“Sure,” I finally said. “As long as you’re fine with it?”

...

Kene and I disembarked the boat at the Dragontooth stop before hurrying to the harbourmaster’s office, which had four lines for people coming into the country, a faster one for simple one day or less visits that basically only required an ID check, and then a longer one for longer stays.

As we waited in line, my eyes were drawn to the person who, judging by the fact she rod straight on a balcony that was open to the air, had to have been the harbourmaster.

She was a worn looking old woman with steely gray hair, and she absolutely radiated the power of abnegation mana, dripping over us even from her elevated position. She was a false ascender, I thought, but she’d polished the falsely opened gate to the point that it was almost hard to tell. If it weren’t for my mana senses being so strong, I never would have picked up on the shaky foundation at the edges of her mana.

It was weird to me how many arcanists there were on and around boats, but I dismissed it. I wasn’t a sailor, and honestly, I preferred flying. I paused at that. There were multiple types of beastial flying spells… That might be worth looking into.

When Kene and I made it to the front of the line, the woman nodded to us.

“Alright, IDs please?”

We each passed them over, and the attendant held them over an enchanted plate made of marble, each one for thirty seconds.

“Alright, since you all are from Mossford, you can stay here in Dragontooth for up to one hundred and one days. Neither of you are here with the MossU expedition, right?”

It took me a second to realize she meant Mossford University, and I shook my head.

“Alright,” she said, jotting down a few things, then passing us a list. “Please check off and ensure that you’re not carrying any of these items, signing at the bottom, and place any spatially extended bags, extraspatial rings, and ordinary luggage on there.”

She pointed to a series of baskets, and Kene put their ring in the basket, which began to glow with knowledge mana. Kene passed over their paperwork, but I was unable to put anything on the scale. If I summoned my old expanded briefcase, then she’d assume I pulled it out of a spatial ring – a spatial ring that I didn’t own.

“I don’t have any,” I lied. “All of my stuff was destroyed when the Idyll-Flume exploded.”

“I see,” the attendant said, sounding bored, then she opened her desk. Within, I could see a case of glimmering silver potions.

I’d run into these before – truth potions. Dusk, however, hadn’t, and peeped curiously from my pocket, causing the woman to start.

“What the…?” she asked, and Dusk seized on the opportunity, leaping out of my pocket and floating onto the woman’s Desk, where she proudly announced that she was Dusk, the best nature spirit on all of Ddeaer!

“She’s my familiar,” I said. “Is there any extra paperwork I need to fill out to register her coming with me?”

The attendant shifted through the desk’s contents and pulled out some more papers for us to fill out, then turned to Kene, holding her hand out for the first round of paperwork. She checked it over, handed them back their ring, and waved them to go.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll wait for my boyfriend,” they tried.

“You’re welcome to wait in the waiting room,” the attendant said in a monotone, then gave Kene a bland but firm smile. Kene nodded and ambled away, but I was sweating as the attendant pulled out a truth potion and passed it to me.

“I just have a few questions while you fill that out,” she said.

I drained the vial. Not doing as much would be incredibly suspicious, after all. But before she could speak, I started talking.

“No problem. Here, I’ll go ahead and knock out as many as I can. I really am Malachi Roth Baker, I’m not bringing in any of the things on the list.”

The potion shivered in my veins, but I was telling the truth. Technically. Dusk was the one who was bringing in the endangered species

“I do have a couple of battle spells, but I’m a registered auxiliary member of the Spirit and Wildwatch, and they’re useful in the course of my work. Dusk and I really are soul-bound, and neither of us means any harm to any people in Dragontooth. Or anywhere, really. I’m just here to compete in the Beastgate Trial Trail, then go home.”

I gave her an easygoing grin.

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“This is a bit annoying, but I’m not mad at you. I understand why I look suspicious, but I really don’t have any spatial rings, bags, or any other items or spells to stor–Agh!”

Pain exploded through me, and the attendant shot to her feet, a wand pointed at my chest.

“So you do have a spell,” she said flatly. “I thought so, with you being a spatial mage and all. Please come with me and we’ll scan your spirit.”

“The only spell I have that stores something within my spirit is Pinpoint Boneshard, one of the battle spells that I mentioned earlier,” I said. “I really just wasn’t thinking about that when I spoke. Other than that, no storage spells. But of course I’ll submit to a spiritual scan.”

The attendant did relax a little bit when I said all that without the potion causing a spike of pain, but she still gestured for me to follow her through the side door.

I did so, quite glad that people tended to overlook the intelligence and thought of spirits. If Dusk had been given a potion too, that could have easily gone far worse.

In a weird way, this was also good practice. The border security getting into Delitone would be far more intense, and knowing to prepare my briefcase with a week or so of clothes and living supplies was a good call.

It did make me feel a bit like a criminal.

Actually, come to think of it, it was criminal. For a good reason, but still criminal.

Ah well.

The attendant led me to a circle on the floor engraved with all sorts of spellwork, and pointed to it.

“Stand there, raise your arms above your head, and lower your veils. If the enchantment has to break through a veil, it will hurt and can potentially cause spiritual damage, so I highly, highly advise that you don’t.”

I hadn’t been actively veiling myself in that moment anyways, but I tried to still my mana as best I could, then held up my hands.

“Three, two, now,” the woman said.

There was a flash of knowledge mana across my senses, and I felt a powerful spell slam around and rattle around in my spirit. It was powerful fourth gate, though that was just a guess based on the moment that I’d had to sense it.

Still, I did take note of the potential fact. I’d given up the ability to cast Analyze Mana-Garden, but whatever spells that this enchantment was based on might possibly be able to be redone with death mana. Fourth gate was a long way away, but it wasn’t impossibly far, like becoming an arcanist was.

“You can lower your arms, but don’t leave the circle,” the woman instructed, while she examined the output of the spell. She poked at them a few times, then nodded and gave me what I thought might be the first genuine smile so far.

“Everything looks clear, though the Pinpoint Boneshard spell didn’t come up in our databases, it was still at least an eighty percent match, and it seemed fine. Sorry for the hold up.”

She led me back to the front, where Dusk was sitting, kicking her feet, chatting to the person in line behind me. When she saw me, she waved to them and then floated over to land on my shoulder. The attendant passed my ID back, and I headed out to meet Kene.

“Everything go okay?” they asked, and I nodded, not wanting to say more while still in a governmental office.

“I’m gonna go report the lady who attacked me to the lightwatch,” I said. “I doubt they’ll go anything, but at least if she attacks me here, there will be a record for me reporting that.”

“Your first day in Dragontooth and you want to spend it hopping from government office to government office?” Kene teased me, and I rolled my eyes.

“Yes, I definitely want to do this, and it’s not a legal and social obligation,” I said.

“Yeah, I know, you love sitting still and doing paperwork. Also, I think they’re called the frostwardens here,” they responded.

“Huh?” I asked.

“Their lightwatch. It’s the frostwardens. Or warden? I can’t remember if it was singular or plural, but that was the idea.”

“That’s weird,” I said as we left the doors, and then I immediately revised my opinion.

I’d seen the country from the boat, of course, but seeing it with my own eyes, up close, was entirely different.

The entire country was cold and mountainous. The entire city we were in, despite it being a port, was ringed with massive peaks coated in white snow that large juts of purple-gray-blue stone emerging from underneath. They spanned higher than any of the hills or mountains I’d seen in Mossford, and as the snow fell in flakes around us, I could feel an ancient glacial energy within, one that reminded me of Aput’s strong draconic magic.

Fainter, of course, it was ambient snowfall on the mountains, not actual power condensed into a natural treasure or mana source. But the type matched.

I turned my vision to the town itself. The entire place was… different. Mossford had a utilitarian layout, with numbered streets that ran in more or less straight lines, but the streets here were windy, with names like ‘iceflower fruit lane’.

There were lights everywhere, to the point it almost looked like a festival to me. In between the tall street lamps were rows of multicolored globes of pastel light that stretched from post to post, swaying in the wind. All of the businesses on the snowy streets had warm, orange light, like that cast by a fire, pouring out onto the snowy streets, and each shop’s sign was also lit up, often with both an image and a name glowing against the dark of the sky.

The entire place still somehow managed to come off as quaint and charming, rather than garish. It was probably something to do with the fact that they kept all of the color palettes muted, but I didn’t pretend to understand color theory.

Where in Mossford I would have expected to see the streets filled with enchanted carriages and brooms sweeping overhead, the streets of Dragontooth were… not bare, but foot traffic only. A street vendor had a cart set up that was selling warm drinks of hot wine, spiced with cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, ginger, orange zest, and a splash of sherry, and not too far away, another vendor was selling Tambapanni tea that had been seasoned with dried fruits and flowers from Tianzhu and the Redsummer Isles alike.

I squinted into the sky and used both Surveyor’s Eye and Vampiric Senses to look in the sky. There were a few people flying around, but it took me a moment to realize what was different about them.

All of them were flying under their own power. Be it wings, wind, force, gravity, or other, stranger methods, none of them had any sort of visible flying items.

The effect, though, was strange. The lack of people made it easier to look up and behold the constellations above, the faint humming lines of power that connected the bright and burning lines splattered across the canvas of the void.

I did wonder exactly how people got around, but I’d figure that out eventually.

“I want one of those,” Kene said, pointing at another street vender that stood in front of some sort of stairwell that headed underground.