Jim drifts near the edge of sleep in the crack, body curled tight against cool stone, the constant low growl of the tide beyond the red wall lulling him like distant surf. The lantern light has softened to a dull amber smear on the wall opposite. Everything is muffled, safe, distant.

  A small sound pulls him partway awake — not enough to open both eyes, just enough to register.

  Fabric shifts. A soft tap of fingers on leather boot.

  Then the rogue’s voice, low and matter-of-fact, barely louder than a breath:

  “Garrick.”

  The warrior comes awake like a trap springing — one moment bundled shape and steady breathing, the next upright, sword already half-drawn, shoulders squared, eyes hunting shadows. The motion is so fast and practiced that even in his groggy haze Jim feels a flicker of old-GM admiration: that is how you survive to level four.

  The rogue is already rocking back on his heels, well out of reach, calm as if he’s done this a thousand times and never lost a finger yet.

  “It’s your watch,” he says, quiet, no flourish.

  Garrick exhales through his nose. The sword lowers a fraction. Tension bleeds out by careful degrees — never all at once, never carelessly. He settles the blade across his knees and nods once.

  “Right.”

  The rogue gives the smallest tilt of his head in acknowledgment, then steps back to his own patch of stone. He lies down almost immediately, cloak pulled around him, knife still in easy reach, and drops into sleep with the speed of someone who has learned to steal rest wherever the world leaves a gap.

  Garrick remains seated a moment longer, eyes on the dark beyond the red wall, the black pools behind them, the lantern light catching the edge of his blade and the tired lines around his eyes.

  Jim lets the sounds blur again — boot leather creaking once as the warrior shifts, the faint metallic whisper of mail settling, the slow even rhythm of breathing from three sleeping bodies and one watchful one. The tide’s distant roar rolls on like a heartbeat he doesn’t have to think about.

  His eyelid droops.

  The world softens back toward dark.

  Then the surf-noise stops.

  Gone.

  Not quieter. Not faded. Simply not there anymore.

  Jim’s eyes snap open, both at once, heart already hammering against his tiny ribs before his brain can name why.

  The crack is the same. Stone against his side. Dry dust in his nose. Faint lantern smell baked into the wall.

  But the camp below is empty.

  No Garrick with sword across his knees. No sleeping shapes. No lantern pole. Just cold empty stone where light used to pool.

  For one bright, awful instant panic owns him whole.

  They left. They left and I slept through it. They’re already in the deep sewer. They’re at the crypt. They’re probably dead and I missed the whole plot again.

  His claws scrabble against the inside of the crack before he forces himself still.

  No. Stop.

  Panic is for prey animals.

  He drags in a breath through his nose, then another, and makes himself think.

  Facts.

  The surf-noise is gone, which means the tide has receded.

  The party planned exactly for that. They wanted the full window after the sweep. So yes: of course they moved the moment the channel cleared. That was the whole point of camping here.

  He did not miss a disaster. He missed a departure.

  Different problem.

  He peers farther out into the tunnel, nose working now that his brain has stopped trying to explode.

  Fresh signs snap into focus immediately:

  Boot scuffs on the stone at the edge of camp.

  A faint line where the lantern pole dragged or tapped the floor.

  The smell of stirred dust and sleeping cloaks recently lifted.

  Warm human scent still hanging in the air, not yet fully flattened by sewer damp.

  Recent. Very recent.

  They have not been gone long.

  Good.

  He scans the ledge near the red wall. No blood. No signs of a rushed fight. No dropped pack. No we died in the dark and the bodies got dragged away indicators. The camp broke cleanly, not violently.

  Better.

  Now the real question: how much head start do they have?

  Not enough to be unreachable, probably. But enough that if he dithers, the deep sewer will swallow their trail.

  Jim slips out of the crack, lands softly, and gives the abandoned camp one quick circuit.

  The dungeon moved on without asking whether Rat #1 was ready.

  His tail lashes once.

  Then calculation locks fully into place.

  The tide is out. The deep sewer is open. Halden’s symbol is pulling them toward the crypt, which means they will not waste time or wander. They will move in a straight, cautious line.

  In this situation Jim has the advantage. He is smaller, faster over bad footing, and can squeeze through the ugly parts.

  He looks toward the red-marked boundary and the quieter deep channel beyond it.

  The panic is still there, but now it has been caged and given a job.

  Okay. No more sleeping through act transitions.

  And with that, Rat #1 darts out of the abandoned camp and heads after the vanished party.

  He scrambles up the red-marked wall, claws finding little bites of purchase in flaked paint and old mortar.

  At the top edge, right where the warning stripe curves around a chipped seam in the stone, he finds something small and pale sitting on the rim.

  Cheese.

  A narrow little slice, gone slightly sweaty in the sewer damp but still unmistakably cheese. Not dropped by accident either—placed where it would not fall and where only something small, nosy, and wall-capable would find it.

  Jim stops dead.

  He stares at it for a long second, then looks back toward the camp that isn’t there anymore.

  Nix, he thinks, with a mixture of suspicion and reluctant delight. You weird, thieving little pilgrim.

  The cheese smells sharp and rich and gloriously unlike stale bread. Rat body overrules philosophy for a moment. He hooks it with both paws, sits back on his haunches on the painted rim, and starts eating while he looks out over the deep sewer.

  It is a different world down there now.

  The tide has gone out, and what it left behind feels less like a sewer and more like the exposed floor of a drowned ruin. The smell has changed too—less rot, less city-filth, more salt and stone and old wetness. Briny air rises from below, carrying the taste of the harbor with it, but stripped of its surface noise. It is the sea after the crowd has gone home.

  The deep channel curves away beneath him in uneven shelves and slick drop-offs. The old floor is visible in stretches now: broad dark stone with seams of white-gray tile still clinging to it here and there, like bones showing through old skin. Water still moves through the lowest run, but not with the rage it had before. Now it glides and sucks and eddies around exposed ledges, draining away toward some farther darkness.

  And the climb down is ugly.

  From up here he can see three possible routes, all bad in different ways.

  The obvious one is a sloping break in the stone where part of the wall collapsed ages ago. It leads down in stages—ledge, crack, narrow shelf, then a drop to the lower floor. Human-climbable with caution. Rat-climbable too, but exposed as hell.

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  The second route is less route and more sewer nonsense: a half-broken runoff chute spilling into the lower level. Smooth, algae-slick, used by water and unfortunate debris more than by anything with survival instincts. He could ride it down, maybe.

  The third option is the most promising and therefore probably the most cursed: a tangle of old ironwork and cracked masonry near the wall, where some long-dead maintenance platform or drain assembly has rotted into a kind of accidental ladder.

  Jim chews thoughtfully.

  The cheese is absurdly good. Salty, oily, almost sweet at the edge. He has to consciously stop himself from just stuffing the whole thing into his mouth and having a tiny emotional moment about being remembered by a rogue.

  Instead he takes another bite and squints down into the salt-washed dark.

  The adventuring party is somewhere below and ahead by now, moving toward the crypt with Halden’s symbol pulling them on. He cannot see their lantern from here, which means they have already rounded a bend or dropped into a lower cut.

  So: no time to over-plan, but enough time not to be stupid.

  The ironwork is the smart route.

  Which would be great if he were chasing a map instead of a party already disappearing into the dark.

  Jim swallows the last of the cheese, licks his whiskers clean, and makes the call.

  Fast.

  Not elegant. Not safe. Fast.

  He turns from the rim and scrambles onto the broken slope where old stone has collapsed into a series of half-ledges and bad footing, the sort of route a desperate human might take and a sensible rat would avoid.

  He drops onto the first shelf cleanly, claws biting into old stone, body flattening low as the whole surface shifts under him just enough to remind him this was a stupid plan.

  He goes.

  Not graceful, exactly. More like a controlled series of tiny bad decisions linked together at speed: slide, catch, hop, skid, grab, recover.

  Loose grit skitters past his paws into the dark below, but he stays ahead of it. The slope steepens halfway down and for one long heartbeat he is basically surfing ancient sewer masonry on claws and prayer.

  He hits the last broken shelf, bunches, and launches for the lower run.

  He lands on the walkway and immediately realizes the scale of the place.

  This is not a sewer the city still thinks about. This is something older that the city has been using for far too long.

  The deep sewer runs broad and straight here, a wide rock-cut tunnel with a sunken central channel carrying the black, salt-tinged water away through the middle. On either side, carved from the same stone, are narrow walkways—just enough for a person to pass if they watch their footing, more than enough for a rat to move quickly if he does not panic.

  To his left, the central channel moves with a heavy, sucking current, not tidal violence anymore but still fast enough to make falling in feel like a terrible life choice. The surface drags bits of floating refuse along in little eddies—splinters, peelings, something that used to be cloth, something that used to be a small dog.

  Above and around him, the walls are busy with ugly civic improvisation.

  Large drain pipes jut from the stone every so often, pouring waste down into the central run in uneven streams. Some gush. Some dribble. Some just breathe damp air and make soft, hollow noises. Smaller holes and cracks ooze lesser trickles, each one adding its own note to the place’s constant muttering soundtrack.

  Every few stretches, old side tunnels open off the main run—but many have been bricked up, closed with rough masonry at some point in the city’s long history. Some of those walls still hold. Others have cracked, sagged, or failed outright, leaving broken teeth of brick around openings that vanish into black side passages.

  Jim’s whiskers twitch.

  Good rat country.

  The adventuring party’s trail is easy enough to pick up here—not by smell alone, though that helps, but by disturbance:

  Fresh print boot damp on the walkway.

  A recent scrape where metal kissed stone.

  They are not sprinting. They are moving carefully, exactly as they should.

  Jim goes after them at once, low and quick, staying to the wall side of the walkway whenever he can. The center of the walkway is too exposed. Too visible. Anything looking from across the tunnel or up from the water would catch him there.

  The first intact brick seal he passes is old and heavy, mortar blackened with damp, no gaps bigger than a mousehole. The second has a crack at the base wide enough for smells to slip through.

  Cold air. Mold. Old dust. No party.

  He keeps going.

  Farther ahead, one of the sealed branches has failed almost completely. Half the brickwork has collapsed inward, leaving a jagged opening into a narrow dark tunnel beyond. The floor inside slopes away and vanishes.

  Jim slows and sniffs as he passes.

  No party. But something moved through there recently. A musky, low-to-the-ground smell, with a hint of rot. Could be a sewer scavenger. Could be undead or another ghoul. He files it and moves on quickly with a slight shudder.

  The walkway dips slightly where the stone has worn smooth over years of water splash. Jim has to slow for three paces to avoid sliding himself straight into the channel. Ahead, faint and far, a soft clink echoes off the rock.

  Metal on stone.

  The party.

  He stops, listens, and catches voices too blurred to parse but clear enough in rhythm: one low and practical, one a little sharper, one lighter and drier. They are still ahead and still together.

  Good.

  Jim resumes, more cautious now.

  Every few yards the deep sewer offers him choices the adventurers do not really have. Broken brick failures, side cracks, low drain mouths, little rat-scale bypasses along the edge of failed masonry. He can already tell that if he needs to vanish from the party’s line of sight, this is the place to do it.

  He pads under a fat drain pipe vomiting a stream of foul water into the channel and has to flatten himself as droplets splash wide of the fall. The runoff spatters the walkway in greasy little stars. He darts past, and keeps going.

  A little farther on, one of the bricked-up side tunnels has failed high as well as low, creating a broken arch. Through it he catches a view of worked stone beyond the brick collapse—not rough cut stone, but older, finer, maybe part of whatever this place was before it became a tide drain.

  That makes his skin prickle.

  This is the right kind of territory for Halden’s crypt.

  Ahead, the scent of the party strengthens.

  And with it comes something else, very faint under the lamp oil and old salt: disturbed dust, dry stone, and the dead, closed smell of a place that has not been properly open in a very long time.

  The deep sewer keeps breathing around him—pipes pouring, channel sucking, broken side tunnels holding their silence—and Rat #1 follows the heroes deeper along the walkway, into the part of the city where infrastructure and tomb architecture have started to blur into one another.

  He eases up to the broken edge of a bricked-up passage and lowers himself until his belly brushes damp stone.

  Beyond the failed brickwork is a buried layer older than the sewer around it. At the bottom, the structure is plain cut stone. Above that, the room changes: old marble, dusty and webbed, with devotional work to Ilmater worn into it. Even from the doorway, it feels like a place built for grief and endurance, then drowned, then forgotten.

  The original entry floor lies under about two inches of brackish water, salt and sewer mixed together in a thin reflective sheet. Beyond that, rougher stone stairs—clearly added later, after the crypt was buried—lead up to a corroded bronze door.

  The party has already passed through that door.

  Jim cannot see them yet from his angle, but he can hear them inside: boots shifting on stone, the faint scrape of gear, the little noises people make when they think they have found something interesting.

  Then he hears a box or coffer being handled.

  A pause.

  Then the room erupts.

  There is a wet, violent impact and Nix makes a short, ugly sound of pain. Something heavy slams him hard enough that even Jim feels it through the stone. Garrick barks a curse. Selise sucks in a breath. Brother Halden moves at once.

  Jim freezes at the brick edge, ears high, every instinct telling him to back away and every scrap of curiosity pinning him in place.

  Inside, something that was supposed to be loot is very much alive.

  Jim forces himself to stop spectating.

  One quick scan. Then move.

  He lowers his head at the broken brick edge and gives the entry chamber the kind of fast, brutal once-over that small prey animals and old GMs both understand.

  The marble corners look filthy and neglected, but not occupied.

  The rough stairs up to the bronze door are wet, old, and ugly—but just stairs.

  The active danger is inside and beyond the bronze doorway, where the fight is happening.

  That is enough.

  He commits.

  He drops from the failed brickwork into the flooded entry floor with a tiny splash, every instinct screaming at him that open space is how you die. The water is colder than he expects and tastes of salt over sewer, which is somehow worse than either flavor alone.

  He keeps low and runs it rather than swims—belly almost brushing the surface, paws churning through the thin brackish layer as fast as they can go. Each step sends tiny ripples across old Ilmateran marble.

  For one awful second he feels completely exposed:

  No wall crack.

  No shadow worth the name.

  Just him, open floor, and the sound of violence beyond the bronze door.

  But nothing in the entry chamber reacts.

  No second ambusher peels off the wall.

  No skeletal hand rises from the water.

  Jim reaches the base of the rough-added stairs and scrambles up them two and three at a time, claws ticking on stone. The bronze door above is open just enough to admit the party.

  He reaches the threshold, low and fast and scrabbles up the first step.

  Inside, there is another heavy, ugly impact—wet and solid, like a butcher’s block falling sideways. Nix makes a rawer sound this time, not surprise anymore but pain. Whatever the thing is, it hit him again before he can get clear.

  Jim scrambles higher up the stairs, claws ticking on rough stone.

  Brother Halden answers immediately.

  Jim hears the cleric’s voice—short, urgent prayer, no wasted syllables. Divine power flares warm and brief through the doorway.

  Nix’s breathing changes. Still ragged, but not dying.

  Good cleric. Solid save at the last second.

  Nix is trying to break free from whatever has him.

  It does not work.

  Jim flattens instinctively on the stair for half a heartbeat.

  Adhesive. Of course it has adhesive. It’s a damn mimic.

  Then Garrick moves.

  The fighter’s boots shift on wet stone, then steel cuts the air. Jim hears the sword swing but no impact. Miss.

  Jim hits the upper steps as the room flashes with force. Magic missiles slam into the mimic with that unmistakable sound: sharp impacts, like invisible hammers punching rotten timber.

  Jim’s whiskers pull back.

  That was a real hit. Well done hand waver.

  The mimic is still fighting, still dangerous.

  Jim stays pressed to the bronze doorway, half hidden by the hinge-side stone, one black eye fixed on the fight.

  The room smells terrible.

  Not just old crypt and sewer wash. Now there is scorched mimic flesh, hot spell residue, sweat, wet leather, and the sharp metallic edge of blood.

  The mimic lashes out at Garrick.

  Jim sees the pseudopod swing like a club—fast for something that big—and slam into the fighter with a heavy, meaty crack that echoes around the chamber. Garrick absorbs it, but not gracefully. He gives ground a fraction, boots scraping on wet marble.

  It’s off the rogue. Good. It’s on the wall now.

  Brother Halden takes that opening and casts bless.

  There is no visible burst, no dramatic halo. Just a tightening in the room—a subtle settling of nerves and intent. Garrick squares himself again. Nix’s posture sharpens. Even Jim, who is not part of the prayer, feels the little shift of everyone is now slightly harder to kill.

  Nix is hurt, breathing hard, and absolutely done being prey.

  He slides in from the side, not flashy, not heroic, just fast and mean in the way rogues are when a thing has nearly killed them. Jim barely sees the knife-hand move—just the change in Nix’s shoulders, the lean, the step, and then the strike.

  It lands.

  Not a broad hit like Garrick would make. A close one. A precise one. The kind that turns monster back into meat.

  The mimic jerks hard.

  That’s nasty work. Beautiful nasty work.

  The fighter steps in on the opening Nix just created and this time the sword finally connects.

  Steel bites into the mimic’s mass with a wet, heavy chop. The thing convulses, half folding in on itself, and for one heartbeat Jim thinks that it is over.

  Selise makes sure it is.

  The force darts hit with those hard, invisible punches Jim already recognizes. The mimic shudders once, loses what little coherence it had left, and collapses into a sagging heap of false wood texture, adhesive slime, and dead meat.

  Garrick still has his sword up. Nix is still half crouched, knife ready in case the corpse has one more stupid trick. Brother Halden is already scanning for who needs healing. Selise holds his line of sight on the target for a beat longer, making sure dead is actually dead.

  Jim, from the floor-level edge of the doorway, feels the entire fight release at once.

  His first thought is blunt and heartfelt:

  Okay. They’re good.

  His second is drier:

  And that chest absolutely deserved what happened to it