[About 04:18 PM on Day 47]
The words drop into the room like stones into a still pond, audacious and utterly treasonous.
"Perhaps. Orléans? The king's bankers should contribute to the rightful king."
Sir Kaelen goes completely still. You can see Louie, out of the corner of your eye, take a sharp, silent breath. He is a soldier who followed an order to destabilize a barony; you have just proposed gutting the financial heart of the kingdom.
The Duke's wolfish grin doesn't just widen; it transforms. The faint amusement is gone, replaced by the raw, predatory delight of a conqueror who has just been handed the perfect weapon. A low chuckle rumbles in his chest, a sound like stones grinding together.
"Orléans," he muses, walking back to the map. His finger, thick as a sausage, traces a line from Dijon straight west into the heart of the Crownlands. "The Guild of Coin. The King's purse."
He laughs again, louder this time, a bark of pure, ambitious joy. "Gods, the boy has teeth." He turns his gaze on you, and it is filled with a terrifying, newfound respect. "Poisoning the roots, not just the branches. I like it."
He taps the city of Orléans on the map. "But a simple robbery? No. Gold is heavy. It has guards. It is... vulgar." He dismisses the idea with a wave of his hand, but his mind is clearly working, seizing upon the core of your suggestion and forging it into something far more dangerous.
"The Guild of Coin does not just hold the King's gold," he says, his voice dropping as he leans over the table, inviting you into the conspiracy. "They hold his ledgers. The records of every loan, every title held in collateral, every secret deal made to secure the loyalty of a hundred 'loyal' houses."
His eyes gleam with manic brilliance. "That is the King's true power. Not the gold in his vault, but the debts on his books. The chains of obligation he has wrapped around the necks of my rivals."
He straightens up, his decision made. The energy in the room shifts from appraisal to command.
"This is your new mission," he declares, his voice ringing with authority. "You will go to Orléans. You will infiltrate the Guildhall. You are not to steal a single coin."
He points a finger at you, driving the point home. "You are to acquire or destroy the Master Ledger. The record of the Crown's debtors. Bring it to me, and I can turn half the King's loyalists into my allies. Burn it, and you sever the King's financial control and plunge his network into chaos. Either outcome is a victory."
He turns to his silent captain. "Kaelen. See to it they have what they need. A safe house in the city. Intelligence on the Guildhall's defenses. Proper attire. This is no longer a mission for a tourney knight and his strange companion. This is a mission for... serpents."
The Duke looks back at you, a final, sharp assessment in his eyes. He has taken your chaotic improvisation and your audacious suggestion and forged them into a concrete, surgical strike against the foundations of the kingdom.
"Do this," Duke Charles says, his voice a low promise, "and you will have proven your worth beyond any doubt. You will have a permanent place at my side. Fail... and your bodies will be fished out of the Loire, your names forgotten."
[About 04:19 PM on Day 47]
A faint, confident smile touches your lips. You give a slight, formal bow of the head—a gesture of professional acknowledgement, not subservience.
"Consider it done, my Lord Duke."
Duke Charles nods, the predatory grin returning. He has his weapon, and he has a target. He turns back to the map, his mind already leagues away, planning the political fallout of a kingdom's failing finances.
"Good. Kaelen will provide you with the details. Do not fail me."
With that, you and Louie are dismissed. Sir Kaelen leads you from the solar, the heavy door closing on the Duke's ambitions. The silent captain takes you to a quartermaster, where your mission is given life. You are handed a heavy purse filled with gold crowns, a letter of credit for a bank in Orléans, and a dossier containing preliminary intelligence on the Guildhall's layout and the patrol schedules of the City Watch. Your traveler's clothes are replaced with the fine but understated attire of minor merchants or landed gentry—wool and dark leather, designed to blend into the background of a wealthy city.
[About 10:00 AM on Day 55]
After a week of hard travel, you arrive in Orléans. The city is everything Dijon was not. Where Dijon was a military camp of iron and mud, Orléans is a city of stone and gold. It sits astride the Loire River, its lifeblood the constant flow of merchant barges and the ringing of coins in the counting houses. The architecture is grand, the streets are clean, and the air is thick with the scent of prosperity. In the city's heart, the Guildhall of Coin looms over the central plaza, a veritable fortress of finance, its marble facade projecting an aura of unbreachable security.
Following your instructions, Louie proves ruthlessly efficient. Using the Duke's funds, he secures two properties. The first is a small, respectable storefront in the Scribes' Quarter, a street lined with bookbinders, stationers, and parchment makers. It is your public face. The second is a dusty, forgotten warehouse in the dyer's district down by the river, anonymous and secure, with thick stone walls that muffle sound and block prying eyes. The cost of establishing this foothold is significant.
[Your Ledger is updated from Level 5 (Prosperous) to Level 4 (Stable)]
Inside the locked and warded warehouse, you get to work. You lay out the problem for Louie: scroll-crafting is the bedrock of all Formulaic magic, but it is an achingly slow process. A scribe must dip their quill into a pot of magically-attuned ink for every few runes, breaking their concentration and the flow of intent into the formula. The process is limited by the quill.
"What if," you propose, your mind already dissecting the physics and aetherics of the problem, "the quill never had to be dipped?"
For the next several days, the warehouse becomes your laboratory. You procure fine-grain ironwood, slivers of treated copper, and a small, flawed scryocrystal. This is not mere tinkering; it is an act of conceptual creation.
You use Conceptual Kinesis to shape the wood, hollowing out a perfect, seamless reservoir. With the same power, you draw the copper into a micro-thin tube, a channel finer than a human hair. The true genius, however, is in the nib. You shatter the crystal and select a single, perfect shard, using your will to carve it into a writing point, its geometry calculated to regulate a perfect, steady flow of ink.
The final, crucial step is the enchantment. Holding the assembled device, you channel your intent. You don't cast a spell on it; you impose a new, fundamental property into it. You weave a conceptual formula of Resonance Control directly into the crystal nib—a passive ward that ensures the pen acts as a perfect conduit, allowing the user's mana and will to flow through it and into the ink without degradation or interference.
The result is a sleek, dark-wood pen with a crystalline tip that seems to faintly drink the light. You fill its reservoir with standard attunement ink. Then, on a sheet of parchment, you begin to write.
There is no scratching, no blotting. A single, flawless line of glowing runes flows from the nib. You draw complex magical circles, intricate warding patterns, and entire spell formulas without ever stopping.
The speed is intoxicating.
The efficiency is revolutionary.
You have not just invented a better tool; you have created a fundamental disruption to the science of Formulaic magic.
You have created the Flow-Quill.
[About 06:00 PM on Day 62]
For a week, the warehouse becomes a silent factory. Armed with your Flow-Quill, you work with an efficiency that would make a master scribe from the Silver Marches weep with envy. What would take a team of artisans a month to produce, you accomplish in days. Stacks of parchment are transformed into neatly rolled and sealed scrolls, their latent power humming faintly in the still air. One pile contains the raw, destructive potential of Fireball. The other, larger pile holds the intricate, restorative magic of Lesser Restoration.
You seal the final scroll and place it on the stack, the sheer volume of your output a testament to your invention. You turn to Louie, who has been maintaining your security, managing supplies, and watching your process with a kind of grim awe.
"My friend," you begin, holding up the sleek Flow-Quill, "we already know that the Mageocracy will get very rich from selling their arms during the war. But that is their business model. We are after something different." You gesture to the piles of scrolls.
"How do we use these to gain the attention of the bankers, and make them desire this," you indicate the quill,
"so much that they would offer us a percentage of their shares?"
Louie doesn't answer immediately. He walks over to the table, his gauntleted hand hovering over a Fireball scroll, then a Lesser Restoration. He is not a merchant or a spy, but he is a noble, trained to understand the levers of power—and in a city like Orléans, power flows from coin.
"Shares," he says, the word tasting foreign on his tongue. "That's not a price, Janus. That's a throne. You're asking to be crowned a king of their guild. They will not give that up for a clever toy."
He picks up a Lesser Restoration scroll, unrolling it and studying the flawless, glowing runes. "But this... this is not a toy. This is a logistical miracle." He looks from the scroll to the mountains of others you have created. A slow, cold understanding dawns in his eyes.
"We don't sell them the pen, Janus," he says, his voice low and certain. "We sell them the inevitability of the pen. We don't knock on their door. We set a fire in their neighbor's house, and when they come out to see what's happening, we're the ones holding the bucket of water."
He lays the scroll down, his plan forming with the brutal clarity of a battle strategy.
"First, we don't try to compete on all fronts. A Fireball scroll is a commodity. Every hedge wizard and his apprentice can make one. It's a soldier's weapon. But Lesser Restoration? That's different. It's a healer's tool. It requires more precision, more skill. It's always in demand and always expensive because it's hard to make. That is our product."
He points a finger at the stack of healing scrolls.
"Second, we don't just open a shop. That is the act of a merchant. We must act like a force of nature. We will use our storefront to announce a one-time 'Surplus Liquidation Sale'. We will sell one hundred Lesser Restoration scrolls. And we will sell them at thirty percent below the standard market price."
Louie begins to pace, the strategic implications energizing him.
"The Mageocracy has a monopoly on high-quality scrolls. The Guild of Coin are their biggest clients and financiers. When word gets out that some unknown upstart is flooding the market with a high-value, difficult-to-craft scroll at a price that should be a financial impossibility, every quartermaster, mercenary captain, and field surgeon in this city will stampede to our door. We will sell out in an hour."
He stops and turns to you, his eyes glinting with grim satisfaction.
"The bankers won't see us as competition. They will see us as an anomaly that breaks the laws of economics. They will want to know how we can afford to take such a loss. They will investigate. They will assume we have a new, secret source of raw materials, or a revolutionary supply chain."
"They will come to us, demanding to know our secret. And that is when you show them the pen. Not as a product for sale, but as the engine that is about to make their entire investment in the Mageocracy's slow, inefficient workshops obsolete. They will understand that they can either be crushed by the new reality or they can own a piece of it."
He gestures around the warehouse, at the tangible proof of their impending obsolescence.
"We create a supply shock. We prove their model is broken. Then, and only then, do we talk about shares."
[About 06:01 PM on Day 62]
A genuine smile spreads across your face—not a calculated smirk, but a look of sincere appreciation for a perfectly crafted strategy. It is the smile of a master artisan seeing a weapon honed to a flawless edge.
"An excellent plan, Louie," you say, your voice resonating with confidence. "Let's proceed."
---
[About 09:00 AM on Day 65]
The next two days are a flurry of precise, quiet activity. Louie handles the public-facing preparations with the efficiency of a seasoned quartermaster. A day before the sale, notices appear on public boards across the city's mercantile and mercenary districts. They are simple, printed on plain parchment with no heraldry:
> One-Time Liquidation Event.
> One Hundred (100) Scrolls of Lesser Restoration.
> 7 Gold Crowns Each. First come, first served.
> Sunrise. The Quill of Seers. Scribes' Quarter.
The price is an economic absurdity. A Lesser Restoration scroll of reliable quality typically fetches ten crowns, often more. To the city's professional buyers, the notice is either a scam or the work of a madman. It is too intriguing to ignore.
At sunrise, you open the doors to "The Quill of Seers." The shop is sparse, containing only a single counter and a heavy, iron-banded chest. You stand behind the counter, the impassive scholar. Louie stands by the door, a mountain of quiet menace in his plain traveler's clothes, his hand never far from the sword at his hip.
The first hour is a trickle. A skeptical hedge-mage, a cautious apothecary, a mercenary captain sending a subordinate. They inspect the scrolls, their eyes widening at the flawless quality of the runes. The aetheric signature is clean, potent. They buy, and they hurry away to tell their colleagues.
By 10:00 AM, the trickle has become a flood. The street outside is jammed with a clamoring mob. Armored sellswords shove past robed healers; guild agents try to buy in bulk; quartermasters for noble houses shout offers over the heads of the crowd. It is a controlled chaos, with Louie acting as an unbreachable dam at the door, letting in only two customers at a time. The chest of scrolls empties at a dizzying rate.
By 10:47 AM, it is over. You sell the last scroll, and Louie bars the heavy oak door, shutting out the shouts and groans of the disappointed crowd outside. The iron-banded chest is now overflowing with gold. But the money is irrelevant. The shockwave has been sent.
[About 08:00 PM on Day 65]
That evening, you are back in the quiet sanctuary of the warehouse. The din of the city feels a world away. The profits from the sale sit uncounted in a corner. The true prize you are waiting for has yet to arrive.
A sharp, precise knock echoes from the heavy warehouse door. It is not the hesitant rap of a lost citizen or the heavy thud of the City Watch. It is the knock of someone who knows exactly where they are and is confident they will be answered.
Louie moves to the door, his hand resting on the pommel of his longsword. He peers through a hidden slit in the wood, then glances back at you and gives a slight, affirmative nod. He unbolts the door and opens it just wide enough for one person to enter.
The man who steps inside is neither a warrior nor a common merchant. He is middle-aged, with sharp features, impeccably trimmed grey hair, and the soft, uncalloused hands of a man who fights his battles with ledgers and contracts. He is dressed in a fine but severe black doublet bearing a small, discreet silver pin on the collar: the balanced scales of the Guild of Coin. He is flanked by two guards who remain outside, their forms silhouetted against the torchlit alley.
The man's eyes take in the scene—the spartan warehouse, the two of you, the stacks of raw parchment—and a flicker of understanding crosses his face. He is not in a simple scroll shop. He is in the factory.
He gives a slight, formal bow, his movements economical and precise.
"Good evening," he says, his voice as smooth and cold as a polished stone.
"My name is Arnaud. I am a factor for the Guild of Coin." He straightens up, his gaze settling on you.
"My employers have a vested interest in market stability. They find your recent activities... destabilizing. They wish to speak with the proprietors of this venture."
He pauses, letting the weight of the summons hang in the air. "An invitation has been extended. Will you come?"
[About 08:01 PM on Day 65]
You step forward into the dim lantern light, your expression neutral, your posture relaxed. You offer the man a slight nod, your voice carrying the quiet confidence of someone holding all the valuable cards.
"Janus," you introduce yourself, the name simple and unadorned. "Inventor." The word hangs in the air, instantly reframing the entire situation. You are not a merchant who got a lucky shipment; you are the source. "I will be honored."
A flicker of something—not surprise, but confirmation—crosses Arnaud's sharp features. The word "inventor" is precisely what he came here to discover. He gives a thin, professional smile, a gesture that conveys understanding without warmth.
"Excellent," he says smoothly. "My employers are eager to meet an inventor of your... productivity." He gestures towards the open door. "If you and your associate would be so kind as to follow me. A carriage is waiting."
You and Louie exchange a brief, knowing glance. This is it. The hook is set.
You follow Arnaud out into the damp, torchlit alley. A heavy, unmarked black carriage, its windows curtained, waits at the end of the street. The two guards, silent and imposing in their dark livery, open the door for you. The interior is plush velvet, a stark contrast to the grimy district you are leaving behind.
The journey is short and takes a winding, deliberately confusing route through the city's labyrinthine streets. It is a standard security precaution, meant to disorient. When the carriage finally halts, it is not in front of the grand, public-facing Guildhall, but in a quiet, private courtyard behind a wealthy townhouse in the city's most exclusive district.
Arnaud leads you inside, through a silent, richly appointed hall, and stops before a set of imposing, soundproofed mahogany doors. He gives a soft knock. A moment later, the doors swing open silently, revealing a private council chamber.
The room is dominated by a long, polished rosewood table. Three figures are seated at its far end, their faces illuminated by the soft, steady glow of an enchanted lantern hanging above them. They are the true power in this city: two elderly, severe-looking men and, seated between them, a woman of indeterminate age with eyes as sharp and cold as freshly minted silver. All three wear the dark, immaculate attire of the Guild's highest echelons. They are not bankers; they are princes of commerce.
Arnaud steps aside, gesturing for you and Louie to enter. "Janus and his associate," he announces, his voice a low formality.
The central woman inclines her head slightly, her silver eyes appraising you with an unnerving intensity. The air is thick with the silent, crushing weight of immense wealth and power.
"Welcome, gentlemen," she says, her voice like the quiet rustle of banknotes. "We understand you have created a disruption in our market. Please, have a seat. Tell us how."