Miles clawed his way to his feet, every thorn in his back tearing just a little more into skin and muscle. But this was a medical building, if he could find an office there would be quality scrolls of mending. He had to find them fast, there was yet to be a scroll found that could raise the dead and everyone in the room seemed to be bleeding fast.

Celest stumbled over to Miles, still bringing the scent of citrus as she looked him up and down. Her chocolate curls hung limp on her shoulders, and a line of crimson blood trickled over her brow and onto her ruined white dress. “Goddess,” she said, and Miles winced when her finger touched one of the spines in his shoulder.

Finding difficulty breathing, Miles could only form brief words before the tightness in his chest seized his voice. “Office… Heal… Scroll.”

Though tears formed in her eyes, Celest swallowed hard, nodded, and escaped through the hole in wall where the door used to be, displaced and now rudely planted into Miles’ body.

He hobbled to Lord Eckles, kneeled over his body and tapped his face. The lord groaned in response, but otherwise remained still. Satisfied, Miles strained onto his feet and found Doctor Galen scooting and sitting up against the wall. He looked Miles in the eye, holding his side where a dagger of glass had impaled him and red was soaking his white coat.

“The Fairy-elf…” Galen whispered between shallow breaths. “Must be more important… A hill of gold, boy. Gold and scrolls… to get her back.”

As tempting as the reward was, Miles didn’t know how he could catch a thief with a teleportation scroll, much less one with offensive scrolls. If the thief could blow up a solid wood door, he could do the same to Miles if he got too close. In came Celest, as reliable as ever, with an armful of scrolls. She dumped them at Miles feet, began to unroll them with hasty inspection, then handed one up to him. While she healed Galen and Eckles, Miles spoke the powerful scroll handed to him over himself.

He cringed, and an audible slurping came from his back. One by one, the shards of wood squeezed out and fell from his flesh and clacked on the floor until at last Miles gasped with a rush of warmth and relief. He turned. Doctor Galen, being assisted to his feet by Celest’s courageous strength, again eyed Miles.

“Boy,” he said. “Teleportation scrolls have their limits.”

The insinuation seemed to be that the thief couldn’t have gone too far. If Miles refused to give chase, well, he would look like dreg in front of everyone in the room. The least he could do was run out as far as the property gate, snap his fingers if there was no trace, and return without a lead.

Miles nodded.

Coming out of the building, Miles shaded his eyes from the bright sun overhead and looked down the steps, just catching a glimpse of a blue flash past the gate. So he ran, leaping down five steps at a time, and twisted his ankle as he came before the bronze, swirling bars at the bottom.

Sweat soaked his collar, and without hope of catching his breath, much less the thief, he used the Mending scroll on himself again. Not only did his ankle feel better, but his muscles were refreshed and his breathing sated.

A small blue flash taunted him from down the street, surprising pedestrians and rearing horses. It was possible the thief was running out of scrolls, and if Miles could apply his healing to himself to keep up a sprint, luck might be on his side.

Miles didn’t believe in luck. But he may have been the right person at the right time.

He unlatched the gate and pushed it open, sprinting down the brick road. The scroll clasped in his hand warmed his knuckles, indicating several more uses. Which was good, because Miles was already wheezing. He unfurled the page as he ran.

“Mend!”

Energy and vigor filled his lungs and muscles as he sprinted ahead without missing a step. He weaved between carriages and shoved pedestrians from his path. Whenever he strained himself to the point of collapse, he used the scroll again.

Down and through the city, the blue teleportation flash seemed to be barely distancing itself from Miles. Another six flashes, and Miles wondered how many scrolls the thief had. His own healing scroll was growing cooler by the use. Even if Miles couldn’t directly catch them, he could at least find where in the city they were going.

He followed the blue flash through the first inner wall archway, then through the second. Finally, past the outer wall slums and beyond any shopping squares, the last of the apartments went by on his right and the brick road turned to dirt. Ahead was the last wall with the sun coming over it like a sunrise at the bend of the world. Still, the flash emanated at the base of the wall, and the cloaked figure was clear, the Fairy-elf slung across the thief’s shoulder as one would carry a woman from a burning home.

After the final use of the mending scroll, the vibrant and warm touch fading from feeling, Miles cast it aside and spent the last of his strength to corner the thief against the wall. There was nowhere else to go, but considering how dangerous this person was, the fact that he was gaining didn’t comfort him.

Just when Miles believed the thief’s last Teleportation scroll had been used, another blue flash shone, and the snap of collapsing air echoed off the wall. Baffled, he slowed, breathing hard and looked around. A blink caught his eye, and looking up he found the thief atop the wall.

“Goddess…” he whispered to himself, wiping the stinging sweat from his eyes. To his left, a construction ramp zig-zagged up the wall. Coming this far, Miles followed the way up, all the way to the top of the wall, panting. He came to the top, but there was no one there. Instead, beyond the wall, and within the green fields of the wilderness, Miles gazed out disbelieving he would find anything there.

On the contrary, the midsummer breeze swayed the long bluestem grass, and the pines far in the distance shadowed their mysteries beneath their boughs. To his right, the vast ocean, green and sparkling with shards of light, went out and touched the clouds thereafter.

At the eastern hills, a caravan came like an army of ants from the mines, and Adventurers were doing their daily duty of fending off the attacking ambreraptors. Spheres of lights, like fireflies in daylight, spiraled from the slain monsters and shot like meteors to the East.

Then the blue flash caught his eye again, heading south, and now like a blinking star getting further and further away. Across the green fields, it shone dozens of times until finally disappearing at the forest’s edge. The thief and the Fairy-elf had gone into the monster filled wilds.

As Miles caught his breath, standing atop the thick wall, he rested his hands on his waist. This whole affair was utterly unfair. How many scrolls was the thief carrying beneath their cloak? And why take the Fairy-elf when dragon scales and bones were so much easier to smuggle and sell? An Adventurer who braved the wilds by themselves, and handicapped from carrying another person couldn’t survive long anyway. Miles dismissed the thief with a wave of good-riddance and came down from the wall.

Exhausted from the chase, and unwilling to make the trip all the way across the city to Galen’s clinic, Miles opted to instead make his appointment with Elle at the old bookstore. The thief would be dead by nightfall, and the Elf could be recovered by a certified Team. It wouldn’t matter if Miles waited a few hours to relay the facts of the chase to the doctor.

On the way through alleys and streets, with his head hung in thought and his hands in his pockets, Miles became more bothered with every time he replayed the thief’s escape. The sheer number of times Teleportation was used was over twenty, double that number if the thief had used Teleportation to get inside the city in the first place. Not to mention multiple Strength scrolls, Endurance, and other powers to break into Galen’s compound and carry an adult Elf on his back for two or three leagues.

The thief may have had an Artifact, but three of them: Strength, Endurance and Teleportation? Even so, Artifacts had their limits. The thief hadn’t spoken any names to invoke the magic, either.

He couldn’t think of any answers to his questions, and only found relief for his perturbed mind when he looked up finding Elle leaning against the bookshop’s wall and smiling at him as he came. Her twinkling blue and yellow eyes seemed to glow, complimented by her black leather outfit. As he walked past her, pulling the oak door open, Elle put her shoulder-length hair behind her ear and followed him inside.

“Have you been waiting for long?” Miles asked in passing.

“Not long. You look like you have had quite the morning.”

“The best,” Miles answered. The little bell above the door range, then range again as it closed. All sound outside hushed, save for a group of city soldiers who jogged by, likely in haste headed toward Doctor Galen’s. The air was chilly inside, as though the candle-lit chandelier hanging over the librarian’s counter couldn’t warm the cool presence of a thousand books.

A lonely bookstore: the short and white-haired man behind the counter dozed over his book, and a boy, perhaps twelve years old, huddled in the corner with a thick tome as his only company.

“Where do we start?” Elle asked.

No sense in wasting time. Miles went right up to the counter, shading the wisps of light above and casted a shadow on the old man’s book. Slowly, the librarian simultaneously looked up and carefully removed his round spectacles. Milky blue eyes stared back at Miles, and the librarian smacked his lips. “What are you looking for, my lad?”

“The Pool of the Dead,” Miles replied, leaning his elbow on the counter.

At the same pace as before, the librarian smacked his lips, returned his glasses to his nose, and silently looked down at the partially obscured book. “Please move your elbow,” the old man said, expectantly.

This was not the day to test Miles’ patience. “Look here, old man.” Miles took the book by both ends, folded it shut, and pushed it aside. The librarian made a sound and tried to catch his reading material, but Miles held it firmly against the countertop. “I know you have probably been bothered your entire life by people like us, asking you about the myth and goading information out of you.” The librarian met Miles’ eyes now. “But humor me. Do you know where it is? I won’t leave until you answer.”

The old man pressed his wrinkled lips. “You will leave me alone if I answer?”

“Yes.”

“And buy a book?”

“Sure, old man. I’ll buy a book.”

“I’ve never heard of the place,” the old man said. “Now buy a book and get out.”

Miles kept his hand planted on the tome. “That’s a lie.”

“And you don’t have any money,” the old man accused.

He was good. “Just tell us where it is.”

“No.”

“Give us a map.”

“No!”

Goddess. Miles was not prepared for this. A dragon and an Elf thief he could deal with, but this obstinate old man was taxing. Of all the wealthy men and women, even among the sailors and gangsters of the city, the elderly were the most difficult to charm. They had simply seen it all before, and as blind as their eyes often were, no veils could ever be pulled over their minds.

“Mister librarian?” Elle inquired, leaning in from Miles’ side. “Why won’t you help us?”

The old man’s tense face fell slightly as he looked at her, then hardened when he met Miles’ eyes again. “Because you all go and get yourselves killed! I must have sent a hundred boys and girls to their deaths over the years. Well, I’m not doing it anymore.”

“But you found it, didn’t you?” Miles asked, rhetorically.

The old man glared up. “No.”

“Don’t play stupid with me, old man. I know a liar when I see one.”

“And I know monster fodder when I see it,” the librarian replied, spitefully.

“Don’t call me monster fodder!”

“Don’t call me a liar!”

At his absolute limits, Miles tisked, shoved the book off the counter and went to the door. But Elle didn’t follow.

She went around the counter, stopped the librarian from bending over, and picked up the book for him. “You know,” she said with a gentle smile and hugging the tome to her chest. “There was once a man in my village who was afraid of everything.”

The librarian stood poised with his thin wrist reaching for the book. He looked Elle in the eye.

She laughed lightly to herself, as though remembering something. “He would sit in his hut all day long, never building his fire above a flicker out of fear of burning his house down. He didn’t want parasites or sickness, so he overcooked his food, which made it taste terrible and tough.” She winked and held book out. “But at least it was safe, right?”

Miles leaned against the door, waiting for the point of the story, which Elle was taking her time telling. She found a stool at a nearby shelf and set it down at the counter. Conversationally, she sat and rested her chin on her arms. “Can you believe: that at a seaside village, he didn’t even know how to swim?”

Setting the book down, the librarian sat in his tall chair behind the counter, listening.

Elle sat up. “He lived to be ninety-six years old!” She grinned, and as though at a punchline, the librarian wheezed out a laugh. Her smile faded. “But you know? I feel sorry, most of all, for him. I had friends and family who died younger. Some drowned, some caught the red fever. Some were even killed by monsters, but that old man is the only one I ever felt sorry for.

“He didn’t eat tasty food; didn’t enjoy the sunshine or the splash of water. His strength was never tested against the beasts. His bones were frail and his muscles: weak. He didn’t love anything in life except the years to his name. And guess what happened to him in the end?”

In response, the librarian swallowed, answering, “He died.”

Elle nodded. Her eyes softened. “You feel responsible for sending Adventurers out there so they could have their chance at finding the Pool of the Dead. I’d wager very few ever came back.”

“None.”

“You didn’t kill them,” Elle replied, softly. “They had the choice to go and take that risk, just like Miles and I have the choice. What good is life if there are no choices to make? I know you suffer, and feel like you are responsible for showing those young men and women the way to the Pool, but it’s not your fault.”

The librarian looked solemnly at the desk.

Elle smiled again, like a beacon lighting the room. “Some people don’t want live ninety-six years, alone and with no accomplishments.” Reaching out, she touched his shoulder. “I am going to the Pool of the Dead, with or without your help, Mister Librarian. So you see? If you talk with me for awhile about how to get there and how to prepare for the journey, you will not be sending me to my death, but you may end up my Team’s salvation.”

Miles didn’t like it when she said, my Team. Elle seemed adamant about going to the Pool, even though there were plenty of other rumored places of power; most Adventurers have no hesitation at the taverns, divulging details about glowing forests, abandoned Fairy-elf villages, and mines filled with treasures. Perhaps Elle thought this old man was more credible.

It was true: those that hide their stories are the ones who experienced them. Those who tout and brag about their adventures are often liars. For a country bumpkin, Elle had fantastic instincts.

And it worked. The old man slumped in his stool, removed his glasses, and slowly rubbed his eyes. He sighed and gestured. “Sit,” he said in his sandy voice.

Miles found another stool, and he and Elle sat side by side, ready to listen.