Time was still playing tricks on me. After the ordeal with the mind-bending beast, I was still catching up with reality. What I thought had been a short break had been ten weeks. Silven was patient, but patience had its limits.   When I arrived at The Gilded Wyvern, Silven barely looked up from his cards. "Took your sweet time getting back," he muttered.   I sat down, tossing a coin pouch onto the table. "I had... distractions."   "Distractions that make ten weeks feel like a few days?" Silven finally looked at me, his violet eyes unreadable. "Either you've been hitting the bottle harder than I thought, or you tangled with something nasty."   I shrugged. "Let’s just say it was the kind of creature that eats time."   Silven exhaled slowly, rubbing his temple. "Why do I even bother asking?" He shook his head and gestured toward the cards. "Let’s see if you still remember anything from before you got yourself lost in time."   The game resumed.   ----------------------------------   Day One: A Shaky Restart   I could tell right away—I was rusty. The hesitation in my hands, the miscalculations in my bets, the slight twitch when I tried to bluff. Silven capitalized on it ruthlessly.   "You're playing like a drunk merchant trying to barter with his last copper," he scolded. "Get your head back in the game, or you’ll be broke before you blink."   I clenched my jaw and forced myself to refocus. The rhythm of the game—the rise and fall of bets, the delicate balance between risk and reward—I had to fall back into it, like a warrior remembering the dance of battle.   By the final hand of the night, I was starting to feel it again. But I still had a long way to go.   --------------------------------------------------   Day Two: Whispers in the Tavern   Silven took me to a new table that night—new faces, new risks. A grizzled dwarf named Torvik, a sharp-eyed human noble named Elira, and a half-orc who simply went by "Nash."   The game was tense, but what caught my attention wasn’t the cards. It was the rumors swirling through the tavern.   "Some of my boys saw it," Torvik muttered, shuffling his cards. "Strange lights—green and gold, flickering across the sky over the eastern Wyrm Mountains. They don’t move like normal auroras, and they sure as hell ain't mage lights."   Elira nodded. "Not just in the east. The central peaks too. Some travelers swear they saw the mountains themselves breathing."   The table fell silent for a moment.   Then Nash, the half-orc, leaned forward. "That ain't the worst of it," he said, voice low. "You hear about the beast?"   Elira scoffed. "People are always talking about some beast."   Nash shook his head. "Not like this one. Something massive, bigger than any dragon’s got a right to be. Some say it’s got scales thick as castle walls and a maw that could swallow a house whole. But the strangest part? The thing's been spotted moving underground—but when it burrows, there ain't no tunnel left behind. Just a pit of nothing where it passed."   Torvik paled. "That's... not natural."   "No," Nash agreed. "It ain't."   The game continued, but my mind was spinning.   ----------------------------------------------   Day Three: Playing the Players   The rumors stuck with me, but I forced myself to focus. Silven drilled me in reading the players, not just the cards.   "Elira bluffs when she has nothing," he murmured as I observed. "But when she’s got a good hand, she barely breathes."   Torvik adjusted his rings whenever he was unsure of his bet. Nash, for all his bravado, clutched his cards just a little too tightly when he was hiding a weak hand.   I used what I learned. I folded when Elira smirked too easily. I raised when Torvik started fidgeting. I pushed Nash into a bigger bet when I saw his grip tighten.   By the end of the night, my winnings were heavier than before.   Silven gave me an approving nod. "Now you’re playing like someone who belongs at the table."   -------------------------------------------------   Day Four: The Art of the Bluff   Silven didn't just want me to read people. He wanted me to control them.   "You need to learn how to make them believe what you want them to," he said. "If you can sell a bluff, you don’t even need a good hand to win."   He forced me into bad hands, making me play as if I had the strongest cards in the deck. The first few times, I failed miserably. My voice wavered, my bets hesitated.   "Again," Silven growled.   I adjusted. I kept my expression even, made my movements fluid, my words confident. I pushed my luck in ways that felt natural, ways that made my opponents second-guess themselves.   I started winning hands I had no business winning.   Silven smirked. "Now that is how you play the long game."   -----------------------------------------------------   Day Five: Rumors at the High-Stakes Table   That night, Silven brought me to a different kind of table—higher stakes, sharper players. Men and women who didn’t just play for coin, but for power.   These were people who knew things.   I overheard whispers about a mercenary band refusing contracts in the Wyrm Mountains—said they weren’t getting paid enough to deal with "whatever was up there."   A noble mentioned an entire village near the foothills disappearing overnight—"no tracks, no bodies, just gone."   And a dark-cloaked figure spoke of a deep tremor in the mountains, felt even in Isondale. "Like something waking up beneath the stone," he muttered. "Like the world itself taking a breath."   The words made my skin crawl.   -------------------------------------------------   Day Six: High Risk, High Reward   Silven pushed me into a riskier game—higher stakes, bigger risks. I had to be bold. I had to trust my instincts.   I made one big bluff—a reckless move, one that should have ended in disaster. But I committed to it fully.   And it worked.   Silven grinned. "That’s it. That’s the kind of confidence that wins games—and gets you killed if you’re not careful."   ----------------------------------------------------------   Day Seven: A Gambler’s Instinct   The final night, Silven and I played one-on-one again. No talking. Just cards.   I didn’t hesitate. I felt the game. I read his moves, his strategy. I adapted.   I won.   Silven leaned back, tapping his fingers on the table. "Not bad," he admitted. "You’re still rough around the edges, but you’ve got the instincts. Another few weeks, and you might just be dangerous."   I smirked, gathering my cards. "Good. Because I have a feeling I'm going to need every trick I can get."   Silven chuckled. "Just don’t go betting against the beast in the mountains. Even I wouldn’t play that hand."   Glynhorn’s training wasn’t finished, but he was learning fast. And as the shadows deepened over the Wyrm Mountains, he had the sinking feeling that he’d need more than luck to survive what was coming.