be able to control me. Unlike them, I had come from a very poor family, and I had next to no ties to the City of the Blue Tower. I wasn’t a scholar, either, and I wasn’t especially interested in being a part of any sort of high society. I was much happier spending an afternoon with a few farmers out in a quiet little village than I was dining at the court of some refined gentlemen and ladies… and there was a general fear that I might unravel things, I think, in a way that might be too wild, and too unpredictable – that I wouldn’t uphold the ‘norms’ that had come before… whatever those ‘norms’ might be, of course.”

“At the time, I just took their opposition to me as a simple kind of envy, and also as a rather prudent fear that I might weed out all sorts of needless expenditures and corruptions. But looking back on it… I can’t help but wonder if they were afraid that I might uncover something a little more sinister than all of that, somehow - and considering it now, I’m actually a little surprised that they allowed my election to go through at all, rather than trying to undermine my leadership by more insidious means.”

“At any rate, just about two weeks after I’d been elected to become the head of the Guild of Knights, the man who was then the head of the Guild of the Pen came over to my office, and had a very peculiar sort of conversation with me. He asked me, first, if I had any interest in discovering the Vaults of Kalia. And when I told him that I did – because I was quite the adventurer back then, and quite eager for discovery – he told me that it would be very, very imprudent of me to ever think of entering them… and he warned me that opening up the vaults would be absolutely calamitous, and a source of great ruin for this world of ours.”

“Then, he showed me a piece of paper that he claimed had been written by the original head of the Guild of the Pen, nearly twenty five hundred years ago. That piece of paper claimed that each of the vaults were full of all sorts of ancient relics, from the Age of Mages… and it further warned that there was an ancient prophecy – allegedly told to him by the Prophet Lucian himself – that if those relics were ever to be recovered, then the Age of Mages would begin again, and the whole horror of the past would be unleashed back onto our world, and bring great destruction and misery to each of our cities – perhaps for all of the rest of time.”

“Of course, I hardly knew what to make of that. But the man simply told me that this parchment had been passed down through the leadership of the Guild of the Pen for thousands of years, and had been kept as a secret among the heads of the Guilds for all of that time, in order to keep the existence of the vaults as a secret from the vulgar… and he told me to respect its wisdom, and never to enter into those vaults, myself – or to allow anyone else to enter into them either.”

“We talked for a little while after that. But I couldn’t really get him to say much more about the vaults, and he never brought up that subject with me again. Then, a year or two later, he died in his home of natural causes. And his successor and I weren’t especially close, or communicative about those sorts of things.”

“That was the conversation that I had with him, at any rate. I think that he must have thought that I would simply be obedient to his authority, and be moved by awe and by piety to adhere faithfully to each of the dictates that he had given me. But… that whole meeting ended up producing just about the opposite effect in me. I didn’t trust that man at all, and I couldn’t stop wondering just what his intention had been in showing me that piece of parchment, or or from wondering what he might really know about the contents and the existence of the vaults.”

“And so while I certainly told him that I would respect his wishes, I resolved right then and there to try to make my way inside of the vaults, if ever I was able, and to try to discover just what he might have been trying to conceal.”

“But then… nothing further ever came of it. I never found an Interloper, and I never found any real sign of the vaults, either. If they did exist – as I began to suspect that they must - then I still hadn’t a clue about where they might be, exactly, or how I might be able to find them.”

“And then, of course, time began to pass. The Guild demanded my attention, for many years… and then my wife grew sick… and then the situation in the world worsened day by day, and I signed on with the Free Folk, and devoted myself to their cause. And I let all of those questions of mine drop, and I haven’t thought much about the vaults for quite a few years by now.”

“But seeing that mark on your hand… it felt significant to me, somehow – like God had finally given me another chance to pursue something that I never ought to have abandoned. And so, if you are willing… I would like to put everything that I have into your service, William – and to help you to find your way inside of the vaults. Maybe then, we can find out something that will give us a bit of Insight… and maybe then, I can discover if my suspicions about the Guild of the Pen were ill-founded, all of those years – or if there might really have been something important that they were trying to conceal from me, and from the world.”

“What if what that piece of paper said was true,” I asked, “and there are all sorts of ancient, and powerful relics there, that might plunge the world into ruin?”

“Then,” Roger continued, “we will deal with that when the time comes. But I wouldn’t worry too much about any of that. Even if there are some powerful relics sealed away in there, I don’t put all that much stock in any of those old tales about relics that corrupt a man’s heart by giving him the power to do anything that he wishes, and which thereby reveal the terrible evil that lurks within.”

“I had power once, William, and I had about as much power as you could imagine. I was the head of the most powerful and feared Guild in the entire world, and I was beloved by the people to boot. I could have killed just about anyone that I had wanted, and I could have slept with nearly any woman that I had yearned for, and I could have acquired the most tremendous wealth, and done nearly anything that I desired. Instead, however… I just sat in my little wooden home with my wife, who I adored, and did some gardening, and played with my dog. And so, I’m not especially worried about what will happen to me if I find those sorts of artifacts. And – at the risk of sounding very, very arrogant – I doubt that there are any artifacts that you could find that would be able to stop me from killing you… if it ever really came to that.”

“But, of course,” he added, with a surprisingly friendly, and genuine smile, after what he had just said, “I truly hope that it will not.”

I grinned at him, as I leaned back, and feigned a certain degree of sinister intent.

“Maybe I should go and search for those vaults on my own, then,” I said, “so that I can make use of those relics for myself, without having to worry about your intrusions.”

“It wouldn’t be completely unreasonable,” he said, with a smile. “But somehow, I doubt that you will succeed without my aid… though, perhaps that is arrogant of me, too.”

“Alright,” I said more seriously, as I leaned back towards him, and gave him a single nod. “If you’d wanted to kill me before, you could have. And maybe it’s naive of me, but I feel like I can believe that everything that you said is true – that you want to find out the truth about those vaults as much as I do, and to discover what’s happening in this world. And I agree that I’m probably not ever going to be able to find them on my own, at the rate that this war is going. So I’m willing to help you to find them, and to search for their location.”

“But,” I added, after a short pause. “Do you have any idea of where they might be, exactly?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve been all around the world, so I at least know all sorts of places that they’re not. I’ve talked with quite a few curious characters, too – and have known a treasure seeker or two in my day – so I at least know where those people had thought to look, and where their investigations had led them. That’s something, at least… but, I know that it’s not much.”

“What about you, William,” he continued. “Have you found much of anything?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve found something, I think… although, I don’t know what to make of it.”

And then, I told him about my dream, and about the picture that I had seen in the book, and about the canyon to the north of the City of the Blue Tower, where I’d been planning to head towards next.

As I spoke, I felt fairly excited. But…

“I don’t think that the vault is there,” Roger said, slowly.

“Why not,” I asked.

“I’ve been there,” he said. “To that canyon that’s to the north of the Blue Tower – and I know the image that you’re talking about. The two of them don’t actually look much of anything alike, once you’ve seen them side by side.”

“Plus… quite a few other people have had that same thought themselves. One of my oldest friends was a treasure seeker – a person who devoted their lives to searching for all sorts of different relics. At any rate, after he had made a bit of a fortune, he decided to spend almost ten years living in a little town right near that canyon, and he went there every day, searching for that vault. But, in the end, he didn’t find anything at all – and he seemed to be quite convinced that there weren’t any vaults out there, and that it had all just been a wild goose chase.”

“And yet…,” Roger said quietly, after a short pause. “You’re sure that you didn’t see that image in the book beforehand? You’re sure that you dreamed of it without ever having seen it before, then saw the same image in the book a while later?”

“I’m positive,” I said. “I thought of that, and I checked for it. That image only appears once in the entire book, and it appears almost towards the end – on a page that I’m sure I hadn’t read yet. So, I don’t think there’s much of any chance that I could have seen it… even though it might seem impossible to believe that I hadn’t.”

Then, Roger leaned forward, and began to think.

“Then… if that really is the case. Well.”

He started to laugh, a little.

“How would you explain that, exactly,” he asked.

“Well…”

I didn’t really have a great answer to that question. But…

There were only two possibilities, I supposed.

The first was that the dream meant nothing at all, and that it was all a weird coincidence.

The second possibility was that the dream really did mean something, and that it wasn’t all just an accident.

In that case… that place that I had seen in my dream had probably existed, somehow – and probably at some point in the distant past.

But, then…

“…then, the canyon must have been covered over,” I said. “That canyon to the north of the Blue Tower was the only one that I saw on the globe that was at all comparable in size. So if the canyon that I saw in my dream really did exist… then it must be almost unrecognizable by now – and it must have been covered over by something, or by someone.”

“But then,” Roger said. “Aren’t we just back to where we were before? If it’s been covered over, it seems like it could be just about anywhere. Any valley, any plain – anywhere that you can imagine. Even the Great Forest that you arrived in when you first came to this world – even that could be the canyon, if trees had been planted there after it had been filled up with soil.”

That was true. But…

“I still think that’s the best lead that we have, though – even if it isn’t much. Or, I guess more honestly… it’s the only lead that we have – even though it isn’t that much at all.”

Roger nodded, as he looked off into the distance.

“That’s what I think, too,” he said, eventually. “But for now, I doubt that we’re going to be able to make that much more progress on any of these questions.”

Then, he stood back up, and began to stretch.

“Let’s call this here for now, William,” he said. “What I said before was only a partial lie – I really should get back to Westfall, and to help with the efforts there. May I assume that you’d still be interested in coming with me to Riverdale, once things here have calmed down a bit?”

“Absolutely,” I said, nodding my head.

“That’s good, then,” he said, with a smile. “Then for now, why don’t you look after Aaron, and Lily, and Praxa, while I tend towards the affairs of Westfall. We can each keep thinking about where the vaults might be for these next few days… and once we end up making our way to Riverdale, then we can begin to talk together about what we have thought of, and start to set out to explore. Does that suggestion sound good to you?”

“It does,” I said. “That sounds really good, actually.”

“Alright, then,” he said. “In that case… I’ll be looking forward to it, William.”

Then, the two of us shook each other’s hands, as we pledged to work together for the foreseeable future, and to search out the vaults together.

I doubted that I would be able to figure out too much more for the time being. But I felt a lot of excitement as I thought about working with him once we had arrived in Riverdale, and going out exploring through this whole, beautiful new world, in search of each of the ancient and sacred vaults.

Then, the two of us said our goodbyes, as he headed back towards the town of Westfall.

And afterwards, I made my way back towards the little house in the quiet, and secluded woods, as my mind swum with everything that we had just discussed – and as I thought again of everything that had happened between me and Praxa, and how good it would be to see her once again.