Chapter 8: Lift

In its original usage, the term mage referred to anyone with a connection to a Font from which they could draw power. In this paradigm, even Primals would be considered as such. Over time, when the art of wizardry was discovered, the designation of sorcery was given to the innate ability to cast, but all still were considered mages.

-Tallen Elmheart, On Mages

—

Amara began walking down the streets of the warehouse district, oblivious to the dangers such parts of town were known for. It was early morning, but that wouldn't stop an opportunistic thief who caught a young girl unaware.

"How do you know where to go?" Kole asked sometime after she'd made another turn.

She pointed up.

Kole followed her finger, squinting against the sun.

"I just see a bunch of gulls."

"One of them is with me," she said.

"How are directions ’understanding'?!" Kole started but then stopped himself adding, "Never mind."

They continued like this a while longer until they found a line of carts and wagons loaded with supplies. The noise got louder and the crowds grew, and Amara lost some of her confidence, becoming agitated by the noise. Far ahead they spotted a large stone construction of dwarven build, perfectly square and free of adornments that served no function, only runes giving it any semblance of decoration. Groups of cargo were loaded onto a large rectangular platform, which then slid to the side to make room for the next one.

Finally spotting something he recognized, he took the lead.

"We don't have to wait in this," he told Amara.

They walked along the line until they reached a much shorter line up front reserved for passengers without cargo. A dozen people waited as one person stood on a runed plate in front of a clerk's window.

Behind the window, a dwarf woman said, "203 pounds. That'll be 6 Will or 6 bits."

"Could you have said it any louder?” the human woman who'd just been publicly weighed hissed, “Will I suppose."

The dwarf laughed at the irritation and Kole guessed that public shaming was seen as a small perk of the job to the toll keeper.

She handed the woman a small glass sphere, and the woman touched it briefly before the dwarf took it away satisfied.

When it became Kole and Amara's turn, they collectively owed 12 Will.

"What if we offer more Will?" Kole asked.

He knew the Will was a tax to power the runes of the great lift, but he vaguely remembered his father exhausting his Will when they'd used it.

"Then you get paid. 1 bit for each 1 Will extra." The dwarf explained.

"I can give 25," Amara said, eagerly.

Amara was handed a gemstone this time. A small ruby but wonderfully cut. She held the stone in her hand and focused and handed it to the dwarf, who inspected it and gave Amara a copper coin and 5 bits.

"Just the 7 for me," Kole said.

He had plenty of Will, but he required all of it if he needed to cast anything but Invisibility. He had enough money to see him through the coming months if he was careful, and if came to it he could come back and sell more Will. All his Will capacity for the day could earn him 40 bits, or two copper counts, but that was worthless to him next to a lost day of progress.

Plus, he hated the headaches caused from Will drain. He looked to Amara who was already rubbing her forehead and shielding her eyes from the light.

They were ushered through a gate and onto the giant platform. The platform itself was a 30-foot square, with 8-foot tall sides. The floor and walls were made of wood, but that was simply a platform secured to the metal runed plate that the elevator rested on.

“What are you doing?” Kole asked Amara who was attempting to pry up a board.

“I want to see the runes!” she said with focused determination, forgetting the pain of her Will-drained state.

“Stop it! You’re going to get us kicked off.”

Amara stopped her desperate clawing and looked around to see if she’d been spotted.

“They’d do that?”

“Yes. The dwarves are rather protective of their runes,” Kole explained

Amara was disappointed for a moment but then smiled as a rat climbed out of her bag and onto the floor, where it quickly found a hole and squeezed through. As soon as it was through, she pulled out a notebook and sat down on the floor, drawing out a series of runes.

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Kole watched her work, nervously looking to see if anyone was paying attention to them. The dwarves that ran the lift were busy directing the passengers and cargo, evenly distributing the weight, and paid no heed to the meager weight of the pair of teenagers.

Once sure they were unobserved, he watched Amara draw. Kole didn’t know much about runes, but in many ways, they were similar to the spellforms he’d studied endlessly. The lines in each magical art had no decipherable meaning but were instead shapes that resonated with the Fonts and the Arcane Realm in ways that allowed Will to draw upon them.

“How are you doing that?” Kole asked, despite knowing he wouldn’t be happy with the answer.

“Gus wants me to write them down, so I can understand his desires and do it,” she explained, as if that made perfect sense.

Kole stopped himself from engaging, and instead focused on something else, “Gus? The rat's name is Gus? Like from the children’s story?”

Amara just nodded in response as she continued to work.

“Why?”

“I like the story. He likes the story.”

“He likes the—”

“Shhh!,” Amara interrupted his question.

“Sorry,” Kole whispered, planning on bringing this topic up at a later date.

The rat likes stories?

Amara spent the entire hour-long descent drawing and annotating the drawings until she had a dozen pages of seemingly random shapes.

“Bottom!” came a shout from one of the dwarves shortly before the platform came to a grinding halt.

The gate on the platform opposite their entry opened, and the wagons began to offload in an ordered fashion. In all the movement Gus squirmed out from under the platform and crawled back up into Amara’s bag.

Kole eyed the rodent with new eyes in light of the revelation of its opinions on fiction.

“Hide the journal,” Kole whispered to Amara who was looking through the pages as they walked.

She looked up, confused for a moment, before remembering his previous warning, and then slammed the book closed.

The platform came down alongside a lake, formed where water exited from an underwater cave from the ocean. The lake now served as a secondary port to handle the cargo from the lifts. Sailors and dock workers were busy loading and unloading freight. A small town had formed around the lake, but with Nest just up the mountain and Edgewater a days travel south, it was only a way-station.

“Let's take a ferry,” Kole suggested before leading the way.

The road to Edgewater was a safe and easy journey, but it took a whole day, and they wanted to reach the city before nightfall. Enrollment for the new year of study was open for another day, but they felt no need to risk it.

They boarded a ferry with some of their fellow light travelers, and sat for the six-hour journey, taking in the sights of the forest that lined the river. Kole had hardly ever left Illandrios and Amara’s home was rocky, devoid of any trees. The sight of the ancient forest with its towering trees awed the pair.

Kole knew from his prior studies that the forest hadn’t always been this impressive, but in the wake of the blight druid that had corrupted the area in the lead-up to the Last Dragon War, Assuine’s followers had descended on the region, repairing the damage and then some. Now those followers stayed as Assuine’s representatives to the Academy.

Suddenly, the trees ended, and a city came into view. The tree line didn’t fade or grow sparse over time. Instead, there was a clear delineation from the forest and the farmland that surrounded the city. The former logging village still partook in the trade, but the druids now dictated regions from which trees should be felled.

The farmland itself was not typical either. Farms filled the region beyond the river, but the ones directly around the city were run by the school. Many grew reagents and ingredients needed for the study of alchemy and other arts, while others still were used to research the newly developing science of horticulture—something the Assuine worshipers were still coming to grips with. They didn’t dislike the art, far from it, but the methodical approach to rearing nature was at odds with their goddess’s more instinctive and whimsical nature.

The ferry stopped near one of these farms and ushered all the passengers off where a small rickety dock sat.

“Trust me,” the ferryman said as he unloaded his mules to haul the ferry back up north. “You don’t want to get dropped off in the docks.”

Looking down the river, Kole saw a line of ships waiting at anchor in the middle of the river. The thought of their unwieldy ferry passing through that gave him an appreciation for the unstable dock.

They followed a road through the farms that led them through the outer city until they found the main northern road that would bring them through the gates to the city proper. A small logging town before the war, Edgewater had experienced a boom with the influx of citizens from the Fall of Landing. The town quickly became the major city of the region, and a wall had been constructed at that time as part of the war effort. The city had long since outgrown that region, but the wall still remained, now more of an inconvenience to its inhabitants than it would be a hindrance to any invading army.

No one challenged their entry at the gate, and once through they noticed a marked improvement in the quality of the building construction. While the area outside the walls was far from a slum, the buildings had all been constructed by humans, orcs, and halflings. Those races surely had their own skills and techniques for constructing buildings of quality, but the inner city had been constructed with the aid of the dwarves, and it showed. The vast majority of the buildings were crafted from stone, some of which was quarried from the nearby mountain, but others were drawn from down below by Stoneweavers and Torc’s Blessed, and then molded into shape.

The buildings were devoid of adornment, but every surface was polished so that the patterns in the stone were brilliant in the sun. Free of adornments save for runes, that is. While it was just past noon when the pair arrived, the unpowered Light runes could be made out on the corner and door frame of every building. The simple aesthetic of the dwarven craft was marred slightly by the later additions the city’s non-dwarven residences had added over the decades. Most of the buildings now bore additional levels built directly atop the originals, but the combination gave Edgewater an aesthetic matched nowhere else on Kaltis.

The Dahn—the central tower of the Academy of Illunia—could be seen from anywhere in the city, and Kole and Amara took advantage of this to guide their feet toward the campus. They forewent stopping for a meal, instead eating from a bag of travel rations Meech had given Kole before his departure. The city was packed with a diverse mix of humans, orcs, halflings, and dwarves, and Kole even caught sight of the occasional gnome and demonkin. There was a small population of elves in the city, but they stuck to the district they’d constructed for themselves and the campus.

As they got closer to the school, the demographic changed. The races were still diverse, but the ambling crowd was replaced with young potential students all heading toward the school. The mass eventually formed into a line, until Kole and Amara found themselves in a serpentine queue in the green around the Dahn.

“Do you think this is the line for admissions?” Amara asked, looking around at the crowds with apprehension.

“I think that’s a safe bet,” Kole answered.