Chapter Twenty-one

Melted Expectation

The naming of The Two Worlds Trading Company had unfolded with little pageantry and somewhat by accident. Certainly, it had not been the poetic crescendo of another near-calamitous airship heist, though time was of the essence. They needed to register their new vessel while it was still safely stowed within the wooden confines of Mr. Mason’s Ship Repair and Other Services, and for that they needed a company.

The discussion had gone something like this: “How about The Crunchy Cricket Company,” Bertrand offered after four beers at The Thirsty Eagle. “That was a joke.”

“Crickets are crunchy, so at least you get points for accuracy this time,” a bag-eyed Briley replied.

Elias stared into his ale and shook his head. “This really should be the easy part,” he said. “It doesn’t need to be an alliteration, Bertrand. Not everything needs to be an alliteration. It just needs to… work.”

“Inspiring.” Bertrand cocked an eyebrow, then sighed and said, “Look, names matter. What we call this company will stand the test of time, for better or worse. It needs to be clever yet obvious, precise yet flexible, small yet big. It needs…”

“To work,” Elias inserted.

“Yeah,” Bertrand said. “It needs to work.”

Briley rolled her eyes. “Small yet big,” she repeated. “What world does this company exist in?”

“I’m pretty sure Elias and I slipped into another world this past summer.” Bertrand did not need to mention the sky rift. Briley had already heard their tall tale a dozen times too many.

“That’s it!” Elias shot up from his seat, the backs of his knees knocking over his bench with a screech and a bang—and the attention of the Eagle’s rowdy patrons. He stretched his fingers and played the name like a piano song: “The Two Worlds Trading Company.”

“The Two Worlds Trading Company.” Bertrand said it once to ensure he’d heard it right, then again with a rising enthusiasm. “The Two Worlds Trading Company. It’s perfect.”

And so it was. The perfect name for their company. Or rather, Bertrand liked it and Briley—Briley didn’t say otherwise.

The Two Worlds Trading Company was registered the next morning and, after a few hours of paperwork that Briley insisted she handle, so was their conveniently discovered airship. Bertrand gave Elias credit for the company name, but he was still proud of The Sapphire Spirit.

Elias was simply proud. The promise of greatness dangled in front of them, so close that he could almost touch it.

It took them a month to acquire their first official contract, delivering lumber from a mill in the mountains about a day’s ride from Sailor’s Rise. The cargo was heavy, and delivering planks of cedar wasn’t the most efficient use of The Sapphire Spirit’s particular strengths, but they had bid low and won the contract on cost alone. They had to start somewhere, and evidently being cheap was the only competitive advantage an unknown venture had.

Winter melted into spring, the season of promise, and yet they felt more like the snow. Once piled high, their hopes gradually grew smaller and crustier by the day. Few would even consider the young company and its young entrepreneurs, and those who did were inevitably tight on relics.

Yes, the promise of greatness dangled in front of them—if only they had realized sooner that they were the horse chasing a carrot on a stick.

Revenue was inevitably undermined by expenses. Briley had found them an economical berth in Lowtown—in the shadow of the sunnier, sturdier docks of Hightown—though the pier was barely large enough for The Sapphire Spirit. Theirs was undoubtedly the nicest ship in the neighborhood, a fact Bertrand bemoaned before accepting that this, alas, was their lot.

Indeed, their worth was no longer an idea, no longer a dream. It was a numerical reality. One that Briley tracked precisely with quill and paper. To help them stay afloat, she and Elias still worked occasional shifts at Fairweather Provisions, while Bertrand had a foot firmly planted in both companies. Certainly, Elias was not consuming relics for anything beyond necessary expenditures. Ascension, he grudgingly accepted, would have to wait. And here he’d thought the waiting part was finally over.

On a more positive note, he had a new way to kill time. Alone in his bedroom and whenever he could steal a moment of privacy, Elias experimented with his permanent abilities as an awoken collector, no longer needing relics to glimpse fleeting pathways to the future. As promised, Jalander had also lent his impatient apprentice months of reading material. Words, at least, he could afford to consume.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Elias learned more about the Five Great Schools, their perennial squabbles, and the eventual rise of the Valshynar. In one text, the event sounded like an allegiance—in another, an annexing. In the time it took him to power through every one of Jalander’s dust-covered books, flowers bloomed, trees added leaves, and Elias found a cramped apartment in Lowtown to be “nearer to the business.”

Times were tough, tougher than they had anticipated. But the thing that soured him most was a thought that snaked into his tired mind during that first day of summer: that in many respects, his new life wasn’t so unlike his old life back in Acreton.

* * *

Elias heard a sudden clamor and jolted upright, his chestnut hair disheveled, his lean body sticky with sweat as his bed sheet slid to the floor.

“Sorry,” the culprit said. “Didn’t mean to wake you. I also didn’t mean to knock over your jar of pencils. You have a lot of pencils. And drawings. You’re quite good.”

Elias shook his head to recalibrate and thanked her. He reached for the half-empty water glass on his nightstand, then chugged it in one gulp. “Did I sleep in?”

“No, it’s stupidly early. I’m just… a morning bird,” said the young woman who, unlike Elias, was fully clothed. She flapped her hands like wings.

What was her name again? He had it on the tip of his tongue. She had honey blonde hair—which had probably been done up neatly the night before—and a pretty face that reminded him of someone, though he couldn’t say whom. He was trying to piece together the previous evening before she flew away.

They had met each other at The Thirsty Eagle after Elias had wandered to the Hightown pub alone, not bothering to invite Bertrand or Briley (a habit he’d formed since moving to Lowtown). Had he said something funny? Maybe. Or maybe he had just looked like a man who could use some company.

He remembered now. The Eagle had a horseshoe-shaped bar surrounded by stools for lonesome and affable patrons alike. Elias—who was most certainly the former—had been sitting across from her, forming eye contact by accident whenever he looked up from his book and she from hers. The accidents increased as the night went on.

At some point, he got cocky and ordered her a beer, then promptly lost his nerve the second the beer arrived. Elias recalled how he glued his gaze to the same page he’d been staring at for ten minutes, flopped between his palms like a bad prop. Maybe the bartender wouldn’t say anything, he told himself as the minutes passed ever so slowly, or maybe she wouldn’t read into it.

When he figured he must finally be in the clear, Elias looked up and immediately made eye contact with the young woman with honey blonde hair—and this time, not by accident. She smiled, and he couldn’t help himself.

Nor could he help himself the next morning as he struggled to recall her name. “Lela.” He snapped his fingers as he searched for approval on her grinning face.

“Sure,” she said. “Call me Lela.”

“Can I get you something?” he asked before realizing he had nothing to offer.

She brushed a lock of hair behind her ear, looking either flattered or humored or some other emotion Elias wasn’t yet familiar with. “You’re a sweet boy,” she said, “and a fine young artist, but I—I have to go.”

“I could… sketch you before you leave.” Elias was reaching desperately, wishing he had anything else to offer, something besides his services.

She seemed almost tempted before sharply shaking her head. “Let’s not leave evidence behind. This was fun. I take it you don’t invite many ladies to your humble abode—down here in Lowtown.”

She had been the first, though not his first. There had been another in Acreton a year back, though that relationship had been, as Bertrand would say, much like the fruit fly. “Not many,” Elias said. “I thought you and I… connected.”

“We did,” she confirmed, “literally and metaphorically. But still, I must go.”

“Will I see you again?”

She flapped her wings once more before seeing herself out, blowing him a kiss as she shut the door to his tiny apartment behind her.

Elias couldn’t decide if he ought to feel pride or rejection. He was often a mix of competing emotions these days. Instead of sorting it out, he attended to his more basic needs, standing up from his disheveled bed, stretching his stiff limbs, and finally peeing with great relief into his chamber pot.

His new apartment wasn’t much to look at—or much to exist in. The square space was barely larger than the room he had occupied for half a year with the Fairweathers, and not nearly as nice, or as quiet, or a lot of things. But Elias had needed his independence, or so he’d claimed. Every young hawk must leap from its nest in order to fly.

Admittedly, he wasn’t exactly soaring. His yellow (or yellowing) plaster walls had peeled to the point that they reminded him of the clay-laden soil around Acreton, of those imaginary islands he used to hop between. Sometimes, he leapt between the cracked islands that covered his peeling walls with two very acrobatic fingers. It was stupid, and it made him feel more like Elias Fisher.

But Elias Vice was drawn to his writing desk. Not only to the dreams he sketched upon it, but to the few relics stowed in its single drawer, rattling like dice as he yanked the compartment open.

He didn’t need to count them, but he did anyway. Twelve relics. He hadn’t been that poor since the summer he first arrived here. And yet it wasn’t his meager balance that bothered him so much—they had bought themselves an airship, after all—but rather it was the lack of growth. His balance a month ago had been fifteen.

Elias needed to grow, and yet he was shrinking—shrinking in the unforgiving shadow of Lowtown. Whenever he spoke like this, Briley told him he was being melodramatic, though it bothered her too, especially as the company’s self-appointed bookkeeper: their razor-thin margins, their lack of any kind of contingency fund. They were always one bad month away from losing what little they had. How could they run a trading business without a berth?

One bad month. That’s all it would take. One bad month and The Two Worlds Trading Company would become The No Worlds Trading Company. Maybe he was being a little melodramatic, Elias conceded with a sad smile.

He picked up a single relic from his drawer and held it to the window so that he might catch a few glimpses of color—its jade mysteries, its amber promises. Elias squeezed the relic in a tight fist before slowly releasing his fingers. He placed the relic back inside the drawer.