The Forgotten Continent

Ten years ago, Aldric lost a bet. He should have seen it coming. Now he runs the Adventurer's Guild from a desk in the eastern district of a city called Aldenmere, with a stack of paperwork that has never once been fully cleared and an endless mountain visible from his window that nobody in the city has ever thought to ask about. The monsters are getting worse. Across the whole continent, the dungeons are getting worse. Something underneath the world is shifting and nobody in any currently standing civilisation has the framework to name what it is. Something beyond the world is answering a call it was never supposed to receive. Something without a name in any language currently spoken. Something that has been waiting, with the patience of things that do not measure time the way civilisations do, for the moment the door opens wide enough. The moment is getting closer. The village elder walked four hours to file her complaint. Lord Edric called it a decisive tactical repositioning of available grain resources. Aldric filed it appropriately. The universe, Aldric thought, wants me buried under the paperwork. Mira, his assistant and a dear friend, finds this amusingly satisfying every single day. The guild is ten years old. It handles granary wall complaints, processes recruitment applications every season, and manages the careers of adventurers from E-rank to S — ordinary institutional operations for an institution that is, underneath all of it, anything but ordinary. What follows is not a story about heroes. It is a story about what institutions do when the thing they were built to prevent arrives ahead of schedule. Beneath the surface of the guild, beneath the surface of the kingdom, there are people who have been watching this continent across more eras than any current civilisation has existed. They know what is coming. They have always known. And after everything — after eras of battles, of dynasties rising and falling, of things that should not exist being sent back to where they came from — it turns out the paperwork is what gets them in the end. The stack has no mercy. Not even for the old ones. — ✦ — If you are enjoying The Forgotten Continent, early access chapters are available on Patreon. Updates every Monday — always five chapters ahead of Royal Road.