The main streets of the town were cobblestone and hardpack, a central thoroughfare of mortared cobbles with a wider secondary section of earth so thoroughly trodden that it had almost no give underfoot. The side streets were more the latter than the former, but Nathan was not going on any such side streets; he stepped out of the tavern and went towards the center, walking briskly towards the cluster made by the three tallest buildings in the town.

One of them was obviously some type of mage tower, judging by its towering, spindly height and the glowing orb at the top of it. Lightning flickered around the orb and ran up and down the red, yellow, and gray traceries that decorated the white stone of the tower, representative of and once upon a time made out of the three most common mage-metals for runework: copper, electrum, and aluminum. Why copper was represented as red rather than in its true color was a matter of historical argument, with a quite reasonable initial proposal being ignored by a hundred years’ worth of historians who made arguments rooted in emotion, nationalism, poetry, or visions born from psychoactive substances and the alternative states of consciousness they beheld the visions in—and very few cared, since it worked well enough and there was no particular need to change it.

The second building was shattered and broken. Not in a haphazard way, nor by accident; its fifteen stories were blasted apart, leaving the structural skeleton in place and exactly enough of the walls, floors, and roof to anchor the various enchantments. All of the Risen Crown’s laboratories were shattered in the same way, a symbol of the way that the House Abhorrent had responded to the mass executions and various other measures which had been taken to try to suppress them.

There were no other Houses left in Jejuna, not after they had finished their work.

The third building was where Nathan walked in his brisk way. The air was fresh and clear, the streets clean and well-maintained, and the few horses whose enormity took up wide swathes of the hardpack beside the cobblestone were both mannerly and possessed of clever shit-catchers to keep the streets clean. The clothes were almost uniformly linen, which suited the warmth of the season, and they were died in a riot of colors that had him smiling the smile of someone who knew that most stories that were told of times and periods that looked superficially like this had everyone clad in ahistorical browns and dullness.

Of course, this world had magic, so it was not clear to him how—and then the moment passed, and it was, in fact, clear to him that despite the magic, the relative availability of cloth and textiles was not substantially changed. The economic realities were that any increase in productivity of the disenfranchised and relatively powerless would be squeezed out of them, leaving them producing more in order to get nothing in return. The Halls and their labor associations had done a great deal to alleviate that, but the measures needed to recover from the Abhorrent War had undermined or reversed nearly all of the Halls’ progress; a generation of magic had been poured into healing the blights and taming the rifts, and it had twisted around itself the entire study, scholarship, and practice of wizardry in not only Jejuna but its neighbors.

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

The Hall was unchanged in appearance for all that. It was a blocky, nine-story building that was unprepossessing despite its height and the subtle decorations, looking as though it simply didn’t care whether anyone respected it or paid it heed. The eye was inevitably drawn to the decorations regardless, Nathan’s resting on the tools and materials with which people were building the structure in miniature. The woman he passed who was ogling the mural no doubt had hers resting upon the intricate depictions of the tools a different trade, but he noted the flush on her face only absently as he strode towards the Hall and his mind went elsewhere.

This was as wise as any other path, for having dismissed her, he would never see her again; and being one to dismiss her, was never suited otherwise.

“Nathan,” he said to the door once he’d finished passing the shops and houses and market stalls and children playing in the town square and little places where people could and did sit and all of the other sundries of town life. “Itinerant wizard in good standing.”

The door opened for him, and he knew that the door would always remain open to him so long as he remained all of the things he had said, because it wasn’t a door at all. It was a door-shaped hole in the Hallward, one that had an illusion of a door on top of it; and he stepped through the hole and into the quiet bustle of the town’s neuromuscular axon.

The open, high-ceilinged expanse of the room gave it a spacious feel despite the dozens of people socializing, drinking, eating, and generally waiting with an air of expectation. They milled about or sat in the three-quarters of the thousands-of-square-feet interior that was dedicated to that purpose, sitting at long benches or small tables, each of them keeping an eye on the hall-board in maximature that took up most of a wall. The board would flicker, and everyone’s conversations would hiccup as they all took in the change—and then almost all of them would go back to whatever they were doing as though nothing had happened, which nothing had, for them.

And some would go to the desks, where Nathan was ambling.

“I’m an itinerant,” he was explaining to a bored-looking clerk who was not at all bored and only barely a clerk. “I’m not registered, because I’m an itinerant. It’s a classification, it exists in Jejunao law, it’s recognized by the Halls, please stop being an asshole about it.”

“We don’t have any jobs for the unregistered,” the technically-a-clerk sniffed.

“Fine,” Nathan sighed, and slapped two plots onto the desk. “That’s the standard application fee to take the Junior Magus qualification exams.”

“This Hall charges—”

“—the standard fee,” Nathan finished for the clerk pointedly, hand drifting to his staff, “because to do otherwise would be illegal and also your boss is walking into earshot.”

The clerk startled, turning to check behind him. Seeing that the Quill’s door was still closed, he turned furiously and then took a deep breath to settle himself at Nathan’s mild smile. “Fine,” he muttered, glowering. “Exam room for Juniors on the third floor, no refunds.”

“A pleasure doing business with you,” Nathan replied with complete honesty, and then he turned on his heel and sauntered off towards the stairs.