SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Trafalgar didn’t make him wait for it. ”There’s a nest,” he said. ”I got all the way down to the core of it. Right at the bottom of the mountain.”

mountain.”

He let the black mouth of the mine hold his eyes a breath while he sorted the telling from the memory of standing in it. ”A cavern of raw mana crystal, the richest I’ve ever laid eyes on. Pillars of it taller than houses, whole sheets of it, lit from the inside and cold enough to fog your breath from across the room. And the entire brood is down there feeding on it. Tearing it out of the walls and grinding it between their teeth, swelling on it while you watch them do it.” He rolled the dead weight out of his sword arm, slow. ”That’s the answer to why they hit like a pack three times their age. They aren’t only nesting on the vein. They’re eating it, the purest mana in Morgain land, and every last one is fatter and meaner for it than a brood this young has any right to be.”

Moses stood without moving, arms folded, weight easy, though the ease had gone brittle. ”And the mother of them?”

”Real. Big as a house, and half turned to crystal herself from however long she’s been drinking it down there. She’s brooding a clutch under her, hundreds of the things, cradled in the frost and glowing like lamps.” He met the old captain’s eyes and let the plain truth carry it. ”Give that nest a season and this mountain births an army.”

Moses held quiet a long breath, chewing it behind that weathered face the way he’d chew a bad report from the field. ”Hm.” When it came, the sound was low and hard. ”That is something that has no business existing in a mine on Morgain land. Not a shred of doubt in me about that.”

”Just as I thought coming down.” Trafalgar’s voice cooled a degree. ”Someone has put a hand into my family’s territory. That is not a simple thing to manage. Who has the nerve to touch Morgain ground, and the reach to pull it off without a trace behind them?” He heard the size of the question and let it stand anyway. ”This took patience. Weeks of it, in the dark, with nobody the wiser.”

The old man’s gaze slid off the mine and fixed on him, steady and unhurried. ”You’re implying something, young master.”

”That someone inside the family had a hand in it.” He said it flatly, because gilding it would only make it uglier. ”Maybe something slipped its leash while Rivena was gone from her post half a year. Maybe Rivena is the one who set it loose herself.” He turned a gauntlet over, palm up and empty. ”But I’ve no proof of a word of that, so I’ll say none of it aloud past this slope. What I will say is this. Tomorrow the two of us go back in together and put an end to the mess.” A worn edge crept into the words. ”And in truth, I’d sooner not spend one more hour in that mine than the work demands.”

Something in the phrasing caught the veteran’s ear, and he read it for what lay under it. ”Bad experience?”

”One.” Trafalgar didn’t reach past it. ”A long time ago.”

For all his calm, Trafalgar felt the weight of the mine behind his ribs, an ugly pressure that had nothing to do with exhaustion or cold and everything with memory.

Moses let the answer lie where it dropped, which from him counted as a kindness.

He shifted his weight off the cold at last and jerked his chin down the valley. ”Back to the city for now, then. Let’s warn the others.”

”We will.” Trafalgar reached into the fold of dark at his hip and drew the shadowlink loose, the small coil of it waking cold against his palm. ”I’ll get word to Caelum as well, so he can carry it straight up to Valttair. All of it, what we found down there. I think the old man will want to know it tonight.”

”You don’t think that’s better done in person, once we’re home?”

He shook his head, and there was no hesitation in the motion. ”It’s too big a find to sit on. This reaches Valttair the moment it can, not three days from now when we haul ourselves back up with a dead queen and a story gone stale in the telling.”

Moses grunted, and buried somewhere in the sound was approval. ”Fair enough. Better it comes from your mouth than from a rumor sprinting up the road ahead of us.”

And Trafalgar had the right of it. Someone had reached into Morgain territory and made one of the family’s greatest mines grow a nest, a warren that by now surely held its monsters in the thousands, coiled and multiplying in the dark on the finest mana in all their land.

This was no accident, and no act of beasts. A hand had done it, careful and unhurried, and it had spent a whole town of two thousand souls to keep itself hidden.

And when morning came, that ruin would be his to answer for, with Moses at his shoulder.

The two of them set off down the long grade together, the settlement’s lights kindling small and gold in the black basin below, the mountain’s cold weight dwindling at their backs with every stride. Moses kept his pace and kept his peace, and for a good stretch there was only wind, and the give of frozen snow, and two tired men walking down out of the deep.

They were most of the way down, boots breaking the crust and the wind shoving at their backs for once, when a figure came up off the road to meet them out of the gloom, lantern swinging, moving faster than any old man had business moving over ice. Trafalgar knew him before the light found his face.

Gerhardt.