image [https://i.imgur.com/9JnFmXw.jpg]

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Rick had fully intended to ask Dorian for a tour around Loverlock, and they’d half arranged it on the barge ride in, so he was a bit surprised to find that the writer had already disappeared by the time Rick emerged from his shower.

No matter. If Dorian was nowhere to be found, and Fig was still on guard duty for Mirabelle, Rick could quite happily explore the town on his own. It would be the first real time he’d had to himself since they left Saltcrust.

The festival wouldn’t officially start until the following night, which gave Rick some time to kill and a chance to run an errand he’d been thinking about for the past few days.

He went to check in with Fig before he left the hotel.

She sat cleaning her boots beside the Floating Chest while she waited for Mirabelle’s current meeting to finish. It looked like the rest of her day was going to be more of the same, both unable to leave the suite or properly relax. She was doing everything she could to pass the time, which right now meant a very intensive polish job for the boots she’d bought on her Saltcrust shopping spree.

‘Where’s Dorian?’ Rick asked.

Fig wouldn’t meet his gaze when she responded, ‘He decided to go and have a poke around town.’

‘Yeah, we were supposed to go together.’

Fig shrugged.

‘Did you two have another fight while I was in the shower?’ Rick asked.

He was starting to get frustrated with Fig’s one sided vendetta against Dorian. The writer didn’t have a cruel bone in his body, but Fig couldn’t seem to help herself taking jabs at him whenever she got the opportunity.

‘Not exactly,’ she said. After a second she looked up at Rick who was waiting expectantly, and rolled her eyes before elaborating, ‘He suggested travelling together after the Lovers’ Festival. I turned him down.’

‘Is that all?’ Rick frowned.

‘I might have… been a bit harsh with how I phrased it,’ Fig grimaced and looked back down at her boots.

That was probably an understatement.

Rick sighed, ‘If I run into him I’ll see how he’s doing. I'll probably be gone for a few hours.’

‘Ok. Just be careful,’ Fig called as he closed the suite door and walked to the elevator.

If Fig didn’t want to keep Dorian around, she could at least have had a conversation with Rick about it, not that he’d necessarily mind if they parted ways for now. The man was a bit unhinged and probably more trouble than he was worth.

Still, Rick found himself feeling bad for the writer. The more he got to know him, the more he got the sense that Dorian’s bravado and tall tales were partially there to cover a fragile and lonely inner life. If half of Dorian’s stories were true then he’d been through an awful lot and seen many companions die.

Rick hoped Fig hadn’t said anything too hurtful.

He tossed a coin to the elevator musicians and stepped out on the ground floor.

The hotel was packed with new visitors arriving for the festival. They filled the foyer and almost blocked his exit. He managed to squeeze through in the wake of a couple of luggage carts collecting belongings from the new carriages that were pulling up to the entrance every few minutes.

His raised hood and cloak to conceal his face from the chattering throng as he crossed the busy square outside and ducked through an archway.

Rick had never been the biggest fan of crowds, even before the fire, and feeling the need to hide his disfigured features from view only added to that anxiety.

It wasn’t until he was around the corner in a slightly quieter street that he was able to calm his nerves and settle into a more relaxed pace.

At least during the festival everyone would be wearing masks and he wouldn’t have to worry about being revealed as a burnt up mess.

Rick leant on his walking stick, and slowly made his way through town towards a building he’d had the good fortune to notice earlier when the party were making their way up from the docks.

The Independent Guild of Arcanists kept a smart guildhouse overlooking one of Loverlock’s charming tree lined squares, proudly placed between its neighbours, the Loverlock Merchant’s Guild on one side and the prestigious Rattlestaff Playhouse on the other.

Loverlock townsfolk and festival visitors strolled and sat on nearby benches to enjoy the afternoon breeze, while Rick crossed beneath the square’s shaded canopy and looked up at the I.G.A’s stylised sigil of a overlapping wand and crystal, set on a hanging board above the building’s entrance.

Finally, a place where he could find some decent quality magical supplies.

The Independent Guild of Arcanists was the only reliable alternative to the Magisterium when it came to magical goods and services. They’d only been around for about fifty years, but in that time they’d already built up a good reputation, and a strong foothold in cities of the Outerlands and Heartland alike.

Rick entered the guildhouse and found the entire first floor of the tall building had been converted into a kind of showroom, with cases full of all manner of items that might interest a mage who had a little coin to spend.

The whole room was brightly lit by ether-crystal torches, which partially made up for the lack of windows out onto the street. A pair of armoured mannequins stood to either side of a staircase that led to the upper floors, alongside a little plaque that said “Conference Rooms” with an ascending arrow.

The main service desk to one side of the room was currently occupied with a small party of visiting mages who were checking in for some kind of meeting with the local guildmaster, which gave Rick a minute to browse the showroom without being interrupted.

There were shelves of magically potent reagents taken from exotic plants and the bodies of monsters, preserved and pickled in bottles for ease of storage.

One rack held a huge range of symbolic focuses made out of every material he could think of, including some he couldn’t identify at first glance. The conceptually powerful sigils and fetishes were designed to stabilise ritual castings, like the elaborate teleportation spell Rick had performed a couple of times recently. Definitely a contender for a future purchase, if he could get some more money together.

His attention was drawn to the fortified and magically warded cabinet along the back wall, packed full of enchanted items ranging from simple tools and oddities to magical weapons and armour. There were even a few enchanted staves for experienced mages.

Some of those enchantments were powerful. Just standing close to the cabinet made Rick’s skin prickle and his teeth ache. He could feel the Book responding to their resonance in the Veil.

He’d always dreamed of owning a wizard’s staff, not just an oversized walking stick, but the real deal, an enchanted channel for powerful spellcasting. Unfortunately their value went far beyond Rick’s spending power. He had just under a hundred and fifty gold suns, and the cheapest staff on offer would have set him back over seven hundred.

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He imagined himself holding one, the feeling of it. The power.

‘How can we help you today, Sir?’

Rick started from his daydream.

He turned and saw that the group of visiting mages had ascended the stairs to a conference room above, and one of the I.G.A's desk clerks in practical office-wear was standing just behind him at a respectful distance. The Vermili man inclined his head, as if to apologise for startling his customer.

Rick must have seemed a rather strange figure, wrapped head to toe in his dark cloak and bandages, staring at the enchanted items with a longing glaze, but if the man found his appearance alarming it didn’t show in his manner as he respectfully waited for Rick to respond.

‘I’d like to purchase some ether-crystals,’ Rick croaked.

The clerk nodded once and beckoned Rick over to a set of numbered cupboards on the far side of the room.

‘And does sir have any particular requirements with regards to grading or colour?’ the man asked, producing a key from his pocket which he used to unlock one of the cupboards and withdraw a large strongbox.

He brought the box to a nearby desk while he waited for Rick to expand on what he was looking for.

Grading and colour. It was tricky. Rick had done his best to educate himself, not just recently, he’d been reading into the subject for a while just out of personal interest, but his knowledge still felt sadly lacking when it came to the inner workings of ether-crystals,

Rick knew at least the broad concepts of their valuation. First was grading Essentially, the more pure a crystal, the larger its capacity, and the larger the energy capacity, the higher the grade. Simple in theory.

The lowest and most flawed, grade five, barely had any capacity above Splinterra’s ambient ethereal charge. They wouldn’t do much for a serious spell-caster, and were mostly just used as ever-glowing torches, like the ones lighting this room or the living space in the Floating Chest, but also to briefly fuel basic appliances like magical heaters.

On the other end of the scale, the capacity of flawless grade one ether-crystals went so high that when they were fully charged it was supposed to be like holding a piece of the sun in your hand, not that Rick had ever actually touched one before. They were incredibly rare, not to mention expensive, but he’d read stories about wizards of legend fighting great magical duels with them.

Back in the age of the Fallen, the evil wizard Hellion supposedly even created The Cauldron, a lone volcano on the southern edge of the Luddish Grasslands, just for the purpose of raining down toxic ash and brimstone on the cities of his enemies, and he did it using the complete charge of a single legendary grade one ether-crystal.

Rick had read all about the myth in the Enduring Dawn’s archives in Brightlodge, back when he was still an archival squire.

Unlike purity grading, crystal colour was a much more complex topic and Rick only had a very basic knowledge of it.

For an ether-crystal, having a strong colour was sometimes considered a flaw, except when it wasn’t. Colour often reduced the overall energy capacity of the crystal and lowered its grading. However, different colours of ether-crystal seemed to have affinity for certain types of spellcasting, which could make them more sought after for specialised tasks.

If Rick remembered correctly, the rough breakdown was purple for illusions and sensory tricks, red for disruptive force, orange for enhancement of conceptual properties, yellow for clairvoyance, green for pattern manipulation, and finally blue for enhancement of physical properties.

Some of those affinities were memorised directly from an old mage’s essay collection, and Rick didn’t really understand what they meant in a practical sense. What made enhancement of conceptual properties different from the enhancement of physical properties? What was a conceptual property anyway, and what did any of that mean in the context of spellcasting?

He’d always been very frustrated by crusty academics who just threw out terminology and assumed the reader perfectly understood the nuances of what they meant by it without any attempt on their part to explain or clarify.

Still, it was generally agreed that the right colour of crystal could stabilise your spells, making them easier and more efficient to cast. Mages who specialised into particular types of spellcasting often favoured the coloured crystals associated with that domain.

On top of that, there were overlaps and transitional shades between those broad points on the colour spectrum, not to mention colourless crystals that seemed to have no particular affinity but were usually graded higher.

It was a real rabbit hole to go down, and a very expensive one if you wanted to experiment with different ether-crystal setups. Rick didn’t have that kind of money.

He’d spent most of the barge journey since Grisson recommended that he get some ether-crystals trying to figure out what would work best for him on a budget, bearing in mind he didn’t necessarily need the crystals to fuel his magic most of the time because the Book basically covered that for him.

After a lot of consideration over the last few days, and a last quick decision in the moment, Rick decided what to ask for.

‘I want six, grade three crystals. One each of purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red, ideally on the compact side,’ Rick said.

Grade three crystals were a decent balance of power capacity and lower cost, and having a range from across the colour spectrum meant he would be well stocked for whatever he needed, even if he didn’t fully understand their utility yet. Still, this was going to be a hefty purchase. He pulled out his coin-purse, enjoying the jangling weight while it lasted.

‘Certainly,’ the clerk said, unlocking the large strongbox to reveal a glowing array of hundreds of ether-crystals of grade two and lower, each nestled in a wire cradle, ‘That’s actually quite a common request among working mages here at the guild. We call it the journeyman set. Grade three, did you say? Let me arrange that for you.’

He used a pair of elegant metal tongs to pry each ether-crystal from its cradle and lay them on a leather mat on the desktop.

After a minute, six crystals sat in a row like the bands of a rainbow, glowing fiercely in their respective colours and casting rays of chromatic light that refracted through the glass display cases of the showroom to cast odd patterns on the walls.

‘There we are,’ the clerk said, locking up the strongbox and returning it to its cupboard, ‘Just so you know, all of our crystals are charged to capacity at time of purchase, and we usually find that they take at least a week to return to the ambient energy level here in Loverlock. Should you require recharging services, our prices are very competitive.’

The clerk indicated to another counter where an extravagantly dressed Orend woman in a feathery hat was picking up a set of freshly charged purple, orange, and green ether-crystals.

She winked at Rick. Odd.

He put it out of his mind and turned back to the clerk.

‘Thank you. I’ll bear that in mind,,’ Rick said, ‘How much is this going to set me back?’

‘We offer better rates to guild members. Do you have one of our badges?’ the clerk inquired.

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘We could arrange an interview for later in the day, if you are interested in joining.’

‘What would that involve?’ Rick asked, he’d never looked into the I.G.A’s membership criteria.

‘You’d need to provide information about where you trained, and usually a reference from an existing member. Many of our signups are apprenticed to members prior to joining, which streamlines that process,’ he looked Rick up and down before adding, ‘However, if you can demonstrate enough skill and technical knowledge in our practical entry test there’s always the possibility of waiving the usual reference requirement. We’ve admitted former Magisterium mages on that basis in the past.’

‘I think I’ll have to give it a miss this time,’ Rick said. He didn’t have anyone to vouch for him. Plus, if he undertook a practical test in front of a trained mage they would immediately notice the unconventional nature of his magic, which could lead to all kinds of questions he didn’t want to answer right now.

Grisson’s warning about standing out still hung over him, as did other questions about the pirate mage that he wasn’t likely to have resolved anytime soon.

‘I see,’ the clerk said, without pressing the issue, ‘In that case we usually charge one hundred and twenty gold suns for a grade three journeyman set.’

Rick resisted the urge to flinch, that wasn’t everything he had, but it was most of it.

He pulled a couple of fifty coin sticks out of his purse, and then counted another twenty gold suns onto the desk.

He had thirty gold suns left. Enough for any regular person to live very comfortably for a few months, but not much when measured against the extortionate cost of magical supplies. Even the cheapest enchanted items in the showroom were now firmly outside his budget.

Forget getting any magical focuses until he’d had another payday, Orot only knew what that would be.

The clerk thanked Rick, and placed the six ether-crystals into an insulated pouch that would slightly reduce the rate at which they lost charge.

Rick tucked them into the inside pocket of his coat. He could faintly feel their charge fizzing through the Veil.

‘Thank you,’ Rick said, inclining his head to the clerk.

The Orend woman picking up her charged crystals, with a silver guild badge grasped in her hand, gave him another strange look as he walked to the door.

He pulled his scarf up higher and tucked the hood down over his face.

Fucking gawkers, the masquerade portion of their visit couldn’t come soon enough.

Rick left the I.G.A guildhouse with a much lighter coinpurse, but a pocket brimming with magical potential as he continued his walk through Loverlock.

[End of Chapter 22]