In the Dragon Cult offices, the neatest desk in the temple starts tracking what no one wants counted.
Gale arrived before the receptionist unlocked the front door and before Jack the PR Director began smiling at anyone he could trap in the sales booth. That was the only hour when the office made sense. The waiting room chairs sat in rows. The coffee tables held magazines nobody had yet pretended to read. The brochures in the tourist office still formed clean stacks beneath the plaque, every one of them promising cool robes, free tickets, and all the other benefits of belonging to something that called itself a temple when visitors were nearby.
She carried the new appointment book against her chest and crossed Dragon Hall without looking too long at the paintings. The dragons always won in those scenes. That was not the troubling part. The troubling part was that the painted soldiers seemed to be standing farther back than they had last week, as if even old pigment had learned caution.
In her office, everything had a place. Papers low. Certificates high. Ink to the right. Incoming forms in the tray marked TODAY, outgoing forms in the tray marked LIE BETTER. Fred called that humor. Gale called it filing.
By midmorning, the organization was moving at full ugly speed. A shrill ringing sound came from the main office. Fred shouted from his mess of cigar butts and random junk. Jack tried to explain the organization to a traveler who had only asked for directions. Marie slipped into the break room for coffee and returned with a look that said she had smelled the basement again. Two minor priests scuffled past in dark robes, their staffs tapping the floor a little too fast.
"Inventory variance," Gale said.
Nobody stopped, so she said it louder.
The old monk from the candy shop finally appeared with his list. Dragon Candy, Zombie Candy, Lich Candy, and the other strange little pills were all present in their jars, but the Dragon Candy had been handled. Not stolen. Handled. Seven pieces had black dust pressed into their wrappers, and one wrapper held a fleck of green no larger than a grain of salt.
Gale sealed it in a folded memo and wrote NO ACTION REQUIRED across the top, because that was the only way Fred ever read anything twice.
After lunch, the High Priestess sent down a request for revised sacrifice timing, three replacement robe orders, and a note asking why the Black Dragon Wyrmling had refused its morning feeding until the steel door was shut again. The note smelled faintly of ash. The handwriting had pressed so hard through the page that Gale could feel every letter from the back.
Outside the glass wall of her office, Bob passed with a black pen behind one ear and a face full of explanations. Gale let him keep walking. Explanations were where facts went to die.
She made her rounds at dusk. Waiting Room, presentable. Tourist Office, brochures restacked. Dragon Hall, paintings unchanged except for a tiny empty space on one battlefield where a green smear might once have been a wing. Shrine candles, steady. Place of Worship, chalk circle intact. Priests' Quarters, neat except for dirt around the loose tile. The downward tunnel breathed up the stench of human flesh and old danger, and Gale did not go down.
Back at her desk, she copied the day's final numbers into the ledger. Appointments missed: four. Robes requested: three. Candy variance: one trace. Wyrmling agitation: continuing. Public incidents: none.
That last line was the important one. Public incidents were what turned halls into mobs and offices into ruins.
Gale sharpened her pencil, squared the papers, and listened to the temple settle into its night sounds: chants below, sales talk above, claws somewhere behind steel. On the corner of her cleanest form, where no one else would notice, a single green speck caught the lamplight and went dark.