Colm collects his pay at the Ardglass Guild for escorting a farmer's goat. He gets eleven copper instead of the posted fifteen, because the farmer docked him four after the goat ate Colm's hat and got a stomachache. While he's at the counter, he overhears a tipsy woman named Mags talking about her friend Tobin's discovery: a new dungeon in the north end of Moonlight Grove that isn't in the log book. Tobin's familiar went all the way through without trouble, and he's reporting it to the Guild tomorrow. Colm memorizes the directions, past the charcoal pits to a rock split down the middle, and runs back to camp.

By Guild law, no one can go into a dungeon until the Guild rates it, but the first party inside gets the best loot. At camp, the rest of the party is out: Hedda and Pell are at a bar playing dice, and Tess is with a man she just met. Only Agnes, the party's healer and a nun of Althea, is there, hanging Colm's laundry. He pitches going in tonight, before the dungeon is reported. …

Colm and Agnes teleport to the north end of Moonlight Grove at dusk. The jump makes Colm sick, as teleporting always does, and he turns down Agnes's offer of a healing spell. The scroll drops them right where he wrote: past the charcoal pits, at a rock split down the middle with a tall metal door set inside the split. The door is covered in carvings of circles inside circles. Colm finds it strangely calming to look at.

Agnes notices a half-circle of dead, bare dirt in front of the door that gives off a faint sweet smell. She reminds Colm of his promise to turn back if anything looked wrong. He argues that the other party's familiar came out fine. She answers, "Familiars don't breathe," and he has no comeback. He agrees to turn around. Then they face the dark woods with no scroll and half a day's walk home, and he talks his way into "just one touch" to see if the door is locked.

When he touches the door, it shudders and pours out pale purple smoke that smells of the same sweetness. C…

Colm wakes up inside the dungeon to Agnes slapping him awake, hugging him, then punching his arm for breaking his “one touch” promise. They’re in a curving hallway of wine-red brick with purple mist on the floor, there’s no teleport circle to show how they got in, and doors with torches keep appearing as they walk. When they spot a door with two empty torch holders, the ones they took, they realize they’ve been walking in a loop, so Colm draws his sword and kicks the door open.

Colm kicks open the door and finds a dusty bedroom. Agnes sneaks up behind him while he’s examining a slime core and scares him so badly he squeals, and she teases him about it. She then realizes from the books that the room belonged to an alchemist, so Colm packs everything into his adventurer’s sack, down to a chipped cup and a pair of slippers, before they head back into the looping hallway, with Agnes walking a little closer to him than before.

Colm and Agnes find the alchemist’s lab, with its huge cold stone table, scalpels and anatomy drawings, among them a man with something long coiled inside him. They loot it all and keep walking, until Colm stops for a break and realizes Agnes has vanished without a sound, so he runs back the way they came to find her.

Colm runs back down the hallway to find Agnes and notices that the doors they passed have vanished into solid brick. He reaches a pair of marble boss doors, shoves them open without checking for traps, and finds Agnes lying on the floor in front of an open stone box.