The transition to Floor 10 was a widening.

  The passage simply expanded, gradually, the walls pulling back over thirty meters until the tunnel had become something closer to a corridor, high-ceilinged and broad, the dungeon's architecture scaling up without announcement. The mineral deposits here were rger individually but more spread out, the amber light of Floor 9 giving way to something cooler and less frequent, pools of illumination with genuine dark between them.

  The floor itself was wider than anything above it.

  The cavern spaces they passed through in the first twenty minutes were rge enough that the far walls weren't always visible from the entrances, the darkness absorbing the distance. The passages connecting them were broad enough for four people side by side.

  "Bigger monsters," Aris said.

  "Bigger everything," Colette said. "The dungeon scales its architecture to its popution. Floor 10 hosts creatures that Floor 9 doesn't have the ceiling clearance for."

  Aris looked at the ceiling clearance.

  "How much bigger," he said.

  "Bigger than the Stoneback," she said.

  "Reassuring," he said.

  They heard the other Wanderers before they saw them.

  Laughter, first. The specific easy ughter of a group that knew each other well enough that the ughter had its own internal nguage, references and callbacks that made the volume higher than the original joke warranted. Then voices, multiple, overpping, the conversational texture of people at rest between movements.

  Then one voice louder than the others.

  "—literally just stood there—"

  "I moved—"

  "You moved after it hit you—"

  "That's still moving—"

  The passage opened into a mid-sized cavern and the group was there, four of them, resting against the far wall with the ease of people who had done this enough times that resting in a Floor 10 cavern felt ordinary. Their equipment was good, practical, the wear on it the wear of regur use rather than dispy. A campfire substitute, a dungeon light crystal propped in a rock formation to maximize its output, casting them in the cool white of its focused glow.

  One of them had a bruise developing along his left side that was visible even from the cavern entrance, the specific purple-red of recent significant impact, and he was sitting with slightly more care than the others, the posture of someone whose ribs had been consulted and had opinions.

  The other three were not consulting his ribs. They were consulting their own amusement at his expense.

  "You have to move sideways," he said. "It—" He stopped because one of the group, a girl near the crystal light, had looked up from the ongoing entertainment of her injured friend and seen them in the cavern entrance.

  She looked at them.

  At Colette's red hair and good armor and the hide roll on her pack.

  At Aris's green-stained everything.

  At the space between them.

  A smile developed that had a specific quality to it.

  "Oh," she said, loudly enough that the whole group looked up. "Look at that. Two lovers in the dungeon."

  The injured one forgot his ribs.

  Colette went red.

  Not gradually. Immediately, the color arriving in her face with the completeness of something that didn't have a dimmer setting, and she straightened to her full height which was considerable and looked at the girl across the cavern with the expression of someone who had addressed council chambers and Lodge officials and noble house representatives and was currently being defeated by a Wanderer girl with a campfire crystal and a sense of humor.

  "We are not," she said, with great precision, "lovers."

  "You're very close together," the girl said pleasantly.

  "The passage is narrow," Colette said.

  "The passage behind you is quite wide," the girl said.

  The injured one was ughing now, his ribs objecting audibly.

  Aris looked at the passage behind them, which was, objectively, quite wide.

  He looked at Colette.

  He did not ugh. He was very careful not to ugh. His face did something in the direction of ughing that he redirected firmly before it arrived.

  "Don't," Colette said, not looking at him.

  "I didn't say anything," he said.

  "Your face said something," she said.

  "My face is neutral," he said.

  "Your face is—" She stopped. Looked at the group across the cavern, who were now thoroughly entertained and no longer concerned about the injured one's ribs at all. "Good luck on your descent," she said, with the composed dignity of someone reciming a conversation on their own terms, and walked forward through the cavern toward the far passage.

  Aris followed.

  "Safe travels," the girl called after them.

  "And you," Aris said.

  "Bring her flowers next time," the girl called.

  The passage received them and the ughter followed them down it for longer than the distance should have allowed.

  They walked in silence for approximately forty seconds.

  "What's funny," Colette said.

  "Nothing," Aris said.

  "You're smiling."

  "I'm not."

  "Aris."

  "The passage was objectively quite wide," he said.

  Colette made a sound that was not quite a word and walked faster.

  Aris smiled at the passage wall where she couldn't see it and followed her.

  Floor 10 opened as they went deeper.

  The architecture scaling further, the cavern spaces becoming genuinely rge, the passages between them wide enough to feel less like tunnels and more like roads, the dungeon's design at this level built for things that needed the room. The crystal deposits here were sparse, individual formations rather than the seam-running deposits of the upper floors, and the light between them was the genuine dark of a pce where the dungeon had not prioritized illumination.

  They moved carefully.

  The Stoneback popution was present but less active than Floor 9's, the creatures they passed either occupied with something else or simply disinclined toward engagement, the Floor 10 versions rger than Floor 9's and proportionally slower, their stone pte coverage more complete. Aris noted the additional coverage and the additional mass and revised his timing estimates for the Repel technique accordingly.

  They didn't engage.

  No reason to spend what they had on a Stoneback when the floor's evidence was what they'd come for.

  The rge room appeared at the end of a passage that had been widening for five minutes.

  Not a cavern. A chamber, the distinction meaningful, the space too regur in its dimensions to be purely geological, the walls too close to vertical, the ceiling too consistently high. Someone or something had shaped this space or the dungeon had shaped it with a specific purpose, the architecture purposeful in a way that the organic cavern spaces weren't.

  Thirty meters wide. The ceiling invisible in the dark above them. The floor ft and clear, no debris, no crystal formations breaking the surface, the stone here swept clean by something or simply never accumuting in the way that lower-traffic areas accumuted.

  Four crystal deposits, one in each corner of the chamber, too far apart to pool their light effectively, each one illuminating a circle of floor around itself and leaving the center of the chamber in genuine dark. The spaces between the corner lights and the center dark were the specific grey of insufficient illumination, the quality of light that showed shapes without details.

  Aris stopped at the entrance.

  He looked at the ceiling he couldn't see.

  He looked at the ft clear floor.

  He looked at the four corners and the four pools of light and the dark between them.

  "This is going to be trouble," he said.

  "Yes," Colette said.

  "The architecture," he said. "The scale of it. The ceiling clearance. Whatever uses this room is big enough that the dungeon built the room around it."

  "That's how floor bosses work," she said. "The dungeon creates the appropriate space."

  "Is this a floor boss room," he said.

  "It has the character of one," she said. "But Floor 10's boss isn't here currently. The room feels empty."

  "Feels," he said.

  "Dungeon empty has a quality," she said. "You develop a sense for it. This room has that quality." She looked at the dark center. "Currently."

  Aris did not find currently as reassuring as she perhaps intended it.

  "Alright," he said. "What are we looking for."

  "Evidence of passage," she said. "People moving through this room under duress leave different marks than people moving through it normally. Equipment contact, blood, Eido discharge residue, the specific patterns of a fight or a pursuit rather than a transit." She looked at the four corner lights. "We split the room. Two corners each. Look at the walls at height, the floor near the walls, and the transitions between the light and the dark."

  "The transitions," he said.

  "People retreat to light sources when they're frightened," she said. "Whatever happened here, the survivors would have been near the corner deposits."

  She said survivors with the specific weight of someone who was not certain there had been any but was choosing the word anyway.

  "Left side," Aris said.

  "Right," she said.

  They entered the chamber.

  Aris heard it before he saw it.

  Water, not the single drip of Floor 7 but a continuous sound, thin and steady, coming from the chamber's left wall near the back corner. He crossed toward it and the crystal deposit in that corner illuminated it as he got close.

  A crack in the wall, high up, two meters above the floor, and through it water came in a thread too thin to call a falls and too continuous to call a drip, the specific middle category of water movement that deserved its own name. It had been coming through that crack long enough to have carved a shallow channel down the wall's face and a small depression in the floor below it, the stone worn smooth by the consistent contact, the pool in the depression perhaps thirty centimeters across and consistently full, the overflow finding a second crack in the floor and disappearing into it.

  The water was clear.

  The pool's bottom was visible, the stone beneath it the clean pale color of rock that water had been washing for a long time.

  "Colette," Aris called.

  "Found something," she called back, from the right side.

  "Water," he said.

  A pause.

  "I'll be there in a moment," she said.

  He looked at himself in the pool's surface.

  The reflection was not fttering. The green had dried to the specific texture of something that had been wet and biological and had then decided to become permanent, the color darkest on his chest and left shoulder where the Sentient's wound had expressed itself most enthusiastically. His hair had opinions. His jacket was a loss.

  He looked at the water.

  He looked at the chamber around him, the four corner lights, the dark center, the ft floor, Colette moving along the right wall with her hand at the stone.

  "I'm going to clean up," he said.

  "Go ahead," she called. "I'll look around."

  He took the jacket off.

  Colette moved along the right wall methodically.

  The stone at height, the floor near the base, the transition zones between the corner light and the dark. She was thorough and she was trying to be thorough and she was finding, with the specific frustration of someone who had been thorough before and found things, nothing.

  The floor was clean. Genuinely clean, the dungeon floor here unmarked by the evidence of passage in any direction, no scuff patterns, no equipment contact, nothing that a Wanderer in flight would leave on a surface they'd crossed in a hurry.

  The walls were the same. Stone, uninterrupted, the crystal deposit's light finding nothing on the surface that didn't belong there.

  She reached the back right corner and stood in the crystal's pool of light and looked at the dark center of the chamber and thought about fifty three people and one page.

  "Anything," Aris called from the left side.

  "Nothing yet," she said.

  She moved to the back wall and followed it left, toward the waterfall sound, toward Aris, and let herself look at the floor and the walls and find nothing and file the nothing and keep looking.

  She reached the left back corner and stopped.

  Aris was at the pool, shirtless, the water doing what water did with dungeon sludge when applied with sufficient intent, which was address it slowly and completely. His back was to her, the waterfall thread running over his hands as he worked.

  She looked at the back wall.

  Nothing on the back wall.

  She looked at the floor near the base of the back wall.

  Nothing there either.

  She looked at the waterfall.

  She crossed to it and crouched at the pool's edge and put her hands in and the cold hit immediately, the specific cold of water that had been moving through deep stone and had not been consulted about temperature preferences. She brought it up to her face and the cold resolved the floor's accumuted warmth very effectively.

  She filled the bottle from her belt, watching the thread from the crack above fill it, the water clear all the way to the bottom.

  "Is dungeon water safe," Aris said.

  "Safer than surface water," she said. "The stone filters it completely. No surface contamination, no runoff, nothing biological above Floor 15 that can survive in moving water." She capped the bottle. "Guild expeditions bring empty bottles down and fill them here. It's standard practice."

  "That can't be right," Aris said.

  "It's been tested," she said. "Extensively. The Lodge has a full report."

  "The dungeon produces better drinking water than the surface," he said.

  "The dungeon produces better a lot of things than the surface," she said. "If you know what to look for."

  She put the bottle back on her belt and brought another handful of water to her face and pushed her hair back from her forehead and let the cold do its work and looked at the pool's surface.

  The pool's surface showed her the wall behind Aris.

  She looked at the wall in the reflection.

  Then she looked up from the pool.

  She was looking at Aris.

  Specifically at the fact that Aris, who had been going into the dungeon every day since he was ten years old, had the physique that going into the dungeon every day since you were ten years old produced, and she had not previously had occasion to notice this and was currently noticing it with the specific comprehensive attention of someone who had not been prepared to notice it.

  She looked back at the pool.

  The pool reflected the wall.

  She looked at the wall.

  Aris turned around.

  He looked at her.

  She was looking at the wall with the focused attention of someone who had found the wall very interesting.

  "The wall," he said.

  "Yes," she said.

  "Found something," he said.

  "No," she said. She looked at him. Her face had the color it had acquired in the cavern above when the Wanderer girl had made her observation and it had not lost that color since arriving here. "You're quite toned," she said, with the specific delivery of someone who has decided that saying the thing directly is less complicated than the alternative. "For a church boy."

  "I go into the dungeon every day," he said.

  "Since when," she said.

  "Since I arrived at the church," he said. "Six years. Deepbloom doesn't grow on the surface."

  "Every day," she said.

  "Most days," he said. "Rest days I run the clinic."

  She processed this.

  "Put your shirt on," she said.

  "It's covered in—"

  "Put it on," she said.

  Aris looked at her face, which was the color it was, and looked at the shirt, which was the color it was, and made no comment about the retive merits of either situation. He picked up the shirt.

  He was smiling.

  "What," Colette said.

  "Nothing," he said.

  "Aris."

  "I'm putting the shirt on," he said.

  They sat together at the pool's edge.

  The waterfall thread continued its work above them, patient and consistent, filling and overflowing and filling again. The chamber's four corner crystals held their positions and their pools of light and the dark center of the chamber held its position too, the room existing in the specific equilibrium of a space that had been doing this for longer than either of them had been alive.

  Aris's shirt was back on. It remained an accurate record of the evening's events but it was on.

  "Break," Colette said.

  "We just got here," he said.

  "Ten minutes," she said. "Minimum."

  "Why," he said.

  She looked at him.

  "Mana," she said. "You've been running Void alot since Floor 7. I think it's best we rest it."

  "If you exhaust your mana completely," she said, "Your Eido goes dormant. Could be hours before it recovers enough to manifest again." She looked at the chamber. "Being without an Eido in the dungeon with no way to defend yourself isn't a problem you survive."

  "How long does recovery take," he said.

  "Depends on the depletion," she said. "Partial, an hour of rest. Full depletion, six hours minimum. Sometimes more." She drew her knees up. "The biggest mistake low level Wanderers make is treating their Eido like a tool they pick up and put down. It's not. It's a system. You run it too hard without recovery and it fails at the worst possible moment."

  "You manifested Sovereign at the end," he said. "How are you."

  "Fine," she said. "Sovereign is mana consuming. That's why I always save it for the perfect moment." She looked at him sideways. "Which is why we're sitting at a waterfall for ten minutes."

  Aris looked at the pool.

  "Edric makes everyone rest after clinic work," he said. "He says the same thing about Marionette. Run it past the threshold and it costs you double to bring it back."

  "Your priest knows Eido management," she said.

  "He's been doing it for thirty years," Aris said.

  The waterfall came down. The pool filled and overflowed. The dark center of the chamber held its quality.

  "We didn't find anything," Aris said.

  "No," Colette said.

  "We keep going," he said.

  "We keep going," she confirmed.

  They sat at the pool's edge in the crystal light and let the chamber be quiet around them and let their Eidos recover in the specific way that Eidos recovered, which was slowly and without shortcuts, and the dungeon continued to exist around them with its usual indifference toward their timeline.