Fomoria was upset, but she wasn’t wrong, she wouldn’t be wrong, Marigold wouldn’t trick him like that.

If Anon came to him directly, he’d let her have the sigil, but not without wanting something in return, not without trying to find some way to take it back if he had to.

She was never going to stay, and whatever was wrong with her mind, she couldn’t handle owing him.

If it was for the best, it was for the best.

Maybe Xol was too blunt, maybe Marigold was under orders not to stop her.

Maybe maybe maybe.

He didn’t know where exactly he was, he just thought about the Great Desert, and he ended up on some sand dune.

The Hornet Bird jumped up and down on his shoulder, it wanted to fly.

It spoke to him in much the same way that the Cerast did, images, feelings, but not words.

It was a strange thing, but he had noticed that was often the case with insects, their minds seemed to lack some kind of compatibility with other creatures, their perception of everything was alien.

Still, he was certain that it possessed intelligence on par with that of a human.

He wondered, with the rate at which most insects grew into magical creatures, how long had this bug been alive? How long had it been alone?

He fluttered around freely, diving into the sand to grab small lizards with its barbed stinger.

Clearly it was meant for this kind of place, it belonged here.

When it flew back, its stomach full of reptilian meat, he was overjoyed, and Fomoria could feel that.

“Do you want to stay?”

Images flooded his mind, sleeping in the cacti, sinking into the sand to reach the underground rivers, flying high in the air just for the sake of seeing how far the dunes went.

“You want to stay…”

He saw images from the hornet, Fomoria alone in his room.

“Don’t stay just because of me, I’m going to find a friend here.”

There was hesitation, stopping, looking back, but ultimately, he flew away.

Fomoria laid there in the sand until a large toad woke up and disturbed him.

It shoved him a few times to check if he was alive or not, fighting was not its strong suit and it didn’t want to swallow him alive.

“I’m alive.”

It didn’t understand human speech, but when Fomoria stood, it thought that it wasn’t worth the effort.

Fomoria briefly returned to Kor, but only to get updates on what was happening and to say that he might be away for a time.

The Great Desert was, as its name implied, great in size.

So he flew, he flew far, and he flew fast.

It was subtle, but his stomach being weak to motion sickness made it clear why nobody had ever reached a Golden city.

They didn’t use simple arrays to keep people out like the Fomorians, but rather the lands held a great deal of spatial distortion.

He tried leaving marks in the sand, coloring them with magic, and even casting spells to stabilize the space.

But he was not a spatialist, and everyone seemed to vanish when he looked away from it; he began to question how much more magic was at work than just the distorted space.

He roared, bringing attention that he didn’t want.

The wyvern landed softly and looked at him, but instead of fleeing, Fomorian walked closer to the beast.

The sand under his feet blackened as he covered himself in hot bone plates.

He opened his mouth and flames with solidity dripped down, turning the sand to glass.

It suddenly realized that it had picked off a much bigger fight than was worth taking, and it began to stand so it could flap its wings and take off.

Yet instead, something came up and grabbed it.

The Sandworm had eight hard mandibles that pulled it down into the maw with rows of spinning teeth.

In less than a second it had come out and then sunk back into the ground.

Fomoria jumped back, he hadn’t heard it, he hadn’t felt its mind.

He knew that they were the apex of the deserts, and his instincts told him that the beast was not something he wanted to fight.

But luckily it seemed uninterested in him, and now that he knew it was there he felt the mind move away before it suddenly vanished.

They hunted mostly by sound, having no eyes, but Fomoria had very light feet.

He wandered another hour, mostly clearing his head since he wasn’t making any headway into actually finding out where the cities were.

Fomoria cried a little, but he wasn’t certain exactly why, maybe he was just so damned tired.

The hot sand under his body was nice, it was soft… just a small nap.

He awoke to glass.

How long he had been sleeping, how much destruction was wrought in his wake, he didn’t know.

He followed the path back to where he first laid to rest, but found now bodies, no death, not even a hint of what he had been fighting.

Whatever it was, either it fled or he had eaten it, both seemed just as likely in his mind.

“Micheal, what was I fighting?”

There was no response.

“Micheal?”

“What?”

“What was I fighting?”

“Demons.”

“What did they look like, were they strong?”

“Not outside, inside. It pains me to see you like this, but there was nothing I could do to help you.”

A partly true statement.

“What is your take on all this? I’m I just wasting my time, pretending that I’m looking for anything?

Night has fallen, but I’m still just here in this place surrounded by nothing but sand.”

“Do you think that you deserve a loving woman?”

“What the fuck did you just say to me?”

“I meant no insult, but if magic is a want placed upon the world, perhaps you do not find her because you do not want her.”

Fomoria took a deep breath and recentered himself, he thought of Yara.

“Thank you.”

He kept his eyes closed the entire time, and he just walked in a straight line, thinking of her.

How long he walked, in distance and time, he didn’t know, but once he felt the hostile intentions of other intelligent life, he knew that he found the city.

He opened his eyes then, and saw the sand under his feet was white as snow.

Fomoria knelt down, picking up handfuls and then watching it fall between his fingers.

“HOW DID YOU GET PAST THE DESERT?”

They stood not more than 50 feet away from him.

The Golden were physically somewhat better than a human, but their greatest advantage was their magic.

“I wanted to be here, that is all.”

The Golden looked confused.

“TURN BACK.”

“I’m just here to visit a friend, nothing more. My name is-”

They readied their magic, and he fell silent when he felt the shifting in the air.

While they seemed happy to do this, being stuck as wall guards was surely a boring job, Fomoria prepared his counters with a blank expression.

He thought what was likely to be used against him.

They aren’t touching the ground, but rather are on a secondary defensive wall, this is the White Sands, he could see the motes of light mana moving, and at that range… radiance was the clear option.

Beyond that, Delmet seemed to enjoy earth magic quite a bit, and he was from here. Maybe.

Fomoria hadn’t thought about Delmet in ages, but he thought he must’ve been from here. Probably.

As he found himself caught up in trying to remember how many Golden he had seen at the academy and trying to calculate how many each of the Sands likely sent, two beams of radiance came at him.

Fomoria was a man of higher instincts, he had allowed himself to fall into this absent mindedness because he felt no threat from these men or their attacks.

He looked up from his thoughts for a moment and wreathed his hand in void flame, then swatted away the beams without effort.

“You’ve interrupted my train of thought.”

These men were not the best of the best, but still, the contempt he had for their attacks put fear into their hearts.

They fled back to the wall, scaling it easily by making small sand tornados to lift themselves.

His only thought was that surely flight would be cheaper.

He attempted to recreate their sand magic and test the idea that perhaps the high levels of earth and light mana in the area caused the sand to be very conductive to magic and thus cheaper.

Yet strangely enough, the sand was actually quite hard for him to control.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

He couldn’t think of a logical reason, but his gut said that he didn’t belong in this place, and it knew that.

So when he reached the gate, he tried to fly, but found the air disagreed with him as well.

Even if it were the will of Aarde themself, it would make little difference in making it over the wall.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t fly, but it just wasn’t worth the mana required to do it in this place.

The wall was a mere 200 feet high and sicky magic worked without issue despite the lacking water mana here, so he just walked up.

He made it 40 feet before molten oil was poured down, igniting along the way.

Oil, depending on its source, was not always best handled with water magic, which governed most liquids.

Those that came from plants such as olives were generally best controlled with earth magic.

The same could be said of the crude oil that came from ancient decay, but in its current state, fire burned through it, and adding a little of that allowed one to be ever so slightly more efficient.

Still, none of that mattered, in part because he regularly bathed in boiling water.

Fomoria covered every inch of himself in his armor, leaving no gaps to his more vulnerable flesh, and he kept walking as if nothing had happened, barely letting himself be slowed.

Yet in his fully armored form, the void flames that made up his mane were simply out, and when they contacted the fire of the evidently magical oil, they latched onto it as a source of energy.

The Golden looked on in horror as red edged black flames began to crawl up the oil, eating the fire.

They tossed the entire pot down, and he split it in two with an aura technique strike that brought new meaning to the term knife hand; the Sectlanders called it cleaving chop.

They followed it up with a rather predictable beam of radiance multicast by several of them.

Yet void and radiance canceled one another out for less than it cost to cast a spell of the other.

When Fomoria got too close to the top, they all stomped, showing the walls to have really been made of magically stable sand.

The entire section crumbled in an instant, and what he was sticking to was nothing but a layer of grains.

He really didn’t want to fight them, he was trying to be reasonable, but they were starting to annoy him, and a small lesson was needed.

Fomoria placed his hands on the wall.

Sound, nothing but vibration, the shaking of the air telling the mind to interpret it as something.

Sound imbibing would allow the user to send out vibrations, and to redirect the ones which were naturally occurring, but also to feel the tune of an item and find its resonance more easily.

His heart beat quickly, and without his armor, people could hear it from a dozen feet away quite clearly;

he had all of the naturally occurring sound that he needed.

They felt the wall shake and rumble, then a stretch up to the top and 100 feet across was reduced to sand.

The Golden fled and called for reinforcements.

Fomoria was baffled, bewildered, and befuddled.

He heard that the Golden were a smaller population, that they likely lived this way because they were strong and lived in a massive desert that couldn’t support life.

Yet beyond the outer walls of the White Sands, it was verdant, a veritable jungle inside, and the wall was certainly no less impressive than the capital of Ragne.

He couldn’t exactly guess until he saw how the city was laid out, but if the other cities were this size there could be millions of them.

This rumination on population was cut short when he saw the Golden gleaming in the sky, a wall of white sand under them.

He opened a void gate and stepped through, their spatial magic that prevented others from entering did not stop the spell.

When he came back, over a hundred Others were along with him.

He thought about how best to fight them.

He would start by heating the sand that they used to fly.

Once it was white hot they would either need to stop flying or they’d be flayed alive, their skin blistering and bubbling as…

Fomoria called Yara.

The Golden took her amulet away when she returned so she couldn’t talk to Liat, but they were both mental mages and he knew her mind.

“Hello?”

“Yara, it’s been a while.”

“Now isn’t a great time. Someone is attacking the city and… where are you?”

“It is all a big misunderstanding, they attacked me before I could explain. Is there someone you can talk to so this doesn’t turn into a giant mess?”

“I… have a connection to the city leaders.”

The two armies stared one another down for about ten minutes before there was a break in the wall of whirling sand came.

Three dozen people came out, one of them Yara, but there was also a man without armor.

Fomoria stepped forward, removing his armor as he did.

“HALT.”

He skipped forward, past the man and his guards.

They reacted quickly, but they couldn't risk hitting Yara along with him.

He held her in a strong grip, in other terms, a hug.

“Yara, it’s been too long.”

“Harlan, what are you doing here? What are those men?”

“I said before, I’m Fomoria, not Harlan. When I went out, he stayed here, lived my life.”

“Honey, can we go inside, I’d like to hear the rest of his story.”

“We can’t just-”

She looked at him, and he couldn’t help himself.

“Fine. But just to the inner wall, he can’t be in the city itself.”

“Thank you.”

She kissed the man and they all moved back towards the city, the guards and the soldiers watching him closely.

“Tell your men to stand down.”

“Why would I? This is a friendly conversation, and if not, they know what to do.”

His tone was kind and casual, but his threats, barely veiled, chilled the air.

The room was small, well, it was actually spacious enough for the three of them, but it was the 33 guards that made it cramped.

“Don’t you people know that having so many people in a room actually makes it harder to protect a target?

I could snake between you with ease and force you to either kill your comrades or do nothing.”

They gripped their swords more tightly, and the man looked fearfully at him, but Yara just giggled.

“You haven’t changed a bit.”

“That’s… not true.”

Another sullen face from him.

“But anyway, I’ll explain everything as best I can, cutting it down for time.”

Yara went through a swing of emotions, laughing and crying, being angry and consoling him.

It took some time for her to calm down.

“That’s… I’m sorry that happened.”

“A man cannot change the was, only what the will be. Enough about me, what about you?

This man is your fiance then? And those clothes, their… not quite your style.”

She blushed.

Her top was little more than three bands, one which hid her breasts, and two that made an X.

She wore a short skirt along with it that reached just to her knees and had decorated stones attached to it so nobody could easily blow it up and reveal her underwear; it was all yellow in color with gold filigree patterned on it.

“This is Cruz.”

Fomoria reached out for a handshake, and the guards drew their swords.

“Idiots. Curved swords are poor in this environment as well, so bunched up you don’t have the space for a proper swing. Cruz, nice to meet you.”

“You as well, Little Shadow.”

“So. How did you meet?”

“I was arranged to marry her after-”

“It’s fine.”

“What?”

Cruz was confused by her interruption.

“I’m just telling Har- Fomoria, that it's fine. Cruz is a good man, he’s never hit me, never touched me without my being comfortable with it, never tried to control my every action.”

He leaned back in his chair.

“But do you love him?”

“We’re to be wed in a month, and I’d like to try for a child-”

“But do you love him?”

Cruz didn’t like the tone of his voice, nor of the question.

“Sir Fomoria, I think that-”

“Sir Fomoria is my copy, I’m Emperor Fomoria. Yara, Marigold sent me here because she thought that you and I would be good together. Now, if you and him happened to-”

Cruz grabbed Fomoria by the hand, who shifted his arm to grab Cruz on the underside of his forearm, then he twisted and hooked his foot behind his knee, forcing him to bend backwards.

“Don’t touch me in an aggressive manner.”

Fomoria had swords at his throat.

“Are any of those enchanted or soulsmithed? If not, then you won’t even break my skin.”

One of them drew blood when he pressed in.

“Good then.”

The wound instantly sealed around the blade.

“Yara, I only need to know one thing, do you want to stay with Cruz, or do you want to come with me and get married. I won’t make you fight, but I can’t promise that it will always be safe. You already heard what happened to Viviane.”

“I’ve been in love with you for a long time, I’d take you over some arranged marriage any day.”

“Honey-”

“Cruz, you aren’t a bad person, you are wonderful, and I’m sure the next one will love you just fine, but… I know him, we’ve been friends for years. So please, let’s not make this any worse than it is.”

Several minutes passed before anyone spoke.

Fomoria was honestly just bored of it now.

“Do you know the story of the crocodile and the drake?”

Cruz was still in an awkward position, but he could speak fine, and he was naturally limber so he could hold without locking up for some time.

“No.”

“I wouldn’t expect so, since it is one of those from the Reinoan Holy Book.

A crocodile in its youth sees a drake pass by, and it tries to speak to it.

He wants to know when he will be so large and powerful, to shatter trees underfoot and wrestle wurms. The drake replied that he would never be so, because he was not born to be a drake, and nothing would change his very nature.

The crocodile aged, growing into a large magical creature.

The drake returned one day, his migration once more took him near the lake that the crocodile was now master of.

So the crocodile balked at the drake.

Look at me, I’ve become like you. Look how I shatter the trees and wrestle the wurms.

Yet once more, the drake was unimpressed.

But I now shatter the mountains and wrestle the Behemoths.

Yet the crocodile did not believe the drake. He was old now like him, he was strong, and the drake wasn’t any bigger than when last he saw him.

So the crocodile attacks the drake to prove his strength, to prove that he had grown.

Yet the drake quickly bested the crocodile, slaying him with his breath. He tells the crocodile as it lays dying that he would never win, because he has always coveted what he wasn’t, and what would never to be his.

If the crocodile had just left the drake be, what would’ve come of it? Would he remain as the master of his lake? Or would something bigger and stronger one day arrive to kill it and take its place?

Was it worth it for the crocodile to try its might against the drake?

You can never be the drake, but you don’t need to be the crocodile.”

“Men. Stand down.”

They pulled their swords away from Fomoria, and he helped Cruz back up.

“I don’t hold any malice or contempt for you, but Yara is my friend, and she can make her own choices.

I can feel how angry you are, but you are not me, so naturally the chances of you getting another wife are much better than mine.”

Fomoria took Yara by the hand and cast a void gate.

“Also, I’ll kill you all if you try to stop me.”

The first gate led him outside to his others, and the second sent them back to Kor.

Yara’s heart was pounding.

“I can’t believe I did that, gods, I can’t believe I just did it.”

She shivered a little as she opened the doors to the balcony.

“It’s colder here.”

He chuckled and hugged her from behind, looking out over the city, his warmth cut the cold.

“In that story, what do you think would’ve happened if the crocodile remained there, if it didn’t try to pick a fight with the drake?”

“There is too much we don’t know.

Did he get as old as he was because he defeated everything around him, or was the lake too safe?

Was there ever a chance of him beating the drake? Did he not try hard enough? Not train hard enough?

Was he a poor fighter because he didn’t get properly challenged and that led to an ego problem?”

Yara laughed.

“That is a very… you answer.”

“The crocodile was right though. He had to know, even if he died for it, he had to know if he could do it, or if he was deluding himself.”

“That’s also very you.”

She went back inside.

“Was that alright? Should I have-”

“I don’t know. But it felt right to me. Or maybe I have heatstroke and I’m still passed out in the sand.

Fuck. That felt good actually. I got to be… selfish, to just get something that I wanted, and I didn’t even need to kill anyone.”

Fomoria began to pump his arms, and he did actually feel quite faint.

He’d wandered the desert for hours without eating or drinking anything; he thought how rude it was on reflection that he wasn’t offered anything in White Sands.

He could do it, but it was never pleasant, and whatever he fought likely took probably took some effort.

Fomoria stumbled a little, then sat in a chair, nodding off.

“Don’t let me sleep… I don’t know if it’s safe to… shit… call, Amber.”

He had been burning up his last fumes for some time already, running off of adrenaline and anger towards Marigold.

If it worked out between Yara and him, then he’d consider possibly forgiving her.