Bib had only missed a summer of schooling, and had learned plenty of things during his adventure across Inter, so it hadn’t felt like a waste at all. He had slept under the stars and moons, raced his bird as fast as it would go, and done a hundred things that all the other children his age hadn’t. Traeg’s Knob didn’t have all that many other children, but he regaled them with stories about bards and druids, airships and walking houses, mad sorcerers and stoic chrononauts.

School was, comparatively, pretty boring. His teacher tried her best, but Bib’s heart just wasn’t in it, and her efforts to relate the subject matter to his adventures fell on deaf ears. Besides, there were all sorts of things that he knew about the world, having traveled the breadth of the province and seen so much of its people and magic. He didn’t need a lesson on the importance of the hex, he’d been through dozens of hexes.

Traeg’s Knob was boring. The highlight of the year was sledding down the big hill, done with the use of the hex warp so there was no issue of hiking back to the top. It was an enviable arrangement, and people came in from all around to partake, which was a fresh injection of friends for Bib, who spent a lot of his time milling about at the top of the hill. He had a small stall near Hill House where he sold cider, which people took with eager mittened hands, partly to warm themselves rather than to taste the sweet spiced apple.

Bib hadn’t come away from his house-guiding empty handed. He’d have done it just for the meals they fed him, or maybe just for the experience, but Alfric had been generous, and Bib had been given six entads over the course of the trip, which was absurdly generous even if none of them were particularly powerful. The best of them was a necklace that flipped around temperatures so that a hot day would feel chilly and a cold day would feel sweltering. Bib could go bare-chested in the winter, feeling almost feverish, letting the snow touch his hot skin and cool him down. He wasn’t sure quite how it worked, but he was the only one shirtless on the hill, and sometimes jumped straight into the snow piles just to show off that he could.

Alfric had also given Bib a sword, one that had the nature of Bixzotl and could double and triple up a cut, multiplying it. All Bib needed to do was make one good cut, then tap the hilt with his thumb, and the cuts would keep on coming. Bib mostly used it as an axe, winding up a single big swing and then tapping away until the tree was felled, which took basically no work at all. In his off hours, when he wasn’t forced to be at school, he was a bit of a lumberjack, though he was really only chopping down trees for other people to take away. It made him a few rings though.

It wasn’t until two years later that Bib realized that maybe Alfric had been setting him up to do dungeons. You weren’t supposed to do dungeons until you were older, but especially out in the country, kids often snuck in early. There were locks on the dungeons, but they were pretty easy to get past, if you couldn’t just steal or borrow a key from someone.

Bib did his first and only dungeon at thirteen, the one in Traeg’s Knob. There weren’t enough local kids for it, so he’d poached from Pucklechurch and Pate Knob. Because of his presence at the sledding hill in the winter and riding his bird all around the region, he had plenty of contacts, and had formed not just a party but a whole guild, which gave him the title of Guildmaster even though he didn’t do a whole lot.

He was the only one with armor, another gift from Alfric, so he went first, his gifted sword drawn and held unsteadily in front of him. The armor was a bunch of wires that extended from a brooch and wrapped around his limbs, though they moved just as easily as cloth. There were so many gaps that Bib didn’t really trust it, but Alfric had said that it would take a hit or two.

The first animals died easily, barely giving Bib a scratch, and they picked up an entad for the trouble, a platter that Bib was selfishly hoping would bind to him instead of the others. He was doing most of the work, but he was their leader, so that was fine. He thought Alfric probably did most of the work in their dungeons too.

It was only the last room that ended up giving them any trouble. There was a bear at the end of it, and as soon as it saw them, it was up on its feet. Bib got out in front of the others and swung his sword at the bear’s face, making a gash, but the bear turned toward Bib with a snarl. It opened its mouth wide and Bib saw a small light nestled within the yellowed teeth before flame erupted out of it in a huge gout that bathed Bib.

It took Bib a moment to realize that he wasn’t dead, just chilled to the bone. He’d known that the necklace worked, but hadn’t realized that it worked that well, turning unimaginable fire into a bitterly cold winter day. He was surprised that he wasn’t frozen solid, but before he could think about that, the bear was after him.

Bib tapped the sword’s hilt as he retreated, frantically using the magic. The bear breathed out fire again, but this time some of it sprayed sideways through the deepening cut in his face. The flames hit Bib, and he grew colder still, unable to feel his fingers. The bear's claws swiped through the air and hit the wirework of Bib’s armor, pushing him back onto the ground. There were screams from behind Bib as the rest of the party ran away. He couldn’t feel whether or not his thumb was tapping on the hilt, but he could see the gash getting deeper, and the bear was slowing down, losing blood, dazed and half-blind.

The light in the bear’s mouth came once again, but this time wickered out. The bear slumped, and Bib didn’t stop replicating the cut until it was halfway through the skull.

They were all a bit shaken when they left the dungeon. They’d gotten four entads and a sack full of henlings. They had a platter that could hover a foot off the table, a mug that made things bubbly, a dirk that could be thrown so fast you had to cover your ears to not be deafened by the screaming sound, and a ball of yarn that could knit itself into different clothes. The dirk was cool, but it didn’t seem like enough.

Bib didn’t do another dungeon after that. He saw the bear in his dreams sometimes, and it would burn him to a crisp or freeze him so cold his fingers would snap off. If they had all died in the dungeon, he wasn’t sure what would have happened. They hadn’t told anyone what they were doing, because they knew that they would get in trouble for it. Maybe one of the others had escaped, they would have told an adult, and then a chrononaut would have undone it, but that wasn’t guaranteed.

One of the other boys that had been in the party, Chance, hadn’t really thought it was all that bad. He formed a new dungeon party, and every time they went and did another dungeon, Bib kept thinking that those idiots were going to get themselves killed. That never happened, but it caused a rift that eventually tore the guild apart, especially since it added to all the other drama that a guild of teenagers was bound to have.

When Bib turned fourteen, something grimly inevitable happened: puberty. Bib shot up like a weed over the summer, and though he was still able to ride his bird, it was clearly more of a strain for the creature than it had been before. He’d been all over Greater Plenarch with that bird, not just the trip west, but in other wanderings he’d done, including a tour around the eastward coast of Lake Gornorian. You weren’t supposed to name a riding bird, though Bib didn’t quite know why, and late in the trip to Plenarch, he’d given the bird a private name of Charlie, which he’d never told to anyone but Charlie.

Riding birds weren’t born big, they were made that way by clerics of Xuphin, and had a few different problems that came with that, mostly strain on the heart and the joints. Bib had loved having a riding bird, but he also had a deep affection for Charlie, and couldn’t put more strain on the creature. For a time, he tried using floatstones, but it made the riding more difficult for both of them, and it clearly wasn’t a good long-term solution. When he’d bought the floatstones, the ectad dealer had laughed and said that lots of young boys tried them. He’d ended up selling the stones back at a slight loss.

At age fifteen, Bib retired from bird riding, and fell into a deep funk. He’d sold Charlie off to a cousin who was eight years old and light as a feather, and he’d shown her how to ride the bird, along with giving instructions on how to care for it and its particular quirks — Charlie was afraid of worms unless they were dead and sundried. She had given a yip and rode Charlie off into the sunset, and that was the last Bib ever saw of his faithful companion. A riding bird could live to be forty years old, and Bib hadn’t been its first owner, but he imagined that the time he’d spent with Charlie had been the best years of Charlie’s life. They certainly felt like they would be the best years of Bib’s life.

When he was sixteen and practically an adult, Bib got an apprenticeship in Liberfell working as a mail carrier. Within a year, he had his own route, one which took him all over the hex and sometimes outside it, but most of the long-distance mail and packages were handled by cartiers or entads. He started going by his given name, Bibiano, and started dressing with more care and consideration, which was at least partly to impress one of the other mail carriers. She was a year older than him and had a real energy to her that he couldn’t help but like. The first time they’d met, she’d challenged him to a race, which she’d won pretty handily. She learned that his nickname had once been Bib, and she often called him that in a teasing way. Eventually, the nickname he had shed stuck to him once again, but he didn’t mind it.

On his eighteenth birthday, the Settlers and some of their family members came to pay him a visit. Alfric sent letters pretty regularly, one every six months, usually pretty short nothing-letters that Bib only occasionally responded to. He imagined that Alfric had a whole list of people and their addresses, and when the calendar said to, he would spend half an hour firing off another letter to them. There wasn’t all that much that was personal, except for a few updates on what was going on in Alfric’s life. Bib’s replies were similarly perfunctory, short one-page summaries that didn’t touch on what was really going on — the feeling that he was just going to end up being a mail carrier forever, which wouldn’t have been so bad, if that’s what he wanted to be.

It was strange to see them in the flesh. They had seemed very adult to him when he was ten years old, and in spite of the time passing, they now looked younger somehow, like they had gone backward while he’d gone forward. It was difficult to believe that he was now the age Alfric had been during the Plenarch trip.

“We’re here for the day, then going to Pucklechurch,” said Alfric. He’d explained most of this by letter. “Most of us haven’t been there in years, and the kids wanted to see where their mom grew up.”

There were nine children who were part of ‘the kids’, with most of them seeming to belong to Alfric and Mizuki. The children had been introduced, but that was as much as Bib really interacted with them, and their names hadn’t stuck in his head. One of them, who was five years old, had introduced herself as Bib, which was definitely not her name.

They had a lunchtime meal together, served from entads, and at least for a while, it was like being a small child at their dinner table again. They weren’t just seeing him, they were seeing each other, taking a week to get back together, as the years had seen some of them drifting apart. They didn’t all live together anymore, with Mizuki and Alfric being the only ones in the giant walking house, though they apparently had expanded the place and put in a number of doors that led to other cities across the world.

They weren’t just adults, some of them were important adults. Verity was teaching at the same conservatory in Dondrian where she’d been trained, with her own coursework and training focused on ‘dungeon duets’, the formal name for the technique she had pioneered years earlier. She was famous for that, and for the many songs she’d recorded, which were now being played all over the continent. Bib had recognized more than one of them being played by a half-ring bard at a local tavern. And Alfric was doing something with ‘chrononaut police’, but while he’d said, ‘Mizuki, for the last time, it’s not that’ he hadn’t been able to furnish an explanation that made it sound like it was anything else. Hannah was back in with the Church of Garos, and described herself as a lieutenant to the Plenarch bishop, but Bib didn’t quite know what that meant.

Isra was only there in spirit, which is to say, she was present in the form of an entad that projected a ghostly image of her. The others treated this as normal enough, and Bib tried to too. Isra had apparently had a child not too long ago, and was raising her in the woods so that she too could be a druid. Bib itched to know who the father was, but she didn’t mention it.

“So, have you done any dungeons yet?” Alfric asked toward the end of the meal. “You’re at the right age for it.”

“No, and I don’t think I will,” said Bib. “Dungeons are different now anyway.”

“I’m with the League,” said Alfric. “My role is provincial manager, it’s mostly administrative, making sure everyone gets paid. I could put in a word for you, if you’d like. There are always people looking for an extra.”

“I actually did a dungeon when I was younger,” said Bib. “I didn’t really have a taste for it.”

That had led to questions, and eventually Bib had described the dungeon to them and the bear that had nearly cost him his life. Alfric’s face was set after that, and for a moment, Bib thought he was disappointed, which was strangely crushing. They had sparred together on occasion, and Bib had learned a lot — but apparently not enough.

“The locks and keys system is badly in need of overhaul,” said Alfric. “Especially with the duet system, dungeons aren’t what they once were. We need to get a handle on that.”

Mizuki sighed. “The long ago old days of eight years ago,” she said.

“It’s unpopular,” said Verity. “I got a particularly nasty letter the other day, and a few months ago, there was that scathing letter to the editor in The Register.”

“It’s unpopular to a specific sort of person,” said Alfric. “Or a few specific types.” He turned to Bib. “When you almost died, did you wish that you had been stopped from going into the dungeons? That people had been more responsible.”

“I don’t know,” Bib shrugged. “I was scared out of my mind, and if I hadn’t had the necklace and the armor, I’d have been toast.”

“Nah,” said Hannah. “Burns are hard to come back from, and can kill easily, but there was probably less danger than you’re thinking. There’s somethin’ that happens to the skin, makes it hard to burn if it’s just a flash of fire.”

“Could have fooled me,” said Bib, shrugging again.

“You could go in with a bard,” said Alfric. “There’s not much danger there, even if they’re one of Verity’s freshly minted dungeoneers.”

“There’s more danger than we’d like,” said Verity. She was frowning slightly. “In another five years, there will be people who actually know the technique and know how to teach it, gods willing.”

“Most can’t do it,” said Bib.

“That is what the papers say,” said Verity. “Top quartile. Pinion doesn’t really agree with that, but it’s complicated, I guess.”

That led into a complicated conversation that Bib didn’t entirely follow as Alfric, Verity, and surprisingly, Mizuki, all traded opinions, or maybe had an argument with each other. It was a question of the ultimate future of dungeoneering, and what that might mean, and it was so far beyond him that he would have frozen in place if they asked his opinion. It sort of seemed like they didn’t know either, but Alfric thought it likely there would be a two-tiered system.

The lunch came to an end, and Bib thought that would probably be it, that this would be the last he’d ever see of them, unless they made a regular thing of coming to visit. They had one last surprise in store for him though: a pair of birthday gifts.

“There’s this,” said Alfric, handing over a leather bag. “It’s waterproof and rugged, but the real treat is the interior.”

“This is … landcraft?” asked Bib, taking it carefully.

“Laundoncraft,” said Alfric with a nod. “Look inside.”

Bib looked in. It was cavernous, and he almost dropped it. He knew almost nothing about laundoncraft, aside from the fact that it had been brought into the world by one of the bastlefolk, one of three ancient magics that had been uncovered in that way.

“How do I get things out?” asked Bib, whose mind had gone to letters.

“You just think about whatever you want,” said Alfric. “The intent aspect is very difficult, and it won’t work correctly all the time, but it should be good enough, especially with properly labeled mail.”

“Thank you,” said Bib.

“The other gift is a bit … more,” said Alfric. He looked over at Verity.

She stood and pulled out a lute, and with a single strum of it, a huge animal appeared next to her. It took Bib a moment to recognize it, since he’d been out of the picture not long after the party got them, and it had been eight years during which all kinds of things had happened. It was a horse, with a brown mane and four long legs.

“You can say no,” said Alfric, almost before Bib had a chance to take it in. “There are some costs associated with it, though I’ll cover most of them, and it’ll be work, but I know how much you liked riding the bird when you were little, and how much you didn’t like giving that up. So you can say no, and we’ll take it back, but the breeding program is going well and this is a good use case.”

“He wanted you to have it,” said Mizuki.

Bib moved closer to the creature. It was looking at him with large brown eyes, and didn’t seem terribly impressed. There was already a saddle on its back, hard worked leather and a bridle, part of which was in its mouth, which was totally different from what you used for a bird’s beak.

“How do I touch it?” asked Bib.

“Gentle stroking and petting, no patting,” said Isra’s spirit. “There’s a blind spot in its front, and it won’t like it if you approach from there. Try to be to one side, so it can see you. And stay away from the back, those legs can kick hard enough to kill a man.”

Bib slowly and softly touched the horse’s side as it watched him. The fur was surprisingly soft.

“There’s a lot you’d need to learn,” said Alfric. “The horse has been with the bastlekeeper here. He’s a bit of a friend from when we were here, and he’s been trained on care and feeding over the last two weeks.”

“Turns out you can’t just give someone a horse,” said Mizuki. “It’s gotta be a whole thing. Who knew?”

“Thank you,” said Bib, turning to Alfric. His eyes were drawn back to the horse.

“You can ride him,” said Alfric. “We can find a field, and I can give you some pointers. We all ride, actually.”

“We can ride,” said Mizuki. “I would rather fly, personally.”

The riding lesson took some time, but by the end of it, Bib had no intention of giving the horse back. Alfric had offered to pay for all the costs involved, but Bib would have moved mountains to have the horse, whether that meant selling his possessions or going into the dungeons for some quick and easy money.

It took a surprisingly long time to learn how to ride, but Bib was at it almost every day with Perrin, the bastlekeeper. In spite of the training that Perrin had gone through, as well as his long and storied career in Liberfell, it was a bit of an education for the both of them. Perrin had designs on breeding horses, though wasn’t particularly interested in riding one.

After a month, Bib was doing everything with confidence, the mounting and dismounting done without any hesitation or help, and he could finally ride the horse to make his rounds and deliver mail. It was like riding a bird, but also totally different, the horse being a more stately animal, larger and more imposing. There was such a feeling of height being on top of a horse, and when the horse was made to run, it was a feeling like riding thunder.

There was one unexpected aspect of having the horse: it made Bib realize that he didn’t want to spend his life in Liberfell.

He sold off almost everything he owned, broke up with the letter carrier (who had seen it coming from a mile off), bought discount dungeoneering equipment, and hit the road. He wasn’t quite sure where he was going, but he found himself moving north, partly to escape the worst of the coming winter. He’d named the horse Charlie, after his old bird, which was stupid, but the great thing about having a private name for an animal was that no one could judge it.

People stopped and stared at the animal, and Bib was reminded so much of his time shepherding the house that the nostalgia was almost painful. He slept out under the stars, or with a small tent, always pitching up on a farmer’s land so Charlie could graze. He went to taverns and asked what there was to see in the area, and saw local sights, often rare bits of magic that were either a long-ago dungeon escape or some quirk of the local landscape.

There wasn’t any real purpose to the travel, so in that respect it was different from guiding the house.

Bib made it halfway across the continent before he started to feel lonely. There was Charlie, naturally, but a horse was about as good a companion as a bird, which was a polite way of saying that the conversation was a bit lacking.

He got good at making friends, though most of them didn’t last for more than a day before he was off to somewhere else. He’d scratch the surface, get the general gist of them, share some drinks and food, and sometimes tell them about the wider world. The people in small towns were always hungry for that kind of thing, even if they didn’t necessarily want to leave their homes.

Money became a bit of an issue. He only really needed food for himself, since the horse could graze, but there was only so much he could depend on the kindness of strangers, and it was one thing to be a wanderer, but another thing entirely to be a destitute wanderer. If he’d had the rings for it, he’d have bought a food entad before setting off, but being a mail carrier hadn’t paid well enough. He sent off a letter to Alfric, mostly asking for advice, and Alfric had come back with a job offer: there was a dungeon party in need of extra help.

Bib felt a bit awkward joining up with the counterparty, which was just him and two others, a redheaded boy of fifteen and a bespectacled girl of twenty. The boy was a ‘camp hand’ and the girl was their accountant, and they were making a spiral around their home base in Morrium.

Bib’s job was mostly to deal with all the stuff that was being pulled out of the dungeons. The adventuring party were all a bit younger than Bib, but not by much, and they were a part of the new breed of dungeoneers. Their bard was one of Verity’s students, and everyone else was from a new branch of the Junior League, one which was specifically designed for supporting this new style of dungeons rather than directly fighting dungeon monsters and dealing with traps. There was still some of that, given that the dungeons couldn’t be confirmed totally safe, and sometimes it took a bard a long time to get a handle on the technique.

“I actually spent a lot of time waiting outside of dungeons when I was little,” Bib said to Eternity as they waited at camp. It had been a few days, enough time for him to get the lay of the land and do the first bits of actual labor, which didn’t amount to much.

“Oh?” she asked. She was idly leafing her way through a book, but had said that it wasn’t very good, which Bib hoped meant that she didn’t mind him trying to talk. She was sardonic by nature, but in a way he found charming, and she had particularly beautiful eyes.

“I was sort of in a counterparty when I was ten,” said Bib. “In the sense that I was following around a party and doing very minor amounts of work for them. I actually think maybe I was in the way more than I was helping.”

Eternity put her book down. “You were hired when you were ten?”

“Yeah,” said Bib. He smiled. “Best time of my life.”

Eternity rolled her eyes and picked the book back up.

“What was that for?” asked Bib.

Eternity sighed and then set her book down and looked him in the eyes. “You’re nineteen years old,” she said. “It wasn’t the best time of your life, it was the best time of your life so far.”

“I don’t know,” said Bib. He was using a brush on Charlie’s back. “There’s got to be some time in your life that’s the best, doesn’t there? And why shouldn’t that be when you’re a kid? I had no responsibilities, I rode around on a bird all the time, and I went shirtless.”

“You have one responsibility now, which is helping me to move everything,” said Eternity. “You ride around on a horse instead of a bird, and there’s nothing stopping you from going shirtless.”

Bib took off his shirt.

“I didn’t mean like that,” she sighed, but she was blushing slightly. “All I’m saying is that there’s nothing stopping you from living that life now, if you want, and you practically are living that life — so long as you help me, which is really only a few hours a day, if that.”

Bib considered this. “I want to have adventures,” he said.

“Adventure is a mindset,” replied Eternity.

Bib considered this too. “Is it?”

Eternity put her book down again, and at least a little bit of her annoyance seemed forced to him, like she was trying to look annoyed. She looked at his chest for a moment, then up at his eyes. “Adventure can be small things. It can be having a new and different breakfast you’ve never had before. It can be a new book, meeting a new person, going on a date.”

“Do you want to go on a date?” asked Bib.

She sighed and brushed her hair from her face. “We’re in the counterparty, we’re supposed to be professionals.”

“That’s kind of how the professionals do it,” said Bib. “In my experience.”

“What would a date even be?” asked Eternity.

“An adventure?” asked Bib.

She rolled her eyes, but she was grinning. “Fine, one date. And if it goes poorly, which it probably will, then you can’t let it get in the way of the counterparty stuff. We still need to work together.”

“One date,” smiled Bib.

It probably was a terrible idea, but so was going in a dungeon, and between the two, he would much rather leave the dungeons to someone else.