Saetha smiled, and for a moment she looked less like an NPC and more like someone who had been sitting with a very long story and was finally being asked to tell it.
"The stories speak of a time before time," she said, "when the builders of this realm created not just walls, but also doors. For those wise enough to find the keys. Seven locks, seven keys, seven trials that test not just strength and cunning, but understanding of the world's deeper truths."
She turned to a specific page in Marcus's journal. A hand-drawn map, twelve zones rendered in his careful engineering notation, each one labeled with the shorthand we had used during development. Abbreviated names I recognized because I had coined them. Annotations in his small crossbar-seven handwriting that filled the margins.
It was
