Travel

"I don't know why we didn't just turn them away." Rethys remarked. "They themselves said that, that we weren't obligated to answer to them."

"Rethys, one does not simply turn away not one, but two Custodians. Yes, we could have technically done so, but it would have done us a disservice. They have already extended an unexpected helping hand with the teleportation incident, and it would have been in extremely bad taste for us to refuse them." Sevi explained.

"I see."

"I too have my share of gripes with them, especially the Titan, but we should not be sentimental about these things."

Reclining back into his chair, Rethys let out a heavy sigh.

"We still haven't decided on what to do." He said.

"I would say that we are in no rush to choose." Sevi replied.

"But we can't stay here forever."

"Hmm..." She began. "Our first order of business would be to acquire more information about the world and ourselves. Chief among these would be finding out your elemental affinities, so that we may know what we have to work with. If what Antinem said is true, then we would find be able to find appraisers in the closest town, along with the necessary equipment.

"Ideally you would have a high enough affinity with one of the material elements, that would save us some hassle. Actually, we could somewhat guess things right away. Which of the material elements do you feel suits you the best? Which of them 'resonates' with you? You must have seen most in action by now. Oh, and focus primarily on the four basic elements."

Rethys seriously considered Sevi's words, thoroughly thinking of the elements as he knew them and as his senses once felt them.

"No need to overthink things, it is only a matter of preferences." She noted.

It was quite easy to come to a conclusion if it was just about what he liked and didn't: he simply didn't like Fire, and Earth and Wind didn't appeal to him, which then left the element of Water, which he quite liked, especially with its versatile ability to manipulate both water and ice.

"Water, I think. I don't like the rest, especially Fire." He answered.

"I see. That is quite good. It is common for one to possess decent affinity in both a material and ethereal element. Origin is an ethereal element, and so it would be logical for you to have a high enough affinity with some material element, presumably Water. " Sevi revealed.

"So do I just attune or...?"

"No, not so quickly. Simple guesses and beliefs can only go so far, we need conclusive evidence provided by attested instruments."

"I see." He nodded. "So how do we go about it?"

"We will see once we get to Kalantor, though I doubt we would encounter any difficulty. Antinem had said that the mage ranks go through awakened Mages, unbound High Mages and Archmages, and ascendant Mage Lords. Of them, the ones I cannot subvert would be Mage Lords and perhaps the more powerful Archmages, and even then."

"Alright, if you say so." He answered as he stood up. "Let's take what we need from this place and move then, Kalantor should be a few days' travel southwestward."

And so Rethys set out to rummage through whatever valuables the clandestine mage and his hired hands had, while Sevi pored over the research he had been working on and the materials he had used.

"Do you really have to take his notes?" Rethys asked as he set down a bag full of food.

He was wearing thick furs and leathers now. It wasn't useful armor, and he didn't mind the cold either way, but wearing only the bare minimum in the middle of harsh winter was not exactly subtle.

The poachers had little in the way of actual valuables aside from coins and some shoddy jewelry, and the few weapons they had were completely useless to Rethys.

They had simple weapons: machetes, spears and bows for hunting, as well as a couple of swords which were unfit for mages with their superior strength.

A mage's sword would be broad to accommodate enchantments etched on its surface and have plenty of heft and hardness to be able to harm and be wielded by mages.

And though Rethys would've liked to find a decent enchanted weapon or two, this served as a reminder how he was no longer a magicless mortal. Though remembering what being a mage truly entailed instantly soured his mood.

"No knowledge is useless Rethys, even this may one day prove useful." She said as a pool of red appeared in the air and absorbed the papers. "Though the script is terribly hard to grasp. Come to think of it, your kingdom's script is wildly different from Yvtar's, how in the ether's sake were you able to read it?"

Her words made him recall the sleepless nights he spent with Fulgrith poring over all sorts of antiquated journals and notes to decipher knowledge of this rare ingredient or that unique phenomena. They were pleasant memories.

"My master and I used to go through a lot of different documents from all sorts of places. You should have seen him; he could read any human script and even different languages altogether." Rethys replied with a melancholic voice.

"Oh, I am sorry."

"It's nothing." He shook his head before changing the subject. "What else do you have in there?"

"Nothing, aside from these." She sighed despondently as alabaster chains fell from her spell and clattered to the ground. "I did not dare to use it to store valuables, untested as its power is, but now I wish I had just gone through with it..."

"I see." He replied awkwardly before trying to dispel the depressive mood that descended on the room. "On the other hand, the poachers had money to spare, thirty whole gold coins, mostly from the mage's quarters. We wouldn't have to worry about money for a while."

He was all smiles as he grabbed the purse from his new belt pouch and set it on the table, its coins jingling inside.

"Rethys, I do not know how much thirty golds is, elaborate, or at the very least tell me how much it can afford us. Can it, for example, equip and provision a functional laboratory up to the standards of those we have seen in Yvtar? Or at least up to your master's standards?" Sevi inquired.

Rethys scratched his head in thought, his mind shifting out of beggar mode and into assistant mode, recalling the many times he helped Fulgrith with replacing tools and buying new ones. His face then sank in realization as he started making calculations of this and that.

"We'd need hundreds of golds to bring a workshop to my master's standards. The thirty we have just means we won't have to worry about anything basic, but it wouldn't get us anything meaningful now that I think about it. So aside from gold coins, the rest are irrelevant..." Rethys sighed.

He thought back to the days when the sight of a copper coin on the ground made his day, and the sight of a silver coin was a momentous occasion, so much so that he still remembers every time he had held such wealth during his street days.

'Things changed.' He thought, his thoughts growing heavy.

"Even if we get that kind of money, we wouldn't be able to get anything you'd want. Remember how I told you that everything needs plenty of identification." He continued.

"I see." Sevi replied. "I believe I have an inkling of an idea now, but it would require you to be able to blend in with other mages without arousing suspicions, which would require suitable affinities and very hard work."

"What's on your mind?"

"It is but a mere thought for now, and I will share it with you once we find out your affinities and if further consideration does not invalidate the idea. For now, let us just be on our way."

*****

A while later, Rethys stepped outside of the cave entrance, wind ruffling his hair and cape. The sky was still gray and moody. But when was it not, here in the north. On a more positive note, the rain had let up.

He shuffled in his clothes; he didn't like how constraining they were. Combined with his missing arm and magical senses, his combat readiness was all but gone. Things were tolerable inside of the cave, but now outside of it, his paranoia was aggravated again.

"Sevi make sure you keep an eye out." He muttered as he glanced left and right.

"Yes, yes." She shrugged. "I am always scouting our surroundings, and now is no exception. Cease your needless worries."

"Alright." He nodded reluctantly as he began walking vaguely to the southwest.

The trip through frontier territories would take them a couple of days of travel before they would come upon the closest village, and then it would be a day more before they reached Kalantor.

The poachers seemingly didn't possess any sort of map on them, and so the duo was forced to simply rely on Sevi's scrying to point them in the right direction.

Eventually the scenery changed, from thick forest on one side and craggy cliffs on the other, to rolling hills of grass-less soil mostly devoid of life except for the occasional hardy shrub or two.

The expanses of lifeless hills went on and on and on, even with Rethys walking much faster than any normal person could. Even he, taciturn as he was, couldn't resist the temptation of jogging or sprinting or jumping or whatever distracted him from the ennui. It was almost like those periods of long travel in Yvtar's undergrounds.

'Except a thousand times better.' Rethys fervently nodded to himself.

He looked around, observing his dull surroundings and trying to spot anything interesting, but to no avail. It was too cold for any life to prosper here, in the absence of sufficient ether, and too magical for regular, non-magic nature to take its course. It was a weird, in-between region that once Rethys lingered too much on, looked sort of unsettling, with quiet dirt fields as far as the eye can see.

But thankfully, by the end of the first day of travel, snow had made an appearance.

It was at night when Rethys, deciding to forsake sleep and keep moving, slipped on a frozen puddle and fell to the ground, only to find it entirely covered in soft, downy snow. He hadn't realized that he had been walking through snowfields for hours then, what with it being night.

Still, he didn't mind it and soldiered onward, now much more mindful of his footing. His harsh insistence on continuing to walk through the night and at a brisk pace saw him finally encountering the first sign of true civilization, a farmstead.

It was unused at the time, seeing as it was harsh winter, but Rethys was able to find and follow a trail from there leading up to its associated farming village.

At a glance, the village seemed all but deserted, but Rethys knew that its inhabitants as well as the owners of the nearby farms were all huddled up inside of the village's winter manor, which served as a communal habitation during winter.

And aside from that, and despite his senses being dormant, he could still feel presences within the manor. It seemed that this ability of his, as the first manifestation of his element he ever had, would always be available to him. It was a comforting thought, both for safety and for what little sentimental value Rethys could draw from such a callback to a different time.

He ignored the village and its winter manor, deciding to walk the whole way to Kalantor altogether. He passed by other villages as he went, his sprinting shadow bounding road after road in the middle of the night. He must've looked horrifying to any onlooker, he realized.

The villages kept getting larger and larger, eventually resembling small towns, as he delved further inside Voldren's territories and further away from the wildlands he had emerged from, further away from Yvtar.

Eventually he slowed down his pace, seeing that dawn was on its merry way, and from there it only took a few hours to reach Kalantor in the late morning.

"Sevi, wake up. We're here." He said as he stared at the distant city walls.

He looked ahead, seeing a line of people and carriages awaiting approval to enter the city. The sky was still gray and cloudy, and the weather was most certainly still extreme. Rethys even suspected that it might snow later, the clouds looked the part.

He lingered on the sight of travelers awaiting entry, shuffling around in their capes, coats and cloaks. It must have been terribly cold, Rethys thought before turning his sight back to the soldiers overseeing the city gate.

As he finished his observation, he felt several Mind element spells cover him from head to toe.

"These should be enough to keep us from getting noticed. Just walk through and around that line. I will notify you if I notice anything interesting or alarming." Sevi explained.

"Just walk through?" He repeated.

"Yes. Act as if no one is there, for in their eyes, you would not be there either. Do however avoid brushing too close and making too much noise, speak only in whispers if anyone is nearby."

"Understood." Rethys nodded as he approached Kalantor's gates.