The healing wing at the Association outpost was becoming far too familiar a place for William’s comfort, though this time he entered with someone else leaning heavily against his shoulder rather than visiting an unconscious raid leader. The girl’s name was Lyra Vespern, seventeen years old, and according to her increasingly flustered explanations as the healers worked on her dislocated wrist, she’d been exploring that particular rift specifically because something about it didn’t make sense.
"It’s not supposed to be that deep," she insisted, wincing as the healer manipulated her arm back into alignment. "The Eastwick Rift has been catalogued for forty years. It never goes past the third chamber, and the monsters never escalate past Common grade. Seven goblins in the main chamber shouldn’t even be possible down there."
William and a healer exchanged a quick glance, and something in that exchange seemed to resonate with Lyra because her eyes narrowed, some calculation happening behind the pain-hazed focus of her gaze.
"You know something about displaced monsters," she said. It wasn’t a question.
"Maybe." William wasn’t about to start explaining his personal history with a Guardian Class beast to a stranger, even one he’d just pulled out of a goblin ambush. "Why were you down there alone, investigating something you knew might be wrong?"
"Because my family won’t listen." The bitterness in her voice cut sharper than pain should have allowed. "I’m the Vespern merchant family’s heir apparent, which means I’m supposed to sit in an office, manage trade routes, and never embarrass the family name with something as undignified as actually hunting." She looked down at her newly healed arm, flexing fingers experimentally. "My father especially thinks any time I spend as a hunter is time wasted, potential squandered on something beneath our station."
"So you came to prove you belonged."
"I came to find evidence that something’s wrong with the Tower system, something that proves hunters matter, that we’re not just adventuring for sport the way my father likes to pretend." Lyra’s jaw tightened. "If I could bring back proof of an anomaly, documentation, something the Association would have to take seriously, maybe he’d finally understand that being a hunter isn’t beneath anything."
William understood that particular flavor of desperate motivation better than he probably should have, that need to prove worth to someone who’d already decided what you were worth couldn’t possibly be enough. The parallel wasn’t lost on him, and when the healer finally cleared Lyra to rest and recover, William found himself sitting beside her bed in the recovery ward without any clear decision to do so.
"The anomaly you found," he said quietly. "Have you reported it to the Association?"
"Not yet. I wanted to gather more evidence first, but I obviously failed that plan spectacularly." Lyra’s mouth twisted into something that wasn’t quite a smile. "You probably saved my life, which means I owe you a debt I can’t exactly repay with merchant trade goods."
"I’m not asking for payment."
"I know." She studied him with an intensity that suggested she was reassessing everything she thought she knew about the boy who’d appeared out of nowhere and soloed a goblin pack without breaking a sweat. "But I want to help, with the anomalies. With whatever you’re actually investigating, because I can tell you know something about this. An F-Rank doesn’t develop that kind of combat ability without also developing some very specific knowledge."
"You don’t know me well enough to make that kind of offer."
"No," Lyra agreed. "But I know you didn’t have to come back for me in that dungeon. Plenty of hunters would have kept walking. And I know that when you were fighting, you didn’t look like someone desperate to prove something. You looked like someone who already knew exactly what they were capable of." She shifted slightly in her bed, testing the movement of her newly healed arm. "That’s a different kind of strength than what most F-Ranks have, and I want to understand it."
William was quiet for a long moment, turning the offer over against everything Reyes had warned him about, the careful low-profile existence he’d built, the borrowed time before Ardenfeld or someone else came back harder.
’A dedicated ally is a liability when you’re trying to stay hidden.’ But Reyes had also said the moment he was strong enough to matter, he’d need to stop hiding anyway. ’Maybe having someone inside the merchant families, someone with access to information networks, isn’t a weakness.’
"If you’re going to help," he said finally, "you need to understand that what you’re looking into might be dangerous. Not just goblin-in-a-rift dangerous. Actual, world-shaking dangerous."
"I already figured that much," Lyra said quietly. "My family’s trade network has access to information most people never see. Anomalies in Tower behavior, disappearances, strange reports that don’t make sense until you look at them together. There’s something bigger happening, and I want to know what it is. If you’re already hunting it, I want to help."
William looked at her, this merchant’s daughter who’d come into the dungeon alone to prove herself, and made a decision that would, in retrospect, mark the moment his carefully maintained isolation started to unravel.
"There’s someone you should meet first," he said. "My mentor. He’ll want to know who you are before we agree to anything."
Lyra’s expression shifted into something almost like relief, as though she’d been bracing for rejection and found acceptance instead. "When can we go?"
"Tomorrow. You need to rest. Healing magic isn’t free, even from the Association, and pushing too hard will only set your recovery back." William stood to leave, and Frost, who’d been curled quietly at the foot of the bed throughout the entire conversation, lifted its head at his movement.
"Wait." Lyra’s voice stopped him at the doorway. "What’s your name? I realized I never actually asked."
"William Belforht."
"William." She repeated it like she was committing it to memory. "Thank you. For coming back. For being there."
He nodded, not trusting himself to add anything more, and left her to rest, already thinking through how Reyes was going to react to learning that William’s carefully maintained low profile had just acquired a merchant family heir who was apparently devoted to helping him investigate Tower anomalies he’d never planned on revealing.
’Borrowed time,’ he thought, as he stepped out into Ashvale’s evening air, Frost trotting quietly at his heel. ’Well, the time just got a lot shorter.’