Ruyo held her hands together and made a show of stretching raw, shimmering mana like taffy. It rippled into existence as a square of canvas, not quite as big as she'd want for a bedsheet.

Tulia said, "Still impressive to see you do that. But is it always that tough sailcloth? Can't you do another kind?"

Ruyo blinked. "Yeah, what about wool? Don't you have unlimited sheep here?" Most of the locals wore wool, even in the late summer. In this hilly, relatively cold land they were better dressed than Ruyo with her linen.

A quarryman laughed. "We have to sell most of the wool to make ends meet."

"Can you show me? I might learn something."

After finishing the usual magic lesson, she got some training in return. The locals showed her a bit about the spinning and weaving of wool. Making cloth at all had been hard for her at first because she'd known so little about it. Fibers tangled together in one place, right? But the truth was that threads with no unifying pattern were a useless hairball, and they needed both order and flexibility.

So Ruyo had become a magic weaver only after repeated lessons from normal cloth-makers who knew what they were doing. Now, she got introduced to a variant on the same technique, with local knowledge about this particular kind of wool and the best way to twist the fibers together. She felt the rough, warm texture of the thread and the finished product and watched how a woman sewed and cut it, then made Ruyo try the same by hand. Finally Ruyo tried it by magic. Her first attempt was a weird jumble but the second worked, producing a handkerchief-sized square of wool that the weaver couldn't tear apart with gentle tugging. On the third try, Ruyo made a genuine blanket.

"You're not going to make a hundred of these and harm our business, I hope," said the weaver. She'd been too caught up in teaching Ruyo to think about the implications until now.

Ruyo had needed to consider them. "Not enough to hurt you, at least anytime soon. I'm making trade items for my followers, not trying to get rich from making them."

She'd turned a modest profit here and there as she traveled, but that was by ordinary trade in westlands dyes and spices, salt fish from Starshore and so on. Between that, a stipend from Averell and Starshore, and her ability to generate food and trinkets, she was slowly getting richer. But she also had an entourage now. Very much not how she'd expected her career as a young merchant to go.

She went to the mayor's house to sit around and create a few more wool blankets. She traded those for a modest meal of bread and vegetables for everyone. Her group was sick of eating the standard bread rations she could make, so even the slightly different kind they had here was some variety. While she was at it she picked at her food and worked out a better version of her veggie-style bread. She could do that, a plain wheat kind, and an orange flavor. "Hey, I'll trade you for some mutton jerky if you've got any." They did, so she scrutinized that too.

"Are you ever going to give people the power to make food for themselves?" asked the village's doctor.

"I've been worrying about that. It might be possible, and you'd think it'd be a great blessing, but it could wreck the lives of all the food farmers. What do you think?"

"I'd say give out the power and let the farmers grow something other than food."

Khulis said, "Spoken like someone who hasn't had to live on conjured bread."

"If it's that bad, it won't destroy the market for food crops."

The Averell soldier accompanying their group was impatient. "I thought our purpose here was to get to the ruin."

Ruyo asked the mayor, "About that. You visited the place, right? What did you find from digging out the rubble?"

"The upper level wasn't very interesting. What we found was the remains of bedrooms, mostly. We scavenged scrap metal and broken glass. If that place was a hospital, then some people got abandoned in the end."

"There were skeletons?"

"A few, may their labor be ended. And then, below..." He shuddered.

The doctor went on. "The excavation team explored a vast tunnel. There must have been a major battle against those metal creatures you mentioned."

"That was us," boasted Khulis.

"And a massacre."

"Not us."

The doctor shook his head. "The explorers didn't get far into the tunnel, but they reached a huge metal wagon that had been buried. It was crowded with the dead. Long-decayed, nothing much of value, but we found trinkets. And the people weren't all human."

Ruyo nodded grimly. "We suspect there was a final war. In most ruins we haven't found bodies, but this place was an exception. Maybe these were the last people trying to escape."

The mayor opened a locked chest. "These are a few things we recovered. I wanted to show them to you before selling them."

Ruyo's party eagerly looked at the loot. Besides metal scraps from furniture, there were bits of jewelry made with the uncanny skill of the ancients. A shiny black slate with a cracked front, similar to others the group had found but were unable to turn on. A metal toy of pieces that clicked and spun. The largest item was a heavy metal tank attached to a hose with a mask on the end. "What's this one?" Khulis said, lifting it out.

The doctor said, "Look at that design on the side. It sort of... explains itself?"

Khulis stared at a square design of white and gold covering a few inches on the tank's side. He went wide-eyed and staggered back against the wicker wall, sitting down heavily.

"What?" said Ruyo. She looked more carefully at the glyph. Its pattern was abstract, yet somehow meaningful.

This is a portable breathing device. It contains compressed air. Hold the mask against your face and turn this valve clockwise. Share the mask with others to escape emergencies. The gauge measures remaining air. Warning: while the device can also be used underwater, beware of blood poisoning from rapid ascent or deep dives. Obtain dive training for details.

Ruyo reeled, confused. It was as though she'd just read a page of illustrated instructions, from this doodle. "Nusina, what was that?"