The morning light came through the dome's barrier in fractured columns.
Penelope's office smelled of ink and old wood. She stood at the center of it, her hands folded at her waist as though she expected a formal inspection rather than a conversation.
"I need a list," Kaelen said. "The old guards. The ones who have been stationed here the longest."
Penelope nodded slowly. "I can give you that." She moved to the writing desk at the edge of the room and drew a folded sheet from a drawer. It looked like she had prepared for this possibility. She laid it flat on the desk and turned it toward him.
Kaelen scanned the names. Twenty-eight in total, written in Penelope's careful, restrained hand.
Jil Ack. Orvyn Tass. Sable Duren. Conner Holt. Maris Fane. Toven Cray. Ilwen Bruck. Dorran Vel. Asha Mor. Fest Quill.
He continued reading but Penelope spoke before he reached the bottom.
"The ones you want most are those." She leaned forward and tapped the first name with one finger, precise and deliberate. "Jil Ack, specifically. He is the most senior among them and has been here far longer than anyone else on that list."
"What's his role?"
"Barrier patrol. All the old guards are assigned to it, actually. They are the ones tasked with inspecting the dome's boundary because they have been here long enough to know every mark and seam of it by memory." She straightened up. "They move in three groups across the dome's cardinal points. But Jil is the exception. He leads his own patrol separate from the others, with his own set of guards."
Kaelen studied the list again.
"You should be watching him more than anyone," Penelope said, quieter this time.
"I intend to."
...
Jay was already restless.
"We don't have the time to be delicate about this," she said. "We follow the guard. Openly. Get close enough to see what we need to see and move on."
She looked at Kaelen directly, not with aggression but with the flat certainty of someone stating facts.
"Whatever is inside this dome has been quiet. That silence isn't comfort, Kaelen. That's a warning sign and we're burning time standing here."
"You're not wrong about the time," Kaelen said. He said it without hesitation, which seemed to catch Jay slightly off guard. "But tailing a guard who has spent decades walking the same ground inside an enclosed property where everyone knows everyone is not subtle. It's obvious. And if Jil already suspects something, you won't be following him. You'll be confirming his suspicions and we'll lose whatever ground we have."
Jay said nothing. The silence between them held a moment.
"Then what?" she said.
"We keep to the work we were hired for. For cover." Kaelen turned to include Lira and Mel. "The beasts that came loose from their harness, they're still out. Lira, Jay, I need you two together on that. Round them up, get them back to the harness. To anyone watching, you're doing exactly what you were hired to do."
"And the old guards?" Lira asked.
"Penelope." He looked at her. "I need you to assign some of the old guards on that list to Lira and Jay. Under the pretense of help. Let them believe they're there to assist with the beasts. That gives Lira and Jay a reason to be close to them, observe them, without raising any suspicion."
Penelope considered it briefly. "I can do that."
"Mel." Kaelen looked at her now. "You patrol the northeast section. Watch the guards assigned there discreetly. Check if anything in their behavior sits wrong."
Mel gave a quiet nod.
"What about Jil?" Penelope asked.
"I'll handle Jil myself." He folded the list and tucked it away. "Penelope, you stay visible. Keep doing your work as normal. Nothing out of the ordinary."
Penelope looked at him steadily. "And if something happens while we're separated?"
"Please, don't jinx us."
There was a short burst of laughter among the group, and then Mel said almost casually, "You should know what you're walking into before you go looking for Jil."
Kaelen glanced at her.
"He's not easy to miss," Mel said. "Purple hair. Dyed, not natural. Athletic build. Around five foot seven." She paused briefly. "He looks like a man you'd want on your side in a fight."
"Good to know," Kaelen said.
...
The dome was different on foot.
Kaelen had seen it from the entrance, had stood inside it and felt its scale in the abstract way you feel something when you're not paying close attention. But moving through it with purpose changed that. The eastern sector alone stretched further than it had any right to. The barrier line ran along the perimeter in a long, curving arc and the ground beside it was dense with different species of plants.
He found Jil's patrol.
The man was leading four guards along the barrier's inner edge, each of them moving with the easy familiarity of a routine done a thousand times before. Mel's description had been accurate but what she had undersold was the sheer quality of how Jil moved. Athletic build was the clinical term for it. What Kaelen was looking at was a man whose body had been maintained like a working tool, deliberate and without excess. He looked to be in his forties at the absolute oldest, with broad shoulders and the kind of posture that didn't come from trying.
Kaelen fell into step and approached at an angle that made it difficult to be ignored.
"I'd like to help with the patrol," Kaelen said.
Jil stopped walking. He turned and looked at Kaelen the way a man looks at something he has not yet decided is worth his attention.
"Would you now." It wasn't a question.
"That's right."
Jil looked him over slowly, from his boots to his face, and what came back was not hostility exactly, more the particular contempt of someone who has made a judgment and found the subject wanting. "A young boy," he said. "Still wet behind the ears, barely dried off, and you want to help us patrol the barrier." A small breath left him, not quite a laugh. "What exactly do you imagine you'd be contributing?"
The other guards shifted. One of them smirked.
Kaelen wasn't offended. "I'm only here to do what I've been assigned. I'm not asking you to admire me for it."
"What you were assigned," Jil said, "was to return the rams to their harness. That's the extent of it. A glorified beast wrangler." He tilted his head slightly. "Is that not what you agreed to?"
"It was," Kaelen said. "But the situation is more complicated now. It's not only the beasts. There are other concerns with the dome—"
"Other concerns." Jil's tone sharpened at the edges. He folded his arms, squaring himself. "You know what I think your other concern is? You and that little group of yours. Riffraff, the lot of you, who couldn't even leave when the lady humiliated you. Couldn't walk away from a million coin." He said it with aease, like the words had been sitting in his mouth waiting for the right moment. "My advice to you, boy? Drop her case. It isn't worth whatever she's promised you."
The guards laughed. Not loud, but enough.
Kaelen smiled.
It was a small, composed thing, and it stopped the laughter before it could settle. Jil's expression shifted fractionally, something between surprise and caution passing behind his eyes.
"You're right," Kaelen said. "I'm here for the money. That's the truth of it." He met Jil's gaze without moving from it. "And that's exactly why I'm going to put in more effort than anyone here."
Jil stared at him for a moment longer than was comfortable.
Then, without a word, he turned and resumed walking.
"Keep up then," he said.
...
Penelope closed the door to the manor's records room behind her and stood alone in silence.
The space smelled of aged paper and something faintly damp beneath it. She lit a small aether lamp and moved to the older ledgers, the ones pushed to the back shelving that looked as if nobody had reached for them in years. She wasn't sure what she was looking for, only that something was wrong and the shape of it kept pulling her back toward the beginning.
She found it in the third ledger.
A maintenance log. Routine entries at first, the same kind of dry procedural language that filled every inspection record. Barrier check, eastern sector. Barrier check, northern sector. Routine. Routine. Routine.
And then, further in, a single entry that didn't match the rest.
Full dome maintenance. Cleared for delayed repair.
Two years ago.
She read it twice.
Right before she had taken ownership of the dome. And at the bottom of the entry, a signature.
Brennan.
Penelope set the ledger down on the desk carefully, with both hands, as if it were something that might break if she wasn't careful about it. She stared at that name for a long time.
She said nothing.
...
The nine old guards assigned to them weren't unfriendly. That was the thing Lira kept circling back to as the morning wore on. They weren't hostile, weren't evasive. They answered when spoken to. They moved without hesitation and they worked. Whatever Lira had expected to find in their behavior, she wasn't seeing it.
The beasts were another matter entirely.
The lantern rams were F-rank, which meant killing them was an easy option, but that wasn't an option they could take.
Getting them back to their harnesses alive while they kicked and lurched and kept trying to double back required more patience than strength. They were large, stubborn creatures.
"Left," Lira said sharply.
Jay moved left, cutting off the ram's angle before it could break around her.
"You knew it was going left before it moved," Jay said.
"They always go left when they're scared," Lira said. "At least that's what have noticed."
Jay glanced at her sideways. "How do you know they're scared?"
"Because you keep growling at them."
"I'm not growling."
"You are."
Jay opened her mouth to respond and then closed it again. She lowered into a crouch and pressed her palm flat against the earth. The ground accepted her hand with a soft give and the ram she'd been herding sank two inches, just enough to slow it without hurting it. She rose, dusted her palm off and directed it back toward the harness line with the guardes following behind.
"Seven," Jay said.
Lira steadied her own beast with a low, measured sound in the back of her throat.
"Seven," she agreed.
They worked in silence for a moment and then Jay stopped.
"Jay." Lira started to ask.
She went still so suddenly that Lira had to speak since it was unusual of her.
"Don't." Jay held a hand up, barely moving it. She looked at the guards beside them. "Nobody move."
The guards exchanged glances. One of them started to say something.
"I said don't move."
Silence.
Jay lowered herself slowly to the ground and pressed her ear against it. She was listening with the full weight of her ability turned downward.
Lira watched her face.
Whatever Jay felt, it registered in her expression as something between recognition and unease. She stayed down for several seconds before she rose.
"Something's wrong," she said quietly. She looked southwest, toward the manor. "The pressure is coming from that direction. I felt it before but I thought —" She stopped. "It's strong. Whatever it is."
Lira looked in the same direction.
"How strong?" Lira asked.
Jay looked at her with an expression that didn't leave room for comfort.
...
The eastern patrol route was longer than it appeared from a distance. Kaelen had known the dome was large but walking its perimeter with his attention actually on the land rather than passing through it was different. The barrier line stretched ahead and behind until both directions blurred into the same grey-green horizon. He could understand now why the old guards had been divided into separate cardinal groups. One team covering all of this would take half a day.
The patrol had been quiet for a while when Kaelen spoke.
"How are the rotations?" he asked.
Jil kept his eyes forward.
Kaelen let a few seconds pass. "You've led this group for a long time without a single incident serious enough to cost you the position. That's not easy to manage."
Jil stopped walking.
He turned and looked at Kaelen with an expression that had moved past mild amusement and arrived somewhere colder. "This is a patrol," he said. "Not an interview. If you can't walk quietly, you can fall back."
"I apologize," Kaelen said, and he meant it to sound genuine because part of it was. "I'm not trying to press. Penelope gave me the list of senior guards and your name was the one she considered most important. I suppose I was looking for something to say to someone I found worth talking to." He paused, then added, quieter: "I was put in charge of my team twice. The second time nearly got all of us killed. Bad call on my part."
He didn't look at Jil when he said it. His eyes went somewhere slightly past the patrol, past the dome line, back to the obsidian mauler. To Davos. To the weight of that moment still sitting unresolved in the back of his chest.
Jil was quiet for a moment. Then he resumed walking, slower than before.
"Leadership doesn't work the way people think," he said finally. His voice had lost its edge without softening into anything warm. It was simply more honest. "A clean first lead doesn't promise you a clean second. And a disaster doesn't mean you're finished. It just means something went wrong. The ones who stop there are the ones who were never really built for it."
Kaelen listened.
"I led three hundred people once," Jil said. "Six groups. The mission was extermination of a hoard of great red charging bulls." He paused. "Classified as C-rank."
Kaelen looked at him. "The great red charging bull is a C-rank beast."
"Yes."
"Three hundred people for a C-rank extermination?"
"It was a hoard," Jil said. "And I mismanaged every part of that mission. Divided the groups wrong, miscounted the herd, pulled two teams into a choke point they had no way out of." He didn't sound ashamed exactly. He sounded like someone reporting weather conditions. "It was miserable. I adapted. You either do or you don't."
Kaelen looked at him for a moment, genuinely curious now rather than strategic about it. "What rank are you? As an adventurer."
Jil took a breath through his nose. "B-rank," he said.
"And your cultivation level?"
A pause. Long enough that Kaelen thought he might not answer.
"Paragon," Jil said.
Kaelen kept his face steady. Paragon cultivation. Someone at that level could build wealth independently, could operate without anyone's patronage and still live comfortably for the rest of a very long life. Yet here he was, walking a dome patrol line for the Divian family. He was one of many in that same position, which said more about the Divian family's reach than it did about Jil.
"That's real dedication to the family," Kaelen said.
Jil's mouth moved slightly. Not quite a smile. "Fifty years of it."
"Since you were young then."
Jil laughed. It was short and genuine, the first sound from him that hadn't been measured in some way. He looked at Kaelen and there was something almost like appreciation in it, the kind that comes when someone finds you less irritating than expected. "You're surprised," he said.
"A little," Kaelen admitted.
"I'm eighty-three," Jil said simply.
Kaelen filed that away behind a neutral expression. At the Paragon level the body aged differently. The higher the cultivation the slower time took from you, which meant the man walking beside him who looked to be in his prime middle years had been alive twice as long as his face suggested.
"Then the dedication is even more impressive," Kaelen said, and he meant it
...
They had nearly completed the eastern patrol line by the time the conversation opened up enough for Kaelen to try again.
"You're content," Kaelen said, keeping his voice easy. "Working with the Divians this long."
Jil glanced at him briefly, then looked back out at the distance. "I am," he said.
"Then why not help Penelope? You were there the day she brought us in. You and the others." Kaelen kept his tone even, curious rather than pressing. "She's dealing with something serious and the old guards haven't stepped in."
Jil was quiet for a beat. "My loyalty is with the Divian family."
"Right," Kaelen said. "I'm not sure i follow the distinction."
Jil looked at him properly this time. He exhaled through his nose and when he spoke again, he dropped his voice below the ambient noise of the patrol, just low enough that the guards ahead of them wouldn't catch it.
"This isn't something I should be telling you," Jil said. "But you remind me of something I've mostly forgotten about." He let that settle for a moment. "What do you know about Penelope? Beyond the mission."
Kaelen kept his face neutral. "Not much. She seemed strange when we met her. She mentioned posting the mission because she wanted friends, if you can believe it. Before everything got complicated."
Jil made a small, dry sound. "Friends." He said the word like it explained something.
He looked off into the distance again and was quiet long enough that Kaelen thought he might not continue.
"Penelope is a bastard," Jil said. "An illegitimate child. Lucky, in a narrow sense, that Divian blood runs through her at all. Her mother was a maid in the family's house. Her father had no business being with her, but he was and here Penelope is." He said it without cruelty, but without warmth either. The plain recitation of facts. "She was never considered family. Not genuinely. She was set aside from the beginning. Mocked by some, ignored by most."
Kaelen listened, kept his expression interested but unreadable.
"The old guards," Jil continued, quieter still, "were given specific orders. Not to offer Penelope help of any kind. Not in any form." A pause. "Those orders came from Brennan. Sorin. Isolde. Reva. Aldric. Dorian."
The names landed clearly.
Kaelen knew all of them except Dorian. But it was Aldric's name that snagged on something. Penelope had mentioned Aldric once, with something approaching warmth, the one person among the family she had seemed to hold a slightly better thought about.
That apparently hadn't been mutual.
"I pity her," Jil said. "Genuinely. But there's nothing I can do."
"Has any of them visited the dome?" Kaelen asked. "Since Penelope was put in charge."
"No." Jil said it without hesitation. "Not one. I'd have known."
Kaelen opened his mouth to respond.
The explosion hit first.
It came from the northwest, from the manor's direction, and it hit the air like something solid, a concussive thud that rolled across the dome and shook the ground underfoot. The guards around them stopped. One of them swore. Several looked at each other with the stunned incomprehension of people whose routine had just been violently interrupted.
Kaelen was already moving.
He didn't wait for them to process it. He turned northwest and ran, leaving Jil and the patrol behind before any of them had fully registered what had happened.
...
Mel was in the northeastern sector when the sound reached her.
She had been watching her assigned guards with a quiet patience. None of them had shown her anything worth marking. They moved like people who had done this job for so long it had stopped requiring thought.
Then the explosion came.
Even Mel, for the span of one second, went still. The sound came from the manor's direction and it was not a small sound. It was the kind that arrived in the chest before it arrived in the ears.
Then she moved.
The ground cracked beneath her feet as she launched forward, a spiderweb fracture spreading from where she had been standing as the force of her departure hit the earth. The guards near her spun around, already rattled by the explosion, and the sight of Mel leaving at that speed rattled them further.
She was already too far to hear their confusion.
...
Jay had just opened her mouth to say something to Lira when the ground moved beneath them.
It wasn't a tremor but an explosion.
The sound hit a half second after the pressure did, a deep concussive boom that rolled across the dome and scattered the remaining rams in every direction at once. Every guard around them went rigid. Lira stumbled back a step and caught herself.
Jay was already moving before any of them had fully processed the sound.
She grabbed Lira's arm. "Manor," she said, and broke into a run.
The guards scrambled after them, the task abandoned entirely, the beasts already scattered.