"Oh, Mommy!"
"*Dana!*"
Magda had been the first of the three to wake.
When Ethelid opened his eyes, still dazed and throbbing with pain, the first thing he saw was Magda on her knees, clutching five small bodies against her chest, tears streaming freely down her face. The children clung to her — dirty, trembling, but *alive*.
"Are the children hurt?" Ethelid asked, pulling himself upright.
"No, wizard! Just scratches — nothing serious!" Magda laughed through her tears, running her hands over each child's face, each pair of arms, as though counting them by touch.
Ethelid winced against the sharp pulse of a headache and slowly made his way to Juliet, who hadn't moved. He knelt beside her, pressed two fingers to her wrist, and exhaled with relief.
Unconscious. Not dead.
"Good. Now that we've found everyone, we just need to find a way out of—"
"Oh — *uncle!*"
One of the children in Magda's arms screamed, eyes wide with terror, pointing at something behind him.
***Whoosh!***
"Watch out, wizard!"
Ethelid threw himself sideways on pure instinct. Something sharp sliced through the air where his head had been a heartbeat before — close enough that he felt the wind of it graze his ear.
He rolled, hit stone, and came up in a crouch.
"Stay still, damn you!"
Armed figures materialized from the deeper shadows of the cave. Three — no, four men, clutching shovels and crude blades, their faces twisted with desperation rather than malice.
"What the—"
Ethelid didn't finish. He ducked again as a shovel arced toward his skull, the rusted edge whistling past his temple.
"...Wait." One of the attackers froze mid-swing, his face draining of color. "Did she just say *wizard*?"
A ripple of fear passed through the group. The men exchanged uneasy glances, their weapons lowering by inches as the word settled over them like a cold draft.
---
"Hold on," Juliet interrupted, raising a hand. "Back up. Why is this Black — why is this guild down here in the first place?"
She and Ethelid were running their palms along the cave wall as he spoke, feeling for variations in the stone's density. Shortly before, Juliet had suggested that the rock forming the walls wasn't uniformly hard — if they could locate a section soft enough, they might be able to carve a passage out.
Ethelid's fingers paused against the stone.
"They're the reason the children disappeared."
"***What?***" Juliet's voice echoed sharply off the cave walls.
"They told the children they'd pay them if they went into the forest on the mountain and found magic stones."
"By magic stones, you mean—"
Juliet stopped mid-sentence. She didn't need to finish.
Slowly, she turned and looked around the cave — *truly* looked — and noticed what she'd missed before. Scattered across the floor, embedded in the rough walls, lodged between cracks in the stone: small stones that pulsed with a faint, ghostly green luminescence.
"...Mana stones."
"Yes."
Ethelid continued, his voice flat with barely contained disgust.
The village children had been small enough to squeeze through the narrow fissures in the mountain — passages too tight for adult bodies. The Black Mane Guild had used them as miners, sending them down into the dark to pry mana stones loose and carry them back up.
But greed had made them reckless. They kept sending the children down even as the rain intensified. The ground, saturated and weakened, had given way — and the guild members, children, and earth had all collapsed together into the depths.
Juliet absorbed this in silence. Then she looked around again, and this time her expression held no warmth at all.
"I've heard of places like this."
Deep in mountains and along fault lines, one could find narrow, plunging passages encrusted with mana stones — natural deposits formed over centuries.
"This is a nest," she said quietly. "A monster's—"
She caught herself a fraction too late. The words had already left her mouth.
Ethelid stopped examining the wall and turned to look at her, surprise flickering across his features. Few people — even among guild members — possessed that kind of knowledge.
Juliet changed the subject before the silence could sharpen into a question.
"...Speaking of mana stones, I just remembered — your bracelet. The tracking one. Could it help us?"
"The tracking bracelet?"
"Yes. Do you have it with you?"
Ethelid's eyes widened as the realization struck him. He plunged a hand into his coat pocket and pulled out the leather bracelet, the green crystal at its center dull and lightless.
The logic was sound. The Marigold Guild would have noticed their absence by now. If the bracelet's signal could reach them, the guild's people would be able to pinpoint their location — even beneath thirty meters of solid rock.
"You should have thought of this sooner!" Juliet said, a note of genuine exasperation breaking through.
"No — wait — Miss Juliet, this is *my* magical item. *I* made it. So why didn't *you* remind *me*?"
"That's — that's exactly my point! You made it, so how did it not occur to—"
"It doesn't matter! Let's just activate it!"
Their voices rose together, excitement and urgency tangling in the dark. Around them, the sleeping figures began to stir, roused by the commotion.
"Hey! Wizard! Keep it down!"
"I can't sleep with all this racket!"
"Shut *up*, damn it!"
Neither Juliet nor Ethelid spared them a glance. Once the bracelet was active, it was only a matter of time before—
Ethelid pressed his thumb against the crystal.
Nothing happened.
He pressed again. Harder. Twisted it. Held it close to his lips and murmured a word of activation.
The crystal remained dark.
"...It won't turn on."
"That's impossible."
"I think," Ethelid said slowly, turning the bracelet over in his hands, his voice dangerously calm, "this is the one that wasn't charged with mana."
"What do you mean? I'm certain it was fully charged before it was given to me—"
They both fell silent at exactly the same moment.
The same thought. The same name.
There was only one person who'd had access to this item before Ethelid handed it to Juliet. Only one person who could have swapped a charged bracelet for a dead one.
"Theo Lebatan," Juliet breathed, and the words carried the weight of a blood oath, "if I get out of here alive, you will ***not*** escape me."
---
## — On the Surface —
"*Still* nothing?!" Theo shouted, pacing the length of the camp like a caged animal.
"We've sent word — reinforcements should arrive any minute."
"Don't worry too much."
"...Oh, *shit*."
Theo swallowed the worse curse that had been climbing his throat and instead rounded on the three wizards the moment they arrived, jabbing a finger at the dark tree line.
"Find them! *Now!*"
"B-but tracking magic is Ethelid's specialty—"
"I don't care whose specialty it is! *Do it!*"
The wizards flinched but stood their ground, their excuses tumbling out in overlapping, desperate waves. Ethelid's magical signature was unique, they said. His mana flows were unlike anyone else's. And this particular forest — the Eastern Forest — erupted with ambient mana like a dormant volcano suddenly awake. Trying to isolate one wizard's trace in that chaos was like searching for a single voice in a screaming crowd.
*Useless. All of them, utterly useless.*
Three men, and they couldn't accomplish what Ethelid managed alone on an ordinary afternoon.
"Fine," Theo snarled, dragging both hands through his hair. "Then think of something else. Something we can do *right now*."
"We're trying—"
"Try *harder!*"
He grabbed his head and turned away, his breath shallow, his chest tight.
There had been no malice in what he'd done. He'd simply been irritated — a passing, petty frustration — and he'd thought nothing serious could come of it. Let the wizard wander around the forest for a while. A mild inconvenience, nothing more.
Because Ethelid was the guild's best wizard. Unflappable. Nearly impossible to catch off guard. Theo had assumed — with the breezy confidence of someone who had never truly considered consequences — that Ethelid would find his way out of anything.
But hours had passed.
Then more hours.
And neither Ethelid nor Juliet had returned.
Theo had sent search parties into the forest again and again. Each one came back empty-handed. He'd even gone to the village of Kanavel himself, hoping the locals could help, but all he'd received in return was hollow-eyed resignation.
"Two days ago, five of our children disappeared. Do you really think we haven't already done everything we could?"
"It's useless. You'll never find anyone the Great Dragon has taken. They're probably no longer alive."
"Mr. Theo." Walter appeared at his side, his voice measured, steady — infuriatingly calm. "I think continuing like this is a waste of time. We can wait a while longer, but—"
"***I know!***"
The words tore out of him before he could stop them — ragged and raw, more confession than command.
Only now, standing in the rain-soaked dark with nothing to show for his efforts, did Theo understand the full, terrible weight of what he'd done.
---
## — Beneath the Mountain —
A monster's nest was a structure not unlike an underground prison.
The deeper you descended, the more dangerous the creatures you might encounter — but also the richer the deposits of mana stones embedded in the walls and floor. It was a devil's bargain carved into the earth itself.
The most common method of obtaining mana stones was through conventional mining. But here in the East, a significant portion came from nests — ancient lairs abandoned by creatures long dead or driven deeper underground. Because of this, a number of guilds in the region specialized in exactly this kind of extraction: descending into the dark and prying wealth from a monster's abandoned home.
*But even so.*
"No, really," Juliet muttered, shaking her head. "What kind of guild name is *Black Mane*?"
"Something troubling you, my lady?" The man who'd identified himself as the guild's leader glanced at her sourly, then flicked his eyes toward Ethelid with unmistakable wariness.
The Marigold Guild's reputation in the East was formidable. A wizard bearing its name was not someone a bottom-tier operation wanted to antagonize.
"They're a low-class guild," Ethelid murmured near Juliet's ear.
"That much is obvious."
Only true scum could be so consumed by greed as to send children into a place like this — endangering innocents and causing an entire village unimaginable anguish, all for a handful of glowing stones.
Juliet regarded the Black Mane members with a gaze cold enough to frost glass, then turned away.
---
The nest they'd fallen into occupied a deep, vertical fissure in the mountain — the kind of structure that ancient, enormous monsters had once hollowed out as lairs. Extinct giants had built their homes in places exactly like this: deep within mountains, surrounded by mana stones, the deposits growing richer and more concentrated the more dangerous the creature that had claimed them.
The typical structure of such a nest resembled an inverted pyramid — broad and shallow near the surface, narrowing to a lethal point far below.
"How deep have we fallen?" Juliet asked, tilting her head back and staring upward into the featureless dark, trying to gauge even an approximate distance to the surface.
She'd been speaking mostly to herself, but Ethelid appeared beside her and answered with his characteristic serenity.
"Roughly thirty meters. We're far too deep for anyone passing on the surface to detect us. Even if we screamed until our voices gave out, the sound wouldn't reach."
"..."
"Hm? Why are you looking at me like that?"
*An encouraging assessment, truly.*
Juliet exhaled slowly, forcing herself to think.
Near a nest, there was always a surrounding forest dense with lesser monsters — smaller creatures drawn to the ambient mana like moths to flame. As far as she knew, the lords who controlled such territories were obligated by ancient tradition to periodically cull these monsters, protecting the nearby villages from attack. The North had its share of such forests, and Lennox, as ruler of the northern lands, would occasionally—
She severed the thought before it could bloom. *Not now.*
"In the North, the lords still honor that tradition," she said instead, keeping her voice neutral. "What about here?"
Ethelid's reply came with a sigh.
"In this region, we can't expect that kind of diligence. The village of Kanavel hasn't been under a lord's protection for a long time."
A silence settled between them.
Juliet's mind circled back to the heavy, unrelenting rain that had fallen before they'd reached Kanavel.
"The entrance — the ground that collapsed beneath us. Didn't it open because the earth settled after so much rain?"
It seemed a perfectly reasonable theory. Prolonged rainfall weakening the soil, exposing a fissure that had been sealed for centuries.
"It's possible," Ethelid conceded. "But such collapses are extremely rare."
He frowned, a crease deepening between his brows.
"What troubles me more is why this nest was never discovered. A deposit this rich, this close to a populated village — someone should have found it long ago."
Juliet shared the thought. This was, in truth, the first time she had ever seen an ancient monster nest with mana stone deposits this dense. The walls practically *glittered* with them; the floor was littered with loose stones like scattered jewels.
By regulation, any person who discovered a previously untouched nest was required to report it to the guild association. The nest itself wasn't necessarily dangerous — not if you could identify what kind of creature had once inhabited it and confirm it was truly abandoned.
But the Black Mane Guild operated outside the association entirely. They felt no obligation to follow its rules. Rather than report the location and submit to an official investigation — which would have meant sharing the spoils — they had quietly infiltrated Kanavel and recruited the village's children to do their harvesting for them.
Their reasoning was transparent: an official report meant a reduced share. Secrecy meant everything.
"Kanavel," Ethelid said suddenly, as though turning the word over in his mind. "In the ancient language, it means *back*."
Juliet looked at him. "Yes, so?"
He returned her gaze with an expression that suggested the answer should have been obvious.
"*Dragon's back.*"
The legend. Magda had told them — the mountain ridge was called the Back of the Great Dragon. Children who vanished here were said to have been taken by the beast itself.
*Not taken by a dragon,* Juliet thought, the pieces clicking together with grim precision. *Swallowed by its nest.*
While she turned this over in her mind, her fingers moved absently across the cave floor, gathering mana stones without conscious thought. There were so many scattered at her feet that, if she could get them to the surface, they'd fetch a considerable sum. Enough, perhaps, to live comfortably for years without needing anything from anyone.
*If* she got out.
That remained the central question — the one that pressed against the walls of every other thought like water behind a dam.
It was then, while her fingers sifted idly through the stones, that she felt something different.
*Hm?*
Among the translucent, crystal-like mana stones — all faintly green, all rough-edged and irregular — her fingertips closed around something that didn't belong.
She lifted it into the faint light.
A perfectly spherical stone. Deep, unbroken **black** — so dark it seemed to drink the dim glow of the mana stones around it rather than reflect anything at all. Its surface was completely smooth, almost warm to the touch, as though it had been polished by centuries of patient hands.
It looked nothing like the others.
*What is this?*