Aleicree slept soundly that night and dreamed of a steel staircase. Zie looked closely at the steps, was drawn to look closely at the steps, could hardly ascend without examining every step in detail, and zie saw that every step was completely made of broken knives. The knife fragments fit together perfectly, and no sharp edges were exposed upon the stair, so that it was cold but safe under Aleicree's feet.
Zie woke with a sense of lingering chill, and the world seemed darker. It was some strange illusion, and it reminded zir of the faith of the Uttermost Dark. Was this feeling sacred to them? Did they have such clinging, dark dreams?
With a shake of zir body, zie let go of the thought, and pulled on zir customary windmage uniform to face the day. It was the fourteenth day of zir stay. Zie was marking the days now, looking forward to the sixteenth day when they would go to the theatre. In years of shuttling back and forth on the Serene Chordalite, and in years of attending at academy before that, and in a muddy childhood in impoverished Denxalue, Aleicree had never been to a theatre play before. Zie knew they acted out stories. Zie looked forward to it as a very new thing, and wondered at Vrekant describing it as fit to the nature of a scribegon.
Aleicree was used to the regularity of constant work. The Serene Chordalite had an unstoppable progression that demanded daily attention to the wind meditations. Scribing books burned away hours and yielded valuable possessions if pursued regularly. These were isolated endeavours. There was a rift between Aleicree and all others. Surely zie was who zie was, and should continue? It was a question, not a confidence.
The next morning at breakfast, Aleicree said, "I'm feeling overwhelmed with the success we've had in recruiting visitors to Nidrio. Do you know thirty farmergons for thirty days?"
"More, but by chance we've missed two significant others already, and I think this'll be a crowded table the day we meet Fiata the Fireheart, who has two paramours." Vrekant smiled and gestured across the table. "Just keep writing letters to Taisach. There'll be time to get replies, and to update our plans if he's not ready to play host."
"I'm sure he will be, I'm more worried about the trip there," said Aleicree. "What a flock we'll be! Will we be overwhelming accommodations on the way?"
"No harm in a night spent sleeping under the stars," said Limist.
"Am I going to have to pay for everyone's trip?" asked Aleicree. "I don't want to buy meals for two dozen dragons."
Vrekant shook his head. "I think, if you're feeling overwhelmed, warning dragons that they'll be on the hook for food and expenses may shave a few visitors off and save your funds, too."
Despite zir complaint, Aleicree quietly wondered about the purpose of zir decades of savings. All those years of going back and forth with the Serene Chordalite had left zir wages accruing, and the fact that zir hobbies earned more than they cost only made the 'problem' worse. Aleicree didn't know what to do with that money. It was just... saved. Someday, zie supposed, zie would be glad to be a dragon with a hoard of gold.
When they had finished breakfast, Aleicree walked 'round the table to approach Vrekant. "May I have the key today?" zie asked. "I would like to go into town."
"Be back before I am," Vrekant said, frowning. "I don't want to be locked out of my own home."
"I'll return in the early afternoon," Aleicree promised, and Vrekant walked off briefly. He returned with the key in hand.
Once everyone else had gone off to work, Aleicree set out into the city of Sorjek. Although zie knew where zie intended to go, zie walked rather than flew, deciding to get acquainted with the city streets. The streets near Tavanth Street were residential. Houses reared up over good-sized lawns or were hidden under small forests of trees. Some were stout timber and some were stone. Many reared up two stories tall. Others like Vrekant's house were lightweight constructions only a single story tall, and some of those were quite small. They were in various colours and mostly quite beautiful.
Aleicree thought about the worth of houses. Zie could buy one. Did zie want a permanent address? What would zie do with zir life if not being a seagon? Become a scribegon? A weather-mage? Those were the professions zie thought zie could get into without retraining. If zie did anything in Nidrio, Praoziu would never see Aleicree impoverished by buying a house. Likely Praoziu would never see Aleicree impoverished at all. Was that unfair?
Poverty was pretty rare. Ugliness and misery were two things most land gods tried to minimise within their theomes. Even when dragons did poorly, they moved to somewhere they could do better. The plans of the land gods incorporated everyone who came to them, so nobody had to be stuck being surplus and unwanted.
Usually.
It'd happened to Azosta and Limist, hadn't it?
Did the planning of the land gods extend so far that they even planned for dragons to emigrate from their theomes? Aleicree wished zie were a better geomancer who knew more of the mysteries of the world zie lived in.
Zir feet had carried zir into a commercial district. Unwittingly, zie had been walking towards Tirivolt's. Zie decided to stop in for another steak and liver pie. It was early, so the place was abandoned. Aleicree walked right up to the yellow izerah behind the counter. "Am I your first customer?" zie asked.
"Not quite," he said with a smile. "There's a couple who like to start their days with a bowl of my soup sometimes, and they were by right as I opened the door. What can I get for you?"
"Another steak and liver pie, and more directions."
He disappeared briefly into the kitchen and came back holding a pie. He handed it to Aleicree and asked, "Where are you trying to go?"
Aleicree asked, "How would you get from here to the Temple of Querent-Querent?"
Tirivolt regarded zir with that great smile of his. "Oho!" he said. "Looking to get an izerah's eye view of the city, are you? Walk a mile in my claws?"
"I never could," zie said. "Izerah are tireless. That's not a small gift."
Tirivolt looked solemn for a moment. "We cannot fly. That is not a small loss." He brightened up. "Don't worry about that though, of course I'll tell you how to get to the Temple of Querent-Querent! It's very centrally-located, you only have to cross half the city from anywhere, haha."
As Aleicree savoured the steak and liver pie in small bites, Tirivolt recited a list of street names to watch for.
"Thank you," zie said when he finished, then chomped down the last of the hand pie and reached into zir pouches to draw out coin to pay for it.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Zie was on zir way in moments, ready for a more ambitious walk across Sorjek. There were gaps between the buildings and the lots occasionally had trees in them, but this faded as zie went on towards the city centre. The buildings got taller and started to run together, taking up all available space, leaving straight main roads and little alleyways. Peering down some of the alleyways, Aleicree could see that there were businesses which opened onto some of them, as well. It would take far more than a few days to explore the whole of Sorjek. Zie expected that zie never would.
Aleicree passed no parks or statues, but zie did see some sign of urban beautification. Mostly there were murals on the walls. Some of them were ugly, but all of them were vibrant. One that really stood out to Aleicree was a fox-headed biped in a robe who stood overlooking a snowy cliff view that sprawled across a wall. It looked like a cold, out of place image with its blue palette of ice and sky, but it was a well-rendered and memorable mural, so zie suspected it was good for the businesses established near it. Doubtless "near that icy mural with the robed fox" could be useful when giving directions or asking for them.
As for the businesses themselves, there were accessory shops, eateries, spicegons, tool shops. Aleicree saw a hatgon, a scribegon, a pipegon, and that last zie wondered: if zie told Limist about it, would the pipegon be a supplier or a competitor? There were countless businesses in every city, so that Aleicree wondered if the land gods loved commerce and blessed the merchants. Was it important to them to have their cities full of goods?
Where'd all the trash go? Some whimsical part of Aleicree's thoughts mused about that. All these goods competed for space, and they all eventually broke or became unwanted. Zie hadn't spotted a city dump from the air in zir overflights of Sorjek. What did the land gods do with trash? That was a bigger mystery of the city than why someone had painted a fox in a robe.
If Praoziu was an inexperienced land god, how would Praoziu solve trash? She would need to. Would she just zap it all away, unsummoning things once they were no longer desirable? Could there be a better answer? Maybe it mattered that Aleicree thought about these things. No! Surely not. Aleicree wasn't going to go from seagon to city planner. Anyways, how could unsummoning trash be beaten for an answer? Send the unwanted stuff back to raw energy. That was probably what all the land gods did.
Aleicree stared at the buildings as they grew taller around zirself, but zie wasn't seeing them, nor the other dragons on the streets. Zie had abruptly remembered Missing Meteorology, still one of the most memorable textbooks from the wind magic academy. It wasn't anything from the book itself that brought it to mind. It was just a serious study of a phenomenon in a Missing theome where there was very little magic. Life went on where magic stopped. There were whole cities in Missing theomes. They almost certainly couldn't unsummon trash. There was a landfill zone in Relny, not far from Zyrine.
Praoziu needed help in finding out the ways that theomes ran, Aleicree decided. If Nidrio was going to get off the ground, someone needed to be Praoziu's geomancer. She needed a geomancer other than Taisach, who was all too happy tending a garden next to a fine house. She needed a geomancer more like Azosta, who saw the toils of life as necessary for life to be fulfilling. If Praoziu made life in Nidrio too easy, it'd remain underpopulated forever. Dragons didn't want to be living in a fanciful world where everything necessary was summoned in.
To really lure in settlers, mom needed to make life hard.
Aleicree was still thinking about this as zie came upon the giant stone structure of the Temple-Library of Querent-Querent. It reared up over the street, occupying a whole city block. This time Aleicree approached while looking up on it from street level rather than down on it from above.
With a wave at the rounded square of information desks, Aleicree bypassed them. Zie had time to kill and wanted to learn the library zirself. Zie was literate. How hard could it be? The mahogany shelves beckoned.
Browsing the shelves that day went nowhere fast. Aleicree was looking for books that would be of interest to Rhis, or else that would be of interest in city planning. Neither was really what the libraries of Querent-Querent were for. They were for promoting trade and travel between theomes. There were a whole lot of books about what was produced where. Historic records on the prices of goods were available for many goods in many theomes. Valuable information for sure, but hard to augur city planning information out of.
There was also a lot of ink shed in these tomes for the question of what amenities were available for travellers and what local appeals might draw a traveller to see them. Aleicree scoffed at the books. How unfathomably trivial! Querent-Querent must commission them, for zie couldn't imagine that they would exist otherwise. Books were expensive. Why did the land gods want shelf after shelf of trivial books to be maintained by Querent-Querent?
Searching alone grew frustrating. There were five floors of books across a vast footprint! Querent-Querent was a creation of the land gods. Their libraries were the fruit of a thousand years of authorship!
A blue dragon behind the counter at the information desks told Aleicree, "We don't have anything on how cities are organised, but we do have some esoterica that might help you understand the land god's perspective. It's less central to our purpose; we keep it on the top floor."
So Aleicree walked up several flights of stairs, first departing up the grand open stairs behind the information desks to reach the second floor, and then going past aisles of shelves for the smaller stairs that went up the outer wall. When zie reached the top floor, zie went first for the centre of the room again. The information desk had a great open space above it, so that from every other floor it was possible to look down on the information desks in the middle of the first floor. It was a grand view with dragons going hither and yon over the red carpets of the temple, many of them carrying books.
Five stories up, zie wondered if wingless dragons found this kind of view frightening.
Aleicree went back into the stacks. The books up here were more interesting, if only because they were more strange. They were organised into schools of thought with names that Aleicree didn't know. The sections of the fifth floor of the library in Sorjek were Chime, Weld, Rift, Dissolution, Garden, Chains, and Hydra.
Aleicree had no idea which of these would help Rhis or Praoziu, though zie recalled that Azosta had recently called himself “a student of Dissolution.”
Trekking five floors back down to talk to the information desk was a distinct possibility, but zie decided to start by plucking a book from a nearby shelf. As it happened, the nearest section was Hydra, and the book was titled The Flight of Lodran. The legacy page inside said it had been authored in the year 926 by Audran the Unsimple. Reading a few pages revealed fiction from the point of view of one Lodran the Mired, and flipping ahead through the book revealed chapter after chapter of that fiction.
This was a book on geomancy?
Zie put it back, walked down the aisle, and picked up another one. Dreams of Division, also a book in the 'Hydra' section. Written in 783 by Frellen the Restless. This one had a table of contents. Each chapter was a different dream. Aleicree was intrigued, but not impressed. What could be learned by reading about someone else's dreams?
Zir mind flickered to the memorable dream zie'd had the night before. It was unusual for zir to remember dreams. Was this Fate warning zir to study this book? If zie were in Shibanyet, zie'd really think so. In Sorjek, Fate was less tuned, and dreams were probably just dreams.
Zie put the dream journal back, and walked back to the index. Picking a section at random, zie sought out the Rift section. Running a taloned finger along the spines, zie read the titles. Crime of the Silent Tourists, The Daughters of the World that Was, Dark Shadow, Death of the Horned Lynx. None of them meant anything to Aleicree. Then zie stopped, suddenly breathless, as zir finger landed on The Ascent of Shattered Knives.
The dream!
Aleicree grabbed the book and started down the stairs to the front desk. Dreams could definitely be Fated. Even if the theome was Fated lightly, zie might have come to someone's attention. Zie didn't know Idsemper of Sorjek's predilections, but it didn't have to be Idsemper's attention that zie came to. The land gods negotiated Fate at long distance. The dream could have come from a distant deity.
Registering the loan of the book, Aleicree took it away from the library and went out into the streets to walk several blocks back to the scribe zie had noticed along the way. One more blank book was acquired. If zie were Fated to read this book, zie should copy it.
Any other dragon would have spent a vacation at the beach. Aleicree spent it with a lev-i-quill.