Just as the Gauntess’s captain foretold, we reached our destination upon the morrow.

We made land in Port Cambridge, that northwestern portal connecting the Cells to the old country. Triarch territory. The Anglican half. A modest metropolis. Well, modest when compared to the cities of Old Europe, at least.

To me, it was massive.

Though not quite so advanced in height, or so prolific in Tinkertech as Talos itself, it was just about as large as the Western Capital, and far, far more populated. The city was a single swarming, seething hive.

And the first thing that hit you upon disembarking was its smell.

It struck your face and swam up your nostrils like viscous liquid, omnipresent and inescapable, almost as bad as that first floor of the Frontier Maw. It was the unwashed scent of one million bodies, the smell of sweat and oil, of rust and human refuse, drowning out even the stink of the sea.

I grew swiftly envious of the few vessels I saw floating along the streets, hermetically sealed Entropic caskets, home no doubt to Blessed of considerable pedigree. It must have been nice, to not smell this smell. But we didn’t have that option. We could have flew, I supposed. But we didn’t want to make a scene, either.

So we pushed our way into the hive.

The bodies pulsed and thronged along the wharf that led into the city proper, a single living mass made up of chapped lips, greasy hair, and sunburnt skin. If not for my increased control, and ADMINISTRATION’s novel silence, I’d no doubt have been overwhelmed.

Instead, the public anxiety I dealt with was of an entirely mundane manner.

Even in the very best of circumstances, I didn’t feel entirely comfortable around crowds. Having grown up in the villages where there were so few, the way we now digested through streets like rats scampering a maze and squeezed together like packed sardines made me claustrophobic.

Everywhere I looked, I felt eyes upon me, roving over and across me, molesting me from afar. The song might no longer have troubled me, but still, the purely physical roar of noise so much life emitted made it impossible to speak, or think.

Sensory Perception, which I had become quite accustomed to serving as my second pair of eyes, was near-useless here. It was a crude creation, being of my own unrefined design, a proto-Shard, and the sheer volume of information it dumped into my mind, sans processing, without any manner of filtration, would’ve made me insensate.

So I didn’t use it at all.

I shambled wretchedly through the streets, lost in a sea of blood and unwashed muscle, with only my two companions to guide me.

At least, I needn’t fear thievery.

All those things precious to me were safely stored, sequestered within my soul, even my Ciphic Tablet, which now proudly reported a novel balance of near five million chits, thanks to Alyss’s provenance. And it was a good thing, too.

Because this place was rotten.

Rotten, and festering.

The streets were swarmed by the sickly, the homeless, and the destitute. Unlike Talos, which had seemingly composed itself of a roughly equivalent number of mundanes and Blessed, this city must have had ten-times the former than the latter. At least. Port Cambridge was an apple rotten on the outside; its core might have been clean and polished, made up of lavish inns and stately town houses, of gilded lamp posts and marble walls, but surrounding them on all sides was a dense, sprawling patchwork of slums.

It was through these slums we strode to reach our destination, and so we received a perfect picture of just how bad the cities in Europe truly were.

Back in Talos, mundane dwellings had settled squalidly amongst shining towers, houses and futuristic shopfronts. For the most part they were brick-layed hovels, and often in a considerably greater state of disrepair than their futuristic neighbors.

But, at least they’d been actual buildings.

These ones were worse off than what I’d seen in Burrick.

Much worse.

The shanty-houses were ramshackle, thrown together from an awkward mixture of rotten wood, rusted iron, and misshaped stone and subsequently left to decompose. I saw leaky roofs, or none at all, corrugated steel patching over gaping holes in walls. I couldn’t imagine any of these places had access to running water, and so I had to wonder where they sourced their water from, at all.

For a brief while, I wondered too of how they disposed their sewage, until I received an altogether unwelcome demonstration by way of one of the slums’ inhabitants. A pair of lanky arms and bony hands emerged with a bucket, tossing said refuse through just such a yawning hole, showering the streets below in shit, as well those unfortunate enough to have chosen a path that led underneath.

After that display, all three of us took care not to stray far from the main road’s center.

It was awful.

All of it. All of it was just awful.

The inhabitants, most of all.

Again, in Talos, although the clothing mundanes sported was certainly…ratty, and their frames indubitably gaunter and grimmer than I’d expected, at least…

Well, at least they’d had clothes.

Not so, here.

Not for the most part.

Here, I saw people languishing about aimlessly, stick-thin and seemingly on the edge of expiration. They would miss pants, or shirts, or both. The skin of some was mottled with sores, and scars, the eyes of others glassy and unfocused. They drifted back and forth, meandering purposelessly about, becoming one with the ubiquitous crowd but traveling nowhere in particular.

I saw, more times than I could count, a collection of poor souls clustered around, or fighting desperately over a greasy pouch laden with what looked like some sort of azure dust. Dueling one another desperately, rotten tooth and uncut nail to imbibe a mere whisper of it. To rub it along their gums, or force it against their septum.

And there were so…so…

So many of them.

They made up, by overwhelming majority, the horde which choked the streets and cramped the passageways of Port Cambridge, set upon by each and every manner of cruel fate and grisly circumstance. Lamed men, sitting or standing about, if indeed they yet possessed the limbs to do so, with nothing at all alive behind their eyes. Sobbing women, hunched up on the side of the road, or in the shadows of an alley, or upon the porches of the crumbling shacks. Emaciated children, hiding themselves behind the slanted boards and rusted steel bars of said hovels, peeking out with fragile stares and hollow cheeks.

But none wore chains.

In Europe, so Alyss claimed, they hated Slavers. Hated the Progressive movement, in general. They were Conservatives by majority. Stuck to the old ways. Outlawed the whole practice for being unethical. Which, to be fair, it was.

In Europe, there were no slaves.

But there were servants.

Oh, yes.

Indents, they called them.

And they were the best off by far.

These were the mundanes that traveled the roads with purpose, ones of considerably haler sort, with filled-out frames and full sets of clothing. Some still looked weak, some still seemed tired, but others were well-fed. Finely clothed. Even plump. Some servants were leading around other servants, looking mightily pleased with themselves as they did so.

It made sense. It was what I’d expected, what Alyss had warned me of. There would be no Hadrid’s, here. Nothing of the sort. In Europe, mundanes couldn’t own property. They couldn’t run a business. They couldn’t vote, or hold office. They had the right to life, and the right to liberty, and that was it. That was all.

And those rights could all too easily be taken away.

The products of this gruesome system were unavoidable, inescapable. They met me every which way I turned. Men and women and children with no hope, no future, and absolutely no way to survive. For a moment, it made me thank the Priest for our Frontlines, and the countless hundred thousand mundanes we lost to them yearly, for surely death was a preferable alternative to this.

It unsettled me.

Slavery was a foul practice, but at least a slave could buy their freedom.

There was no escape from this.

Finally, though, we reached a barrier point between the slums and finer districts, a line in the sand that separated worn-down dirt paths from those of polished granite, policed and serviced by tall, thin, stiff golems of a similar sort to that one I’d faced during the Agoge exam. Other Blessed were expectorated by the crowd on our either side with a regular periodicity, making their individual ways into the Aristocratic districts of Port Cambridge with a grateful sigh and, occasionally, an anxious glance back whence they’d came.

The city proper was marked by a wide, plain sign of off-white coloring which read, Aristocrats Only–All Indents must present contract upon Garde inquest.

“Fucking finally,” I gasped, bending over to draw in deep breaths of air that no longer smelt, or tasted, quite so much of sewage.

Alyss shivered from beside me, glancing back towards the crowded streets we’d just escaped from with a troubled expression on her face.

“Gods,” she said, shaking her head and scanning the ever-bustling hive. “I didn’t…I mean, I’d heard stories, but…I wasn’t expecting it to be this bad.”

“It shouldn’t be.”

Caleb’s concerned mutter drew the both of our attentions towards him. He, much like the sorceress, was examining the crowd behind us with a frown. A frown I’d seen grow deeper, darker, and more ponderous from the moment we made port.

“This is wrong,” he murmured.

“You said it, buddy,” I agreed.

“No, you misunderstand,” he maintained, a measure of agitation in his voice. “It should not…it was not always…”

He trailed off.

“The Faith sent me here, long ago,” he declared, after a pause. “Soon after I triggered. Ten years hence, or thereabouts.”

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His frown deepened.

“The situation…has worsened. This is…untenable. I…I wonder…”

“Well, we shouldn’t tarry long. Don’t we have a train to catch?” I pointed out, filling the next pause in conversation quickly. Caleb was far better of late, but ever since the Maw his demeanor could be a somewhat fickle thing. Europe was bad, but it would be best if I managed to prevent him from dwelling upon it.

“Technically, the train runs twice daily,” Alyss, thankfully, responded without delay. “But, I agree.” She glanced back the way we’d come a second time, and grimaced. “I’d rather not spend a second longer here than necessary,” she muttered, her eyelids fluttering and her irises turning black for a moment as she flitted through her many shadows’ sight.

“I see it,” she exclaimed. “It’s not far.”

“Good,” I said, stepping over to clap my still-silent, contemplative companion on his broad, gilded shoulders.

“Will you leaving us now, then, Inquisitor?” I asked, casually. He’d already made clear his intentions to stop by Rome before joining us in Bern. Metatron and the Faith expected it and, no matter what our feelings might be on them at the moment, there was little reason to raise undue alarm.

“Yes,” he answered, nodding to himself as he swept his gaze across the crowd. “Yes, I think that’s wise.”

“Any idea when you’ll return?” I inquired.

“I am unsure,” he hummed, distractedly. “I travel quite quickly now, by air. The journey will take less than a day. Rome, itself, though, may take a while…it’s hard to say…”

Caleb frowned, shook his head lightly, then glanced our way.

“Even so, not more than a week, I should think. Less, hopefully,” he said, slowly, his incensed eyes roving across the poor, abused, and destitute, his song growing ever-more agitated, writhing under his iron grip.

“Well, we’ll miss you,” I replied, my grip on his shoulder tightening slightly. “Won’t we, Alyss?” She nodded, sharing my smile, though none of my concern. Wincing internally, I raised my arm and poked the Immolator in his cheek. And, when his brow furrowed in vexation, and he turned to face me, decidedly irate, I batted my eyes and clasped my hands atop my heart.

“The days, oh,” I sang, sighing, “shall seem as years until your return.”

“T–Taiven!” Alyss choked, flushing.

Caleb’s brows shot up.

He snorted.

And he grinned.

And then the edges of his grin warped and wavered, and he bent down slightly, wrapping me up in a too-tight, impromptu hug.

“Whoa, whoa, big guy,” I exclaimed, in a voice slightly muffled by our height difference. “It wasn’t that funny. What gives?”

“An insurance policy,” he returned, with an unusually unsteady timbre, before turning to Alyss, who remained just as shocked as before, and treating her to precisely the same gesture. From beside her, I saw the sorceress flush an even deeper red, the likes of which I’d not seen in some time now.

From afar, and wrapped in the Inquisitor’s embrace, the normally poised and powerful sorceress bore a striking resemblance to a strangled tomato, and I had to fight to prevent a blurt of quite untimely laughter from making its way across my lips.

“I have not, ah, had friends,” Caleb stammered, awkwardly, “in…er, a very…”

We stared at him.

“Yes, well,” he attempted again. “What I mean to say is, thank you. Thank you. I appreciate you both. Truly. You are fine…a fine pair of, of Blessed. Without you, the both of you, I do not know if…ah, I should say, if, if we do not see each other again, then I–”

“Woah, woah, woah. Wait just a moment,” I cut in, suddenly concerned. “What’s going on here, Inquisitor?”

I glanced at Alyss, noticing her share my apprehension.

“Should we be worried about something?” I pressed, more urgently. “Do you want us to come with you? Because, if there’s a chan–”

“No, no,” Caleb refuted, quickly, grinning at us, though with what seemed like a concertedly anxious edge. “No. There is no need to worry. None. At all. I merely…thought I should tell you that, is all. You never, you never know what might happen.”

“…right,” I replied dubiously, not at all assuaged.

“Well, then,” he said, nodding stiffly. “Farewell.”

A circle of brilliant light lit up beneath his feat, a set of flawless, shimmering armor clad itself across the contours of his form, and Caleb Conway rocketed off into the air with an explosion of heat and sound. His magnificent and equally sudden departure drew the attention of Blessed and their mundane Indents for leagues around, who paused in their daily routines to watch the High Inquisitor vanish into the far-off clouds, dwindling down until he was naught but a speck upon the horizon.

I looked at Alyss.

Alyss stared back at me.

“Uh, what do y–”

“No idea,” she replied. She glanced back upwards at the departing Immortal’s comet trail, gnawing anxiously at her lower lip. “Hope it’s nothing bad. Nothing too bad, anyway.”

“Me, too,” I muttered.

But that was it. What else could we do? Glare was gone. And so, we made our own way forward. Just as Alyss prophesied, we swiftly reached the train depot.

It was a magical place.

Quite literally, in fact. The entire building, as well as the trains that I could make out waiting in their respective bays, was inlaid with little Runic lettering, glyphs and symbols that twinkled entrancingly with a faint and azure light. Unlike Talos’s infrastructure, which revolved around their own Cell’s Tinkertech, this city ran almost entirely upon Entropy crystals.

I couldn’t see them, exactly, but their many byproducts shone as plain as day in my enhanced sight. Great and branching veins of liquid gold, blue-green energy running up and down and all around this high-ceilinged depot, connecting everything. The lights, the water fountains, the many inbuilt restaurants and kiosks, the gently-levitating trains, even a number of long, thin alcoves in which I caught sight of limp service golems mid-recharge.

This whole building, no, this whole city was one giant network. One arcane organism. And its lifeblood was Entropy.

Just where did they get so much of it?

Just as we entered, and saw the many finely-dressed Blessed, and few mundane servants milling about, a soft, soothing voice seeped from above.

My Lords and Ladies. This station serves all lines to Chivalry, Valliance, Garde, Neo-Amsterdam, Great Bern, and the overnight to Rome. No dueling is permitted in the station. The combative exercise of Blessings may be met with fine. For your own safety, and that of the trains themselves, please stand back from the platform edge, and, when boarding and alighting trains, please mind the gap, between the train, and the platform. Thank you.

Alyss led the way, thankfully. Left alone, even after her thorough lessons, I’d swiftly lose myself in a place like this. We purchased our tickets with little difficulty, the mundane clerk all-too-eager to serve Aristocrats in a simpering manner that so revolted me. Though the slums might now have been out of sight, in Old Europe, one could never truly escape them.

We loaded ourselves into the first-class cabin of the finest vehicle I’d ever had the pleasure to ride upon.

The seats were soft and plush and wonderful, packed full of supple feathers and coated heartily in lavish leather. Despite the grandiose table of polished stone that separated the one side of our lodgings from the other, we each still had enough space to recline ourselves quite comfortably for the apparently four-hour voyage. I noticed a minor damping field permeate the air around us, but nothing I couldn’t easily circumvent, should such a thing prove necessary.

I ran my hand along the smooth, lush leather, and stared silently out the train’s window, trying my best to put the whole voyage behind me. Watching the bustle of fellow Aristocrats, and their relatively cheaper-clad Indents, as they made their way about the station’s innards.

That same soothing voice I’d heard before chimed once again, from above me this time, emanating softly from speakers I could see only thanks to my expanded perception.

Attention, all passengers. Please do not leave your luggage, or storage devices, unattended on the station. Unattended goods may be stolen, or remanded into Triarch custody upon location by service golems. Aristocrats may visit the customer service kiosk to retrieve remanded luggage. All mundane luggage left unattended will be forfeit. If you spot any suspicious items or mundanes, then please speak to a Garde member, or, repeat the phrase ‘suspicious activity’ to a service golem immediately. For those in our first-class cabin, a refreshment menu will be brought around shortly.

I perked up at that.

Refreshments.

The meals Alyss still had in storage were indeed sumptuous but, eerily true to her long-antiquated warning, had grown somewhat tired over time. I’d fare aplenty from the many restaurants I pillaged back in Talos, of course, but that was all Western cuisine.

Europe was supposedly the culinary center of the world, and I hungered to see what they might have in store.

“By the way,” Alyss interrupted my gastronomic fantasies, “the Institute replied.” She stretched herself out across the smooth, supple leather, releasing a low sigh of pleasure as she did so. We’d sent a message via tablet the moment we made land, but that had been mere hours ago. Their response time was impressive.

“Said they’ll send someone to meet us in Bern,” she explained. “Show us to our lodgings, what not.”

“They say who?” I asked.

She shook her head and yawned, causing ebony tresses to dance this way and that about her face.

“Someone important, I should think. An Heir, perhaps,” she murmured, closing her eyes and crossing her arms about her chest. “Most like, someone whom the Institute trusts. Who’s a good judge of character. They’ll want that. They’ll want to get a gauge on who we are, where we’re at. Mentally. Politically. Especially after how the Agoge ended.”

I hummed distractedly, tapping two fingers on my leather booth’s marble arm. On a whim, I sent a pulse down into the depths of my soul, and was met with an unsurprisingly instant response.

From dregs of Entropic immaterium, a massive silver and bone-white wolf emerged, wholly visible to those surrounding us and utterly reveling in that fact. Whistling lightly whilst I opened up my arms, the fearsome creature let out a yip of adorable delight, before promptly diving into my outstretched embrace.

Fang’s lupine form shrank down and down, until he was the size of a mere puppy, less in length even than the span of my own forearm. Stretching himself delightedly across my open lap, my Minor Shard let out a euphoric croon as I started to scratch all up and down his lustrous coat of ferrous fur.

I grinned. Now that I’d a reasonable story to explain my sentient sword’s existence, there was little reason to conceal his more…exceptional abilities. To the contrary, such a display might do me plenty good instead, explaining those powers that didn’t fit well into my newly-Breaker status.

And Fang positively loved the newfound freedom.

Final boarding call, I heard the speakers softly ring, This is the final boarding call for all passengers embarking on the ten-oh-clock indirect service to Bern, stopping at Chivalry, Sante, Verifax, and terminating at Great Bern. All aboard. All aboard.

I looked around.

Surprisingly, we were all alone.

No others saw fit to join us in first class. Strange. The tickets hadn’t been that expensive, so far as I understood. Scant more than fifteen hundred chits. Far less than my own recently-repurchased set of Synthread clothes.

But then, what did I know of money? All I knew was how to spend it, and how I might kill monsters to acquire it.

So I shrugged to myself, and returned my attentions to the loyal hound spread belly-up on my lap. And to gazing distractedly out my nearest window.

To watching the rhythms of the magic city’s heart.

I watched a young woman with eyes of pure, unblemished white as she reclined upon a wicker chair at one of the station’s many restaurants, lethargically panning across the fine print of a newspaper. She sipped a dark-colored beverage with many mixed-in whorls of soft cream as she read. Narrowing my eyes and focusing my vision, I could handily make out the headline of the page she was on.

Crannoch goes the way of Frattol and Galencia. Wergar urges calm.

Two tables across from her, and five down, I watched another, younger fellow, a man staring intently at the outstretched digits of his rightmost hand. Every now and again they’d flicker, sparks of purple shooting off of them, quickly dissipating into the surrounding air, at which point the youth would curse, and glance about himself, anxiously. Left abandoned atop his table was an article of an altogether different sort.

Syren spills all: Top ten sex tips to make your partner devoted to you!

And further down.

Damping is the new foreplay: Neo-Amsterdam’s dimeritium summer catalogue.

Far off and across the great and open, bustling hall, I watched a man with dark, honey-colored skin leaning against the smooth, enchanted walls of the station. His clothing was rather indistinctive, beige pants and a plain shirt of a slightly bluer hue, a pair of tinted sunglasses obscuring his features from view. He didn’t seem in any particular hurry, instead jotting down notes of some sort into a small, black book he held tight in the other palm.

I watched a duo of tall, thin, faceless, grey-skinned golems fumble about with a pair of buckets and a mop, their endless efforts to scrub the station’s already-spotless floor further clean obstructed by errant fauna; a cute and agile black cat, with a single sea-green stripe running through its fur.

It dodged left and danced right as they struggled to catch it, flowing through their fumbling stone palms like the open sea. It evaded their best efforts with no apparent difficulty, as if it could see what they were about to do; easily and gracefully foiling the orders they’d been handed down and looking downright delighted as it did so.

I smiled at the sight.

And then I realized something.

Alyss was looking at me.

Her eyes were half closed, and she was clearly drifting rapidly towards unconsciousness, but nevertheless, she was looking at me. Not at Fang. Not out the window. At me.

There was a strange expression on her face, but I couldn’t quite unravel what it was.

I could’ve reached out with my song, I supposed, my touch plenty deft enough by now to read surface emotions in others, but recoiled at the breach in privacy such an action would have represented. I considered opening my mouth to ask, but then…stopped.

Because she looked happy.

Or, at least, she looked content. Content, in a way I don’t think I’d ever seen her look before.

So I ignored her gaze instead, spinning down my Sensory Perception, instead watching the world around us start to move with physical eyes alone. The train station drifted sedately by, followed swiftly by Port Cambridge’s quite unsightly innards, faster and faster, and faster still, until it all transitioned to gorgeous countryside, and then into a blur before me.

Fang was fast asleep on my lap, his tongue lolling decadently.

From across the sleek, stone table I heard Alyss lightly snore.

My smile broadened.

Today marked the furthest I’d ever strayed from Burrick, and yet, right now, I felt at home.