Chapter 137 — What the Guild Doesn’t Say Aloud
The dungeon safety briefing occupied a considerably larger room than Corwin’s classroom had — tiered seating, a proper podium, and considerably more attendees than the dozen who’d shown up for realm theory, most of them wearing the same mix of nerves and eagerness Arlen remembered from his own very first quest board reading, years and a whole life ago now.
The instructor waiting at the podium looked nothing like Corwin’s weathered, unhurried authority. Ferrin Duskwatch was beastkin, wolfkin by the shape of his ears and the low, economical way he moved, somewhere in his forties by the gray threading his fur, and missing two fingers on his left hand in a way he made no particular effort to hide.
"Ferrin Duskwatch," he said, once the room had settled. "Deep-expedition survivor, near enough two decades now, though survivor’s doing some heavy lifting in that sentence given how many of the people I started with aren’t around to argue the point." He held up the maimed hand, matter-of-fact rather than dramatic. "This isn’t the worst thing the Depths ever took from someone in this room’s family tree. I mention it because I want you understanding, from the first sentence, exactly what kind of place you’re about to be cleared for."
A nervous ripple moved through the seating, and Ferrin let it settle before continuing.
"Maps," he said, gesturing toward a large chart pinned behind him — the Sundered Depths rendered in careful, layered detail, floor bands marked in shifting colors that thinned considerably past a certain depth. "Guild maintains the best records in the kingdom on this place. Best records aren’t the same as complete records. Passages collapse. New ones open. A safe route your instructor walked five years ago might be a dead end now, or worse, might be someone else’s territory now. Never trust a map past what it’s told you it can promise."
He worked through the practical structure methodically — safe zones maintained by continuous adventurer presence rather than any inherent property of the stone itself, emergency signal protocols, the difference between a floor’s official numbering and its actual, sprawling size.
"Floor eleven’s not a room," Ferrin said, at one point. "Floor eleven’s bigger than the district you’re all currently living in. Keep that scale in your head before you assume ’shallow floor’ means ’safe afternoon.’"
It was the section on companionship that Arlen found himself listening to most closely.
"You’ll hear people talk about not asking too many questions down there," Ferrin said. "About skills, specifically. Where someone got theirs, what their full kit actually is. I want to be plain about why that’s the etiquette, rather than just handing you the rule and expecting you to nod along." He paused, letting the room’s attention properly settle. "Information’s currency down there, same as coin. Someone’s full skill set is the kind of thing that gets stolen — their discoveries, their claims, sometimes their lives, if the wrong person decides knowing everything about you is worth more than leaving you alone. Asking a companion to lay out their complete capabilities isn’t friendly curiosity. It’s asking them to hand you a weapon that points back at them."
"Does that happen often?" someone asked. "Adventurers turning on each other?"
"Rarer than monsters killing people. Not rare enough that the guild’s stopped punishing it as severely as anything in the rulebook allows." Ferrin’s expression didn’t shift. "Proving it’s the hard part. Chaos down there, isolation, the whole culture of not asking questions — makes foul play easy to disguise as bad luck. That’s part of why the etiquette exists in the first place. Not knowing everything about the person beside you isn’t suspicious. It’s simply how you keep each other, and yourselves, a little safer."
Arlen absorbed that with a quiet, private relief he was careful not to let show on his face — a whole culture, apparently, built around exactly the kind of discretion he’d spent his entire adventuring life carefully, anxiously maintaining on his own. He thought of Fennis’s quiet choice to never press him after the goblin camp, of Cobb’s easy acceptance of a half-explained cover story, and understood, sitting in this crowded room, that what had felt like a fragile secret back in Greyhaven was simply, here, unremarkable normal conduct.
Ferrin moved on to numbers before the briefing’s close, and delivered them with the same flat, unflinching honesty he’d brought to everything else.
"The guild loses adventurers every year down there," he said. "Not a handful. A meaningful number, the kind the orientation you’re all sitting through exists specifically to reduce. Reduce, not eliminate. I’ve buried students. I’ve watched veterans with twenty years of experience make the one mistake that finished them. Nobody in this room is guaranteed anything by simply completing this course." He let that sit a moment, the room considerably quieter than it had been at the start. "There’s a wall near the eastern archive with names on it. Go look at it sometime before your first dive, not after. Better to carry that weight in before you go down than discover it waiting for you when you come back up short someone you cared about."
The briefing wound down not long after, Ferrin fielding a handful of practical questions about equipment and signal flares with the same brisk, unsentimental clarity, and Arlen found himself, filing out with the rest of the cohort, turning over the accumulated weight of everything the morning had given him.
He found Corwin waiting exactly where he’d promised, near a quiet alcove just off the main hall, staff already in hand.
"Ready?" Corwin asked.
"I think so," Arlen admitted. "Ferrin’s briefing left me a little more sober about the whole enterprise than I was yesterday."
"Good. Sober’s the right approach down there." Corwin studied him a moment. "We’ll do this properly — take some time, no rushing it. I want an honest read, not a quick one."
Arlen followed him deeper into the guild hall’s quieter wing, the memorial wall Ferrin had mentioned catching his eye once through a distant archway — too far to read names from here, though he made a private note to visit it properly before his first dive, exactly as Ferrin had suggested.
Skills you don’t explain. Companions you don’t fully know. A wall of names you’re meant to see before you ever need a reason to understand it.
He turned the morning’s lessons over as he walked, the weight of them settling into him with the same careful, deliberate attention he gave everything that actually mattered. This place asks something different of a person than Greyhaven ever did. I think I’m only just beginning to understand how different.
Corwin led him into a modest, private testing room, gestured for him to take up a ready stance, and settled into his own with the same unhurried patience he brought to everything.
"Whenever you’re ready," Corwin said. "Show me what a year and more of frontier training actually built."