Kene and I spent the following week wandering through Delitone, doing all of the fun, tourist stuff that I didn’t think I’d have had the opportunity to before. We looked at the massive ward wall that surrounded the city, and watched it repel a massive alligator-elephant-oxen thing, one that was easily the size of an entire building.

We visited the fresh fish market, which had several species caught from the ocean, but also some oysters that had been grown in specialized water tanks, the cheapest and largest scallops that I’d ever seen, and shrimp galore.

We watched the stone-moving operations within the cliffside, where they shaped and reinforced new rooms that looked out over the sea, moving the quarried stone up to the top side to reform it into buildings above.

That alone was rather interesting. In Mossford, most homes were individual things, but Delitone seemed to take a more family oriented approach. It seemed like all of the homes here were in what I’d almost have called a mansion or manor house back home, but instead of being overly opulent and wasting space, they were packed to the brim with a person’s parents, friends, cousins, siblings, and more.

We asked Thea about trying to meet up with Octavian, but learned that he was currently out on an expedition into the marshes, driving off a group of hodags.

But we couldn’t just do the fun, touristy things, as two more somber duties needed attending: checking public donation records, and returning a ring.

The first was simple enough, as Kene and I visited the Changley Hall Orphanage and Orange Roof Recovery Fund, checking over the donations that they’d received since the events of the Idyll-Flume. I couldn’t exactly make good on my threat to track down the guy who’d stolen Kamal’s ring right now, but I could at least see if he’d made good on his promise.

In the end, we saw that someone using the pseudonym Enigma had donated a bit over a million silver to the orphanage, and three and a half million to the recovery fund.

“I’m a bit surprised,” Kene said as they looked at the donation record.

“You shouldn’t be,” a lazy drawl came from behind us, and I very nearly teleported backwards, but stopped myself from reaching for my mana at the last second.

“Chill, it’s fine,” the thief said from where he was leaning against a stone column holding up the relief fund’s roof.

“Were you tracking us?” Kene asked, a touch on edge.

“No, I’m not an idiot,” he said, then gestured to the books. “I put a subtle enchantment on those.”

I paused as I pressed my hand to the book. Even without my mana senses directed, I could feel the faint hum of spatial magic over the book, blending in with the space of the world, but still there.

I whistled.

“That’s pretty good.”

Kene frowned and put their hand on the book.

“I don’t feel anything,” they reported a second later.

“Well, it’s alright,” I said. “Performance issues are very common, nothing to be ashamed of.”

Kene let out an indignant squawk, and the thief laughed at my joke.

“As fun as it would be to watch you flirting, I came here for a reason,” he said after a second. “We’re even now, right?”

“We’re even,” I agreed. “I’ve got no idea who you are now.”

The thief let out a sigh and then extended a hand.

“Nice to meet you two. I’m Travis Enigma.”

I stared at him.

“That’s not your last name,” Kene said.

“No, it is!” he protested.

“No it’s not,” I said.

Dusk made a wind-in-trees sound of confusion as she said that it was a perfectly normal sounding name to her. Travis Enigma – if that was his name – rolled his eyes and dug his ID out of his pocket, then passed it to us.

“Primes,” Kene swore. “This has to be a fake ID.”

“Definitely,” I agreed.

He snatched the ID out of my hands, and shoved it back in his pocket, while Dusk commented on how weird it was that humans needed pieces of paper to tell us who we were. I nodded, but was distracted by the thief speaking up.

“And you weren’t a fox-boy the last time we spoke. Does that mean your tail isn’t real?”

“I don’t think that’s a good argument,” I said. “But I’m Malachi, this is Kene. Nice to meet you.”

I paused.

“I don’t suppose that you’ve got any relation to Travis… Ugh, I don’t remember his last name, but the tall, bland guy with a red force aura around him?”

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

The thief stared at me blankly, and I just shrugged.

“It was worth a shot,” I said.

“Well, pleasure to meet you. If you’re ever in need of someone to get things where they don’t need to be, or get things out of places they should, just ask around for Enigma, especially here or the orphanage. They’ll find me.”

With that, he stepped back and vanished in a rush of spatial magic large enough that I could feel it even with my reduced mana senses.

“I think Orykson would have called that a sloppy teleport,” I observed.

“I think you care too much about what Orykson would think,” Kene teased, taking my hand in his. “Onto our next serious job?”

“I suppose,” I said, growing a little more grim.

In the Idyll-Flume, Kene and I had stumbled across a spot where three kids had died in the competition some twenty-odd years ago, and after feeding their ghosts and laying them to rest, we’d collected their storage rings. When we had, we’d gotten a flash of knowledge of where each of the kids had been from.

One of them, Garrett, the large brawler of the group, had been from Delitone.

Kene and I tracked down the house that Garrett had come from and knocked on the door. I shifted nervously from foot to foot, my tail lashing in anxiety as we waited for someone to answer.

Eventually the door swung open to reveal a bulky older man in his mid forties. If I took the mental image of Garrett, added thirty years and twice that many pounds, I thought they might have been brothers.

“What do you want?” he asked, frowning.

I took a deep breath and looked up at him.

“Did you know a kid named Garrett, who died in the Idyll-Flume about twenty-one years ago?”

The man’s face morphed through a half dozen emotions at once, before it finally settled on sadness, tinged with some anger.

That was pretty reasonable. I had just walked up and asked him about a dead relative.

“What about him?” the man asked warily.

“During the Idyll-Flume, we encountered his ghost,” Kene said. “We laid him to rest, alongside his companions, Sarah and Alexander, and we retrieved the storage ring that he’d left behind.”

The man’s face jumped through a half dozen other emotions again.

“Come on in,” he finally said, leading us into a massive, open-air courtyard and living room combination. There was a roof overhead, supported by magically reinforced marble pillars, but the back end of the house was open to the elements, an old, decaying wardline serving as the protection against storms.

A half dozen kids were running around, being watched by a group of three older people in a corner, one man and two women. The man and one of the women were middle aged, but the third woman was probably in her eighties.

We started picking our way through the room towards the older people when I felt someone tugging at my tail, and phased it through their hand.

“Hey mister, I like your tai– Woah!”

I turned to see one of the kids, presumably the one who had grabbed onto my tail, staring in amazement as it passed through their hand. I ruffled his curly dark hair.

“Lorenzo!” the middle aged woman said, crossing the room so fast she had practically teleported. “We do not grab onto other people.”

She looked up at me.

“I’m sorry about him.”

“No worries,” I said, waving my hand. Another kid had come up to Kene.

“Did getting your tattoos hurt? My dad says tha–”

“Alright, that’s enough, enough!” the man who’d brought us in said, waving the kids away. “Go play outside. We’ve got some adult business to talk about.”

Dusk hopped off my shoulder at that, summoning her cloud, much to the amazement of the kids, and they excitedly followed her outside as she chimed for them to try and chase her. Siobhan materialized a moment later and started chasing, yipping and jumping into the air.

I sent Dusk a grateful feeling, and Kene and I took a seat on a couch across from the grandmotherly woman and the man who’d let us in. He gestured to us, then to the grandmother.

“My name is Andrew, and this is my mother – Garrett’s mother.”

“Please, call me Sofia,.” the grandmotherly woman said. “And if it’s not too much trouble, can you tell us everything?”

Kene and I did, explaining how we were hunting down a natural treasure that took fifty years to reach maturation, and found the cave in. How we had made some food for the ghosts, and met Siobhan, buried their bodies, then finally how we had found the rings, and learned where they’d come from.

By the end of the story, Sofia was dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, and Andrew looked a little remorseful himself.

“I knew he was gone,” Sofia said. “But a small part of me did hope, you know. Hoped that maybe he had taken everything, sold it, and ran off.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head, and Kene reached out a hand to gently pat her shoulder.

Andrew cleared his throat and held out his hand.

“May I see the ring?”

I pulled it from Dusk’s realm and passed it to him. He studied it for a moment, a sad smile over his face.

“Do you remember how proud you were that you had saved up enough for this ring?” he asked Sofia, who matched his smile.

“I do,” she said. “We had so many hopes riding on our little prodigy.”

She let out a sigh and wiped her eyes, then looked up at us and shook her head.

“We can’t thank you enough. Even if the ring is empty, it’s good to have the memory.”

“It’s the least I can do,” I said, and Kene nodded their agreement.

“Hardly,” Andrew said. “I don’t know how you do these sorts of things in Mossford, but in Delitone, we have a longstanding tradition of how to deal with explorers who return comrade’s belongings to their family.”

I blinked as I realized that I didn’t actually know how it was handled in Mossford.

It made sense that Delitone would have that kind of policy, since they lived in the unclaimed lands, and had monsters knocking at their proverbial doorstop. Losing explorers and workers had to be a far more common occurrence here than in the comparatively tamer lands of Mossford.

But were there similar policies in Mossford? I thought it would be more likely for the family to post a reward with the watch’s freelancers for the recovery of remains, if they had the money, or to just file it with the lightwatch if it was more normal.

“It’s tradition to offer the person who recovered the remains something of what the deceased explorer had found,” Andrew continued. “I’m not certain that there will be anything left of value, but if there is, you two are welcome to take half of it.”

I paused for a second, glancing at the worn couch, the decaying wardline, and the nearly hairline cracks on the pillars holding up the ceiling, suggesting that their reinforcing enchantments had started to wear out.

I shook my head.

“How about a tenth,” Kene offered.

There was a bit of relief on the faces of Sofia and Andrew, but then Sofia shook her head.

“You’re too kind. A quarter.”

“An eighth,” I said. “I’m not likely going to be able to make the most use out of it anyways,with my spirit as damaged as it is.”

I felt one of them scan me and they both frowned.

“And I’m not in need of advancement resources at the moment,” Kene said, even though that was definitively untrue.

“You barter against your own interest,” Sofia pointed out, “surely a quarter is more reasonable.”

I waved my hand dismissively.

“I have a home, family, and enough to keep myself afloat,” I said. “I don’t need it. You’ve got kids to support.”

“An eighth is fair to me,” Kene said.

“No, no,” Andrew said. “How about this…”