The roar was still coming back off the walls when the ranger put the second arrow into the torch bracket above the door and the treasury went completely dark.

  Not dim. Not shadowed. Dark, the total lightless black of a room thirty feet underground with no windows and no fire, because the fire that had been keeping this room lit for seven years was dead on the floor and the torches were out and the only light left was the cold green pulse of the Sigil Stone and the heat still building behind Brutus's teeth.

  Which meant they could see him against it.

  He could not see them.

  He moved left, fast, away from the doorway, and something cut across his right forearm — a blade, short, already moving before he cleared the frame, which meant the fighter had been closing the whole time he was roaring and he'd given her exactly the seconds she needed. Good. She was good. He registered this with the part of his brain that was still working and the part that wasn't said, clearly and simply: I don't care.

  He swung where she had to be.

  His fist connected with something solid — armor, shoulder, enough mass to stagger her back two steps — and he moved again immediately because standing still in the dark was how you died.

  "He's left of the door," the fighter said. Flat. Professional. Completely steady despite the fact that he'd just hit her hard enough to move her. "Mage, light."

  Cold white light bloomed in the center of the treasury.

  Brutus crossed the distance to the mage in three strides and threw her at the ranger before the ranger could finish drawing. They went down together. The light spell held, hovering, untethered, because its caster was on the floor.

  The cleric hit him in the back with a mace.

  Hard, the kind of hard that said this was not a soft support cleric but one who used the mace because they wanted to. Brutus turned into the second swing so it caught his raised forearm instead of his skull, got the cleric by the throat, and put him against the wall one-handed with his feet off the floor.

  "Drop it," Brutus said.

  The mace clattered.

  He put the cleric down. The cleric slid to the floor and stayed there with his hands up. Decision made.

  The fighter came at his left side.

  Fast and angled, shield between them, sword going for the gap below his arm where the brigandine didn't fully cover. She'd been watching. She'd learned from the last thirty seconds and she was applying it and he turned to close the gap and she adjusted and he adjusted and for three seconds they moved around each other in the cold white light and the part of his brain still working said: she's better than me at this. More hours. Better training. Better technique.

  And then he stopped thinking about technique entirely.

  "You stupid fucking—" he snarled, and breathed.

  The fire came up from somewhere he hadn't known he was holding it and hit her at approximately four feet, which was not the distance you used a dragonborn's breath if you cared about your own continued health, but he was not in a caring-about-his-own-health mode and the fire didn't know that and came out at full force regardless. It caught her sword arm and her side and the edge of her face and she went back hard into the treasury wall.

  She was still holding the sword.

  "Put it down put it the fuck DOWN—" He crossed the distance and grabbed her sword wrist and felt the bones flex and she hit him with the shield backhand across the jaw and he tasted blood and did not let go. He twisted. The sword dropped. He got his other hand around her throat and she looked up at him from one knee, face burned on one side, eyes streaming but steady, and he looked down at her and his hand tightened and he was making a sound in his chest that wasn't words anymore, hadn't been words for a little while now, just pressure looking for an exit.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  "Down," said the voice in his head. Sharp. All the warmth stripped out of it. "Brutus. Down. Right now."

  He did not process it fast enough.

  The ranger had gotten free.

  The arrow went into the back of his left shoulder at an upward angle — prone position, floor shot, either desperation or training and it didn't matter which. His left arm stopped working correctly. He released the fighter and turned and the ranger was already on one knee with the second arrow nocked and she was not aiming for his shoulder.

  She was aiming for the gap between his jaw and the helmet he hadn't worn because he hadn't been thinking about helmets, he'd been thinking about the treasury and Revenue and the crack in the back wall, and the gap was there, open, and the ranger was very good at her job.

  He opened his mouth to say something.

  He didn't get it out.

  The floor was cold against his cheek.

  The treasury was around him in pieces. The mage's light spell still floating in the middle of the room, attached to nothing. The Sigil Stone's green pulse near his face. Revenue a few feet away, both of them on the floor now in the cold and the quiet.

  He thought: the crack. Fix it first. That's where they came from. Fix the crack and Revenue doesn't—

  He thought: next time.

  Then he stopped thinking.

  He woke up standing.

  That was the first thing that was wrong. You didn't wake up standing. You woke up horizontal and then you got vertical. You didn't just arrive vertical with your eyes open and your lungs already going.

  He was in the Underdark.

  He was in the Underdark and Onetooth was in front of him and Onetooth was dead, freshly dead, still warm, killed by Brutus's own hands approximately four seconds ago by every physical indicator available to him. The Crown of Shadows was in his right hand. His shoulder was fine. His jaw was fine. The arrow was not in his eye socket.

  He stood completely still.

  He looked at his hands.

  He looked at Onetooth.

  He looked at his hands again.

  "What," he said.

  "So," said the voice. Carefully. The warmth was back but modulated, the specific register of something that was choosing its words. "So, uh. Yeah. About that. There was actually a reason the Crown of Shadows was considered extremely valuable, and I did try to mention it earlier, you said not now, which, fair, the timing was—"

  "What happened." His voice came out wrong. Too flat. Too careful. The voice of a person holding something very fragile by the edges.

  "You died."

  "I was—" He stopped. "I was in the treasury."

  "Yes."

  "There were adventurers."

  "Yes."

  "I was—" He stopped again. He could feel the gap between where he was and where he'd just been like a physical thing, like a step that wasn't there in the dark. "Revenue was—"

  "Yes," the voice said, quieter.

  He was quiet for a long time.

  The Underdark glowed around him, blue and cold and completely indifferent. Onetooth was still dead in front of him. The Crown's carvings shifted at the edge of his vision, the same as they always did, patient and unchanged, like they had been doing this for a very long time and expected to keep doing it.

  "Explain," Brutus said.

  "The Crown of Shadows has a history," the voice said. "The short version is that it was made by a god. A small god, mostly forgotten, the kind that slides out of history without leaving much behind. At the end of its existence it made one final thing and that thing was a curse and the curse is—" a pause, "—it's a loop. You die, you reset. Back to a point the curse picks, which is not always the same point. This time it's here. Sometimes it's further forward. The god designed it to be permanent and it is permanent and I want to be upfront with you about that before you ask."

  Brutus looked at the Crown in his hand.

  "Permanent," he said.

  "Yes."

  "No way to stop it."

  "No."

  "Can I tell someone. Maldred. Anyone."

  "No. That's specifically part of it. Anyone who starts to understand forgets immediately. The knowledge just goes. You're the only one who keeps it." A beat. "I keep it too, because I'm neither living nor dead, so the curse can't touch me the same way. That's why I can tell you this right now."

  He stood there in the phosphorescent dark and thought about Revenue on the floor of the treasury and the crack in the back wall and the ranger's arrow and the gap between where he'd been and where he was now.

  He thought about permanent.

  "How many times has this happened before," he said. "To other keepers."

  "You're the first one who's come back," the voice said. "The others who put the crown on didn't survive long enough to trigger it. You're the first keeper in three thousand years who made it all the way to a death."

  Brutus looked at Onetooth one more time.

  "The crack," he said. "Sublevel corridor, eastern face. First thing when I get back."

  The voice was quiet for a moment. Then, in a register he hadn't heard from it before, something that wasn't quite warmth and wasn't quite relief but lived between them: "Okay."

  "And Revenue gets let out every day. That's not negotiable."

  "Okay."

  "Tell me everything you know about the ranger on the way back," he said. "All four of them. Everything."

  He put the Crown in his pack and started walking. The tunnel was long and the dungeon was a disaster and Revenue was alive right now in the treasury with his coal eyes and his inspection circuit and his completely professional relationship with his job, and Brutus had five hours of Underdark between him and fixing the thing that was going to get him killed.

  He walked fast.

  Behind him the Crown of Shadows sat in the dirt of his pack and its carvings shifted and somewhere in the deep cold machinery of a forgotten god's final spite, a counter that had been waiting a very long time turned over for the first time.

  DEATHS: 1.

  It had a lot of room left.