Some things are so obvious they do not need to be spoken. Yet it is important to speak them, lest they go from unspoken to forgotten.


    <hr>


    The moment they were outside the dungeon''s influence, Jair darkflamed them back up to the ledge.


    He promptly fell over.


    "Jair!" Raina stared at him as Skyclaw bounded over to his side and nudged at him.


    "Mnghh hhhom," Jair mumbled, his mouth and throat not really coordinating.


    "Give him time, he''s been a lizard for..." Skyclaw turned to Jair, eyes open wide with horror. "How long were you in there?"


    "Hlurnggh," Jair answered.


    "What''s she saying?" Raina looked between Jair and Skyclaw. "What happened, why are you back so soon? I thought you were going to wait an hour."


    Jai tried to sit up and ended up flopping himself over sideways instead. This body was so complicated, so many fiddly little pieces. He remembered how it was supposed to move, but the dissonance in his soul insisted that he should be able to crawl with a different set of legs. Being a newt was so much easier.


    “It’ll be a few minutes,” Skyclaw said resignedly. Raina had no way of comprehending her. Then she perked up. “Oh! Silverscale!”


    Silverscale appeared, looking just as confused as the first time.


    “Bring Qahri-Seni!” Skyclaw commanded, and her brother immediately bounded off down the tunnel.


    Jair flopped himself back over onto his stomach. His arms made sense again, but the legs were all backwards.


    The next several hours were an irritating combination of awkward convalescence and burning impatience as he struggled to return to his body and fully reclaim his sense of self.


    Qahrvirna came to play translator between Raina and Skyclaw. Skyclaw started trying to teach Raina how to speak draconic.


    Eythron went running by at one point, followed by a furious Uqiar, but they didn’t return.


    Jair sat amid it all, unmoving. He perceived the world through soulsight, fully immersed in himself as he tried to rebuild what Mercurios had damaged.


    Everything in his bodies was as it should be, manabody stable and ready to receive imprints. It was his soul that was the wrong shape. Mercurios had worn away at him, reinforcing certain parts and starving others. A soul was an adaptive and malleable thing, and while that helped one to survive and better deal with unexpected or abrupt changes in active or ambient magic, it also meant that others could theoretically reshape it over time.


    In Jair’s case, the surface details may change, but he himself was solid and unshakeable. The core of who he was had been crushed, broken, rebuilt, and worn back down more times than he could remember. The problem was that the shape of his soul no longer fit the shape of his body, and the unexpected dissonance between them made using the latter very difficult.


    His manabody adapted most quickly—as a fluid and barely formed thing itself, it easily reshaped itself around his returned soul.


    This resulted in an awkward combination of layers where the most efficient way to do anything was to use the manabody to puppet himself around. He had enough experience with this method to do it without damaging anything, but it required a distracting amount of focus.


    A few experiments showed that he could get by reasonably well without running out of mana, since he was still without imprints.


    At this point, he wasn’t sure what imprints he even wanted. As soon as a Nuprima passage opened, he’d go brute force his way to Archmage which opened up a lot more options, but there were other preparation she could do in the meantime. Assuming he could get his bodies to synchronize properly.


    He had no idea how long he’d been trapped within Mercurios, repeating those same days over and over, but with how battered his soul was looking it had to have been months at the least, perhaps years.


    He had to give it to the old monster. Just about anyone else would have given in under such an assault. Good thing he’d never discovered this dungeon in previous loops. Without Maelstrom and Skyclaw, he’d have been entirely at the ancient creature’s mercy.


    At the same time Jair slowly pieced his soul-body connections back together, he also contemplated the deeper implications of this whole experience. It had been overwhelming at first, then frustrating, and later tedious. But while the return to human form quickly overwrote the specifics of the being-a-newt thing, one part of the visit lingered inescapably.


    Seeing his soul spread out in full, all the tangles smoothed and separated, the full pattern of Maelstrom, of himself, of the countless lifetimes he’d experienced.


    It felt as though he hovered on the verge of some elusive comprehension, some answer that would bring it all together. The process of weaving body and soul back into one another. The tangled chaos that was the soul itself. The way it looked spread out like a map across the stars. A galaxy of its own.


    He often found himself staring into space, mentally playing and replaying that moment. It was almost enough to make him want to go back, see if he could manage things differently, stay there longer.


    But he couldn’t possibly trust Mercurios. Not unless he was willing to trade away his dragons, and they’d come to him for healing and protection.


    “Do you want to go free?” he asked Zyesi. The dragon manifested in front of him at the thought. He intentionally didn’t choose Skyclaw since she’d be the most biased. “I’ve destroyed your curse, you can go live on your own now.” Breaking an Unsevered Pact wasn’t fully impossible, but it did require full participation from both members. And that was without taking Maelstrom’s influence into account.


    Zyesi sat down, tail coiled around his legs, and looked around the cave. “If you want to send me away, I will go.”


    Jair put his forehead in his hand. “What do you want to do with your life? Putting aside me one way or another. What would be your ideal future? What do you want to do in a day?”


    “I can do whatever I want freely, my sisters are no longer dying. What more would I need? I don’t need to hunt the humans any more. I don’t need to stay away from the rest for their safety. Though…” he ducked his head and hunched his shoulders, a posture of shyness Jair had never seen from a dragon before. “I don’t think the rest of my family wants me around anyway.”


    This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    “Your Grand-Patriarch Mercurios would welcome you, if you want to go live with him in the dungeon.”


    Zyesi’s eyes narrowed and his crouch turned protective, aggressive. “No. I’m not going back to him. Ever.”


    That was a more dramatic reaction than he’d expected. “You remember that, then?”


    “How could I forget?” Poison mist huffed out with Zyesi’s breath.


    Jair wasn’t sure what that meant about the dragons in his soul. While in the dungeon, Skyclaw had seemed to forget when he reverted the timeline, but now Zyesi was displaying clear knowledge of their brief altercation with the dungeon-dragon even though Jair had only been close enough to bring Skyclaw back in time with him.


    “I do not acknowledge him. I will not bear the Mercurios name any longer. I chose to come to you and I choose to stay with you now.”


    “You don’t know me.”


    Zyesi tilted his draconic head, eyes staring deep into Jair’s. “I do. I know you in ways I didn’t know were possible. You gave your soul to save my family, so it’s only fair I do the same in return.”


    Jair scoffed. “I’m not going to turn down an offer of an army of dragons. I guarantee you, no one would.”


    “If anyone else had bound themselves to us, they would have shared our curse and fallen. You took on the full cost of our damaged bloodline and destroyed it entirely. You would ask that I not acknowledge that?”


    “It was nothing, I’d have destroyed the plague, curse, long ago if I knew how to.”


    “You work so hard to convince yourself that you’re unexceptional. Almost enough to believe it.”


    Jair shook his head, using his manabody to puppet himself without thinking about it. “I simply acknowledge my limitations and boundaries. I’m exceptional for humans, but elves, vampires, dragons, even some beastkin, have an innate advantage I’ll never be able to match. Let alone an ancient dungeon consumed by an intellect like Mercurios.”


    “You plan to casually obtain in three months what elves and beastkin don’t manage in centuries.”


    “Magic is the only way I can level the playing field even a little. Even then, it’s not enough.” One man however tireless, however empowered, could only go so far against a full army.


    Zyesi snorted. “It is not. And you know it.”


    “You think I’m wrong about the ideal path to power, after this many times of trial and error?”


    “One man will never be enough.” Zyesi waved a claw to their surroundings. “Raina, Lilin, Eythron, Qahrvirna, Uqiar, my siblings and I. You’re building an army of your own.”


    <hr>


    The first step in infiltrating the Phoenix Healer''s power base was to discern exactly where that power base was headquartered.


    Knowing the man’s name was insufficient. Sekir’s searches of public records came up with no Welburne anywhere in any Veori city. (Technically there were three, but none were young enough to be his target. His visit to each of them to verify whether they had children turned out to be a waste of time as expected, but he was nothing if not thorough.)


    So, with Welburne himself a dead end for now, the next best thing would be to locate the other members of his network. Sekir’s first step to that end was trivial: find a customer who''d been bragging about their phoenix healing and pay a quick visit.


    Customers were many and far from discreet. A few casual conversations later and all the details he needed were at his disposal. The name and appearance of the one contact point for the elusive Phoenix Healer, Dalin Larenok.


    From there, the next challenge was finding the man. He''d ended up in an enigmatic sort of limbo. His home address was unknown and the place he normally stayed—the Astralla Mageblade Institute—no longer had any claim over him.


    But Sekir didn’t need to find the man’s house, only the man himself. And regardless of Dalin Larenok''s paranoia, he could only collect the customers his precious Phoenix Healer needed by going out into the world.


    He couldn’t stay hidden forever.


    Sekir waited in one of the more heavily populated market district of Vaes City. Larenok was known to occasionally visit this particular plaza, and Sekir’s persistence was rewarded a mere three days later.


    Larenok started a conversation with a particular woman of questionable intention, one whose husband was known to be ailing. Sekir could''ve told Larenok that he was pursuing a pointless lead, talking to her about his healer friend. She had a much stronger vested interest in her husband''s death than his survival, and was in fact already out recruiting to find who she should attach herself to next.


    But it didn''t matter to Sekir who Larenok was talking to, as long as he had eyes on the man himself.


    He observed without interference for nearly an hour as Larenok casually chatted his way through several of the most wealthy individuals present. He seemed to have a real nose for money, if nothing else. That made approaching the man a different sort of challenge.


    Sekir had spent enough time around these people to know what the subtle cues were that you give it pass himself off as one who belonged in this company. While he could do the physical mannerisms effortlessly, it would also require a different outfit. His current wardrobe was intended to blend in as an unremarkable middle-class merchant. Wealthy enough to be present here and reasonably loitering, but not so wealthy as to attract unwanted notice.


    Fortunately, he kept stashes of appropriate clothing and accoutrements for various potential personas in his soulspace at all times on principle. A moment to slip away into the unwatched alley, divest himself of his current garb, and he emerged as a new man.


    Sekir walked up to Larenok with his soulspell active and shining his eyes. "You there, are you the errand boy of this Phoenix healer I’ve heard so much about?" Sekir intentionally chose a strident and borderline accusatory tone.


    Larenok bristled and turned to face him indignantly. "I am Phoenix healer''s agent, yes. What is your business with him?"


    "Nothing in specific," Sekir said, keeping his eyes fixed on Larenok. His gaze was intense enough to unsettle most, and though Larenok''s constant stronger than most, he still shifted the slightest bit beneath Sekir''s weight of interest.


    "I must know, who is this Phoenix healer? Where did you meet him? Who are his friends, his allies? Does he have enemies?" Sekir asked each question slowly, drawing it out to give Larenok the maximum amount of time to think over each question without actually pausing long enough for him to give an answer. "Does he have a wife? Someone close to him? Family?"


    Larenok scowled and crossed arms. "You''re asking—"


    "Is it true he was a student of yours? How was he like, as a student? Did he have any particular specialties? What would you say are his greatest strengths and weaknesses?"


    Images, jumbled memories, pages of notes, data reels, all that flicked through Larenok''s mind even as he grew increasingly suspicious of this aggressively pushing man.


    "Nothing to worry about," Sekir said, accompanying it with a heavy imprint of unconcern. He blinked, and Larenok blinked in unison.


    “Do I know you?” Larenok asked uncertainly.


    "I understand you''re the agent to the Phoenix healer?" Sekir asked in an overly excited tone tinted with just the right touch of affected indifference. "I would simply love to arrange a meeting, is that possible?"


    “Certainly.” Larenok’s confusion cleared and he shifted into business mode, brief distraction left behind without another thought. "Simply pay the upfront fee and I will contact you with information on paying the remainder after service has been delivered."


    "And how much is this upfront fee?"


    "Eight thousand nirei," Larenok said shamelessly.


    Sekir''s eyebrows rose at that. That was more than most people made in a year. Even among nobility it wouldn’t be a casual expenditure. If this was just the upfront fee, then he would definitely need significantly more of his financial schemes to pan out before he could start buying Phoenix Healing.


    "Where can I find you?” he asked instead. “I don''t carry that much on my person. I''ll send an agent to arrange things."


    They negotiated a time and place for Larenok to meet Sekir’s agent to collect the payment, and parted ways.


    To Dalin Larenok, the earlier half of the conversation was forgotten as though it never happened.


    But it had, and Sekir walked away knowing everything there was to know about one Mageblade Initiate, Jair Welburne.


    <hr>