Kings Game

Chapter 107 - Revisiting the Past

"To my knowledge, unless there's something of considerable value, they dump the belongings with the bodies."

Roran nodded. "Then I may need to go digging through a mass grave. This quest has taken some strange turns."

Rath held his tongue. When Roran looked at him, he had a strange expression on his face. It was one Roran recognized. It was the face Rath made when he was keeping secrets.

"Anything you'd like to share?"

Rath mulled over his words before saying, "There are certain things you need to learn for yourself."

Roran grunted. "You sound like my father."

"Oh please, I sound nothing like your father, we just share similar bits of wisdom. Still, as much as I despise offering cryptic answers, I do think this is one thing I must let you learn for yourself. It wouldn't be as important otherwise."

Roran finished his breakfast and his coffee. He stood and stretched, then paused in front of the mirror. He did have more color in his face than before. Though he still looked sickly, his pale body was beginning to regain some muscle. The thing that bothered him most was the lack of etchings.

He still had the base etchings across his body, the ones that gave him his strength and hardened skin. But he didn't have a complex array of spiderwebs like Nul. According to Nul, his godspell was contained within Sarah's robes. When Roran held the robes outward, he could make out faint shimmering within the black folds. He couldn't make out exactly what the etchings looked like, likely an intentional design by Nul to keep others from stealing their work again, but he could tell the robes were full of markings.

Roran pulled the robes off his body and gently balled them up in his hand. He took the opportunity to change as best he could one handed. Once his trousers and shirt were on, he tossed the robes to the ground. The fabric fell once more around his neck and shoulders, reappearing on his body before they could touch the floor.

After finishing dressing and buckling on his swords, Roran took his plate down to the kitchen, using a circuitous route to avoid others along the way. As he left, Rath met him at the door.

"Joining me for the day?" Roran asked.

"I join you most days, you simply don't see me."

"Doesn't mean I don't know you're there. Rath, thank you."

"Don't thank me yet. Remember, I'm helping you because I'm using you. Meeting me could very well be the thing that ends you."

(2)

Feeling a sense of nostalgia, Roran made his return to the Crucible. There was no fanfare or grand welcome. There wasn't even anyone that recognized him, something he was grateful for. He went around the building to one of the lesser used entrances, the one that Kell had shown him when she'd first pulled him out of the Crucible.

Inside, it was just as he remembered. A large open hub with bulletin boards hung along the walls, rows of desks for clerks to sit at, wardens moving about their business, and a handful of gladiators talking with clerks and reading the schedules and announcements on the bulletin boards. Here at least, the city was still alive. The Crucible was still churning through bodies as it always had.

Keeping his head down and his hood up, Roran slipped past through the hub without ever earning a second glance. He worked his way into the hallways that sprawled through the building. Unlike the King's Arena, the Crucible neither changed over time nor was it built like a maze. There was a definitive pattern to the layout of the hallways and corridors. It wasn't an intuitive pattern, Roran certainly wouldn't have designed any building this way, but there was a distinguishable flow to how the hallways led into one another. The building as a whole reminded Roran of a focus marking, with power lines drifting into each other to form a larger design.