Light streaming in through the eastern-facing window wakes me. It filters through the crack in the velvet curtains, a line of radiance falling across the bed. For a moment, I don't want to rise. Corinth left the master bedroom of the penthouse to me, and my brother's bed is by far the most comfortable I have ever lain in, even more comfortable than the ones in the Mari manor.

Then, my mind begins to work. The cloying pull of sleep lets go as I sit up in the bed, throwing back the covers. Sitting up straight in bed, my hand rises to my face. The ache in my eye is gone, not entirely, but mostly. Releasing a long breath, I call out in my mind.

"Galea?"

In front of me, a pop of golden light explodes. Emerging from the light comes the spinning body of a small serpent dragon. Galea hovers in front of my face, looking at me. "Good Morning, Mistress," she chirps.

I sigh in relief, hot breath sticking against the palms of my hands that are collapsed over my mouth. "You're okay?" I ask; I hope.

She looks down at herself, patting her body with her tiny claws. "I appear able to manifest intact." She looks about the room. "You made it out of the underground. Good job, Mistress."

"Thanks to you," I say. "It has been a while since then." But as I say it, I wonder how true that really is. It has only been about two weeks since that fateful night. "There is so much to tell you."

"I would like to hear about it," she says. "Or, given that I have no will, I will listen as you want to tell me."

"Strange as ever," I mutter, but I can't help but smile as I do so. "What is the last thing you remember?"

"I accompanied your manifested spiritual avatar to an extraplanar space. When an unidentified energy began to merge with your being, I made an attempt at identifying it. Damage was sustained in the attempt. After that, I have no records."

I nod, parsing her words. The fact that she can speak plainly and simply refuses to has been known to me for a long time. My relief at seeing her floating in front of me, fine for all appearances, is greater than my annoyance. I spend the next few minutes relating to her what has happened since that night. Just as I am starting to relate to her the possibility of upgrades to the enchantment she is housed inside of, her body blinks, vanishing for a split second. Anxiety.

Then she is back, hovering in front of me in the same place.

"What happened?" I ask.

"It appears manifestation is one of the last enchantments to fully initialize," Galea says. "Persisting is causing an error in the system."

"Will you be alright?"

"I shall," she says. "Once I have stopped manifesting, the final repairs to the array will commence again. It will only take a few days before all functions are at optimal levels."

I nod. "If you need to go away for a little while, that is fine. I'm just glad that you are alright. We have a lot of work to do, and I wouldn't want to do it without you."

"I will retreat for now," Galea agrees. She pauses before vanishing, smiling at me. "I am relieved to see that you made it out of that place in one piece, Mistress. I am so relieved."

Then, she is gone, vanishing back to the place that she usually resides. Seconds pass as I continue sitting on the bed, staring at the open air where she just was. Galea is okay. She was acting a bit differently, but she seems okay. A smile of my own spreads across my lips, and I stare down at my hands for a moment.

Good. At least I could help one of my friends. Now, it is time to look forward. Throwing the blankets off myself, I aim toward the laboratory. If going over our future funds the day before showed me anything, it is that I don't think we will have nearly enough to last for a whole year, even with what Corinth gifted me before leaving. The first order of business will be making money, at least enough to allow me to create an enchantment to show off to the judges at the academy. It is time to get to work.

"Malis ca makasaba," the dwarven man in front of me says, stabbing the table between us again with his pointer finger. "Ca maka."

The backroom of the store is far different from the front. Out there, the walls are made of hard white panels with lights glowing behind them, the floor is made of marble tiles, and the floor is bare except for eight exquisite pieces of artifice suspended in the air above pedestals made of literal gold. When I first found the store after puzzling out directions I got on the street, I thought the place was some kind of art exhibit. Only after entering and using my now functioning eye to inspect the pieces did I begin to realize what a wonderland the interior was.

Only one of the pieces on display was an equipable item, something that I would be interested in purchasing. Even now, arguing with the proprietor over the multitude of mediums I brought to sell to him, my mind returns to that magnificent ring.

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Ring of Supremacy<Very Rare>: (Enhancement) (Interface Enchantment) (Storage) (Protection) A ring crafted by the master enchanter Mato Colberoy, this device was made for the elite clientele of Faeth. It has been made to integrate smoothly with the interface of all six generations of the Maester or Ylldaro social devices, as well as the Talagast and Propero interface devices, and allows for the storage of sixteen tons worth of goods. Additionally, it offers a robust suite of magical reinforcement to protect the bearer from both magical and physical attacks, a common threat for the very well-off. Protection: The Ring of Supremacy can conjure a shield in response to sudden attack, reducing the damage of the blow if not outright negating it. Enhancement: +300 Defense, +300 Magical Defense

The description is a mess of references that I don't understand in the least, and the price is double the amount of coin that Corinth left me with. I won't be getting anything like that any time soon.

My focus returns to the backroom around me. Unlike the front, no consideration toward decoration has been given to this space. The expansive room that takes up nearly a quarter of the thirteenth floor of the building is lined with harsh steel shelves that house nondescript wooden crates. A single lamp lights the corner of the room where Mato sits on a stool, my offered items laid out on his workbench.

"Testro?" I ask Mato, the dwarven man in front of me, wanting to know why he won't purchase my infused ropes. I spent the first few hours of the morning infusing several different mediums, hoping to trade on affixes I have accumulated.

"Testro," he repeats back at me. The coils of teal-colored rolls that make up his wig wave precariously atop his head as he parrots back my question to me with sarcasm so thick I can hear it despite the language barrier. "Ca nadir nais." He points to the device lying on the steel workbench next to him. A numerical display blinks numbers from the top of the hose-like device. It is some sort of fraction, one hundred out of one hundred and twelve. At my apparent blank look, he growls, tapping the display and then the infused cord set out on his desk. "No. Good," he grunts in Castinian, so think it is hard to understand. "Talsa. Ser main talsa kaf."

I click my tongue, pulling out my translation book and flipping through the pages to understand what he means. Muttering to myself, I flip through the pages, coming up with his meaning. Talsa translates roughly to purity, while kaf means low.

"How can it be low purity?" I argue back at him, snapping the book closed. "I infused this with my own fire affix. It is my most pure affix!"

"Talsa kaf!" he yells back at me. Mato picks up the end of his device and runs it over a roll of copper that I have infused with steel mana. Another fraction appears on the display of the device, 241/305. "Talsa kaf!" Then he reads another cord of copper wire with my corrosion mana infused, 206/305. "Talsa kaf!" He stops for a moment after reading the copper wire with the sword affixed mana, 289/305. "Talsa deschu," he says, waving his hand in a non-committal manner.

I don't need the book to understand his meaning. I lift the copper wire with the sword mana. "Will you buy this? De sedda?"

The man looks between my hand holding the copper wire and my face for a moment before he starts laughing. He laughs so hard that he drops his device on the workbench and falls back into his chair.

With my face reddening from anger or embarrassment–I don't know which–I collect the infused mediums and turn from the room. "It's a bad idea to laugh at me, old man!" I yell back at him. He points at me, still laughing. He doesn't stop, even as I slam the door closed behind myself.

I am steaming as I march out of the store. Those with the ability to sense magic give me a wide berth as I stomp down the stairs, my presence barely restrained to a few inches from my skin. The squeal of the brass handrail warping beneath my grip is what finally signals to me that I need to calm down. In the stairwell of the towering building, just in front of the door leading out to the third floor, where people skittishly move around me, I breathe hard.

"Purity?" I rant to myself. "Tits and honey, what is this? Mana is mana, isn't it? It came from my soul, so how could it be any purer?" I am still fuming as I leave, but the burn has become quieter, just a smolder. I never really expected to have a problem like this. There are only a few weeks left until the academic year is set to begin. This needs to be solved quickly.

Cold is the first thing I notice, which is odd. Fluctuations in temperature don't bother me as much as they used to, but this cold is another thing entirely. It isn't surprising, given the massive hole in the center of the stone room.

Eight men, all adventurers in the third rank, look up from silver poles they hold in their hands as I enter. Each wears heavy clothing, mostly beautiful furs that no doubt come from one monster or another. Two allow their eyes to linger on me long enough to offer a nod before they, too, turn back to staring into the open well in the middle of the room.

The chamber itself is one of the lowest in Faeth, requiring that I descend a stairwell that bores straight through the meat of the flying continent to arrive here. It is impossible to see anything beyond the hole in the floor. Faeth flies through a cloud, and vapor is already freezing on my hair as I make my way around the larger circular chamber to find an empty seat next to the well after retrieving a silver pole from a case set into the far wall.

"Excuse me, boys." Freezing water clings to my hand as I wipe it off the seat before plopping down. To my left, a Faethian dwarf looks me over, his left eye the same black and red as my own. He sniffs, turning away to grunt something to his neighbor. On my right, an elven man doesn't even bother to turn my direction, continuing to stare into the sheet of white that flies by beneath us, his knuckles turning white as he grips his pole.

I settle in. My ass is soaked, and the rest of me is quickly following, but that is just part of the experience. I pull a ring of copper into my hand from my inventory, the metal infused with my own fire affix from the day before, and rub it across the surface of the silver pole. The magic flows easily from the wire to the pole, the instrument primed to accept it. Holding the end out over the open well in the middle of the room, I feel the enchantment activate, a line of magic running away to disappear far, far below.

"This brings back memories," I comment to the dwarven man. He barks something back to me, and I don't bother to translate it. "It's been so long since I went fishing."

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