The Curse of Arcadia

Life in the mansion had a shape to it now, the kind that came less from anyone deciding it should and more from five people just... wearing the same grooves into the same days until it became the routine.

Kaelid and Tatsuya had the tower most mornings, dragging themselves back sometime after dark. Eric split his time between odd jobs and, more often than he ever admitted outright, quietly making sure the mansion's finances actually worked the way Ana's ledger insisted they did. Aria claimed the back courtyard for herself most afternoons, December strung and restrung until her draw felt right, arrows thudding into a target she'd dragged out there herself rather than pay the archery range's rental fee. And Ana ran everything else — lectures some mornings, healing work when the guild needed an extra pair of hands, dinner every evening without fail, and the household ledger with an authority nobody had actually given her so much as assumed she already had.

Feels less like five people sharing a house, Kaelid thought, more than once, and more like we all just quietly agreed on our jobs without ever saying it out loud.

Nobody complained. If anything, the routine felt like the first solid ground any of them had stood on in months.

Dinner most nights fell into its own kind of ritual — the five of them around the umbra table, plates emptying faster than Ana could really keep up with, the day's aches and small victories getting talked through whether anyone asked or not.

One evening, stuffed on Ana's cooking for the third helping running, Kaelid told her, with total sincerity, that he hadn't known she was such a good cook.

Eric answered before she could. "You should've seen the state me and Tatsuya were in before she found us. She basically became our leader and chef on the spot."

"Cooking's annoying," Tatsuya said, deadpan, not looking up from his plate. "Takes time away from training. Doesn't matter, though — we just pay her, and we never have to cook."

"Ha. Nice joke."

Tatsuya looked at him without a flicker of humor. "Joke? Sadly, no. Our leader regularly extorts us. Says it's because we're 'incompetent fools who need her for everything.' I believe those were her exact words, last time I asked for a favor."

Kaelid laughed hard enough that he caught Ana behind her own hand, shoulders shaking with poorly-suppressed laughter of her own.

This side of her is cute too, he thought, and didn't examine that thought any harder than usual.

"I stand by every word," Ana said, once she'd recovered enough to talk. "Someone has to wear the pants in this house."

"You say that like the alternative was ever on the table," Aria said, reaching past Eric for the bread. "Left to yourselves, you three would've eaten nothing but whatever you could kill and cook over a fire within a week."

"Sounds fine to me," Eric said.

"You would think that." Aria didn't even look up. "You'd also wear the same shirt for a month straight if nobody stopped you."

"That happened one time."

"It happened twice." Ana, not even glancing up from her plate. "I was there both times."

Eric opened his mouth, found nothing, and settled for pointing his fork at her instead, which only made her smile — small, quick, gone almost before it landed — before she went back to her food like she hadn't noticed doing it at all.

Kaelid caught it anyway. Filed it away without saying anything, the same way he'd started filing away most things lately that felt like they belonged to someone else's story more than his own.

Tatsuya, for his part, just reached for a second helping and let the whole exchange pass without comment, apparently satisfied he'd already delivered the best line of the night and had nothing left to add.

Between training days, Kaelid picked up whatever paid work crossed his path — a pest job clearing burrowing rats out of a grain cellar, a delivery run to Ring 1 that paid better than it had any right to, a half-day escort for a merchant too nervous to walk two blocks without a sword nearby. Nothing that tested him. Nothing that felt like progress.

Feels like treading water, he thought, counting silver into his coin pouch after the third job in a row that hadn't drawn his blade even once. Not drowning, but not exactly swimming anywhere either.

He found Aria in the back courtyard that evening, December strung, a row of arrows planted in the frost-hard ground beside her like she'd already decided how many shots she'd need before she even drew the first one.

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"How's the new draw?" he asked, dropping onto the low wall to watch.

"Faster." She loosed one without looking at him, the arrow burying itself dead-center in the target she'd dragged out from storage. "Quickdraw's not subtle about it. Feels like my arm knows what I want before I do."

"Show-off."

"You'd know." She nocked another, drew, held it a beat longer than the first. "Cocytus doing what you need it to?"

"Haven't really tested it properly yet. Feels good just standing around in it, though."

"That's not testing it. That's modeling it." She loosed the second arrow, splitting the fletching of the first clean down the middle, then finally glanced over, something sharper than amusement in it now. "I turned down two jobs today. Rats, mostly. A crate delivery."

"I did the rat one. This morning."

"Of course you did." She shook her head, but there wasn't much bite in it. "None of it's worth anything, Kaelid. It doesn't make you stronger. It just makes you tired in a way that doesn't matter."

He didn't have a good argument against that. He'd been thinking the same thing for a week and hadn't said it out loud until just now, hearing someone else say it first.

"So what, then," he said. "We just wait for something bigger to fall in our laps?"

"Or we go looking." She pulled a third arrow free, turning it over once before setting it back down, thoughtful rather than impatient about it. "We've been coasting. Feels like everyone's noticed. Might just take someone actually saying it."

Feels like she just did, Kaelid thought, and found he didn't have anything smart to say back to that.

Eric found him in the mansion's side yard one evening, still sweat-damp from the tower, doing nothing in particular except sitting with his back against the wall and staring at the mountains without really seeing them.

"Mind if I sit?" he asked, already lowering himself down before Kaelid answered, shield propped against the wall beside him with a heavy clank.

"Go ahead."

They sat in silence for a while, the kind that didn't ask to be filled.

"You ever think about how weird this is?" Eric said eventually. "Six months ago I was hauling my family's trade ledgers around, and now I'm living in a mansion with a swordsman, an archer, a healer, and a guy who talks to his sword more than he talks to us."

Kaelid huffed something that might have been a laugh. "When you put it like that."

"Not complaining. Just — weird. A good weird." Eric turned the thought over, quiet for a moment. "You ever miss it? Home, I mean. Before all this."

"Sometimes." Kaelid considered the question longer than he meant to. "Less than I thought I would, though. Feels like I traded it for something I didn't know I was looking for."

Eric nodded slowly, like that tracked with something he'd already worked out himself. "Yeah. Same, actually."

Neither of them said anything else for a while, content to just sit with the mountains and the quiet and the strange, settled shape their lives had taken without either of them planning it that way.

Day fifty-one since arriving in Avalon. Sixty-five since my sixteenth birthday — since all of this started.

Kaelid sat with that thought one morning, turning it over slowly.

Feels like I've lived a whole lifetime here already. This place feels more like home than home ever did.

Almost two months in, and he'd made real progress — he could feel it in his sword arm, in how much less the four-thousand-swing days took out of him now. But some restless part of him still felt like he was falling behind. He wanted to start hunting in earnest — real fights, real monsters, real progress toward the threshold that would let him finally attempt a feat worth Enlightenment.

So that morning, over Ana's breakfast burritos — guac, eggs, potatoes, cheese, and Kaelid privately thinking, not for the first time, that she'd make someone an incredible wife someday — before he told the party what he wanted to do.

They all looked, if anything, relieved.

"Took you long enough to say it," Aria said, already reaching for her second burrito like she'd known this was coming.

"Rats and deliveries," Eric agreed, not looking up from his plate. "I was starting to lose my mind."

Guess I wasn't the only one who felt it, Kaelid thought. Guess Aria wasn't wrong, either.

They geared up after breakfast — Eric in his full plate, shield on his back; Tatsuya in his dark keikogi, Moonlight at his hip; Ana in Talonguard, the muted grey-green plate settling over her black bodysuit like it had always belonged there; Aria in Petunia, her half-plate catching the pale winter light in a way John's work always seemed to; and Kaelid in his white Cocytus Plate, looking, he liked to think, appropriately fearsome for someone about to go looking for trouble.

Three weeks ago none of us owned any of this, Kaelid thought, running a hand along Cocytus's pauldron out of habit more than need. Feels different, going looking for a real fight in gear that's actually mine.

They found it on the job board that same morning — a listing for two Fractured frost ogres, holed up somewhere in the snowy forest bordering the mountains.

Nobody in the party objected.

Two ogres, Kaelid thought, grinning at the posting like it was already a done deal. No big deal, right?

He would, before that day was over, learn exactly how wrong he could be about a number like that.