My first, brilliant, millennial-in-a-fantasy-world instinct was to yeet the satchel containing the shard directly into Silas’s fireplace.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Silas growled, his eyes tracking mine. “You can’t burn it, you can’t drown it, you can’t bury it. It is a piece of forever. All you would do is free it from the leather, and believe me, you don’t want it loose in here.”

  “So, what you’re saying is,” I said, my voice dangerously high, “I’m stuck with a spiritual STD that’s pinging my location to the Dark Lord Voldemort? Fantastic. Just super.”

  Kaelen, who had been silent and rigid as a statue, finally moved. He placed a hand on the pommel of his sword, his jaw a line of granite.

  “We must contain it. A lead box, perhaps? Lined with silver and runes of warding?”

  “A noble thought, Sir Knight,” Barty sniffed from his perch on a high-backed chair, grooming a paw with meticulous disdain. “Alas, it would be akin to putting a muzzle on a hurricane. The Heart craves, and its cravings will leech through any mundane material. It feeds on the very essence of this world.”

  “He’s right,” Silas said, sinking into a chair with the weary weight of a man who’d just had his retirement plans violently canceled. He looked at me, his gaze unnervingly direct. “It chose you, girl. It latched onto you because you were something it didn’t recognize. Your alien nature is likely the only thing that kept it from consuming you outright. It’s curious.”

  Curious. The word sent a chill down my spine that had nothing to do with the drafty cabin. The shard pulsed again, a warm, inquisitive thrum.

  Tell them you can hear me, the voice whispered, smoother now, more confidant. Tell them I know their fears. The old soldier who dreams of the battle that broke him. The knight who fears he is not worthy of the name he carries.

  I flinched, clamping my mouth shut. No. Absolutely not. I was not going to be the personal hype-man for a piece of cosmic evil.

  The next two days were thick with a tension you could cut with a dull knife. Or in my case, my pathetically dull shortsword, Rusty. Sleep was a joke. Every time I closed my eyes, the whispers came, weaving visions of my old life—my cramped apartment, the smell of coffee from the cafe down the street, the infuriating buffer of a streaming service—and offering it all back to me. Just a touch, it would croon. I can show you the way home.

  By day, we prepared. Kaelen was a silent storm of efficiency, meticulously checking straps on his armor, sharpening his blade with a whetstone until you could shave with it. Silas brewed concoctions that smelled like boiled socks and despair, packing them into vials and pouches for our journey. Barty supervised, offering unsolicited advice on the proper tension for a saddle girth or the best way to dry herbs, which everyone pointedly ignored.

  I spent most of my time trying to put an edge on Rusty. It was a hopeless task. The sword was cheap, poorly balanced, and had the structural integrity of a wet noodle. After an hour of scraping metal against stone with minimal results, I threw it to the ground in frustration.

  “You’re going to hurt yourself more than the enemy with that piece of scrap,” Silas grunted from the doorway, wiping his hands on a rag. He gestured with his head. “Come.”

  I followed him to a large, dust-covered trunk in the corner of the main room. He lifted the heavy lid, releasing the scent of old leather and oiled steel. Inside, nestled amongst moth-eaten blankets, was a sword about three feet long. It wasn’t fancy. The cross guard was simple, the leather-wrapped grip worn smooth from use, the pommel a plain, functional weight. But the blade… the blade was beautiful. Forged from dark blue, clean steel and engraved with a twisting vine along its length, it was clearly a tool made for a single, deadly purpose.

  “An arming sword. Balanced, sharp, and honest,” Silas said, his voice softer than I’d ever heard it. “It was my companion for many years. It’ll serve you better.”

  He held it out to me, hilt-first. It was a kind gesture. A necessary one. And my stupid, modern-world pride bristled at the thought of it. I wasn’t some damsel, collecting magical artifacts and charity from grizzled hermits. I was a contributing member of this fellowship of the damned, thank you very much.

  “I can’t just take it,” I said, shaking my head.

  Silas’s eyebrows shot up. “Don’t be a fool, girl. You need it.”

  “I know. But I’m not a charity case.” I reached into my satchel, my fingers brushing past the unnerving warmth of the shard, and pulled out the small pouch of gold the Fey had given me. I’d forgotten all about it until now. I tipped a single coin into my palm. It wasn’t like any gold I’d ever seen. It shimmered with an inner light, seeming to shift between gold and green, and was warm to the touch. It felt alive.

  “I’ll buy it,” I said, holding out the coin.

  Silas stared at the coin, his eyes widening slightly. He looked from the otherworldly gold to my determined face, and a slow, grudging smile touched his lips. It was the first time I’d seen him really smile.

  “Fey gold,” he breathed. “Haven’t seen one of these since I was a boy.” He reached out a calloused hand and plucked the single coin from my palm. He didn’t look at the rest in the pouch. He just rolled the one coin over his knuckles. “A fair trade is an honorable one. She’s yours.”

  I took the sword. The weight was perfect. It felt like an extension of my arm, solid and real in a way nothing had since I’d landed in Eldoria. It was a promise of a fighting chance.

  “What’s her name?” I asked, giving it a tentative swing. It cut through the air with a soft shwing.

  “This isn’t some epic, girl, it’s a sword. You hit things with it. It doesn’t need a name,” he grumbled, his customary gruffness returning.

  “Everything needs a name,” I countered. “It gives you something to yell in a dramatic moment. I named my last one Rusty.”

  He gave me a look that clearly questioned my sanity.

  “Call it… call it whatever you want.”As I slid the new weapon into Rusty’s old scabbard—a clear upgrade of tenant for a shoddy property—the shard pulsed insistently against my side.

  A better weapon, the voice whispered, a hint of something like approval in its smoky tone. Good. You will need it. They will all try to take me from you. The Knight in his shining self-doubt. The Cat in his ancient pride. The Old Man in his bitter regret. They will try to stop what is coming.

  A cold dread washed over me, but it was mixed with a flinty resolve. I looked at Silas, then at Kaelen, who was watching the exchange from across the room with a neutral expression that didn’t quite reach his eyes. I glanced at Barty, who offered a slow, deliberate blink of acknowledgment.

  These people, this broken knight and hermit scholar and talking cat, were all I had. The shard was right about one thing. They would try to stop the Shadow Lord. And I, Paige Hawking, accidental evil-artifact-courier, would be standing right there with them.

  “Okay,” I said, my hand closing around the worn leather hilt of my new sword.

  Ding

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  [Magical Weapon Added] [Nightshade] [One-Handed Sword +3]

  Nightshade. I liked that. I kept reading.

  [When Equipped, Nightshade augments the bearer’s base stats, adding two levels. If the sword is unequipped or lost, this bonus is removed.]

  Huh. Two levels just from carrying a sword? Sweet. That made me level 11 and actually helped a lot with the whole level 16 problem. I’d definitely gotten my money’s worth.

  “Okay,” I said. Nightshade. It felt good. Solid. A name to yell in a dramatic moment. The shard pulsed once, a low thrum of satisfaction, and then fell silent.

  The morning of the third day arrived with a crisp, damp air that smelled of pine and wet earth. Silas’s cottage, which had felt like a sanctuary, now seemed small and confining, a temporary stop on a road I was terrified to travel. My arm was a ghost of its former agony, a dull ache the only reminder of the broken bone. Kaelen’s cuts had sealed over into thin, pink lines, the only mark on his otherwise infuriatingly handsome, perpetually grim face.

  Silas met us at the door, a leather pack slung over one shoulder. He looked older this morning, the lines around his eyes deeper, as if he’d spent the night wrestling with old ghosts. The shard’s whisper echoed in my mind: The Old Man in his bitter regret.

  “The road north is treacherous,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “Stick to the King’s Road once you clear the Greenwood. Kaelen knows the way.” He then turned his gaze to me, and it was surprisingly gentle. “You can’t keep up on foot. And I have no more use for him.”

  He gestured to a small, stocky pony tied to a nearby post. It was a shaggy, brown creature less than half the size of Argent, with a profoundly unimpressed expression and a mane that looked like it had been styled in a wind tunnel. It watched me with dark, intelligent eyes that seemed to be weighing my soul and finding it wanting.

  “Oh,” I said. “You’re giving me a… horse-adjacent creature.”

  “He’s a pony,” Silas grunted. “Sturdy. Stubborn. His name is Boulder.”

  “I’m calling him Steve,” I declared instantly. The pony flicked an ear in what I could only interpret as disdain.Kaelen sighed, a sound that was quickly becoming the background music to my life in Eldoria.

  “Paige, perhaps we should honor the name given—”

  “Nope. He’s Steve the Wonder Pony. It’s decided.” I patted the pony’s neck. His fur was coarse and smelled vaguely of regret and wet hay. “Thanks, Silas. For everything. The healing, the sword, the emotionally distant steed, and let’s not forget the dire warnings of impending doom.”

  A ghost of a smile touched Silas’s lips.

  “Just… be careful, girl. The path you walk is shadowed, not just by the enemy, but by what you carry. Don’t let its whispers become your own thoughts.” He looked from me to the hilt of Nightshade, then back again, his eyes filled with a warning I didn’t fully understand. He gave Kaelen a firm, warrior’s clasp on the shoulder. “May your path be well lit, old friend.”

  “And yours,” Kaelen replied, his voice low and serious.Bartholomew, perched regally on Kaelen’s pack, gave a slow, deliberate nod.“Farewell, Scribe of Sorrows. May you find the closure you seek.”

  Silas simply nodded, then turned without another word and disappeared into the dense woods, heading west while we were bound north. A man on a mission he wouldn’t share.

  “Right then,” I said, turning to Steve. “How does this work? Is there a key? An ignition button?”Kaelen pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “You do not know how to ride.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of weary fact.

  “I have a communications degree, not an equestrian one,” I shot back. “In my world, we have things called cars. They’re like horses, but they run on processed dinosaur juice and don’t try to bite you when you get close. We’ve been over this.”

  This was how our grand journey to save the world began: with Ser Kaelen, the Knight of the Silver Gryphon, holding a stubborn pony steady while I, the chosen-by-default-artifact-courier, tried to mount it with all the grace of a collapsing deck chair. My first attempt involved putting my foot in the stirrup backward. My second resulted in me hugging Steve’s midsection like a weird, ambulatory tree.

  Ding.

  A familiar blue box shimmered into existence before my eyes.

  [New Skill Unlocked] [Riding (Equine)] [Level 1] [You can now get on a horse without injuring yourself. Mostly.]

  “Oh, thank god,” I muttered, and on the third try, I managed to heave myself into the saddle. It was a victory, but a short-lived one. The moment we started moving, I discovered a fundamental truth about riding ponies: it is a full-body assault. Every jarring step Steve took traveled directly up my spine. I bounced. I jostled. I was fairly certain my internal organs were being rearranged into new and interesting configurations.

  Kaelen rode ahead on Argent, a creature of grace and power, while I trotted—or rather, jolted—along behind on Steve, who seemed to have only two speeds: ‘glacial’ and ‘stop to eat suspicious-looking weeds.’

  “Can’t this thing go any faster?” I called out, my voice quivering with each step.

  “He is setting the pace,” Kaelen called back over his shoulder, not bothering to turn around. “Find your seat, Paige. Move with him, not against him.”

  “Find my seat?” I grumbled to Bartholomew, who was now riding in a pouch on my saddle, looking utterly unperturbed. “It’s right here, and it’s currently attempting to divorce my pelvis.”

  “The noble beast senses your lack of conviction, Mistress Hawking,” Barty intoned, yawning delicately. “One must project an aura of command. You currently project the aura of a sack of particularly uncoordinated potatoes.”

  For hours, we traveled like that. Kaelen, a portrait of knightly competence. I, a bouncing, complaining mess. Steve, a furry instrument of torture. The dense canopy of the Greenwood slowly thinned, the ancient, gnarled trees giving way to younger, sparser woods. The King’s Road was a welcome sight—a wide, well-worn dirt path that promised a slightly less bumpy ride.

  As the afternoon sun slanted through the trees, casting long shadows across the road, a fragile quiet settled over our trio. The initial misery of my ride had subsided into a dull, rhythmic ache, and I finally had a moment to think. I looked at the back of the man riding ahead of me. The Knight in his shining self-doubt. I could see it now. It wasn’t just in his grim expression. It was in the rigid set of his shoulders, the way he held the reins just a little too tight, as if he expected the world to bolt from beneath him at any moment. He was the perfect image of a hero, but he wore it like an ill-fitting suit of armor.

  I glanced down at the cat dozing in the pouch beside me. The Cat in his ancient pride. That was easier to see. Bartholomew carried himself with the unassailable dignity of a creature who had witnessed the rise and fall of empires and found them all vaguely tiresome. His pride wasn’t arrogance; it was a deep, unshakeable certainty of his place in the world, a place far above the petty concerns of mortals like me.

  And me? I was just Paige Hawking, accidental hero and unwitting evil-artifact-courier. My hand rested on the hilt of Nightshade. The sword felt cool and ready. The shard was quiet, a dormant weight. They would all try to take it from me, it had said. They would try to stop what was coming. Maybe. But they were also trying to help me. This broken, mismatched fellowship was my only shot.

  “So where are we actually going?” I asked, urging Steve into a slightly faster walk to catch up with Kaelen.He glanced at me, his expression softening for a fraction of a second, perhaps in surprise that I’d stopped complaining. “North,” he said. “First to the capital, and then to the Sunken City of Aeridor.”

  “Sunken City? Sounds… damp,” I remarked. “Why there?”

  “Knowledge,” Kaelen said, his eyes fixed on the horizon again. “Before it was lost to the Great Flood, Aeridor was the center of all learning in Eldoria. Its Grand Archives were said to hold texts from the dawn of the First Age. If there is any record of how to destroy the Shadow Lord, or the artifacts that bind him, it will be there.”

  “Okay. An ancient, underwater library. Got it,” I said, processing this. “And I’m guessing it’s not exactly a popular tourist destination?”

  “It is a place of ghosts and waterlogged memories,” Bartholomew supplied from his pouch, his voice a low murmur. “Guarded by spirits of the librarians who refused to abandon their posts. They do not take kindly to visitors.”

  “Great. So, angry, water-breathing librarian ghosts. Sounds like a party.” I sighed, shifting uncomfortably in the saddle. The road stretched out before us, a ribbon of dirt disappearing into the hazy distance. The journey had just begun, and it was already the hardest thing I’d ever done. This wasn’t my world, and it wasn’t my fight. But it was my life. And I felt like I finally had a weapon to defend it.