"Stone dungeon today," Bruce said, without turning.

A pause from the direction of Kael’s bed. Then: "You’ve been up for a while again."

"Yes."

"And you’ve already decided."

"I’m telling you, not asking."

Another pause. "The stone dungeon has mineral-type beasts. Dense cores. Good leather from the carapace types, if you can get it off clean. Bad dungeon for fire." Kael stopped. "Ah."

"You noticed."

"You want to know which essence suits which of us best."

"I want data," Bruce said. "Data before we commit to a long-term hunting pattern. We have a few days before we can afford the spatial rings. We should use them to find out which dungeon types advance us fastest. Then we optimize."

He heard Kael get up. The demon came to the table and looked at the map over Bruce’s shoulder for the second morning in a row, and Bruce did not mind the company.

"Stone dungeon for you will feel like... heavy essence," Kael said. "Mineral-type. Solid, slow, dense. For me it’ll be..." He made a slight face. "Manageable. Not optimal."

"That’s the point. We need to know what not-optimal feels like, so we know what optimal actually is when we find it."

"We already know my optimal is the heat dungeon."

"We know one heat dungeon. There may be variants. There may be a heat dungeon at E-rank that suits you differently. Understanding the principle now means making better decisions later." Bruce traced a finger across the map to the grey marker. "One day there. We see how the beasts are. We see how the essence lands. We bring back a comparable haul to yesterday and compare the exchange values."

Kael nodded slowly. "Fine. Stone dungeon. But if the beasts are ugly I’m registering a complaint."

"With whom?"

"With you."

"Noted."

Theron’s voice came from the bed, muffled slightly: "I’ve been awake for ten minutes listening to you two plan and I just want everyone to know I’m going to have the sweet cakes for breakfast again."

They ate at the same food stall.

The burn-scarred woman had the morning stew ready, and the sweet cakes, and today she had added a third option: a flat grilled cut of beast-meat, thin and crispy at the edges, served with a small dish of something dark and sharp on the side for dipping. Kael ordered all three and ate them in the order he felt like, which was cake first, then the grilled meat, then the stew. Theron ordered the same and ate in the same order, copying Kael with the comfortable ease of someone who had decided to simply follow the most confident person in the room on trivial matters.

Bruce had the stew and the grilled meat. The dipping sauce was excellent. He noted the flavor, not able to name what it was, filing it as another thing Sophie would want to know about.

"I was thinking," Theron said, partway through breakfast, "about yesterday. About what you said. The scythe as a boundary."

Bruce waited.

"I practiced last night. Before I fell asleep. Just in my head. I couldn’t actually call the scythe out in the room without taking your arm off, but I was thinking about the motion. The boundary motion, the shorter arc. And I realized..." He paused, searching for the words. "When I use the scythe as a weapon, I’m attacking. When I use it as a boundary, I’m defining. I’m saying: this space is mine. Nothing in this space that I don’t choose. And the talent responds to that differently."

"How differently?" Bruce asked.

"More. Just... more. Like the talent is happier with the second thing than the first."

"Because a scythe isn’t a sword," Kael said. He had been listening with the quiet attention he deployed when something was more interesting than his surface manner suggested. "A sword is for killing. A scythe is for cutting what’s due. Harvesting. The reaping thing Bruce said." He dipped a piece of grilled meat into the sauce. "A scythe in the hands of someone with that talent might not work best on things that are alive and healthy. It might work best on things that are... due."

Theron looked at him. "Due for what?"

"I don’t know. Due to be reaped. Due to be ended. Due to pass on to the next thing." He shrugged. "I’m a demon, not a philosopher. But that’s the feeling I get."

Theron sat quietly with that for a moment.

Bruce watched the young man’s face and saw the thought land. Not fully, not yet, but the first part of it settling in like the first stone of a foundation. Something about Kael’s words had touched something true. Theron would need time and the right situation to develop it further. Bruce did not push.

"Anyway," Theron said, coming back to his breakfast. "Stone dungeon today."

"Stone dungeon," Bruce confirmed.

"Will there be deer-like things or something different?"

"Something different," Kael said. "Almost certainly."

"Good. I was starting to feel bad about the deer."

"Theron."

"I know, I know. Food and beautiful are the same category."

"Keep telling yourself that until it sticks."

"But the fact that your sword has emotions and you can feel it doesn’t it mean your soul talent is alive?" Bruce suddenly asked Theron.

Theron could only stare blankly as he thought about it.

The walk to the stone dungeon took them through a part of the city Bruce had not yet seen.

North of the heat portal district, the streets narrowed and the buildings grew older. Not damaged. The soul-stone here was as solid as anywhere else in Xiltra. But older in feel, the carvings on the walls worn softer, the street-level stalls replaced in places by permanent shops with heavy doors and small high windows. The souls in this district moved more slowly. More of them were traders rather than hunters, carrying goods between buildings, talking in doorways, loading and unloading the floating carts that moved through the streets in quiet procession.

Kael, walking beside Bruce, pointed at a building whose upper floor glowed with a shifting, internally mobile light. Not the steady glow of a lantern but something alive and variable.

"What’s that?" he asked.

They slowed.

The building’s sign read: Soul-Script Workshop. Inscription, Binding, Enhancement.

Bruce stopped walking.

He had been moving on autopilot, his mind on the dungeon plan, and the sign hit him the way unexpected things sometimes did. Sideways, below the level of planning, at the level of recognition. Soul-script. Writing, in this realm, with soul energy. The kind of writing you bound into objects. Enhancement. Inscription.

His talent was called [Sanare Veritatem]. The name the Guild had recorded was Writer. And he had been using the talent exclusively as an attack medium. Ink bullets, ink constructs, ink tentacles. Because those were the combat applications that had been necessary in the mist and in the dungeons.

But ink was not only a weapon.

Ink wrote.

He stood in front of the workshop for a moment, looking at the shifting light in the upper floor.

"We’ll come back here," he said.

"Shopping?" Kael asked.

"Learning." He turned and kept walking. "Later. Not today."

Kael filed it without pressing. Theron, who had gone ahead a few paces, turned back to see why they had stopped, saw Bruce’s face, and turned forward again without asking.

The stone dungeon’s portal was set into a low stone platform rather than hovering free in the air.

It was noticeably different from the forest and heat portals. The surface of it was darker, more still. Not the dark water of the forest or the dark glass of the heat but something thicker and more resistant. It seemed to push back slightly when Bruce looked at it directly, the way a heavy door feels heavy before you even try to open it.

The guard here was the youngest guard Bruce had seen at any portal. A lean soul who could not have been in Xiltra long, still carrying a slightly new quality in his armor. He was efficient, though. He took their tokens, checked them, gave the standard advisory in a brisk rhythm that said he had memorized it recently and was still running through it at memorized-thing speed.

"Stone dungeon. Three levels, F-rank access level one only, tokens key the level barrier. Level one has shell-crabs, spine-rollers, and sometimes a stone-bear. Shell-crabs in clusters, manageable at F-rank. Spine-rollers are solo but heavily armored. Target the underbelly or the eye-sockets, nowhere else works. Stone-bear is E-rank, does not appear on level one often but has been seen near the deep entrance twice this month. Treat it as you would the tortoise in the heat dungeon: avoid and relocate. Any questions?"

"Spine-rollers," Bruce said. "Describe the roll."

The guard looked at him slightly differently. It was the question of someone who had already parsed the advisory rather than just heard it. "They curl into a ball and roll at their target. They’re fast. If you’re in their path when they commit, you take the hit full. They can’t steer once they’ve committed but they can stop and restart. If you dodge the first roll and get clear before they stop, you have a two-second window on the underbelly."

"How big?"

"Mid-sized. About chest height to most souls when upright. Smaller when rolled."

"Thank you."

The guard nodded them through.