He came back with a plan.

  That was the difference this time. Last time he'd come back standing over Onetooth's body with no context and no framework and the specific blank panic of a man who had just died and didn't have a category for that yet. This time he had the Crown in his pack before the body finished cooling, the core's voice already in his ear, and a list.

  Fix the crack first. Sublevel corridor, eastern face, before anything else. Wake Grelwick if he had to. Stand there and watch it get done.

  Pay the armory staff. Back pay, both of them, before they made the decision they were already thinking about making.

  Find out who hired the party. Someone had given them the layout and told them to bring a siege weapon and that was not a standard dungeon run and he wanted to know whose idea it had been.

  He walked faster than last time. The Underdark glowed its cold blue around him and he moved through it with the energy of a man who knew what the first three moves were, which was three more than he'd had last time.

  "You're moving faster," the core observed.

  "I know what needs doing."

  "The eastern fork cuts forty minutes off the route," the core said. "If you take it at the split ahead."

  Brutus looked at the fork. Forty minutes was forty minutes.

  He took it.

  The eastern route was narrower, lower-ceilinged, the phosphorescent growth thicker on the walls. He moved carefully. The path curved ahead and he watched his footing and watched the ceiling and he was watching both of those things and thinking about the crack and about Grelwick and about who in the administrative wing had access to four months of unresolved maintenance logs when something came out of the dark from the left and hit him in the side of the head.

  He didn't see what it was.

  He didn't see anything after that either.

  He woke up standing in the Underdark with Onetooth freshly dead in front of him.

  He stood there.

  One second. Two.

  "What the—" he started, and then the dragon rage that had no target and no context came up from somewhere below his lungs and he snarled something that was not words in any language and his fists were clenched and his throat was full of fire looking for something to burn and there was nothing, nothing, just the cold tunnel and the dead kobold and the carvings on the Crown shifting at the edge of his vision, patient and unchanged—

  He stood there and breathed.

  In. Out. The fire went back down, slowly, the way it always went back down when there was nothing to aim it at, leaving just the heat and the anger and the specific humiliation of not knowing what had killed him.

  "What was that," he said.

  "A crossbow bolt," the core said. "Underdark scavenger. Opportunistic. They post up on the high ledges in the eastern fork and shoot at anything warm that comes through." A pause. "I didn't know they'd moved into that section. They weren't there three days ago."

  "You sent me down that path."

  "I told you it was faster. I didn't know—"

  "You didn't know," Brutus said flatly.

  "The dungeon's sensor network doesn't extend that far into the Underdark. I have no way to—"

  "How many times," Brutus said. "How many times am I going to get killed by something you didn't know about."

  The core was quiet for a moment. "Honestly? A lot. For a while. Until you've mapped enough of the variables that the unknown unknowns start becoming known unknowns." Another pause. "That's actually a significant part of why the curse is so effective as a punishment, if you want to get into it."

  Brutus put the Crown in his pack. He did not take the eastern fork. He started walking the route he knew, the long way, five hours instead of four, because four hours was apparently the kind of shortcut that ended with a crossbow bolt in his skull from a scavenger who hadn't been there three days ago.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  "Talk," he said. "The curse. Everything. I want to know what I'm in."

  The core was quiet for a moment with a different quality to it — not playful, not careful, something that recognized weight and was preparing to carry it in front of someone else for the first time.

  "The god's name is lost," it said. "Not unknown. Lost. Deliberately. The forgetting is part of what happened to it."

  "What kind of god."

  "Small. The kind that exists in the cracks between larger domains. It had a domain that was minor enough that when it began to fade nobody noticed and nothing intervened." A pause. "Best estimate, based on the shape of the curse itself, is something adjacent to memory. Persistence. The idea that things which have happened continue to exist in some form."

  "Which is why the loop," Brutus said.

  "Which is why the loop," the core confirmed. "It didn't build the curse from power. It built it from the only thing it had left, which was what it was. When gods fade they lose definition — the domain blurs, the identity blurs, they spread too thin to do anything and eventually there's nothing left that could honestly be called a god. This one decided it wasn't going to do that."

  Brutus walked. The tunnel moved around him, long and cold and glowing.

  "So it made the curse instead," he said.

  "It poured everything into the curse," the core said, and something shifted in its register, something that recognized the weight of what it was saying. "Not just power. Everything. Its domain. Its memory. Its identity. Its consciousness. Every fragment of existence it had accumulated across its entire divine lifespan. It spent itself completely and deliberately and with full awareness of what spending completely meant. There is no god left. No remnant, no echo, no divine presence maintaining the thing it made. It is gone as thoroughly as anything in this universe can be gone."

  Brutus was quiet for a moment.

  "That's why it can't be broken," he said.

  "To break a curse you find the source and you deal with the source. There is no source. The source became the curse. What you're carrying isn't being sustained by anything — it simply is, the way a rock that has been thrown keeps moving after the hand that threw it is gone. The god's will isn't behind it. The god's will is it."

  Brutus thought about this.

  "The god spent its entire divine existence," he said. "Its whole self. Its domain. Everything it was."

  "Yes."

  "To make a time loop."

  "Yes."

  "For one person."

  "Well," the core said. "For whoever put the crown on. It didn't know it would be you specifically. It just knew someone would, eventually. It was patient about that part."

  Brutus walked for a while without speaking.

  "That is," he said finally, "the pettiest thing I have ever heard of."

  "In three thousand years of existence," the core said, with something that might have been genuine awe underneath the cheerfulness, "it is the pettiest thing I have ever encountered. An entire god. Gone. Spent. Finished. For this. Because it was angry about fading and it wanted to leave something that would last and it decided what it wanted to last was someone else's suffering." A pause. "The theological implications alone are—"

  "Can it be fixed."

  The core went quiet.

  "Tell me," Brutus said.

  "Theoretically," the core said carefully, "there are entities old enough and fundamental enough that they could engage with something this concentrated. The curse has density that ordinary divine power can't touch — trying to unmake it with regular godhood would be like trying to stop a thrown boulder by breathing on it. But something that predates gods. Something that operates at the level of how existence is structured rather than what exists within it." A pause. "A Primordial. Something like the Primordial of Time, if the oldest texts are describing something real and not just a concept given a name."

  "Where do I find it."

  "You don't," the core said. "That's the point. These aren't beings you locate. They're not beings at all in any sense that makes locating them meaningful. They're more like conditions. Properties of how existence works. The chance of one of them intervening in a specific mortal's specific curse is—" it paused, "—I don't have a number small enough to be useful."

  "But it's possible," Brutus said.

  "In the way that anything is possible if you use the word loosely enough," the core said. "Yes. Technically. There is a door. The god left one, whether it meant to or not, because it spent everything it had on the curse itself and had nothing left over to close that door. But the door is at the bottom of the ocean and you don't have a boat and the ocean is the size of everything and—"

  "There's a door," Brutus said.

  A long pause.

  "There's a door," the core said quietly. "Yes."

  Brutus nodded once. The way you nod when you file something away in the part of your mind reserved for things that aren't useful yet but might be eventually. The part that doesn't expect anything soon but refuses to throw things out.

  "The crack," he said. "When I get back. First thing."

  "Yes."

  "And Revenue gets let out. Every day. That's not a discussion."

  "Yes."

  "And I want to know who hired that party. Someone with access to the maintenance logs, someone who knew about the crack specifically, someone who wanted Revenue dead or wanted the treasury open or both." He thought about Maldred's journal. The way her eyes had gone to his pack. "I have a candidate."

  "You don't know it was her," the core said.

  "No," Brutus agreed. "I don't."

  He walked.

  The tunnel was long and cold and the phosphorescent light shifted around him and somewhere above him through the rock and the dark his dungeon was on fire in two places with a crack in the treasury wall and Revenue alive and doing his circuit and two days until an inspection that was going to require everything he had.

  He'd died twice now. Once to four adventurers he'd let his temper kill him against and once to a scavenger on a shortcut he hadn't needed to take. Both times something he should have handled differently. Both times something he was going to handle differently.

  DEATHS: 2 sat in the corner of his overlay.

  It had a lot of room left. He was aware of that. The god had made sure of that, had spent everything it was to make sure of that, and somewhere in whatever passed for its afterlife it was probably very pleased with itself.

  Brutus thought about the door at the bottom of an ocean the size of everything.

  Then he thought about the crack in the treasury wall, which was a problem he could actually fix in the next four hours, and he walked.