The descent into the well is quiet, the way deep places often are. Stone walls press close, stitched with old sigils and the marks of others who have passed this way. Eileen moves with steady certainty, Audry close behind her, their footsteps muffled against the worn stone until the passage opens into a chamber not yet sure of its own shape. They are back where Eileen had first found the two of them.
But this time the altar chamber has not finished becoming what it was meant to be. It holds its breath instead, like a room caught mid-curtsy, walls unsure whether to complete the gesture or collapse entirely. The stones underfoot are warm, but uncertain. Lines once etched with purpose now flicker like memory trying to recall itself, while sigils half born melt across the walls, names unwriting themselves even as they appear.
In the middle of room sits a mural that pulses gently, like a skipped heartbeat. Painted faces oscillate between joyful caricature and eyeless voids. A chest in the corner shivers through forms, first golden, then rotten, then something between, as if wood and treasure cannot agree on what a reward should look like.
The air is thick with the scent of unsettled incense, as if someone tried to finish a prayer and then forgot what they were asking for.
Audry follows behind Eileen, but instead of confidence she walks with the practiced lightness of someone who has long mistaken vigilance for virtue. Her steps are exact, reverent in their caution, not fearful but conditioned, the way a child might set the table in a house where silence is the loudest rule. Squeezing Eileen’s hand, Audry glances toward the altar, not with dread but with expectation. As if expecting the altar to speak, as if it might say words that would make the altar feel kinder this time.
But Eileen does not stop at the same altar where Audry hesitates. Instead, she approaches the panel on the back wall, which lights up when she nears. Not gloriously, nor grandly, but with a flicker, like a machine unsure if it has been summoned.
"Insert Proper Offering?" the wall panel asks, in letters made of softly buzzing light.
"Unknown Echo Detected. Reconfigure Reward System?"
"Token Recognition Failed. Restart y/n?"
Eileen stands still for a moment, head tilted, eyes scanning the half formed runes and the twitching user interface. It reminds her of a catalog sales order form, but with the presence of a hum like a refrigerator that has forgotten what cold means. She decides then to smile, not at it, but through it, the way one smiles at a child mid tantrum.
She pulls a handkerchief from her pocket. White with clover embroidery, the green faded gently at the edges from many washings. She smooths it out without ceremony and places it on the altar behind her with both hands, as if setting a table for someone who hasn’t earned dinner but will be fed anyway.
Her voice is quiet, not commanding, not pleading, just honest with truth. "No child owes you a debt," she says.
The system spasms. Its softly buzzing interface shudders, pausing halfway through a flicker of light, uncertain of the handkerchief's appropriateness. One icon, the bleeding crown painted above the altar, darkens all at once, as though ink has spilled inward. Then, like a cascade of failures, the mural glitches. A dozen smiling faces blink on for a moment before disappearing, and the whole interface winks out.
And then the motes come into the altar room from the direction Eileen and Audry had come.
They drift in slowly, like seeds on a still morning breeze. White and blue mainly, calm and precise, each one moving as if it already knows where it wants to go. Their target is the handkerchief for reasons unknown, and they gather around it in a kind of bumping, orbiting dance before simply waiting, like humans hoping a star might one day become a constellation to guide them through the centuries of night.
Until a brown mote drifts forward and brushes the handkerchief.
A low sound curls through the floor. Not a tone, not quite. More like a skipped beat, a hesitation in the breathing of the world.
+1 Brown Mote: Offering Rejected
Sacrifice Pathway: Suspended
System Authority: Conflicting
Thread Stability: -2.6%
Audry stands beside Eileen now. She has not touched the altar, but she watches the motes, mouth slightly open. The interface on the wall stutters briefly back to life, drawing Eileen's gaze. Her eyes pass over the motes without reaction, finally convincing Audry that Eileen cannot see them. The interface blinks several more times, the outline of the chest warping again and again, never resolving.
Audry’s voice is soft, more breath than sound. "See? It remembers us."
Eileen gives Audry a small smile before gently walking away. Behind them, the altar does not reset. Instead, it waits. Like something trying to recall a song it was told it was never meant to forget.
There is a protocol for this.
He recites it in his head without moving his lips.
In the event of system flicker, initiate containment.
In the event of white mote emergence, prioritize sacred scripture
In the event of anomaly drift...
He doesn’t finish that one, no caretaker ever has for The Ninth Binding never provided it in full.
A single mote floats near the ceiling, pale and steady, humming with no sound and no visible source. White means observation, or whiteness, or so the sacrament commands. White means ritual audits. White means they are being seen today, and the children never survive being seen.
William does not panic. He pivots instead, retrieving the first child. Axel, age six, compliant, quick to freeze, one of the better dungeon products. He lifts Axel from his cot and folds him gently into the chute, sealing the latch with a linen scrap dipped in ward oil, and pressing the stone button above it with a hand that does not tremble. No words, no comfort. For there is already comfort in procedure, performed precisely, as any caretaker must.
The white mote drifts left, no faster than breath, tracing the old beam line above the beds. Three older goblin children catch William’s eye. He gestures urgently toward the sacred chute. They disobey, scattering instead, one vanishing under the floor grate, one slipping behind the offerings rack, one disappearing into the disused gallery shaft. He counts each shadow as it flees. He had wanted the best for them, but he would not force them to listen. They did not understand that intruders could never be reasoned with. So he focuses on the ones he can save, moving quickly, helping nearly all of them into the chute.
Until the air thickens.
It is not a change in temperature, but in texture, a wrongness coating the back of his tongue like old wax. He lights a ward candle immediately, the flame guttering against unseen pressure, and scrawls a glyph for boundary at the edge of the camp. The chalk skips and stutters, the wall rejecting his claim. Intruders always did this, they solidified the edges of dungeon spaces, made the unreal, too real, too fast.
Another mote enters, blue this time. Clarity, as the sacrament foretells. The blue mote slows above a partially carved prayer, lingering for a long moment before turning away.
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One mote was bad.
Two was worse.
Rushing to his cot, William pulls a dagger from beneath his pillow, along with a vial of reddish black ink harvested from himself. On the floor, he carves the sigil’s frame with the blade, then begins to trace the Binding Blessing. The first line falters, too much ink pooling in the grooves, nearly incomplete. The second line holds, barely, the kind of sickly belief that registers only in forgotten places. The third unravels mid-mark, the glyph splitting apart as the ink resists the stone. He clenches his jaw, forces his hand steady, and begins again.
The fourth line was never meant to be spoken aloud. He breathes it anyway, scraping the sound raw from memory.
He is interrupted before he can finish.
+1 White Mote: Fear Witnessed
+1 Blue Mote: Memory Echoed
William looks up, his gangly green body recoiling. The single white and single blue mote have both doubled. Worse was becoming terrible, there were now four motes in the room, humming softly in accusation.
User Tag: "Caretaker" → Conflict
Emergent Role Flagged: "Warden"
“Warden!” he says too quickly, voice cracking in horror. Warden had been deprecated many system cycles ago. It was no longer a role, except in memory.
"I'm a category error?" he whispers, as if saying it aloud might undo it.
Scrambling, he begins yelling across the camp, forcing the remaining goblins toward the chutes, even the ones who try to hide. Urgency tightening into something closer to fury as he works, a terrible momentum he cannot stop. But the goblins move slowly, blank-eyed and unafraid.
Because they do not remember that invaders always choose violence and not the ritualistically gentle kind.
The Hall of Instruction does not hide what it is. It does not need to.
The stone walls glow with cheerful certainty, painted in warm, chalky hues. Sunny yellows, safety blues, soft greens chosen by someone who believed that color could conceal cruelty. The murals stretch from floor to ceiling, drawn in the style of a child's picture book but curated with the precision of a punishment schedule.
Audry walks just ahead, her steps light, her face open. She moves like someone returning to a sacred place. Her fingers trail along the outline of a smiling goblin child painted beside an altar slick with old scarlet red. The altar is stylized, cartoonish, like a toy. The blood red 'Water...' is stylized too, curving neatly into a swirling heart.
"That one teaches you how to smile when you're picked," Audry says, her voice calm, almost proud. "The orders always make the best choices. And when the lights stay on in the camp, that means an order was followed and it worked."
Eileen does not flinch, she is too practiced for that. Her face instead remains soft, thoughtful. She stops beside another mural, this one showing a procession of small green figures, each carrying an empty bowl, each vanishing one by one into a chute shaped like a treasure chest with eyes and the narrow ridges of a mouth. Audry stands beside her, pointing helpfully. "That's the lesson for tribute delivery. It's done many times a cycle."
Eileen nods, slow as tidewater. "I see." She does not say what she sees, because Audry does not need to hear the horror resting silent on her lips. Eileen has questions, of course, but the conversation is better left to those who have aged. What Audry sees as survival, costumed in joy, Eileen recognizes as rituals built to train grief into compliance. She sees mantras taught like math problems, follow the steps, and all will be made right.
Near the far end of the hall, one mural flickers, the stone beneath it pulsing faintly. A goblin child drawn with a bright purple smile pauses mid-motion. Its cartoonish smile widened, brows elongated all wrong and it stays like this until the bright purple smile begins to cry. The altar beside it fades, its colors dulling into the shade of an old bruise.
Audry blinks, watching the change. She does not speak, but her fingers curl into Eileen’s palm. Still, Eileen does not name the horror nor does she push Audry for information. Children should not be asked to carry their revelations too early. She knows how easily truth can become another stone tied around the neck until one eventually sinks their own ship.
Audry walks a few more steps, slower now. She stops before a final mural showing a goblin child offering a wrapped object to a tall, shadowy figure whose eyes glow with shifting script. The child’s smile is wide, too wide, fabricated.
Audry murmurs, almost to herself, "When the Crown bleeds, we kneel and smile, so Father won't be lonely."
Eileen breathes in and holds it. Some lessons are harder to outgrow. She reaches out, not to the wall, but to Audry, resting a light hand on her shoulder. She offers no correction, no denial, only presence. Audry misses the reason for it, missing the soft sorrow in Eileen’s steadied grip. "They gave us extra honey bread when one of us did it right," Audry says, almost brightly. "So... it couldn't have been bad, right?"
Behind them, a blank wall shifts into a new mural. A child who once held a blade now holds bread, their smile diming into confusion as one of the goblins behind them vanishes in the mural. Overhead, the light flickers once, soft and slow, and the system records the deviation without comment.
+3 Blue Motes: Ritual Reinterpretation Logged
+1 Green Mote: Potential Paradigm Shift Detected
SYSTEM QUERY: Who gives permission for one to change?
William moves quickly now, deeper into the oldest tunnels, the hallway narrowing into a hush so complete that he moves through the passage like a pilgrim and a trespasser both. His steps echo too loudly, each footfall a small betrayal of some unspoken agreement. This was not a space meant for caretakers, nor wardens, nor elders. It was likely that the last to wander these halls had been the Quills, either their enforcers or scribes, those charged with keeping the oldest laws unbroken.
Above him, the walls scroll their truths in perfect rhythm, the script carved deep into the stone and humming faintly with authority.
OBEDIENCE IS EVIDENCE.
ONE MUST NOT SPEAK IF ONE IS TO LEARN.
WHEN IN DOUBT, PREPARE THE CHEST.
MERCY IS A MALFUNCTION.
He stops under the last commandment, the words pulsing once, faintly, like a muscle twitching beneath bruised skin. Then they pulse again, irregular, unsettled. He frowns because commandments are not meant to shift. They are carved to endure and yet the wall ripples regardless.
MERCY IS A MALFUNCTION.
MERCY IS A MALFUN...
MERCY IS A
MERCY IS
MERCY...
The words regress, stuttering into uncertainty, as if reconsidering the scripture of the Ninth. William backs away slowly, boots scuffing old ritual lines that still hum faintly underfoot. His heart thrums like a system flag caught in recursive conflict. He forces himself to move again, even as the lights flicker overhead, guiding him deeper. The corridor finally ends in a door older than most names, marked in the ancient script of the Ninth Binding. William speaks the access code aloud, the words falling from his lips like a confession of sin.
The vault opens with a hiss.
Inside, they wait. Not hounds, not truly. Just shapes wearing the idea of hounds, bone limbed and skin stitched, their heads split by the scars of blessed scripture. Breath steams from mouths shaped like broken sigils, and their eyes flicker with command glyphs, all pre written, all patient, all waiting for the signal.
Holding his breath, William throws himself down and to the side, knowing he cannot control what they target or what they choose to seek. He begs the Dawkith Lorth for salvation, even as the shapes leap past him, locking not onto scent but onto something older and deeper, deviation. They rush into the tunnel, hunger sharpened by ritual command.
They move without hesitation, not tracking scent but structure. For deviation is not a smell, it is an errant pattern, a wrongness written too warm, too near, too ready to do anything other than obey. And the pattern ahead is wrong, warm, humming.
They race forward as a group, shapes sharpened for destruction, but what waits for them in the dim corridor is not prey. It is recognition, old and unlooked for, the flicker of a memory buried deeper than bone. They find instead emotional motes, not bound by scripture or sacrament or commandments, not corrupted by a dungeon forced to heel to notions of obedience it no longer fully understands. And so they find themselves slowing before the hunt has even truly begun.
The first shape falters mid-leap, confusion burning through its command script like a fever too severe to ignore. It vanishes without cry or collapse, undone not by force but by irrelevance, its purpose forgotten before it touches ground.
The second unravels next. It shudders when a mote brushes close, the barest graze of comfort against the wound where its heart had once been caged. It folds inward, not broken but released, a tether finally cut from a wall that had long since crumbled.
The third tries to howl, but the sound curdles into fractured symbols, scattering across the floor like ash. In its place remains only the hum of the motes, steady, soft, and infinitely patient.
The last shape vanishes mid-leap, undone not by force but by irrelevance, as a mote lingers beside the script where its heart should have been. And if any listening ear had remained in the tunnels, it might have heard it. The half formed sound of a child's laugh, soft as dust, rising from the place where the first shape had vanished.
The system logs each entry of their passing, even as the constructs fray and fail.
+4 Red Motes: Shielding Without Ask
Discrepancy Invalidated
Ritual Purge: Stalled
Local Permission: Revoked
Emotional Archive Updated: Kindness Observed
New Memory Fragment: Acquired
Sub-System Query: "If Deviation Blooms, What Then?"