Chapter Text

Orario: The Beginning

Chapter 1 — Dice of the Worlds

Orario had collected a great many names over the centuries, and it wore all of them badly. The Labyrinth City. The center of the world. The last honest destination for anyone foolish enough to want to be a hero. At its heart stood Babel, a white tower so tall that newcomers stopped dead in the street to stare up at it until a cart driver swore at them to move. Beneath that tower waited something older than the tower, older than the city, older — some said — than the idea of cities.

The Dungeon.

In the Ancient Times its mouth had opened and monsters had come pouring out across the Lower World, and there had been no Falna then, no Familias, no blessing on anyone's back. Only mortals with steel and stubbornness, spending their lives on futures they would never live to see.

Then the gods came down from Tenkai. They sealed their divine power away, put on mortal limits like borrowed coats, and began writing blessings into the backs of their children. After that, heroes stopped being figures in old songs. In Orario, new legends were born every morning.

Most of them died before anyone bothered to learn their names.

Bell Cranel knew that. It hadn't made his smile any smaller when he walked under Babel that morning and went down into the dark for the first time in his life.

The goblin came apart into ash, and Bell held his stance for three full breaths before he let himself believe it.

The corridor ahead stayed empty. Pale blue stone, faintly luminous, sweating a thin damp that collected in the seams of the floor. The air down here was warmer than the street had been and it smelled like wet rock and something underneath the wet rock, faintly organic, the way a cellar smells when something has died in the wall. Somewhere behind him a party of adventurers was laughing about a debt. The sound carried oddly, arriving flattened, as though the Dungeon had taken it apart and put it back together slightly wrong.

Only then did he lower the knife.

"Ten," he whispered.

Ten goblins. Ten fights. A shallow scrape on his left forearm that had stopped bleeding an hour ago, and nothing else. For a first day, that should have been enough to make him proud all the way up the stairs and out into the sun.

Instead he was frowning at the thing lying beside the goblin's exposed magic stone.

Another drop.

He crouched and turned it over between two fingers. A goblin fang, small and yellow and ugly, indistinguishable from the nine others riding in the separate pouch at the bottom of his pack. The pouch had begun the day flat. It was not flat now.

Magic stones, he'd expected. Every monster had one; it was the core that kept the thing alive, and the Guild bought them by weight to feed into the magic-stone lamps and stoves and pumps that kept Orario lit, warm, and watered. That was ordinary. That was the job.

Drop items were something else. Sometimes — rarely, unpredictably — a monster left a piece of itself behind when its body burned away, and smiths and apothecaries paid well for the pieces. Eina had been very clear about the word rarely. She'd said it twice, in the tone she used when she suspected he wasn't listening, and told him not to plan his week around finding a single one.

He had found ten. Out of ten.

Bell dropped the fang into the pouch and stayed crouched there, looking at it.

"Maybe goblin drops are just more common than Eina-san thought."

It was possible. It was also exactly the sort of sentence his sister would have answered with silence — the particular flat grey silence she deployed instead of an argument, which she would hold until he heard how stupid he sounded and retracted it himself.

He shivered, which was ridiculous, because the Dungeon was warm and Alfia was hundreds of kilometers and one closed door away. Distance had never had much effect on the woman's ability to be disappointed in him.

"Ten out of ten," he said to the corridor. "That's strange. That's definitely strange."

His grandfather would have laughed and said it was luck. He'd always insisted Bell was fortunate — usually right after one of Alfia's training sessions, while Bell was lying face down in the grass trying to work out which ribs still functioned, which had always made the old man's definition of fortune a little suspect.

Bell dug out the magic stone, wiped it on his sleeve, and dropped it in his main pouch. Behind him the wall gave a dry crackle like ice under a boot, and the crater where the goblin had emerged began quietly closing itself, blue stone flowing back over blue stone.

He took that as the Dungeon's opinion on how long he'd been standing there.

The first floor was supposed to be gentle. Wide corridors, weak monsters, a steady traffic of other adventurers so that nobody who got into trouble had to be in trouble alone. That was the theory. In practice Bell had fought more in six hours than Eina's lessons said a first-timer should meet in two days, and the pattern had stopped being subtle around the fourth repetition: whenever another party came within sight, the floor went quiet and polite. Whenever he was alone, the walls cracked open and things came out of them in twos and threes.

The first time, he'd called it coincidence. By the fourth he'd stopped saying the word even inside his own head.

He pulled his pack strap tight and started for the surface.

He'd done everything he'd come to do. He'd learned what his body felt like under a Falna — the strange lightness, the way a step meant to carry him one meder carried him one and a half until he learned to stop over-committing. He'd practiced cutting magic stones out cleanly instead of shattering them. He had enough valis in his belt to bring home food and a piece of the rent. Going deeper because the Dungeon kept setting out treats in front of him would be greed, and greed down here had a specific technical name, which was how novices die.

A hero must know when to advance, Bell! His grandfather's voice arrived uninvited, at volume, the way it always had. Preferably toward a beautiful maiden in need of rescue!

And immediately behind it, in memory, the sound of Alfia's hand connecting with the back of the old man's skull.

He must first learn when to retreat. If you put any more nonsense into the boy's head, I will demonstrate the lesson on you.

Bell smiled at the empty corridor.

His grandfather had raised him on stories — heroes, princesses, encounters that changed a life in a single afternoon — and as a child Bell had believed every word without reservation. Alfia had never managed to burn the hope out of him entirely. She'd simply filed it down from a life's purpose into a pleasant possibility, which Bell privately thought had been the correct edit.

Heroes didn't become heroes by chasing girls. Argonaut had taught him that, in the oldest of the stories, the one his grandfather told worst and Bell loved most. A hero was someone who made the people around him able to smile. Someone who turned despair into hope while he was frightened out of his mind, while everyone who watched him called him a fool.

That was what Bell wanted to be. And not alone.

Someday he'd find others — people carrying their own impossible dreams around like contraband — and they'd grow together, and cover each other's backs, and build something whose legend outlasted even the Zeus and Hera Familias from his grandfather's stories. A family made out of heroes, where nobody was a spectator to anybody else's legend.

It was an absurd thing for the sole member of a goddess's Familia who lived in a leaking church to want. Which was why he hadn't said it out loud to Hestia yet. First their Familia needed a second member. Preferably one who wouldn't laugh.

Bell came around the next corner and stopped.

The passage split ahead of him.

He drew the Guild map out of his belt pouch slowly, without looking away from it, and unfolded it against his thigh.

There was no split marked at this location.

He went back. Found the shallow scratch he'd cut near the floor at the last turn, exactly where he'd left it, exactly where his own notes said it should be. He hadn't wandered. He hadn't lost the route. He returned to the fork and checked the map against the stone three more times, and three more times the map insisted the corridor ran straight.

The left branch went up, toward the stairs and the sun and a bowl of something hot.

The right branch shouldn't have been there at all. It was narrower than the main corridor, and its entrance sat behind overlapping ridges of blue stone that, from almost any angle, resolved into an unbroken wall.

Bell took one step left, and the opening was gone — just rock, just the same rock as every other stretch of the floor.

He stepped back, and it returned.

"That's—"

He didn't have a word, so he stopped hunting for one.

Nobody found new passages on the first floor. That was the entire point of the first floor. Hundreds of years of adventurers had walked these corridors; the Guild kept the maps current; the big Familias swept the upper levels on a schedule precisely so that structural changes got caught early. The first floor was the most thoroughly known space in the world.

Bell walked up to the opening.

Warm air came out of it and moved across his face, and it carried a smell he didn't expect — not the wet-cellar smell of the Dungeon, but something dry and clean, like sun-warmed stone. Like a doorstep in the afternoon.

Every instinct Alfia had put into him with six years of patience and bruises told him to leave.

Mark it. Report it. Bring Eina. Let people with four levels and twenty years go look.

He took a step back.

And something glimmered, far down inside the passage. Gold, faint, there and then not there, gone so fast he immediately began arguing with himself about whether he'd seen it.

His heart went hard against his ribs.

This might matter. This might be something the whole city needed to know about. It might equally be the exact shape of bait that experienced people used as a teaching example when explaining why beginners died.

Bell marked the location on his map, pressing hard enough to dent the paper.

Then he took the spool of white thread out of his pack — good thread, the expensive kind, because Eina had stood over him in the shop until he bought the expensive kind — knotted one end around a projection of stone out in the main corridor, tested it with his weight, and tied the other end to his belt.

He would look at the entrance. That was all. He wouldn't fight anything. At the first sign of trouble he'd follow the thread out and go straight to the Guild.

Alfia would still call this stupid.

But maybe, he thought, not completely stupid.

Bell drew both knives and went in.

The passage curved sharply enough within twenty paces to cut off any view of the ordinary floor behind him, which he disliked more than he'd expected to. The walls here were darker, nearly indigo, and through them ran thin veins of gold that did not so much glow as hold light, the way honey holds it. The sound of his own boots came back to him wrong. Too close. Like a room much smaller than this one.

The thread stayed taut behind him. He checked it twice.

Twenty steps in, he heard stone crack.

Bell turned, and the wall beside him split, and the thing came out of it before the fragments hit the floor.

He got his knives crossed. Black claws hit steel and the impact picked him up off the ground.

His boots skidded, found nothing, and he hit the far wall shoulder-first hard enough that pain went down his whole arm to the fingers. When his vision cleared the creature had landed neatly between him and the way out.

It had the shape of a goblin. Almost nothing else about it matched. It stood taller, and where a goblin's limbs were short and badly assembled this one's were long and clean, built the way a runner is built. Its skin was black — not dark, black, drinking the gold light out of the air around it and giving nothing back — and its claws had length and curve, like a set of short blades that had grown instead of being forged.

Its eyes were red, and what was in them was not hunger.

It was hate.

Bell's mouth went completely dry.

"An irregular—"

The goblin shrieked and came at him.

It was too fast. He turned aside and the claws went through his jacket and drew a burning line across his ribs. He cut at the exposed arm as it passed and his knife hit skin and skated off, not even scoring it.

The goblin came around with a backhand. Bell got the left blade up in time and the blow broke it — snapped the cheap steel and carried through into his forearm, and the pain went from wrist to elbow like something had been pulled out of him.

He got three steps back before his legs agreed to stop.

One knife left. Half a knife and a useless hilt.

The goblin crouched, and its mouth opened, and there were far too many teeth in it, and Bell understood that it was enjoying this.

His breathing was going fast and shallow and his hand had started to shake.

He was outmatched. Not narrowly. Not in a way that cleverness closed. Physically, completely, in every measurable way, he was standing in front of something that could kill him whenever it decided to.

The correct thing was to run.

The goblin was between him and the exit, and the white thread lay cut on the floor under its foot.

Fear closed around Bell's throat, and then Alfia spoke from six years and a closed door away, as clearly as if she were standing at his shoulder with her arms folded:

Fear is information. Nothing more. Listen to what it tells you, and then act, before it starts giving you orders.

Bell breathed in through his nose. Held it. Let it out slowly.

The goblin rushed him.

And Bell watched it come.

Right claw leading. A short step off the left leg. The shoulder going out further than it needed to, because the body was fast now but its habits had been built at a slower speed.

He turned the first claw with the flat of his blade. The second opened his cheek. He drove his knee up into its stomach and the thing twisted so that most of the force went past it, then snapped its forehead into his face.

White light. Then the floor tilting. Warm blood came out of his nose and over his mouth and he tasted copper.

The goblin came again.

Right claw. Left step. Shoulder over-extended.

The same pattern.

He deflected, gave ground, made it come.

The same pattern.

Whatever had been done to it had made it stronger, faster and harder to cut. It had not made it clever. Underneath the new body it was still a goblin, and a goblin only ever knew one way to open a fight.

Bell smiled with blood on his teeth.

"My sister was faster."

Which was not remotely true. Alfia would have ended this, corrected his footwork, and made a remark about his intelligence before he registered that she'd moved. But saying it out loud steadied his hands, and steady hands were what he had instead of strength.

The black goblin screamed and Bell threw the broken knife at its face.

The hilt bounced off its brow. It flinched — not from pain, there was no pain in it, but from surprise, from the sheer wrongness of being thrown at.

Bell was already moving.

The right claw came down and he slipped inside it, inside the reach, close enough to smell it — ash and hot iron. The left claw changed direction faster than anything that size should have managed and laid his back open from shoulder to hip.

His legs went. He caught himself on the creature's own chest, got his hand around its wrist, and drove his last knife up under its jaw with everything he had.

The blade went in halfway and stopped.

The goblin howled, and its claws closed around his throat.

There was no air. Red eyes filled the whole world, close enough that he could see his own face reflected badly in them, and the grip tightened in small deliberate increments, taking the strength out of him a little at a time.

Bell pushed on the knife. It didn't move. The thing was stronger than him by a margin arithmetic couldn't cross.

Black crowded in from the edges of his sight.

Was this lucky? The thought arrived from somewhere calm and far off. A hidden path on his first day. An impossible monster, with no other adventurers within a hundred meders. An enemy just weak enough that victory looked possible, and just strong enough to kill him for believing it.

He didn't know.

He knew he had promised Hestia he'd come home. He knew he hadn't built the family yet. He knew he hadn't been anyone's hero, not once, not yet.

Bell let go of the knife.

Before the goblin could understand what that meant, he put his thumb into its left eye and pushed.

It shrieked and its grip came loose and Bell tore himself out of it, got both hands on the buried knife, and twisted with every fragment of everything he had left.

The blade ripped sideways through its throat. Black blood came out in a sheet and went across the golden veins in the wall.

The goblin hit him one more time — a blind, dying swing that lifted him off his feet and threw him the width of the corridor. He hit the floor, rolled, and came to rest against stone.

The monster took a step after him. Then another.

Then violet light cracked open across its body from the inside, and it fell apart into ash.

Bell lay on his back and looked at the ceiling. Air came into his bruised throat in thin painful pulls. Every part of him was shaking, and he let it shake, and for a few seconds he simply listened to his own heartbeat and found it remarkable that it was still going.

Then he started laughing, which hurt, and kept laughing anyway.

"I won."

Not cleanly. Not impressively. Certainly not in any manner Alfia would have praised without appending a numbered list of his errors.

But he had won.

Bell got himself upright in stages.

The black goblin had left a magic stone three times the size of an ordinary goblin's, sitting in the ash like an egg. And next to it lay a book.

Bell stopped.

There was no fang. No claw. No strip of hide. A book was not a drop item. A book had never been a drop item in the history of anyone's report to the Guild.

He went closer, slowly. It was bound in something pale that was not leather and not cloth and not anything else he could name, and its cover was crowded with golden symbols — not Koine, not the divine hieroglyphs Hestia had shown him on his own back, not any of the four scripts Eina had made him learn to recognize. Beneath the cover something pulsed, slow and steady, and Bell recognized the color. It was the gold he'd seen from the main corridor. The thing that had made him come in here.

He should not touch it. That conclusion was so obvious he could see Alfia nodding.

So he hooked the tip of his knife under the cover instead.

The book opened itself.

The pages went over in a blur, faster and faster, and gold erupted out of it and filled the passage wall to wall. Bell threw an arm across his eyes and felt the book come apart — felt it, in the air, thousands of points of light where a solid object had been a moment before. They circled him once, unhurried, the way a hand moves over something it is measuring. Then they went through his clothes and into his back and were gone.

For one instant something enormous opened on the other side of his perception.

Countless skies. Countless worlds. Countless possibilities tumbling end over end across a table with no edges, and a sound underneath them like dice.

Then it closed, and Bell was standing alone in a corridor holding a knife with nothing on the end of it.

"I should have listened to my first conclusion."

Nothing answered him.

He checked his hands. His chest. The inside of his pack. He felt no different — nothing beyond the injuries the goblin had already put on him, which were sufficient on their own. He collected the oversized magic stone, gathered what was left of his weapons, and followed the severed thread back toward the entrance.

The opening was still there.

Out in the main corridor, an ordinary afternoon was happening. A party of four went past without one of them glancing his way. A dwarf walked so close to the hidden entrance that Bell could have reached out and taken hold of his shoulder, and the man did not so much as turn his head at a bloodied boy stepping out of a wall.

Bell turned back and looked.

The passage was still there for him, gold threading the dark stone, quiet as a held breath.

He moved two paces to the left.

Wall.

He added a second mark to his map, folded it carefully, and started the long climb home.

"You did what?"

Eina Tulle did not raise her voice, which Bell had learned was substantially worse.

They were in one of the small consultation rooms on the Guild's second floor — a table, four chairs, a magic-stone lamp turned up too bright, and a window that looked out on the back of another building. Bell's cuts had been cleaned and dressed by the Guild's healer, his ruined jacket was folded on the chair beside him, and his entire day's work was laid out across the table in two uneven rows.

The black magic stone sat between them like a third participant in the conversation.

Eina pushed her glasses up her nose with one finger.

"Let me be certain I understand you. On your first expedition, you found an unrecorded passage on the first floor."

"Yes, Eina-san."

"You correctly concluded that it should be reported."

"Yes."

"And then you went into it. Alone."

Bell looked at the table. "Yes."

"With a piece of string as your only precaution."

"It was very strong string."

Eina smiled.

Bell immediately wished he had chosen almost any other sentence.

She had known him for less than two weeks. It had started the day he walked into the Guild looking for a Familia that would take him, and it had gone on through every subsequent rejection, and somewhere in there the professional interest of a Guild advisor in a new registrant had quietly turned into something warmer and more personal. Bell was grateful for it most days.

Today he was afraid of it.

Eina leaned forward and folded her hands.

"Bell. Do you know why beginners die?"

"Because they meet monsters stronger than they expected?"

"Because they notice a danger, correctly identify it as a danger, and then invent a reason it will be safe for them." She let that sit. "You wrote the word 'concealed entrance' on your own map, Bell. You knew."

He winced. "I'm sorry."

The anger in her green eyes eased slightly. Only slightly.

"You came back with bruising around your throat, a fractured arm, four lacerations, and two destroyed weapons. If that knife had gone in at a slightly different angle, I would not be sitting here being angry at you. Somebody would be sitting here telling me."

Bell looked down at his bandaged hands.

"I know."

"Do you?"

"I was scared," he said. "Not only during the fight. Before I went in. I knew retreating was the right choice — I could hear exactly how my sister would say it — and I wanted to see what was in there anyway." He made himself lift his head and meet her eyes. "I made the wrong decision. I'm not going to pretend otherwise just because it worked."

Some of the tension went out of Eina's shoulders.

"Good," she said. "That answer is the only reason this lecture is going to finish before sunrise."

Bell let out a breath and smiled. "Thank you, Eina-san. I knew I could count on you being kind."

Color came up on the tips of Eina's ears.

"Flattery will not save you."

"I wasn't flattering you."

Her cheeks caught up with her ears.

Bell tilted his head, not following at all, and Eina turned abruptly to the table and began arranging the drop items into a straight and entirely unnecessary row.

"That's not important. This is."

Ten goblin fangs. One from every ordinary monster he had killed.

She checked his written report again, then checked it a second time, which she did not normally do.

"Drop rates aren't fixed. Anyone who tells you a number is guessing. But this is absurd, Bell. There are adventurers with ten years down there who have never seen a run like this."

"My grandfather always said I was lucky."

"Your grandfather may have been understating it."

Eina lifted the black magic stone with both hands, carefully, the way you'd hold something hot.

"I can't identify this here. Size and energy are both wrong for a first-floor goblin — wrong by an order of magnitude. I'm going to register the encounter as an irregular and request an investigation of the location you marked."

Bell hesitated.

He had given her the passage and the monster. He had not given her the book.

There was no evidence it had ever existed. He didn't understand what it had done, or whether it had done anything. And if he reported an object that had dissolved into his spine, the Guild would have questions nobody could answer, and there was a version of that conversation — he could see it clearly — where the thing being investigated stopped being the passage and started being Bell.

He hated keeping it from her. That was a real, specific, uncomfortable feeling and he let himself have it.

But Alfia had taught him that honesty did not oblige a person to hand every secret to every authority that asked. Tell the right person first, she'd said. Then decide who else has earned it.

The right person was Hestia. She had put her blessing on his back two days ago. If something had changed in it, she deserved to learn that before the Guild did.

Eina finished her calculations, counted coins into a pouch, and slid it across the table.

"Five thousand valis."

Bell's eyes went wide. "For one day?"

"Most of it is the drops. Bell." She put one finger on the pouch before he could take it. "Do not build a single plan around this being normal income."

"I won't."

He picked it up. It was heavier than he'd expected, and the weight did something complicated in his chest. Hestia would be delighted. They could eat something tonight that had not been a potato.

"Bell."

Her voice caught him halfway out of the chair. She reached across the table and straightened the edge of a bandage that had come loose above his elbow.

"You did well to survive. You also did well to report the passage instead of hiding all of it because you were afraid of being shouted at. Most people your age would have hidden it."

Then her expression went flat and professional again.

"But if you enter an unknown area alone a second time, I will go to your goddess personally and ask her to forbid you the Dungeon."

Bell tried to imagine Hestia and Eina working in concert.

He decided he would genuinely rather fight the black goblin again.

"Understood."

"Good." Eina's smile came back. "Come home safe tomorrow, little brother."

He stopped in the doorway.

"I will. I'd hate to make you cry, Eina-san."

The door closed.

Eina sat perfectly still for several seconds, looking at the place where he'd been. Then she put both hands over her face.

"He says things like that far too innocently."

The abandoned church was not an impressive building.

The roof leaked in three places, which Bell knew precisely because he had spent his first night positioning bowls. The walls had cracks you could put a finger into. The room underneath held a sagging couch, a table with a shortened leg, a bed, and the small collection of objects two poor people need in order to call somewhere home.

Bell already loved it.

Yesterday a goddess had looked at a boy that every other god in Orario had turned away, and said yes. Today he was coming back from his first adventure to a place that was his.

He had the door half open when something small hit him in the chest.

"Bell-kun!"

He caught her on reflex, which pulled the cuts across his back wide open and made his vision go briefly white.

"I'm home, Kami-sama."

"Welcome home!" Hestia beamed up at him, blue eyes bright, ribbon crooked.

Then she saw the bandages.

The smile went out like a snuffed lamp.

"Bell-kun." Her voice got very calm, which he would learn to dread. "What happened."

Bell considered several answers, and Alfia's voice supplied the relevant rule: never lie when the truth will surface within the minute.

"My first adventure got more exciting than I planned."

"Sit."

"Yes, Kami-sama."

She pushed him down onto the couch, climbed up beside him, and went over every visible injury in order, and though they had known each other for two days her hands shook when they passed over the marks on his throat.

Bell felt the guilt arrive and settle somewhere under his ribs, and this time he didn't argue with it.

He told her all of it. The monsters that only appeared when he was alone. The ten drops out of ten. The wall that was not a wall. The black goblin, the thumb, the throat, the ash. The book.

Everything he had held back from Eina, he gave to Hestia.

She listened without once interrupting. He watched her face go through disbelief, and then fear, and then something hot and furious that was not aimed at him, and then settle into a tight, concentrated worry that was worse than all three.

When he finished, she flicked him in the forehead.

"Ow."

"That's for going into the passage."

She flicked him again.

"Ow."

"That's for touching the mysterious book."

A third.

"Kami-sama, what was that one for?"

"For making me worry on your first day!"

Bell rubbed his forehead. "I'm sorry."

Hestia folded her arms and turned away from him on the couch.

She was actually angry. He could tell, because she had stopped leaning against him.

"I promised Eina-san I wouldn't do it again."

"You promised your advisor before you promised your goddess?"

"I'm promising you now."

She glanced at him sidelong, unwilling to commit to looking.

Bell met her eyes and said it without any hesitation at all, because he didn't need any.

"I found a home yesterday. I'm not going to throw it away on my second day."

Hestia's anger came apart in her hands.

Pink crept up her neck and into her face.

"Y-you can't get out of being punished by saying charming things!"

"Was that charming?"

"That makes it worse!"

Bell didn't follow, but Hestia came back to his side and put her shoulder against his arm and let out a long tired breath, so he decided the crisis had passed.

She liked being close to people. He'd noticed it inside the first day — the way she found reasons to take his hand, to lean, to sit nearer than she needed to when they talked. He didn't mind. The room had been very quiet before he arrived; he could hear that in how she talked about it. And her being there made a ruined building feel like somewhere he lived.

He remembered the pouch at his belt and put it into her hands.

"I also earned five thousand valis."

Hestia looked at the coins. Then at him. Then at the coins.

"Five thousand? In one day?"

"Most of it was the drop items."

Her face went through pride, then astonishment, then a flicker of suspicion that he was glad she didn't voice, and arrived at pure determination.

"Then tonight we celebrate your safe return with a feast!"

"Can we afford a feast?"

"Of course we can. We'll buy two potato snacks instead of one."

Bell laughed, and then realized she was entirely serious.

"Kami-sama, I think we can aim a little higher than that."

"...Three?"

"I'll cook."

Hestia seized both his hands like he'd promised her a banquet on Tenkai, and for a moment the Dungeon and the black goblin and the book that had gone into his back were all very far away, and they were only a goddess and her first child working out what to do with the first money their Familia had ever earned.

Then Bell remembered why they'd started the conversation.

"Kami-sama. Can you tell if the book did something to me?"

The delight went off Hestia's face and something older and more serious came up underneath it.

"A Status update will show anything that's been written into your Falna." She pointed at the bed. "Shirt off. Lie down."

Bell obeyed.

Hestia knelt beside him and looked at the hieroglyphs across his back, which had been hers for two days and still gave her a small private thrill every time. She pricked her finger and pressed a bead of ichor to the center of the blessing.

The Status woke.

Divine script shimmered up through Bell's skin as the excelia from his first adventure gathered itself into a shape she could read.

Hestia expected small numbers. She had never updated anyone's Status before — Bell was the first child she had ever had — but even she knew roughly what a careful first day on the first floor was supposed to be worth.

The numbers rose.

And kept rising.

She stared.

Bell Cranel

Level 1
Strength: I 0 → I 25
Endurance: I 0 → I 28
Dexterity: I 0 → I 35
Agility: I 0 → I 40
Magic: I 0

Development Abilities None

Magic None

That alone was abnormal enough to keep her awake.

Then two Skills wrote themselves in underneath, and Hestia stopped breathing.

"Kami-sama?" Bell's voice came muffled from the pillow. "Is something wrong?"

"No."

It came out far too fast.

He turned his head to look back at her, and she made herself smile.

"Nothing's wrong. Your Status is just... surprising."

Which was true, in the way that calling the Dungeon a hole in the ground was true.

Hestia copied it all out onto paper, taking her time with the translation, getting every character right. When she was finished she read the last two entries again.

Liaris Freese Single-minded heroic aspiration. Growth accelerates in proportion to the strength and constancy of the user's desire. The effect endures while the aspiration remains unbroken.

Alea Mundi — Dice of the Worlds Cast the die beyond the boundary of the world and call forth one random possibility. The result may be influenced by desire, compatibility, and fortune. Knowledge sufficient to identify the manifested result is granted to the user. No Mind is required. May be activated once every three days.

Two Skills. On his first day.

One of them born out of a desire strong enough to bend the ordinary accumulation of excelia around itself. The other capable of reaching past the edge of the world.

Pride came up in her chest, huge and warm and immediate, and the fear arrived about half a second behind it.

Bell had something extraordinary in him. And extraordinary children drew gods the way blood draws things in the water. Some would try to buy him. Some would try to charm him, or frighten him, or take him apart very carefully to find out what kind of soul produced a Skill like that.

She had known him for two days.

It was enough. He was hers. He was the first child she had ever had, and she would burn her own name out of Tenkai before she let anyone touch him.

"Kami-sama?"

Hestia sealed the Status and handed him the paper.

Bell read it once, then again, and his crimson eyes went wide.

"Is this normal?"

"Not remotely."

"I thought so."

She'd braced for panic, or for the kind of delight that made boys reckless. Instead Bell sat up with the paper on his knee and studied the descriptions like a text he was going to be examined on.

"Liaris Freese is probably why the numbers went up so much."

"Probably."

"'Single-minded heroic aspiration'..."

His expression went soft and distant, and Hestia found herself wondering which hero he was looking at in there.

"Bell-kun, listen to me carefully. Nobody sees this paper. Not the Guild. Not another adventurer. And absolutely not another god."

Bell looked up. "Because they'd try to take me out of your Familia?"

The question landed considerably closer to the truth than she was comfortable with.

"Some of them might."

Bell folded the paper in half.

"Then they'll be disappointed."

"Eh?"

"You took me in when nobody else would." He said it the way he might have reported the weather. "I'm not leaving because somebody gets interested now that I've got a rare Skill."

Hestia's heart tripped over itself.

This was not love. They had met two days ago; she was not a fool and she was not sixteen. She simply enjoyed his company, and his ridiculous earnestness, and the fact that the building had stopped being so quiet.

But if he kept looking at her like that, this boy was going to become extremely dangerous to her maiden heart.

She cleared her throat.

"Naturally! As if I'd let some other goddess steal my only child!"

Bell smiled. "So what do we do about Alea Mundi?"

Hestia looked at the description again. Beyond the boundary of the world. It sounded impossible. It also sounded like the sort of thing that got more dangerous the longer you left it unexamined.

"We test it," she decided. "Here. Once. Carefully."

"What do you think it'll summon?"

"The description says random, Bell-kun."

He glanced around the little room — the bowls under the leaks, the table with the bad leg.

"Then I hope it's something useful."

Both his knives had died in the Dungeon. Replacing them would eat most of today's money, and cheap steel would go on breaking as he got stronger; he'd already seen exactly what that looked like from the inside.

What he needed was a weapon.

Bell stood in the middle of the room and raised one hand, and felt deeply foolish.

"Do I just say the name?"

"Skills answer to instinct as much as words," Hestia said. "Reach for it. You'll know."

Bell closed his eyes.

He thought about the broken knife spinning out of his hand. About black claws closing on his throat, and the specific, humiliating knowledge that pushing harder was not going to be enough. About walking into the Dungeon tomorrow carrying something he could trust.

Then he said it.

"Alea Mundi."

Something rolled, beyond the world.

He didn't hear it. He felt the motion — a cast die going end over end across a distance with no unit that would fit it, touching possibilities in numbers a mortal mind put down immediately for being too heavy.

The Skill was random.

Bell did not know that his soul was heavy enough with fortune to make randomness itself hesitate.

The die stopped.

A black knife appeared in his hand.

There was no flash, no surge, no sound. One moment his palm was empty and the next his fingers had closed around a grip that was already perfectly balanced, as though it had been waiting in exactly that position for him to arrive.

The weapon was beautiful. Its dark blade took the candlelight and held it, and along the metal ran lines of divine hieroglyphs. Under his fingers the grip was warm — warmer than the room, warm the way a hand is warm — and the warmth moved, faintly, like something recognizing his touch.

Information arrived in his mind. Not memory. Not skill. Just enough to know what he was holding.

Hestia Knife : A living weapon forged by Hephaestus and completed through Hestia's blessing for Bell Cranel. Its strength grows alongside its wielder. Only a bearer of Hestia's Falna may draw out its power.

Origin: An adjacent possibility.

Bell opened his eyes.

"Kami-sama..."

Hestia was not smiling.

She was looking at the knife with an expression he had never seen on her face, and it emptied the room of every other thing in it.

"Bell-kun." Barely a whisper. "Where did you get that."

"Alea Mundi. It says it's the Hestia Knife. Made by Hephaestus. Blessed by you. For me."

"I have never blessed a knife for you."

"I know."

Hestia reached out and stopped just short of the metal.

Every god can recognize their own divinity. It is not a skill and it cannot be mistaken; it is closer to hearing your own name called across a crowded room.

The hieroglyphs cut into the black blade carried her name. Her blessing. And an affection so specific, so unmistakably hers, so plainly given to one particular boy, that her chest ached looking at it.

It was hers. Not an imitation. Not some mortal smith's careful copy of divine writing. Hers, given to Bell, complete.

And she had never in her existence seen it before.

Hestia closed her fingers around the handle.

The hieroglyphs lit.

The color went out of her face.

Somewhere past the boundary of their world, another possibility had answered Bell Cranel when he called.

And on the second day of knowing him, Hestia understood that her first child had brought home something considerably more dangerous than an unusual knife.

He had brought home proof that the impossible could be summoned.