In the week and a half since arriving in Dawnguard, Lucas’ life had quickly settled into a routine. Valerie neglected to give him much of a tour of the tower or the surrounding territory controlled by the Order, wanting to limit opportunities for things to go wrong, for the time being. He could have demanded it, but her reasoning was sound.

  Instead, he knew little of the place so far, aside from the basement room where he practised his floramancy, an out-of-the-way kitchen area where they took their meals, and one of the lesser used training rooms (which was essentially just an empty room where the walls were enchanted to repair themselves from most damage) higher up the tower where Valerie helped him to work on his swordplay and other combat abilities. They were taking things slow and cautious for now, curbing the chances of exposure.

  There was a general, nebulous, longer term plan to get him soulbonded to the other classes so he could train with them too, and to add more academic pursuits to his regime, but for now they were more focused on getting him to a state where he could adequately defend himself if needs must.

  To be fair, he saw rapid improvement. Though Valerie still mostly kicked his arse up and down the training room, he felt he was getting better, lasting longer, forcing her to put in more effort to win. The days were long and gruelling, leaving him exhausted before falling into bed each night. But they were rewarding.

  As for where he fell into bed, that was the third place in the tower he was growing familiar with.

  Valerie’s quarters were a spartan affair. Already a large space, the lack of decoration just made it feel bigger. Befitting her status as a captain, the apartment was divided into three separate rooms, one of which was supposed to be a bedroom, and the other an office, but Valerie only seemed to use the larger main room, leaving the other two utterly empty. Tall, thin windows lined the far wall at equal intervals, giving a dizzying view of the sprawling city far below and acting as a daytime source of light.

  Lucas had taken up residence in the bedroom, which was actually significantly larger than his flat had been, to his chagrin. In just a week of being here, he’d accumulated almost as many possessions as Valerie had in however many years of living in this place. To be fair to her, she obviously hadn’t spent much time here, in the past. Her life was largely lived on the front lines, holding back the endless hordes that poured from the Blighted Lands.

  It was a little sad to think about. She’d been fighting since she was fourteen, at the minimum, never stopping to take time for herself. There was absolutely zero personalisation in her living space, no artwork or posters or treasured possessions of any description. The furniture she did have was built of simple, pale wood, with no ornamentation; a bed, a table, a chair, an armour stand, and a wardrobe. Once Lucas got himself an armour stand, his room would already match hers, and he had every intention of livening the place up further if he was going to be staying here for a significant length of time, which looked increasingly likely.

  The worst part of living here, though, was the communal showers. They sat at the centre of the tower, with the Order members’ quarters surrounding them on the outside. He’d yet to actually run into anyone else there, but the worry over it turned something that should’ve been relaxing into a somewhat nervous experience.

  At least he’d managed to convince Valerie to wait outside. It turned out that she would indeed follow his orders, if he phrased them as such.

  Sitting on the edge of his bed, Lucas wondered about Valerie. There was no door between his new room and the main living area his companion claimed, because she’d never seen the need to install one, and so he could see her sat at her table, dressed in the simple blue tunic and trousers that was apparently standard Order uniform beneath their armour, scrawling away on some document or other with a feather quill.

  Apparently, she was being rather thorough in the report she was writing on her mission. Every day since they’d returned, she’d dedicated a couple of hours afer their training to writing it. Lucas suspected part of it was to give him some free time to relax and do what he pleased, but she’d definitely gone through multiple pages at this point, and he wondered what her thoughts on their little adventure were. He could only imagine she had a lot to say about his performance.

  Shaking his head, Lucas pushed himself to his feet and strode through to Valerie’s room. She glanced up at him briefly, then went back to writing when he waved her off. He came to a stop by her desk, and silence filled the room, broken only by the monotonous scratching of Valerie’s quill on the parchment.

  The quill never needed to be topped up with ink; Claire had charmed a bunch of them to draw from a reservoir kept somewhere in the tower, because she found quills frustrating but didn’t care enough to figure out how to manufacture pens. Its magical signature was also paired to Valerie, somehow. Only she could write with it, and anyone perusing her report would know for a fact it was written by her, assuming they knew how to check such a thing.

  Lucas watched her write for a moment, waiting until she finished a paragraph before he spoke, “Are we really going to just tread water until Claire comes back?”

  Valerie went still for a moment, then carefully laid down her quill by the side of her parchment. Leaning back in her chair, she laced her fingers in her lap and levelled a cool gaze upon him. “What would you prefer to do?”

  A sigh almost escaped him, but he held it back. Valerie’s attitude had changed since arriving here. She was more than happy to advise him on what she believed was the best course of action, and for the most part he preferred to listen to her, but she was always going out of her way to make it clear that it was all up to him.

  “I don’t mind what we’ve been doing, exactly. Training me up is a good idea.” He paused, grimacing. “Though I’ll admit the need for secrecy is grating on my patience a bit. Having to sneak around in dark underground rooms does rather take away a lot of the fun of learning how to fight with a sword.”

  “You’ve been improving rapidly.”

  “Still not enough to last ten seconds against you.”

  “I have had a lot more training, and the gap in our experience is vast. Even so, you’re catching up much faster than even the most prodigious warriors I’ve worked with. Your skill is still fairly average at this time, but just a few weeks ago you were a clumsy amateur who barely knew how to use a sword at all.”

  “Sure. I know I’m improving way faster than is reasonable. That’s all well and good,” Lucas said. “I do enjoy the training, despite the secrecy, and I’m looking forward to learning the other roles and whatever magic we can secure access to.” He hesitated, unsure how to express himself. “I just want more of a concrete idea of what we’re doing while we wait for Claire to return. It would be one thing if we knew when she’d be back, but I kinda feel like I’m in limbo like this.”

  Valerie watched him for a moment, expressionless. “I’d been working under the assumption you’d prefer to pursue whatever skills took your fancy, and worked to accommodate you. Would you like me to draw up a more structured training regime?”

  “That might help,” Lucas admitted. “I guess I just want some short term goals to work towards? Everything seems kind of far off right now.”

  Valerie nodded. “That’s understandable. I had noticed you were feeling restless, but I suppose I thought you were just struggling to adapt to living in a place of safety after having been in danger for a long time, and it would pass on its own. Forgive me.”

  Lucas flapped a hand in dismissal. He turned, moving to one of the windows, overlooking the vast city below.

  From so high up, the sheer scale of the city was mind-boggling. This lofty vantage surely let him see for dozens of miles, yet Dawnguard seemed to sprawl all the way to the horizon in every direction, an endless sea of buildings. It had taken them hours to navigate the main street that slashed straight through the city, forming a line right from the front gates to the Moontower.

  The morning sun threw hundreds of long fingers of shadow over the landscape, all those tall buildings looking like twigs from up here. It was hard to even pick out the few he’d already learned, like the sprawling College campus that took up much of the northern sector of the city, or the various towering guild headquarters. Lucas wondered how exactly many people were down there, trying to live their lives as best they could.

  Another part of him wondered what they all thought of him. It was a surreal feeling, to look out at a city that boasted a population of millions and be reasonably sure that the majority of them knew his name, and had opinions about him. An intimidating thought.

  He looked back at Valerie over his shoulder. “Nothing to forgive. I am struggling to adapt. A big part of my motivation here is that I’m kinda sick of being cooped up in this tower. No offence.”

  “None taken,” Valerie said. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the desk, moving her laced fingers beneath her chin. Even in an ostensibly lounging posture, her back was still straight, her shoulders back, and she spoke in an even voice, “Would it help if we specifically worked towards training you to a state where we could take missions in and around the city?”

  “What would that standard look like?” Lucas asked, curious.

  “A full member of the Order is expected to have their class bonded, and to possess significant skill in its usage. They must know the Order’s laws, and the laws of the polity they’ll be operating in. Further, the academy hands out certificates to show that a member has reached the necessary skill or knowledge in diplomacy, negotiation, battle tactics, teamwork, survival, geography, history, mathematics, and magic theory.” Valerie frowned. “There used to be more, as our members were once supposed to be able to adequately answer any question you could come up with if we were to encounter you.”

  “Well, I can’t imagine the subjects in that last part would apply to me anyway,” Lucas said.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “They wouldn’t.”

  “Even without them, it’s a lot. I’m going to have to do all that?”

  “You don’t have to do anything. If you truly wish to leave right this moment, we can.” She didn’t look enthusiastic about that possibility.

  Lucas rolled his eyes. “Okay, okay. You think it would be best for me to do all that?”

  “Not necessarily all of it. I would propose that we give you an abridged course of all a skycloak would be expected to know. A sprint through the academy curriculum, if you will.”

  “A speedrun,” Lucas said, smiling.

  Valerie nodded. “Essentially. Notably, the academy curriculum includes several mandatory training exercises that would get you out of the tower in controlled conditions.”

  “You’re not expecting me to go on a field trip with a bunch of teenagers, right?”

  “The academy is not a school. It’s not uncommon for students thrice your age to attend.” She paused, eyes narrowing. “And no. It would be us two, and perhaps others I can trust.”

  That gave Lucas pause. “Trust, huh? I was starting to wonder if there was anyone in this whole city you trust. I can’t help noticing Florence is the only person I’ve met, and that wasn’t an introduction you consented to.”

  “Trust is a difficult thing, in the circumstances. I would trust any member of the Order of Five to fight by my side in a battle. But it’s not a matter of confidence or competence.” She rose from her chair, and came to join him by the window, where she looked off to the horizon. Her quarters were north-facing, where the Front Lines lay far off. “There are no factions in the Order of Five. Lady Claire’s word is law, in all things. No one who wears the skycloak would ever be foolish enough to disobey her, let alone betray her.” Her gaze turned to him. “But you are not Lady Claire. And if I cannot be certain how someone will treat you, I cannot take the risk of putting my faith in them. The stakes are too high.”

  Lucas sighed, feeling a little frustration creeping in. He tried to push it down. Valerie was being eminently reasonable in her deduction. She certainly wasn’t wrong that there was no way of knowing for sure how anyone would react to his arrival, and they knew for a fact there were groups out there who’d take advantage of him in various ways—some would even seek to kill him.

  So he wasn’t frustrated at her, he supposed, and he had to remember that. What bothered him was this ridiculous situation he’d found himself in.

  Seriously. How did this bloody ritual decide that my friends and I were the bloody chosen ones? By what criteria did it think we were destined to save an entire world?

  It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in his childhood best friends. Maybe he was a bit naive, but he reckoned they could do anything if they all put their heads together. Sure, saving a world from demons was a harder task than anything they’d been through by a long way, but they could’ve pulled through with the power of stubbornness and friendship, or some such nonsense.

  The idea that some great magic ritual would believe in them too, however, was something he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to get past.

  He sighed again, his shoulder drooping for a moment before he shook himself and squared them back up. “You think there’s people in the Order of Five who’d do me harm, then?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Valerie admitted. “As you can probably tell from my living quarters, I haven’t spent a great deal of time here. In those rare occasions when I’ve been stationed in Dawnguard, the vast majority of my attention has been dedicated to researching in the archives. My hope is that members of the Order would see you as an extension of Lady Claire, but I am aware that the Order’s general remit has changed over time, and our membership has a variety of opinions on that.” She blew out a breath through her nose, and there was a hint of darkness in her expression. “While I know of most of the Order by name, there are very few I truly know on a personal level. One could say I have perhaps neglected to build social ties.”

  Lucas moved closer to her, laying a hand on her shoulder and letting his lunar mana seep into her pathways. She went briefly still, then relaxed and gave him a grateful nod.

  “Can you trust that Florence woman?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Valerie said. “I wish I could. But I don’t know.”

  “Well,” Lucas said. “We can always just keep up the secret. Keep telling everyone I’m your resident lunamancer now, and I’m doing various academy-ish things so I’m not a liability during your missions. At the same time, we sound out your comrades to see who can be trusted.”

  “That’s probably the best path forward, if you’re amenable to it,” Valerie agreed.

  “Sure,” Lucas said, stamping down on his irritation once more. It was, again, not her fault. He doubted she wanted to be unable to trust people, thus forcing him to keep up a false persona and generally skulk around, avoiding drawing attention to himself. “You up for heading down to our practice room before we do the sword stuff? I want to work with my floramancy a bit more.”

  “Certainly,” Valerie said, as if she’d ever outright deny anything he requested, these days.

  He felt he had to check, “You don’t think it’s a bad idea, for any reason?”

  “I see no need to caution against it,” she said, eyeing him as she strode over to her armour, which she quickly set about donning. It wasn’t like regular armour, needing to be clipped on and such, she merely touched her fingers to it, and it transitioned into lunar light that rolled over her body until it had her fully encased. She was capable of storing it in her soulheart, but avoided doing so unless it was unnecessary, saying it was uncomfortable.

  Next came her cloak, which she’d hung up in her wardrobe. Once the sky blue garment was in place, she continued, “The room is deep underground enough that it would be unlikely for anyone else to head down there without reason, and positioned such that we would hear them coming even if they did, with plenty of time to hide the fact you’re working with floramancy.”

  “The plants might look a bit suspicious, though,” Lucas said.

  “As long as you clearly display use of lunamancy, it wouldn’t be a problem.”

  Lucas shrugged. “If you say so.”

  They left through the front door, which was really just a slab of pale white stone that only moved through magic, sliding out of the way. Valerie touched her hand to it, and some glyphs lit up as it slid closed once more, oddly silent. Outside was a curving corridor that they followed all the way to an unassuming archway which opened out onto the bane of Lucas’ existence.

  The grand staircase spiralled through the tower all the way from the top to the bottom, but the height was the only thing grand about it. It was an enclosed space, barely wide enough to fit two people walking side by side, and squat enough that he was sure he’d hit his head if he jumped too high. Diamond-shaped glyphs glowed at either end of every other step, projecting kaleidoscope-light patterns on the walls and giving the staircase its light.

  Heading downwards, at least, wasn’t so bad, and Lucas had little cause for complaint as they descended. If he was feeling petty, he could rant that the steps were too shallow, prone to tripping, but obviously that wasn’t a problem for the skycloaks, given they had cloaks that could grant them flight. It probably hadn’t ever occurred to them that there could be better ways of navigating their stupidly tall tower. Maybe they didn’t even want to, looking down on the plebeians who didn’t have a magic flying coat to propel them up. It felt like every few seconds they passed a member of the Order casually hopping up the steps a dozen at a time like they weighed nothing, or those floating down past them, barely even needing to touch the stairs at all.

  (To be fair, it was probably a significant defensive advantage, if the Moontower were to ever come under attack. But he wasn’t feeling charitable enough to acknowledge that.)

  When they reached the 100th floor, it mercifully opened up a bit. Most of the floors above that were private quarters and barracks, and the grand staircase provided only one arched exit per floor. Below that were more common rooms and training areas and administrative offices and places that generally saw a lot more use, so someone had had the bright idea of cutting windows into the staircase, turning it from a suffocating passageway to a decent approximation of a pleasant climb/descent.

  Unfortunately, none of them had thought to turn it into a magic elevator, and so it still took a good few minutes overall to reach the ground floor, which was just ridiculous. And they still had so long to go!

  At least he was able to get a brief look at the main chamber of the Moontower. The bottom ten floors of the tower had been hollowed out and expanded, forming a massive atrium that surrounded the grand staircase at its centre, with a glass roof that was so clear you could only see it was there due to the sunlight refracting through. The white marble floor was packed with people, Order members and otherwise, all flitting between the hundreds of doorways that lined the great hall.

  It was beautiful. It was marvellous. It was open.

  And it was rather exposed, meaning that when he saw the red-headed woman making her way through the crowd, that meant she could also see him. If she could see him, she could undoubtedly see Valerie.

  Indeed, he couldn’t help noticing that his companion’s pace had increased, and he hurried to follow her, taking two steps at a time. Simultaneously, the red-headed woman making her way through the atrium clearly sped up too.

  Lucas sighed. “She’s just going to chase after us,” he told Valerie. “I’ve got the feeling she’s the type who’d follow us right down to our training room.”

  Valerie slowed down, her shoulders tensing for a moment before she sighed. “You’re not wrong,” she said.

  They ended up stopping at the ground floor, where the grand staircase fully opened out, its walls having been hacked away. There were a few skycloaks on guard, making sure there wasn’t a constant scrum to get to the stairs, but those who had permission to be there seemed to know there was no point rushing anyway.

  It took only a few seconds for Florence to make her way through the crowd, and her green eyes widened when she saw Valerie there waiting for her. They soon narrowed in suspicion, and she strode up to them, looking them both over. “You two are difficult to find,” she said.

  “I’ve been training Ser James here to be mission ready,” Valerie said. “I can hardly take him into the field unprepared.”

  “So I assumed,” Florence said. “Strange, that you appear to be headed down to the bowels when we have perfectly good training rooms up above. I saw your name on the schedule.”

  “We desired privacy.”

  “That much is evident.” She eyed Lucas for a second, frowning. “Why do you want to hide away your lunamancer’s ability?”

  “It’s a rare art,” Valerie began.

  Florence cut her off. “And therefore a very valuable one. But you’ve always put the Order before yourself, Val. You’d never hide away such a valuable asset.”

  “It’s my fault, really,” Lucas said, scratching the back of his head. “I’m the one who doesn’t want the attention.”

  “I can appreciate that,” Florence said. “I’m just surprised she agreed to it, even if she intended your primary utility to be for her purposes.”

  “Enough of this,” Valerie snapped. Her eyes were darting around, cataloguing all the people around them. “What did you want?”

  “Apart from to check up on my friend?” Florence asked with a glare. She crossed her arms and huffed a mirthless laugh. “We barely get to talk these days, busy with our own things. I want to know what’s been going on with you. There must be something, if you missed out on Lady Claire’s mission.”

  Valerie closed her eyes, took a deep breath. When she opened them again, they were cold as ice. “There is something I would like to talk to you about, come to think of it,” she said, then turned on her heel and strode towards the staircase once more.

  Lucas and Florence exchanged a look, then hurried to follow.

  Discord :)