Lucien set Dirge of Blades down beside the others and stared at the cards for a long while.
The room remained quiet. The inn creaked around him, old wood settling under the weight of too many bodies and too many secrets. Below, muffled laughter rose from the common room, followed by the scrape of chairs and the dull thump of a cup being struck against a table. Prav was still alive beneath him, drinking, lying, gambling, bleeding, and pretending dawn would make any of it cleaner.
Lucien barely heard it.
His eyes had returned to Carrion Before the Snare.
[Vestment, Side Down: Carrion State.]
[The user appears half-dead to fate and predators, but risks bodily collapse.]
The thought came again, quieter this time.
If he used Carrion State in the dungeon, perhaps the reflection would copy that. A half-dead Lucien. A weakened Lucien. A thing close enough to collapse that the trial might break itself against its own rules. It would be cleaner than poison. Less messy. Easier to control, perhaps, if the card listened.
Lucien's fingers hovered near Carrion's edge.
Then he stopped.
"No," he said.
The word was soft, but final.
The dungeon copied what entered. That much was true. But what did it consider real? Flesh? Mana? Fate? Skill? Will? If he wore a state given by a Black Arcana card, would the dungeon copy the weakness, or would it copy the card? Would it create another Carrion State? Would it see the trick and answer with a more perfect trick of its own? The dungeon became famous because strong men walked into it believing they understood its rules. Every one of them had died for the arrogance.
Lucien was not going to add his corpse to that lesson just because a card description looked convenient.
Poison was simpler.
Poison entered the blood. Poison slowed the lungs, weakened the muscles, blackened the veins, clouded the mind. There was no metaphor in it. No fate-mask. No clever reading of death. His body would be sick because his body would truly be sick. The copy would have to answer that honestly, or at least more honestly than it might answer a card's vestment.
A predictable plan was still a plan held over a pit, but it was better than gambling his life on an unknown interaction between a dungeon named by rumor and a deck born from his own execution.
He pushed Carrion Before the Snare away.
"Not tomorrow," he murmured. "Maybe not ever."
The card gave no answer.
Inspector's pale eye watched him from the bed.
Lucien gathered the deck slowly, but before he dismissed it, one last thought caught him. The mission had offered three cards: The Fool, Band of Swords, and Knight. He had obtained two. The third remained. If the Black Arcana was going to continue presenting conditions, he needed to know them before the moment arrived, not after.
"Inspector," he said, placing the pale card over the empty place in the deck where the Knight seemed to wait behind a locked door. "Show me the condition for Knight."
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then blue light formed above the cards.
[Knight.]
[Condition Pending.]
[Save something from death.]
Lucien blinked.
Something.
Not someone.
The distinction passed across his mind too quickly to settle. He was tired, sore, and still smelling faintly of other men's blood. His thoughts took the easier path.
"That one is simple enough," he said, though he knew better than to trust simple things. "Prav should provide that too."
The window faded.
Lucien dismissed the deck, then checked the lock again, the stool under the door, the window, the poisons, the treatment, and the sword beside the bed. Only after the routine satisfied the older, harder part of him did he remove his boots and lie down.
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Sleep did not come gently.
It came like a hand over his eyes.
One moment he was staring at the ceiling, listening to the inn breathe around him. The next, morning light had begun to gray the edges of the crooked window, and the common room below had gone from drunken noise to the quieter misery of men regretting what they had drunk. Lucien woke before the city fully did, which meant the part of him that had survived his first life was still working properly.
His body ached.
Not from wounds. Not truly. He had escaped the alley without serious injury, but his younger muscles had been forced to obey older memories, and they protested the theft. His wrist was stiff. His shoulder hurt from the two clean kills he had made without the card. His neck felt tight from sleeping lightly, half-ready for someone to kick the door open.
Good.
Pain meant he was alive.
He washed quickly, changed into a plain dark shirt bought from the innkeeper's wife at an insulting price he did not bother arguing down, and folded his bloodied coat into the bottom of the satchel. The poisons and treatment were checked again. The sword was belted at his waist. The deck remained hidden in that strange inward place, close enough to feel but not touch unless he called for it.
Downstairs, the innkeeper looked at him once, saw the cleaner clothes, the sword, and the same face as last night, then slid a piece of hard bread and a cup of watered ale across the counter without being asked.
"Road?" the man asked.
"Outside the city."
"Coming back?"
"Probably."
"Bad answer."
"Honest one."
The innkeeper grunted and left him alone.
Lucien ate enough to keep his stomach from turning on the poison later, but not so much that sickness would become harder to control. After that, he returned to the stable, where Vela greeted him with a look of deep suspicion, as if blaming him personally for the quality of Prav's hay.
"I agree," Lucien said, checking her saddle. "The service was mediocre."
The mare huffed.
He led her out through the morning mist and took the western gate without drawing attention. Prav at dawn was a different beast from Prav at night. Still dangerous, but tired. Sweepers pushed filth into gutters. Vendors prepared stalls. Guards pretended they had not slept against walls. A cart full of turnips broke an axle near the gate and gave everyone something mundane to curse.
Lucien used the noise to leave.
He did not take the direct road to the old burial hill.
That would have been foolish. Instead, he followed the western road for nearly half an hour, then cut south along a farmer's track, doubled back through a thin copse of river trees, and waited long enough to see if anyone followed. No hoofbeats. No figures keeping pace. No curious rider pretending to admire the morning fields. He used the reflection in a shallow irrigation ditch to watch the road behind him before moving again.
No one followed.
At least no one obvious.
Good enough.
The land west of Prav rolled upward slowly, trading river mud and fields for rougher ground. The old burial hill did not look impressive from a distance. It was one of many low rises covered in grass, thornbushes, scattered stones, and the remains of ancient markers too weathered to read. Shepherds avoided it because animals disliked the slope. Children dared one another to climb it at dusk. Priests visited once a year, muttered over the oldest graves, and left before dark.
In three years, men would dig here with banners, hired guards, priests, scholars, and enough arrogance to pave a road.
Today, the hill had only wind.
Lucien tied Vela near a cluster of scrub trees, loose enough that she could graze but secure enough not to wander back toward Prav. He patted her neck once, then took his satchel, sword, torch bundle, and a small flint-and-steel fire striker he had bought before leaving the city.
"Wait here," he said.
Vela stared at him with the clear opinion that she had not needed the instruction.
Lucien began searching.
At first, the hill offered him nothing.
He circled the lower slope, studying every cluster of stone, every depression in the earth, every patch of brush that looked too thick or too thin. He checked the old markers, the shallow clefts between rocks, and the places where roots had broken through soil. The morning passed. The sun climbed. Wind moved through the grass and made every shadow look briefly suspicious.
Nothing.
By noon, frustration had settled behind his teeth.
He ate a little bread, drank water, and continued.
The story from his first life had never included exact directions. Why would it? By the time the dungeon became famous, everyone knew where it was. Tavern tales did not waste breath saying which side of the hill held the entrance or what stone stood beside it before half the slope was torn open by excavations. The sickly child had found it by accident during winter. He had been running. Hiding. Crawling into a place no adult had noticed.
Lucien was not a sick child.
He was a man with too much memory and not enough patience.
He climbed higher, boots sliding once on loose earth, and searched the cliffside on the northern face. It was not much of a cliff, really, only a broken rise of stone where the hill had split long ago and exposed dark rock beneath the grass. Thorny vines grew across much of it, thick enough to hide cracks, roots, and small animal dens. Lucien looked over them once, found nothing, and almost turned away.
Then he stopped.
Winter.
The child had found the cave during winter.
During winter, those vines should have been dead or bare, not lush enough to hide an opening. But the vines before him were green. Too green. Their leaves were broad, waxy, and wet-looking despite the dry wind. Tiny white flowers clung to them in clusters, though the season was wrong for them. A faint sweetness hung in the air near the cliff, almost pleasant until he noticed that no insects touched the blossoms.
Lucien stepped closer.
The vines did not move.
That made them worse.
He drew his sword and used the tip to lift a curtain of leaves. Behind them, shadow waited.
Not a crack.
An entrance.
Narrow, low, and perfectly hidden unless one stood close enough to smell the damp air breathing from inside the hill.
Lucien felt his heartbeat change.
Not faster.
Deeper.
He had found it.
For a moment, all the cleverness, all the planning, all the future knowledge and bargain-won poison narrowed into one simple fact: the dungeon was real, and he stood before it years before the world had learned its name.
He cut enough vines to pass through and slipped inside.
The air changed immediately.
Cool. Damp. Still.
The sound of the wind died behind him, replaced by the faint drip of water somewhere deeper in the dark. The entrance sloped downward just enough that the light from outside thinned quickly. Lucien took three steps, then stopped as blue light opened in front of him.
[You are the first to discover the dungeon: Self.]