The next week that passed working in the candy shop was a lot more fun than Tay would’ve otherwise expected. Rarely had he had the chance of interacting with kids since he’d left the orphanage, and he’d nearly forgotten how excitable they could be—especially while being handed long sticks of rock candy or giant wax bottles full of sour syrup.

Tay had barely finished helping out a couple starry-eyed youngsters when, without warning, Mond came lumbering down the stairs, using the guardrail to hold up his massive weight. “Tay! We’re going out!”

Cari was stammering behind Mond, saying that the he wasn’t ready to go out and he really should’ve been back in bed.

But Mond turned around to say, “You don’t mind holding the shop down, do you? Where’s your sister?”

Tay knew the answer to that one. “Some of the children asked her to play some Runicka with them a bit ago. She’ll be back before long though.”

“Then we ought to go and come back before she misses us,” Mond said.

“Mond, you’re not in a position to be going anywhere,” Cari said, “I really don’t think I ought to—”

“Come now,” Mond said. He cradled his bandaged left arm, bound up in the sling the doctor had provided. Not that they knew exactly what was wrong with Mond, since he’d asked them all to leave when the doctor had arrived. It could’ve been just a sprain, or a break, or something more permanent, but Mond just waved off all their concerns. “Tay’s been doing excellent work around the shop. I want to get him a little something as an early reward.”

Cari stomped her foot on the floor, and looked like she had something she wanted to say. Tay slid out from behind the counter and got a word in first though.

“Cari’s been a huge help too. I don’t really know where things go—but she does. If anything, I just talk to the kids.”

Cari regarded him calmly with her amber eyes, then sighed. “No, you’re right, Mond. Kids have been buying a lot more than usual. And more are coming in from around the block. You should just hear them talk about how they want to meet the man who dueled one of the ‘big and scary Polamunds.’”

Mond rubbed his blond mustache and lowered his brow. “They know that I also dueled a Polamund, right?”

“You’ve been locked away in your room,” Cari said, shrugging.

“Exactly the reason why I need to get out of here. Come on, Tay. Let Cari handle the shop. We’re getting you a brand-new Runicka deck!”

~~~~~~~~~~

The local card shop in Peace and Quiet was located two streets down and just beyond an underpass where Mond had to stop and take a break. When Tay brought him over to a bench, Mond waved him on and said to go on without him.

“I want you to have a deck picked out by the time I get over there,” Mond said, and then he smiled. “Have fun with it. Go. Go!”

Mond practically forced Tay into going on ahead, though Tay turned back twice to make sure the big man was actually okay. If he passed out or something in the road, Cari would kill him long before anything worse happened to Mond.

But Mond insisted, and Tay would have been lying to say that he wasn’t excited for picking out a new deck. He found it on a corner, right across from an open-door smithy and next to a carpenter’s store. That was probably a good thing, because the card shop’s roof had definitely seen better days and had hundreds of differently-colored planks patching up various holes. Its windows were tinted dark, and Tay couldn’t even make out the slightest bit of movement from inside.

He wondered if he had the right place, and hesitated before going in. He checked over both of his shoulders, and when he made eye contact with the smithy across the street, he quickly turned back and pressed his forehead up to the dark glass.

He could see shapes on the inside, but it was so dark in there that he couldn’t possibly make out any friendly faces. One last time, he looked back to see if Mond was already on his way.

He wasn’t.

But Tay had come all this way, and he wasn’t going to find a deck out here. And without a new deck—or any deck, really—Rantho would keep his mother’s amulet, so Tay used that fact to force his hand onto the door’s handle, and then swung it open.

Peace and Quiet hadn’t been necessarily loud outside, but there was always a low humdrum throughout Duskborough. All that vanished as Tay crossed the threshold into the card shop.

Aside from its drop in noise, the first thing Tay noticed was the air. It smelled stale and yet pristine, like the inside of a chest that hadn’t been opened in a whole year. It was definite stagnant though, with noticeable hot and cold spots brushing past his face as he moved away from the door.

To his right was a glass counter, with display shelf upon display shelf visible within it. Misty beams of illumination—like trails of sunlight through a fogged window—curled together above the glass, mixing their snowy whites and inky blacks. A closer look revealed rows upon rows of Runicka cards all laid out for customers to clearly see.

Practically gliding over from the far side of the counter was a thin woman in a tight-fitting cloth top that ended just above the middle of her stomach. She had two sashes—one violet and the other black—around her shoulders, and large hoop earrings made from gold or some similar metal.

Her hair was rather short for what he would’ve expected to find in Stormwall, as it didn’t even make it to her shoulders, and she had lines of blue and violet running through her otherwise brunette strands. She regarded him with two large dark eyes and a half-smile that said she was both glad to see him and wary of him as a stranger. Tay could appreciate that sentiment.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“I—uh,” Tay stammered, but really didn’t know what to say. Should he wait for Mond? The big man had told him to find a deck. So, Tay asked, “Do you, uh, sell decks?”

She raised an eyebrow and widened her smile. “We are a card shop, and we’d be a pretty awful one if we didn’t.”

“Don’t give him a hard time, Emandra,” someone called out from behind Tay.

Tay turned to see a couple of men and a lady all sitting around one of the tables tucked into the shadowy corners of the shop. Tay wondered if they cast less light on that side on purpose, as it allowed all their Runicka cards to illuminate their faces and boards.

The one who’d spoken was a pudgy-looking man with long sideburns and a round chin. His clothes were bit ragged, and the sandy blond hair atop his head was shaved almost down to his scalp. He had one foot on the ground and another on his chair, with his opponent sitting back as to allow him a direct shouting path to the clerk known as Emandra.

“That’s the man who stood up to the Polamund after Mond got decked,” the man continued.

“I haven’t even said ten words to him, Atro,” Emandra replied, leaning over the glass counter.

“Actually,” Atro said, making the chair groan from the weight of his foot. “You’ve said fifteen words to him.”

“Ah, get back to your game, you monster,” Emandra said. Then, she regarded Tay again, and gave a little chuckle. “Sorry about that. Well, anyone who’s a friend of Mond is welcome here. You can call me Em. You said you were looking for a deck?”

Tay stiffened, but then exhaled. “Yes, um, I am. My name’s Tay, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you,” Em said, skirting around the glass counter and bidding him to follow her along.

There were small stands in the middle of the shop. They held everything from leather deck boxes, to small dice sets, to some fingerless gloves that Tay thought might’ve looked cool on him.

Though, for how interesting those all were, Tay could hardly keep his eyes off of all the Runicka cards he passed by. There had to be hundreds in the glass cases, all shining and glorious and worth a lot of money. Actually, upon closer inspection of their small tags, most of them weren’t worth more than a pocket’s worth of coin at a time, but together, they could fetch a hefty sum.

Tay reached the end of the glass counter, where another—nearly identical—one ran perpendicular across another wall of the shop. Em gestured down into a section, and Tay saw small, carved wooden boxes with slits in them to reveal the soft glows of the Runicka cards within them.

“So,” Em said. “These are our premade custom decks. We’ve built them from lists submitted by tournament winners here. We also have Council-approved starter decks up here, but I’m guessing the man who stood up to the Polamunds is going to need a little more power than what those can offer?”

Tay followed her finger to the wall behind here, where different boxes—these without either carvings or slits—sat in a larger wooden chest. Each one had a stamp on its front of a circle containing a hefty coin purse resting behind a thick cudgel. The words STARTER DECK were printed just above and CHAOS – BRUISER BEATDOWN were just below.

One single card was framed in the side of the chest. Its art was of a burly man with eyes as black as coal. He had two clubs, one in each of his hands, and a crown atop his head made entirely out of scrap metal.

(20) Bruiser King Bursting Shout: up to 2 target foe revenants can’t attack and can’t fuse until the end of their controller’s next turn. <<< 5

Tay might’ve been tempted to go for a starter deck, had he not seen the price tag and then compared it to the ones down in the counter. The starter weren’t even a fourth of the cost of the cheapest custom deck. How much more powerful were the custom decks if the starter one couldn’t match up coin-wise?

“Right,” Tay said to Em. “So, what sort of power do these have?” And he pointed down to the ones in the counter.

“Well,” Em said, moving to the far left and kneeling down in front of the furthest deck. “We do name them, so we call this one Geobold Geometry—it’s a zoo deck that focuses on the positioning of your revenants.”

“Zoo deck?” Tay asked.

“Yeah. Zoo. You know—like playing a lot of cheap-costing cards and trying to swarm the board. A lot of the revenants in this deck don’t even have a cost and don’t take up space on the board. That’s what makes this deck so fun. You just whack your opponent down before they can get a handle on the situation.”

There was a single card pulled out of the deck box and laid out before it. Tay bent down to get a closer look.

(10) Geobold Hierarch Inert

Shout: Parallel target foe revenant (neither this revenant nor its target may attack so long as both remain in play, and other revenants may ignore them while attacking).

Revenant Fragments have Flying.

Barrier << 4

Its artwork was of a draconian creature, complete with a whip and chains in its little claws, hunched over and shouting into a dark tunnel. It had no visible eyes, but did have a large nose with tendrils falling down the sides of its elongated muzzle. Wherever it lived, it was not under sunlight.

“Of course, if aggro’s not really your thing, we’ve got control-heavy decks too,” Em said, jumping to the next one before Tay even got a chance to know if he wanted the Geobolds.

He moved with her and came to squat in front of a deck with a card that depicted a swimming woman. She had blue hair, and eyes as white as a sandy shoal. Water wrapped itself around her hands and arms like veils of cloth, and she played with a crab drifting across the surface of the water.

“This is our Tides of Enchantment deck,” Em said. “Really focuses around bouncing as many cards as possible and keeping yourself in the game with auras like Replenish and Resurgence.”

(25) Archsiren of the Depths Bursting

Your foe must pay 5 Life to declare an attack with each of their revenants.

At the end of your turn, your foe loses 5 Life.

Replenish, Resurgence 4 >>>

This card had Tay jumping up and down on the balls of his feet, because he could only imagine the possibilities of endlessly taxing an opponent each time they attacked. How much closer would Rantho have been to losing if he’d have had to pay 5 Life each time he’d swung? Tay might’ve won just like that.

Suddenly, all his late nights tossing and turning in his cot, all while trying to come up with how he might’ve played differently against Rantho, didn’t matter. The answers to beating the Polamund weren’t in what Tay could’ve done instead—they were here, in this new deck that had different ways of winning a game of Runicka.

Em kept showing him different custom decks, and Tay kept getting more and more excited. It was all so overwhelming that by the time they’d reached the sixth custom deck, he’d already forgotten what the third had been. He bounced back and forth a lot, unsure of which one he wanted.

All in all, Em showed him ten decks that she thought would do him well, though by the end of it, Tay was no closer to deciding which cards he wanted than when they’d started. He kept coming back to the Tides of Enchantment deck. He could just picture how this Archsiren of the Depths could’ve turned the tides against Rantho, so to speak.

“If you’re a fan of control decks, you should ask her to show you Will of the Warlock.”

Tay looked to his left to find that the man named Atro had come to join him, leaning casually on the glass counter. He seemed friendly enough, though Tay noticed that a subtle pungent odor followed the man over. It wasn’t bad—just very noticeable up close.

Em rolled her eyes. “We do not call it that.”

“You don’t call it anything. You’re just sitting on my decklist and letting it collect dust.”

“Maybe if you won a tournament with it, I wouldn’t have to?”

“I’m sorry,” Tay interrupted. “Will of the Warlock?”

“Ignore him,” Em said.

Atro shot a grin over at him and raised his brow twice, and Tay then said, “Seems a bit hard to do at this point. Why isn’t that deck out here with the rest of them?”

“Because we only showcase premade custom decks that have actually won tournaments here, and though Atro’s submitted the list, he’s yet to win with it.”

“Win here with it,” Atro said. “Get him the cards, Em. Come on—couldn’t hurt, right?” And while she was reluctantly doing that amidst the piles of cards behind her, Atro turned to Tay and said, “You’ll love it. I built the deck around debuffing and hard removal. Super control.”

Em returned with a stack of inky black-glowing cards, and plopped them down on the glass counter with spiteful nonchalance. Tay was a little unnerved by the fact that these were Chaos cards—just like the ones that Rantho played. But he supposed he’d used Chaos cards in his duel too, so they couldn’t all be as terrible those Gargoyle revenants.

No sooner had Tay picked them up than a warm tingling sensation crawled all the way up through his arm to nestle against the nape of his neck. He turned the cards over and beheld the bottommost card.

(5) Apprentice of the Warlock Stable

Shout: reduce target foe revenant’s Power by half until the end of the turn (rounded down).

Uproar: add Warlock of Midnight Darkness from your deck or Oblivion to your hand.

< 2

The art showed a robed figure with her hood off, black locks flowing all around her head. In her left hand, she held a glowing skull, and she wielded a curved dagger in her right. Some markings were across the ground all around her, and she looked to be up to some mischief.

Tay rather liked some mischief. She had the very same look he always made whenever he was in the middle of a plunder.

As if his own excitement wasn’t enough, in the back of his mind, Tay heard, Yesssss…

That made him shudder all over, as if a cold had suddenly come over him. But quite the opposite actually happened. Something was burning in his pant’s right pocket. Before he could attend to it, something then slammed against his back.

“Oh, what’s this? Find a deck, did we?”

Mond loomed over him, his good hand against Tay’s back and wide smile breaking across his face. He gave Em a nod, and then peered down at the card in Tay’s hand.

“A Chaos deck, I see. Are you sure you want to go with that? I’ve always been a fan of Order decks myself. They may be a bit slower, but they’re more reliable.”

“Actually,” Atro said, jumping in. “This is a control Chaos deck. I made it myself, Mond. Also, hello, by the way. My name’s Atrofek.”

Mond shook the man’s hand in his own giant ones and then shot Em a sidelong glance. “He made the deck. Has it won any tournaments or can we get this one at a bargain price?”

“It’s technically not one of our premades,” Em said. “But if you want to buy it, we can work out a price—lower than the usuals, but higher than anything provided by the Runic Council.”

Mond gave that a nod and then turned to Tay. “So, how about it? Want this one? I’m happy to pay for one of the tournament-proven decks too, kid. Whatever you fancy, I’m buying. It’s the least I can do for you sticking up for me and doing such a fine job around the shop.”

Tay looked back down at the inky cards glowing in his hands. Should he go with the Tides of Enchantment? That was an Order deck and Mond preferred Order.

But Tay, for better or for worse, knew he was a creature of chaos. He hadn’t fallen into Duskborough out of careful planning and execution. No, he’d come here on a whim and met Mond by chance. Chaos had brought him the only people in his life who’d stood up for him without personal gain. And so, Chaos it would be.

“I want this one,” Tay said, and smiled at Mond.

Mond smiled back and then turned to Em, saying, “It’ll be that one then. And you might as well throw in a deck box while we’re at it too. Oh, and he’s going to need to be registered.”

Tay furrowed his brow. “Registered?”

“You said you wanted to get better. Well, you’re going to have to compete in tournaments, and for that, you’re going to need your registration in order.”

Tay wasn’t sure what Mond meant by that, but after he and Em negotiated a final price for the Will of the Warlock deck, his deck box, and whatever registration might entail, Em called him over and then handed him another card.

This one was made entirely out of a thin but unbendable sheet of metal—all entirely bronze. On one side was a sword that pointed up, and yet was broken halfway down the blade. It seemed unassuming and entirely pointless, aside from looking mysterious.

The other side had four large circles—two against the top corners and two more below them in the middle. Underneath those were five more smaller circles lined up in a single row at the bottom. There was nothing else, and no way to intuitively understand what anything meant.

But apparently Atro knew exactly what it meant, because before Mond had finished handing off his coin to Em, he’d thrown and arm around Tay and spun him about.

“I can’t tell you how happy I am that you went with my deck, and you’re going to be playing in tournaments here! Oh, we’re going to tear this house down at the next tournament. If you need any pointers, look no further.

“Ah, but what am I saying? Why would the man who faced a Polamund need my sort of help? Regardless, welcome to Bronze 5!”