The inside of the Guild hall was louder and more chaotic than I'd expected — a wide, high-ceilinged room packed with long tables, a sprawling quest board covered edge to edge in fluttering parchment, and enough armed, road-worn people to make it clear this was less a formal institution and more a very well-organized clearinghouse for anyone willing to solve problems for coin.
A young woman behind the front counter caught my eye and waved me over with the practiced efficiency of someone who processed dozens of new faces a week. "First time at the Guild?"
"That obvious?" I asked.
"You've got the look," she said, not unkindly. "Everyone does, first time. Name?"
"Lukas Gigonos."
"Lukas, then. I'm Wren. Registration's simple enough — we'll need a basic combat and skill assessment, nothing invasive, just enough to slot you into an appropriate starting rank. Guild ranks go from Iron at the bottom up through Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Mythril at the top, though I'll be honest, most people spend their whole careers between Iron and Silver, and that's nothing to be ashamed of."
The assessment turned out to be exactly the kind of delicate problem I'd been quietly dreading since deciding to build a cover identity in the first place. A Guild evaluator — a scarred, no-nonsense older man named Dorren — walked me through a series of basic strength, speed, and combat tests in a private yard behind the main hall, and I spent the entire process carefully, deliberately performing at a level that matched my fabricated status window rather than my actual one.
It was, unexpectedly, one of the harder things I'd done since arriving in this world. A trillion years of training had wired something deep into my instincts that resisted, on a level I couldn't fully articulate, the act of deliberately underperforming. Every strike I pulled felt like lying with my whole body.
Dorren, to his credit, seemed impressed regardless. "Good fundamentals," he said, jotting notes on a worn clipboard. "Better than most who come through claiming 'Swordsman' as a job title without ever having held a real blade before. I'll put you in at Bronze rank — you'll move up fast if the rest of your work matches this."
Bronze rank, as it turned out, came with a small metal pin, a modest stipend for accepting Guild-sponsored quests, and access to a slightly less crowded section of the quest board reserved for jobs the Guild considered too risky for total novices but not yet worth Silver-rank attention.
I spent the next hour scanning the board less for actual work and more for information. Requests ranged from mundane — pest control on a farm, an escort job for a merchant caravan heading south — to considerably stranger. One posting, tucked into a corner and clearly ignored by most Guild members based on how faded and undisturbed it looked, caught my attention immediately.
[ REQUEST: Investigation - Unusual Shadow Sightings, Eastern Border Villages. Multiple reports of anomalous shadow activity over the past two months. No confirmed casualties. Guild recommends Silver rank or higher due to unknown threat classification. Reward: Negotiable. ]
Two months. Eastern border. The timeline lined up unsettlingly well with everything Boren the caravan master had mentioned on the road, and with whatever had first stirred near Valoria before Malakar ever showed his face directly.
"This one," I said, tapping the posting as Wren passed by with an armful of parchment. "Any idea why nobody's taken it?"
She glanced at it and made a face. "Silver-rank recommendation on a job with zero confirmed danger and a vague reward tends to scare off exactly the people qualified to handle it, and attract exactly the people who shouldn't touch it. It's been up for six weeks. You're Bronze, technically under-ranked for it, but—" she hesitated, studying me with slightly more attention than before. "Honestly, given what I just watched Dorren clock for your assessment, I don't think rank's really the limiting factor here. Want me to flag it for you?"
"Please," I said, and meant it. A Guild-sanctioned excuse to investigate exactly the pattern of sightings I already suspected connected back to the Grey Sovereign was worth far more to me than the actual reward attached to it.
As Wren made a note in the Guild ledger, I found myself already turning over the shape of the next few weeks in my mind — quiet fieldwork by day, library research by night, a careful, patient unraveling of exactly how deep this particular thread went before I let myself pull on it too hard.
For the first time since the Heart of Valoria had shown Eldrin and me that broken, smoking crown, it felt less like I was reacting to an ancient threat and more like I was finally starting to hunt one.