Nolan’s gaze snapped up, meeting mine with a desperate intensity that was a far cry from his earlier, almost passive observation. His mouth worked silently for a moment before he finally spoke, his voice raspy.

  “No. No, it’s not mine.” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I… I drew it. From a book.”

  “A book?” I raised an eyebrow, my finger still resting on the crude flame. “What kind of book has a logo that looks like it belongs on a t-shirt for a band called ‘Inferno’?”

  Nolan flinched at my tone, his eyes darting between me and Bartholomew, who was now sitting up, his tail giving a slow, deliberate sweep across the rough-hewn table. The cat’s yellow eyes were fixed on Nolan with an unnerving stillness.

  “It wasn’t… it wasn’t a logo,” Nolan stammered, his hands clenching and unclenching on the table. “It was an illustration. Ancient text. Some kind of forbidden lore. I… I found it in a dusty archive. Back when I was still trying to… to figure things out.”

  “Figure what out?” I pressed, enjoying the crumbling of his carefully constructed detachment just a little too much. This was far more interesting than any clickbait headline.

  “Everything,” he whispered, his voice barely audible. “Why I ended up here. What this world was. It was a throwaway mention, a footnote really, in a tome about obscure heresies. The text was fragmented, almost illegible. But the illustration… it was clearer. And that symbol, it… it resonated. Like a forgotten piece of code. I sketched it, thinking maybe I could research it more thoroughly once I got to Aethelgard.”Bartholomew purred, the sound laced with acid. “Truly, the ambitions of the modern man know no bounds.”

  Nolan ignored him, his focus entirely on me.

  “I swear, Paige. I have no idea what it is. Just a symbol in a book. I didn’t make it. I didn’t give it to anyone. Why would I? I’ve been trying to fly under the radar just as much as you have.” He gestured vaguely around the deserted inn’s common room. “This whole ‘adventurer’ thing? It was a desperate, ill-advised attempt to escape the inevitable consequences of my indiscretions.”

  I studied him, the faint flickering of the embers casting shifting shadows across his face. He looked genuinely terrified, not in the way he’d described the Shadow Lord, but in the raw, primal fear of being caught. And for all his greasy, awkward exterior, there was a startling clarity in his confession. It fit. The detached programmer, the obsessed researcher, the man who’d stumbled into a magical fantasy world and tried to intellectualize his way through it.

  “So,” I said slowly, picking up the parchment and folding it carefully. “You’re telling me you’re not part of this ‘Firebrand Cult’?”

  “Absolutely not!” The vehemence in his denial was palpable. “I’m a programmer. I deal with logical systems, with predictable outcomes. Cults? Ancient prophecies? They’re… they’re chaos theory on a level I can barely comprehend. I want no part of it.” He looked down at his hands, then back at me, his expression earnest. “I just wanted to learn. And then everything went sideways. First the cat, then you… and suddenly I was running for my life from things that defied all logic.”

  I tilted my head, the wheels in my mind turning. If Nolan wasn’t a Firebrand, then who was? And why had a barmaid associated him with the symbol? Perhaps the patron who dropped it looked like Nolan, or acted like him in some minor, insignificant way. Or maybe the barmaid had seen the sketch and associated it with the only other person she’d seen drawing in a notebook. It was a loose thread, but it was a thread nonetheless.

  “All right, Nolan,” I said, tucking the parchment back into my pouch. The air in the room seemed to lighten, the tension easing slightly. “I’m going to believe you. For now. But you’re going to have to be a lot more helpful if we’re going to survive this, and a lot more honest. Not just about what you don’t know, but about what you do know.”He nodded eagerly, relief washing over his face.

  “Anything. Seriously. I’ll share everything I’ve found. My research notes, my theories… I’ve got pages of observations on Aethelgard’s infrastructure, the economic disparities, the potential weaknesses in their siege defenses…”

  “Whoa, slow down, code-monkey,” I interrupted, a small smile finally touching my lips. “We’ll start with the basics. Like, for instance, how you managed to get yourself from where you started all the way to the capital without drawing more attention. That’s not a short road.”Bartholomew stretched, yawning to reveal an impressive array of tiny, sharp teeth.

  “Indeed. While the intricacies of Aethelgard’s sewage system are undoubtedly fascinating, perhaps our focus should remain on the more immediate existential threats.”

  Nolan winced again, but this time it was accompanied by a ghost of a smile. The game was over, but the interrogation, in a way, had just begun. And as the embers glowed, and Bartholomew resumed his fluffy, judging pose, I had a feeling Nolan Christensson, the former backend developer, was about to discover that his new reality was far more complex, and far more dangerous, than any poorly documented ancient text.

  Nolan let out a long, shaky breath, the kind you exhale after narrowly avoiding a head-on collision. He fumbled with the leather satchel at his side, his pudgy fingers surprisingly deft as he pulled out a worn, grease-stained notebook. It looked less like a scholar’s journal and more like something that had been used to prop up a wobbly tavern table. He opened it reverently. The pages were a chaotic mess of charts, maps, and densely packed lines of a script that looked like a bizarre fusion of English and something runic.

  “It’s all about pattern recognition,” he began, his voice gaining a sliver of confidence now that he was on familiar ground. “This world, Eldoria, it’s like a legacy system with poor documentation. Nothing makes sense on the surface, but if you watch long enough, you start to see the logic. The guard patrols in the outer villages? They change shifts every six hours, but the night watch is always understaffed and tends to congregate around the taverns. The merchant caravans stick to the King’s Road, but their supply wagons, the ones carrying hay and cheap grain? They use the old dirt tracks to avoid the tolls. They’re slower, but nobody pays them any mind.”

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  He tapped a crudely drawn map of a stretch of road. “I traveled with a grain convoy for a week. The driver thought I was a half-wit pilgrim. I just had to help load sacks in the morning and keep my mouth shut. Paid me in stale bread and watery ale.” He flipped a page, showing a complex diagram of interconnected circles and arrows. “This is my analysis of the social hierarchy. Peasants ignore anyone who looks poorer than them. Merchants ignore anyone who isn’t a customer. Guards ignore anyone who looks harmless and unimportant. My entire strategy was based on weaponized insignificance.”

  I leaned forward, genuinely intrigued. He wasn’t a warrior or a rogue; he was a systems analyst. He hadn’t fought his way to Aethelgard; he’d exploited its bugs.

  “I’d find a group, attach myself to the periphery, and just… observe. I learned who was sleeping with whom in the logging camps, who was skimming profits from the tanneries, and which town guards were drunks. Information is a currency here, maybe the most valuable one. And nobody expects the fat, sweaty guy in the corner to be listening.” He looked up at me, a flicker of pride in his eyes. “I’m a ghost in the machine, Paige. That’s how I got here.”

  A ghost in the machine. A backend developer finding a backdoor into reality. I had to admit, it was brilliant in a way I never would have conceived. My approach was to talk my way through, to confront, to persuade. His was to become a non-factor, a variable so small the system-at-large rounded it down to zero.

  “Okay,” I said, a slow grin spreading across my face. “Okay, Nolan the Odd. I’m impressed.”His shoulders, which had been hunched up around his ears, relaxed.

  “Really?”

  “Really. But it still doesn’t answer the ‘why’. Why come to Aethelgard at all? It’s the most dangerous place to be if you want to stay insignificant.”

  His brief moment of pride evaporated, replaced by the familiar sheen of anxiety.

  “The same reason as you, I guess. Answers. I thought… I hoped… the Great Library, the Royal Archives, or somewhere in this city, there has to be a record of what happened to us. How we got here. And maybe,” he lowered his voice to a whisper, “how to get back.”

  The word hung in the air between us: back. Back to Wi-Fi and hot showers. Back to a world where the biggest threat was a looming deadline or a passive-aggressive email, not a Shadow Lord or a city guard with a grudge. A sudden, sharp pang of homesickness hit me so hard I felt it in my chest.

  “God, I miss pizza,” I said, the words tumbling out before I could stop them. “Like, a real, greasy, New York-style slice. The kind you have to fold in half. And cheap, terrible beer in a frosty mug.”Nolan’s eyes went wide, a look of profound, almost religious understanding on his face.

  “A twenty-piece McNuggets,” he breathed. “With all the sauces. Sweet and Sour, Hot Mustard… even Tangy Barbecue. Fries with extra salt, and a giant, watery Diet Coke that’s mostly ice. I used to eat it in my car in the parking lot so my roommate wouldn’t see.”

  We stared at each other for a long moment, two refugees from a world of glorious, processed convenience, stranded in an age of hard bread and roasted meat of questionable origin.

  “I miss my laptop,” he continued, his voice thick with emotion. “The clack of the keys. The hum of the fan when I’m compiling code. Arguing with strangers on Reddit about pointless shit.”

  “Scrolling through Instagram until my eyes burn,” I added. “Binge-watching an entire season of some mediocre drama in one weekend. Calling my mom to complain about my job.”

  “The smell of a new graphics card.”

  “Air conditioning.”

  “Heated car seats.”

  “Headphones!”

  “Ah, yes,” Bartholomew intoned from his perch on a dusty chest, breaking our reverie. He was meticulously grooming a paw, his tone dripping with condescension. “While this litany of manufactured comforts is undeniably poignant, may I remind you that our immediate concerns involve avoiding evisceration, not lamenting the absence of your electrically-warmed posteriors.”

  Nolan and I fell silent, the spell broken. The embers in the hearth cast long, dancing shadows on the rough-hewn walls. The room suddenly felt colder, the straw-stuffed mattresses less inviting. He was right. We were two mice in a cage, reminiscing about a cheese factory while a cat sharpened its claws outside.

  “He’s right,” I said, sighing. I stood up and stretched, my leather armor creaking in protest. “We need to rest. Kaelen will be back by morning, and we need to have a plan.” I looked at Nolan, who seemed to have shrunk back into his shell. “You did good, Nolan. Seriously. Your notes could actually be useful.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah. The whole city is a system, right? Maybe you can help us find the bugs in the Shadow Lord’s code.”That seemed to bolster him. He nodded, managing a small, genuine smile.

  “I can do that.”

  We doused the last of the embers and settled onto our respective sleeping pallets. The room was plunged into a profound darkness, broken only by a sliver of moonlight filtering through a grimy windowpane.

  “Paige?” Nolan’s voice was a soft whisper in the dark.

  “Yeah?”

  “My first job in Portland… I worked for a company that designed inventory management software for artisanal donut shops. That’s what I did. I wrote code to track sprinkles.” He paused. “I hated it. Every single day.”

  I lay there, staring up at the unseen ceiling. I’d spent my first year out of college writing marketing copy for a company that sold ergonomic dog beds. I’d described it as ‘disrupting the canine comfort space.’

  “Yeah,” I whispered back. “I know the feeling.”

  In the quiet that followed, a strange sense of peace settled over me. We were a bizarre, dysfunctional party: a sarcastic communications major, a socially anxious programmer, an exiled knight, and a cat who thought he was Shakespeare. We were out of our depth, under-equipped, and hunted. But I didn’t feel completely alone. And in the sprawling, dangerous code of Eldoria, that felt like the first variable that might finally be starting to work in our favor.