Rank F Demon King

It turns out that saving the world, at Rank E, is mostly janitorial.

Yrsa's "circuit" was a loop of nine live wards scattered across three days of deep wilderness, and for a week she walked us around it like a woman showing new hires where the mops were kept. At each circle she taught me the craft, and the craft was not glamorous. You cleared the moss and the leaf-rot out of the grooves. You re-cut the shallow places with a hooked iron tool until your hands blistered. You packed the grooves with dark resin from a pot she kept warm at her belt, working it in with your thumbs, symbol by symbol, until the whole ring was whole again. Cosmic plumbing. Reality's gutters.

And then — the part only I could do — you fed it.

Not the way I'd fed the deep circle in Chapter Twenty-Four, that terrible full-body drain that had nearly put me on my back. Yrsa taught me the trickle: a thin, controlled thread of aura, no more than a candle's worth, poured into a topped-up ward to wake it back to a healthy hum. "A full feed is for a ward that's gutting out," she said, watching me like a hawk the first time. "You do that maybe once a season and it costs you a week. A trickle is maintenance. You'll do a dozen a day and it should cost you a good night's sleep, no more." She grunted when the ring under my hands brightened from a sputter to a steady glow. "There. That's a Warden's work. Boring. Endless. The only thing between the villages and the teeth."

The strangest part was that the System paid for it.

[Warden's contract: Ward of the Leaning Stones — restored.]+35 EXP. Rank E: progress 74%.]

"It gives EXP for weeding," I said, staring at the box, blisters throbbing.

"It gives EXP," Lila corrected, practically vibrating — she'd been in a state of continuous scholarly ecstasy for a week — "for the most important task in the world. Think about it, Adrian. The System rewards what keeps people alive. A rat cull is worth fifteen copper because it saves a pantry. A ward is worth—" she gestured at the glowing ring "—everything. The System knows exactly what these are. It's been quietly filing them under 'Warden's contract' this whole time, waiting for someone who could actually take the job." She beamed. "You're not grinding rats anymore. You're grinding the apocalypse. Slowly. One weeded gutter at a time."

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Which was, I had to admit, the single most on-brand way for me to save the world: reluctantly, with a hooked tool, complaining about my hands.

It was good work, though. That was the thing I hadn't expected. Bruno hauled resin and cleared brush and hummed. Vera mapped the circuit obsessively, cross-referencing every ward against her stolen sheaf, and I watched her handwriting fill the margins with a fierce, hungry focus — she was building something in there, a picture only she could see yet. Lila catalogued everything. And I weeded reality's gutters and fed them a candle at a time, and my rank crept up, and for a week the two moons felt like somebody else's problem.

Then, on the eighth day, we reached the ward at Blackfen Split, and it was wrong.

It should have been a trickle job. Yrsa had tended it two seasons back; by her count it should be at half-strength, guttering slow like the rest. Instead we came over the rise and the grooves were dark — not fading, not gutting out gently, but pulled empty, the resin cracked and grey, the whole ring cold and dead as a snuffed wick. And around it, the trees leaned toward the circle, not away. Bending in. Like something under the ground had a grip on it and was hauling.

Yrsa stopped dead. In sixty years, I understood, she had never once run. She was thinking about it now.

"That's not age," she said quietly. Her wolf-thing had gone flat to the ground, hackles up, a low sound in its chest. "Wards fade slow. Even and slow, like a candle. This—" she crouched by the dead grooves, and her weathered hand was not quite steady "—this was drained. Fast. From below." She looked up at me, and for the first time the blunt honesty in her face had fear underneath it. "The deep doesn't do that. The deep leaks. It doesn't reach up and pull." Her green eyes went to the horizon, to the gap in the sky. "Unless something down there has started to push. On purpose. Picking the weak ones." She stood. "Which would mean the wilds aren't just waiting for the moons anymore, boy. They're helping."

[Warden's contract: Blackfen Split — WARD FAILED.][Anomaly: accelerated depletion. Source: below.]

The dead circle sat there, cold, and under my feet — faint, patient, and for the first time hungry — I felt something in the deep turn its attention up toward the empty gate it had just made.