“Magic is a weird thing,” says Hineni, looking at the piece of metal that Rhine is flicking around with his small hand. It’s not a wand just yet, rather, it’s just a metal cylinder. The first thing that he did was to take a bar of copper-iron alloy and to split it into several pieces. One ingot of the alloy, like every standardized ingot, has a weight value of five kilograms. But for this, somewhat easier to work with density, and given the thinness and length of something like a wand, he can make about eight cylinders from one ingot.

However, eight cylinders doesn’t exactly add up to eight wands. Given that the ingot is shorter than a wand needs to be, they need two cylinders for one wand and then a lot of it needs to be shaved down to a snubbed end. Plus the handle needs to be grooved inward a little too and smoothed out on the base. A lot of material is going to be lost during this process of refinement and from the two cylinders that had weighed a combined total weight value of one-point-two kilograms, only zero-point-seven will remain.

Then the two separate pieces need to be fused together into one longer ’stick’, but this is a highly precise process. If the fusion is done wrong, then the magical energies channeled from a caster’s hands out through the wand will get caught in the middle, where the separation of the two pieces is. It could cause the wand to explode in their hands during spell-casting if this were to happen.

“That’s why wands are usually made from one long piece of material,” explains Hineni to Rhine who, despite the torrential dripping of sweat down his body and face, still stands there and nods, listening intently.

“So how come we don’t melt it again?” asks Rhine. “And then just take it out as a longer, flatter bar?”

Hineni nods. That’s a very good question, actually. By simply melting the ingot to be longer instead of thicker, they could cut out cylinders in the exact length that they needed instead of combining two shorter ones. But there’s a problem with that plan. “It’s a good idea. But I don’t have a mold,” he explains, pointing at the furnace. “We’d need to get a mold with the right shape and then melt it back down into it.”

Rhine rubs his lower lip with the back of his thumb. “Can’t you use a crafting spell?”

“I could,” says Hineni, looking at the bar.

“So?”

“I can’t,” shrugs Hineni.

“Huh?” Rhine tilts his head, not understanding.

Hineni picks up a cylinder and looks at it. “I don’t have the crafting recipe for this kind of ingot-manipulation,” he says. “We’ll have to do it by hand.”

“Can’t you ask the owl-god?” asks Rhine. “Can’t she just give it to you?”

Hineni wants to say that she can’t do that and that it obviously doesn’t work like that. But then again, Obscura had given him his advanced-class as a weaponsmith, even if he wasn’t exactly ready to become one. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility that she could give him a minor crafting recipe like this one too. He really wants to sit down and talk with her about her ‘godliness’ sometime, just so he can get a clearer understanding of it.

“She’s not here right now,” is all that Hineni says, looking back at the boy. As the two of them stare at each other for a moment, each of them trying to come up with a new argument for their plans. Hineni finds, in a strangely unusual moment of clarity, that the boy isn’t looking at him oddly, not in the way he expects people to look at him.

Sure, he still feels a need to adjust his hat lower to hide his own eyes and he still feels the need to pull on the leather-wrap that he wears in the forge, to hide his face. But he does neither of these things, having decided to leave that fearful person behind in the past. However, Rhine doesn’t seem to care at all, really. He doesn’t seem disgusted or scared or even just like he’s forcing himself to be polite. The boy is just thinking about the problem at hand, entirely indifferent to what he looks like and Hineni appreciates that a lot.

Even if he has already decided that they’re just going to use the two long pieces fused together. “Let’s get started,” says the man, turning back to the anvil.

“How about clay?” asks Rhine. Hineni turns back to look at the boy. “There’s a lot of clay by the river,” he says excitedly. “I know where some is!” exclaims Rhine. “What if we get some clay and some gunk and stuff and make a mold ourselves?”

Hineni looks at the boy for a moment, already ready to shake his head ‘no’ and to just meld the cylinders as is. This idea sounds troublesome. They’d need to go outside. They’d need to go to the river. They’d need to find ‘clay and gunk and stuff’ and make some molds with the right shape and size and then they’d have to test them to see if they’re even heat-safe, let alone safe to be used with molten metal.

It’s too much work. Too much effort. He has the two cylinders right here. A single spell will fuse them together before he even finishes this train of thought. It’s just too -

Hineni stops, lowering his eyes to the boy, realizing that a familiar man had almost caught up with him. “I almost did it again,” he says.

“What?” asks Rhine, not understanding.

“Good idea, Rhine,” praises Hineni. “Help me put out the forge. We’re going to the river,” he says, looking up at the high-windows of the forge to see not only if the sun has retreated for the day, but to see if a familiar owl is sitting there with eyes only for him. But she isn’t there, rather, the metal owl statue sits there on its perch, watching him from above and, despite not being as good as the real thing, it brings him a sense of relief to see.

Oddly enough, Hineni had expected there to be frogs at the river. But there aren’t any. There isn’t any croaking or anything of the sort. Instead, he hears a quiet running of water and the chirp of night-haunting crickets, singing their song from low perches atop blades of tall grass, dangling out over the starlit waters of the river.

It’s still night-time. The two of them had made their way out to the side of the city, to the outskirts, past the walls, where the river runs towards civilization, out over the grass-lands. The landscape in this direction is rather plain and featureless, simply being a lush, fertile meadow that goes on for days. But that can’t be seen now, beneath the cover of darkness. Only the river seems to be aglow, as if lit up especially for the two of them, as the light of the star-shine above comes down to meet the ebbing waters, as the glow of many fat, orange fireflies floats above the surface as if illuminating the world for them to see what they seek.

“I’ve never been here before,” says Hineni.

“Nobody ever comes out to the river,” says Rhine, walking along its bank. He jumps up onto a dead log, holding his arms out at his sides as he walks along it. “I come here a lot.”

“I guess it’s part of the job, huh?” asks Hineni. “So what’s up with the river-wizard thing anyways?”

“What do you mean?” asks Rhine. Hineni shrugs, not really sure what it is that he’s asking either. He looks around. “Are you going to get into trouble for being out here?” he asks the boy, before then wondering if he himself is going to get in trouble for being out here. As someone from the tower quarter, it won’t look good for Hineni if anything happens to Rhine. Any slip from that log, a cut on a branch, a scuff of mud on his robe, which is, to be fair, already pretty dirty, would be blamed on him.

People from the tower quarter are rich. Owl-god or not, he’s poor. That’s just what it is.

“No,” says Rhine, shaking his head as he pokes a cat-tail frond sticking out of the embankment. “Nobody cares,” he says. “Anyways.” The boy turns around, stepping off of the log, his fists at his side. “The thing that’s up with the river-wizard thing is that -” Hineni rolls his eyes. He’s going to do the thing again. “- I’m RHINE! THE RIVER WIZ-!”

“WHO!”

“-AAAAAH!” Rhine in his startled panic, falls over, flailing his arms in terror as Obscura pops out from behind the cat-tails in her half-human form and hoots at him.

Water splashes everywhere as the boy falls into the frigid river and is carried away by the current. “Help!” yelps Rhine, the river-wizard.

(Rhine) takes: [Frost Damage {1}] ! [HP: 15/16]

“Swim to the shoreline!” calls Hineni after the boy.

“I can’t swim!” replies a quickly fading voice.

Hineni blinks, the situation starting to click in his head, as he lets out a surprised yelp himself and then scrambles after the boy who is floating away, carried down and away by the current of the river.

(Rhine) takes: [Frost Damage {1}] ! [HP: 14/16]

“Frogs?” asks Obscura, holding out her long, taloned hands in which there are three frogs who had a very unlucky night. She tilts her head, looking past Hineni into the room.

Hineni shakes his head, shooing her away from the door leading into one of the rooms upstairs. The ones that had been used for adventurers to sleep in for a fee, in days now long since gone. “Let him sleep,” says Hineni. “I need to go to town, to tell his parents so they can pick him up.” Though, now that he says that, he doesn’t really know anything about them or who they might be.

Rhine, after having been swept away by the river, was plucked out of the icy water of the frigid river by a giant, taloned foot that had swooped him out and up into the air. Perhaps it was the fluctuation of temperatures that did it, from the steaming heat of his forge to an icy river at night, or perhaps it was all of the excitement and stress of these last few days, but, for whatever reason it might be, Rhine seems to have gotten sick. Though, Hineni is familiar with the nebulous illness.

“It’s winter-sickness,” says Hineni, recognizing the symptoms. Especially the rapid onset. Back during his stay at the orphanage, this would come to them too. He himself had it a few times, during the colder nights. The body simply isn’t able to keep up its health under extreme circumstances and it eventually just loses whatever battle it was already fighting.

A dawning cold that had been coming for a few days now, a sniffle that had never really progressed past a light drip, an ache in the gut, broken ribs, perforated insides, difficulty with one’s lungs. Whatever ailment might’ve been there before, simply now has had the chance to flourish and to take hold and to really come out as what it is after an extreme shock to the body or stressful situation.

‘Winter-sickness’ isn’t really a real thing. It’s just what they called it as kids. It’s just a summation of everything, really, brought to a head by the winter’s unforgiving bite.

“Soup?” asks Obscura, bobbing with her head in a circle.

“Soup?” asks Hineni.

“Obscura read many of Hineni’s ‘H’-books!” she explains “’H for human! For health! For husband!”

“Uh…”

“Who~!” The owl vanishes in an instant, leaving behind an explosion of feathers where she was just a moment ago. Hineni scratches his head, not sure what’s going on. The man turns his head, looking back at the sleeping boy, making sure the blanket is covering him up high as he closes the door, unable to see either the azure blue of the robe, hanging there over the back of a chair, or the dark blue of the many welts and bruises on Rhine’s body, everywhere that the long robe had covered. This symptom of winter-sickness is also common.

Hineni shakes his head, making a note to get more wood. This big house gets cold and he’s going to need to heat a lot more this year. He has a sort-of-not-but-also-is-wife to keep warm, as well as a guest who he’s apparently going to find a surprising amount of work for.

He makes his way downstairs and readjusts his clothes, dusting himself off as he gets ready to go. He stands there, at the front door, realizing that something feels… wrong. Something is missing. Something is… unsaid.

“Soup…” mutters Hineni to himself, feeling better immediately. They had only said it twice before. Having been summoned, something coos from behind him and he feels Obscura rubbing her head against his back. “I’ll be right back,” says Hineni. “Please be nice to Rhine, okay?” he requests.

“Obscura will apologize,” says the owl-goddess. He turns his head to look at her and she lifts up an old book, pointing at its insides. Many of its pages are ear-marked. 'Health, housekeeping, homemaking'. It’s an advice book on pragmatic ways of being a good partner. Hineni makes a note to read it himself when he gets the chance. “Mean Obscura, terrible Obscura, wicked Obscura!” she hoots, spinning her head around.

“Maybe I wouldn’t go that far,” says Hineni. He squints, looking at the page she has open and then nods, approving of her idea. “Just be careful in the kitchen, okay?”

“Obscura will use frogs instead of chicken!” she exclaims proudly and then vanishes. Hineni stares at the doorway to the kitchen. He can hear pots and pans rattling on the other side as she sets to work, making a ‘chicken’ soup.

He makes a note to take the long way home.

“About this tall. Blue hair,” says Hineni to the woman, looking out of her window. She shakes her head and closes the shutters.

Hineni sighs, looking around the area.

The tower quarter is essentially exactly that. The city has many different, distinct and lively areas, each with their own domain and purpose. But the tower quarter is where the upper-upper-upper class parts of the normal city lived, particularly the casters. These aren’t exactly noble houses, but they are definitely wealthy people with connections and at least some modicum of social power.

Hineni looks around at the many high houses that line the street. Tall, timber-framed constructions line the way, each at least five to six stories tall. The ones in the middle are connected to a construction of four large, stone towers with a tiny keep in the middle. It might not seem like much, but a few gods live there. Some reclusive elemental gods who like the view, apparently.

As for Rhine, Hineni can’t make heads or tails of where the boy is from and nobody seems to know who he’s talking about. At least the people that will speak to him. He had assumed that the boy was fairly conspicuous, but it seems that he was mistaken.

He decides to head back home. If Rhine is awake now, he’ll just ask him. Otherwise, his parents would just have to wait until tomorrow. Though, judging by the ‘symptoms’ of the boy’s winter-sickness, Hineni doubts that they’re worried.

He spares a glance back at the large, castle-like construction, before shaking his head and heading back home. It's cold out here. Maybe he'll try that soup after all.