“Salvar, Raiaera, the Aleran dead lands... nothing close enough for me to make it back to claim the reward for finishing by the end of the month,” Glacies muttered under his breath as he tucked a loose strand of hair behind his ear while reading the ledgers. “Plenty of unpaid accounts, but I'm not here to be a basher and force people to pay up or get bloodied. I want to go out there somewhere and come back with riches... or artifacts... or something to show for the effort I put into the job.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose and looked up as the light of his reading lamp began to die. He sighed and rubbed his right temple with two fingers. He closed the hard leather bound book and slid it under his arm as he stood up and turned around. He reached down in the dimming light and grabbed the handle of his travel pack, the old burlap holding up surprisingly well for how much weight it had carried over the years. He brought the book back to the ledger keeper of the headquarters and laid it carefully down on the table.

“Still nothing you think you can go after?” the book keeper asked.

“Nothing I can afford the start up money on,” Glacies admitted with a grimace. He needed some kind of capital or free supplies to get him to a site from which he could glean the kind of riches he sought.

“If only more of us had made it out of Concordia, but those spiders have probably eaten all of the horses and scattered the tools throughout the forests... Hell, all of the iron bits are probably rusted, as humid as that damned forest is.”

The book keeper tapped the feathered end of his quill against his chin and nodded, saying, “You're probably right on that note. There really isn't much that you can do to recover those goods. However, there is something that might interest you.”

“And what's that? I kind of doubt there are any active expeditions into Concordia again anytime soon looking for ancient ruins or anything,” Glacies said with a bitter laugh. The book keeper shook his head and slid a piece of paper across the rough wooden desk.

“No, but I did keep this one off the books in case you needed something like this. You're new, and I like that you've been keeping notes on unfinished and uncollected accounts for me while you've been searching for your precious first expedition. Consider it payment for your services.”

“Um... thanks, but you know I was only doing that as a favor in order to look through the books and find something unfinished I could do for myself to claim ownership of whatever's out there, right?”

“So? You still helped me out and got nothing out of your search. This isn't an old expedition, though. Someone requires the services of guards, experienced or otherwise. Should be easy enough, and the coin might give you the resources you need to mount an expedition even if it's outside of Scara Brae or even beyond Corone. What do you say?”

“Guard services? Does this guy at least have some idea of what he's actually going to be doing? I don't want another Concordia situation.”

“You should be fine. He's a former member of the Guild. He knows very well what he's doing. It's just a quick jaunt to an excavation site recently discovered in the hills south of here. The payment is pretty good for a short trip, all things considered.”

Glacies scraped his fingernail across the rough oaken surface and looked around. The hall was empty and darkened. The middle of the night was the best time for research and book keeping after all. There were so few who entered the record hall at this time of night.

“Fine, I'll check it out in the morning,” he said with a nod and walked off, waving as his footfalls slowly disappeared into the night's gloom.