Ermin squinted at Seymour and cocked his head to the side. The shuttle churned along, ferrying them through the cherry blossom forest outside Ghiuzo’s Crossing in the hours before dawn.

  “Why are you suddenly so interested in gold coins?”

  “I’m just curious,” Seymour fibbed. “Like, I know everybody uses imperial chits to buy stuff, but I’ve noticed there are these gold coins floating around, too – what’s the deal with that?”

  “Well, to begin with, I wouldn’t say that they’re simply ‘floating around’. Gold coins are an ancient, obsolete currency, and no one can say for certain by whom they were first minted.”

  “Really? Obsolete? Are you sure about that? I’m just saying – I’ve been seeing them all the time down at the depot. The adventurers come in with sacks full of the things. The shop even offers a money-changing service.”

  “Aye, I am well aware, and three chits for every coin is the most generous exchange rate one can hope to find in all the realm.” Ermin leaned in closer and lowered his voice. “Some folks simply collect them as a hobby. And, of course, there’s also a rumor out there that Dragon Dan keeps a great hoard of treasure in a secret, secure location. The rumors further claim that he possesses such an enormous sum of these gold coins that he can swim through the mounds as a fish does through water.” His voice returned to full volume in order to announce, “I do not believe such claims, myself.”

  “Ever the skeptic, eh?”

  “I’d say not. I abide regular flights of whimsy and fantasy.” His expression had become uncharacteristically stern. “I simply struggle to accept that a sum of such size could exist in private. For a dragon the size of Gorgudan to swim within its mounds would require a veritable ocean of coins – would it not? A vast lake, at the very least. And how could he keep such a thing hidden for so many years?”

  “Fair enough.” Seymour crossed his arms and settled further back into his seat. “But that still doesn’t explain where they actually come from and how the adventuring parties who come into the depot always seem to have at least one member lugging around a sack or a chest full of the things.”

  “Well, Seymour, the answer is as obvious and in front of you as the nose on your face: monsters within Vol’kara’s subterranean dungeon carry them, and the adventurers kill monsters in order to collect their loot. And before you ask: no, I have never set foot within the dungeon and I can’t tell you how or why these monsters possess the coins in the first place. Perhaps they still use them as currency. Perhaps they engage in regular commerce down in the depths of Vol’kara as part of their civil society.”

  “So you’re saying all these coins I’ve been seeing are looted from monsters who live in the dungeon right outside my workplace?”

  “Aye,” Ermin confirmed, winking. “And nowhere else.”

  “The coins are sourced exclusively from Dragon Dan’s dungeon? That’s weirder than shit, isn’t it?”

  “I reckon that depends entirely upon the diet of the one doing the shitting.”

  Seymour laughed.

  “Nice one.” He slumped in his seat and closed his eyes. “Well, thanks for satisfying my curiosity, in any event. I’m gonna try to catch some z’s.”

  “And I should get back to steering this shuttle, I suppose, before we veer off the highway and into the woods or the like. Enjoy your nap.”

  But while Seymour sat there with his eyes closed – he couldn’t actually sleep. His mind raced, busily attempting to calculate the odds—the impossible, magical odds—that the lone source of the gold coins he needed to buy more powerful ranks of his sigil powers just happened to be located right outside the place he went everyday to work.

  Well, not exactly the lone source, right? Not anymore. A smile spread across his supposedly sleeping face. Not now that I can Cash Out items for gold.

  Seymour had already begun to develop something like a cozy little morning work routine. Upon entering the depot, he bee-lined to retrieve his basket, which he stashed each night behind the main counter. He’d say good morning to Eusebio and the salespeople and then he’d head upstairs to grab a quick snack at Gordon’s cafe. But Eusebio was nowhere to be found that morning, and though his absence seemed odd, Seymour decided to continue to follow the routine he’d been establishing and hit the stairwell up to the second floor. He was starving for one of Gordnon’s breakfast sammies and Eusebio could have been anywhere, so there was no sense waiting for him to appear.

  “Maybe he’s down in the Resurrectory again or something. The dude stays busy.”

  More importantly just then, Gordon was behind his counter, right where Seymour expected him to be. The friendly, wisecracking dwarf offered a number of take-and-go breakfast sandwiches on flaky, croissant-like buns stuffed with something like ham or sausage and cheese that Seymour couldn’t get enough of after being forced to eat Chester Hedwick’s cooking for so many weeks.

  Next, he intended to head up to the third floor and get to work, unloading merchandise from a curio with one hand while finishing up his breakfast sammie in the other. But that was where his plans would diverge from the days prior, because today he needed to test out this new Cash Out power. And unlike yesterday, when he had spent time transforming wands into other wands in order to level up Infringement, today he couldn’t simply repurpose merchandise into the raw materials he needed, because Cash Out’s description said that it would consume the items upon use.

  So instead, he’d stuffed his pockets with twigs earlier that morning. He was eager to turn them into wands using Infringement, and to then turn the wands into gold coins using Cash Out, after which he’d straight up convert those coins into some goddamned experience points or the like with his new Blood Money class-trait. His daily grind was about to become part work, part self power-leveling session.

  He’d never felt as giddy to get to work anywhere, but on his third day of employment at Dragon Dan’s Adventure Depot, he found that the stairwell leading up to the third floor had been barricaded. A sign hung upon the barricade notified Seymour and shoppers alike that the floor would be closed until further notice. Apparently the third floor was still doing its hedge maze thing. Seymour wasn’t sure why he’d assumed it would have reverted to its original state already.

  “Huh, well dammit. Wonder how long it’s gonna hang around?”

  For a long moment he could only stand there, shoulders slumping with disappointment. His plans to power-level himself would need to wait. Without the privacy and endless heaps of cloneable merchandise afforded him by the depot’s third floor, it just wouldn’t work. He couldn’t very well clone and consume items off the shelves down in the showroom or anything, right out in the open.

  Sammie still in hand, he turned to head back downstairs and nearly collided with Eusebio.

  “Jesus, dude. Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

  He couldn’t read his manager’s expression, which was weird. Eusebio hadn’t seemed to have much of a poker face—quite the opposite, even, as he typically wore his emotions right on his sleeve—but now he stood there stone-faced.

  “Good morning, Seymour.” He executed a quick head-bow. “He wants to see you.”

  “Who?”

  “Dragon Dan, of course.”

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Seymour’s gut flipped the way it used to when he was a kid getting summoned to the vice-principal’s office. “Dan wants to talk to me? Why?”

  “Oh,” Eusebio grinned. “I think I’d better let him tell you himself.”

  “Uh, okay. Should I go now? Looks like my gig is kinda canceled today, huh?”

  “Correct, go now.” His grin widened. “He’s outside – you can’t miss him.”

  “Alrighty.” Seymour held out his basket to Eusebio. Once, back on Earth, he’d been fired from a call center gig mid-shift and they ordered him to turn in his ID badge before leaving the building. This felt much the same. If Dan wanted to see him, it could only be because the dragon knew Seymour had taken the Card of the Gambler and used it to manifest a new power.

  But Eusebio pushed the basket back at him and said, “I don’t want that. Take it back downstairs.”

  Seymour nodded and paced back across the second floor and then down the stairs. He stashed the basket where he had collected it only a short time earlier. He dropped his half-eaten breakfast sandwich into a waste basket, his appetite having fled. And then he walked down the red carpet which led to the depot’s main entrance. The experience felt surreal; a combination of a perp walk and a nostalgic farewell to a place he’d barely gotten to know.

  You screwed up big, this time. He cursed himself for having made the snap decision last night to use the Card of the Gambler. Not that it’s the first time you’ve made a bet you half-expected to lose.

  The sun blinded him as he stepped through the swinging saloon doors and headed outside. He put a hand up to block the glare, and he shuffled around the side of the building. There, he found a sleeping dragon. He’d only ever seen Dan in this state, and it was easy to conceive of the ancient creature as some sort of colossal statue rather than a living, breathing entity.

  But at Seymour’s approach, Gorgudan the Golden opened his eyes and lifted his head.

  “Holy shit,” just came muttering out his mouth.

  He could see himself reflected from head-to-toe in Dan’s Seymour-sized dragon eyes, which were cat-like, with vertical slits for pupils and turquoise irises. Two ropy, golden tendrils hung down from below the dragon’s smoldering nostrils, forming his mustache. Seymour was surprised to see the tendrils come alive, rippling with flame, as if fire resided within every fiber of the dragon’s body and was eager to escape. Similar flaming tendrils formed something like a crest or a mane which bordered Dan’s oddly mammalian face. His snout looked flatter than Seymour would have expected; again provoking the memory of the dragons under glass at the Chinese restaurant of his childhood. Dan’s face bore more similarities to a lion than it did to a lizard, in Seymour’s opinion.

  He realized then that he was staring and had been for some time while standing there zoning out like a zombie. He drew in a deep, centering breath.

  “Good morning, uh, Sir.” He couldn’t come up with any other salutation just then. “Eusebio said you wanted to see me?”

  The dragon chuckled and the ground trembled just barely and the heat from his breath was staggering, bending the air like a desert mirage. Seymour took an involuntary step back, worried for a moment that his hair and clothes might ignite.

  “Please,” the dragon pleaded, voice booming but surprisingly gentlemanlike. “Call me Dan.”

  “Okay, Dan it is then.” Seymour bowed his head, the way people on Heschia greeted one another in professional settings, but with an extra pause added in to express his humility. “And before you say anything, I want to come clean and say I’m sorry.”

  “Oh?” The dragon's golden, flame-kissed eyebrows perked up. His face suddenly struck Seymour as more snake-like than it had a moment ago; his expression and the quality of his facial movements. And then as if to accentuate that point, his immensely long torso began to slither around behind him, stirring up savannah-dust across hundreds of square feet. “And what are you sorry for, Mr. Little? Be precise.”

  “I took something I shouldn’t have.” He paused and the dragon said nothing. “Let me explain.”

  “Please do.”

  “When the third floor turned into that freaky labyrinth, I found something—a card—and I put it in my pocket.” He waited again for Dan to say something but the dragon remained silent and showed no sign that he knew where Seymour’s confession was going. “I guess in all the excitement I forgot about it, and I didn’t remember until I was changing out of my work clothes last night, when I found it still in my pocket. I swear I didn’t mean—”

  “A harmless mistake,” Dan suddenly cut in. “Simply return it to Eusebio and he will see that it is restocked where it belongs.”

  Seymour’s guts knotted together and his hands threatened to start shaking. For all the practice he’d done over the past few years, right then he couldn’t maintain his poker face for even one more second.

  “About that,” he said, feeling dizzier by the moment, “I sort of can’t give it back to Eusebio.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because I already used it to give myself a magic power and some kind of freaky necro class.” The words came out in a gush and he suddenly had to wonder – was the dragon somehow influencing him?

  As if he’d legit read Seymour’s mind, Dan chuckled once more, a sound not unlike a rockslide falling onto an orphanage for three-legged kittens.

  Three-legged kittens? Seymour wondered, silently interrogating his morbid imagination. Dude, why you gotta be like this?

  “That you have used a catalyst which you did not pay for is a serious admission,” Dan decreed, his voice falling heavy on Seymour, rattling his bones.

  He took an involuntary step back and could only manage to whisper, “I’m sorry.”

  “The Card of the Gambler is a valuable catalyst, in great demand for its potential to manifest luck-based powers.” Plumes of black smoke seeped from the dragon’s nostrils, a sure sign that Seymour was in big, big trouble. “What shall I do with you now, Seymour Little?”

  The sky turned suddenly dark. There were no clouds to pass in front of the sun and yet its light seemed unable to reach the ground. Or at least unable to reach Seymour. Terrible pressure began to crush him where he stood, pushing in from every angle, as though the air itself had turned hostile.

  His vision became fixated on the dragon’s train-like torso as it coiled and piled up behind the beast, slithering and twisting with a life of its own while his head remained unnervingly motionless and steady, as if it was a mask being worn by an angry and immense sandworm.

  “Please,” Seymour begged, falling to his knees. “Please don’t kill me.”

  The dragon laughed at him again, and suddenly the sun shone down and the air felt clear and clean and light. Seymour blinked and tried to breathe. Dan’s huge torso and tail had ceased their slithering.

  “I’m not going to harm you, Seymour Little.”

  He looked up into those enormous, turquoise eyes. “Then what?”

  “I’m going to offer you more responsibility." The dragon’s smile struck Seymour as downright serpentine now. “I’m going to offer you a way to repair our trust.”

  “Name it, I’ll do anything.”

  “I want you to assist Ridley, not just by inventorying and collecting damaged goods, but more directly.” The dragon smiled. “You will become the depot’s first artificer in training.”

  Later that night, long after Seymour Little had returned to Ghizo’s Crossing on Ermin Troudt’s shuttle, Eusebio locked the depot’s doors and headed out into the jungle. He wore his Sneaking Shoes so that he couldn’t be followed. Dan had gifted them to him back when he first gave Eusebio directions to the rendezvous point, shortly after he became the depot’s manager.

  During the intervening four years, he’d trekked out here at night so many times that he could have found the way with his eyes closed, which was a good thing – because tonight the sky had no moon and he might as well have been blind. Nevertheless, he marched purposefully across the savannah, bee-lining for his destination.

  In an unusual clearing deep within the jungle, a grandiose marble staircase stood all alone. Pure white, it stuck out from the surrounding rainforest like a bone shard in a dinner salad. The columns of its banisters were masterworks of sculpture which depicted a warrior race of men and women, members of an ancient civilization which had become lost to eternity, whose unusually large size would have dictated the unusually tall and deep steps. The building to which the staircase had once belonged had collapsed so long ago that there was no sign left of any other rubble.

  This was the meeting place. The secret clearing where Dan told Eusebio things he didn’t want anyone else—not even Adara—to overhear. And before long, the dragon came spiraling down out of the sky, becoming visible only as his body began filling the clearing.

  “All has gone according to plan,” the dragon confirmed, hovering just above Eusebio.

  “Then tomorrow we shall see if Ridley finally cracks. You don’t worry that harm will come to Little?”

  “I am confident we aren’t the only actors who are interested in keeping him alive.”

  “And you’ve invited him to live on-site? Would you have me bring a cot into Ridley’s workshop before the shop opens tomorrow?”

  Dan chuckled his most evil chuckle. Eusebio loved it when the dragon let his ornery side show. “Yes, please do. We want to make it obvious to Ridley that he is never truly alone now. And that the space is not his alone.”

  “Consider it done, then, but—” He cut himself short.

  “What worries you, Eusebio?”

  He looked the dragon directly in the eye. “It doesn’t worry you? The Riftborn living on-site, I mean.”

  “He’s learned his lesson.” For a moment, the dragon’s mane glowed as Dan’s internal flame intensified, a sure sign of his self-satisfaction. “I do not expect him to ever again take anything without permission.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Then what?”

  “His proximity to the maze. Aren’t you worried about it appearing every month now?”

  “Oh, that.” Dan’s body began to accelerate its circuit around the clearing. He was preparing to take flight again. “No, that likely outcome doesn’t concern me in the least. In fact, I’m counting on it to be true.”