"Frank!" A lady behind the glass counter on my right shouted. "Frank, get down here."

The lady reached beneath the counter and raised a green orb the size of her palm in her right hand. The way that she was pointing it at me it was obviously a weapon of some sort. I raised my hands to show her that I was unarmed and that I meant no trouble.

I looked around the store, which obviously catered to magic types. There were shelves of small mana crystals, robes, and several bookcases filled with books. Interestingly there was a small section that just held coils of rope hanging on a steel bar. I heard the footsteps of someone stomping down the stairs on the left side of the room that led to the second floor. I could hear them muttering as they came, though only because of my enhanced ears. Something about...

"I've told you to call me Magus Steelborn while we are in the shop." The man, Frank Steelborn, said as he came into view. "Hello then. Who are you, and what are you doing half naked in my store?"

He was an enormous man, in width as well as height. He stood well over two meters tall and was wearing a deep blue robe, his hands stuck in his sleeves. His eyes were a glowing hazel colour.

"My name is C.C." I said. "I was trapped and robbed of all of my possessions, though they spared me the indignity of taking my underwear. When I tried to escape, the people who had trapped me tried to kill me. I was running from them and the door to your shop was the closest, so I ran in here."

"Aye, the city has been getting rougher of late." Magus Steelborn said. "This would be the first I've heard of someone being attacked on main street, but it doesn't surprise me. Would you like to have a seat while I call the city guards?"

"The people who attacked me might still be out there." I said.

What I had said was technically true, but I had no doubt that the city guards would be on the winter priest's side. An escaped prisoner who had killed two dozen priests...

"Do you have a back door I could use?" I asked. "The safest thing would be to lose them more thoroughly before they find me again."

"What did you do that they would be hunting you even after robbing you of everything?" Magus Steelborn asked. "It is plain to see that you are a mage, did you offend the wrong person?"

A mage?.. Oh, right, my neon blue eyes were a mark of someone who has a mastery over a magic or uses a lot of mana.

"Not precisely." I said. "They kidnapped my girlfriend and used her to lure me into a trap when I came to get her back. The wrong person being offended might be right, though."

The lady behind the counter had been keeping a close eye on me, the orb still pointed in my direction. She and Magus Steelborn exchanged a glance and she put the orb back under the counter, giving him a slight nod.

"We can't have you running around the city half naked." Magus Steelborn said. "Though I don't have any cheap robes, all of my stock is moderately enchanted and worth several gold... Hmm."

"I do my work primarily in stone." I said. "If you had some loose material, preferably stone, though I can work with other material, I could trade you a medium mana crystal for that and a robe? I would prefer an unenchanted one, honestly."

"Come upstairs to my workroom then." Magus Steelborn said. "Maleena, if anyone comes in looking for our young friend tell them that you chased him out the back."

I followed Magus Steelborn up the stairs to the second floor which was filled with aisles of products. The aisle we walked down to get to the stairs on the other side of the room had orbs, rocks, pendants, shoes, mana crystals up to a medium size, and even some weapons.

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I opened my mouth to speak with him as we made our way up the stairs to the third story, but he placed a finger over his lips and shook his head. We made it to the top of the stairs and he placed his hand on the wooden door there which clicked and then swung open. Entering the room he went to the side to several robes. He pulled one out, a matching blue to his robe, and passed it to me as I entered.

"That should be about your size." He said. "Put it on, then we will see about your stone magic."

I was looking out the front wall of the room. The entire wall was transparent, and the road could be seen through it. The ice walls were down, but the torn up cage was clearly visible and the bodies of the priests were still in the road.

Magus Steelborn gestured for me to not speak again, going to a desk to get a thick sheet of paper and an iron pen. The pen lightly burned the markings he was making into the paper, and I was relieved to see that I could read the writing the same way I could understand the spoken language.

/I saw it all. Bastard winter priests. Have to be careful about saying anything aloud, the air has ears. People have been disappeared./

I frowned and pulled the robe over my head. He passed me the pen and paper at my gesture and I wrote under what he had written.

/How did you know you could trust me?/

"Truth enchantment on a crystal under the front counter." He said. "If you had of lied Maleena would have seen it, and probably blasted you back into the street. Here, can you use this for your stone magic?"

He passed me some scrap pieces of stone, offcuts from gems mostly.

"This will work." I said. "Do you have a small mana crystal I could use as a reference?"

He frowned and pointed me to a wooden tray in the corner. There were several mana crystals in the wooden tray ranging from extremely small up to larger than usual medium sized crystals.

This was how other people made mana crystals, I realised. Fill the tray with mana and it slowly crystallises around any impurities.

I soaked my power into the mana crystals in the tray and duplicated them into a medium mana crystal in the shape of an orb from the scraps I'd been given. I was using the carbon from a gem shard as the source of energy, having misplaced my staff yet again. It took about a minute to finish. I handed the orb to Magus Steelborn. His face went white as the blood drained from it.

"You..." He said, spluttering. "How did... What are..."

His hands were shaking as he reached for the pen and paper, his writing coming out shakily.

/Are you a god? Or the avatar of a god?/

I shook my head and reached for the pen.

/A Champion. No affiliation with the gods. And definitely a friend./

He reached for the pen again and I heard a crash from downstairs. I moved closer to the front wall and looked down, Magus Steelborn joining me after a moment, and saw men in plate armour and winter priests entering the building.

Magus Steelborn wrote something, then showed me.

/Follow me, we'll take the roof./

I followed him to the stairs going up and he ignited the sheet of paper with magic as we went. The fourth floor was dark and looked to be a living area from what I could see. The stairs to the roof were along the wall from the landing on the fourth floor and we headed up them.

The roof itself was flat and there was a garden growing on it with a path that met a path on the roof to the north with a fifty centimeter high wall marking the boundary between the buildings. There were six roofs before there was a gap, presumably for a road, and about five hundred meters away a fortress rose above the city. That was where Chantelle was.

We started to jog, going over six roofs to the last building before Magus Steelborn turned off of the main path and headed for a doorway. There was a crystal beside it that he placed his hand on and ten seconds later it made a chime sound.

Magus Steelborn opened the door and we headed down the stairs, bypassing the fourth floor and going straight to the third. He knocked on the door at the bottom of the stairs and it swung open to reveal a tiny man in bright green clothing.

He was a meter tall at most, very thin, and had red hair and beard. He was a striking contrast to Magus Steelborn, who could have made up six of the little man by weight.

"Frank." The little man said, his voice at about the same pitch as my own. "You've brought a guest."

"Aye, a new friend who has gotten himself into a bit of trouble." Frank said. "Gerry, this is C.C.. C.C., Gerry. C.C. needs a safe door back out onto the streets, my building had some visitors that made this the best exit."

"Come in and be welcome, then." Gerry said. "I'm a leprechaun. You looked like you were wondering."

The room was a work room, a tray for growing mana crystals in the same corner as Magus Steelborn had, and various equipment for making thread and cloth. Gerry was leading us towards the stairs down when I stopped him.

"Would you be willing to trade for some high quality thread?" I asked.

"How high quality, and what do you have to trade?" Gerry asked in return.

"Give him a bobbin of your best thread and some stone." Frank said. "He made me a thousand gold mana crystal in less than a minute." He looked at me. "That was what you had in mind, yes?"

"It was." I said.

I made Gerry a medium mana crystal orb from a rock he handed me while he dug through stacks of cylinders full of thread.