It was then that she thought to just get back in bed and realized something. Her side of the bed was not one that would be directly illuminated by the moon. Next, she realized that Zef was nowhere to be seen, and that in fact, the room around her was like a smudged painting - it held up when her focus was on something else, like a mutant cock attached where one certainly had not been previously, but under any real scrutiny it fell apart.

Zel looked out the window. There was nothing outside - no sky, no street, nothing, just the moonlight. Not even a moon in the place one would expect it over the mountains given the angle of the light.

Indeed, nothing out the window.

Just her own reflection in the glass, pointed stag horns growing from her brow and her face masked by a bear’s skull.

Then she woke up, and found some relief in the fact that no such extreme mutation had taken place, and that she was not trapped in a bizarre dream realm. The dream, however, remained clear as reality itself in her mind.

It hung there, like a question waiting to be answered.

Zel decided to just go on with the day as normal, as always slipping out of bed without waking Zef, going through her usual routine and going to the kitchen to have breakfast. She found that Makhus was awake, eating some bread with lard, tomato, and onion of all things. Zel poured herself some water, warmed up some leftover blue meat from the previous day and fried two eggs to go with it, using some of that nigh-magical meat-undrying concoction to make a subpar breakfast into a decent one.

Despite all-consuming muscle ache, a part of her wanted to do at least some training today, but such a decision was not one she would get to make. Before she could finish her meal, a still half-asleep Zefaris poked her head into the kitchen, wearing an oversized gold-trimmed white shirt through whose semi-transparent fabric glowed a set of highly ornamental black and cochineal-red lingerie.

Unsurprisingly, it had turned out that the Locust Queen’s exploitation of the Dungeon Core produced not a wardrobe of clothing not opulent just on the surface, but made from high-grade Fog-infused fabrics and colored with cartoonishly expensive dyes. Zel almost felt like she’d wasted all that money commissioning Bherad.

Surprisingly, despite Zef’s incessant protests and claims that it wouldn’t fit and that she hated this sort of thing, Zel got the distinct impression that she wasn’t all too eager to replace it with mass-produced cotton.

“The uh… The governor’s son is looking into the displays out in front, he’s got a letter. I’m pretty sure he’s here for you,” she murmured, shuffling through the kitchen. The blonde squatted down in front of the fridge, looked into it, then turned to Zel with a question: “Mind seeing if there’s a food cart nearby once you deal with the brat?”

“Sure,” she nodded with a smile, remembering that Willowdale’s streets had been all but flooded by Kargarians in recent days leading up to the arrival of the main caravan. The option of just buying breakfast hadn’t even come to her still-waking mind. She quickly finished her food, but not so quickly as to miss out on watching Zef stand up, stretch, yawn, and drink a glass of water. Sure, the markswoman looked damn good as she was, but Zel’s reason laid more so in the fact that the whole situation just felt nice. The same tranquil warmth she’d felt most every morning on the way back to Willowdale from the Dungeon.

Zef raised an eyebrow, muttering most of the way through the glass: “Whuh?”

“Nothing,” Zel chuckled, getting up. “Just you.”

Just in time as she neared the ground floor, she nearly collided with Sigmund, who was busy running back and forth to stock shelves with newly-refilled bottles. She promised to help later, asked if he wanted breakfast from a food cart, and went on her way out the door keeping in mind the beardo’s request for something sweet.

Halxian’s eyes trailed her the entire way across the storefront, and by the time she stepped out the front door he was already right there holding out a hand with a letter.

“The caravan will arrive approximately at three in the afternoon today. Furthermore, I wish to formally inform you of my intentions to apply for discipleship under the Newman Family,” rattled off the young man.

“I preferred it when you called me a hag,” Zel grinned.

He grinned right back, “The old man made me promise to say that spiel word for word. I look forward to watching you beat that golem into rubble.”

“Who-” she began, but cut herself off, sighing. “Of course Krishorn talked about it, she’d want an audience.”

The grin on the young man’s face grew twice over and he asked, “So she did make a deal with you? I figured that crazy bitch would want to make a show of something like that. Nice to be right for once.”

“Yeah yeah, just piss off won’t you. I’ll savor every moment not having to see that shit-smeared peach fuzz on your lip from now on,” grumbled the beast-slayer, stowing the letter and making a beeline for the first Kargarian food cart that came into her sightline just to get away from that kid. The less antagonistic he was, the more he infuriated her, and she was certain he knew it.

Cutting across the promenade and weaving between an uncharacteristically dense amount of pedestrians, Zelsys found the food cart to have a line four people long. Yet, before she could even get a good look at the cart or whoever was manning it, the line was down to three. He moved with speed and deftness, entirely unbecoming a mere street food vendor, and spoke with a cartoonishly exaggerated Pateirian accent, only fitting for the cart’s theme. Just as cartoonish as its proprietor’s performance, the cart resembled an exaggerated form of Pateirian architecture, specifically that of royal palaces, slightly similar to the style of the sect property.