Pryce had no other option but to start asking around for this Dawn of Night guild.
If his mission was to find the place, then by all means in heavens he was going to find the place, even if it meant wearing out what was left of his boots on Veyra's endless, shit-slick cobbles.
It came as no real surprise that the first twenty souls he asked—vendors, runners, a bored temple boy sweeping the steps of some minor shrine, a half-drunk bard who tried to sell him a loveballad instead of directions—didn't know the Dawn of Night guild.
Hadn't heard of it or place it on any of their mental maps.
But the name was good and cool, rolling off the tongue with a dark little shiver of poetry, and every one of them gave it an honest moment's thought before shaking their heads.
A name like Dawn of Night wasn't the kind a man forgot once it had slithered past his ears. If they'd ever heard it, they'd have remembered.
They hadn't. They didn't.
And that, by itself, was strange as a three-legged priest.[1]
Pryce knew the guilds of Veyra the way a whore knew the bad tippers.
Every house, every hall, every shabby little outfit with a cracked sigil nailed to a leaning door, right down to the pathetic one-room mercenary shop two brothers had opened last week above a soup stall and named, in a fit of embarrassing optimism, the Iron Hearts of Storm's Reach.
He knew the big players, the small players and the tragic players who were about to become corpses. He knew which guildmasters slept with which rival guildmasters and which ones paid the Sanctum's bribes on time.
And he had never, ever, heard a single whisper of a Dawn of Night.
Either the place was so mysterious it flew clean under the radar of every gossip in the city—which would explain, rather handsomely, why a Supreme Angel with celestial taste had picked it out of the heap—or it had literally started sometime yesterday afternoon and hadn't finished hanging its curtains yet.
But there was a third option, an uglier one, that he really fucking hoped wasn't the case: that the place was a trap dressed up in pretty names, set in his path by something with teeth that had noticed him waking up too alive.
He pushed that thought down into the cellar of his skull, where the rest of his better-not-to-think-about-its were already busy drinking.
The thirtieth person—to Pryce's enormous displeasure—took one long, slow look at the young man in the stolen duster and the small half-burned girl tucked under his arm, and his face did that particular crumpling thing Pryce had grown to loathe more than any pain he'd ever worn.
Pity. Bright, steaming, wet-eyed pity.
"Oh, son," the man started, in the long-suffering voice of a bastard who was about to deliver a sermon nobody had ordered. "If you're looking for salvation or decent healers for the little one, that isn't the place at all. Dawn of Night won't help a soul like hers.
"What you want is the Temple of the Radiant Tear, three streets down and a left at the singing fountain, they've got priestesses there who specializes in burn scars, and the donations are very reasonable, and of course you should also consider the Sisters of the Mercy Veil because their laying-on of hands has been known to—"
Pryce's ears politely closed the shop for business around the second sentence, but he kept his face pinned into an expression of attentive, gently interested patience.
He'd learned the trick in his portering days.
This rambling bastard clearly knew where the Dawn of Night actually was—knew well enough to volunteer an opinion on whether it would help—and cutting him short in the middle of his little sermon might offend the saintly prick and cost Pryce the directions entirely.
Who the hell knew how many more mouths he'd have to open in this gods-damned city before he found another soul with the answer tucked behind their teeth.
So he nodded. He made the small mm sound of a man deeply considering life choices. He let his eyes go slightly unfocused in the middle distance like a peasant receiving counsel from a magistrate.
And inside his skull, he composed a short, loving ode to the moment this sermon would finally fucking end.
When the man at last ran out of well-meaning steam and stood there looking expectantly for gratitude, Pryce flashed him the sweetest, brightest smile in his considerable arsenal.
"Thank you kindly, friend," he said, warm as fresh bread, not having absorbed a single syllable of the speech. "Truly, genuinely, from the bottom of my heart. Now. Where's the Dawn of Night guild?"
The man's face fell into the hollow-eyed sigh of a missionary watching a soul happily stroll off a cliff.
He muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like gods help the stupid, and then, with the reluctant resignation of washing his hands of a drowning idiot, he pointed.
Out. Past the last of the market stalls. Past the northern gate. Past the neat rows of nobles' townhouses and the guild wards and the trimmed walking parks where the Awakened took their morning tea.
Into the trees.
And now, an hour later, as Pryce and Lulu stood at the ragged edge of what had once been a path and now barely qualified as a suggestion, he finally understood why nobody in Veyra knew the Dawn of Night guild but that one insufferable rambler.
It wasn't because the place was far nor was it mysterious in some deliberate, cloak-and-dagger way. It wasn't even because it was hiding.
It was because the Dawn of Night guild was a three-story building of obsidian-black stone, squatting like a secret in the middle of a forest nobody in the city bothered to walk through.
No crowds milled about outside. No floating carts hawked blessed snacks and mana-vials to hungry recruits. It had no kind glowing sigil banners snapped in the wind above the door.
It lacked the loud, sweat-drenched adventurers lounged on the steps bragging about their last dungeon crawl while their porters sweated behind them under sacks of loot or apprentices sparred in a dusty yard, guildmaster's crest.
No runes pulsed along the walls... no nothing.
[1] If you know what I mean... hahaha