I woke to the rumbling of a cart and watched the duo trundling down the road. Their cart now had 6 of the wolf bodies it the back of it, draped upon barrels of ore. The older man appeared to be sleeping as they passed him by and the boy looked much more tired and more alert than he usually was, constantly sweeping the treeline for threats. I don't know what good it was doing him since he didn't spot me at all but it couldn't be a bad thing to be alert.

This time when I began to follow my movements felt much more smooth, it was like my familiarity with my body had multiplied overnight and I was suddenly aware of exactly how I should be moving. It wouldn't be much but I was sure I could squeeze a little more speed out of this body now if I wanted to. I attributed this to my new and improved core and felt even more pleased with my decision.

Other than that the day passed without much ado except that this time they did not stop for camp. When the sun fell the man woke and traded places with the boy and they continued on. I took this to mean that the town was probably within a few hours of here and kept following, this turned out to be the correct assumption as within a couple of hours the forest gave way to farmland and not long after that I began to see a town pop over the horizon. I looked around at the surrounding farms.

There wasn't much to see to be honest since there were 6 foot high crops along either side of the road. It looked like wheat, except that the seeds were small pea-like balls, were bright orange and there was much more stalk that I was used to from wheat fields back home. It looked almost like corn but I would see inside some of the dead seeds on the ground and found that inside they were very fibrous and not juicy like corn was.

The road around here was much more compact, clearly having seen more traffic which was presumably from the farmers so I kept alert in case I needed to quickly hide. No-one spotted me though and soon the wagon had reached the walls of a large town. I was still quite far away and was hanging back since there was a lot of activity near the gate. I was eager to note that more than one golem was moving about, although I couldn't tell if they were accompanied by anyone.

Most of them were much taller than I was, usually around 6 feet tall compared to my barely 4 feet. They were all made of either wood or stone though. Not a single metal man was around but it was enough that I hoped I could enter the town with no problems. The gate was open and unguarded which seemed prudent since dozens of people were coming and going but mostly entering the city, presumably they were returning home for the evening.

The corn around my current hiding spot was making it difficult to tell how long the walls went on for but they were at least ten feet high, were made of a solid grey rock and there wasn't a single building outside of them which made me a little confused as to where all these people were headed.

I eventually decided to approach and once I got past the edge of the field I saw just how big this place was, the walls extended for miles in either direction and there were several gates along that. I had been wrong when I had said that there were no buildings outside of the walls. Near every gate but apparently, just out of my line of sight there were stables filled with a variety of different animals, the vast majority were horses or cattle but I could see at least one large lizard that was saddled up and in its own, unroofed stall. A market had been erected outside one of the gates that was several to my right and there were hundreds of stalls, multicoloured and selling a variety of things that I couldn't make out from here. Most of the people were heading from this market which was probably closing down for the night.

I had not really expected a settlement this large, this had been described as a town and I was expecting some kind of small, middle of nowhere type towns with a couple of thousand people, depending on how far the town went beyond the walls there could easily be tens of thousands of people here if not hundreds of thousands. I continued to look around as I got closer to the walls and as I did I began to notice something. Some of the people here had a much more graceful air about them, they walked as if gliding and had sharp features and pointed ears. There were elves! I had hoped but hadn't seen anyone other than humans since arriving and this revelation caused me to notice other things.

Some of the people that I thought to be children had beards and there seemed to be two types. There were short but incredibly stocky people who tended towards pot bellies and long beards, and then there were the ones that looked just like children but with facial hair. The former seemed to range from three to five feet tall and I mentally dubbed them dwarves. The latter were between two and four feet and I dubbed them gnomes. To be perfectly honest this wasn't a huge surprise, I would have thought it would be more jarring to see different races (species?) living together but I had read so many books and watched so many films with those kinds of things in them that I was sort of desensitised.

They were the only really distinguishing features that I could make out on each, they differed as much in how they looked, hair colour style, clothes etc as any other person would. When I walked through the crowd I did notice that the dwarves and gnomes would look at me more than anyone else, they would look and then shake their head as if ashamed for me before pointedly not looking at me anymore. I was almost tempted to cover myself with my hands, what was I doing that upset these people so much? I did my best to ignore them as I went into town without much direction. I ended up just wandering down the street and looking around.

The houses here were different to the style I had seen in the village, they were essentially Tudor style houses but more colourful. The upper floors tended to overhang the bottom and there was a combination of wood and brick used in their construction. This seemed to be some kind of residential district as there were nothing but houses as far as I could tell. The street I was perfectly straight and every so often there would be streets that went of to either side, I was pretty sure this town was built to be some kind of grid but it was hard to tell from the street.

The roads themselves were made of dirt but the pavement was a perfectly smooth stone. I had thought that it was concrete at first but it appeared to just be rock, I was sure some kind of magic was used in it because there was something blocking my magical perception from travelling through it. In fact, every building had been blocking my vision since I had arrived which I imagine is to stop creatures like me from being used to spy on people.

I continued down the road for miles, the streets had started off crowded but by the time I began to reach the end of the road most people entered houses or turned off down side streets. The streets were far from deserted though, it was getting late but there was by no means nothing to do in the town when it was dark I was sure. I had been walking not much behind a wooden golem that was particularly large. I could feel the range of their senses and couldn't help but be cowed by it. It extended a good thirty feet around them, was that the difference between a lesser core and a well made one?

We eventually made it to a large central square. In the centre was a small garden full of bushes and flowers with a water feature surrounding a large metal statue of an incredibly muscular man. I had stopped to look around and the wood golem was already walking down another main street so I decided to follow along. This street was vastly different from the last, all of the buildings were covered by metal grates and were closed up. Presumably, this was some kind of shopping district that had been closed for the evening.

I watched as the wooden golem approached one of the few shops that weren't closed so I approached the front of the shop. There was a picture of what looked like the exact wooden golem I had followed here on the front of the store but in duplicate many times. In big bronze stylised letters was a sign reading:

"CRAFTED CREATURES"

with a smaller sign below it with the tagline:

"Golems for hire"