Chapter 84: Daredevil

Ahead of their entry into the Golden Land, Lernen takes Edel to a man who outlived the fall of Weise, a former servant of the Gluck household who agrees to have his memories searched. In them Edel watches the feudal lord fasten the Stone Bracelet of Servitude onto Macht six decades earlier and lay down his commands: the demon is to guard Weise's people and all who come after them, to bear them no ill will, and to take his own life the instant any malice stirs in him. Edel catches the slack in that wording at once, remarking it would hold firm only against a human foe. Pressed on the lord's aim, the servant says the goal is reputedly great wealth.

Once across the barrier, Edel lays out the contradiction nagging at her: because Macht's gold can be neither broken nor reshaped, it would betray itself as counterfeit and carry no worth, ordinary gold being prized only for its scarcity and the ways it can be worked. Some unseen purpose, she insists, must still be in play. Lernen describes the land they are entering, a vista so dazzling it stirs greed, its villages long deserted and Weise itself slipped from memory, where the few who pierce the concealing magic to plunder the gold almost never come back, the great barrier built to repel demons and powerless to fully stop reckless men.

Further in, the pair pass the golden, impaled forms of Lernen's old comrades and a band of adventurers before Macht materializes at their backs. They should have retreated, he tells them, and when Lernen senses his reluctance, the demon admits he loathes fighting and shapes the slain into statues precisely to scare others off, so that only daredevils ever break his quiet. He draws a golden blade from his coat, but Lernen fires first and drives him to parry, declaring himself honored by the label and naming it the finest praise ever sent his way.

Through the servant's memory, Edel learns the loose terms by which the lord of Weise once bound Macht, and flags their fatal vagueness against a non-human foe. She and Lernen weigh how gold too inert to work undercuts the supposed hunt for riches. Deeper in the Golden Land, Macht ambushes them, and Lernen lands the first strike to open the fight.

Gluck is introduced, and the chapter revives the puzzle of why Weise's lord ever enslaved Macht when the gold he makes holds no usable worth. It reiterates that Diagoldze yields gold that can be neither broken down nor reshaped and that passes as common gold while being something else entirely.