It took us the better part of an hour to completely regroup, and to my surprise, the last one that we were able to find was Meadow. She was standing over the bog, leaning on her staff, gazing into several shards of what seemed to be crystal, and felt like incredibly intense mana that was even more unusual than it was intense, with aspects of mental, knowledge, death, and other things that still didn’t feel like anything I knew.

She looked up, her eyes landing on the spirit dragon that was still curled around my neck, then to Octavian, then to Dusk, before flitting over Octavian’s moms, before she smiled.

“There are some interesting things afoot tonight, it seems.”

We spent a while coming through the bog with the small folk, but nothing exceptional jumped out at me. There were a few mana sources that I tucked away, but as the evening drew on, we returned to the dragon sanctuary, and Octavian’s mom’s invited us over for dinner and to discuss our findings.

“Why don’t you go first?” Octavian said as we sat down around several large bowls of tomato and lentil soup. “You’re the one who found a spirit dragon.”

“She’s a starsoul ,” Meadow said idly, looking surprisingly inattentive. She was usually quite present in the moment, but right now she looked a million miles away.

“Oh, the dragon’s a she?” I asked, and Meadow nodded, pulling her attention back to focus on me.

I went over the basics of what had happened – chasing down the strange staff-mimic item, then turning to search for more things and finding her dying, feeding her, and then bonding to her. By the end, Olive’s nails were gouged into the table, and Thea patted her arm.

“Strength, dear.”

“Right,” Olive said, then took a breath and looked up at me.

“Malachi, do you know why soul or spirit dragons are rare?” she asked.

“No,” I admitted.

“Because they’re unnatural,” Olive said. “They don’t appear or reproduce. There aren’t environments that are purely mana without energy, because everything physical has energy. An environment without energy is like…”

She struggled for a moment, and Kater stepped in.

“Draconic magic is beast magic, absorbed from their environment’s natural energies. Energy is in everything, an environment with mana and no energy is impossible. Even a constructed demiplane has spatial energy. So a soul or spirit dragon is theoretically impossible to naturally occur.”

“That hasn’t stopped people,” Thea said, picking up the thread of the conversation. “Some mages have tried to create areas saturated so perfectly with an amalgam of souls and elementals that there is only mana, no energy. They’ve raised monsters.”

“But sometimes, very rarely,” Meadow said. “A spirit is caught amidst shooting stars. Perhaps twice a decade. Their advancement doesn’t seem to work quite the same as ours, and their powers are often strange. I didn’t expect you to run into one. Let alone one that you had the ability to unwarp.”

“I… didn’t know,” I said, looking down at the little dragon spirit curled around my neck. Dusk, on my shoulder, walked over to her and placed her hand onto the dragon’s snout, whispering like trees in the wind.

I relaxed a bit, glad that Dusk wasn’t going to be completely jealous or anything like that.

We spent a while examining my staff as well, and Meadow seemed a touch less freaked out about this one, running her finger along its strange, matte surface.

“Interesting. The craftsman would likely love to examine this. This is more in line with my expectations, though we’ll have to test if its artificial connection is to any resonance, or if it’s only able to absorb truths. I suspect the latter, but you never know.”

“What is it?”

“Oh I have no idea,” Meadow said. “But it’s a standard twist on the rules, which is common enough for a starfall.”

I nodded slowly, then glanced around.

“Who’s next?”

Dusk hopped off my shoulder and zipped over to the center of the table. She thrust her hands into the air, and three spinning seeds floated above her palms. One was a rich and deep power of a lushloam seed, and the others felt like a forest as well, but different. One was the endless emptiness and shadows of the woods at night, always surrounded by things you cannot see but will never leave, while the other was the brightly lit woods of the day, growing and providing light and water to all.

Dusk proudly announced that she planned to plant them within herself. Since she was the realm, she thought she might be able to gain some of their other effects simply by having it as a part of her garden. Even if not, the health and power of her realm was important.

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I let out a low whistle.

“And you all dogpiled on me for getting strange things!” I said. “Look at Dusk!”

“She deserves them,” Kene said. “You don’t.”

They grinned and winked at me, and I sniffed haughtily.

“Exactly,” Octavian said, “Dusk is great, and her familiar’s okay.”

“I can call Mantle Dragonfyre,” I said.

“We know, dear,” Kene said. “It’s very impressive.”

“Curse the both of you,” I said. “Thea, what did you get?”

“Hm?” Thea said, looking up from her soup.

“What did you get?”

Thea was silent for a moment, then simply said, “Clarity,” before going back to eating.

“I’ll go,” Kene said, flicking out their hand and revealing a strange looking shard of ice that caught the light and glimmered, then a smooth gray-white stone.

“A hudau heritage stone!” I said, whistling. “Nice!”

“Peak fourth gate, at that,” Octavian said. “That’s a good bit of power you can add, or you could use it to smooth your path to peak fourth gate, and still consolidate the first and second layers into your mana.”

“I’m going to try and do a bit of both,” Kene said. “The speed should help the fight against the hag, but I want to also clear my gates right. Having a bunch of diffuse power’s not great.”

“I think that’s wise,” I agreed. “So what’s the ice crystal?”

“I’m not sure,” Kene said. “It’s not a natural treasure I recognize.”

I focused on my mana senses with it, and it felt like the end, like death by the frigid cold, an empty abyss that would consume all things.

I shuddered and pulled my mana senses back.

“It’s a killingstone,” Thea said. “It’s a natural treasure that sits in your spirit and adds some extra magical punch to your attacks. The more things you kill, the more powerful the treasure grows. They’re also quite rare and expensive, easily worth seven hundred thousand silver.”

Kene sighed and tucked the two treasures in their ring.

“Well, you can always trade it,” Octavian said. “The auction house we work with is always interested in natural treasures, and they actually have standards. Since we live in free territory, we spend a lot of effort on our wards, but we have to put down rouge spirits of murder fairly often. It could be put into good hands, and you could get something you want!”

A glimmer of greed entered Kene’s eye at that, and I elbowed him.

“Hey, who’s lucky now? You get to trade it in for whatever you want!”

They laughed and kissed my cheek, and we talked about potential ideas to trade, before Octavian started to remove items from his own storage rings.

The first thing he put down was a mana source that felt like highly dense sixth gate lunar mana.

“Not very impressive, but amazing for an enchanter, we can find a lot of uses for it,” he said, putting down the next item, a pile of dull grayish stuff that looked almost like clay. Kene perked up.

“Oh that’s ironchannel,” he said. “It’s a really useful spiritual enhancement to reinforce your mana channels.”

“Good to know! Octavian said, pulling out a head sized lump of charcoal-colored… something… from his ring, and this time, Kater was the one to react.

“Spirit-ore? You lucky boy.”

Kene murmured his agreement, and I looked around. Meadow took pity on me and explained.

“There are certain rare and expensive tools that can be brought into the spirit and used in the mana-garden. A set of shears to allow for easy trimming of trees, a shovel to help dig steps, a chisel to help carve out stone, that sort of thing. Spirit-ore is the primary component in making them.”

“Better yet, since Tavi’s bonded to his creatures, the tool can be passed between them,” Kater said. “If he makes a spiritual machete, then both Roh and Araceli can also use it!”

I let out a whistle this time. That was good!

Octavian for his part seemed extraordinarily pleased, to the point I wondered if he might have a specific need that he hadn’t talked about. I’d never seen his mana-garden, so it was definitely possible.

Finally, Octavian pulled out another gray lump of about the same size. I squinted at him.

“Do you have some secret, extra aspect of your legacy that makes you able to detect gray lumps?” I asked. “That’s three out of four.”

“I’ll never tell,” he said with a laugh. This time, it was Meadow to speak.

“Starlit Iron. It’s meteoric iron that seems to bind well to anything else it’s used to create and enhance its power. If you used it with the spirit-ore, it could give you more metal for working with, and make the tools more effective. I know it’s sought after by many mineral mages, to bind to minerals they have.”

“A good haul, all in all,” Octavian said, sweeping them into his ring again.

Olive and Kater, oddly enough, had both only collected mana sources. High gate and quite dense, but still only mana sources.

I wondered about that. Dusk and I had made out like bandits. I somewhat expected that for me, given that I’d been waiting for months and had gotten this from a mana meditation.

Kene and Octavian had both made out very well.

A fourth gate hudau heritage stone didn’t sound like much if I thought about it like a mana source, but it wasn’t. A heritage stone directly added to a person’s walls or pushed back mist, increasing their power more like a pill than just a mana source. It represented a pretty impressive amount of power bundled into a small space, and the kind of thing that would only compound as they grew, and might help them fight the hag off better.

Octavian wasn’t talking about it, but judging from how pleased he was with the spirit-ore, I thought he might have gotten exactly what he needed.

And yet Kater and Olive both got so little. Was it because they were already near the end of their paths?

It was strange, and I mulled it over as I ate some of the soup.

“So, what are you going to name her?” Kene asked, gesturing to the starsoul dragon. Dusk piped up, suggesting the name ‘Noodle’, because she was kind of like a long noodle.

“Don’t you think a rare and beautiful creature should have a rare and beautiful name?” I asked.

Dusk considered for a moment, then said that no, she didn’t think so, why?

“Solaris,” Olive suggested seriously. I hummed noncommittally, and she nodded.

“I like Noodle,” Octavian said.

“Eos?” Thea offered, and again, I considered it.

“Amy,” Kene said. I looked at them.

“It’s a lovely name,” they said.

“It’s not a dragon name,” I said.

“Bridgit,” Meadow offered.

“That sounds more like a phoenix.”

“Dawn?” Kater offered, and the dragon looked up.

I considered it, looking down at where I had one spirit on a shoulder, and the other around my neck.

“I think she likes it,” Olive said.

“Dawn and Dusk,” I said. “Two impossibilities, one a spirit of the world, and one of the stars above.”

There was a moment of silence and contemplation at that, which was broken a moment later by Dusk zipping down and stealing a bite of my soup, then stealing a second bite for Dawn.