"Hm!"
The moment Juliet finished speaking, the Black Mane Guild members erupted into angry muttering amongst themselves.
"And here I thought the Marigold Guild had some great spirit summoner!"
"Damn it — we wasted our time!"
"Exactly. What did you expect from a woman like her?"
One by one, the disappointed men turned their backs and drifted away, their interest extinguished as quickly as it had flared.
Juliet didn't care in the slightest. This was *precisely* the reaction she'd wanted.
Satisfied that her abilities remained safely concealed, she shrugged and turned away from their retreating figures — only to find herself face to face with a smirking wizard.
Ethelid hadn't looked away from her once. His eyes glinted with quiet amusement, and when he spoke, laughter threaded through every syllable.
"...Your ability is simply *magnificent*."
The sarcasm was thick enough to carve. Juliet didn't react. What he thought of her was irrelevant.
She turned instead toward the children — and toward Magda, who sat with her arms wrapped around all five of them as though she could shield them from the darkness itself.
Dana, perched on her mother's lap with a smile still lingering from the butterfly display, puffed out her small chest and declared proudly:
"And *my* mother is a sculptor!"
"Is that so?"
Juliet's reply was polite but distracted. Ethelid, however, leaned forward with genuine interest.
"A sculptor? I thought you were from Kanavel?"
"No — I studied at the fine arts school in Carcassonne first, then worked there for some time. I only came to Kanavel recently." Magda's voice steadied as she spoke of her craft, the tremor of fear receding. "We work primarily with Belsan marble. It's quite popular these days."
"Are you still working on a piece now?" Juliet asked, her curiosity stirring despite herself.
"Yes — I should finish it soon."
"What kind of sculpture?"
"A statue of the Sorrowful Saint."
"The Sorrowful Saint?"
Juliet, who had little interest in religion, repeated the name with a faintly embarrassed expression. But Ethelid, apparently well-versed in the subject, rejoined the conversation without hesitation.
"Is this the commission for this year's carnival?"
"Yes, exactly right!"
"It must be quite an honor."
"An honor?" Magda's eyes widened. "*Of course* it's an honor! Only thirteen sculptors on the entire continent have ever received such a commission!"
Juliet glanced at Ethelid and found him looking back at her with an expression of profound disbelief — as though he couldn't fathom that someone would need to *ask*.
"Well — it's not *that* remarkable," Magda added quickly, a flush rising to her cheeks. "And the biggest problem right now is that it isn't finished. I still haven't found a suitable face for it."
She sighed, the weight of the unfinished work settling visibly across her shoulders.
"As a rule, it's much easier to sculpt the face of a real person."
"Because you don't need to create a separate sketch?" Juliet offered.
"Exactly. And if you make the face slightly more beautiful than the original, the reward is even higher." Magda laughed — a warm, tired sound — and Dana giggled along with her, sensing the ease between the adults even if she couldn't follow the words.
*Wait.*
A thought snagged at the edge of Juliet's mind, but before it could take shape, she was interrupted.
"Wizards aren't supposed to be interested in religion, are they?" she said, turning to Ethelid. "How do you know about the carnival commission?"
"Is it forbidden?"
"As far as I know, the Magic Tower and the main temple don't exactly get along."
Ethelid offered a vague shrug that answered nothing at all.
"If things continue like this," Magda said with another sigh, "our statue may end up as a faceless saint. I've searched everywhere, but I simply can't find the right face."
The task, as she described it, was deceptively simple and impossibly difficult: create the most perfect face in the world. But standards of beauty varied from person to person, and since the client was a temple, satisfying their exacting aesthetic demands bordered on the divine.
---
"Hey — *hey!* Does this look like an exit to anyone else?"
A voice rang out from the far side of the cave — sharp with excitement, barely contained.
Juliet and Ethelid turned simultaneously.
One of the Black Mane Guild members stood pressed against the wall, his fingers tracing a section of stone that was subtly, but unmistakably, different in color from the surrounding rock.
"Does that look like a passage?"
"Who the hell knows. But even if it does, what difference does it make? We can't—"
"No — *look*. The stone here is softer. Feel it."
Whatever skepticism the others carried evaporated the moment they touched the wall themselves. Three days in the dark — three days of hunger, fear, and suffocating helplessness — had left them starving for any scrap of hope. And now they'd found one.
"This is our chance!"
"If we dig through here, we can get out!"
"Let's start — now!"
"Hurry! *Dig!*"
The guild members threw themselves at the wall with frenzied energy, attacking the discolored stone with shovels, pickaxes, and bare hands.
"Hm."
Juliet watched in silence, her arms folded, her expression flat.
She was skeptical.
This nest followed the same structure as the ones described in old legends. The deeper you descended, the richer the treasures — but the more dangerous the creatures that guarded them. They had been fortunate: the level they'd landed on appeared to be an ancient, abandoned habitat. No monster. No immediate threat.
If the guild members were lucky, they might actually break through to a passage leading upward. But if they weren't...
*And if they dig through the floor instead of the wall? What are the chances the ground doesn't collapse again — dropping us even deeper?*
Their tools didn't inspire confidence either. Battered shovels, chipped blades, implements meant for prying loose stones from crevices — not for tunneling through a mountainside.
But Juliet was too exhausted to argue with twelve desperate men who would not be talked down from their only hope.
*There's no point in stopping them. They won't listen.*
She let it go.
---
*I wonder what time it is.*
Juliet tilted her head back and stared upward into the impenetrable darkness. Too many hours — too many days — had passed since the fall for her to have any reliable sense of time. Without sunrise or sunset, without the slow turning of light across a sky she couldn't see, the hours had dissolved into a single, formless mass.
It felt as though only one day had passed since she'd arrived.
It had been three.
"Sir Ethelid."
"Yes?"
"Up there." She didn't lower her gaze. "It's magic."
Ethelid followed her eyes toward the ceiling — or rather, toward the barrier of stone and compressed earth that sealed them beneath the mountain like a cork in a bottle.
She kept her words sparse. Three days without food had reduced her strength to something thin and brittle, and she had no intention of wasting what little remained on unnecessary speech. The last thing her stomach had enjoyed before the fall was the cold, sweet milk drink Ethelid had brought her in the tent.
*Well,* she thought with a quiet, hollow laugh. *As last suppers go, that was rather fine.*
"I see it," Ethelid said after a long pause. "An obstruction. Magical in nature."
He understood what she was suggesting. If they could destroy whatever sealed the gap above them, they might create an opening — or at the very least, make enough noise for someone on the surface to hear their cries.
But the problems were obvious. They couldn't reach the ceiling. And even if they could, breaking through a magically reinforced barrier was an entirely different challenge from chipping at soft stone.
"I don't think it would break easily, even if we managed to get up there," Ethelid murmured, his brow furrowed.
Magic wasn't suited to brute physical force. But with enough precision — with the right application of power — it wasn't impossible.
He opened his mouth, and Juliet could see the thought forming behind his eyes before he spoke it.
"Your butterflies — could they—"
"No," Juliet said. The word was flat, final, and left no room for negotiation. "I can't use them that way."
Ethelid's expression flickered with disappointment, though he masked it quickly.
"Understood."
"You're a wizard, Ethelid. Can't *you* do something about it?"
He stared at her as though she'd suggested he simply flap his arms and fly.
"What exactly do you think a wizard *is*? Certain conditions must be met to cast spells. There are limitations, requirements—"
He broke off mid-sentence, his gaze sliding sideways toward the Black Mane Guild members laboring at the far wall. When he resumed, his voice had dropped to a whisper.
"...It's not so simple to do it *here*."
He didn't elaborate. He didn't need to.
Juliet understood the hidden calculus behind his caution. If Ethelid revealed the full extent of his abilities — or if the balance of power in this cave shifted even slightly — the Black Mane Guild members might reconsider their options. Twelve armed men against one wizard, one woman with mysterious but apparently useless butterflies, and a mother with five small children.
As long as they feared Ethelid's reputation — as long as the name *Marigold Guild* and the shadow of the Magic Tower kept them wary — they wouldn't dare attack.
But fear was a leash that frayed quickly in the dark.
Juliet counted the guild members as discreetly as she could, watching them hack at the stone with grunting, single-minded determination.
"I'm tired — can't dig anymore..."
"Then *work harder* and stop whining!"
"Move it! Don't slack off!"
Twelve. There were twelve of them.
On their side: a wizard operating under severe constraints, a spirit summoner pretending to be useless, and Magda clutching five children to her chest.
*Honestly,* Juliet thought, her gaze lingering on Magda and the little ones, *they're lucky they weren't taken hostage the moment we all landed down here.*
While she turned these grim calculations over in her mind, Ethelid drew a long breath and whispered beside her:
"It's a pity Theo isn't with us."
Juliet raised an eyebrow and shot him a look of open skepticism. Ethelid read the thought on her face and laughed softly.
"I'm serious. He's actually quite skilled with a sword." A pause. "Though I'll admit — looking at him, it's hard to believe."
"Hm. I'll take your word for it."
---
***BOOM.***
The sound erupted behind them — sudden, deep, reverberating through the stone floor and up through the soles of Juliet's boots.
Both of them spun around.
"*Finally!*"
"It's breaking! It's *breaking!*"
Shouts of elation rang through the cavern. The Black Mane Guild members crowded around the wall, where a jagged crack had split the discolored stone from top to bottom.
"Soon we'll be free!"
But Juliet didn't join the celebration. She rose slowly to her feet, a frown deepening across her face, something cold and instinctive tightening in her chest.
*That wall was solid rock. How did it break so quickly?*
Stone that dense, that thick — it should have taken hours more. Days, perhaps. Even with twelve men working without rest.
Unless it wasn't meant to hold.
Unless something on the other side had *wanted* it to give way.
"And now — just a little more—!"
***That was when the ground moved.***
Not shifted. Not settled. *Moved* — a slow, deliberate undulation that rolled beneath their feet like the deck of a ship in a rising swell.
"...I'm not the only one who felt that," Juliet said quietly. "Am I?"
"..."
Ethelid's silence was answer enough.
In that instant, Juliet felt the full, crushing weight of her own mistake. She had seen the danger. She had *felt* it — the wrongness, the too-easy hope, the wall that broke when it shouldn't have. And she had done nothing. She had let exhaustion and apathy override every instinct screaming at her to intervene, and now—
*Why didn't I listen?*
Every habitat had a ruler. Every nest belonged to something. And in a cave this deep, this rich with mana stones, the creature that claimed it would not be small, would not be weak, would not be kind.
Three days of silence. Three days of peace.
They had mistaken dormancy for absence.
"***AAAAAH!***"
The guild members nearest the cracked wall screamed — a raw, animal sound torn from throats that had forgotten how to do anything else.
"***Get back!***" Ethelid was already moving, throwing himself toward Magda and the children, hauling them away from the fracturing stone.
The moss-covered floor — that soft, thick carpet that had cushioned their fall, that had felt so mercifully gentle beneath their exhausted bodies — began to *rise*.
Not the floor.
Not stone.
***Skin.***
"Gh-*SHHHHHHH!!!!*"
A sound split the darkness — not a roar, not a scream, but something older and worse: the hiss of something vast and ancient and *hungry*, vibrating through the rock itself until Juliet felt it in her teeth, in her bones, in the hollow space behind her ribs.
A doomed smile touched Juliet's lips as the truth revealed itself with terrible, absolute clarity.
The soft surface they had been sitting on. The moss that had saved their lives. The ground beneath their feet for three long days and nights.
It had never been ground at all.
***They had been resting on the body of a colossal serpent.***