Chapter 184 — The Last Climb

Chapter 184: Chapter 184 — The Last Climb

The return journey took the better part of a week, and Arlen found the accumulated distance settling into his legs with the particular, honest ache of ground genuinely covered rather than merely survived.

They cleared Floor Twelve’s standing lake on the fifth day back, the waystation’s warm, familiar lantern-light drawing them in for one final night’s proper rest before the last push toward Floor Ten.

"Selling anything before we go?" Kess asked, already eyeing the trader’s counter with practiced interest.

Arlen considered his own accumulated materials — the Cave Shark’s gill structure, the Ironclaw Lobster claws, a modest collection of scale and shell fragments gathered across two weeks of steady, patient harvesting — and found the trader here offering prices considerably fairer than he’d expected for someone this deep beneath the surface.

"Region Three material moves well enough down here that I don’t need to gouge anyone for it," the trader said, counting out his payment with brisk efficiency. "Different story for anything from further down. That, I’d charge properly for."

Arlen thanked him, genuinely satisfied with the exchange, and spent the remainder of the evening simply resting alongside the others, the waystation’s small, permanent community settling around them with the same strange, comfortable familiarity it had offered on the way out.

They pushed on the following morning, and the final stretch back toward Floor Ten passed in the same steady, practiced rhythm that had carried them through the whole return — Grennig anchoring the pace, Osric noting terrain shifts without much comment, Kess ranging ahead with her usual unhurried confidence.

Arlen felt the change in the water before he saw it, the current finally easing into something calmer, the passage widening gradually until the familiar ramp emerged ahead of them, worn glass-smooth by years of steady traffic.

They surfaced together, water sheeting off their gear as they climbed the ramp’s final stretch, and Arlen found the settlement’s warm, impossible daylight considerably more welcoming this time than his first, overwhelmed glimpse of it weeks earlier.

"Feels almost like coming home," he admitted, wringing water from his sleeve.

"That’s Floor Ten for you," Osric said. "Everyone who works this region deep enough eventually starts feeling that way about it."

They made their way toward the settlement’s inn, and Arlen found himself, walking through the familiar market square, cataloguing the small, ordinary details that had struck him as so impossibly strange only two weeks earlier — the baker’s stall, the cartographer’s crowded shelf, the steady, patient murmur of the river running through the heart of it all.

It was near the square’s edge, threading past a cluster of merchants haggling over some shipment of crystal-touched ore, that Arlen caught sight of her.

He stopped walking entirely.

She moved through the crowd with the same unhurried, deliberate grace he remembered from Marrowgate weeks earlier — dark-skinned, sharply pointed ears longer than any standard elf’s, dressed in traveling clothes that gave nothing away about her business here. She didn’t look toward him. She didn’t seem to notice anyone at all, moving through the market with the singular focus of someone who had somewhere specific to be.

"Arlen?" Kess asked, noticing his sudden stillness. "Something wrong?"

"That woman," he said, nodding carefully toward the retreating figure. "Dark elf. I’ve seen her before — Marrowgate, weeks ago, before I ever reached Aurenholt. Twice, actually, in the same city."

Ilyana’s expression shifted immediately, her usual composed attention sharpening into something considerably more focused. "You’re certain?"

"Fairly certain. Not a face I’d easily mistake for another."

"That’s genuinely unusual," Ilyana said, watching the woman disappear around a distant stall. "Dark elves don’t often travel this far from their own territory, and when they do, it’s rarely for anything as simple as trade. Seeing one twice in one city, and now here as well—" She trailed off, something thoughtful and faintly uneasy settling into her expression. "That’s not nothing, Arlen. Worth remembering properly, even if it doesn’t turn into anything."

"Should we follow her?" Arlen asked.

"No," Ilyana said, firm but not unkind. "Whatever her business is, it’s hers, and dark elves aren’t people you casually corner over idle curiosity. But I’ll mention it properly when we report back to the guild. If she’s genuinely moving between cities this deliberately, someone with more authority than us should probably know about it."

Arlen nodded, filing the sighting away alongside every other careful, unresolved thread he carried, and let the moment pass without further comment, though he found his gaze drifting once more toward the crowd where she’d vanished before finally turning back toward the inn.

They settled in for the evening, and it was over a proper, shared meal — considerably finer than anything the dive itself had offered — that Ilyana finally addressed the matter Arlen had privately suspected was coming since their first day back on Floor Ten.

"This is our last guided dive together," she said, without much preamble, though her tone carried genuine warmth rather than any cold formality. "Not because you’re not welcome along. Simply because our own work from here takes us places suited to what we’re actually capable of — Region Four, deeper stretches of Three, work that doesn’t make sense to drag a Novice through simply for the company."

"I understand," Arlen said, and found he genuinely did, the practical logic of it settling into him without any real disappointment attached.

"You’ve earned considerably more than we expected to teach you, this trip," Osric added. "Terrain, technique, proper underwater discipline. From here, I’d wager you’re better served continuing your own solo work — Floors Eight through Fifteen, properly explored on your own terms this time, rather than guided through at our pace."

"That was my plan already, more or less," Arlen admitted.

"Good instinct, then." Ilyana raised her cup in a small, informal toast. "To a proper education, and to whatever you build from it."

Arlen raised his own cup, genuine warmth settling into him despite the practical, matter-of-fact framing of the moment. "Thank you. For all of it. I don’t think I’d have managed Region Three half so comfortably without watching all of you do it properly first."

"You’ll manage it fine regardless, going forward," Kess said. "Just try not to find anything else the size of that Guardian without proper backup this time."

"No promises," Arlen said, echoing her own words from weeks earlier, and found the table’s easy laughter settling into him with genuine, grateful warmth.

They finished the evening in comfortable, unhurried conversation, and Arlen found himself, sitting among people who’d shown him more of this world’s true, patient scale than he’d known to properly imagine two weeks earlier, already turning over everything waiting for him once they finally reached the surface — a quiet parkland, four new understandings still patiently held, and an entire stretch of familiar floors waiting to be properly, deliberately rediscovered on his own.

He thought, one final time before sleep claimed him, of the dark elf’s careful, purposeful stride through the market crowd, and found the memory settling into him with a weight he couldn’t quite name — not fear, not urgency, simply the quiet, persistent sense of a thread left dangling, waiting for some future day to finally pull it properly taut.