“Something wrong?” Burt asked the dumbfounded acolyte.

“It… uh, but he… where is… where’s his smile?” stammered the Al’Matran. “Look at his face!”

Burt squinted up at the statue. “I dunno. Looks happy enough to me,” he said with a shrug.

The Elf’s only reply was a squeal of terror before he sprinted away.

“Yeah, nice talkin’ to you,” Burt called after him. With a snarl and some muttering about pinkskins, the Kobold pulled a limp cigarette from his vest, lit it in a holy brazier, and pulled a long drag as he wandered over to Gorm. “All right, big guy. Here’s Niln. This is what you wanted, right?”

“Yeah.” Gorm sat in front of the statue, staring with bleary eyes at Niln’s feet. He took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he repeated softly.

“Feels like we didn’t need to come all the way just to talk to a ghost. He’s just as gone out there as in here.”

“No, no,” Gorm slurred. “It’s different. Lost a lot of friends in my career. Iheen, Tib’rin, Ataya… all of ’em gone, each one leavin’ a hole in me heart. But Niln… what with his books and this statue, it just... it just feels like he’s here with me, ye know? In some little way. Ain’t much, but it’s the most I got.”

Burt sighed, but his expression softened. “Yeah. Take your time, Gorm.” The Kobold pulled a small flask from his vest and poured himself a thimbleful of Teagem rum. Drink in one hand and smoke in the other, he settled down next to a warm brazier and closed his eyes.

Gorm sighed again. It wasn’t a matter of finding the words; the apologies, the excuses, and everything else he wanted to say battered the back of his teeth like floodwaters against a dam. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to look into the high scribe’s sad bronze eyes. So he sat in silence, slowly sobering as the evening drifted on. Eventually, an admission leaked out. “I failed ye,” he said.

Niln looked down with a benevolently blank expression.

“It ain’t that I gave up. I still… still haven’t. I won’t. I want to fight. I want to make it right.” Gorm squeezed his hands into fists and wiped salty tears from his eyes. “But I ain’t enough. Every lead I chase goes nowhere. Every plan I hatch gets us nothin’. Johan just… well, the world seems set up for him to win. And nobody else seems to care.”

He shook his head. “The Shadowkin say I can’t fix all their problems; if I came in and rescued ’em I’d be part of their problem. Light’s Folk think Johan’s a hero, and tellin’ ’em otherwise only makes ’em hate ye and love him more. Nobody cares about the truth provided the lies are more comfortable. Even Burt’s gone cynical. Well, more cynical.”

“I’m a realist,” Burt called.

Gorm sighed. “Now Johan’s going to slay his fake dragon, and then he’ll be even more of a hero. City’s already full of people who don’t care about his crimes. What will they let him get away with after that? And I don’t want to give up but… I don’t see the way forward.”

He looked up at the statue. Niln seemed to stare down at him with benevolent understanding.

“Is this what it was like for ye?” Gorm asked the high scribe. “Knowin’ where ye needed to go, and no idea how to get there? I always thought ye didn’t know what ye were doin’ because… well, because ye were a young fool, but now… Ye were tryin’ to make the world right when the world’s doin’ everythin’ it can to stay wrong. And all ye could do was give up or stumble around in the darkness, looking for the way forward.”

There was a fond warmth in Niln’s cold, bronze face.

“And ye never gave up,” Gorm told him. “Even when ye stopped pretendin’ to be a guild hero, ye were goin’ back to find your place at the temple. Ye kept tryin’ to find your way. And it’s inspirin’, but…”

Gorm fell silent. Niln waited patiently.

“I been readin’ your scriptures again,” he said eventually. “And the old books ye collected for me. Know half of ’em by heart by now, but they… they just don’t make sense. If there’s somethin’ I’m supposed to see in the prophecy, I missed it. Or it ain’t here yet. Or it’s all nonsense, just as daft and useless as… as everythin’ else I tried.”

Someone cleared their throat. Gorm glanced back, and saw that the entryway was packed with worried Al’Matrans, all staring at him and the statue.

“I’d better go,” Gorm said. “The king’s been down in the dungeon for three days, and he should reach the dragon soon. If he sends a sprite back tomorrow, maybe we’ll get some clue as to what he’s plottin’ behind all this nonsense. And then… well, then I’ll keep on fightin’, once I figure out how to do it. And wherever this goes, however dark it gets, I’ll fight.”

The statue’s smile was all gentle acceptance.

“I swear it to ye, Niln.” Gorm’s voice cracked, and the next breath he drew was long and ragged. “I’ll see it through to the end.”

He dusted the salt from his knees as he stood. Burt hopped up and fell into step beside him as they crossed the sanctuary. They tried to push their way into the temple’s lobby, but the crowd of Al’Matrans glommed onto them like dungeon slime on an adventurer’s boot. The priestesses and scribes peppered Gorm and Burt with questions as they forged a path to the door.

“Did you see him move?”

“Was he like that when you arrived?”

“Notice any tears on the statue?

“Perhaps bloody ones?”

But sobriety had snuck up on Gorm under the cover of his melancholy, and now his emotions were coalescing into curmudgeonly determination. “What are ye lot on about? Don’t ye have work to do? Such as cleanin’ out this sanctuary, for one!” Before anyone could answer, the Dwarf shouldered an unfortunate scribe out of the way and stormed out of the temple. Burt stepped over the prone Human, careful not to spill his drink, and scampered along in pursuit.

The clergy of Al’Matra sagged as the pair left the temple, disappointed that they hadn’t any answers as to what happened with the statue. They quickly went rigid again as they realized, virtually in unison, that in their eagerness for answers they had left the statue unmonitored. The acolytes and priestesses crept back to the sanctuary door like mice approaching a sleeping cat. The first scribe to peek around the door shrieked in terror.

The statue of High Scribe Niln was staring directly at the door, his mouth set in a wide grin. One of his eyes was squeezed shut, as if to give the shocked Al’Matrans a mischievous wink.

“Are you trying to make a joke? Is this supposed to be clever?” Laruna’s brow knit as she glared at the apprentice manning the registrar’s desk.

The hapless solamancer behind the desk withered under a glare as dry and heated as the desert sun. “I… I, uh, sorry miss. I thought you were making a joke as… I mean, no, of course not. My apologies.”

Laruna snorted. “Just enroll me in these classes and then we can both move on.”

“Yesss…” said the clerk, finessing an unspoken “but” into a prolonged sibilance. “Have you, maybe, considered some courses that are more, ahem, rigorous?”

“These classes are what I need.”

“Of course, of course,” stammered the clerk. “It’s just that, well, an illustrious hero such as yourself might be more interested in plumbing the mysteries of existence, or the latest weaves for refracting light and heat. These classes are more focused on… basics.”

“They’re what I need,” she growled again.

“People may think it strange to see a grown woman⁠—”

“They’re what I need!” snarled Laruna, with enough force and heat to send the apprentice diving behind his desk for cover. She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. “I need to fix some… basic things,” she said evenly. “I can handle people giving me strange looks.”

A legion of dour faces stared at Weaver Ortson. The throne room was packed with people, and every one of them wore a fine suit and a deep scowl. The only sounds in the great, stone expanse were the sibilant hiss of the sand falling in the hourglass, and an occasional cough echoing through the chamber. He felt naked and exposed, a rigid grin his only defense against the impatient stares.

Ortson glanced at the hourglass. There was just under a minute to go by his judgment, but it felt like a small eternity. A glass cloche was set on the table next to the timepiece, and in it a small, pink sprite waited patiently.

Industry leaders and nobles were ready with their own sprite stones, preparing to issue buy or sell orders the moment the sprite spoke. Agekeepers and town criers lined the walls, quills ready to record history in the making. Queen Marja, on the throne behind Ortson, was watching the tiny, glowing figure with manic concentration.

All eyes were on the sprite. Unfortunately, according to Nove’s fifth principle of universal irony, that only served to further delay the announcement.

Anyone who has had a birthday party, opened holiday presents, or watched a clock for the end of a particularly painful class knows that time seems to pass more slowly while waiting for a desirable event. The philosopher-scientist applied a more rigorous methodology to this axiom, using Nove’s Constant to devise a mathematical model that showed how attention and anticipation delay events and distort time. Nove’s writings on his fifth principle of universal irony posited that enough people watching a pot over a fire could actually postpone the water within it from boiling indefinitely.

Nove famously attempted to prove the theory in a grand experiment involving a cauldron of water, a bonfire, and an arena full of students, with tragic results. The combined attention of thousands of philosopher-scientists in training suppressed the water from boiling for well over an hour, nearly long enough to rule out any other conceived explanation for the delay. Yet, just before the designated time passed, a sudden distraction arose. Sources disagree on whether it was the call of a passing waterfowl, a flatulent professor, or the confluence of the two, but some noise caught the collective attention of the student body, causing them to momentarily ignore the pot. The sudden shift in perspective and expectations caused ripples in the Novian counterforces at work in the pot, releasing all of the pent-up energy in one horrible instant. The boiling water vaporized in a violent explosion that shattered the cauldron. Three graduate students were killed and many more injured by the shrapnel.