Beneath him, Lisa’s foot slipped. She lurched on the climbing wall, one arm hanging free.
Ryan glanced down, a hand already on the platform, and pulled himself up and around to lay over the edge.
She slowed after her mishap, checked her climbing holds, and slotted her foot in the next stone grip to push toward the edge—
He clasped her wrist and hauled her up with a groan, planting a knee to take the weight off. The slanted wall and outdoor area swayed around them. When she made it up, he nearly stumbled and let go.
“We made it.” ‘Advanced difficulty,’ as if. The climbing assistants had tried to push them toward the indoor beginner walls, but they had free reign of the place.
His harness bunched up his clothes as he shifted. Ryan wrestled the ropes to sit and enjoyed the gentle breeze and view: a nearby park, a glimpse of an Old City wall through the pines, a wide street.
This climbing gym was on the edge of the inner city, a little ways out, but things were less cramped here. The trip had been worth it.
Lisa huffed as she sat next to him. “You’re more agile than me. Big deal. I’ll still get where I’m going.”
Ryan blinked. “Huh?”
“I want a rematch.”
“ … Was that supposed to have been a race?”
She gave him an annoyed look. “I can still climb better than the average person.” She didn’t say it with her usual arrogance. More like she was arguing with a teacher she disliked.
Ryan frowned. Because she had seemed happy to get away from her family a moment ago? “Lisa, you could tell me you can fly and I would believe you.”
That brought her up short. Her glare wavered and she looked away. “Sorry. My family has been … commenting on a lot of things here.”
“Oh. That—” sucks, he wanted to say.
Lisa sucked in a sudden breath and whirled on him. “Right. You went flying! How was it?”
“I’ve never experienced anything like it.” He was more than happy to talk about that. At camp, the others and he had been free advertisers to anyone who would listen. “I want to do it again, even if it’s expensive.”
She held onto the ledge and smiled. “You didn’t hurl?”
“No?”
“How high up were you?”
“Only, what … a hundred? Two hundred meters? The woman who flew us out avoided the trees but still had to keep the bugs off.”
“Mm. They’ll pelt you like hail. An air shield is good. Alchemicals and frost auras are slow … The right kind of magic signal can get them to clear out, but then you’re telling the whole world you’re coming.”
“If it’s magic, it’s probably banned around the cities. [Pest-herds].”
“True. Wind magic is a good choice. And if you do that, you know, with a little more training, you could probably learn to fly on your own …?” She leaned into him.
So she was still trying to get him to accept her lessons?
Ryan leaned away. Maybe before this summer, he would have accepted. Maybe. It’d be weird to have a friend tutor him, even one who knew everything.
But now …? He’d pushed himself to his limits before and it had ended with him crying like a wimp in front of his parents.
“The woman said it took her years to get that far. I can take my time.”
Lisa gave him a long stare and sighed.
“Besides,” he added, “I just leveled. I don’t want to get too greedy.”
He’d already gotten more than he could have asked for after their arena fight, more than he deserved—a way to assure his parents he would be safe, and to keep participating in the arena after they sold the raincoat: [Thick Skin].
A standard fighter Skill, sure. Nothing special. Less useful than something like [Improved Toughness] or [Improved Resilience].
He’d also felt … weird these last few days. As if he had bathed in healing potions, his skin felt oddly tight all over as it adjusted to the Skill. But that would pass. And it wasn’t all he had gotten.
[Polearm Proficiency: II]. Now he could spend less time trying to keep up with those who had combat Paths and spend more time hogging the library spellbooks. Or being here.
On top of the world.
“But—” Lisa started again.
Ryan rolled his eyes and let himself fall off the platform.
She growled and leaped after him. The safety lines dipped under their weight. Metal ground against rope as they zipped toward the safety mats.
Just before he touched down, Ryan hit an invisible mattress in the air, bounced off, and spun. His ropes coiled up and slowly twirled him as they untangled.
Lisa landed. Her appearance blurred on the other side of the air cage she’d trapped him in.
With a scowl, he tried to tear it apart. Tried. Ryan didn’t … actually know how to counterspell stuff. Mages had inherent magic resistance because of their strengthened auras. It complicated things, as much a blessing as it was a curse.
He should have been able to leverage that, right? Artificially riot his aura? Radiate mana like blades of thorns around him? He focused his will and … Nothing happened.
He squirmed. Maybe it could have worked for someone with more skill, but it got him nowhere. “I get it. I get your point.”
“Do you?”
He rolled his eyes. “‘The Tower is dangerous. Life is a competition. I owe it to my teammates, and my parents, and myself to do everything in my power to improve.’”
“That’s not all—” she started and sounded smug, like she was about to pile on, but stopped herself with a sigh. She changed tacts. “You don’t have to do everything. I want to give you options. You can jog a dozen miles every day, Ryan, and only get so far.”
He wasn’t getting anywhere right now. The harness began to dig into his skin. People noticed the mage playing a prank on her friend. He glanced around and said, “Let me down.”
Without moving so much as a muscle, the air cage around him vanished. He landed and cleared the area for the other climbers coming down.
Why was she so insistent about this? The thing was, Ryan was above average for his age.
[Fighter] level 11. [Scout] level 5. [Mage] level 2. He had two Paths and had as many Skills on them as he’d gotten from his Classes, including attribute Skills. That wasn’t normal.
But if those things weren’t enough to convince himself he was good enough, maybe they wouldn’t be enough to convince Lisa’s family either?
Ryan could imagine why she was acting strange. She’d spent the summer with them, steeped in her own culture again, being exposed to strange magics and people who knew better than her. Now, she’d brought that family back to … What? A few unimportant friends in a very important city?
Would they even have context for levels? They probably didn’t care about them. So, she was trying to teach him something they would have context for.
He didn’t want to put himself in a situation where he would have those kinds of expectations placed on him again, but he did want to help his friend out …
Fine.
He sighed. “What did you have in mind?”
“Something closer to acquired sorcery. One lesson. Try it; if you don’t like it, you can always go back to traditional spellcraft.”
He looked up at nothing in particular as he considered, but it didn’t sound too bad. Sorcery often relied on personality and emotion more than theory. If nothing else, Ryan had a lot of that.
“Alright, but … can we do it after our time slot runs out?” He didn’t want to say it, but the tickets here had been more expensive, and the arena paid less, than he had expected.
“We also wanted to head into the Tower soon,” he added because that was a sure way to earn money. And he wanted to know more about her family. And Sam.
Lisa’s relief turned into confusion. “Huh? I’m not leaving this place until I’ve climbed that upside-down wall.” She nodded over his shoulder at a corner of the outside area.
Ryan was already unhooking his safety line. “A silver penny says I can make it to the corner platform first.”
She scoffed, “I’ll take that bet.”
Lisa said she needed few props other than him. They sat down outside an ice cream parlor, ‘his treat’—he paid with the money he ‘owed’ her.
It turned out climbing upside-down on a ceiling wasn’t as easy as he had thought. And Lisa could climb with jagged movements like a midnight horror.
In other words, she cheated.
All was fair in pride and fun. He ate his ice cream sandwich until he got to the cherry filling, put the rest in the little metal bowl, and wiped his hands. “What am I doing?”
She finished the sip of her shake. “Meditating on your internal essences.”
His lips spread into a thin smile. He didn’t want to bring up Micah. Then again, the comment he held back wasn’t true: his Path did deal with essences. In the same way that metallurgy dealt with chemistry.
So he folded his legs up on the tiny chair, took a breath, and closed his eyes. “What am I looking for?”
“I’ll guide you through it. Take another bite of your ice cream first.”
Ryan did, juggling it around to warm it with his breath before it went down the hatch. It wasn’t cold enough to give him a headache, but he definitely felt it.
“Focus on the feeling of it melting and breaking down inside you, on how warm your body feels in comparison. Okay?”
That seemed like a sure-fire way to make himself feel bloated. Ryan would have to do sit-ups after this. “Is this going to be affinity training?”
“Aspect, apparently. In Dower.”
“Huh?”
“Micah uh, got a Skill. [Minor Aspect — Wind].” She sipped from the straw and looked away.
“Oh. That’s … cool. Good for him. But I don’t— He has his Path and got help from his Classes, I think? And uh, used potions. If you’re going to run me through aspect training, it would take me far longer to succeed.”
“I’m not so sure, but that isn’t what I’m aiming for anyway. You mentioned you researched how spirits exist on multiple layers—”
“‘Researched’ is a big word.”
“Micah infused his spirit with wind magic on a bodily layer, so it affects his body. Affinities tend to infuse the spirit on a mental layer, or connect to it, making it easier or harder to cast certain spells. I don’t know where yours lies, but it’s the connection part I’m interested in.
“You don’t have to aim for a full aspect like Micah. You can build up a sort of … spark … of magic inside of you, which you tap into whenever you need it. Like gut flora. And since you can already shape your Skills with your Path …”
Ryan gave a slow nod. “It would take as much time as creating another Skill.”
“Less. From what you’ve told me, it takes you longer to create more powerful Skills, though you can sort of ‘stockpile’ time, and you have to meditate on a subject, but it’s easier if that subject is something you have experience with. That you resonate with.”
“Uh—” Ryan had no idea if he should frown or smile. “Yeah, that’s right.” He took a bite of his melting ice cream. She paid that much attention to the things he said?
“This is something that would start weak and you could grow or consume over time. The only investment would be maintenance.”
He nodded quickly. “I’m listening.” He owed her that much if she had put thought into this.
“I don’t want to you meditate in a separate headspace. This will originate from your body so we will have it connect to it. It won’t passively affect you like Micah, but it will be able to react and help you bridge the gap to cast spells on your body when you do tap into it.”
Ryan took another bite and closed his eyes. That meant he might not get the learning speed benefit from his Path after all, but he assumed she knew that. If she wanted to introduce him to her family, she probably expected him to be done soon.
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“You’ve convinced me, Lisa. How do we start?”
There was a smile in her voice. “I want you to focus on your body. Acknowledge the things you can feel but wouldn’t normally think about: your tongue resting against the roof of your mouth, the tension in your neck, the veins pumping blood along your skull.”
Ryan swallowed and started to relax, but she stopped him.
“Don’t. Feel that pulse. Feel the sweat on your skin, the blood pumping through your veins, your body heat—not just what your Skill radiates, but what is inside of you.
“Your saliva, your stomach acids, your guts are all breaking down food and absorbing nutrients to create short-lived chemicals that fuel reactions all over your body. Waste elements and toxins your liver filters out build up on the other end, waiting to be flushed out.
“Your lungs pump air to carry nutrients through your blood and pump carbon dioxide out. If you hold your breath for too long, you begin to feel the pressure build within. If you run for too long, you begin to feel the burning exhaustion build with the acids in your muscles.
“What you don’t need gets reconfigured and buried as fat packets throughout your body, to keep you warm, to be recycled later.”
“Lisa—” he tried.
She spoke over him, “I want you to feel the life inside you like the warmth you radiate. It’s a living fire. And it’s yours. Your body, your life, your essences. Gather their embers like an echo of yourself. Condense them down into a single spark.”
Ryan tried but did it with a grimace. He practiced advanced meditation techniques meant for the fourth years. Even so, this eluded him.
He opened his eyes with a huff and told her as much. “I don’t know if this is a good fit for me.”
She seemed surprised. Or insulted. “What, why?”
“Because—” He took a breath. “I can’t feel my ‘body essences’ like you or Micah can. I don’t even know if I’m doing it right. And if I am, I don’t … like it. It feels so ugly.”
Her description made his body sound like some sort of blood-filled dumpster that had come to life. It made him antsy.
She hesitated. “I could check? I have a spell for that now.”
“[Appraise Creature]. You use it to study monsters you intend to copy, right? Isn’t it kind of … thorough?”
He wanted to say ‘intrusive’ but there was no need to be crass. And she got the idea.
She sighed. “I just went through training to gain more control over my spells at home. It would be kind of annoying to have to do it again, but … I can adjust it.”
“No, you don’t have to. We can just—”
“No. This won’t take long,” she brushed him off and began to shape a cloud of mana over her shake with a light scowl, focused as she ran through the spell a few times.
Great. So now she was going to take a peek at his innards.
Ryan held onto his knee and finished his ice cream while he peered around the street. The people passing them by. The Tower blotting out a column of the sky …
“Okay,” she shook her arms out and said, “let’s try this again.”
He sighed and closed his eyes.
“You’re right. This cycle is ugly. It’s a messy thing full of body fluids, nerve wires, and trillions of cells dying and multiplying every second, following a delicate balancing act and meter-length strings of information bundled up into tiny balls inside each one.
“You would hope to find some brilliant design there. A beautiful machine. But the truth is that you are filled with inefficiencies, with mistakes. It would take you decades of study to understand it all. But, whether you like it or not, it keeps you alive.
“One of those inefficiencies are the essences your body produces, a shadow of heat in a tundra, unable to affect the world. Waiting for you to gather it up … and ignite it.”
“[Sterile Cast: Appraise Creature].”
Her spell washed over him. He barely noticed. He was trying to follow her instructions. He thought back to the things Micah had said, the conversations he’d overheard between the two of them, what he knew of his Path.
He tried to adjust her words into something else in his mind, a clearer mental image he could hold, a message that would resonate.
None of it worked. The more he tried, the more ashamed, and frustrated, and disgusted he felt. When he tried to think of solutions, it only reminded him of his mistakes.
“You’re doing it,” Lisa said softly, “but it’s like you’re bleeding yourself to get there. You should stop.”
Hadn’t he already? With a start, he realized a part of him was spiraling again. Ryan set his shoes down, briefly stood, and adjusted his clothes. He pulled his chair up as he sat. A distraction.
“Huh. My way doesn’t seem like a good fit for you. I thought with your Path … Maybe we should hunt some stronger Salamanders instead if that’ll make you stronger.”
He shook his head. That wouldn’t impress her family. Besides— “Thanks for trying to help,” he told her, “but my Path is a dead-end anyway. No need to invest.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “[Salamander Path]. You do know Salamanders can grow up to titanic sizes, right? And there are all sorts out there. Esoteric ones. I wouldn’t call it a dead end.”
“[Exemplarism Path],” he corrected her. “It was never just about Teacup Salamanders—no offense. It’s about life. People. And I can’t exactly paint them.” This had been so hard to say to his dad over a month ago, but now it almost didn’t matter.
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “It’d be weird.”
“Wait, you don’t mean, painting them naked or something, right?”
“What? No—”
“Then what’s the issue?”
“Because it’s … intrusive,” he said, “to just do on my own. And asking for permission seems somehow worse. Intimate.”
Lisa didn’t seem perturbed. Her straw gurgled as she sipped foam. She shrugged. “I don’t know how it would help you grow stronger, but if you want to advance your Path, you can always paint me.”
“I, uh …” Ryan averted his eyes and scratched his back. “You know that offer sounds weird, so soon after you rejected me?”
She made a face. “Make up your mind already! Do you want to paint people or not?”
“I do! I do! Well, not people. It’s about what they represent, the scene around them, and—”
“Ryan.”
He stopped. “Right. Sorry. So I’ll just … do that then?”
She urged him on. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to relax. It was Lisa. If anyone wouldn’t be weirded out, it was her. Besides, he’d already painted her once, around the campfire. This time, he could do it right.
Honestly, he already knew what he wanted to do.
He pictured her in comfortable clothes. The way she’d dressed on those lazy heatwave Sundays they would spend together at Garen’s house. In-between the pouring rain of the heat storms and cloud breaks.
But instead of laying on the couch, she stood with both arms wrapped around Sam, holding him to her chest. His legs kicked as his exposed stomach hung low. It was the same image he’d used to paint Micah hugging a captured Honey Ant.
In one of the market squares near the school, there was a display: a carved statue of a tree whose branches, from the right angle, formed a face hovering in the air.
The paintings he’d made inside of the Argent Path were similar. Three dimensional. His bonfire, campfire, and islands.
But the paintings he’d made before he had come that far? By a child with no understanding of art, who broke the rules to make stuff look cool? Those were the opposite. They became three-dimensional when he stepped onto the Path.
As he did now. The ice cream parlor, street, and passers-by were stripped away by a sea of darkness and a silver circle. All except Lisa.
The branches of his bird singing tree flickered and phases into different seasons.
If he walked around the painting of Micah hugging a Honey Ant, there was a gap between him, the ant, the crystalline embellishments, and the background.
He continued working on the painting of Lisa and layered it into his so that, if he looked at them from one angle, they overlapped. And if he kept walking, they separated to exist side-by-side.
In comparison, she looked … unfinished. Flat. The shadows were missing. Her hair seemed off, though she rarely did anything with it.
Ryan considering braiding it. He didn’t know how—the only times he’d paid attention to someone braiding their hair was his mom, and she did it in a hurry. But he liked the image of the layered dips and lines. Almost like scales.
Of course, he didn’t have to know how to do it. He was a cheat. He could just will the result into being.
But if he was distilling the conceptual essences of the things he painted, the people, and the life around them, a bit of realism could probably go a long way.
Just, not now. Time was passing out there, he didn’t want to rush this, nor did he want to keep Lisa waiting. Her outline was finished. He would come back later to finish it.
He walked until the two images overlapped again. Lisa stood a step behind Micah, taller and reassuring.
He was a firm statue in front of a grey cavern wall, brown eyes, a blue … aura, for a lack of a better term, enveloping the clean yellow radiance of the ant. Syrupy sunlight inside it.
She was a mild presence, brown hair, a tan shade of pink, and drab clothes, hugging the deep red flare of Sam. His scales almost bled into her.
Where they overlapped, the picture crystallized like stained glass. A finishing touch, he carved white illumination into the frame, flowing knots and scales.
Pink light through yellow, underlit by red, shaded by brown and blue—it distilled a warm amber glow in the center of the painting, which rose and fell with their moving chests.
Like a tiny heartbeat.
“And, did it work?” Lisa faced him, eyebrows slightly furrowed.
Their dishes were gone. Their table had been cleared. The sky dimmed as the clouds migrated and covered the sun.
He jumped up with a spring in his step. “Yep. Did you pay?”
“I did, but—” She hurried after him. “Wait, what Skill did you get?”
He fished around in his pocket and handed her a coin with a frown. ”I didn’t get one?”
“Wait, what? I thought— How is this supposed to help you get stronger then?”
He walked backward. “I’m only mostly finished, but uh … I sort of added you to my vitality. Sam connects you to the Salamander island so I think you might improve those Skills as well. And your connection to my aura.”
A little.
Not that it was important if he’d gotten a Skill or not, because he’d painted her. With her permission. Ryan grinned and spun back around to stride down the street.
“Oh,” came Lisa’s distracted voice behind him, “that’s … similar to what I was aiming for. Cool.”
He paused for one step, eyes wide, and slowed. In his excitement, he had forgotten what the point of this all had been.
“I mean, I can still polish up my spellcraft! I applied for spellbook reading slots. And I can learn a ‘bodily spell.’ A buff? Did you have one in mind to impress your family?”
“My family? Oh, no, you—” She grimaced. “Ryan, you don’t have to impress them.”
She didn’t sound convincing. “Still. If there is one spell you want me to learn, name it.”
“There are other ways to improve. I have other information I could give you. Secrets of Classes and magical diets.”
He frowned. An hour ago she’d insisted on teaching him magic. Didn’t she think he could learn a spell without affinity training wheels? That … might have been fair. It still hurt.
Ryan shrugged. “I already know how Classes work.”
There was a pause. Then Lisa caught up to him and spoke in a low voice, “You do?”
“It’s concept essences, isn’t it?”
Her expression was weirdly intense so he tread carefully. And fibbed.
“Fighter Class, ‘fighter essence.’ We sort of cultivate it by trying to embody the Class. Surround yourself with weapons and combat to cultivate fighter essence. When you have enough to affect your body in a meaningful way, like Micah’s wind aspect, you level up.”
He looked ahead but glanced at Lisa for confirmation. Slowly, she dipped her head.
“That … fits with a lot of what we have discovered.”
He nodded. Except, it was a lie. He thought of the paintings of himself on the Argent Path, the ones he hadn’t made. Not paintings. Doorways.
He was far from the only person who used this meditation method. He couldn’t have been the only one to have figured it out. So then, it seemed to him like some unspoken truth:
What they cultivated weren’t the essences themselves, it was the connection.
Surround yourself with weapons and combat to forge a greater connection to the concept of being a [Fighter], create a larger doorway, and receive more essences on a level up.
Except, their nation had a little over seven million citizens, three-quarters of which had Classes. Roughly a quarter was level thirty. A handful had made it to level forty, like their principal. Less than a percent.
Above them were modern monsters like the Rat Hermit. Who knew what level they had?
If every level granted them more essences than the last … He thought of the crystals he and his classmates, and all of their countrymen, harvested from the Towers every day for years.
From the shards he could crush in his fist to the firm gems. The new marbles. Some felt warm, some gathered condensation.
If Principal Denner’s levels were converted into a crystal, how large would it be? How high its quality?
All of that had to add up. All of that essence had to come from somewhere.
Or someone.
Ryan had his answer. It didn’t change much. It might help him level, but it wasn’t like he suddenly believed in a higher power—if anything, if there was a higher power, he wanted to tell it to go fuck itself.
But he wouldn’t burden Lisa with that. Not for any of his usual hang-ups. He doubted Lisa shared the same hang-ups about religion as his home. He was pretty sure it was the opposite. From some of the comments she’d made, and her unshakeable conviction in her knowledge before she had even had a Path, he got the sense her family had its own subtle faith.
And she was incredibly argumentative.
His answer didn’t change his feelings, but it did represent a … chance? For something. Answers, maybe? And he could see Lisa obliterating that in one conversation.
So he would keep this to himself for now … and maybe someone else.
Speaking of.
As they got closer to the school, they cut across the sprawling plaza in front of the southern Guild building and Ryan spotted a familiar face in the crowd.
Jason stood next to an ivied fence bordering a fountain and argued with a guy a head or two shorter than him.
Jason had always been a lanky guy, but Ryan didn’t look like he’d grown much over the summer. And after spending all his time baking in the real sun with the other scouts, his tan almost looked a shade too light to him.
The artificial sunlight of the Tower lacked a certain something.
It was also weird to see him arguing with someone. Jason didn’t get really get mad at people.
The other guy looked vaguely familiar with his short brown hair. Ryan thought he recognized him from school. A classmate?
They were a little ways off, he’d barely spotted him, and it was starting to trickle. Grey spots appeared on the ground. Even if he wanted to eavesdrop through the crowds, he wouldn’t have any context.
The short guy made a grab for a bag Jason held. Jason pulled away and looked into the distance with an annoyed expression. He saw them. His eyes widened.
No matter how weird it was to see him like this, Ryan was still glad. He steered Lisa in their direction with a wave.
The short guy tried to hound him but stopped when he noticed them. When he noticed Lisa …? His eyes clung to her.
Before he could so much as greet them, Jason called out, “Ryan! Lisa! Odd question, but would you want to go on a quest with us?”
----------------------------------------
The rain started as a gentle patter against his window. It became a violent downpour that knocked like hail.
On the school grounds between the buildings below, other students cried out and ran for cover. The noise and cold humidity that crept in soothed him.
Micah read at his desk by the soft light of a few crystals and glowing plants he grew in his verdant treasure chest. As the darker storm clouds rolled in, they reflected in the glass.
Potion bonds, like item and familiar bonds, are a spell or Skill that exchanges a piece of the casters’ being with that of an alchemical product to establish a symbiotic connection. They are mainly used to semi-permanently extend the shelf life of a product.
A famous example of a potion bond is the Phoenix Dew elixir that was safe-kept by Reyna Alvarado for the late Marchioness until, on her orders, Alvarado expended her dose to spare the life of an unknown soldier.
Potion bonds can provide a variety of benefits for both caster and potion, such as increasing its efficacy, replenishing expended doses over time, or acquiring traits—even a Class—based on the bonded product.
In historic accounts, Alvarado was often praised or derided in various terms of immortality. It is unknown how much of her traits originated from and were lost with her elixir.
However great their potential, potion bonds carry with them inherent costs and potential risks to the safety of the caster and product, the least of which can inadvertently mutate or destroy the product intended to be preserved.
He almost missed the knocking. The rain drowned it out. He didn’t miss the pounding that followed a heartbeat later.
Micah opened the door and stared up at Brent. “Ah. Hey. What’s up?”
He looked a little damp around the edges and smelled like warm dough. “You’re here, good. A bunch of your workshop buddies, some of the freshmen, me, and a couple of others wanted to go strip mining tomorrow to stock up before the new year. Wanna’ come?”
“Uhm …” Micah considered, shifting his lips left and right, and glanced back at the book he’d borrowed from the library. It was something of a slog. He shrugged. “Sure.”
“Great, then get to the workshop. We need lures, healing potions, and stuff to detect traps if you can help with that.”
Micah squinted, wary of being exploited for free labor but intrigued by the challenge. “I might be able to. Where are we going?”
“Tenth floor, where the good stuff is. Morgana’s old haunt.”