“So you want to go to that school after all?” Garen asked him in the yard.

“Yes, sir.”

Micah tried to sound earnest, just like Ryan told him to, but he couldn’t help but glance at Anne standing a little ways off to the side. When he had stumbled up to them, she had ceased her mentor’s attention to him immediately and seemed content to wait, as if she didn’t mind him interrupting at all.

Micah, meanwhile, felt like he was bumbling about with great big steps.

“Hm.” Garen scratched his chin. “Did Ameryth bribe you?”

“Huh? Uh, no. No, sir?”

Why would Ms. Denner bribe him?

“Then why do you want to go?”

“My friend…” he started but trailed off. Micah had dragged Ryan along with this idea after all, so it couldn’t be that. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “It just seems like an opportunity to do the one thing that I want to do.”

“A gut feeling?” the receptionist asked. “Hm. Alright, then. Just let me go ask Lisa in case I’m screwing something up for her, okay?”

“Uhm, sure?”

He walked off and Micah was left standing there, confused. Had that been a yes?

“... It’s Micah, right?” Anne asked. She took a slanted step forward with her arms behind her back and peered at him.

Micah immediately thought of nothing else.

“Yes! Uhm, and you’re Anne?” he asked as if he hadn’t known already.

She straightened up and nodded. “Yep.”

A sheen of sunflowers spiraled along her hair, different from the floral patterns she’d worn last time. Micah liked the way they matched her hair. The yellow petals also reminded him of golden Truth essence, but he couldn’t help but frown at a spot just above her head. Hadn’t she been taller the last time they met?

“You were the one with the Cosmeticist friend, right?”

“Janet.” Micah nodded, although they barely knew each other. “She works in Westhill. She actually wrote a book which I … don’t have with me.” It was in his Salamander chest at Ryan’s. He should have kept it in the shed.

Idiot.

Anne nodded a little. “Our family has one of their own, though, so …”

“Oh, no. I wasn’t recommending her,” Micah quickly said, but immediately reconsidered. “Although, now that I think about it … if your Cosmeticist is looking for an apprentice or extra help?”

Janet had given Ryan that face cream for free after all, even if it turned him into a tomato. And she’d also made a healing salve as quickly as she could to fix her mistake. If Micah could help her out by dropping her name in conversation, why not?

Anne chuckled. “What’s her last name? I can pass it on, but I can’t make any promises.”

“Janet Mays,” Micah spoke clearly.

Anne closed her eyes for a moment and nodded. “I have it.”

“Thank you.”

They stood around awkwardly for a moment.

“So … Garen is endorsing you, too?” Anne asked, smiling a little bit. It made her cheeks dimple. “Do I have to be jealous?”

“Wha—uh, jealous?” Micah asked, caught off-guard. “What would you have to be jealous about?”

Jealous of Garen?

“That you’re stealing him away from me,” she clarified.

Oh, jealous of him.

“No no no,” Micah said. “I wouldn’t do that. I, uh, actually have an instructor already. Sort of. Lisa? Do you know Lisa? Of course, you know Lisa. But she is teaching me, so I wouldn’t want Garen to teach me even if he offered.”

What am I doing? Breathe.

Anne frowned softly. “Why not?”

Oh, great. And I insulted her instructor!

Micah took a breath to calm himself. “... Because I’m an [Alchemist]?” he said. Hadn’t he told her that last time?

“Right.” She nodded and pushed a strand of hair back over her ear. “I remember now. That’s actually pretty sensible of you, you know? Anyone else would have jumped at the chance to be taught by the Dragonslayer.”

“The who now?”

She looked at him. “The Dragonslayer.”

“Are—” He looked around, lost. ”Are we talking about a story? I’m afraid I don’t know many Tower stories.”

“No. We’re talking about Garen, remember?”

“And he’s the …?”

“Dragonslayer.”

“Oh.” Micah nodded a little, squinted his eyes a bit, and rolled them from corner to corner as he thought it over. There was one problem, though. He cocked his head. “But dragons aren’t real?”

Anne took a step back and held half a hand in front of her mouth to cover a sudden a laugh.

Micah felt like he might have the Skill [Hot Skin] after all.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said. “I’m not laughing at you. I’m just laughing at something else. But yes, dragons are real, Micah.”

She’d said his name.

“Like with wings and scales and breathing fire?” he asked.

“Yes to all.”

“How do you know? Have you seen one before? Which floor are they on?”

Micah’s mind was filling with questions until she said, “You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”

Oh. Was that a bad thing?

“But, no.” She shook her head. “There aren’t any in any of our Towers. At least, not that we know of.”

“Then where else would Garen have encountered a dragon?” Micah asked. If there had been a dragon near any of the five Towers, he thought he would have heard about it, ignorant though he may be.

“You misunderstand, we didn’t give him the title,” Anne said. “The Northerners did. But that’s a long story.”

“I have nothing but time,” Micah said honestly.

She seemed to consider him for a moment and Micah tried not to fidget while she glanced him up and down. He had the irrational fear that his clothes were smudged and his fly open.

“You do, don’t you?” Anne said. “Must be nice, knowing that. A little sad, though. Don’t you think?”

Micah had no idea what she was talking about. He was about to agree with her simply for the sake of it—he thought girls liked that—but what if she thought he was lying? So instead, he told her the truth.

“Oh,” she said. “But you— I’m sorry, I mistook you for someone else. What did you say your last name was again?”

Had she assumed he was some kind of noble?

“Stranya,” he said and pronounced it wrong. He pronounced his own last name wrong.

“Like … Maya Stranya?” she asked, pronouncing it right. “Or like Elissa Stranya?” She said it as if those were two different options.

“Those would be my eldest sister and mother,” Micah explained.

She probably knew about his mother because of how vocally she opposed the city relying on the Tower and was on the district council. But how had she known about his sister? Maya was just a registrar-turned-historian … or something similar. Micah honestly didn’t know what his eldest sister did for a living.

Maybe she knew of her by association?

“Oh,” Anne said, eyes gleaming. “So you’re like a rebellious youngest son, then?”

… Did she want him to be a rebellious youngest son, then?

“Kind of,” Micah said with a stilted voice. “I do what I want, you know?” He scratched the back of his head in feigned embarrassment and tried to subtly flex his arm a little, like Ryan naturally did. He immediately felt stupid.

What was he doing?

Anne chuckled anyway and said, “That was a nice purple truth.”

Micah let his arm drop and scratched his elbow instead, actually embarrassed this time, “Purple truth?”

“It’s when you’re telling the truth, but you think you’re lying,” she explained.

“Oh.” Had he thought he was lying? He wasn’t sure. “You can see all that?”

She nodded. “There are all sorts of colors to truths and lies. Purple is one of the sadder ones, but I still like it.”

She smiled at him. She was a Heswaren, so she could probably see all his lies like stones that paved the road behind him and yet, she still smiled at him. She was a paladin of truth and still smiled. That alone lit up a whole new path.

Micah let go of his arm and grinned back. “That must be awesome, being able to tell the truth in all things.”

She weighed her head a little. “It’s a blessing and a curse. I can’t turn it off, you know? I grew up with people feeling uncomfortable around me. And I can’t tell lies, but my mother always says that one’s a blessing in disguise. ‘An honest upbringing leads to an earnest life’, she’ll say.”

Micah listened patiently and nodded a little, but caught on something there.

I think you look stupid.

That phrase was burned into his mind like Skills were supposed to be. He could never forget it.

“You can’t lie?” he asked.

“Well, I can,” she clarified. “But it hurts.”

Oh. And he had made her do it. “I’m so sorry,” he rambled. “If I hadn’t looked—”

She seemed confused before she caught on and shook her head. “No. Stop. Don’t worry, that was a silver lie. They’re one of the ones that hurt the least. And if it stopped you from … Believe me, it was worth it.”

Micah loved asking questions, but he was starting to feel ashamed about it now. He didn’t want to annoy her or look stupid, but he saw no way around it. “Uhm, silver lie …?” he said instead, wringing his left hand behind his leg a little. Maybe if he didn’t phrase it as a complete question?

“They’re lies without depth,” she explained. “It’s like when you say ‘this food tastes great’ when really, you don’t mind how the food tastes at all. They’re usually used to be polite, so they don’t hurt so much at all.” She smiled reassuringly, but Micah was thinking of something else.

So when she said, I think you look stupid …? His hopes fell. He’d just assumed she had been lying about the opposite, that she might think he looked smart or cool, but she didn’t care about how he looked at all. Of course not. She didn’t even know him.

Even then, at the back of his mind, a small part of him wondered what kind of color lying about the opposite would have been.

“So, Garen?” he asked to switch topics.

“Right. We got kind of off-topic there, didn’t we?”

“I didn’t mind,” Micah said. He was more interested in Anne than Garen anyway, but now he felt a little bit guilty about that interest.

“I usually don’t talk so much about my blood, just so you know,” she said. “Not that you think …”

“I didn’t,” Micah said. “Think anything bad, I mean.”

She smiled. Because she knew it was the truth? Or maybe she just liked to smile a lot. She seemed pretty sunny. That might have been the sunflowers spiraling in her hair, though.

“It seems like Lisa and Garen are squabbling anyway,” she said, glancing at the house. “Want to sit down?”

Micah followed her glance. Lisa and Garen were squabbling? How had she known? “Sure,” he said.

She plopped down onto the yard from where she stood, so Micah mirrored her. Wiping that same strand of hair back behind her ear, she asked, “So you really didn’t know who Garen is at all?”

He shook his head. “Nope.”

“Because you grew up in Westhill?”

“Probably?” Micah asked. “Honestly, I might not have have known about him even if I grew up in the Guild.”

She smiled. “Well, the story of Garen the Dragonslayer is a grand one full of adventure, strife, glory, and lots and lots of bullcrap. Ups.” She flinched a little. “Sorry. But the versions you’ll hear in songs or books are really exaggerated. Garen told me the real one when he agreed to train me, but … I can only tell the simple version or he’d get angry…?”

“That’s fine,” Micah said.

He liked how embarrassed she’d been at cursing, but cursed anyway.

“Well, the story begins when Garen was just a private doing his mandatory military service for the church and, uh, made one of his superiors really mad. Back then, he was even worse than he is today, so that’s pretty easy to imagine.”

Micah listened raptly.

“He was sent off to patrol the border all the way in the North in the middle of nowhere as his punishment. After a few weeks of nothing and infighting in his group, they happened upon a group of Northern raiders … Well, they weren’t actually raiders. That’s just what the stories say. They were adventurers, just like you or me. But in full military church garb with some ardent believers alongside him that hated the North? They fought.”

“Unfortunately for Garen’s group, these were powerful adventurers who had inherited at least one powerful technique from their families and developed another. They, uhm, defeated—”

“Techniques?” Micah interrupted her.

“Huh? Oh, it’s the Northern version of magic,” she explained, waving a little to brush it off. “Think of them like having two Skills, if you want.”

“Oh. Okay ...”

Just two Skills didn’t seem so powerful, though.

“So Garen fled. But he was lost in the middle of nowhere and didn’t know where he was going. He fled north, right into a southernmost part of Avemele, the Witch’s Forest. But I guess you would know it as the Monster Wilds.”

Micah would not. He didn’t even know what that was and itched to interrupt her again, but bit his tongue. He couldn’t interrupt her every time he had a question. What would she think of him? Maybe he could read up on those locations in Ryan’s geography textbook later?

“There, he fought against many true monsters and spent his nights learning how to sleep with one eye open. He got the [Adventurer] Class, fought with a sharpened stick, and lived off of tree bark, berries, and the occasional monster he could catch. He leveled rapidly for his efforts and discovered one or two unexplored ruins. When he finally made it out of the forest, he stumbled upon a village that had somehow managed to survive right next to the wilds. The people there took him in and taught him a little of their language and magics, but warned him to soon leave. For there was a dragon terrorizing the nearby lands.”

Her eyes went wide in overdone emphasis.

“Of course, Garen, like you, didn’t believe in dragons. But he had seen many strange monsters in the weeks before, so he thought it might be something else, like a large fire-breathing lizard the town’s people were just exaggerating about. Either way, he followed their advice and left.”

“A day out …” She paused and shook her head sadly. “He saw the dragon destroy the village at night. He was too far away to help.”

“How big was it?” Micah asked.

“The village?”

“No, the dragon. If he could see it from a day away. How big was the dragon?”

“The flames,” Anne explained. “He could see the river of flames flowing down from the night sky. But dragons vary in size. This one was middle-grown, maybe the size of the Tower’s wall”—Micah’s eyes went wide. What? A monster that size could trample over their city—”But they never stop growing. One of the eldest supposedly lives in, uhm, a mountain range all the way at the Northern tip of our continent, where the mountains meet the sea. Apparently, it’s as big as a mountain itself and worshipped as a God by the … people there.”

“Really?” Micah asked.

He hadn’t known about that. He hadn’t known about dragons or the North at all and his mind was dumping question after question into his head. How many dragons were there? Were they common in the outside world? How powerful were they? Could they speak? Could—

“It’s just a story,” Anne interrupted him.

“Oh.” He blushed. “Uhm, continue?”

“Where were we? Right ... Uhm, distraught,” Anne went on, “Garen went back to save whoever he could—even if these were Northerners, they had taken him in, given him shelter, food, and knowledge, you know? He even made some friends. So he wanted to help. And, uhm … all he found was wounded elder who sent him into the forest to find a family of sages.”

She looked uncomfortable saying that. Was she embarrassed? It did sound like kind of a like a children’s story, Micah admitted.

“He weathered the Monster Wilds once more, determined now, found these sages, and told them about the dragon. They agreed to help him and taught him Northern magics over many months. But one day, the dragon attacked them and Garen managed to slay it almost on his own. Afterward, the sages forged a brilliant, red blade from its still-beating heart, one meant to burn away all the rage of its enemies so that they need not meet the same fate as the poor soul it was wrought from. Tooth of Seven, they named it. Garen accepted the blade and left.”

“When he returned home, the church had already fallen and Garen became a climber. Rumors trickled down from the North over time, about what he had done, about Northern legends of him, and other things. People ridiculed him for years, because, like you or him, they didn’t believe in dragons. And they didn’t believe anything a Northerner would say anyway, but then…” she trailed off meaningfully.

Micah frowned. “Garen became famous anyway?” If a Heswaren believed the story, then it had to be true.

She nodded. “When he applied for a job at to the Guild, he had to get himself proofed for his application. Such a simple process, but it revealed the truth. They saw it, then. He had twenty-two levels in [Adventurer] from his time in the North and the years spent climbing, eight in [Soldier] for the time during his service, and two lone levels in the hitherto unseen Class [Dragonslayer]. The first level he got for the dragon he slew, the second for the one he didn’t.”

“Personal information like that is actually supposed to be somehow confidential,” Lisa said from the doorway. “Garen still curses the name of the man who hired him today. If he’d just kept his mouth shut …” She shook her head and smiled. “But where’s the fun in that? Now we get to tease him for it.”

Micah was still a little caught up in the story and tried to process that information. He had more than one question, though.

“But he was at most level thirty back then,” he demanded. “How did he kill a dragon the size of the Tower’s wall?”

Even Ed had more levels in combat Classes than that … probably. Micah wasn’t sure what his third Class was.

Anne shook her head. “You forgot, the sages taught him for months. He knows Northern magic, old magic.”

“But isn’t that supposed to be weak?” Micah asked. Everyone knew the Northerners were weak. Or else, why didn’t they slay the dragon themselves? They needed Garen to do it for them, someone with Skills and levels.

“Show a little respect, Micah,” Lisa scolded him, and Micah realized he was basically calling Garen a liar.

“Oh. I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I just meant …”

He didn’t know what he’d meant.

“It depends on how you use it,” Anne explained. “Like everything else. The smallest insect can bring down, what is to it, a giant. The smallest spirit can bring down a mountain. The smallest soul ...”

A lucky strike, then?

Micah still had a hard time believing it. All he could see when he thought of Garen was a man sleeping at his desk, or gesturing around wildly as he gossiped with his granddaughter, or haggled with store-owners.

He even had a hard time picturing him in armor.

As if reading his mind, Anne offered, “If you really doubt the story, just ask yourself, ‘Can I beat him?’ Garen has a Skill called [Open Level]. It’s usually meant to be used similar to [Repel Lesser Pests], in that it wards off really weak monsters, but it also lets other people gauge his strength and find out whether they could win against him in a fight. Most people I’ve met have gotten a crushing and absolute ‘No’, but it’s fun to try. Soo ... want to try?”

Anne was leaning forward a little and staring at him with expectant eyes, but Micah would have wanted to even if she hadn’t.

He closed his own and imagined the receptionist he’d met during his first visit to the Climber’s Guild, who had spent an afternoon teaching him the basics about the Tower by imitating monster sounds and making child-like drawings on a pad of paper.

When he imagined fighting him, though, he got an answer as if from nowhere.

Don’t. Your victory would be pyrrhic.

His eyes snapped open, but Lisa and Anne had theirs closed. Apparently, they were trying it out for themselves.

Pyrrhic? Micah wondered. Why? Maybe … because of moral and legal costs? If he used something like poison to kill him, it would both damn him as a person and land him in prison, or worse, for the rest of his life.

“And?” Anne asked a moment later.

“Nope.” Lisa shook her head. “Not a chance.”

“Me neither,” she said and winced.

Micah frowned at the two of them. “Uhm, yeah. Me neither,” he lied.

Anne laughed then. She clutched her stomach with one hand and steadied herself on the ground with the other.

Micah didn’t know what to do, but he smiled along nervously. Was she laughing at him, because he thought he had a chance to beat Garen? She must have known he’d lied, after all.

“What’s got you all cheery?” Lisa asked.

“Because,” Anne said, wiping away a tear. “We all three just lied, didn’t we?”

Lisa glanced down at Micah with a frown. “I guess we did.”

“Woe is me,” Garen said with a light tone from the doorway, as if humoring their childish thoughts. “I guess I’m doomed, then.”

Micah looked at him with different eyes and thought he caught something dark and weathered in the old man’s expression, but it was quickly gone when he joked, “I better run away before you three slay me.”

He headed back inside, and Anne said, “Ah! My lesson. Don’t run away you old geezer!”

She jumped up and ran off, following him.

Micah felt a pang of regret as she left, but he didn’t have any excuse to ask her to stay. At least, if he put in the effort, maybe he could see her at school in the Fall? It was a nice thought.

He remembered something else then, too. The first time he had asked Lisa about Garen.

He doesn’t like what made him famous.

“Lisa,” Micah asked as the two of them watched the empty doorway. “What are dragons like?”

There was a long pause before she answered. “They’re powerful,” she said. “But young. So young. They’re not much older than the Tower people and twice as lost. And they’re not just beasts of scales and fire. They know magic.” She considered. “More than anything, they’re just people, Micah. Foreign, maybe, but still just people. Like you or me.”

“Oh.”

What did Garen think of what he had done? Maybe that he was famous for bringing down a murderer? And he even had a Class to remind him, so he would never forget.

Anne suddenly appeared again, holding onto the doorframe to lean out. “Bye, Lisa,” she called. “We’re leaving. Bye, Micah Stranya. See you around!”

They waved and called back, all the while Micah thought, Hopefully.