The sails out there almost cloud out the water. I had Hala start gifting paint to the dockyards; I enjoy the way it makes the sails come to life as the sun touches the water. We will free ourselves, we will take to the seas, a poor imitation of our forebearers, but they sailed too, didn’t they? There are so many lands out there, so much to see. I dream that will make the march worth it.

  -Prince Kas Van Dialla

  Baths are wondrous things. So much work put in to create a few fleeting moments of pleasure. On the orchard we had only cold baths, unless you were willing to work to change that, spending time heating the water, lugging it back and forth from the fire to the tub, but it was always worth the effort, the issue was it not so much being worth the fuel to stoke the fire. In Westgrove, I could pay for someone else to put in all the effort, and soak in warm water, trying not to count how many hours of my life I had spent just so that my water would be warm. In Grim, I discover, they have something called a shower.

  The first night in the hotel, a nice place at the bottom of the upper third, not too expensive, but the amenities were lavish. I spent a good hour beneath the split water, letting it pour and trickle over my skin, sitting on the stone floor of the boxy compartment in the bathing room. The hotel even had an arrangement of soaps to scrub with, four designed for hair by itself. Half my time in the warm running water was spent experimenting with it, trying to decide which soap fit to my new crimson strands the best, being unable to figure it out. My hair was as smooth as silk now no matter what I used. Exeter, those devil curls of orange are finally gone.

  When I finally drag myself away from the washroom, there is a silver tray carrying three white porcelain plates waiting for me on the single bed with a note. I read the scrawl over, eyes more attracted to the food. Jess went out into the city for the night. I told her earlier that I was busy, so I don’t mind her leaving me alone back in the room. After spending the entire day going from shop to shop, I feel like I can use a night to relax alone. It is probably a good idea for each of us to find some alone time.

  She left me a steak, now cold, an entire plate stacked with various fried vegetables, and a hand-sized cake with a bite taken out of it. I sear the steak again with a burning finger, finding it absolutely delicious when I settle down to eat. I didn’t realize how much I missed professional cooking, done with real equipment, not just some bowls and hoarded spices out over a makeshift fire. Before I realize, the steak and veggies are gone, and I scoop up the cake, heading to the big, golden door blocking the closet.

  The vault door spins open at my approach. Descending the stairs inside toward the near-empty floor, I savor the bite of berry and cream filling inside the pastry, forcing away any thoughts about expense, casting a glance over to some crates stacked in a corner. How did the rich possibly live like this every day? Where did they get all the money from? The itch to open my inventory window and look at the amount and type of currency I still hold nags at me, but I force that deep, deep down.

  The inventory window flashes open anyway, and I run my finger along the top boxes, trying to decide what to do first. The plate I am carrying in my other hand decides for me. I tap a box, and a table appears, clacking as it falls a few inches to land on the hard floor of the vault. The table is twenty feet long and six wide, made of wood the color of smoke, Cinderwood apparently, twice as heavy as oak. Just storing it away until I could bring it back to the hotel had taken up a good chunk of my entire inventory space. It is only after I set the plate down on top of it, sneaking another bite of the cake first, that I realize it’s now where I would like it, up against the wall. Afraid to break the legs under its huge weight, I spend a good three minutes moving one side, running around the table, lifting and moving the other, until I eventually have it snug against the vault wall.

  After that, I am far more meticulous about where I place the rest of the furniture. A fine four-post bed is set in a corner, fabrics of orange and pink draping it in a veil. I have always wanted a bed like that. The mattress that I work on top of it costs easily five times as much as the frame of shining brass, but its feathery softness is worth every iron penny. I place a table next to the bed, unfurl a glorious emerald colored rug in the center of the vault that covers almost half the floor, arrange a set of ox-leather chairs in a corner around a glass table, set Arabella’s bookshelf, now stained with water marks and with dirt caking the stubby legs, against a wall. Three more empty bookshelves go next to the first, each made of that same Cinderwood, heavy, embossed with dancing horses, and exorbitant in price.

  When I am finally done with all of the furnishing, I skip back up the stairs near the vault door. Looking back down…it is still far too empty. The idea of stacking coins throughout the chamber is appealing and is also what I was told that a vault is for, but I can’t bring myself to make my personal funds that vulnerable. Who knows who out there could break into this place, located in my soul, and pilfer all of my gold if I just leave it lying about. It strikes me that keeping it inside my ring might be less safe than that, but if I took it all out, I couldn’t look at the big number anymore. An impossible quandary.

  I put thoughts of money aside, again, and look at the crates stacked in a corner. Time to get to work.

  Schlepping the crates over to my fabulous new table, I busy myself with first pulling out all of the equipment that I purchased at Erika’s shop earlier today. I arrange the glass tubes, vials, glass cups with graduation marks on their outsides to measure with, steel circles with lips designed to hold containers in place, burners that are themselves products of enchantment, columns with odd chambers inside meant for trapping or separating gasses, a trunk with a plush and springy inside for storing volatile mixtures, a set of heavy gloves, a tall machine with three different chambers of various size called a thaumatometer, the various boxes containing the many mediums I now possess, and finally a heavy steel box in which I have stored my black sand. Putting everything out takes the better part of an hour, and at the end of it, I am still not satisfied. At the end of it, I set down a fine chair made of dark wood, plush maroon cushions, and a theme of spiraling lines in front of the table, completing the look with a simple mat of cerulean on the table in front of it to complete the arrangement. My enchanting table is, at last, ready for use.

  No, don’t dwell on the expense. Stop it.

  I fall into the chair, scooting out the footrest already set beneath the table, and kick my feet up while I stack all the books Erika recommended to me in easy reach. It might be a good idea to go out and find a real tutor in the enchanting art, but I feel like doing so will tie me down too long to the city. I don’t have any plans for staying here that much longer.

  Idly, I flip through a more advanced tome written explicitly on describing the interaction of mana affixes with one another. My original glossary has proven invaluable, but this book contains second and third order interactions, what might happen when three or four different sources of specific power meet. The information is fascinating, the effects almost never what I might have predicted. I smirk, finding a section listing what the confluence of fire, lightning, and stone might do together, but I already know that one, violent explosion.

  There are graphical illustrations throughout, which helps me, just an uncultured and church-educated bumpkin, understand at least some of what the book describes. My attention curls back to another of the books I tossed out on the desk, one about something called physics. No illustrations there.

  Up the stairs, from the door to the vault, I hear the door in the hotel room. Jess peeks her head inside, finding me reclined in the chair, flipping through some pages.

  “How was the city?” I ask her.

  “Interesting.” She leans against the wall of the vault door, looking down at me over crossed arms. “I see that you have been decorating.”

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  “Seemed like a good idea.” I think to offer her something to drink, a good host should always have something to offer visitors and realize that I hadn’t made that part of my shopping trip. Perhaps I still need a cabinet. Decorate it with some nice crystal. Buy those fancy liquors that are interesting colors, make the whole thing seem fancy. No, don’t look at your money again, you already know the number!

  “I ran into Jor’Mari earlier,” Jess says.

  That gets me to snap the book closed. “You did? I would have thought he’d leave the city by now.”

  “Nope.” She laughs a little. “Found him at a bar, it’s a place like a tavern except you can’t sleep there, it’s dirtier, and the good ones have almost no room.”

  “I know what a bar is,” I say, feeling a little silly for the distance between us. Halford never would shut up about the one time he had been to the capital and lost half his money in a dice game inside one. “Never did understand not having beds in the same place people drink. What do they do with them when they start falling over?”

  “I just said that you can’t sleep there. I didn’t say there weren’t any beds.” She must get the reaction she is looking for in me, because she snickers and shakes her head. “They are calling him Gallant now.”

  “Who, Jor’Mari?”

  Jess nods. “He looked so fine, sitting on some plush couch, serving women hanging off his arms, a drunk woman practically falling over herself to get into his lap. Gallant, buy us a drink. Gallant, tell us that story about that one thing again. Gallant, flash us that smile so we can pretend to swoon. He spat his drink all over that drunk woman’s face when I snuck up behind him and whispered in his ear. Oh, what a night. Do you like dancing?”

  “I do.” I picture Jor’Mari sitting there in some strange lighting, lavender and blue in my head, with three barely dressed women hanging all over him. He would be wearing that robe of his too, probably they would be running their hands over his chest while he has that damned smirk on his face. “I don’t know what city dancing is like though.”

  “You can barely even call it dancing,” Jess agrees, leaning over the rail at the top of the stairs. “He invited us to go with him to the dungeon tomorrow. Apparently, the one they have in Grim puts those others we saw in the trial to shame.”

  “Do you really want to go and kill more monsters?” I ask, groaning as I flop back in the chair. “We just got done doing that for two months.”

  “No, you killed monsters for two months. I was done in the first three weeks. Then, I just spent time watching you get impaled or cut up from my nice cushion because you didn’t want me to help you, whenever I wasn’t busy fixing the dents and breaks in your armor.”

  “Soul reinforcement is less effective when someone else is helping you,” I say.

  “Is it?”

  I shrug. “Seems to be, for me at least.”

  “He asked about you, you know.” She hums. “Where is Red, I thought you were with her?”

  “He calls me Red?” I find myself climbing the stairs. Jess just turns sideways on the rail, smirking up at me as I reach the landing. A part of me does like her having to look up at me now, perhaps a petty part of me.

  “I assume he was talking about you,” she says. “Wouldn’t make sense if he was talking about me. Then again, he was pretty drunk. Do you want to go show off for him with me tomorrow?”

  I can’t help but roll my eyes. “I’ve never shown off for him before, why start now? You and Gallant can go murder all the monsters you want; I’m trying to figure out other things.”

  “That’s what I figured.” Jess pushed back from the rail, walking backward into the hotel room. “That’s a nice-looking bed you have in there,” she calls. “Mind if I borrow it some time?”

  “As long as you’re not afraid of getting locked in here while I’m gone.”

  That stops her in her tracks. She considers for a moment before shaking her head. “Nah.”

  “I’m going to get back to work then,” I say, heading down the steps. “Enjoy your own bed. Maybe spend some time in the shower.”

  “Why do you say that?” she calls from around the corner, but I’m already down the steps making my way back to the table. “Charlene! Why do you say that!?” Some grumbling comes from the top of the steps after, but soon enough I hear the splash of running water on stone.

  I try to turn my mind back to the books, back to trying to wrap my head around principles that are so foreign I can’t even figure out why I can’t figure them out, but that image of Jor’Mari keeps coming back to me when I find my mind drifting. Him there, some wasted woman with her ass in his lap, red-head probably, with big pouty lips, trying to peck at his face while he keeps playfully pulling his own lips back.

  “Gah!” I snap the book shut, tossing it down on the table. There is other work to be about, some that requires a lot less thinking.

  I gesture over to the steel box I set out earlier, commanding the black sand inside to come to me, and am delighted when a trickle of the fine grains begins to seep from the thin crack beneath the lid. The rubbing of the sand against the steel buzzes the air with a rattling rasp, the motes of sand lazily streaming toward my palm, spiraling three inches above my hand into a ball that draws in more and more. I pull all of the sand out, watching the mass swirl in front of me, all thoughts of the world outside this vault vanishing.

  The spinning ball of black goes sailing away at my command, careening toward the crates I have piled in a corner of the room. After six feet, the sand drops from the air like a stone in flight, scattering across the floor of the vault, seeping into the lush carpet I just rolled out. Huh, perhaps there is a limit to how far I can move it. I think back to when I first made the material. My soul presence was the first thing the dust that then became sand interacted with, maybe that is a part of it.

  I weigh that a moment, the swirl of sensation that drove me into unconsciousness when I pressed too far out with the presence against perhaps being able to throw the sand all the way over to those crates. The decision is fairly easy to make. I’m a girl that needs to consciously remember my fears to get them to stop me from doing foolish things. Recovering from painful events is what I am specialized in now. If it happens again, I’ll just wake up again, except this time I won’t be half-naked.

  Hesitantly, like a child leaving its mother for the first time to see if other children will either hurt it or play with it, my soul presence drifts from my skin. I am careful with it, applying as little force as I can, watching as it crawls through the air toward the spot with the sand, feeling as it washes over the edge of the carpet. It is as if my own hand is running over the fabric, the texture running smooth against my palm, the coolness of the metallic floor seeping into my skin. I feel the first grain of the sand, and at the same time the knowledge of what I touch enters my mind. A speck too small to even see, a coarse kernel that by all means should glint gold in the light but does not. It rolls with the wave of red, sticking into another grain as the two are brought together. A tickle runs over me as thousands upon thousands of tiny grains start to shift inside the presence, kneading together at my command, pooling into a jagged obelisk on the floor, eight-sided like a pyramid reflected in water.

  The sand rises off the floor, streams of minute particles pulled toward it out of the carpet as it begins to levitate, and it drinks them in. I continue to push against my own reticence, the soul presence expanding even more, almost filling the vault, before I stop. The black sand drifts through the presence like a fish in water, swimming comfortably, at the whims of no force other than my own will. It thunks against the nearest crate, and I command it to become soft. It pools against the wood, smooshing until it has no shape left to it. I imagine the sand running around the other side of the crate, becoming a stiff square at its back, and it squirms out of sight against the wood. I can still sense it, almost see it, inside my soul presence, growing firm once more on the far side. I jerk my hand back, some instinct, and the sand tries to rush toward me. The crate topples over, flipping once, and the black sand rushes off its side and into the air.

  I takes me a good dozen tries to get the sand to bring me the crate. In that time, I could have likely moved all of the crates over to the table by hand. When I finally have it, I crack the thing open, pulling out all kinds of monster parts that I have collected over the past months, tossing them unorganized onto the table. Each one sparks a strange sensation on the back of my tongue, each having its own kind of mana carried within. I sit back in my chair when the whole crate is empty, looking between the contents out on the table, the several crates and chests still stacked in the corner, and the ball of black sand levitating at my shoulder–Galea flying around it, inspecting it with big eyes.

  “Maybe I should have bought more mediums.”

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