“Is that pounding in my head . . . or at the door?” Umbric mumbled into a wine-drenched pillow.

“The door,” Rommath grunted, though the muffled sound indicated he was applying a pillow to his own face.

“Someone should get that,” Umbric said.

“Someone should,” Rommath agreed. “I shall cheer for your success.”

“Please do not. The noise might kill me.” With a groan to answer Rommath’s quiet snicker, Umbric tumbled off the couch. In his seven years as a student in Dalaran—barely the blink of an eye to a high elf—he was certain he’d never actually been this hungover before. The friends he’d made among his fellow students of the arcane, Rommath chief among them, were normally a boon to his soul and a balm to his spirit . . . Though in this case they were the author of his pounding headache, the culmination of an end-of-term party that had spanned four pubs and then devolved into a game of Archmage’s Cup, using a deck of cards that had apparently been all archmages. Squinting against the light, Umbric staggered across the tiny room the Kirin Tor considered suitable accommodations for students.

Umbric didn’t know what he’d expected to find upon dragging open the door. A flood or fire or plague of magicked, carnivorous cheesecakes, at the least. (No, that was last week . . .) Instead, a decaying book was thrust at his face, brandished with the same intensity that most people reserved for displaying a prized fish, driving him back a step.

“Romm—oh, it’s you, Umbric. Took you long enough.”

Umbric squinted at the pallid, narrow face behind the tome, the normally sullen expression replaced with a grin that couldn’t seem to settle on being smug or manic. “Dar’Khan . . . What . . . ?”

Dar’Khan Drathir elbowed his way in, shutting the door behind him with a wave of his hand. “World-shattering brilliance is not to be kept waiting on the doorstep.”

“What?” Umbric repeated.

Dar’Khan frowned at him, then leaned forward and took a speculative sniff before giving him a look eloquent in its communication of disgust. “I believe that wine is meant to be taken internally, Umbric.” He glanced over at the sodden lump of blankets that Rommath had cocooned himself in and sighed. “Neither of you are any use in this state.” He pointed at Umbric, then over at the small table that Rommath ostensibly used for dining. “Sit.” With shocking efficiency, Dar’Khan proceeded to rout Rommath out of bed and brewed a pot of strong herbal tea that he insisted would cure any ailment.

Perhaps his claims about the tea weren’t entirely bluster. Less than half an hour later, Umbric felt dangerously close to alive, and Rommath was leafing through Dar’Khan’s tome. “Well, Dar’Khan, you have done it,” Rommath said dryly. “You have found a book by the only person with handwriting worse than yours.”

Dar’Khan rolled his eyes. “It is in code, you imbecile.”

Umbric batted Rommath’s hands away from the book and pulled it closer so he could squint at the spidery writing. “And you have deciphered it?”

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