The Adventurers' Guild hall in Thornwall occupied a building on the village's main street that had, in better days, been a courthouse. Before that, it had been a granary. Before that, according to Alderman Fitch's records (which went back further than anyone thought healthy or necessary), it had been a sheep pen.

  The building's architecture reflected this layered history the way geological strata reflect the passage of epochs — each era had left its mark, and the cumulative effect was a structure that couldn't quite decide what it was and had settled, with visible reluctance, on being all of them at once.

  The ground floor was a single large room with a flagstone floor, a high ceiling supported by oak beams that had been installed during the granary phase and were now held in place primarily by habit, and a stone fireplace at the far end that was large enough to roast an ox in and was currently being used to warm a kettle.

  The walls were lined with banners.

  There were fourteen of them, representing the fourteen adventuring companies that had, at various points in Thornwall's history, registered with the local guild chapter. Twelve of the fourteen companies had since disbanded, relocated, or died, and their banners hung with the faded dignity of retired flags at a war memorial — commemorating something that had once mattered to someone, probably.

  The remaining two banners belonged to the Thornwall Irregulars (a party of three who took on odd jobs when the weather was good and their knees weren't acting up) and the Silver Foxes (a husband-and-wife team who had been Level 6 and Level 5 respectively before retiring to run a cheese shop, and who maintained their guild membership purely for the dental benefits, which were, by all accounts, excellent).

  Beneath the banners, running the full length of the eastern wall, was the quest board.

  The quest board made the tavern's notice board look like a model of organisation and curatorial restraint. It was enormous — eight feet wide, six feet tall, constructed from three planks of pine that had been bolted together and then covered in cork, and every square inch of its surface was occupied.

  Notices overlapped notices.

  Pins held down corners of papers whose centres had curled free and now waved gently in the draught from the door, like tiny surrender flags.

  The oldest notices, pinned at the bottom, had yellowed to the colour of weak tea and bore dates from the previous decade.

  Someone had, at some point, attempted to impose order by dividing the board into sections — "URGENT" at the top, "STANDARD" in the middle, "LOW PRIORITY" at the bottom — but the system had collapsed almost immediately, and a notice requesting the urgent extermination of sewer rats now sat directly beside a low-priority invitation to a poetry reading at the Millhaven library, and both had been there so long that they had achieved a kind of peaceful coexistence, like neighbours who disliked each other but shared a fence.

  Levin had not intended to visit the Guild hall. Levin had intended to drink tea, sweep the floor, and perhaps — if the afternoon proved sufficiently uneventful — take a nap.

  These were modest ambitions.

  They required no paperwork, no social interaction beyond Marda's monosyllabic commentary, and no standing in buildings that smelled faintly of sheep.

  Berta had other plans.

  Berta had arrived at the Leaky Sovereign approximately forty minutes after Levin's return from Briarwood, carrying a loaf of bread (dense, rectangular, capable of stopping a door or, in extremis, a small projectile) and a sense of purpose that preceded her through the door like a weather front. She had placed the bread on the bar, placed both hands on her hips, and informed Levin that he was going to register with the Guild.

  "I don't need to register with the Guild," Levin had said.

  "You cleared goblins."

  "I fetched some sacks."

  "You cleared goblins. With magic. One spell. Dorin told Fitch, Fitch told the baker's boy, the baker's boy told me, and I was standing right there, so now everyone's told everyone and the only person in this village who doesn't know what you did is you, apparently, because you're standing behind a bar pretending to be a dishwasher."

  "I am a dishwasher."

  "You're a mage."

  "I'm a Level 1 mage who also washes dishes. The dishes are arguably more impressive."

  Berta had stared at him for a long moment. Then she had picked up the loaf of bread, held it in front of her like a shield — or possibly a battering ram, given its density — and pointed at the door.

  "Guild. Now. Move."

  Levin had moved.

  There were, he had learned during his six weeks in Thornwall, certain forces in the universe that could not be resisted: gravity, entropy, the passage of time, and Berta when she had decided something. Of these four, Berta was the most immediate and the least negotiable.

  And so he found himself standing in the Adventurers' Guild hall, holding his staff, wearing his one shirt, and facing a man who appeared to have been constructed from the same materials as the building — broad, weathered, slightly crooked, and giving the impression that he had been here for a very long time and would require significant structural work to remove.

  This was Guildmaster Harwick.

  Harwick was a man of considerable dimensions. He was tall — well over six feet — and wide in a way that suggested his body had started out as a normal human frame and then, over the course of several decades, been gradually filled with additional Harwick until it reached capacity and began to expand outward, like a balloon being inflated by someone who had lost count.

  His arms were thick.

  His neck was thicker.

  His hands, resting on the registration desk, looked like two flesh-coloured crabs that had given up the sea for a career in bureaucracy. He had a beard — grey, dense, trimmed to a length that said "I care about my appearance" while the beard itself said "but only up to a point" — and eyes that were small, sharp, and deeply embedded in a face that had clearly spent years outdoors squinting at things and had developed permanent fortifications around the eye sockets as a result.

  He wore a leather vest over a linen shirt, both of which strained at their duties.

  A bronze medallion hung around his neck on a chain — the Guild's official seal, depicting a sword crossed with a staff over a shield, which was the kind of design that a committee produces when every member insists on including their favourite weapon and nobody is willing to compromise.

  "Right," said Harwick, looking at Levin. He looked at Levin for quite a long time. He looked at Levin with professional assessment, mounting scepticism, and the quiet certainty that whatever this was, it was going to need work.

  "You're the goblin lad," Harwick said.

  "I cleared some goblins, yes."

  "Berta says you did it with one spell."

  "They were standing close together," Levin said, for the second time that morning. He was beginning to suspect this would become his most-used sentence.

  Harwick grunted. The grunt was a complex piece of communication — it contained acknowledgement, reservation, a request for further information, and the faint suggestion that Harwick had heard a lot of stories in this hall and most of them had turned out to be considerably less impressive upon investigation.

  It was the kind of grunt that had been refined over years of professional use until it could convey an entire paragraph of meaning in a single exhalation.

  "Standard procedure," Harwick said, reaching beneath the desk and producing a wooden box. The box was old, scratched, and had the words "REGISTRATION KIT — PROPERTY OF THE ADVENTURERS' GUILD — DO NOT REMOVE FROM PREMISES" burned into its lid in letters that suggested someone had once removed it from the premises and the Guild had feelings about this.

  He opened the box.

  Inside, nestled in velvet that had once been red and was now the colour of a sunset that had given up halfway through, were the tools of guild registration: a measuring tape (cloth, fraying at the 40-inch mark), a set of brass callipers (tarnished), a small glass vial (empty, purpose unclear), a quill (goose, indignant), an inkwell (half full, or half empty, depending on one's outlook on bureaucracy), and a leather-bound ledger so thick that it had developed a visible curvature, as though the weight of all the names inside it had caused it to sag in the middle like an overloaded shelf.

  "Arms out," Harwick said.

  Levin extended his arms.

  Harwick came around the desk — a process that took several seconds and involved the desk shifting two inches to the left, because Harwick and the gap between the desk and the wall had a relationship best described as "theoretical" — and began measuring.

  He measured Levin's arm span.

  He measured Levin's height, which required Levin to stand against the wall beneath a series of notches that previous registrants had been measured against, the highest of which was labelled "GROK — 7'2" — DECLINED (STRUCTURAL REASONS)" in faded ink.

  He measured Levin's chest circumference, his waist, his wrist diameter (left, then right, then left again because the first measurement "didn't look right"), and, for reasons that were never explained and that Levin chose not to enquire about, the distance from his left earlobe to the tip of his nose.

  "Five foot ten," Harwick announced, recording the figure in the ledger with the quill. "Hundred and forty pounds, give or take. Chest thirty-six. Waist twenty-nine. Wrist — hm…" He squinted at the measuring tape. "Six and a quarter. Bit thin."

  "I eat regularly," Levin said.

  "Wrists don't lie, lad. Wrists are the first thing a monster goes for. You want thick wrists in this line of work. Thick wrists and a good pair of boots." He glanced down at Levin's boots, which were engaged in their ongoing philosophical negotiation with the concept of structural integrity. "Those aren't good boots."

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  "They're the boots I have."

  "That's not the same thing." Harwick returned to his side of the desk, settled into his chair (the chair protested, briefly and without effect), and opened the ledger to a fresh page. "Name?"

  "Levin Kai."

  Harwick wrote it down. His handwriting was surprisingly neat — small, precise letters that marched across the page in orderly rows, each one formed with the careful deliberation of a man who believed that penmanship was a reflection of character and that sloppy writing led, inevitably, to sloppy adventuring, sloppy morals, and the eventual collapse of civilisation.

  "Class?"

  "Mage."

  "Specialisation?"

  "I don't have one."

  Harwick looked up. "Everyone has a specialisation. Elemental, Arcane, Divine, Illusion, Necromantic—"

  "I just do spells," Levin said. "Whatever seems appropriate."

  Harwick stared at him with the expression of a man who had just been told that a chef's specialisation was "food." He wrote something in the ledger.

  Levin suspected it was "General" or possibly "Unclear" or, given the slight tightening of Harwick's jaw, something less charitable.

  "Level?"

  And there it was.

  The question.

  It arrived with the same inevitability as rain at a picnic, or a pebble in a shoe, or the moment in any conversation about Levin when the numbers came up and the atmosphere shifted from "professional interaction" to "awkward reassessment."

  He had been through this exchange dozens of times.

  The sequence never varied: the question, the answer, the pause, the look, the recalibration.

  It was a little dance, and Levin knew all the steps.

  "One," he said.

  Harwick's quill stopped.

  It did not merely pause — it stopped, the way a clock stops, the way a heart stops, the way a sentence stops when it hits a full stop that it wasn't expecting.

  The nib rested on the page, and a small bloom of ink spread outward from the point of contact, forming a dark circle that grew slowly larger, like a pupil dilating in surprise.

  "One?" Harwick repeated.

  "One."

  "Level... one?"

  "That is the number that comes before two, yes."

  Harwick set the quill down. He leaned back in his chair.

  The chair made a sound that was half creak, half plea.

  He folded his arms — an operation that, given the circumference of the arms in question, resembled two logs being stacked — and regarded Levin with an expression that cycled through several phases in rapid succession: disbelief, amusement, suspicion, a brief stopover at pity, and finally a kind of weary professional resignation, the look of a man who had processed a great many registrations and had learned that the universe occasionally sent him paperwork that defied categorisation.

  "Son," Harwick said, "I've been running this chapter for nineteen years. I've registered warriors, rangers, healers, bards, one taxidermist who insisted his class was 'Preservation Specialist,' and a woman who listed her primary weapon as 'disappointment.' I have seen Level 3 recruits who could barely hold a sword and Level 15 veterans who could split a hair at forty paces. I have never — not once, not ever — had someone walk in here, claim to have single-handedly cleared a goblin camp, and then tell me they're Level 1."

  "I just helped," Levin said. "With the goblins. It was more of a... community effort."

  "Berta says you vaporised four of them."

  "She's being generous."

  "Berta is never generous. Berta once charged her own mother full price for a birthday cake… It was Berta's birthday. If Berta says you vaporised four goblins, you vaporised four goblins, and she probably has a receipt."

  Levin said nothing.

  There was, he had found, a particular kind of silence that worked better than any denial — the silence of a person who was not going to argue the point but was also not going to confirm it, and who was content to let the conversation find its own way forward, like a river encountering a boulder.

  The river could go left, or right, or over, or pool for a while and think about it.

  Levin was the boulder.

  The boulder had no opinions.

  Harwick picked up the quill again. He looked at the ledger. He looked at Levin. He looked at the ledger again.

  "Level 1," he said, writing it down. The quill moved slowly, as though each stroke of the "1" was being inscribed under protest. "Level 1 Mage. General specialisation. Five foot ten, hundred and forty pounds, thin wrists, bad boots." He paused. "All bark and no byte, eh?"

  "Sorry?"

  "Old guild expression. Means you talk a big game but the numbers don't add up. Byte — B-Y-T-E — it's a magic term. Unit of arcane measurement. Mages used to get tested on their byte output before registration. We stopped doing that in — oh, must have been twelve years ago. Too many appeals. Too much paperwork. One lad blew up the testing apparatus and we never replaced it because the requisition form was fourteen pages long and nobody could find a quill that worked." He shook his head. "Bureaucracy."

  Levin felt heat rise to his cheeks. It was a mild heat — the faintest pink, barely visible — but it was there, and it annoyed him, because blushing was an involuntary response that he had no control over and that communicated vulnerability to anyone paying attention, and Harwick was very clearly paying attention.

  "I'm not trying to talk a big game," Levin said. "I cleared some goblins. I'd like to take on more work. That's all."

  Harwick studied him. The small, sharp eyes performed their assessment — quick, thorough. It produced a verdict that might or might not be shared.

  "Bronze rank," Harwick said.

  "What?"

  "Bronze. Starting rank. Lowest tier. Entitles you to take quests rated E through D, access the guild's notice board, use the common room facilities — that's the kettle, the privy, and the bench by the fire, don't sleep on the bench, we had an incident — and receive a ten percent discount at participating merchants, of which there are currently none in Thornwall because the last one moved to Millhaven, but the policy stands in principle."

  He reached into a drawer and produced a small bronze disc, roughly the size of a large coin. It was stamped with the Guild's sword-and-staff-and-shield emblem on one side and the word "BRONZE" on the other, in letters that managed to be both official and faintly apologetic, as though the disc itself knew it was the participation trophy of the adventuring world.

  "This is your adventurer's certificate," Harwick said, placing it on the desk between them. "Carry it at all times. Present it when accepting quests, entering guild halls in other towns, or if challenged by authorities. Losing it costs two silver to replace. Defacing it costs five. Using it to open ale bottles — and yes, people try — costs ten and a formal reprimand."

  Levin looked at the disc.

  The disc sat on the desk with a quiet patience.

  "I don't really want fame. Or a title. I just want to take jobs," Levin said.

  "Nobody wants fame at Bronze rank, lad. Fame starts at Gold. At Bronze, you get jobs, blisters, sore legs and arms, and the occasional thank-you from a farmer whose turnips you've recovered. That's the deal. Sign the ledger."

  Harwick turned the ledger around and pushed it across the desk.

  The page was divided into columns: NAME, CLASS, LEVEL, SPECIALISATION, RANK, DATE, SIGNATURE.

  Above Levin's entry, the most recent registration was dated four months ago — "MAREN COLE, RANGER, LEVEL 4, TRACKING, BRONZE" — in handwriting that was confident and slightly impatient. Above that, the entries grew sparser, older, the ink fading from black to brown to the ghostly lavender of deep history.

  Levin picked up the quill.

  He dipped it in the inkwell.

  He looked at the column marked LEVEL, where Harwick had already written "1" in his precise, judgemental script.

  "Under 'Class,'" Harwick said, "I've put 'Mage.' Under 'Specialisation,' I've put 'General.' Under 'Level,' I've put—"

  "I can see what you've put."

  "Just making sure. Some people get emotional at this stage. Had a Level 2 Bard cry once. Actual tears. Said the number didn't reflect his 'inner journey.' I told him the ledger doesn't have a column for inner journeys. He cried harder."

  Levin signed.

  His signature was small, neat, and occupied exactly the space allotted to it — no flourishes, no embellishments, no attempt to make the letters larger or more impressive than they were.

  It was the signature of a person who understood that a name on a page was just a name on a page, and that whatever the name represented would have to speak for itself.

  Harwick blotted the signature, closed the ledger, and slid the bronze disc across the desk.

  "Welcome to the Adventurers' Guild, Thornwall Chapter," he said. "Nominal Level 1 Mage. Bronze rank. May your quests be profitable and your wrists get thicker."

  Levin picked up the disc.

  It was warm from sitting on the desk near the fire, and it weighed almost nothing — a few ounces of stamped metal that officially declared him to be the lowest possible rank of adventurer in the smallest possible chapter of the Guild in one of the least remarkable villages in the southern provinces. It was, by any objective measure, the most underwhelming credential a person could possess, short of a certificate confirming that you had, at some point, existed.

  He put it in his pocket.

  "The quest board's over there," Harwick said, gesturing at the eastern wall with one crab-hand. "E-rank at the bottom, D-rank in the middle. Don't touch anything above D until you've completed five registered quests and filed the appropriate advancement paperwork. The paperwork is on the shelf by the door. It's seven pages. You'll need two references, a character statement, and proof of at least one successful combat engagement, which—" He paused. "Which I suppose you already have, given the goblins."

  "I just helped," Levin said again, quietly.

  "You keep saying that."

  "It keeps being true."

  Harwick looked at him for a long moment. Then he did something unexpected.

  He smiled.

  It was a small thing, mostly hidden by the beard, visible primarily in the way the skin around his eyes creased and the way his shoulders dropped a quarter of an inch, releasing a tension that Levin hadn't noticed was there until it was gone.

  "Most people who walk in here," Harwick said, "want to be told they're special. They want the big number. They want the rank, the title, the pat on the back. They want me to look at their Level and say 'impressive' and mean it." He tapped the closed ledger with one thick finger. "You walked in here with a Level 1 and a straight face and told me you just helped. Either you're the most modest person I've ever registered, or you're the most dangerous. Possibly both."

  He leaned forward.

  The desk creaked threateningly.

  "I've got insurance for anyone who outranks Bronze. Covers injury, equipment loss, magical mishaps, acts of deity, and — since the Millhaven incident — livestock-related damages. For Bronze rank, we've got a sympathy card and a ten percent discount at a merchant who doesn't exist. So try not to die."

  "I'll do my best," Levin said.

  "That's what the Level 2 Bard said. He's fine, by the way. Runs a poetry stall in Greymarch. Terrible poetry. Sells very well. There's a lesson in that, probably."

  Levin turned toward the quest board.

  The board loomed on the eastern wall, a vast patchwork of paper and pins and faded ink, humming with the accumulated desperation of a hundred small problems that nobody had gotten around to solving.

  He scanned the E-rank section at the bottom — rat clearance, herb gathering, fence repair, a notice seeking someone to "talk to" a well that had "gone strange" (no further details provided, which was either an oversight or a warning) — and felt the bronze disc settle in his pocket like a small, cool weight.

  Behind him, Harwick had already reopened the ledger and was reviewing the entry, his quill hovering over the "LEVEL: 1" as though he were considering adding a question mark, or an exclamation point, or a small drawing of a man shrugging.

  He did none of these things.

  He closed the ledger, returned it to its shelf, and went back to his kettle.

  The Guild hall settled into its usual state of quiet, dusty patience.

  The banners hung.

  The quest board rustled.

  The receptionist fought off sleep.

  The fireplace crackled and popped with the contented sounds of a fire that had nowhere to be and was in no hurry to get there.

  Levin stood before the board, reading. The warmth behind his sternum hummed its quiet hum and the bronze disc in his pocket pressed against his thigh like a question he hadn't been asked yet.

  He reached up and unpinned a notice.

  E-rank.

  Rat clearance in a grain cellar on the south side of the village.

  Reward: three silver.

  Requirements: Level 1+, any class.

  Level 1+. The plus sign was doing almost no work whatsoever, and yet there it was, bless it, reaching optimistically upward like a small plant growing toward a sun it would never reach.

  He folded the notice, put it in his pocket beside the disc, and walked toward the door.

  "Levin," Harwick called.

  Levin stopped. He turned.

  Harwick was standing behind his desk, kettle in one hand, mug in the other, looking at Levin with an expression that had settled, finally, into something that resembled — if you squinted, and if you were feeling charitable — respect.

  "Thick wrists," Harwick said. "Work on it."

  Levin nodded once, pushed open the door, and stepped out into the Wednesday sunlight, which fell on him with the warm indifference of a star that had been shining for four and a half billion years and was not about to start taking a personal interest in the career prospects of one Level 1 Mage with thin wrists and a bronze disc in his pocket.

  And an extra boot he had no clue what to do with in his room.

  He walked back to the tavern.

  He put the kettle on.

  He counted to two hundred.

  Poured himself a cup.

  It was as acceptable as usual.

  The broom was waiting. It pulled left. He corrected.

  The day, having produced one guild registration, one bronze disc, and one piece of unsolicited advice about wrist circumference, appeared to consider its work done.

  The sun moved. The shadows shifted.

  Thornwall went about its business with the unhurried certainty of a place that had never been in a rush and regarded urgency as a character flaw.

  And in the warm place behind Levin's sternum, the reservoir hummed — five hundred and eight percent, growing by nothing today, because rats were Level 0 and the universe's bookkeeping department, whatever else might be said about it, kept meticulous records.

  He would need to find something bigger than rats.