Book 3, Chapter 26 (Patreon)

My original plan had called for us to reach the edges of the island, to a place that was known locally as the Outlander’s Gateway, about half way through the day. It was the only spot that was almost five hundred miles wide where there was a break in the mountains. Or rather, the only conventionally accessible point. There were some spots along the east coast where a ship might find a place to dock, but they’d still be blocked from the interior of the island by mountains twenty or thirty miles inland.

Technically, we didn’t need to pass through the Gateway. We could have simply flown over the mountains ringing the island, but this trip was about the journey, not the destination. We were exploring the world and seeing what it had to offer. Right now, that meant viewing the only way non-mages had to get on or off the island.

There was a small trading town there, though perhaps ‘small’ wasn’t the right word for it. It was larger than any town I’d seen thus far, but by my standards, a population of perhaps a thousand meant that I considered it barely more than an overly large village. More importantly, the people living there were a mix of desert natives and merchants from outside the island.

I was hesitant to even call them sailors. To me, the word implied someone who crossed vast expanses of water, but the reality was that their ships were more like river boats. The channel separating this island from the next wasn’t more than fifty miles wide, and even that was being generous.

Senica and I were perched on an outcropping overlooking the pass leading down from the mountains to the Gateway, which was itself still a little way off. It was closer to twilight than noon, which was still good. We’d flown something like two hundred miles in one day, and my sister was exhausted.

 Neither of us would be able to see the town from so far away without using sensory enhancing invocations, but with them, I could clearly make out the individual buildings. “What do you think?” I asked. “This side or the other?”

“Is there a town on the other side, too?”

“Yes, but I don’t know much about it. We’d be foreigners there.”

“That’s going to be the case from here on out anyway,” she pointed out. “Might as well get used to it.”

“That does mean flying all the way across that channel tonight. Are you sure you’re up for it?”

“I can do it,” she declared confidently. “I’m doing a lot better now.”

That was true. After cutting our speed to a third, Senica was able to fly for hours on end. I’d ramped the speed up slowly a few times to test her, but it seemed she really was giving it her all. For the moment, at least, that was as fast as she could go without tiring herself out in less than an hour.

“It’ll be another two hours of flying, at least,” I warned. “We’ll make landfall after sunset.”

Senica didn’t look concerned. “Nalicin is a full moon tonight and I think there will be at least one more partial. Besides, we can see in the dark.”

“All true, but…”

“But what?”

“But people still need to sleep, and they don’t appreciate being pulled from their bed. If we cross instead of finding a place to stay in this town, we may end up camping out in the wilderness instead.”

“I think we’d be fine, either way. I know you’ve got a bed stowed away and can raise a whole house up out of the ground in minutes.”

“I’ll make you do it instead,” I warned.

“I can’t,” she told me shamelessly. “I’ve been refilling my shield ward for the last half an hour while we fly. It was getting low.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Suspicious timing.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m just following your instructions.”

“I guess we’ll be sleeping outside tonight then,” I told her, wiping the smirk off her face.

“What? No. Come on, it’s dangerous. There are monsters. You wouldn’t risk my safety like that, would you? Mom and Dad wouldn’t be happy about that.”

“You’ll be fine,” I told her mercilessly. It was even true. I’d set a ward to keep us safe, but there was no way I was letting Senica play things like this. She needed to learn to rely on her own power instead of trying to manipulate me into bailing her out every time she overextended, especially when she was doing it on purpose.

She stood there and thought that over for a few seconds, then announced, “I guess we should make an effort to visit both sides of the channel to see what we can find. That’s why we’re here, after all.”

I snorted and cast flight on the both of us again. I wasn’t exactly surprised she’d changed her mind once she realized I wasn’t going to do all the work for her. “After you,” I said, gesturing for her to take the lead.

Whatever she was muttering under her breath, it was swept away by the wind as we flew away.

  *

One of the things I was most curious about was currency. The village I’d been reborn in, Alkerist, operated on a barter system. That was easy enough to get away with when there were only a few hundred people, but the bigger a society grew, the harder it got to manage without using some sort of money.

The people living in Derro had numbered in the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. That hadn’t been enough to fill even a quarter of the city, itself a left over from a bygone age, but it had still necessitated a currency based on leech stones filled with mana. I’d only gone back to Derro a few times after I finished destroying a cabal of mages that had taken over there, but my understanding was that their economy was in a slow state of decline now.

Without mages regularly draining the mana from the leech stones, they’d started to produce draw stone growths. That was the natural life cycle of the magic-eating rocks, so it was no surprise to me, but it did make it a lot harder to use the leech stone cores as money when they quadrupled in size every few months.

To the best of my knowledge, the city’s nobility had advocated for a switch to a precious metal standard and put its crafters on mass-producing coins to replace the leech stone shards. It wasn’t a perfect system by any means, not in the least because it was vulnerable to mages who knew how to transmute the metals, mages like me.

So I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Outlander’s Gateway. These were the only people to trade with the outside world, and I was curious to see what they’d come up with. Truthfully, I considered the town to be a sort of trial run for society beyond the island. What were their customs like? Their language? Could we pass for natives? If not, how accepting were they of foreigners? I hoped to find answers to at least some of these questions tonight.

We landed a few hundred feet away from the edge of town and walked the rest of the way. My hope was that enough people had seen us fly in, and it was uncommon enough, that a few interesting people would find us. That’d save me some trouble.

As we got close, the first thing I noticed was that the town hard a surprising number of guards. Weirdly, none of them had anything resembling a uniform. It was more an attitude and the presence of weapons openly carried that tipped me off, and it quickly became apparent that the guards weren’t there to keep the town safe. No, their purpose was to protect the trade goods their employer had stored in various warehouses.

As we walked, I extended tendrils of mind reading spells out in every direction and picked up random thoughts from strangers.

From a guardsman standing in front of a warehouse door, ‘-cannot wait for this shift to be over. I need a hot meal and a good hook-’

‘That guy is way too old for that girl!’ thought a woman at least twice my mother’s age staring at us as we walked by.

‘Were those two flying? Must be mages. Better to stay out of their way. Although…’ a merchant manning a street-side stall thought.

‘-swear he does it on purpose. What good is it having the world’s strongest mage as a brother if he doesn’t help me out?’ thought my sister. ‘Why is he smirking at- Wait. Gravin! You little shit! You’d better not be reading my mind!’

“How’s your enchanting coming along?” I asked. “I can teach you how to set down a mind shielding enchantment into a piece of jewelry.”

She huffed and tried to shove me, but I was over a foot taller than her now and outweighed her by fifty or sixty pounds. Plus I saw the mana course through her arms in a strengthening invocation and cycled some of my own to counter the extra force. “Why- Don’t- You- Damn it!” she cursed after a few seconds of struggling and failing to budge me.

“So far, I haven’t found anyone speaking anything other than Enotian,” I said, ignoring her feeble attempts to push me. “But I don’t really see any foreigners yet. Maybe when we get closer to the docks.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m hungry. Think we can find a place to eat here, or should we just fend for ourselves?”

“I wouldn’t mind a hot meal that I put absolutely no effort into producing,” I said. “The question is where to find one.”

“Eggert’s place,” one of the guards who’d been watching us walked by called out. “My brother owns it. He’ll fill your bellies for a reasonable price.”

“That sounds like just the thing,” I replied. “One more question, if you don’t mind. What are you using for currency here?”

The guard laughed. “Wow, you must be from way inland. Both towns run on velci.”

“Follow up questions. Both towns? And what is velci?”

“On either side of the channel. It’s the official currency of Velcinar.” The guard held up a hand. “Before you ask, that’s what they call their country over there. Truth be told, this place is basically part of their country anyway. It’s not like we’ve got any sort of official government that controls the whole island, anyway. I think it’s only that the merchants who run the place don’t want to pay taxes to Velcinar’s crown that keeps us independent.”

“I see,” I said. I’d never heard of the country, but that wasn’t much of a surprise. The world I’d known in my past life was gone, obliterated by two particularly stupid groups of mages who were just smart enough to develop planet-destroying magics, but not smart enough to know better than to use them.

“As for velci…” The guard produced a wallet from a pocket in his coat and pulled out a few slips of what appeared to be some kind of thick paper. On closer inspection, I realized it was actually some type of cloth. That was smart of whoever’d come up with it. It’d be significantly harder to transmute something into that. “This is velci.”

“Thank you,” I said. “You’ve been beyond helpful. If you could, directions to Eggert’s place would be appreciated.”

While the man told us where to find his brother’s restaurant—or maybe it was an inn; I wasn’t entirely sure—I scanned his thoughts.

‘Out-of-towners,’ the guard thought with a mental snort of derision. ‘Don’t know a thing about how the world works. Hope they’ve got something good to trade Eggert if they don’t have any money. Both wearing nice enough clothes; there’s probably something. Then again, I don’t see so much as a pack between them… Whatever. Not my problem.’

“Thank you again,” I told him.

“No trouble at all. Have a good night, sir.”

It wasn’t terribly uncommon to find people with rude thoughts and pleasant words. I’d long since learned to accept politeness at face value for casual interactions, so I didn’t trouble myself over the guard’s thoughts. I’d only wanted to make sure he wasn’t lying about anything, and I’d sensed no deception from him.

“Come on,” I told Senica. “Let’s see if we can’t barter for a meal and maybe some beds for the night.”