“One more thing,” Gatosh said, and Shirel handed Markas a small artifact. “This is an experimental new enchantment designed to help adventurers find and evaluate the difficulty of dungeons. It should help guide you when you get near.”

Markas accepted the dungeon compass-slash-meter, and nodded.

“All right, let’s move out,” Markas said to the party, and everyone started to leave the office.

“Actually, if it’s all right with you, leave Deklan behind,” Gorban said. “He’s still relatively new, and I need to make sure he’s actually up for this.”

“Deklan can handle himself,” Markas said, grinning at me. “Meet up with us later for dinner?”

“Sure,” I said, and waited for the party to leave the office and for the door to shut. Shirel walked over to the door, opened it and took a peek outside, then shut it again, nodding to Gorban.

Gatosh disappeared as Shirel released the illusion of the priest. She’s almost as good as Atlessoa at that now.

Sitting back in his chair behind his desk, Gorban groaned. “I truly dislike this obfuscation and subterfuge,” he muttered, rubbing his face. “I should never have accepted this position.”

“Oh, don’t be such a grump,” Shirel said, stepping up behind him and starting to rub his shoulders. Gorban sighed, then looked back at me.

“The crown is really worried about these dungeons? The Guild Master could barely tell me anything, beyond how to handle your party. I know Shirel knows more than she’s telling me, not that that’s anything new.”

Shirel smirked from behind him.

“I’m not sure ‘worried’ is the right word. The king wants the cores, and is maybe worried about them falling into the wrong hands. I’m just here to round them up. Speaking of,” I said, taking the core from the desk. “I’ll get this back to the capital when we’re done.”

Gorban shook his head, defeatedly. “Fine. It’s not like I know what to do with it. Dismissed.”

I left the Guild Leader’s office, tucking the core into my inventory when I was sure no one was watching. One down, two to go.

* * *

After wandering around to find my party, I found Sidel in the stables attached to the Tamers Guild, feeding Tug the Gold rank meat. The scraps I had been trickle feeding him had pushed him along quite well, but with Sidel wholeheartedly infusing and feeding the larger cuts to the rhinothell, she was growing by leaps and bounds.

Meandering around the stables, I found the flock of bushcallers who were hunkered down in a stall. “Have you fed these bushcallers yet?” I called out to Sidel.

“No,” she called back, feeding Tug another piece of meat.

I made my way into the Guild and bought a small bag of millet to bring out to the birds, and when I scattered it in their stall they got a bit startled, but soon were pecking away at the ground hungrily. I grinned as I watched them strut and coo, then walked back to Sidel and dropped the rest of the grain off with her.

“Oh, thanks,” she said, momentarily distracted from force-feeding her rhinothell, who was starting to look sleepy.

“No problem. I sent a message north to the winged beast fancier I know, so hopefully you’ll hear back about them soon.”

“Right. I almost forgot about that,” she said, glancing at the crate of meat. “Hard to focus on some small scale bounties when you’re given a small fortune.”

“True, but you might be surprised,” I said. “Anyway, you should probably let Tug sleep and digest a bit before she explodes.”

Sidel sighed. “I suppose.” She glanced over at Piko, who was hanging from a post in the stable and watching the various beasts. “Do you think anyone would mind if I gave a bit to Piko?”

I chuckled. “I doubt it. Do you have a second beast crystal for him?”

“Yeah. I’ve had him for years, and he’s probably pretty close, so I have one for each of them.”

Snagging a small piece of meat from the crate, I tossed it over to the gremline, who caught it and looked at us. “There. Decision made. No one can blame you, since I gave it to him.”

Sidel frowned, but it slowly morphed into a grin, and she shrugged. “I guess it couldn’t be helped,” she said, nodding at Piko who quickly ate the scrap, then scrambled back down the post and over to the tamer as she pulled a beast crystal out of a pouch on her belt.

Piko was on it immediately, stuffing it into his mouth and swallowing before he started to glow. Sidel scooped up the ashen gremline when he was finished transforming, squeezing him into a hug.

“Oof. You’re a bit heavier,” she muttered through her smile, scratching the fur behind his ears with a smile.

I left Sidel and her beasts behind, heading out of the stable and back into the Guild tavern area, where I found Estorra hidden away in a corner reading the treatise on ice magic with a cup of nikopi.

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

The mage slammed the treatise shut when she sensed someone approaching, but relaxed when she saw it was me. “Oh. Hello Deklan.”

“How goes the studying?” I asked, sitting down across from her.

Estorra screwed up her mouth, thinking, but then came to a conclusion. “Well. I suppose I may talk about it with you, since you’re part of the party.”

The usually quiet and stoic silver-haired mage came alive, purple eyes lit up in excitement as she began talking about what she was reading.

“It’s fascinating,” she whispered heatedly, leaning forward. “And if this is right, it is no wonder water mages have failed to make ice so far. I had always thought that making ice would be more like the inverse of boiling water and turning it into steam, which expands and grows into billowing clouds. You would think, then, that ice requires compressing water until it becomes a solid.

“But according to this, that is where I have been wrong. To make ice, one must still force the water to expand, but rather than explosively turning into steam, it must be calmed. Ordered.” She tapped a fingernail on the book, frowning. “This is where it gets a little harder to follow. It claims the shape of the essence of water is a triangle, but that water is so chaotic they are all twisting and overlapping. To form ice, the water must be organized so that the triangles are arranged into hexagons. I can visualize this in terms of shapes, but it feels like the author is making a leap that I cannot fully follow…” Estorra trailed off, lost in thought. “Still, if the author is correct, it should just take practice and visualization. I have not finished reading, so perhaps it will go into more detail.”

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” I said, standing and leaving the mage to return to her reading.

I had done the best I could while writing the treatise without exposing too much about chemistry, but Estorra was not wrong that this required some leaps in logic that would otherwise have to go unexplained. I knew that it could be made to work, though, since I had used similar concepts in the execution of my ice-making enchantments.

There was not enough room in an enchantment command circle to first write out the chemistry necessary to properly understand how ice is formed, and even if there was, in a big enough circle, that was not how this world approached magic anyway. In studying other enchantments, I had found a way to convert my understanding of ice into higher-level concepts which would allow magic and the natural order to fill in the gaps.

Constructing my first pieces of ice on the back of my early quartz and gemstone experimentation had required precisely understanding the crystal lattices and building them one atom at a time, which was incredibly costly and slow. It was also unnecessary, because if I instead focused on just ordering the water to slow down and organize into groups of six, the crystal lattice would begin to naturally occur, like how ice froze in the wild.

It still required feeding the spell with enough magic to allow the water to freeze fully, and so it scaled with size, but the modified magic was more about creating a chain reaction that leveraged a natural process. The ice formation would freeze the connecting water in turn and expand outwards, so long as the mage could continue the spell.

I knew it worked well enough that my enchantments functioned, but this would be a good test to see if another mage could apply the principles without knowing what I already knew. If so, the Kingdom could start to produce a lot more enchanted ice makers, although they would still require a powerful enough mage to operate without a better source of crystalized magic.

Rashir would be out and about finding the best deals on supplies for the journey east, but Markas was out in the training area. I walked out to find him practicing his sword work.

“Worried?” I asked. I had not seen the man drilling his forms very much since we had met, as he was already approaching Gold rank and an expert with his sword.

The warrior finished his form, then stopped to turn towards me. “Yes and no. The party handled itself well in the first…” he looked around to see if anyone would overhear him. “cave. I’m confident we’ll be able to handle the next. Still, it’s a large unknown, and there could be risks we can’t predict.”

I nodded, grimacing slightly. “I suppose I should apologize. It’s kind of my fault you got dragged into this.”

“No need.” Markas barked out a laugh. “If we keep getting paid like that, we’ll make more coin in a half-season than we would in a full year. Much more, if you account for what Estorra and Sidel walked away with.” He grinned, but then grew a bit more serious. “What about you, Deklan? You’re our defender, so you’re right up in the front of it all. Are you good to continue? Was that what the Guild Leader wanted to talk about?”

“Well, it’s a lot more exciting than blacksmithing,” I said with a casual shrug. “I’m sticking to it. Yes, I’m new to the Guild, but I can handle it.”

“Good,” he nodded. “To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure we can manage without your shield.”

“You won’t have to. I’ll protect the party.”

* * *

Two days later, the party was ready to set back out. Rashir had got a good price on supplies and we had divided up the rest of our first reward to buy anything else we required individually.

Estorra was already able to form a snowflake out of a drop of water, and just needed to figure out how to cascade the reaction through a larger amount of water so she could start throwing icicle shards. She sat in the back of Sidel’s sled, still reading and muttering to herself.

I glanced over at Tug, who was strapped to the sled with a new harness after successfully evolving.

The beast was now a nomadic rhinothell. She had grown larger, but most of that was her height. While she retained the same thickness and power of the rhinothell, she now had longer legs with wider toes that were better suited to long-distance marches and better handled the sand. On even ground, she would be more nimble and quick, able to maneuver and turn better than she could before while able to run even faster in a straight line, her large neck and horn still able to deliver a powerful blow. Tug’s back was also larger and humped, giving her even more weight to slam into her opponents with, while also allowing the beast to go longer stretches without a source of water.

As a rank B beast, Tug’s transformation allowed Sidel to become Gold rank in the Tamers Guild. It was a huge feat, even if she did get some help. She was wearing her new badge with a huge grin on her face as we set out.

Tug snorted as she started to pull the sled, which slid behind her with ease. A wheeled wagon would obviously move faster over solid ground, but the sled pulled better over looser sand, which we would experience a bit more as we headed east. The four or five ton rhinoceros-camel creature had no issue hauling the sled even with a few barrels of water and a mage sitting on it.

Thinking back to the dracosaur, which was still at least three if not four times as large as Tug now was, I wondered how they would fare in a fight. Tug would be faster and more maneuverable, but the draconic beast had sheer size. Draconic beasts seemed like they were stronger, on average, than other beasts of the same rank, but in a battle of attrition, the nomadic rhinothell stood a chance. Not that they were likely to ever encounter each other in the wild.

I shook my head, quickening my step to catch up with my party as we left Haklan and headed to the Gold rank dungeon.